Latrine

Oh whoops, I forgot the content of the last diary. But still some tricky stuff.

So in retrospect I have a little problem with the whole premise of the game...

It's a little better but I still don't like the insurance fraud activity. It would be more fun if you were pinballing around with lots of collisions. But here you're mostly just cartwheeling down the road at high speed hoping to hit something to make your score go up. And I still found it was better to ignore where it sends you and just go on the highway for the higher density of cars.

Imagine a game where when you shoot you have to avoid hitting people to score points. I call it footbullet.

Yeah, because SR4 is basically built on top of SR3 and I played that recently I found that I didn't spend as much time with the customization options. But I found that the super powers are exactly what I felt was missing from SR3 which had a really slow ramp up before you felt really powerful. Also, because this is driving me crazy and I have to ask everyone, at the very end of the game...

There's actually a card game that tries to simulate the strategy of fighting games called Yomi. I've never played it myself but apparently they have a online version and it looks pretty cool. http://www.sirlingames.com/pages/games Also I think some mobile versions of fighting games, like the Street Fighter port for 3DS (which Jake should buy), use the touch screen to let players just tap for special moves. As a fellow PC gamer I have to admit that fighting games are the one genre where a keyboard is woefully inadequate and it mostly has to do with keyboards not being designed to register more than three button presses at a time.

Yeah, I only played SMNC in the open beta and part of the reason I stopped playing is that most people didn't understand that it was a laning and xp game. Also their equivalent of the central global objective was super powerful, if I remember right it was just a control point that would instantly destroy all your opponent's creeps, so you had to contest it or you'd easily lose a ton of towers but no one ever knew to do it or where it was on each map.

The Stranger

"Maybe I don't want to compete with the company that has an unlimited amount of game development capital, some of the most talented developers in the world, and a five year head start on me." - Sean That didn't stop game publishers from trying to compete with WoW for the last ten years, I don't think they've learned not to do that. Also I dunno about MNC, but Super MNC was definitely a LoMa.

One nice small thing I noticed while messing around with the editor is that all the hair styles are available to each gender. Usually haircuts are gender specific in these kinds of editors, but here it shows that making the distinction doesn't make sense and also just limits player expression.

Yeah, I don't think anyone on the show would actually like Saint's Row 3. Although I have to say I just booted up the game to export my character for SR4 and I ended up killing 30 minutes just playing with the weapons and blowing stuff up. It's just crazy dumb fun done right.

Saint's Row 3 had some great set pieces and zany mechanics, but I felt it also had a lot of dry sections and was slow to ramp up. I'm actually looking forward to Saint's Row 4 because it looks like they've trimmed even more fat.

Have you considered the type of mouse grip that you have? http://www.razerzone.com/mouseguide/ergonomic I use a palm grip and personally find that an ergonomic mouse with a high arch is the most comfortable. I'm currently using the G500 which I think is one of the fatter gaming mouse designs out there and I find it quite comfortable. Theoretically the other grip styles might improve your game but I'd rather not deal with the hand strain, and I find I can still arch my fingers a little with this mouse to get finer controller. I don't know if the G500s still has this issue but recently with the G500 I've run into a problem where sometimes the mouse would double click on a single click which is super annoying. Apparently this is because of an engineering design flaw where there is static electricity build up on the button triggers. This can be a bigger problem if you're in a low humidity environment. So far the standard response of disconnecting the mouse and mashing the buttons to remove the charge has worked, but I've seen videos of guys taking their mouse apart to put in insulation which seems like a pain.

Nope, you haven't missed anything. You're being punished and it gets worse later in the game, so if you really hate it then you should drop it now. The best advice I can give to cope with boss runs is that it's faster if you just run past enemies rather than fighting them, but it still takes time. Dark Souls isn't really a "hard" game as much as it is a frustrating one. Part of the reason people like it is because of the euphoric feeling for having overcome long periods of frustration. The game is really not designed to respect your time. It's the player's responsibility to think about what options they have available and minimize the amount of time they have to invest to overcome a section. The only thing the game does to alleviate that frustration is with the online mechanics of player messages and co-op. In my playthrough I actually ended up relying a lot on online resources to help me because I felt it was partly intended for most players to get help playing the game, although perhaps not to the extent of using wikis and youtube.

