Latrine

A few more clarifications. - Amazon Underground appears to be a complete replacement for the Free-App-A-Day program, which is a little disappointing because those apps were actually "actually free" and there was no difference if you had actually just bought them from Amazon's app store. - Amazon's monetization strategy here seems to be a combination of ads which can run when you start or resume the app (although in my limited use I haven't actually seen any) and simply driving people to use the Amazon Underground app instead of the Google Play store. In fact, the Amazon Underground app is different from the Amazon Appstore app which it replaced in that it basically defaults you to Amazon.com, so you see shopping ads for more than just apps (but they do still let you make a shortcut to jump to the app section of the store). I think the main reason ads seem to never actually run is that Underground hasn't scaled up yet and they're just absorbing the costs. The thing I find interesting about Underground is that it seems to be applying the YouTube business model to mobile apps where content creators get payed by the distributor based on how often people interact with their product. Now on one hand this can be seen as a problem since it further devalues the work of app developers and puts them on the same level as totally amateur filmmakers. However I still think it's preferable to exploitative in-app-purchases and gating mechanics that developers are currently using in the race to the bottom. Personally as someone who doesn't spend that much time with apps on my phone I'm not inclined to spend $2 on a game I'll probably play for less than an hour, but I probably would play for that hour if I just had to sit through one ad. It just remains to be seen how obnoxious the advertising will be if the platform takes off.

Yeah, Crossy Road is on Android. Hearthstone is on any platform, although I guess not playable in a browser, and the tutorial is pretty good for absolute beginners to games.

It means this.

Well, I think just because they ended up making the nerf doesn't mean it was a bad idea to wait a few months before doing it. I'm glad that Blizzard is generally conservative on changes to the game, otherwise the meta would be even more in flux and hard to keep track of for casual players. Also it seems fairly clear that the nerf is not because the deck was overpowered and had an extremely high win rate, it did not, but it was just a little too unfun to play against and to lose just because the best thing you could do on your turn was play minions that would activate Patron/Berserker combos. Regarding future plans, I don't think the overnerf justifies it because Warsong Commander is a class basic card. It hurts new players who want to play Warrior because the basic deck will be that much less powerful or draft Warrior in arena where you have a higher probability of seeing class cards. It made sense to add Light of the Naaru to make Lightwarden, which was neutral, a viable minion for Priests. But even if they add something similar for Warrior it's still worse than having a solid basic card.

I don't think they can design any card that would make this version of Warsong Commander good without that card just being broken on its own and even then you wouldn't play Warsong Commander. Or it would have to be something ridiculous that specifically interacts with Warsong Commander like Warsong Shredder, 4 Mana 4/3 with Deathrattle: Summon a Warsong Commander. The new Warsong Commander is like a Dire Wolf Alpha that costs 1 mana more for one health and a buff effect that is only better if you already had three charge minions in play and weren't planning to trade them. It's also like a Raid Leader but with one more health and an effect that is more situational. To think of it another way, 3 mana minions these days are just barely good if they have 3/4 in stats like Spider Tank or Dark Cultist. You're losing 1/2 in stats on Warsong Commander for its effect, which is massive compared to Dire Wolf Alpha losing only 1 stat point for an arguably better effect at a lower mana cost. They needed to either make this Warsong Commander a 3/4 or 2 mana for it not to be ridiculously bad compared to existing cards. Class cards are generally supposed to have a premium value over similar neutral cards, not be worse than them. (Admittedly there are plenty of bad class cards but typically they're reserved for higher rarity and have more interesting effects.) And even worse this really hurts Warriors in arena where they already have a hard time because you need solid quality basic/common class cards to do well in arena and Warrior doesn't really have any besides their weapons. Warsong Commander was never that great but now it's a trash tier arena card. Brode said they'd address this in future expansions but that's hard to do when you already have 4-5 sets of mostly useless Warrior arena cards clogging the card pool.

Even though Act 2 has some harder puzzles than Act 1, I wouldn't say that it's dramatically more difficult. I don't think it's on the level of difficulty as classic adventure games. It's just that the puzzles have a few more moving pieces and you have a few more options to explore before finding the solution.

