eRonin

Pretty sure your AI characters listen to these commands. The one I use most often is to tell some characters to switch to ranged attack if they're under too much fire; that way they move further back and the monster might aggro onto a closer target instead. Most of the time I get by with switching between focus fire and the regroup as required; it makes perfect sense that these two are on shortcuts.

I can't stop listening to Xenoblade Chronicles X's music. The music that plays when you're fighting Tyrants especially:

You're definitely not expected to have a mech at 15 hours in. Most places I've seen say you could get it at 20 hours if you rush, but more commonly you'll get it at 30 hours. I believe you get them after chapter 6. I'm at 16 hours into the game and I'm jut about ready to start chapter 5. I've explored most of Primordia and the lower landmass of Noctilum so far. I hope chapter 5 takes me further out there, or maybe to Oblivia, where I've basically jut dipped my toes into (for Lin's first affinity quest). Multiplayer missions below level 20 seem pretty boring so far, but that might just be because I've been playing with some over-leveled friends using the mechs to destroy everything before I get a chance. Still, the mission structure for low levels at least have so far just been "kill X of Y". One time there was a treasure box to obtain but my friends killed the objective before I had a chance to check out the treasure =( I'm personally a fan of Black Tar! I don't mind the vocals at all and that soundtrack gets me pumped up for the battles. It sounds like I'm sort of near the same level as Sno and aprettycooldude, so maybe once we're a bit higher level, we should do some multiplayer missions together. My NNID is in my sig (it's also the same as my username sooo)

I've had my Wii U for less than a year and I have 6 retail games for it plus a handful of downloaded titles, so I'm happy with what it's doing for me. I have yet to get other older cool stuff like Pikmin 3, Bayonetta 1/2 and Windwaker HD. By the time NX is released (probably late 2017) I'll probably have about 20 games for it, which is plenty for me! I think that's a good investment. Anyway, that NX patent sounds pretty exciting, and it's pretty in-line with what people are speculating the "hybrid" console to be. I think a 6-7" tablet/controller thing that can run its own game, which can then dock to a home unit for beefier processing sounds very appealing to me.

I haven't played this game much since LotV came out. Did you guys see that new recruitment thing? Lot of people up in arms about it because of all the smurfs that are going to dominate low-level games and people feeling cheated out of the rewards because they "recruited" all their friends back in the beta. Personally I thought this would be a good time to get back into it with more friends, shame other people don't see it the same way.

There are definitely people in the fighting game scene who excel across multiple titles. Daigo Umehara for example is very good at Guilty Gear and Marvel vs Capcom, among others, in addition to being considered the best Street Fighter player of all time. Also besides Grubby, there was also Moon, another WarCraft III player who also played StarCraft II at a high level. While they didn't really overlap, World Cyber Games continued to feature WC3 until its end in 2013, and Moon played in those tournaments.

No, unfortunately. Text in-game is small enough as it is on a TV. Plus accessing the map for fast travel is kinda a pain since you have to keep switching. Also with regard to the downloadable packs: there are 4 of them which total ~11GB. They basically are responsible for making different bits load faster (world, character, monsters, and skells (the giant mechs)). I'm level 14 now, finally got a mission to set off to another continent. This is exciting =D

I haven't gotten into the online stuff yet, but it is rather convoluted. There are basically several layers to it: when you play the game and are connected to the internet, you are asked to passively join a 32-person squad. You have the choice of joining a SP-focused or MP-focused squad, OR squad with your friends a squad is given 5 random tasks to complete, which would be too much for one person to handle, but could be cleared by a 32-person squad quite easily once one or more tasks are complete, THEN you can party up with 3 other people to actively play with them to accomplish squad missions finishing squad missions work towards unlocking a "Global Nemesis" mega boss that has an insane amount of HP, but every point of damage done by members of your squad contributes to depleting the Nemesis HP More details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xenoblade_Chronicles/comments/3u77rz/xenoblade_x_multiplayer_information_thread/ It's pretty daunting, as are a lot of this game's mechanics. I definitely recommend perusing through the in-game manual (home button OR start menu leads to the same document) when you first start the game or maybe after beating the prologue. All of this is quite separate to the single-player game. You can play this game with your Wii U not connected to the Internet, if you like.

Nation Wars III started earlier today for StarCraft 2! Unfortunately being in Australia and it being a European-based tournament, that means that matches happen live essentially during the exact hours that I sleep. Oh well! Keen to see how Australia performs in it =)

Sounds like you guys are having trouble with getting the WC3 FFAs going? That sucks =/ A couple of years ago I wanted to LAN with my sister but I got a new router and that just decided, nah, we're not gonna play WC3. It sucks I dunno how attractive this option is, but there are WarCraft 3 assets for StarCraft 2 now, and I think there may be custom maps that recreate WarCraft 3. Not sure about their quality or if any of the maps support more than 4 players. StarCraft 2's arcade/custom maps are free to play so nobody needs to buy StarCraft. Here's what it looks like: Never mind I think that particular mod is still in alpha. I definitely have played a different one with a friend not too long ago, just having trouble finding it again.

Wings of Liberty had install screens that showed "the story so far", which was good since the last game that came out for that series was over 10 years prior. Then for the expansions they started doing that streaming/background downloading thing that Chris mentioned in the episode, which is funky and doesn't always work as well as I want it to. They sounded very enthusiastic about this feature though! I don't think streaming games will be viable for at least another 10 years or so. Internet infrastructure in most places still seem not to be able to adequately handle it.

