eRonin

I think this is a conscious decision they make when they are commentating for the top 8 of literally the biggest Melee tournament ever, specifically. As for the poor explanations, part of it is to do with the fact that Melee was not made to be a competitive fighting game and thus has no official name for a lot of techniques, which end up adopting silly names that make no sense. I watch Toph/Scar's talk-show from time to time and they are very aware of this and often discuss the topic of obscure names such as "tomahawk" (short-jumping, landing without any action, then a grab) or "tournament winner" (performing the jump command while hanging the ledge, causing you to immediately get punished because this is a slow/bad option; which if you watched this year's Melee EVO finals is, spoilers, exactly how the tournament was won (or rather, lost)). I think Scar/Toph did a decent job minimising the use of jargon this year, and also took the time to explain common terms, for example I just randomly selected a top 8 match and they were explaining what a wavedash is; something everyone in Melee knows already so definitely aimed at new viewers. Yeah I getcha. And I do like the way GSL breaks it down into 2 separate group stages because the groups make for more digestable viewing as well. GSL is aired on TV in Korea so having these chunks of the tournament that have predictable durations is really useful for scheduling and organising. Just knowing exactly who is in the lineup for the day helps me decide whether to watch or not as well.

What was it about the commentary that you didn't enjoy? I'm a big fan of the Scar/Toph duo, but they do have some West Coast bias when it comes to player favouritism. Anyway, a double elimination tournament is basically a staple of a lot of tournaments these days, and it's honestly not that complicated. It basically boils down to the idea that you have two chances. You lose once, and you have another chance. The reason a bracket reset can occur in the grand finals is because one of two finalists has never lost up til that point, so a second match is played with that player's second chance. Also WickedCestus; the GSL for SC2 has the Winner/Loser bracket for both the round of 32 and round of 16 now (the groups are redrawn after the round of 32 ends), only the final top 8 is single elimination. But yet you say you hate the winner/loser bracket system, so I'm kinda confused by what you mean?

hoo boy, I hope Rob's audio gets back to normal this weekend. What was up with that? He was okay in the previous episode. Anyway, been meaning to look into Gray Goo; I must admit the name put me off but a lot of people are saying it's a great RTS. I think it's rare that I will play a game that I am pleasantly surprised by, because I'm quite selective with what I play and usually I will have a good idea of how much I will enjoy a game before I buy it. I guess one game that took me by surprise is Crysis, because I am not normally a fan of shooters and I can't even remember why I bought it in the first place, especially since I didn't actually have a powerful computer at the time. It was definitely the height of a generic-looking gruff marine dude shooting a bunch of army dudes but I really had a great time with the first half of the game. The latter half of Crysis is almost a disaster though, the quality really takes a nosedive both from a gameplay and technical perspective (the final level of the game is broken beyond belief for such a high-profile game).

It's a collection game that has little more to do than something like Neko Atsume, but instead of cute cats, there are cute Pokemon, and turns out Pokemon is way more popular than people realise. The social aspect of this game facilitated by the GPS-based gameplay and the relative novelty of AR makes it a perfect storm of something that excites people.

Yeah I only have enough money for about 15 rerolls, which is about how many I would get from a single Splatfest. I'm pretty happy with the gear I already have though so I don't mind. New players looking to play ranked may become frustrated.

Hey guys, gonna try something crazy later today (in about an hour and a half from this post) and stream some Pokemon GO using Youtube Gaming. Stream link is here, hopefully it works out: https://gaming.youtube.com/raexis7/live High chance it'll crash and burn but hey that'll be fun to watch too EDIT: so it crashed and burned, for various reasons like the wi-fi being really unstable and the Pokemon GO servers being down. I compromised and just did a local recording to my phone and uploaded it to youtube.

So I was walking in the park, both because I like to, and for Pokemon GO. I was tracking down a geodude, and it led me off the paved path. I take a step and I hear a squelching sound, and see there's mud all in front of me, but I had already ventured quite far from the path behind me, and the path wound in such a way that it was actually closer in front of me. So I decide to lightly step through the mud to get to the path. I slip and fall flat on my back. My phone is muddy. My back is muddy. My butt is muddy. And I didn't even catch the geodude.

This CS:GO gambling stuff is why I can't get into it, especially on twitch. It's always one of the top viewed games but I know a large number of those viewers are betting on the outcome possibly illegally, and that just completely turns me off this otherwise fascinating game of skill.

I went for a walk in the park yesterday afternoon to catch some Pokemon and check out some gyms, but it started raining and the sun set and I got soaked trying to beat a gym in the dark, and then the game glitched and even though I beat the enemy Pokemon, it didn't register as me beating it, then my GPS got all screwy. Not a good experience. I think I'll stick to daytime adventures.

I'm pretty sure people have modded TMS Western release to get the original Japanese costumes and other things. It's perfectly possible to mod things on the Wii U, just need the know-how and a lot of determination. http://www.siliconera.com/2016/06/28/tokyo-mirage-sessions-fe-modders-working-uncensoring-wii-u-rpg/

Definitely something I've thought about. Maybe they'll make it a reward for ranked play victories, since the use for them is mostly something only serious players are concerned with.

The final Splatfest is to begin later this month, and will take place over an entire weekend, worldwide, hence spanning close to three days. Those of you whose emails are associated with a Nintendo account would have received an email asking to vote for a stage to be chosen in the Splatfest. The theme for this Splatfest, of course, is the ultimate showdown: Callie vs. Marie!! I took a bit of a break from this game due to the release of Overwatch, but I've recently started up again in preparation for this Splatfest. May the best Squid Sister win!! (it's Marie, Marie is best)

Hey Tycho, there's a channel for Overwatch on the idle thumbs slack and discord, and there's quite a few of us who play together!

