thefncrow

We're talking about a movement that is still outraged that sex was traded for a review despite the fact that no such review exists. Or who responded to an article saying that the people who play video games have diversified and developers should cease playing to those stereotypes by saying "How dare you slur me with these old hateful stereotypes! I'm going to join up with a movement that embodies the worst of these hateful stereotypes out of spite!" The saddest thing is I could construct a giant wall of text of all the patently false horseshit that drives Gameragrog, and then hit post and think of another 2 or 3 I've left off. They're not operating on a fact-based discourse.

Anita breathing is fuel for Goobergimpers, so I don't think there should really be much concern over not giving them fuel. It's like when someone says "Obama shouldn't have done that, he's going to rile up the Tea Party". They will get riled up at any slight whether real or imaginary, so it's pointless worrying about how they will react.

It is very weak, assuming the one time I've heard it mentioned in the first 80% or so of the podcast is the only mention. They only really talk about harassment while not really addressing GG as a whole at all. The most harsh thing said might be from Jeff, who qualifies an argument with something like "even if you think their criticisms of journalism aren't fucking ludicrous like I do".

Ugh. Fuck this. On that USU Anita Sarkeesian appearance:

Sadly, it's not surprising. There was a very similar sentiment expressed in a reddit AMA with Assange around the time Goobergout bullshit started, where he sounded supportive but tried to get them onboard with Wikileaks. You could write off the first as getting kinda ambushed during an AMA, though, where you absolutely can't with this.

Deadspin, of all places, has a great article on GG: The Future of the Culture Wars is Here, and it's Gamergate. I'm on my phone so I'm not really going to expound much, but I really suggest reading it. EDIT: Since I'm home now, let's include some choice exerpts. Choosing these was actually difficult, because I could just about cut and paste the whole damn thing.

Yeah, the article went up after the MSNBC segment, but Patrick mentioned on their morning podcast that he was going to put something up on it that day. It wasn't a reaction to getting called out on MSNBC (although it most certainly was a response to getting called out in general). Also, it looks like Milo isn't the only scumbag when it comes to trying to set up an ambush of abuse victims. Zoe Quinn mentioned on twitter that she was asked by the Huffington Post to come discuss her experiences. She then started hearing word from other people that they were also invited to the Huffington Post thing, which was odd since they hadn't said anything to her about a panel or anything like that. The response from Huffington Post was that it would be a debate "with reasonable people from both sides", but that they wouldn't tell her who was the supposedly reasonable people from the other side. It turns out that the Huffington Post almost blindly walked her into a debate against the operator of 8chan, the board explicitly organized to host the harassment campaign after they got kicked off of 4chan. She only discovered that since she's monitoring GG conversations and saw a post on the Kotaku in Action reddit saying he was going to be on Huffington Post.

I'm hoping to maybe get my Warlock to 28 by the weekend, and I'd be down to do the raid then. Of course, this is predicated on me going from 25->28 this week. Exactly the thing I have to do. I bought purple leg armor from the store, and I've unlocked like 4 of the defense upgrades on it, but since they all take 16 helium fragments and I started with basically none, I've been spending all my time on the Moon looking for helium. All that helium will at least get me to the 3rd level of upgrades, at which point I still need all that helium but also need shards for upgrades.

Yep, that's weird. Also, Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon are listed as "Far Cry® 3" and "Far Cry® 3 Blood Dragon". Always looks so weird, especially because Far Cry 2 doesn't have the ® in it.

I was just coming here to post this, because those names are so much crazier than if both games had actually just re-used the N64 title and been named "Super Smash Bros.".

I got the same drop this weekend. I went to play a Crucible match for the first time in like a week, and it dropped for me instantly. My best secondary is also a shotgun, so I have been rolling with two shotguns. It's kinda weird to do, because it means you really have no long range options. It's made bosses more difficult because you can't just engage at range, and most bosses seem to have a disincentive from getting too close. My only ranged options are my grenade, super, and rocket launcher. It's really changed my play style because now I have to use those ranged options while closing the gap, so that by the time they wake up, I'm in their face with shotguns. I understand that, eventually, the shotgun apparently gets some upgrade so it can be used at rifle range, but for now, I've had to adopt a full kamikaze style to make this work.