Age of Empires 2 had buttons you could click that automatically create formations for your army, and I'm sure other games do too. In StarCraft, its popularity, or rather, perception as a competitive multiplayer game restricts what kind of shortcuts and ease-of-access features the developers could add. Superstars of Brood War were known for their ability to perform numerous manual actions under pressure, and removing that when making its sequel wouldn't sit well with top level players and fans of the competition. I think Archon Mode is a step in the right direction, where one player can focus on base management and economy, while the other player focuses on combat. I know some people who excel at decision making in the game but don't have the speed to keep up in a battle. And also the opposite where a player has the mechanical skill to control units in a fight effectively but doesn't have the multitasking for macromanagement at the same time, so they'd be a good fit for an Archon.

Jaina is infamous for being the easiest assassin to kill ever. She is an assassin with no escape option (until level 20), and she is also bad in an assassin 1v1, because her damage comes in bursts rather than a continuous stream of damage. Should the enemy assassin dodge one of her abilities, she's basically useless until her cooldown wears off. Her auto-attack is also very weak, so she's highly dependent on her mana, which runs out pretty quickly. She shines in team fights though, due to her strong area damage, and is usually picked in a composition with 2 or more warriors, especially those that can zone out and keep enemy heroes away from her. Just need to be careful because in every team fight she is always priority no. 1 to kill.

I'm pretty new to this forum, having only been listening to the Idle Thumbs podcast for about a year. I like talking about video games, and I usually post in the threads for specific games, until I realise I am dominating the conversation and there are only one or two other people talking in there with me. I don't post much or often in the megathreads but I do like reading them pretty often. Sometimes it's surprising how long a single conversation can be held in there, like several days to weeks.

Watching high-level tournaments are always good both because you can see what "ideal" play looks like, and they also have the best commentators who really know how to break it down for both new viewers and veterans. The premier tournaments are the GSL and SSL for Korean individual leagues, WCS (World Championship Series) which is Blizzard's official tournament for players living outside of Korea. There is also Proleague, which is a team-based format based in Korea. As far as tutorials go, I haven't really seen much LotV-specific content, but Day9 and Apollo had really good tutorial videos. I'm sure they're still quite relevant, but you just need to be mindful of the economy changes and the in-game timer change (in-game timer now reflects real time rather than being 1.4x faster than real time) between HotS and LotV. Apollo's youtube channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/user/dignitasApollo Day9 did stuff for years and years and I'm not 100% sure exactly which videos are better for new players, though he did have a "newbie tuesday" series that was specifically aimed at new players.

My friends and I just played against the AI to share Cho'Gall around. I wouldn't play a brand new hero against real people straight up anyway. Plus quick match games were really hard to find as everyone was trying to play Cho'Gall so queueing as them took forever.

Here's some actual ethics in gaming journalism: Kotaku has been blacklisted by Bethesda and Ubisoft for reporting on leaks about these companies. While it may be unethical to jump the gun on reporting sensitive information, I feel that the responsibility is for Bethesda/Ubisoft to maintain a tight ship. I think Jason Schreier is an excellent writer and once the leak was in the wild, accurately reporting its contents and implications is the smarter option than trying to sweep things under the rug. Article here: http://kotaku.com/a-price-of-games-journalism-1743526293

I think we can agree that the game that handles damage types the worst is StarCraft 2, whereby being "armoured" means you take more damage from some units. Herp derp.

I've got Cho'Gall, I'll send you a friend request =)

The mission design in LotV campaign is stellar as usual so if you liked WoL and HotS, go for it. The story is kinda all over the place but I don't know how much you care about that. I'd say the missions overall are harder than HotS was; I beat HotS on Brutal but I struggled a bit on Hard in LotV.

I beat the campaign for Legacy of the Void last night, including the epilogue missions. While the missions were enjoyable to play, and hard difficulty posed a good challenge (unlike Heart of the Swarm, which I played on Brutal since hard on that was quite easy to me), the final end to the story was ... strange. It took such a weird turn that it no longer felt like I was still playing the same game, or if took place in the same in-game universe. To be fair...it kinda didn't, but I won't say much more in case spoilers. I think the ending to the main Protoss campaign was good, if a little neat, but the epilogue had a very different flavour. Also, it serves as an epilogue to the entire StarCraft 2 trilogy, not just for Legacy of the Void, so be prepared for what that means, gameplay-wise, for those who are still making their way through the campaign. I'd suggest you don't immediately play the epilogue after the main campaign, both because the gameplay is quite different, and because story-wise, it does take place in a rather different setting, both of which can be quite jarring. Anyway, I went into this game mostly for the mission design so I'm not toooo fussed about the story ending, and mostly just found out bizzare/amusing. I've seen quite a few people upset about it though!

Suddenly, two Zelda games in 2016. I'm not fussed about Zelda Wii U being delayed to next year though, Xenoblade X will keep me interested for a while, hopefully. Also I'm still having tons of fun with Splatoon and Mario Maker! Those two games kinda saved 2015 for the Wii U.

I'm fully expecting the next character to be either Master Chief or Goku at this point.

Live vs. sOs was spectacular, and almost the perfect way to close out Heart of the Swarm (it would have been perfect if Life had won, hehe). I watched the event at Blizzard's official BarCraft in Sydney, which was really great; only the second BarCraft I've been to. I won one of the minor raffle prizes so that was neat too. I'm sure it doesn't match up to actually being at Blizzcon, but people freaking out and losing their heads over Life's baneling busts, Warp Prism snipe, etc. was exhilarating. It was clear Life was the favourite from the room, and he did way more visually exciting things I guess. While as a Terran player I was upset that Innovation lost in the round of 8, Life was definitely the player to take him out. I'm really looking forward to LotV tournaments, especially more Archon tournaments.

I took a break from Mario Making because my gamepad charger broke, but I finally uploaded a new course yesterday! I called it Broadsides, and it sort of attempts to recreate a battle between two airships. Code: CA98-0000-00E1-5271. Lemme know what you guys think!