unimural

The entrance to the area with the railoroad and the baths is next to Linus' tent and the carpenter's house. Initially it is blocked. The baths open up sometime in the during the first summer, iirc.

It think it somewhat uncharitable or hyperbolic to say the world is doomed. The world is doomed to change. This century will like see the most change since the industrial revolution. We have some ideas on what those changes are going to be, but some will still take us by surprise. I suspect climate change was not preventable. It would have required a significant or severe increase in cost of living the moment the phenomenon was understood well enough. I do not think it would have been realistic under any circumstances. Still, I think we have done a lot. But there is still a lot to do. Almost all of it is going to have some economic cost associated to it. And we can not know exactly what we should do about it for good results. 'Burn it all down' doesn't guarantee anything about the direction things are going to go afterwards. And the burning is almost always going to have a very terrible, human cost.

I wanted to just say that your whole post, and this point in particular is exceedingly important. It should be repeated, often. History seems to say that slow, incremental changes are almost uniformly preferable to cost of wholesale change. Sadly, it is not a sexy, passionate message that rallies people.

I don't think it's that silly. There's a difference between the AGI/SCI 1 vs later SCI era Sierra games. Sierra clearly had a lot of trouble with learning to design puzzles for mouse-driven interface. Myst and the 7th Guest did make me worry that I'd loose the games I really loved: the Lucas adventures. Eventually it turned out I did, but not for the reasons I thought. I also thought that Ultima Underworld games were the heralds of a new age, but that also never really came to be.

During the Far Cry map discussion, sadly, my mind imagined a future Ubigame with a lore terminal explaining why in the Far Cry -universe the tectonic plates moved alot more in pre-historic eras and the primal bit of Europe ended up in the Himalayas some 10 millenia later. And a diary for why, despite these vast changes, the area still looks the same. My experience with Stardew Valley was less extreme than Nick's. Still, I did experience some existential discomfort as well. The kind of weird opening cutscene paints the farm inheritance as an escape from the corporate serfdom. However, what the actual gameplay encourages is extreme time management and micro-optimization. Each day lasts only 20-30 minutes, and at the very least you have to water the plants. If a villager has a birthday, you really should give them a gift. If it's raining, you don't have to water the plants but you can spend it fishing or mining or just doing general chores. Instead of leisurly working on the farm, each night I need to plan the next day: I need to buy seeds today, so I should first go to the sea shore to collect the shells, and if I have time before the shops open, catch a fish, and then sell the shells, then go to the seed shop to get the seeds. Then back to the farm and plant the seeds and water the plants. After that I still have half a day so a quick trip to the baths to replenish energy, then to the mines to collect some ore. My poor farmer guy never was this beholden to the clock as the office worker. I suppose this matches what actual farming is like. You worry about the weather, time and expenses. Definetly not relaxing :-) I still feel the comparisons between Myst (plus its sequels) and The Witness are weird, since pretty much the only thing the games have in common is the are first person, they have puzzles and they begin on an island. The Myst begins with a very clear narration, and an hour into the game you're already diving into other worlds. As iconic as the island is for Myst, you spend most of the game off it. There are a lot of journals and there is, in general, a whole bunch of story being fed to you. Pretty much all the puzzles in Myst try (and often fail) to fit in the world. Fictionally, they are not puzzles for the sake of being puzzles. They are the tools the inhabitants of the world used. Where as The Witness, instead of having a bunch of menus for choosing puzzles has an island you walk on. But it effectively is a pure puzzle game. The game I personally have found myself comparing the Witness to is the Starseed Pilgrim. Admittedly it's a lot less well known. But I would never compare Starseed Pilgrim with Myst. Perhaps I'm doing a disservice for the beauty of the island of the Witness, and all the environmental stuff in the game.

