Chris

I absolutely can't stand Will Ferrell's movies, and the entire genre they've spawned. But yeah, when I see him out of character, he always comes off as someone who is intelligent and of good taste. I feel the same way about Ben Stiller. It's too bad.

When I read it, it was the only book I was reading, but I ended up reading less each day than normal. It is indeed exhausting.

Definitely. It's slightly different for me in that I actually enjoy doing things like burning through a tutorial book or what have you, because that in itself feels like a discrete goal, but I find that once I've got the really basic-level stuff down I find it difficult to know where to go from there. When I have something concrete to achieve I always learn much better. Learning on the job is always my favorite way to learn a skill, but that is often difficult to kick off because you need to be given a task that you may not already excel at but that you are trusted to figure out anyway.

I enjoyed Borat and what I saw of Da Ali G show, but the trailers for The Dictator have just looked awful to me. Baron Cohen did an interview on Fresh Air this week and he comes off as extremely intelligent and well-spoken, but man The Dictator sure makes itself seem like one hell of a dumb, unfunny movie.

View from the Idle Thumbs office, sabotaged by unavoidable glare of sun!

Cool, I will pick it up. (I can't imagine something like a parallel storyline bothering me at all; one of my favorite novels Cloud Atlas is composed of six of them!)

I know a lot of people like it, but I'm looking for something that ISN'T a totally wacky sci-fi thing. From general discussion and reputation, I gather Stephenson spans a pretty decent range there, even when he still has futuristic or sci-fi elements, so I'm specifically looking for an entry point for someone who is less into the genre side of things.

I read Snow Crash and heavily disliked it. It's the only Stephenson I've read so far.

What's a good Stephenson starting point for someone who isn't so much into scifi/lore/etc.? It seems like he probably has things I would be in to, and a lot of people whose opinions I respect like him (including some in this thread) but he also seems to get mentioned in the same breath as some really genre-oriented authors I know aren't for me.

I like this site a lot! Here is me: http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5625553-chris-remo

Again, most of the puzzles can be solved by any character. Combinations of characters have little to no effect on the puzzles. There are certain areas that can only be navigated if you have one particular character, and alternate solutions based around specific characters, but there aren't going to be puzzles or solutions that require, for example, the Knight and the Adventure at the same time. The character-specific abilities aren't really a major focus of the game, even though they definitely come into play. The game is being designed such that you shouldn't feel like you have to play it multiple times just to get a decent experience, although there is a certain amount of character-specific content.

I think they're suffering from "Holy shit this is AWESOME" syndrome.

It's all nonsense, but the way it's told is WAY more restrained in the older games. Whether that was by design or a product of its time, it still makes it far more tolerable to me.

No, it's just standard bad supernatural fiction writing. "I never believed old wacky Uncle Deckard and his ke-razy theories!" Meanwhile, a fucked up hell-demon is doing a song and dance routine.

Yeah, I mean, that's why I specifically mentioned SC2 and not every other Blizzard game. Not only the story content but the specific way they're telling the stories have been a HUGE step down for me in SC2 and D3. It's really disappointing.

Most of the puzzles aren't character-specific. There's no reason the puzzles would have to be any simpler than in any other adventure game, most of which don't feature characters with unique abilities. There are certain locations that are specific to certain characters--so you just can't access those special areas unless you're playing with the relevant character--and certain puzzles that have alternate solutions depending on the different characters, but you'll never need to have specific combinations of different characters to solve a puzzle.

Yeah. See also: StarCraft II.

Although there are probably exceptions, I find the approach of setting a period piece to modern music to be really lazy and cheap. You're basically just getting emotional resonance with a modern audience for free, because you're tapping into existing associations people have with stuff that we recognize as cool in this specific era. It just seems like a very surface level way to get an emotional response, almost as if it's saying "Look I know this stuff is totally OLD but it's actually really RAD because there's a sweet techno-rock track in there." It reminds me of sadvertisements for games like Gears of War where they just pick a track to layer over the top as a shortcut to a certain response, although obviously those are slightly different in that they're working from less nuanced narrative source material.

San Francisco's extreme hilliness (and relatively low concentration of fast food) says otherwise. And I've spent a lot of time in London, and other than the river I'd be surprised if many of its natural features are actually left from before the city was built on top of them, rather than being recreated as manmade parks or the like. It's a pretty enormous flat city, for the most part. (And an incredible one, primarily because of the human progress that has created it.) I know it sounds more impersonal, that's why I addressed it. I think generally you're just making a lot of assumptions that are partially predicated on your familiarity with your own city, and such familiarity with San Francisco or New York or Chicago would bear out similar affection if you actually spent a comparable amount of time in those places.

Boooo

Haha what the fuck is this shit

The thing that honestly bothers me a lot more than the difficulty is the goddamn resetting of the world state. That is some lame-ass shit. It's exactly how Diablo DOESN'T work. I should respawn and get to keep going, like I do with every other type of enemy in the game. Instead of having the boss use the same system the rest of the game does, it's a "setpiece." Duriel, the Act II boss in Diablo II was way more ridiculous in terms of difficulty, but you could do crazy shit like a party of eight people all madly spawning town portals before they die a half a second later, creating an endless bonkers revolving door of death and respawning. I mean, it's absurd, but it's absurdity borne out of the actual rules of the game world. It's exactly the reason I hated the Deus Ex 3 boss fights. It's less about the specific difficulty and more that they simply arbitrarily change the way the game system works for no reason other than some designer or writer thought it would be Awesome To Have A Shitty Setpiece Here.

So I just can't beat Belial on my own, and the fact that when I die I have to skip a stupid cutscene and start from the beginning is infuriating. Why do bosses work differently to regular enemies? When you die in a non-boss situation, the world doesn't reset. Why should it be any different with bosses? God I hate special cases for bosses.

The little location icon to the right of the New Content link has one-click access to all subforums.

I think the goal was to eliminate that decision paralysis that often occurs in Diablo II where you just don't really have a very good sense of what your skill and attribute points will mean long term unless you figure a bunch of stuff out or find a build online, in which case you yourself aren't making many meaningful decisions in the first place. The intended experience of Diablo II is obviously that you just upgrade yourself as you go along and make interesting decisions all along the way, but it becomes pretty obvious as you play the game that doing so has the potential to waste a ton of points due to a lack of information or foresight. This is particularly true with attributes. For any given character build, there is clearly a pretty objectively "perfect" attribute allocation, depending on the needs of the skills and equipment you have, so if you want to actually do the best thing for your character, once again, there aren't a lot of meaningful choices for you to make. To combat that they could have done something with a similar system and the ability to respec more easily, or something, but I think they wanted a system that felt more native to the ability to try things on the fly. I think where they landed is really smart and a pretty innovative take on skills. I definitely do miss being able to pump a bunch of points into skills that I know I want to dedicate my character to, but I give Blizzard credit for trying something different and sticking with it. That part of the game, much to my surprise, is the one about which I have the fewest complaints. I have a bunch of OTHER problems with the game that it's too late at night for me to start getting into now, but they're more tonal than anything else.