SometingStupid

That's great to hear I have my schedule on my channel now so hopefully you can make some of those sometime. Currently I'm contemplating hopping around games a little bit just to see where I can start to build an audience (more saturated games have bigger payoffs but can be much more difficult to get any viewers at all) but I'll definitely do some more Isaac thanks to your pledge.

Great article! I'm not normally keen on travel writing but the novelty of this one hooked me in and then the quality kept me reading. Hopefully this is a great boost to your resume and more places will look to publish you soon.

Read through and I agree with you, Rebirth definitely became less of an experience on account of the musical and visual choices, as a piece of artwork it is diminished. However, in some ways I think it reflects the change in gameplay well, in a lot of ways the game became more gamified, more palatable to a wider audience. The original had a lot of creepiness to it, a sort of atmosphere that almost made it a poetic delve into the mind of Edmund McMillen, Rebirth is more like an arcade game, something that you can keep coming back to for more, something that bystanders will enjoy watching. It's clearly been the more profitable and arguably successful model, and when it is disgusting or creepy it has that same sort of shock value as Cards Against Humanity, something that's funny or just plain gross rather than eerie or chilling. And perhaps that's the right direction to go. It depends where you see the value in the game. As you've seen, I really appreciate the mechanics and depth of the game, the core gameplay loop is something I very much enjoy going through and shedding some of its horror/creepy vibe has had very little effect on me, but a noted effect on sales.

Just followed you and checked out a couple of your streams. The Ghost of a Tale stream was having some frame rate issues though, I don't know if you realised that while recording. I look forward to seeing some game dev streams from you too. Also, for some reason when I click that link it puts a full stop on the end and can't find the page, not sure what's going on there. Streamed some Binding of Isaac today. ProblemMachine came over and gave some support which is much appreciated though. sadly you were the only viewer for the entire stream though so it looks like I'll need a bit more publicity before streaming that again is worthwhile. There's a definitive snowball effect to getting viewers. The more you have, the higher up the list you are and the more you'll get.

So I started streaming recently at https://www.twitch.tv/foyfluff. I started with some Magic: the Gathering but I've moved away from that now and I want to start doing some more varied video games and become a bit of a variety streamer. My first foray into this was a playthrough of Gone Home, because somehow I hadn't played that yet. You can watch the full thing here if you'd like: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/118928499 Going forwards I'd like to do more of this kind of thing, including (but not limited to): Far Cry 2, Firewatch, and perhaps a Pokemon game. I've spent today trying to make my channel look a bit nicer too with panels and a header image and what-not, getting that #brandsynergy going, plus, I thought in the spirit of "dress for the job you want, not the job you've got" that it might make some people believe that I actually know what I'm doing. I've been checking out some of the other Thumbers streams and I'll get you guys onto my autohost list as soon as I discover how to do that.

Ah silly me, for some reason I thought I had given enough information to be able to identify me (although I suppose you could discern it from mine being the only video content on the site). Here's my archive. I normally go by Foyfluff on the internet these days, but my account on the IdleForums is older than my invention of that name.

That explanation sounds entirely reasonable and I am very willing to get behind it. I definitely can't imagine it being 100% intentional, as the translation isn't that bad.

'Hidden my game by mom' was pretty funny and definitely an enjoyable way to spend 20 minutes, I'd definitely recommend it. Also, just to confirm, it is available on Android. I'm not really getting the impression that the translation is purposefully shaky though, I think the game is just weird in general.

I think this is a great idea. Often times I'm more of a lurker than a poster, and it's really great to just sift through things that other Thumbs have produced, because they're often pretty great. But today I'm not lurking because I have my own shit to plug! I love Magic: the Gathering. I decided a few months back that, considering I was spending so much time playing and enjoying the game, I should use my own expertise to create something. So I made a blog and wrote a couple of posts. Then I wondered if maybe I could leverage this further and actually get paid to write about MTG (mostly just to offset the cost of playing haha) so I looked around the net and found MidnightMTGO. I got in touch with the owner, and within a couple of weeks I was writing for them and it's a bit of a dream job to be honest. I've been able to write semi-professionally (which was a big goal of mine) about a game that I really enjoy playing. I've also been able to start producing YouTube videos about Magic: the Gathering for the site, which has just been a blast. It's been a really fantastic opportunity for me so I thought I'd talk about it a bit here, even though I know Magic: the Gathering doesn't have the biggest following around these parts.

