Nachimir

Gross. I want there to be a really confusing/enlightening genderqueer expansion for Battle of The Sexes. The girliest girl I ever went out with found Zynga's reskin, Fashion Wars, twee and insulting. So she played Mafia Wars instead :|

That, too. Also, this one feels like the wooden frame inside is starting to give; it flexes in a way that it feels like it's probably not supposed to. I've also had a bunch of giant beanbags. It probably varies, but I found I either become uncomfortable after a while, or I fall asleep. No inbetween

I feel a lot of pity over this kind of stuff, I once organised a bunch of workshops where people were taught how to do this kind of thing well. Nearly everyone's first pitch includes "So what is [macguffin]? I'll tell you what [macguffin] is" which is such a dull, trite, guffy piece of filler. Best advice I ever heard from someone listening to pitches: "No one has ever been criticised for their pitch being too short. Get to the point and we'll ask you questions". Edit: Jesus… . There's bad pitches, then there's delusional. I've seen both, but never that bad. The question at 1:55 really sticks the knife in too. I felt really bad for some guys who had a stall at the Eurogamer Expo and were trying to build a business around using prototyping tech to make bespoke gaming merchandise. They hadn't managed to get their indiegogo thing together in time for the show, because it was a lot more work than they expected. They also had a terrible pitch in person that rambled on for ages attempting to mention everthing. How did it do? Well…

The house I'm currently in has one of those gaming chairs. It's comfortable at first, but I find it mildly uncomfortable after more than half an hour. If I were buying a chair for non-PC gaming, I'd probably go for a big armchair instead.

I hadn't heard of Bulletball before! There are so many people that can't pitch and don't know it :|

Robot is looking great, Tegs. Best minifig? I'm torn between these:

In which I learn the mattock does backswing damage too: Jon, I learned a lot from your stream today, thanks.

Bricklink is often cheaper than ebay, though not always. Both have lots of sets that have been split up for resale.

I did terribly today, though the last minute is fun to watch. I was panicking like a motherfucker trying to get on that rope, then didn't see the next thing I ran under until it was too late. Apologies for cruddy sound, I didn't realise I'd set it to use the external mic.

Sometimes, you'll find a shotgun for sale (16,000 IIRC). The only times I've got away with aggroing shopkeepers it was due to spikes, or staying above them and expending a bunch of bombs before getting a decent hit. Doug Wilson has an interesting method for the black market: Excavate the sides with bombs first, aggro, then stay high as they all filter into the pit you've made. Bomb most of them at once.

Spikes plus idiot coordination in 2-2 :|

I am really liking the low res, low poly art mixed with god rays and smooth gradients. This is strangely nice.

Same ¬¬ Edit: I'm really glad I learned that mistake by making it, rather than by watching other dailies. Edit edit: A programmer I live with reckons it's probably the whip crack setting it off in this case.

I was like, 12 or something! It taught me a valuable lesson completely inapplicable to anything else in my life except XCOM and similar strategy games.

Oh, I get that it fits narratively, it's just that in the original they sucked so much more. It used to be that if you positioned them outside a UFO door, aliens would eventually come out. On my first mission, I put them on overwatch in a semi-circle around a door (which yes, is a… sub-optimal plan). They all missed the sectoid and mostly hit each other.

Twin Peaks fan parents? (sorry) I kinda get you on bootcamp. An SSD has made rebooting fast enough that I'm happy jumping between OSes, but with a decent hard disk in my last laptop, I never did it unless I really had to.

Gorgeous!

Added! Good luck getting over the retina scaling in OS X; it constantly fucks up screenshots for me. OBS seems to work fine in Bootcamp though, apart from the lack of drivers for headset mics. Is that your real name or/and a Twin Peaks reference?

I cycle everywhere and am left handed, so right elbow. Though, low speed right hand turns would be… challenging.

I didn't do as badly as I thought I would! I got lucky with the boulder in 1-2 not enraging any shopkeeps, then made terrible decisions and/or mechanical fuckups in every level from that point on. My headset mic may never work with bootcamp, but I noticed tonight that I tend to play very quietly apart from the odd swear anyway.

Having just completed Enemy Unknown this week, I can't face more XCOM just yet. I was surprised at the lack of friendly fire on projectiles, and what good shots the rookies are. It felt very "fair", in that if someone died or got critically wounded it was generally my own fault for taking a stupid risk or rushing, but it felt really, really easy on normal difficulty. Once I'd developed a set of tactics for each type of alien, it was very by the numbers. Also, snipers are way OP once levelled up with the right abilities and equipment, even without psi powers. Is any of this stuff addressed in Enemy Within? I was glad to see that blaster launchers are significantly nerfed compared to the original. On the Amiga version, I'd get out of the skyranger with a squad's worth of those, immediately demolish the UFO, then maybe have to hunt for a straggler or two in the smoking ruins.

Kinda divergent as it's handheld, but from the right time: Lost Magic was a massively overlooked DS game, which had a fairly coherent and small language of pictograms drawn using the lower screen. By the end of the game I was able to guess at new spells, because it taught me a system rather than just unlocking things or giving me an inventory. I think controllers are one of the most interesting aspects of the last console gen: Because, early on, most indie developers were pinning their hopes on XBLA, the 360 pad became a default controller for a lot of games. That hope is largely gone, but that standard sticks around (360 pads are the thing developers request from me more than anything else at events). Mostly it's been because the other options are utterly terrible, but I'm not sure the Dual Shock 4 working in Windows will be enough to depose that and suspect the standard will stick.

This one is really neat, though I'm guessing it was taken with auto white balance? It looks a bit orange, and most cameras I've had screw up auto white balance some of the time. "What are f-numbers and why?" is the question no one, not even photographers and graduates I knew, would answer when I started out. Beyond describing that it means the aperture is bigger or smaller, mostly they'd say "Oh you don't need to know that" which I suspect meant "I don't know". A given f-number is the ratio of focal length divided by aperture width in millimetres (this is based around equipment originally designed for 35mm film, cameras in other formats may list attributes as "35mm equivalent"). Lenses, and consequently photography, have made a lot more sense to me since I learned that. A 50mm f1.8 prime lens can be relatively inexpensive, but will let you see this ratio in operation really obviously, play with depth of field a lot, and do photography in much lower light than you might expect.

I enjoyed this! I'll start recording these soon. The other day, I managed to die by getting hit by something, then my stunned character landing on an altar. Just as I thought "Oh maybe this will be okay": "Kali accepts your sacrifice".

That's not as sensational as it sounds, since they announced a million pre-orders in August.