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Iframes is probably the most important but adaptability/agility effect a few other things too, for example how quickly you can use consumables. I remember watching videos of someone struggle through the early game because they started with the Bandit class (3 adaptability), so they were chugging potions much slower than they would be in DS1.

Yeah, the spiders in the Freja fight are a tad annoying. But I'd say the bigger problem with that fight is that you can easily bait her laser attack and then do a run around and hit her strategy. Like Gormongous I don't even really consider the Prowling Magus and Congregration a real boss fight. The Skeleton Lords I actually like even though they're kind of easy, it's an elegant design where you can easily get overwhelmed if you try to rush through the fight by killing the big dudes. Dark Souls 2 does have a lot more boss fights with multiple enemies than Dark Souls 1 did and many of them are certainly spotty, but there are a few good ones in my opinion. Also I may have been responding to criticism you didn't raise. For example the first DLC has a boss that can repeatedly summon fairly challenging adds that I found to be quite fun, but some claim that this is a purely artificial challenge because your focus is split. However I think it's an interesting fight because the boss's other abilities work well in combination with adds that can distract you and you really have to keep track of everything that's happening to win.

Excellent show and interesting thread. Although she doesn't mention it, one of the clips from the latest Tropes vs Gaming video that stood out to me and is an example of the designers trying to manipulate the player is the mission in Assassin's Creed where a serial killer is slitting the throats of prostitutes in front of you. What makes this mission particularly egregious is that it actually acts like one of the tutorial missions for the gun mechanic in the game. The gun had this weird mechanic where you had to lock on and charge/aim it before you could fire. This mission is designed to teach the player the range of the lock on mechanic. If the player gets too close to the killer or takes too long trying to lock on and charge a shot then they fail the tutorial and are punished by the death of a woman. The killer runs off to find another woman, effectively resetting the tutorial and repeating it at another location. The whole thing is treated with the same banality of most failable tutorials ("You failed. Try again.") but casually dressed up with violence against women. I think this video guide for the mission does a good job of showing how players are expected to react to this mission, readily objectifying the unimportant female NPCs as props that exist solely to demonstrate the game mechanic. Also note that the name of the mission is Damsels in Distress.

Yeah, accidentally pressing a diagonal instead of a cardinal direction is really frustrating. In Dark Souls I often remove my shield (Left) when I try to switch items (Down) and this can easily result in my death. My hand isn't that big so I find my thumb naturally rests on the bottom left of the down direction groove when holding the controller which makes this problem more common. Also I dislike how even after you get the cardinal direction right, if your thumb wiggles just a little bit then you're suddenly inputting a diagonal. When trying to play Spelunky with the D-pad I would often be running in one direction and then suddenly start crawling on the ground. Or I'd be pressing down to look below an edge then suddenly start crawling off of it.

It's a bit of both. Although personally I disagree with the criticism of the fights that have multiple enemies being inherently unfair or artificially difficult. Some of my favorite encounters in the Dark Souls series have been those kinds of fights, e.g. O&S which is probably still the best of its kind. The core lock-on mechanic is designed to maximize your efficiency of movement in 1 on 1 duels, so anytime you have multiple enemies it requires you to demonstrate a new level of mastery of the game's systems. Although some of the 1 on 1 fights in the series are amazing, many feel more like video game boss fights where there are readily identifiable patterns to solving the fight whereas the complications provided by additional enemies can make them more dynamic. This isn't to say that all the fights with multiple enemies are perfect, just that I think it's a valid design tool that can lead to excellent encounters.

Definitely second Alcazar, I'm almost finished with all the available levels. They're all really satisfying. I've found the Six Rooms puzzles to be the hardest of the lot because often it's not obvious what you have to do first to start making progress.

Yeah, I played around with Cardboard some recently too. There are also some Chrome based demos on the Cardboard website but most of them aren't as good as the Cardboard app ones. I was also impressed by how well the quality compares to DK1. It doesn't seem farfetched to turn this into a plastic case that straps more comfortably to your head for a low cost VR solution.

I think you have to skip a chest on the previous level or two to get a big chest.

Arena is also more gold efficient if you average more than 3 wins. Buy packs only if you hate arena or have so much gold that you don't have the time to spend it all on arenas. Personally I buy packs until I hit 1500 gold which I use as a buffer in case I go on a losing streak in arena. I could probably go lower since I don't play that frequently and you get more gold from daily quests, but I've heard one streamer say he lost about 1000g on a losing streak once.

Most of the time there isn't anything particularly interesting on Twitch unless you want to see high level play in a particular game and these days the most popular games are League, Hearthstone, and Dota. You may get slightly better produced content from Youtubers doing live streaming but those are less frequent and you'd probably only tune in if you're familiar with that streamer and already like their edited videos. I basically tune in to popular Twitch streams as light entertainment when I don't want to commit to playing or watching something.

I learned how to play mostly from watching streamers on Twitch, although these days they don't explain the basics as much as they used to. Playing Arena mode is also a good way of learning what a lot of different cards do, and you roughly break even or profit if you can average 3 or more wins.

I dunno about that Alex game but think of it this way, that Deathwing could just as easily have been Hex, Polymorph, Shadow Word: Death, or any other number of hard removal spells. Just because you lose to a Legendary card it doesn't mean that was the only way you could have lost the game. Certainly the player with better cards has the edge but it's not as overwhelming as people think. I don't think you really need to know anything about the meta to get to rank 20, although having a decent deck certainly makes it easier. I think you might be killing your own enjoyment of the game by tunneling on rank 20 and conceding games. A lot of the fun of Hearthstone, or any game really, is when you can manage to eke out a comeback.

