Gerretic

This is what I'm finding, too - I have yet to lose on Normal, which I'm sure means I should go to Hard, but I want to see if I can beat the game with every squad without ever losing first and I'm fine attempting that on Normal. Wanting to move onto the next thing is also why I've only done four islands once so far, but I'm really enjoying Steel Judoka so I may do a full set with them. The thing I've consistently found important across all the squads is maintaining tempo: if you can answer more than one threat with an action that's good, and if your answers only delay enemies (e.g. pushing out of position without setting up anything else good) then new spawns will make you start to fall behind. I haven't played enough to feel really confident in this answer, but I suspect it's a question of your squad's growth potential. The final boss scales up as you complete more islands, and if for whatever reason you expect that your squad is going to be below curve then you might want to just go for it sooner. I had a run where two of my three pilots died doing the first two islands: since I've generally found new pilots to be pretty scarce, pushing on to more islands would be relying on drops & equipment to get stronger without access to any of the bonuses from leveling up, so maybe I should expect that I'm getting proportionally weaker in that case and will be better off going immediately? (My last living pilot got hit by a rock on that run and died during the final battle, leaving the AI to close out the fight.)

I've done three more playthroughs now; two islands in ~3 hours, three islands in 3.5, and two again in 2.5, so I'm feeling like my pace is acceptable at this point. Starting on the fifth with Steel Judoka. I can't say enough nice things about this game.

How quickly do y'all typically take your turns? I beat the game on my first attempt, on Normal difficulty, with a playtime of like 9 hours (four islands), and from what people are saying online that seems a little surprising so I'm wondering if I'm spending an unusually long time to try and puzzle out my turns or anything like that - I do feel like I stare for quite a while to try and find something perfect (and I usually was able to).

On the daily this morning I got Charon's Ashes (deal 3 to everything when you exhaust a card) and especially with that relic, Fiend Fire will pretty much end the fight as soon as you play it when you've got Evolve ticking and reliably hold a 8-10 card hand. Probably my second favorite combo after Nightmare/Catalyst.

Do you grab Evolve with Ironclad? Evolve+ is my favorite card for him and I think I've never failed to take it when given the opportunity; it's a bit of a combo card in that it really starts to sing with Wild Strike & Power Through, but even on its own it thins your deck once it's upgraded and makes certain enemies much easier.

James is working as a private security guard, which I liked as a parallel between him and Bobby, who were sort of foils to one another in the original run of the show as well.

Minor nitpick but I think Albert described her reply as "heavily encrypted."

Slight correction: I think y'all slightly misheard what Albert says to Gordon in the blue outdoor scene; one of you said that he'd described it as happening 'a year ago,' but I'm pretty sure he says "it was years ago." I interpreted it as meaning that when Albert was in contact with Jeffries, Cooper wasn't necessarily clearly missing at all yet.

Fun episode! Just wanted to mention that MCA Informant is actually way more brutal with Kati Jones than y'all said in this episode; it gives her the text: but her existing text, "You cannot use Kati Jones more than once per turn," still applies. So if you unload credits, you won't be able to trash her and you'll still be tagged. Flavor-wise, I think this makes the already incredible MCA Informant even cooler.

No idea if these overlap with others', but here are my clips. Please credit as Gerretic DS1: https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/ColorfulPenguinDendiFace ("Press R1 to Talk") https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/GlamorousSeahorseCorgiDerp (falling in Anor Londo rafters) https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/DeadSkunkHotPokket (O&S: A Narrow Escape) https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/PleasantOwlDansGame ("I just like, pay, like, a modicum of attention when things are happening in the game.") https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/FilthySpiderPermaSmug ("This whole time I had never realized what the point of this was; I was just doing it because that was the next step.") DS2: https://clips.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/WittyCamelVolcania (Nick falls down; unexciting on its own but could be part of a falling down supercut)

The Machete order for experiencing this episode of the podcast was definitely what I got, which was to listen to the livestream but stop early and go to work, then listen to the edited episode. I was wondering why the Jobs talk was left out when Chris kept making patent jokes that are inexplicable without it, then I heard that stuff back in after the break and thought it was strange to put it there but worked about as well as anything, then heard them say the podcast was presented in Machete order and lost my mind laughing. Great stuff.

I'll also echo this recommendation; this is a really cool thing. I think the trailer would be fine to watch if you're on the fence - this might sound dumb, because there's so little to this game, but I watched the trailer and still managed to get a totally incorrect impression of what the game is and was pleasantly surprised by it. That said it's also a 2MB download so probably just play it

I don't know if I'll actually have time to do this but I'll write down the idea I've had and maybe putting it in a public place will encourage me to work on it: It'd be a game where you make little cyberpunk skyscrapers, stylistically similar to those from Netrunner cards, such as: I've never done pixel art before, and I'm intellectually aware that it's not really any less challenging than other art styles, but I feel like I might have a shot at doing things that way whereas I clearly can't create art similar to the above. If anyone finds this interesting and wants to help with assets that'd be incredible. I think as a game it'd be something like: you're an architect and your megacorp boss is jealous of another company's building, hence the title, and you have to make a new building for them. I'm not sure if it'd have actual win/loss conditions or scoring or resources or anything, where you'd submit your building and have it compared to other people's buildings; I think it might really just be like a dress-up toy but for buildings, where you're given some base models to work with and various accessories you can add, like logos / billboards / antennas that you can drag around, maybe some palette switching options / backdrops, and a tool for saving images of your creations.