Just wrapped up act 2 and I enjoyed it overall but I can see why reviews are a little mixed. Act 2 mostly just builds off the story setup in Act 1 and doesn't really introduce anything new plotwise except for a fun extra twist at the start. Nothing that compares to the plot twist at the end of Act 1. They made an effort to make the puzzles harder and I mostly appreciated that but some of the puzzles were overly frustrating and difficult to understand, I particularly disliked the knot untying puzzle, I basically save scummed to solve it, not sure if I was missing something there or it was really that obtuse. Also some of the puzzle flow was frustrating in some areas where you are presented with several objectives but you can only complete them in a certain order because you won't have the items you need yet. But despite my complaints it was mostly fun to revisit the world and characters here and get a little more Double Fine adventure game.

Yeah, the focus of HotS is more on team fighting and contesting objectives. There is some strategy about when you should get secondary objectives like mercenary camps but it's relatively straightforward. Early game it's hard to outright kill someone 1v1 but I would still say attacks and abilities still have an impact, forcing opponents to back before an objective pops up. What I like about the game is that it does cut out the farming of extended laning phases and most games don't last more than 20-30 minutes. But you're right that it's still the same basic formula as DotA and LoL and teammates will rage at mistakes (or perceived mistakes).

I stayed with space racist in all three games. Like Vasari I regretted it because they really bungled her character in ME2 and ME3. I know a lot of people hated Ashley in ME1 but at that point she was a much more realized character than the idealistic but shallow Liara. In retrospect Liara seems like the best choice if you wanted to be in the same relationship for all three games.

Artorias is great in the DLC but I also think the fight with Kalameet is one of the best fights with a dragon in any game. (And apparently a reference to the final boss in King's Field I believe) Quelaag also has a special place for me because she's the first tough but fair boss in Dark Souls that I had a good deal of trouble with and just barely beat. I'm sure if you played a Souls game before she's not that challenging, but she took me a good number of tries and got me hooked on the series. I know the Ancient Dragon is a fight in Dark Souls 2 that's broken and frustrating in many ways, but at times the spectacle of fighting a giant dragon is worth it. Especially if you use the strategy of baiting his frontal attacks instead of trying to just hide underneath him.

Cool coincidence: Jake retweeted an article today about how "pedantic computer nerds" use more aggressive conversation style and how that's toxic for workplace environments. The article specifically talks about the "yes and" rule from improv. https://www.kateheddleston.com/blog/argument-cultures-and-unregulated-aggression (Actually Jake linked the first article in that series but this one is more directly related)

Well first of all, most people don't look at sales numbers because that's not readily available information. If you're just talking about "money people", i.e. investors, then those people would be stupid if they invest in a business without caring to understand why that business would succeed or fail. If Stardock was not a privately held company then I'm sure shareholders would be calling for Brad Wardell's job as CEO for his irresponsible comments that damage his business. Personally I was kind of interested in the game from the discussion on this episode, but knowing that Wardell is involved is enough to dissuade me from thinking about this further. There are many other games out there that are worth my time and money that don't have clearly visible negative strings attached, and I'm not too worried about what "most people" will do.

Actually, I think Tim does acknowledge the tank controls as a mistake in one of the Making of Grim Fandango Remastered videos. He says something to the effect like how it's an example of having a good argument for the wrong decision.

Fyi I'm pretty sure the mobile version of Valiant Hearts is broken up into four episodes and buying the game only gives you the first episode. I don't know if any in-game DLC is also discounted.

It's hard to claim an aspect of a game is objectively poorly designed when so many people say they like it. A design is only poor when there is no love for it. All skill is based on some prior knowledge. You know getting hit hurts so you try to avoid attacks. You should also know that not every item in the world is good for you, so you should consider the risk that something bad can happen when you use it. Also you should know that when you start doing something new, e.g. playing a new video game, that your prior experiences don't transfer completely and you shouldn't expect to have complete mastery over the new experience. The exception is when a game is designed to give virtually any player who plays it the feeling of complete mastery, but this requires the design of the game to present challenges that require no special experience and thus pretty much no skill. This is the problem people have had with the last generation of mainstream games and why we've seen a resurgence of roguelike inspired games like Isaac. Dying in the Binding of Isaac is not a harsh punishment. You're expected to replay the game dozens if not hundreds of times. Part of the joy of the game is playing a completely new random run and not knowing what you're going to get. By the way, once you've learned about most of the items there are very few that are actually bad. The Emperor is an excellent item because it lets you skip many rooms and jump straight to a boss on later levels. The Tower isn't great but gives you a chance to blow something up for resources if you're out of bombs, and most of the time you can avoid taking damage from it. Many of the shot changing items are pretty powerful and beneficial although they may have a learning curve to using them effectively.