Back when Uru: Ages of Myst servers were still running I met a fellow there, who never ran. He walked everywhere. He said that if felt that he needed to run, he took it as a sign that he was too impatient to play the game and should stop. Even back then, I kind of thought he was on to something. Since then, I've taken to heart that I can be my own worst enemy, and that with simple guidelines I can avoid sabotaging my enjoyment of a thing. So, effectively I'm a poorly function puzzle solver and enjoying puzzle games is an uneasy truce between joy of solving puzzles, progressing in the game and actively disliking being fruitlessly stuck on a puzzle. Hints, in general, make solving puzzles less fun. The chemical cocktail my brain rewarded itself with is lessened by the knowledge of the hint. Sometimes to the point of souring the whole thing. Resorting to an outright solution is often very antithetical to my enjoyment, and will make it more difficult for me to enjoy the rest of the game. Using just one hint makes me less patient, more easily frustrated, and thus more likely to 'need hints'. With most games, I also want to progress in the game. I like stories even more than puzzles. Worlds, characters. For example, in an adventure game, with all the narrative elements spurring on, the desire to see more of the story can become a reason to resort to a hint, or even outright solutions. "I just want to see the story." This is sometimes tied to the third aspect, frustration with being stuck. It can be horribly unfun to be stuck on a puzzle. This is where the enjoyment management aspect kicks in for me. I've learned that I'm very irrational and react poorly to certain stimuli. Sometimes, when I'm really stuck with a puzzle and I finally figure it out on my own, I will hate the puzzle, I will hate the game, I will hate the designer and I will hate myself. Slight hyberbole, sort of, but appropriate. And it'll pass, but it's still not a nice thing to experience. I've kind of learned a set of rules by which I can enjoy stuff the most, and for a pure puzzle game like The Witness, I should not look at any hints until I consider myself done with the game. I will only feel bad if I do. It is kind of preferably to not finish the game instead of spoiling the puzzles. With The Witness, at a certain point I realized I couldn't do the sensible thing and stop playing, despite considering myself 'done' with game. I suspected I would only frustrate myself without pretty-much-solution level of a hint for a particular puzzle. A very very slight spoiler, if you haven't understood the idea of the jungle/bamboo area puzzles: In general I consider using any general tools, or tools that you make yourself as fair game. I admit it's a bit different a category, but it doesn't detract from my enjoyment in the least. While I play a lot of puzzle and adventure games, I'd consider myself average, at best. I think I've been more stuck in just about all of them than I was with The Witness. Actually, the only game that I can think off the top of my head that felt the same is Cliff Johnson's masterpiece Fool's Errand. In fact, if you've never played them, like more linguistic puzzles and have a decent grasp on English , you absolutely should check it out. It's a bit silly mix of a short story and puzzle game with some truly unique puzzles and a wonderful setting. 3 in Three is equally brilliant, yet slightly less wonderful. At the Carnival is merely great. They are available for free. http://fools-errand.com/07-DL/index.htm The 2012 sequel The Fool and His Money is a bit punishing, at least for me. And it is an example of a game I eventually decided to stop playing due to me not being able to continue without ruining the game for myself. Perhaps I'll return to it now that I'm still craving for more puzzles - the map section is bound to be fun. As a side note, despite my strictness with regards to hints, I really really enjoy playing adventure/puzzle games with a friend. In fact that would be my preferred way of playing. Of course not all friends are equally puzzle friendly, and unfortunately haven't really had a chance to do that in a long while. But for a good ten years of so I think I played half of my adventure/puzzle games together with someone else.

Thanks, that was a very nice listen!

Nature fights back! Dutch police are considering using eagles to take down drones: http://www.wired.com/2016/02/so-dutch-cops-are-teaching-majestic-eagles-to-hunt-drones/ Of course the net result is merely that eagles will be the second evil species mentioned in the datapackets future robot educators will create about the terrible, drastic and necessary actions robots had to take to save the planet from its evil slaving overlords and their animal quislings.