As someone that keeps relatively up-to-date with the Hearthstone scene, it's not really the new expansion that has caused this effect. When Whispers of the Old Gods first came out, the influx of high-costed, powerful cards such as the Old Gods themselves caused a lot of people to move to slower, greedier decks. Of course, then the meta shifted to beat those decks with lightning-fast zoo decks and aggressive, curving-out based decks, and now the meta has just about shaken out. The new cards from One Night in Karazhan are having an impact, but mostly people are adding them into already proven decks rather than creating new archetypes. There's still one more wing to go though, and it's definitely been more interesting to play while the new wings come out. I think there's a decent mix of decks, though slower/controlling decks aren't doing too great, and curving out is pretty much the best way to win currently.

Has anybody played the demo of this yet? I just finished it and was quite impressed. Graphics wise I was quite fond of the explosions as well as the nice colourful world, looks even more epic with all of it's greens and blues than it would if it were clouded in grey. Sure it's post-apocolyptiuc, but it still looks really nice. Gameplay seems like an odd mix, the platforming/run/jumpy stuff felt only slightly awkward, but that might just be me, and the combat was really nice. The animations in combat really seemed to flow into each other and gave it a really nice, flowing feel to it. The characters were also really good, incase you didn't know, this game's plot and characters are based on the old TV show, but they replaced magic with tech, demons with mechs, and pigsky (?) and the kappa dude don't exist. Like I said, quite impressed and may pick it up based soley on it's uniqueness.

Today I purchased the premium to start up a game for some friends. Unfortunately something bugged and I ended up paying for it twice and still don't have the premium capabilities. However, as soon as that gets sorted out, I'll gladly start up and participate in a game.

I'm sorry already http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=v7qTHbOEiDY

Haven't beaten the game yet, but picked it up last week and sat down with a friend and played somewhere around 18 hours straight of it. Overall I think the game is fun, though obviously flawed. Firstly, the game feels great if you do it stealthily, but unfortunately the mechanics just don't allow you to reliably take enemies down despite taking a good 5 minutes to plan your entry and all of your moves. In fact, the few times I have managed to pull off stealth well I felt like I was breaking the game. Mechanics were suddenly unraveled as the mess that they can be when I can shoot people with a silenced assault rifle and as long as nobody sees (or does see but is standing in excess of 15m away and will thus turn a blind eye) the surrounding enemies just do not care. Surely they heard the sound of my gun? No? Well, the bullets whizzing straight past their heads? How about the noise of small pieces of lead entering a body at high speed and subsequently causing the owner of said body to scream in pain and crumple to the floor? Oh, that's still a no then. Now that'd be all fine and dandy if the game reflected that these are the games mechanics and this is how you should approach them, but rather it insists that this game can be played stealthily. "Distract your enemies with rocks!" it cries. "No!" I reply, "That doesn't work." Get past that and the game can be quite enjoyable. The wallet crafting debate is understandable, though as far as I could see it was a viable game mechanic, even if it isn't very logical, but I guess it makes sense. "You want the better guns? Put some effort in." Seems to be the case. Exploration is incredibly fun, and it's ridiculously easy to find yourself sidetracked through an underwater cave or gliding through the air to find a suitable bar to play poker in. Hunting is enjoyable, gathering not quite so much. The sidequests are largely varied (more so in hunting) but the main story is quite weak. I'm always expecting the game to take a turn where it suddenly becomes more self-aware and deviates away from the spiritualist stuff. "Follow the path..." "Honour Rakyat tradition..." "Face your insanity..." But maybe I'm just hoping for too much from an otherwise decent campaign. Haven't yet touched any multiplayer features, but look forward to the co-op.

Well yeah, the monolith is probably the only thing stopping this from happening.

I slightly died inside while reading this, realising that this indeed could be a grim future reality for our own civilisation, or much more likely, a horrible game show.

