Nappi

I'm not totally convinced by the "This is not sadistic, I just want to tangibly endanger them and strip them of their powers" argument. I think I still trust that Griffin is going someplace meaningful (or at least not more gross) with this. However, I really don't want to listen to many more episodes where they are shown adventurers that have been blinded and otherwise mutilated and are almost death because Taako literally couldn't have survived another fight.

I wish the latest arc of The Adventure Zone would wrap up already. While on micro-scale there is still some hilarious stuff going on, the overall narrative is repetitive, on-rails, and at times kinda gross and cruel. I hope that Griffin, or whoever is dungeon mastering after this, doesn't feel obliged to ramp up the tension even more for the next run.

Interesting. I always scouted the environments thoroughly with the drone, and if sneaking was involved, I preferred to do that with the RC than by myself. The upgrade that lets you drop mines with the drone and RC was really helpful in some of the later missions. I agree that they should not have focused so much on guns, and would have hoped that I could have leaned even more heavily on using the drone and the RC.

That was some good content.

Nice!

Good to know, thanks. I don't like it when games change the rules just when I'm starting to get a hang of things and feeling powerful. The clockwork soldiers for example resulted in some interesting scenarios because they couldn't really be eliminated silently (?), but I wouldn't want to see them in every chapter from now on.

In case anyone else was having problems with the spatial sound, the new patch that is currently in beta in Steam seems to fix at least some of the problems. The patch notes specifically mention fixes to the footstep sound volume. Hard to say if all problems have been fixed because my issues varied a lot between different environments, and I may also have adjusted to the weirdness a bit. The level design and game feel are pretty great. I just hope the enemies don't get progressively harder to deal with. I just finished The Clockwork Mansion (which was really fun), but towards the end I got worried that it might be witches and clockwork soldiers from here on out.

The discussed list in this episode is pretty great. I definitely don't mind if the podcast becomes (even) less about video games. (A Perfect Spy is the best le Carre novel)

Yeah, I considered buying Switch at one point despite being quite sure that it would be collecting dust for long periods of time, but at that price.. naah.

That board game

I'm using speakers and the option was turned off. I might check if the option changes things.

I fired this up again after finishing Watch Dogs 2 and a campaign of Civilization 6. I'm going slowly through the second mission. The positional audio is fucking killing me. I was in the Overseers' outpost and couldn't for the life of me figure out whether a guard was in the next room or two floors down from me. Not being able to trust my ears at all is making me paranoid.

I played a campaign of this between Christmas and New Year. Quite a pleasant time sink. Compared to vanilla Civ V (the civilization game, I have probably played the most), this game sure has systems. It was impossible to parse which perks to choose for your religion, which policies to adopt, which victory to pursue and how early on. It took me ridiculously long time to figure out what to do with religion points, and once I figured out I could by a shitload of apostles, I used them to slowly convert my own cities back to "my" religion, even though inquisitors would have been much better for that job. In the end, I decided to go for science or religious victory, and ended up getting a cultural victory. The last dozen or so turns were quite hectic, as I realized that germany was already two milestones out of three towards science victory, and that I only needed about 50 more tourists to get a culture victory. I focused all my energy towards culture by buying archeologists, constructing culture buildings, choosing culture benefitting policies, etc. Two or three turns before my victory, three nations declared a war on me (which is a thing I guess), but luckily they had no troops that could rival mine and the status of war doesn't seem to ruin turism. (I was playing on prince difficulty.) Is the AI broken when it comes to handling religious units? I had a really interesting war with Germany, where there was only a narrow "valley" (although between city states and not mountains) through which the units could funnel. The situation was greatly complicated by seemingly strategically positioned Norwegian apostles who did not move at all, and thus prevented me from placing units at those positions. Later on I saw a gathering of at least 4 apostles (again Norwegian), at the polar region. I could not figure out what they were doing.

I finally got back to this and finished the game. I expected to dislike the characters and the "let's pretend we know what teens like" attitude of the game, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. The characters were fine and some of their interaction was actually pretty nice, and the style and attitude of the game was mostly ok (and occasionally cringeworthy, though hilariously so). The gameplay I expected to like, because there were really cool ideas already in the original Watch Dogs, and for most parts, I was not disappointed. The RC and drone were cool additions. I love scouting the surroudings in games before going in, and these made it more viable than the hopping-from-camera-to-camera method of the previous game. This part was maybe even too easy with the see-enemies-through-walls upgrade for the drone. I also appreciated that many of the physical hacks could be completed with the RC and was super delighted when I first saw it extend its arm and plug in the usb dongle in the target PC. As for the action gameplay, holy shit there is some ludonarrative dissonance going on. I wish this game had done away with player character wielding (traditional) guns altogether, and, in addition, figured a better way for dealing with enemies than killing, even if it involved Arkham style "Oh no, he is definitely not dead, just very unconscious" bullshit. I know that you can avoid killing enemies, but that is made extremely hard by some of the design choices. For example, you can set up explosions that make the nearby enemies unconscious. However, other enemies from quite far away can hear that explosion, and will come to investigate, and wake up the guards. In addition, the unconscious guards also wake up after a while. As I'm not a dexterous speed runner type, so I did not find this method viable. The solution: set up lethal explosions, drive over the guards and policemen with remote controlled cars, and drop bombs at their feet from your drone. Super fun, but man it feels weird for a super hip teenage hacker like me to do. I guess the third option would be to use stealth, but I never understood the logic enough for it to feel right for me. For example, if I shoot someone and he doesn't die or go unconscious immediately, it seems to take about a second for him and all the surrounding enemies to know exactly where the shot came from (even if you used a silenced pistol), and start to home in on you. Since, especially in the later missions, there is usually a shitload of strong enemies and you are really quite weak once you get into a firefight, and since you usually have to replay relatively large chunks of stealth again, I did not consider this a fun option in many missions. Anyway, I liked the world (and the colors! This game features fucking colors!) and most of the gameplay a lot. In my opinion, Ubisoft did a pretty amazing course correction from the original to Watch Dogs 2. I hope that they focus on the strengths of the franchise even more with the inevitable Watch Dogs 3.

