eRonin

The meta as a whole has shifted to an abundance of mid-range and control decks. When Patron was around, it was either Patron, an aggro deck that tries to kill Patron before Patron can set up, or a small handful of slower decks. Now that Patron is out of the picture, the super-aggressive decks have mostly retreated to the sidelines. The most aggressive deck right now is aggro Druid that uses Fel Reavers, but besides that, the common decks seem to be secret Paladin, midrange druid, control warrior, and dragon priest. Mech mage is still sticking around but not that common these days.

She doesn't play a whole lot of games. I think she briefly mentioned she played Skyrim and enjoyed that, so I guess she thought maybe Zelda would be along the same vein.

Oh hey, I finished this game recently too. I think I'll play it again with developer commentary soon. I blitzed through the tutorial world with commentary. Some interesting things in there already!

The more I think about it, the more that the current UI of the Wii and Wii U already resembles what is seen on smartphones: a grid of icons that is customisable (drag icons around, make folders, etc.) and an additional row of icons for system features. A jump to an Android-based OS wouldn't be jarring at all, from a UI perspective. I don't know how an Android-based OS would affect game development though.

Yesterday my neighbour came over, and expressed that she wanted to try playing a Zelda game, since she's heard good things about them and has never actually played one before. So I loaded up Skyward Sword for her, but she quickly complained about the lack of voice acting, and the outdated graphics. Here was a game from 2011 that in reality used technology from a decade earlier. She eventually started muttering "pretend it's from 2001, pretend it's from 2001." However, once she got the hang of it, she enjoyed the motion controls, and also really liked the characters, laughing at the dialogue in several points during her ~90 minutes with the game's opening sequences. So I got to thinking, Nintendo doesn't really know how to introduce new audiences to their games, do they? For as popular as Zelda is in the mainstream, relatively few people actually play the games. It seems like the only people who played Skyward Sword have previously played a Zelda game and therefore have expectations about it such as the lack of voice acting. For the record, Twilight Princess was my first Zelda game, so even I'm relatively new to the franchise. Besides a handful of people like me though, it seems Zelda is a series that basically aims only to sell at the nostalgic crowd. I wondered how Nintendo should market the next Zelda differently, and the touted open world at least feels like a way of capturing some of the audience who want games like Elder Scrolls and The Witcher.

Really disheartening to hear about the matchfixing stuff going on. BUT on the plus side, it doesn't seem to be as pervasive as the Brood War matchfixing that happened with Savior, etc. Hopefully the upcoming release of LotV will push it aside and make a fresh start for competitive StarCraft 2.

Ah sorry. You can go access the pdf if you go to my 2nd link, scroll down to version 2.2.0, read more and then "view details" link in weapons adjustments (or any other section, they all link to the same pdf)

Very big changes to weapon balance in Splatoon coming soon. Check them out here: http://splatoon.nintendo.com/assets/media/splatoon-patch-v2-2-0-notes.pdf There are also some more changes relating to stages listed on this page, which aren't in the PDF: http://splatoon.nintendo.com/whats-new/ In general, nerfs to the splattershot (and its variants), rollers, blasters, and the E-litre charger, while there are buffs to almost every other weapon. Some specials have also been nerfed. Some of the nerfs seem a bit harsh, but overall I think the devs have the right idea with the direction that the balance needs to go. Also really good to see specific and detailed balance notes!

@TangoCharlie: I spend 90% of my time in ranked mode, since I want to make a serious effort at hitting S/S+. I'm currently in A-, though I have spent a lot of time in A. I'll play turf wars to wind down after an intense ranked session, or maybe even warm up for ranked if I haven't played in a couple of weeks.

PSA: splatoon.nintendo.net is now available in English! And is also apparently officially called SplatNet. This site, which has been available for several months now in Japanese, shows you which of your friends are online, what the current and next 2 map rotations will be, as well as a weekly ranking among your friends. It also shows you their most recent gear loadouts, levels and ranks, and allows you to set a play-date with your friends and can be linked to a twitter account. Pretty handy!

Gonna miss Danielle's voice and insights into interesting and wacky games, but excited that there's gonna be a new podcast! Right now my weekends are mostly podcast-free, but oh boy, I'm looking forward to podcasts round the clock.

You guys have talked a lot about ByuL in the past few weeks. I'm excited for tomorrow when what I feel like the ultimate trial will take place; GSL Code S Finals. I'll be very interested to hear what you guys have to say about that! I'm a little sad that CJ was knocked out from ProLeague though, but I think Jin Air is definitely the stronger team right now and will be the most capable of making SKT break a sweat. It's been a really good few months for StarCraft 2, I'm glad I got back into it after a year or so of not paying much attention at all to it.