That looks pretty damn cool, I hope you put it to good use.

I saw a successful Kickstarter for a website called 'Roll 20' which promised users the ability to play a tabletop game such as D&D using a series of tokens and allowing someone to take the role of GM/DM in the game. It all looked pretty nifty and all (which actually annoyed me, because an extremely similar idea had been brewing in my mind for several months prior to my discovery of this.) I'm not entirely sure how it works, but it looks like fun and I'd definitely be willing to form a group for those of us that would like to play Table Top RPGs but sadly cannot. If nothing else it's worth a shot?

On the topic of dialogue choices in The Walking dead, I've only really played the demo, but this is how I thought of them. Every line of dialogue that your character says has to have a reason behind it being said, you may be trying to coerce a small girl out from hiding in order to learn more about what happened and try and protect her, which is why you (and the character you have assumed control of) may choose to pick convincing lines of dialogue along the lines of,"Everything's going to be ok, you can come out now." and etc... So with that in mind, when we think back to the whole murder conversation, why on earth would someone admit to a crime that they didn't commit under those circumstances?* Sure, there might be a reason, and if you can come up with it then it can sit in your head and it'll change the character that you see in front of you. But keeping in mind what was discussed on the podcast, that dialogue options cannot change what has already happened, and the things they reference are all canonical, I think we have to be looking at a murderer. That said, Lee is not inherently evil. After all, you're going around bashing in some former-human's heads with hammers and whatnot, and that's not particularly nice either. *Just as I was writing this, I came up with a justification as to why these events might happen, but my thoughts - especially considering I haven't played the game - might be worthless.

I don't often comment on episodes threads, but actually there's some good discussions here, I should check them out more! I'm also excited that I feel I have something I can add here, but usually there's a billion other posts preceding mine that make what I'm bringing up pointless. I find this slightly sad yet true. I know I can't expect everyone to be technologically savvy, but I'd like to think that people know what they can do with the hardware they own. Sure I don't expect every PC owner to understand what a Razor mouse is, but you'd think people would know the possibilities and limitations of their own devices. Just a couple weeks ago I was spending a night at my friend's house when we decided to play some Super Smash Bros. Brawl. An error code popped up and we needed to find a solution to our problem. I suggested that loading up his computer would take too much time, and proposed to just use the Wii's Internet Channel instead. He however, didn't even know this existed. This was somebody that is quite a bit of a gamer, and especially follows Nintendo. He's played just about every Zelda, Pokemon and Super Mario game there is, and yet he didn't have his Wii hooked up to the internet and didn't know of some of the functionality of his device. Besides the people who don't have their consoles hooked up to the 'net, or don't have access to it/download caps that make downloading games feasible, there's a ton of people who have no idea that you can download games. Since their creation games have been sold as physical media, and the digital downloads service is quite new to consoles. The one-console future is a probability. I think the problem with it is the competitive environment console creators have placed themselves in. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft (and possible even Boxer8 in the future) are all throwing ridiculous amounts of money at their consoles in order to prove to the rest of the world that they are the best. In truth, if one of those consoles fades away, those developers are likely going to suffer massively from the loss of one of their main products. I'd like to see the digital future, I want it to happen. I want a future where everyone is a bit more knowledgeable of the things they can do with their machines and so-on. We live in a wondrous age where the internet can be put to such great use by many different people, and yet many choose instead to play FarmVille...

I'll admit, I only really understand the reference to Zynga... Though I did find that particularly rib-tickling.

I'll spearhead a group if people want one, I kinda thought that this here Lords Consortium was multi-purpose, but I suppose it would be easier to split the groups between different games, and perhaps keep the Consortium as a hub? Perhaps I'm just looking too far into it. Also, totally down with official logos... or emblems as I will call them in an attempt to heighten their significance.

Just joined me the group because I'm looking to get back into League of Legends. I guess it's not as popular as DotA 2 but still played? Either way, I'd be super happy to join up with some people on EU West, though I'm quite new to the game (I have potential!)

I think that was "GDC '11: Games Kasavin" based upon the fact I know it was in the latter batches of thumbs and that it has Epic Mickey in the tags. Forgive me if I'm actually a complete liar.