There should be a Firewatch pun thread - Fire watch with me. Lots of rambling In the intro the choice between trying to take care of Julia, or sending her to a home was really difficult. I eventually decided I would probably be too selfish and would try to handle it on my own. I would love to know when and how the intro came to be. After the intro, I had a character called Henry, and a hope that Henry could at least survive, perhaps even heal a bit. But after the intro I never felt as if I was Henry. I was kind of a weird disembodied soul that maybe could bring out the most sure-footed version of Henry about that the game allowed. It went pretty ok, and I enjoyed the ride a lot. I suppose what I ended up with was a rather unrealistic, poor character, that merely reflected my hopes. At just about every time it was possible I chose lines that seemed to imply a rational explanation for things. Or forgiveness or kindness. At the end I chose for Henry to tell Delilah to go with the chopper, because I was a player playing the game and it was the rational choice and it was the choice people should make in that situation. To say it was ok. I don't think the Henry of the intro was this person. It is perhaps a failure of the game. But it was a good fantasy to experience. Perhaps the most important part of the experience was seeing those dialog options, and worrying how mad things might this character end up saying, expressing, believing. The timer on the dialog choices worked well in this regard. I always managed to make a choice, but at times I had to hurry, felt some pressure. I suspect this dicthomy was not intended, but I did work rather well for me. It has a lot similarity with books: identifying with a character, but not inhabiting that character. Having no control over where that story goes. However, I did have some control over the tone of the story. In movies I sometimes get these moments where you feel the character is about to do something, and I tense up and hope the character does not do that. And usually the character does because that's dramatic. Here, while I didn't have probably any control over the actions, I at least had some control over what the character says. And I strongly tried to steer the character away from those hurtful places. I don't know how much effect that had, but that is an experience no book or movie will ever give. I can understand preferring a stronger authorial voice and to a degree the gameplay and story are removed. But I do also kind of like this kind of storytelling. The only thing I really regret though is that I spent a lot of the game collecting evidence, and I treated the camera as a way to collect evidence. I was afraid of taking photos, because I'd run out of film and then I couldn't document something curcial. I guess I was kind of expecting some kind of ending vignette, and even in Ned's bunker I took three photos there. I had three left, and did get a couple of nice ones of the orange forest. And, as I suspect most people did, I also took a nice one in the aspen grove. Also: Brian's death was not intentional. Ned wanted his son to fit an image Ned had in his mind. Brian, the imaginative, smart kid wasn't that and did not like climbing. Ned forced him to, and the fall was an accident born out of that. Ned's actions in the game are a mix of wanting to be caught and fearing it. And being, in general, rather unhinged. I think Ned must have placed the alarm bagback with the intent to lure Henry away, because otherwise Henry should have noticed the beeping of the scanner when he arrived at the tower. And this also means that a tracker was intentionally put in the bag and then turned on. I would want a Miasmata version of Firewatch so very badly. With perhaps actual being on watch for fires even :-) I was very happy the game had the no map pointer/no objectives option. 0451 container had a cap, after which I assume Henry wore two caps. I loved the moment where Henry contemplated whether he was utterly delusional. For a brief moment I even considered it.

I would add to paradi6m's point that most other video games teach you to be good at video games of that genre, at least to some degree. The Witness, because it focuses so strongly on rather specific versions of rather few types of puzzles, does kind of only teach you to play The Witness. I sort of disagree with iax's point about the Witness teaching general problem solving. Puzzles in general, I think, do not do that. They encourage focus and detail-orientation. They can develop various thinking skills, and at least for me The Witness most certainly did challenge my visual thinking. Not sure how generally applicable any of that is, but I'm sure it does help at least in many other puzzle games. But because puzzles are very much discrete problems with prescribed solutions, they kind of lead to poor problem solving habits. In real life problem solving is much more about resource management and optimization strategies, where as puzzle games teach you to beat your head against the wall until you break through. This doesn't detract my enjoyment of the Witness at all. I like wasting my time, and I like wasting my time on puzzles. I am a bit ashamed to admit it but I have sudoku app on my phone which I sometimes use. I do kind of think that The Witness does a lot to make you question, or feel, that it is not mere entertainment. I absolutely think that it is, and I kind of suspect it doesn't have nearly as strong educational or edification goals as people feel it does. But can you blame people when the game is filled with audio clips containing philosophical ponderings on the nature of knowledge. Or James Burke. I wish there were more Tom Chicks around in the field of games criticism. Even when I think he's wildly missing or misinterpreting something, it is still very easy and useful to appreciate his point of view, because they are so often well thought out.

Wonderful! IGN should have added, for their review, a boxquote to the side bar: "Blown away..." --Olly Moss

Consortium is a tough one. It's a game that I'm not sure I can recommend, but I want to. It is also very easy to spoil by saying anything at all about it. At least if you have any sensitivity to spoilers. It is an insanely amibitious game, that's kind of a meta sci-fi reactive, immersive sim of an extension of many of the ideas of The Last Express. It's also a bit of mess. It's been patched, and it is now in a very good state, but it's still a bit of a mess, at least in some parts. And it kind of doesn't end, rather it just stops. How do you recommend something like this? I suppose that's part of the problem. Your experience with Consortium will not smoothly remain the enjoyment spectrum. But it does contain really unique things, and I really really want everyone to play it. I'm just not sure I can recommend it. But I would encourage you to try it. It's on sale -80% until the end of January, so now is a really good time to give it a try. And I really want Chris to play this and talk about it on the podcast. Also Jake, but I'm trying to be realistic. The reason why I'm posting now about it though is that they have a Kickstarter up for the sequel. It's not looking very likely at the moment, with them still not having reached even 10%. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/idgi/consortium-the-tower?ref=users

Clarification:

You are fundamentally correct, but as can be seen from the general confusion the rule is a bit vague. Spoilery hint: My current understanding of the ending.