I agree. The stuff looks cool and helps create tense action sequences. But it is interesting how little sense everything (architecture, technology, aliens) makes, once you stop for a second to think about it.

I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, despite it being all over the place. The two main characters were more interesting to me than Rey and Finn, because they felt so much more "real" to me, with their human faces and non-chosen one storylines. I liked many of the side characters as well. I would have preferred to see the team of rogues do actual rebel stuff - espionage, stabotage, etc. - instead of being the catalyst for one of the most epic battles in the Star Wars movies so far. Then again, parts of that battle looked pretty cool, so hey... I like the idea of these side movies filling in the plot holes and inconsistencies of the Star Wars universe. I can't wait to see the one where it is finally explained why the helmet lights in this movie were positioned so that they light up the wearer's face and nothing else (the movie culminating in an epic space battle of course). Related to that, I'm intrigued by the process by which the buildings, technologies, cultures, etc. are created for the Star Wars universe, because it is clear that no one ever stopped to question "What is the purpose of this? How did this come about?" or at least went as far as to try to answer those questions. I mean, even Jorge Luis Borges would have thought the library system of the imperial data bank is a bit ridiculous, and the architect of that tower would have had to be on space acid to place the antenna adjustment unit at the end of that stupid skybridge. It is incredible how much I'm willing to forgive in this kind of an action spectacle. I probably wouldn't have minded that the central characters got killed, had it not been so convenient in terms of the earlier Star Wars movies, which, I admit, is a bit weird. I can't get over the feeling that instead of a meaningful sacrifice, their deaths served to keep the Star Wars plotline "consistent" (ha ha ha), by making sure that no one wonders why we never saw these heroes later. It is not as bad as how the ending of Fast and Furious 6 set the stage for Tokyo Drift, but it still bummed me out a bit, especially since I would much rather see more of Jyn and Cassian than Rey and Finn. Come to think of it, what I would actually love is a Commandos style video game featuring the rogue team of this movie.

Haha.. I was so disappointed, because for a movie about the difficulty of encountering, dealing, and communicating with something truly alien, the actual alien design was so easy to compartmentalize Maybe it would not have bothered me, if Stanislaw Lem had not been so good at that kind of stuff. Regarding Patrick R's list, I watched Jaws for the first time a couple of years ago (I might have seen it when I was very young, but didn't remember much of it), and damn that movie is wonderful.

The concept is great and creating fake murder scenes is super fun! Like Ben X, I had some problems figuring out the conditions at first (e.g. I had yellow in bloodiness, despite splashing blood on the body. The email I got after finishing the mission revealed that I would simply have needed more blood), but that is not a big issue. Some kind of prop progression would be nice as well (i.e. less money to begin with, unlocking more props, etc.). As I was looking for Wizard Jam videos on Youtube, I found several playthroughs of this game. The game is also very high in the itch.io popular games list. That is awesome!

Christmas fucking miracle, indeed!

Excellent art and writing! I hope there will be more.

Thanks for taking the time to explain how this works! Looking forward to testing it again after the update.

The game concept is really cool! I imagine you can make really devilish puzzle levels where in addition to "finding yourself" you really have to worry about the other slyboots not beating you. I also had troubles getting past the press any key screen. I rebooted the game and smashed my keyboard a bunch, and finally got in though.

I love the story! The pixel-y art style is good too. The tiled noise pattern on the road feels a bit weird at first, but that is not necessary a bad thing.

I like the pixel art a lot, and the consider the oeuvre bits were brilliant! I can't say much about the gameplay because I tested it alone, but it seems like it might be quite interesting. Just out of curiosity, why did you choose "ESDF" instead of "WASD" for the control scheme? I did not pay attention to the control screen, and for a while, thought that the controls were somehow bugged.

Ok.. Good to know. I'm fine with killing in this game because non-lethal route is made so difficult (enemies don't stay unconscious for long enough, someone always hears the explosions and wakes the affected guard, etc.), but hectic gunplay is just so boring when you know that you could be using your cool tools instead. I also hate how fast other guards are alerted to your presence if you don't one-shot a guard with your silenced weapon. Yeah, FBI mission is totally doable without killing. It just seems to me that the design is heading to a direction where the nice tools you have accumulated are not going to be that useful.