I'm playing on PS4 (PSN: thefncrow), just got to level 20 with Warlock. I'd love to join up to run some strikes.

Not to mention they just pulled the Friday evening news dump. This is a clear sign that they desperately just want this thing to go away. Issue a really weasel-y statement, drop it Friday night so that it won't show up but in weekend news cycles when few are paying attention, and hope that things have just moved on by Monday.

I have to wonder if the next game of this type is that they make the Batman game that this was obviously spun off from. So much of the battle system is just from the Arkham games, and there's been some discussion that the LOTR license was bolted on after development had started. Imagine that the lowest 2 tiers on the Nemesis system were basically just goons, who then evolve into villains when they reach just under the Warchief level, with the Warchiefs being the "Top 5 Most Wanted" villains or some sort of "Council of Crime". It would also help explain how guys seem to keep coming back, if you take them down, then they get sent to Arkham, only to inevitably re-emerge.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was. Take a look at this. Now, not all of these code snippets from open repositories is actually an instance of this (so that number of results coming to 4,300 isn't really right), but if you go page by page, you see a lot of instances of that snippet of code. Since one of MS' big deals is trying to keep all the legacy software running on new versions, requiring a bunch of modifications to existing software to remove the ambiguity so that you can keep your version numbering consistent doesn't seem like a good trade.

Believe it or not, that thread isn't as unbelievably shitty as the first thread, which might as well have just been transplanted from 4chan or something. The new thread at least has a handful of reasonable people in there, where the last one did not. That first thread is actually what finally pushed me to come register over here, because it was just so fucking disgusting. The one bright point of both threads? They're great resources for compiling a good ignore list.

Yeah, I personally actually like Ryckert on a lot of their content and think he's revitalized GB's output, but, man, I just can't help but be fucking horrified about some of the insane things he's claimed to have done or thought. Like, on as subscriber video in the last few weeks, Jeff was wearing this shirt that just had a blurred Nike logo (like, printed on the shirt blurred). This prompted Dan to mention that he spent years thinking that the reason rap videos featured a bunch of blurred logos was because rappers smoked weed and the smoke caused logos to blur, a belief he was not disabused of until he went to college.

You left out what might have been the most horrifying bit for me, which was when he was talking about his failures as a pet owner and how people had remarked to him that he really shouldn't have children, to which he mused that he'd probably be fine as a dad, and if not, there's always that law about how people can abandon babies at fire stations.

If that's how it turns out, it'd be nice, but the reactions from the multiplayer beta earlier this year was that it mostly felt like a cops and robbers mod for Battlefield 4 and it really didn't play that differently. Instead of melee kills, cops could arrest criminals, but otherwise it felt largely like Battlefield 4. Now, that beta happened when the game was set for launch this year, so maybe it's being reworked into something that feels like it's own thing, but I'm not overly optimistic from those early impressions. Also, I don't know that Payday is necessarily the best comparison. I didn't play the first game, but from what I understand the structure is very similar to Payday 2, which I did. That game is about a single team of player-controlled criminals while cops are entirely AI. I'd compare it more to something like Left 4 Dead. It's also smart in that it's focused on the goal of stealing whatever it is you're tasked to steal and not necessarily engaging in gun battles with cops. Killing cops in that game is actually kinda bad because it increases police aggression, which means you get more waves of stronger cops thrown at you. Not to mention that the premise there actually allows for the perfect heist where it's possible to rob a target without the police even being notified.