Yeah, you could play with 5 people in the last test. It also feels better because it switches to a mode where everyone can pick their role each round instead of relying on the preference list. So first people select either monster or hunter and then it goes to the screen where you select the specific character, that's where the monster player drops from voice comm.

I think the reason the first set of books sparkles green is because the only set of books in the epilogue that include a red book (the other exception is the very end with three green books) that don't have the green sparkles require you to notice that and use that fact to find the hidden message in the red book. So it's more of a contextual clue for that puzzle than having its own meaning. Similarly the other odd elements in the epilogue may be drawing your attention to the unique mechanic of the epilogue, that is the hidden messages activated by putting Tim behind a foreground element. As for the artwork for the epilogue level, I can't really come up with a good explanation for that. Perhaps it's hinting at the common physics metaphor related to quantum tunneling that there is a small probability that any object can pass through any other as long as the atoms line up right, this makes some sense considering all the physics allegories in the epilogue. The falling through platform trick seems related to this but it might just be a side effect of the fact that Tim is immune to time reversal from the platform's effect but the platform itself is not immune, which is needed to solve the puzzle in that room. I don't remember if this kind of immunity to collision while reversing time is used anywhere else in the game though.

There have been videos of the beginning portions of The Witness, last one was at the Playstation event in December. I remember they talked about audio logs early in development but I'm not sure if they're still in the game. Even if they are, the presentation of the game is much more streamlined and focused on getting the players to the puzzles. For example I think Blow mentions here that there is no soundtrack to the game, it's just ambient sounds. Whereas Braid has a very specific soundtrack. The painting puzzle is actually one of the ones that I like, although I do agree that being able to put it in an unsolvable state is bad. But the point of the stars is that they're only there for the most dedicated fans. You have to explore the game to its full extent, or more likely read about the game online, to find out about them. Either way, they're designed as actual "achievements", rare parts of the game that not every player is going to experience. -- I do think it's fair to criticize parts of Braid, no game is perfect. And sure you can criticize Blow for not communicating in his game what he apparently wanted to communicate to everyone. However as a counterpoint, the game stands on its own legs regardless of its author's intentions and is appreciated by many people. There's a reason Braid is one of the first great indie games of this era, and apparently the fact that everyone didn't "get it", as if there's something that everyone has to "get", doesn't change my own enjoyment of the game at all. Just like there's an overemphasis in discussion of Brain on its narrative, there's also an overemphasis on Blow's artistic intent. Both of those things are his fault of course, but neither of those things is what Braid actually is.

Yes, I think this is the problem that Blow has with popular interpretations of Braid. Everyone is focused on the overt character of Tim and his supposed narrative arc, but he doesn't see that as what Braid is about at all. He's focused much more on the game design and puzzles that you play through. That's why what we've seen of The Witness has pretty much no narrative elements, because he doesn't want those to distract from the core game experience this time. Getting the stars in Braid is amazing because those are the best puzzles in the game (except the one you have to wait two hours for). They're also in the game that way because they're a meta-commentary on achievements and completionism. You're not supposed to be rewarded for getting the stars, getting them was its own reward. The fact that actually getting them all is kind of an anticlimax is not a mistake. I was just rewatching the ending on Youtube and this one part of the epilogue actually jumped out at me as prescient about Braid's reception and how Blow has responded to it. It's almost surprising that he didn't see it all coming because he calls it out right here in the game. Also I have to say that I find the common interpretation of Blow as a pretentious hack for putting all the oblique text in the game and hinting at deeper meaning really off-putting and anti-intellectual. There's no piece of work that requires some extreme level of intellect to be able to interpret or understand. The aspiration here was that people who be able to make their own interpretations beyond the surface level narrative that you see in most games, and his disappointment is that most people did not look beyond the surface or even if they did that they focused more on the text than the game.

I just finished Shovel Knight and I liked the game but not as much as I thought I would. I found the later levels difficult in a frustrating way. The boss rush took me a while too although it was enjoyable finally learning most of the boss patterns since you can brute force them the first time you fight them. Personally I liked Rogue Legacy more. I agree that the basic controls in Rogue Legacy are a little tougher to use but you eventually get better control of your movement with double jump or dash runes, and I simply found the roguelike elements more interesting than straightforward platformer levels.

Yeah, the monster player can't talk to the other players once character select starts. Personally I liked the beta, I'm totally into the asymmetrical hide-and-seek gameplay. But I'm worried that there won't be a big community around the game because of the unusual pacing and DLC issues.