thefncrow

Weekend of the 24th is good for me.

If there's room for another in the CST game, I'd be down for that as well. Only weekend coming up that really won't work for me is October 1.

Funny little thing about this game that I discovered from reddit via Tom Francis' twitter account. There's a point where you find a document that gives a hint for a safe combination as "a combination of Bromine and Bromide" in an underground drug lab run by two people. Someone brute forced the password and discovered the actual combination for the safe is 3556. Bromine is atomic number 35, so that's that, but Bromide is not an element on the periodic table. However, 56 is the atomic number for Barium. And it so happens that Bromine and Barium are the two elements that are used in the logo for Breaking Bad. So the thought is now that whoever wrote this may have been looking at the Breaking Bad logo, decided to derive the puzzle from those two elements, and then somehow tripped over what the actual element Ba was.

He actually is going back out to SF. He'll be out there for the rest of the year, and then he's moving in the winter. They recorded the entire Shenmue run in advance.

Listening to the episode now, but Chris seems to basically hit DX:MD square on when he mentions that the game is trying to play Jensen as a cipher that says nothing so he can be for whatever the player's feelings are. And as bad as that spot is, the writing hurts it even more. This screenshot is from a story beat that's like, 2 or 3 story missions in, but, man, this writing is rough. https://twitter.com/hot_jughead/status/770848985108078592 About that dialogue choice: There's a few other instances where it feels like the dialogue comes from a college freshman's paper on civil rights movements. It's so frustrating, because so much else of this world is so fun to be in, but you can't help but get hammered with some of the worst elements of this game. The one bone I do have to pick with the discussion is that the game does, once you get a little further in, try to give you some perspective on who makes up the augmented. A lot of them are lower class folks who took on augments for jobs, because this is literally a game about megacorps and the Illuminati. Your augmented workforce can do more work. Any job where they used to have to hire people and also buy heavy machinery, now the employer is hiring people and turning those employees into the heavy machinery. Additionally, the augments give you a drug dependency, so you now have an extraordinary reliance on your employer because your life will go bad if you quit and can't find a steady and affordable source for neuropozene. They do at least explore that space a little. It's definitely not enough to redeem it, but I felt it was worth mentioning. (As an aside, on the note about the good apartments fixing the walls and the apartments in the shitty parts of town not doing that, the developers of Mafia 3 have been saying that their game has something to that effect. Where if you're in downtown near City Hall and the cops get called, they're on top of you near instantly, but if you're in a poor neighborhood, the cops take forever to show up if they ever do. Austin Walker wrote something on the way the devs have been previewing that game, and who knows how the final product will turn out, but it's actually one of the few times I can think where a major game supposedly has an intentional mechanical adaptation of structural racism like that.)

You seem to basically have it. The battery mechanic is that the wide part of the bar is the only part of the bar you're really guaranteed. When you use a Biocell, it gives you meter and moves that vertical white line out to the right (possibly to your max?). Your energy will recharge up to the white line, but the white line slowly begins to recede back to that wide section of the bar. It's why I haven't been upgrading battery, because most of the time I just settle for working with the short meter, and when I'm in a bad spot I can burn a biocell and have more battery to expend.

I killed the new Elusive Target, although I kinda have to rack that up as a failure.

I'd be up for playing The Sprawl, although I'd have to warn that I'm a newbie to this stuff. The only time I've ever done this stuff, I played one session with a group here trying to do some D&D, I died on that first night, and I don't think there was another session after that. And my experience with The Sprawl is "I listened to the Counter/WEIGHT campaign of Friends at the Table"

So, I'm really wary about the story, but I've got the itch for some Deus Ex, so I went in on this. It's weird, and I'm liking the gameplay for what it is, but, man, this story. The thing that kinda typifies for me what seems up with this game in story terms comes pretty early in, at the train station: That is so silly and video game-y that I just couldn't stop laughing at something that clearly was meant to play as like sour-note badass. So, on that front, you can absolutely do that.

OK, man, the darkest thing I've seen in Hitman for a while is in this mission, having to do with the birthday party.

Along those lines:

I'm making my way through the Counter/WEIGHT arc of Friends at the Table and just got up to the appearance of Lazer Ted. Lazer Ted is so great.

Gita's in Chicago. It's going to be really important who they hire. They cannot afford another Dan hiring, especially when you consider the seat that's needing to be filled here.

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/giant-bomb-live-at-e3-2016-day-01/2300-11346/ is the video archive of last night's show. I think the Square Enix folks are the 3rd set of guests? Another fun thing from the video is that apparently the clearance rate on the elusive targets has been right around 50%, and the Silent Assassin rate is like 5%. That really, really makes me want to get SA on an elusive target now.