So after a handful of quick, finish-it-in-30-seconds courses that I've made, I decided to sit down and create a longer stage. For whatever reason, I decided to retell Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Mario Maker, so stay tuned for that! If it goes well, I'll do all seven books, and maybe split Deathly Hallows into two different stages, for the lols.

I think there is a way of rerolling that doesn't use sea shells or your coins, that relies on just force-quitting the game when you get something you don't like? Not sure exactly how it works and I don't intend on ever using it. I've gotten pretty lucky with my rerolls. I have my perfect shoes right now (ink resistance + 3 swim speed up). I fell back down to A- from A after a disastrous quad-squad session where every single opposing team bar one was S/S+. I think I want to try to buckle down this weekend to reach A+.

So an upcoming major tournament, The Big House 5, is doing a "compendium" to get crowd-funded bonuses to multiple aspects of the tournament, such as securing additional rooms in the venue and increasing the prize pot. It's on a much smaller scale than the Dota 2 compendium of course, but it's interesting to see if the organisers will consider this a success and whether other tournaments will try to adopt this. It's important to note that despite being such a large and highly-regarded tournament, TBH5 is still kind of a grassroots tournament that is run by community members rather than a large organisation, like we have seen happening recently, with PAX, Twitch, Red Bull, HTC and MLG (for the 3rd or 4th time, I lost track) stepping up support for the game. Therefore I believe that TBH5 is a better fit for community funding, and the tournament organisers are trusted members of the community. I imagine a large company with lots of money asking the community for additional funding would leave somewhat of a bad impression on people. Anyway, here's a link to the compendium: https://smash.gg/tournament/the-big-house-5/compendium

Just want to leave a comment here saying I highly appreciate the in-depth discussion of the WCS finals. A lot of other publications have kind of dropped StarCraft content, so it's good to see coverage for one of my favourite games of all time.

Spent a lovely evening playing quite a few of the creations here! Some really neat ideas on display. There were a few that I thought were too hard and I gave up on =P I couldn't figure out how to get to the bit with Bowser Jr, graddy!

All the levels you've uploaded are automatically posted to miiverse, so you can access that from any browser =) Just go to your profile and click on your posts (the new redesign made it a bit harder). Anyway, as much as I like novelty levels, I do like levels that you actually have to play like a Mario level. So I'll be checking out all these levels you guys have posted tonight =)

I've made a few stages so far! Really enjoying it, though I imagine I would need a lot of time to make more creative levels. I have a few ideas in my head but translating them into the game might be difficult. Anyway, here are a few of my creations, firstly Lakitu Terror: 10F9-0000-0035-EE91. The miiverse screenshot for it fails to capture anything meaningful, so I'll just leave it to your imagination. Another one where I make use of one of the few Amiibo I own, Falcon Dash: B22C-0000-0035-C969. And another random one that I called Koopa Kave: 1CA5-0000-0035-85B1. I later found another level called "Koopa Cave".

Correct, only Smash currently uses the adapter. If you have all your wii controllers still, that's great because you don't need much else. Wii remote + nunchuck isn't a bad option for Mario Kart. I don't have a pro controller, but I've heard good things about it. Very comfortable and good battery life.

I added Bagelmage too, maybe the three of us can play together at some point (and maybe some other thumbs readers too). I played a couple of games with ifthen a while back, though that was several patches ago now, I think.

Yeah I'm surprised there is no post-game lobby while people are on the results screen. I guess you can individually message people or add them to party from the buttons next to their names on the scoreboard. Also looks like I added you a while ago, Irishjohn. I live in Australia so our play times might not line up very well, haha.

I had "that guy" in my team yesterday hahaha. He took too long to draft in Hero League and ended up picking Diablo when we already had a tank, then non-stop complained that we just "ran away" (re-positioning) from him when he was "tanking" (being out of position). Good times had by all.

I find that in HotS, people are hesitant to start talking, until someone breaks the silence. Then it's a pretty constant stream of (mostly friendly) banter between team-mates. The pings in this game are pretty useful and more user-friendly than Dota 2 pings, imo, so often I'll not say anything and rely on those. Stuff like "stick together" is usually the most seen chat message for me, and occasionally there will be some commentary about who to watch out for on the enemy team. Of course I've had the occasional person yelling at everyone else, but because they are such a small minority, it usually ends up being one person yelling, and four other people just laughing about how they shouldn't take the game so seriously. So that's pretty all right imo.

I got pretty lucky with apartment hunting. My university owns a complex that is a little walk away from the main campus itself, which is perfect for me since I'd hate to deal with all the noise that living on campus might entail. I'm gonna super enjoy looking for a new place to live when I graduate.