Steam says 28 hours, 515 +65. I've enjoyed the last 100 or so puzzles the most I think. I also think the last 100 have been a third of my playtime. I think I'll still grind at least one of the ++, although I'm not expecting that to result in anything. All in all, after I got over my hangups with the game not being Myst, I did enjoy myself a lot more. But I can't help but to wish the game would marry the world and the puzzles more. Now, over 20 years later, I think I only remember the existence of the rocketship sound puzzle and the fireplace puzzle from Myst. But I remember at least two of the worlds plus the main island, and I remember the story and setting. I doubt I'll remember much from The Witness in two decades. In that sense I can understand the people who feel the game is a waste of time. It is, but so are all games. Yet I do still uncomfortably feel the disconnect between the meditative and beautiful aesthetics of the island and the act of playing the game. I did end up playing more of The Witness instead of XCOM 2 this weekend, so I guess these are still the ramblings of someone hooked. I do however think that people who say The Witness is pretentious are mistaken, since it is very hard for me to attribute particularly pointed intention or meaning to either the design as whole or the audiologs. I think it all remains fairly firmly in the food for thought category. It all seemed rather 'as is' to me. Also, there's a nice podcast on The Witness at Quarter To Three, well worth a listen if you're still reading this thread. EDIT: PS I agree with Chris and Jake that Riven is superior to Myst, and I am indeed very fond of it, but I am fond of all the Cyan games, and am very much looking forwards to Obduction, despite the production woes.

5 hours in, around 170/+15. I'm still quite not loving it, but I guess I've come more to terms with the game. I guess my two biggest issues are that the most of the puzzles still feel like solving sudokus, and that I still feel the game world is almost entirely removed from the gameplay. I guess I'm just unfairly projecting my expectations and desires on the game.

After 99 minutes, (70 solved; +6) I suspect this is not really for me. I'll give it another chance over the weekend, but I feel nauseous, exhausted and deflated. The way the game is designed makes my brain go pattern matching overdrive. I feel as if I'm doing the exact same thing over and over again and haven't been able to find enough delight in the variations thus far. Also, I'm not sure why, but I also find the environment sterile and off-putting. This is really strange because I've had no issues with all the various Mysts and Talos Principles in the past. I did really want to like the game, and perhaps I'm just having a weird day.

1. Reading the lore is optional. It may help you clue the murder mystery together, but it's certainly not required for that, at not even necessarily helpful. 2. It's not for you. There's not much of the game left after that point. As I said, the game doesn't end, it rather just stops at one point. When I first played the game, I don't think I even used the guns beyond the mandatory and horrible virtual reality training bits. Oh, I guess you kind of have to fight the suit. But I immediately liked the concept of the game, and I truly enjoyed the ship. I admire the game for trying and to some degree succeeding in making the ship feel real. Of the crew existing independently of the player. But none of it works fully. Conceptually I very much value the vastly divergent nature of the story, even though I'm not much into replaying games. I still like it a lot. But it is a case of me enjoying what the game evokes than what the game is.

DF-9 was a failure as a project, but that's fine with me. Perhaps they could have been a bit more gracious about the upset over stopping the development, but I've never felt they've owed an apology. I guess the argument is that people feel Double Fine promised, or at least gave the impression that they would make a deep simulation game out of DF-9. They failed, but it is a game. The "Spacebase DF-9 is now released." -approach was obviously putting a nice sounding spin on an unfortunate situation. However, I do think Tim's form post response to all the hubhub was a nice move. It was certainly more honest than what most companies would have done, and I don't fully understand anyone needing anything more after that. Further rambling Personally, I very rarely buy early access games, or pre-order games. I do back a lot of kickstarters though. Crowdfunding, to me, is providing the opportunity that something might exist at some point, and early access is buying whatever the thing happens to be at that moment. And pre-ordering these days is, I suppose, about the pre-order bonuses versus the possibility that you won't enjoy the game. With early access you do at least get reviews of sort. I understand that a lot of people approach buying games differently, but when it comes to early access, I think they are making a mistake if they do. I really liked the concept of Spacebase DF-9, but I always considered the game as a weird fit for Double Fine. As a developer, I don't think they've ever made a game without a ton of art and animation, and I was concerned whether they'd be able to make DF-9 work with their kind of visual-oriented approach. But I like Dwarf Fortress a lot, and I like JP, or at least the perception I have of him, so I bought the game fairly soon after its early access launch. I didn't enjoy it for long, and I felt my concerns were justified. When they stopped development, I gave it another shot, and it still wasn't very captivating. Steam says I've played it 6 hours, and I mildly enjoyed myself for most of it. As a side note, I do wish it was possible to filter early access games on Steam.