A dev from the Hitman team was on Giant Bomb's E3 show tonight, talking about a bunch of cool things. Fun fact from the show, the elusive targets, unlike the story missions, have actual randomness. For example, when there was the second elusive target, someone I talked to mentioned how they were able to poison him when he goes to the wine cellar and drinks some wine. I wanted to do that, but I never saw him drink anything when he was down in the wine cellar. Turns out, the reason why is that the Congressman has a 25% chance of actually taking that drink, which is part of the devs trying to introduce some randomness so that poison kills aren't so easy.

I also had to go to plan B, after trying the same plan A.

And just because I also went through with capping that play:

Lucha Underground is very good. If you're starting from the beginning, it takes a good 8 or 9 episodes for that thing to settle in and start to let some of the more bizarre stuff start creeping in from the edges. I actually haven't watched all of season 1 myself, as I jumped in late and just picked up with where they were, but I went back and started to watch what I missed. I've still got a good 5-6 shows I haven't seen from that season. Season 2 is even better.

That Ricochet match is such a great match, but I think the gem of that tournament so far is Kyle O'Reilly vs Kushida from the opening show. Of course, that one didn't catch on to where NJPW released it for free, so you've gotta go through getting on NJPW World for it.

Oh my god. This guy completes Sapienza in just over 3 minutes by launching fire extinguishers at the targets.

New level is great. I've made two runs at it so far and got my Silent Assassin rating, and there's still a lot of area I really haven't explored. From what I've seen, Suit Only will be a serious challenge. The last time I was running through I found the safe house that's mentioned, and inside there is an . I now know what my next playthrough is going to be based around.

Yeah, at the bare minimum, Nintendo could have issued a statement about their localization processes clarifying that someone who works in marketing isn't making decisions about localization. She's been getting harassment for months, but that harassment intensified when you got people who were upset about the Xenoblade and Fire Emblem localizations. When that anger flared up, the usual shitheads made it a point to blame her for decisions she had no part of, and that ramped up the harassment. Nintendo saying "She had fucking nothing to do with this, stop it" isn't going to stop all the harassment, but it at least disarms the lies that the usual parties were spreading to paint a target on her back over localization criticisms and would shut down some portion of the harassment.

On Hitman talk: The events in the level seem to be some combination of real time and on when you encounter them. This can actually lead to some ugly seams in the game showing. For example, in the Paris level, there's a woman at the party who is, basically, the woman Jake talks about, the fashion critic who the people at the show don't like. She's long been critical of the people who are running this party. You can eavesdrop on a conversation she has with a friend who works with her and find out that they have some sort of mole who's been telling them things about what shady things your targets are up to. She talks about how she is going to use this information to blackmail the targets, because her fashion magazine is faltering and she needs money to keep it going. At a later point in the level, Victor runs into this woman while strolling throughout the fashion show. She makes some threats about knowing what's going on upstairs and what activities the targets are really up to. Victor kinda laughs it off and walks off, but when he does, he steps out of the party and goes to a corner of the garden to have a phone conversation with Dalia, telling her that they have a mole somewhere. The problem with this last scenario is that it seems to really only trigger when you see the confrontation happen (I've never seen Victor's target marker go out to the garden without me being close to trigger the conversation). This means it's possible that Dalia is already dead when it triggers. Unfortunately, they didn't do any work to check for this, so instead of him trying to call her and she never picks up, he ends up having a conversation with a dead woman. It's a bit of a weird thing for them to not catch, because they pay attention to so many other little details. For example, at one stage I was trying to take out a guard who is talking on his cell phone to another guard. I was too quick in choking the guard out, though, and I raised an alarm because the guard on the other end of the phone call heard his boss being choked out over the phone and came running. Also, on the idea of releasing levels from old games as a bit of a "Best of Hitman" thing, this is something that iO Interactive has a bit of a track record of doing. The third game in the series, Hitman: Contracts, is halfway to this. Contracts had 12 levels in it, 5 of which were actually recreations of good levels from the first two games.

I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with the candidate. I don't think Bernie's really the one to blame here. I'd put it more on the supporters. Clinton in 2008 seemed a little more questionable because she pushed to new extremes in the late stages of the campaign in ways that soured me on her, but I don't really see that behavior from Bernie here. In theory, I have no problem with either of them wanting to contest the primary all the way to the end of the process. The problem seems to lie more with the diehard supporters, who have either demonized The Enemy so much or who have just bought in on their own candidate so hard that they behave in despicable ways and justify it to themselves as necessary.

It's the depressing thing about when you have this situation in the primary where's the candidate hasn't dropped out and it's not mathematically over but it's realistically over. Clinton supporters in 2008 clung to their candidate in a similarly depressing manner, including after the primaries had actually concluded. There was a core that was sure that they'd be able to outmaneuver Obama at the convention and ensure that she was the candidate in 2008, and who similarly would publicly swear off voting Obama if they couldn't get Clinton as the candidate (see: Susan Sarandon of late).