The subject of the Diablo 2 gem that did nothing reminded me of how Rock Band 2 and 3 had something like that. In Rock Band 2, there was a menu with toggles for modifiers to unlock all songs, or turn off the note UI, but the last one on the list was "Awesomeness Detection", with a small blurb that said something like "Lets Harmonix know that you are really awesome!" People speculated about what it meant for a while. Theories were crafted that it was something to tighten up the note detection windows, that it was an opt-in to send some sort of data back to Harmonix, that it was used in matchmaking to put people with Awesomeness Detection together, or that it did nothing but was a late UI replacement for the control that would have enabled the Jukebox Mode (a feature that had been mentioned before launch but didn't make it in the final game). Rock Band 3 launched and had the same Awesomeness Detection toggle in the setup screens. People from Harmonix kinda egged it on, hinting that it had a real impact but that they weren't going to reveal what it did. As it turns out, it was none of those, and was just something Dan Teasdale (lead designer on Rock Band 2 and 3) put in the game as a joke. When he left Harmonix for Twisted Pixel, The Gunstringer ended up with an achievement that referred to it, and his next game Roundabout also has a toggle for Awesomeness Detection.

The Bombcast from a few weeks ago with John Drake is about when I started making that comparison. Drake very much seems like Frank Grimes having his public meltdown over how Homer's stupidity is so dangerous. On MBMBAM, they have some samplers up on YouTube of a some good bits. is the older sampler. There's a 2013 sampler too which is also good, but I kinda prefer some of these bits (like warrior cats and chinchilla shop names). It won't fill that giant hole, but I also enjoy Superego. Superego is like a podcast sketch show in a way. They do live improv to record the episodes, but then go back and edit them down, add music and sound effects, and such. For an example, the most recent episode had Neko Case as a guest in a bit, and they had her and the Shunt McGuppin character singing a capella, then went back and recorded music to fit the dry vocals and edited it together to make it sound like they were recording with a live band. That's the most involved work they've done, but they've said most of the 30 minute episodes take around 30 hours to create. They're really not on a regular schedule, because they produce episodes in seasons where they release episodes roughly monthly (though with season 4 they've warned they probably won't be able to keep that pace). Also, seasons 1 and 2 are behind a paywall now, but Best Of episodes covering those seasons are free. Season 3 is like 17 episodes, and the first episode of season 4 is out. I'd suggest Season 3 Episode 3 as a good starting point if you just want to dip your toe in. There's basically no continuity or anything, so don't feel like you have to start from the beginning.

I haven't had a chance to catch up on the new ones that just started, but yeah, Breaking Madden is great. There's something about it that reminds me of that Old Man Murray article about getting revenge for 9/11 using NHL 2002. In the same vein, Jon Bois did a series NBA Y2K, which was much the same thing but with the NBA2K games. The last article in that series is one of the funniest and most amazing things I've read in a long time, just an absolute must-read piece.

Unfortunately, they removed the chain reaction part of that rune in patch 2.1. I really miss it, there was nothing like going right at a mob of like 80 guys, hitting one with Exploding Palm and then focusing attacks on it until it dies and explodes, and the chain reaction kills most of the mob and leaves the ones left standing prepared to explode when they die to keep it going

Yeah, that's a pretty solid rule of thumb. You should be able to pretty easily rip through many of the regular mobs in the right difficulty for you. Tuning the difficulty so that you have to really work on regular enemies means the tuning is going to be such that blues and yellows take forever to kill, not to mention that blue and yellow enemy damage output is going to be absurd unless you've gone very heavy on defense. Another thing to keep in mind that you might need to move difficulty around as you play, since enemies are tuned to your level while your damage and survivability are tied more to your gear. Some bad luck with the RNG while leveling can mean you can go from a level 25 that's geared to survive Torment 1 to a level 29 geared only for Master. Just drop the difficulty, and if you get that incredible drop that makes things easy again, just jump out and back in to raise the difficulty back up.

I don't recognize the female voice, but Henry sounds like Rich Sommer. It would make sense with that IGN hint about award-winning television, since he's Harry Crane on Mad Men.