EDIT: Right, SgtWhistlebotom is of course correct, that must be what Chris was referring to. Doh. The F. Nick Breckoncast was part of the Kickstarter progresscast series. I remember the opening, where Nick tries to introduce himself and is drowned in clips of other Thumbs saying "And I'm Nick Breckon!" And then there's talk of DOTA, I think, and Nick is kind of ambivalent, but then Nick is really enthusiastic. I would most certainly listen to Steve's Hot Scoopcast.

I'm also really looking forward to Nick's experiences with Dwarf Fortress. However, I do understand if we won't get (m)any. Hopefully the kind reader will ease things for Nick. While perhaps not a common view, I think that Dwarf Fortress isn't that complicated, nor is it that complex, as such. The big difference is that the primary objective of Dwarf Fortress is to be a simulation, not a game. When it comes to complexity, I think it could be compared to some citybuilders, e.g. Children of the Nile. The economic chains are mostly reasonable. Mine the rock for ore, which is smelted into bars, which is then worked into a tool or weapon, which is then used. However, to set any of this up in DF you have to do a ton of work. Because what you're doing, is, in my opinion, more about setting up the simulation so that this economic chain comes about, rather than setting up the economic chain itself. Instead of building tools, you set up the conditions so that the ai agents (aka the dwarfs) can produce the tools if you request them. And the real issue with DF is that the interface is really poor at handling the scope of the simulation. It's just bad at it. The first time you get over 20 immigrants and try to find meaningful things for them to do you realise the value of Dwarf Therapist. Now, I love Dwarf Fortress. Specifically, I love two things about it. I love the expressiveness of the simulation, the story generator aspect of it. The moment I truly fell in love with DF was when I managed to build my first kind of successful fortress, and how it was undone by a dwarf triggering a tantrum when his pet cow drowned. The cow had been pushed off of a bridge by a dwarf already throwing a tantrum, because I was unable to provide him with the materials for his artefact. The craftsman was easily subdued by the guard, but the owner of the cow was unstoppable monster, destryoing property and killing everyone trying to stop him. The rotting corpses of their friends drove the rest of dwarves crazy. The second thing is, I love fiddling around with the simulation. The Rube Goldberg machine -aspect of it all. That it is a creaky machine that can fail unless you build failsafes. And even then it can fail. I love the concept that you have so many things you fiddle around with. And I like that fiddling. Trying to optimise those ever-partying dwarfs into a simulation that progresses mostly in the direction I want it to go to. But I don't think anyone is denying that the interface as it currently is, is rather cumbersome, especially the bigger your fortress is. If the simulation fiddling aspect of the game doesn't appeal to you, I think it doesn't matter in the least how much you enjoy the story generation aspect of it all, you will bounce off of Dwarf Fortress. The insanity of it all must appeal to you as well.

I do get the emails but as a rule I don't read them. I support a couple of other fine folks via Patreon, which means I get a few emails a week from Patreon. Apparently this is too much for me, as I rarely read any of them. I don't mind them either. I have no idea if it would make sense, but personally I kind of wish the Q&A episode was available for all. I understand you want to do something special for all the folks chipping in, but I suspect more questions would result in better Q&A sessions, and exclusive content certainly isn't what I'm looking for.

Fallout 4 does mention VATS during the tutorial/initial sequence, when you enter the evacuation tunnel and are attacked by a few radroaches. Like all notifications the tutorial text is in the upper left corner, and will just go away after a short time. It is a bit inelegant: to activate VATS with just a keypress you have to have enemies in range. However, when you see enemies it's relatively natural to focus on the enemies, not something on the periphery. You can also activate VATS anytime by holding the same key (q) for a while. I personally missed the notification for the sttlement being under attack. However, you can see the status of your settlements in the pipboy's workshops tabs, so now I just check that occasionally.

To be fair, Bethesda themselves used the "Oblivion with guns" as the elevator pitch marketing line. A digression: I first encountered this phenomenon when the movie Speed was described as "Die Hard on a bus". Which is wondeful. Also, as someone who recently has been systematically listening to the original run of Idle Thumbs podcast, I can say with high degree of certainty that you are not the same people now. The lineage is clear, certainly, but the emphasis is rather different.