Played some yesterday night, suppose I'll do a little write-up if it would entertain you guys. My friend Nathan is the one who persuaded me to buy the game and get this mod, and he'd already had some experience with it. I loaded up the game and spawned near a lighthouse. It took some time to fully describe my location, but it turned out we were only about a kilometre away from each other. I waited atop the aforementioned lighthouse as Nathan ran towards me. I figured out how to draw my pistol and decided that I was ready. I wasn't. At first things felt easy, we headed towards a small lake that he had been staying at previously, the area was quiet and we stayed for a short while, attempting to hack down a tree (I say attempting, the result was a load of flares being strew across a forest.) Our map indicated that there was some sort of settlement over the hill near us, we ascended the hill slowly, descended the other side and had to ascend to the ruins. Ruins would imply that something had stood there previously, if this were indeed the case it had been very, very ruined. We found a single stone arch, presumably a doorway, and nothing of use. After finding a Lee Enfield rifle but no compatible rounds in a hut not too far away, we headed towards air hangar, however, this was overrun with zombies, so we quietly backed away and instead headed for a small village which looked somewhat safer. It was not safer, we managed to escape while attracting only one hopper-style zombie, which we took out further away without alerting anything more. We just needed somewhere else to go now. Further along the village we saw a factory of sorts, we decided to take the long way around and found a zombie outside, we took a different route than we thought we would at first, by climbing on top of a roof and then coming down the other side. As carefully as possible we sneaked around into the factory and found only a pistol which was of no use, seen as though there was no suitable ammunition around. We exit the factory and head for a barn in the distance. Around the barn we find one walker-style zombie and a hopper. I have no experience with the walkers, but I don't need to learn quickly as we dodge through them and enter into the barn. We search the area for anything of use and find depressingly little for our troubles, at one point we're both on the highest rafter, at which point a zombie visibly walks through a wall into the barn. I convince myself it's a glitch and sure enough, the zombie stutters back through the wall. This means that at least one zombie is waiting for us on the other side. We both retire for the night as the tension gets too much, and it's 2am by this point. Day the second: Fortunately, due to the power of servers, the zombies around us have disappeared. However, the loot has also changed, we find two magazines for my Lee Enfield and three steel bolts for Nathan's crossbow. We head for a larger town nearby. The fields leading to this town are littered with zombies, we avoid some and confront others, in the process learning that either A) Nathan can't shoot straight or The crossbow is useless. When we arrive, we decide to head for a supermarket, as this should have valuable rations and possibly rounds. We enter armed with pistols, a stealthier approach. I see a zombie run across the parking lot as the door closes in front of me, I hope this alleviates the problem for now at least. We turn to find two more zombies running towards us, the first is dispatched with ease, but the second cuts us both, causing us to bleed out. If zombies around hadn't already been alerted to our presence, the letting loose of about three magazines of bullets may have helped. In my heart of all hearts I hope that these zombies were already in the building, we turn into the next room, spying ammunition and a rifle on the opposite side of the room. I run to the doors and shut them, not realising that this does not effect zombies as they can teleport through them, at least delaying them would have been nice. I leave Nathan to organise the loot and peer back through the corridor to the room we began in. Behind a bare stack of shelves, two sets of dead eyes turn to face me. I raise my rifle and their bodies fall to the floor, their dead eyes shut once again. I return to Nathan for a second, and then head back to the corridor. Over Skype I couldn't quite describe both the events that befell my eyes and the urgency with which we had to move at the time, but words to the effect of,"There are zombies in a line heading towards us, we need to leave now." may have helped at the very least. Instead, in my own incompetence I simple step backwards and signal Nathan to look at the doorway, which now has a stream of zombies filtering through and spreading through the room. It becomes obvious to us that we have to run. I fire off two shots in reasonably quick succession and sprint for the doors. It didn't quite help that I had closed these doors, but a quick mouse click prevented me from the fate that befell my partner, and I run into the distance. I crouch behind a bale of hay and patch myself up, I have lost almost 5 6ths of my blood. My eyes twitch and blur, and I pass out... So yeah, sweet mod.