The Marvel vs Capcom 3 finals were great, I'm glad Nick saw them and talked about it on the cast because they were so exciting but no one seemed to be talking about it. I also had the same experience of at first watching it and thinking what is this long combo and super spamming bullshit, but then after watching it enough with commentary you start to understand the underlying strategies. Justin Wong's comeback run starting with his match against ChrisG was particularly fascinating since his team was unconventional and used supposedly underpowered characters like Storm and Akuma, and he often had to rely on single character fighting game basics to pull off his comeback victories.

I agree, project management for C++ is a nightmare. Visual Studio is easily the best IDE but it overwhelms you with options and installing libraries on Windows is a pain. Package management in Linux is a lot better but then you have to deal with not having a good IDE and manually editing make files, and I don't think there's any help for these things written after the 90s. As for learning C++, I don't think it's that different syntactically from C# or JS which you can use in Unity. I don't know if you'll pick up the real differences (which I'm guessing are memory management, templates, and class definitions) while making a game using an existing game engine.

Interesting matches, lots of unexpected outcomes. Looks like things will be even more competitive this season. The TSM vs C9 game was quite good and tense the whole way through.

I dunno about Obama, but I bet Sean could dunk on Shu Yoshida.

Yes Chris! You need to be able to mute sound in mobile games! The most disappointing thing for me about the Android version of Super Hexagon is the inability to do this. I originally beat the game on PC while listening to podcasts and it's the perfect game for this since somehow you can pay full attention to a conversation while still focusing on that game. I'd still be playing it on my phone if I could just mute the music.

Not just the name, coming up with a sigil and motto also sounds intimidating.

Good show. I think it's really interesting how even though Brad appreciates League's more player-friendly design decisions that he still prefers DotA. I've been getting really into Dark Souls lately and I think it's that same appeal where the game is engaging precisely because it is so ruthless to the player. I still find it perplexing given the polished games in Valve's catalog that they're making DotA 2 what it is. Although I understand why, I'm a little sad that Brad didn't talk about Brazen. I would've loved to learn more about how he'd design that kind of game. Even more so than Valve, I can't imagine Double Fine making a game as difficult as DotA or Dark Souls. I guess Massive Chalice is being billed as a roguelike, but so far I haven't seen a strategy game that really behaves like a roguelike because even though some characters may die the campaign proceeds and in the end it's a binary win/loss. What I like about the modern roguelike games is that even when you reach a fail condition you can feel like you've made some progress, so it's possible to have fun even with frequent failure. Re: Surrender option. It encourages people to "gg" early and prematurely end games that could turn into comeback situations. Also it could create tension because some people just don't like to surrender and always think they can come back (I'm guilty of this often). However yeah, those problems exist without the surrender option so you might as well have it.

I think he was referring to this: http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/14/simcity-tested-offline-play-phantom-sims/

I didn't mean to say that you should pay attention to the story or subjectively like it for any reason, I personally didn't much like that stuff either but I'm just not in the habit of skipping things in games. My point was simply that if you consider the younger audience they are designing for then they make some unusual choices that one wouldn't expect. I agree that I would not be impressed by the same kinds of choices in media intended for a mature audience. Also I personally don't mind the JRPG/visual novel presentation style of the game and think it could be used well. Ghost Trick comes to mind.

I enjoyed and played through Clash of Heroes but I have to say that all the interesting mechanics in that game were introduced and exhausted in the first campaign. It also didn't help that some of the later factions in the game are just weaker and more painful to play as. I feel like the intent of the game's design was to have a lot of combos and chains that you see in other match three games, but because it had to be balanced around being a versus turn-based game you didn't have many opportunities to set those up. So in the end the game kind of devolved into a standard strategy, and usually you win because of limitations of the enemy AI and your hero's special ability. Also I'd disagree in saying that Clash of Heroes' aesthetic is entirely awful. Sure it's targeted for a younger age group, but it's a surprisingly dark story for that age group with a lot of character deaths. Also I found many of the characters had weird antiquated ethics that also seemed out of place for this kind of game. Perhaps these kinds of points don't amount to much in the overall childish good vs evil storytelling, but at least they indicate that even in this game the people at Capy are trying to do good things.

After slipping and falling on an icy walkway, finding the Idle Thumbs postcard in my mailbox brought a smile to my face. Now the puzzle is complete, thanks Thumbs.