Evo 2014 done. Good show, I always enjoy what I manage to catch. I actually started to like watching MvsC3 these past two years, it's a hard game to watch because of the infinite combos and off-screen action but there's been some interesting stuff with Justin Wong making an amazing run in 2013 through the loser's bracket to the grand final with the most conventional looking team and unfortunately losing the second set. Street Fighter however is my favorite game to watch. Just very technical but still dynamic.

I liked the combat in Dragon Age 2 but it was also plagued by repetitive encounter design. It didn't feel as strategic as Origins in large part because of that lack of variety. I was so sick of fighting spiders in caves by the end of that game.

You can eventually get everything but not necessarily on a single playthrough. NG+ is pretty fun though, the extra limiters up the challenge and I think there are more enemy spawns in general. Something you don't notice on the first playthrough is that a lot of the encounters are actually random.

I've actually played a lot without Jaunt, it can be tricky but it's possible. It helps to have some defensive passives like the shield from Bounce and reduced damage from Crash. Also it helps to to spec something that you can spam with Jaunt slotted in it while Turn recharges, Spark is a good choice here. Even if you don't have Jaunt available a playstyle where you spam an ability until you have to use Turn to avoid damage can work pretty well and in fact is something you might have to do in some encounters with lots of limiters on because otherwise you get overwhelmed with Cells during Turn's cooldown. In this playstyle it's not always a good idea to use the full meter of Turn because then it takes longer to recover. The last build I was using with full limiters and was pretty powerful had passive Crash and Bounce, Tap with Get which seems to do crazy damage on the edge of the AoE, Spark with Spark and Jaunt for huge AoE spamming, and Void with I think Crash to just do ridiculous damage with Tap during Turn. I spam Spark to get rid of all the little annoying enemies and only use Turn when I have to avoid damage or burst down a high health enemy.

An award-having studio: http://imgur.com/gallery/3VWWk/

If you go back and talk to Nashandra she tells you to go to the forest. Shalquoir might say something too.

Or an achievement for killing him.

Well the game isn't designed for a single player to discover everything in a blind play through, it's designed to be discovered by a community of players that communicate through the in-game message system or use other means of communication to share secrets. The existence of those kinds of secrets is part of why Dark Souls has such a robust post-launch community. For the door with Vendrick's soul I think seeing a message like "Need humanity" is not uncommon. And considering that you need to beat Vendrick to get that stuff you might as well consider that a post-game secret.

The fireballs always strike at the same spot with the same time interval. Wait for one volley to go by, run up hugging the right wall to trigger the you know what, wait for another volley and then proceed. You can also see them coming if you look up to the left.

You get some cool stuff just for joining it though.

Finished the first playthrough. Transistor is an interesting game. I don't love it as much as Bastion but I'm glad that Supergiant did something so different, I really liked the semi-turn based combat and completely new art style and world design, and the music and voice acting are also great. But the main story just didn't hit with me for the most part, and they even more embraced the one thing I found problematic with Bastion, an emphasis on ability customization over combat design. Part of my criticisms stem from my completionist playstyle. When I first started playing I wanted to read all the description on the abilities, but you can unlock so many at the beginning of the game they I felt I was just reading wall of text profiles of random people for half an hour in my first two hours of the game. And in retrospect most of these descriptions never tie into anything terribly important and are mostly similar to each other which makes them even more annoying. Fortunately the rest of the world building through dialog, the less verbose terminals, and the smattering of connecting scenes brought me around a little. The main plot however was so muddled that it was difficult to relate to any of the events or characters to any extent. Actually on the latest Idle Thumbs they talked about how the game's storytelling is noir inspired but the character dialog is both oblique and with a vague context, when it should be one or the other to allow the viewer to understand what is going on either through concrete dialog or obvious plot points. End spoilers: As for the gameplay, one minor part that actually really bugs me is those stupid little checkmarks on the ability screens that indicate which combinations you've tried. They're not tied to any unlocks or anything but I've been trying to get them all by selecting a new loadout at every checkpoint and there are just so many bad combinations that it's really a chore. I like the overload system in theory, but I'm already using a variety of abilities to get those bloody checkmarks and if you overload an ability you won't get that checkmark. It was especially bad for me in the midgame because many of the new abilities I unlocked then didn't have any direct damage so a single overload could put me in a really bad spot. I feel like I'd personally make more fun gameplay decisions if those checkmarks weren't there since the system seems to be designed for you to reason about and avoid the bad combinations. But besides this collection obsession, which I admit is totally my fault, I have an issue with this kind of supremely customizable system since it leads to less tailored combat design. Even in Bastion many of the weapons felt poorly defined in terms of combat purpose but they each at least had a level that introduced them and a corresponding challenge room. Actually I think Transistor does a better job of making each individual ability useful in some way, but because most of the abilities are acquired in a non-linear fashion there are no levels that teach you how to use them. Some of the challenge rooms are good for this but there aren't too many and they vary in quality. There's some depth to the combat system and I've come across some interesting combos but it's hard to get a feel for it in the initial playthrough. Like Bastion, I expect to get a better appreciation for it on NG+ with maxed out difficulty.

Yeah, my first playthrough I've done a lot of co-op and it's been fun. Some of the bosses are easy enough that the co-op really trivializes them, but for some like Smelter Demon it felt just right. I definitely want to go through again in the Champions Covenant and do all the bosses solo, but being able to get through the game once without hammering your head against the same boss is an interesting experience. I also like that you get massively rewarded for helping other people by having your humanity restored and everything repaired. Jolly cooperation!