It's election night in Australia and it's insanely close, but the right-wing party is in the lead. This makes me sad. I didn't even get a democracy sausage when I voted this morning, so I may as well have not voted at all.

Hey Badfinger, I decided to run a test stream and actually focus on looking at the exact numbers since before I was giving you wishy washy values based on memory. I was still running at the "epic" preset, and was getting about 50-70fps in a bot match. Contrary to what I told you before, my CPU usage DID hit 100%, with OBS taking up ~40% and Overwatch ~30% while streaming at 1080p/60fps. For the record I normally get 100-120fps when I'm NOT streaming (my GPU is a GTX 980), so I'm definitely taking a hit as well. And also contrary to prior information, my CPU (i7-2600k) appears to be overclocked to 4.25GHz while I was playing, which I had no idea was happening since I could have sworn I did nothing to overclock it. I don't know if playing a bot match is more taxing on the CPU, but I'm pretty sure last time I was streaming real matches (the VOD of which I shared with you), I wasn't getting such drastic CPU usage resulting in choppiness and framerate reduction. Anyway so a few things: I'm getting more CPU usage than I thought I was, sorry! And I may be underestimating the difference between between a GTX 970 and a 980, but you getting ~40fps on "medium" settings and me getting ~55fps on "epic" while streaming seems a bit off!

Whoa you went almost 10 years without a graphics card upgrade? That's insane!! Your GTX 960 should be able to play all current-gen games at medium settings at least. But anyway, in terms of RAM; speed doesn't really matter much, and these days you want at least 8GB of RAM. Good brands for RAM are Corsair, Kingston, and I kinda like G-Skill too (they look silly but I like that, lol). DDR4 came out recently but I'm guessing your motherboard doesn't support that.

Are you playing on PC? I fought O+S in April for the first time and the third guy I summoned helped me beat them (the first two died unceremoniously without offering much in the way of help), so there definitely are still people playing. Also, a large group of players recently started playing again solely to revitalise the online play, so soon quite a lot of them will reach O+S. http://www.pcgamer.com/today-is-the-dark-souls-global-restart-day/

I feel that while there has been a lot of reaction to Death Stranding on social media, much of it hasn't been very substantial, because the comments usually either amount to a variation of several question marks, or weird memes based on the weird stuff they showed off. I saw an article showing that the reaction to Zelda: Breath of the Wild was the largest, which is understandable since that game had way more stuff shown off than any other (and more time dedicated to it than everything else Nintendo showed off combined). I think I must have watched about 5 hours of Zelda gameplay at this point; most of it is just running around setting things on fire, but I've been enjoying that a lot. On WarCraft: there is actually a high profile Hong Kong actor in the movie, Daniel Wu playing Gul'Dan, but he was so heavily covered with makeup that you probably didn't realise the actor was Chinese. Still, WarCraft has enjoyed huge success in China, apparently making more money there than Star Wars: The Force Awakens, according to this BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-36524703. I went to high school in Australia, but a lot of my friends are Asian, and a lot of us were definitely fans of WarCraft. I have yet to see the movie, but oh man, I remember us all talking about it about 8 years or so ago when it was first announced.

Although the Wii U gamepad tablet seems like it lines up perfectly with the sheikah tablet that Link uses in the upcoming Zelda game, Aonuma has stated that he didn't like the way looking down at the gamepad distracts the player and splits their attention. People who reported their experience playing the E3 demo has said that there is nothing on the gamepad screen besides a refresher on the controls. I really like having a map and inventory screen on the gamepad, so I hope Aonuma changes his mind and at least makes it an option for people who like that kind of thing. Right now, the game is playable both with a Wii U gamepad or a pro controller (though this option was not available at E3), with no difference between the two besides the ability to use the gyroscope in the gamepad for some of the abilities or aiming the bow. Some people have used this to speculate that the NX will not have a screen on the controller, since Aonuma said that the experience on both platforms will be identical. I'm not going to try to predict anything about the NX based on this, though. Crazy how little we actually know about the NX. I think Nintendo should announce it sooner later than later so all these probably false rumours don't start to take hold and ingrain themselves into people's minds. edit: I went back and watched an older gameplay video; there definitely was an interactive map on the gamepad tablet previously. That video was from 18 months ago, wow. (and Aonuma claims the game will release in 2015 in that video, haha)

I am so excited for Zelda, I've watched about 3 hours of the livestream from this morning now, will probably watch the rest later. I really like the physics in the open world exploration; I know other games have kinda done this but none really that I've played a lot of. Not impressed with how quickly some of those items break, but hopefully late-game weapons will be durable/indestructable. It would suck if you were fighting a boss and suddenly you're out of weapons to use!

Yep it's official, Nintendo just made it into its Facebook banner. Also wow Twig that's awesome! I suppose you'll be able to let us know what you worked on after it's revealed?

I'm gonna be upfront, the only thing I care about at this E3 (that I am currently aware of, there might be a new announcement that has not yet leaked) is Zelda. That said, I am super duper excited about this:

I will probably just be tuning into Nintendo's Treehouse streams. Last year and the year before, it was basically a few days of ~8 hour streams showcasing game demos and interviews with the devs, which is basically all I want to see. The Treehouse folk are also super duper fun and rad, although two of my favourite members have recently left the team.

If you love mobility, give Genji a go. He can run up walls like his brother Hanzo, but additionally he can also double jump, and has a dashing strike you can do on the ground or in the air. Insane levels of mobility on one character, rivaled only by Pharah or D.Va, who can essentially fly.

Well ping across continents hasn't improved in the past decade. I don't think that's something they can fix. Nothing's stopping you from switching to another server though, since the unlocks don't matter to gameplay, unlike say, Hearthstone or Heroes of the Storm.