I'm planning to have this be my first GameMaker project.

I've also been enjoying this. The structure of the world actually reminds me of Dark Souls, with paths circling back on themselves and giving you shortcuts into places you've been before. It's been a while, but I don't really remember anything like that in Myst and it's cool to see it here.

I love voting systems and I'm obligated to hop in to any discussion of voting systems to say that instant runoff voting is terrible. There are voting methods that are (probably usually going to be) better than FPTP but IRV is not one. There's a result in political science, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, that essentially lists a bunch of properties you'd like a voting system to have and then proves that it's impossible to satisfy them all at once. (Ewokskick mentioned above that ranking a candidate higher can sometimes hurt them; avoiding that is one of the criteria.) So on one level all voting systems are bad or subject to strategic voting, etc. However, IRV is worse than most of the others. This website has a bunch of really cool graphics demonstrating how different voting systems behave, and consistently IRV has really weird results. Besides that, however, it's also got other problems. One nice thing about FPTP (and shared by other systems) is that you can count the votes in a distributed fashion; i.e. if we want to know the winner of a state election, we can tally the votes of a bunch of districts and sum them. With instant runoff voting, what candidate a ballot in district A counts for depends on the entire statewide result, because you have to look at the entire state, see who lost, drop them off every ballot, and then re-compute. FPTP and approval voting don't have this problem. Computers make it not the biggest issue but a lot of people are wary of electronic voting. tl;dr - voting systems are all going to be kind of bad. some are better than FPTP, but instant runoff voting isn't.

If you had asked me if I'd ever read a steampunk book, I would've said no, but I've read Perdido Street Station and I have a bit of trouble articulating reasons it shouldn't qualify. I guess it has a lot of steampunk-y elements, but there's a lot of other stuff to the setting as well - magic, multiple fantasy races - that are never associated with steampunk normally, and it doesn't feel to me like it has the customary machinery fetish, either.

Thanks again for all your help, everyone! I beat Quelaag last night in a super close battle, where I ran out of flasks, burned a hard Humanity to heal during the fight, and just scraped it out. Rang the bell and proceeded to go up the elevator back to the Valley of Drakes, got killed by a big club guy, lost the humanity by falling off the elevator on the next attempt, died on the elevator again, ran past all the club guys & out of the cave & straight off the cliff into the bottom of the valley, but eventually did make it back to Firelink. Without any spoilers, more overt narrative elements are coming into play and I'm much less concerned about missing what's happening & really excited to keep going from here (and to never put any points in Resistance again )

For what it's worth, I think Dark Souls actually handles this pretty well - you can go through an area on your own & at your own pace, find items, etc., and then pull in another player if you get stuck on the boss. Typically by the time that happens you've already explored pretty thoroughly and you're retreading old ground & old enemies.

Thanks so much, everyone! This is all very helpful and I'm looking forward to getting back into this game and doing my best to be observant.

Watching Nick & Chris get into Dark Souls 3 on stream and seeing people talk about it on Twitter has made me want to go back to the original and see if I can finish it. I’ve put about 40 hrs in intermittently over about the last two years (I started when it was the free game with Xbox Gold) and I think I’ve made decent progress in that time but I really have no calibration for how many bosses I should have beaten by now, etc. Also, I’ve been doing my best without guides & I think there are still major systems I don’t understand. I would welcome any advice or input veterans have to offer (either in the form of ‘this is how X works’ or ‘Y is something worth figuring out on your own.’ One specific thing that I’m wondering about is how best to approach the story of this game. People speak really highly of the environmental storytelling, etc, and I have basically no idea what is going on. I’ve talked to the NPCs I’ve met so far, but even if I hadn’t split my play time up over a couple years, I still don’t feel like I would know even basic things about what’s happening narratively. Anyway, assorted stuff: I started the game as a Pyromancer. Lately I’m using a sword & shield, with very occasional Fireballs and Soul Arrows. My stats / items: I’m in Blighttown right now. I made it down to the bottom & attempted Queelag once or twice a while ago, but this time through I’d completely forgotten how to get there so I finally looked at a map and found the closer bonfire. Bosses I’ve beaten: Systems I don’t feel I understand:

What are people saying the first boss is? Is it Like people have mentioned, I had a bit of trouble interpreting the map and I'm pretty sure I've gone where I was supposed to go but it's hard to be sure. Separately: Did I make a huge mistake buying the projectile reflect as my first upgrade? IDK what a bullet dash is but it sounds cool.

Thanks!

I'm going to ask a stupid question: where do people see the n+k numbers for their game that I see people talk about? I'm playing on PC and I have never seen this number.

Sure, that's fair. I think it's a tough line though because as a player the one thing I felt more sure of than anything else going into this game was that it wouldn't have supernatural elements. As people on this forum I imagine we're all more aware of Campo Santo than the average player but I think it's still reasonable to consider how plausible it would've seemed. The flip side of this is that I also realized as I was playing it that where my expectations were, the addition of supernatural stuff would have been genuinely surprising and unexpected in a way it never is in games normally.