Korax

No, quite far from it. Some challenges will give you more experience, but it's pretty easy to fill up mastery by fucking around a whole bunch. Even completing elusive targets gives some mastery experience, so as long as you're doing things, you'll get there.

Got Silent Assassin after a bit of a false start. Found the perfect place to lure the target into a concealed spot, and then slightly weird pathing made him shortcut just barely around the spot 3 times in a row. A quick restart and then I pulled it off perfectly.

You guys sure you weren't thinking of "Annoyed Grunt" when talking about a track made up of interstitial mouth sounds? The first track has a couple in it, but is much more about fulfilling the name (Starting Line), with full clips of the starting lines from a bunch of songs.

Big Rude Jake.

Almost got Silent Assassin, but got a little too eager running through a door and was spotted by a suspicious hacker. This one was definitely more interesting than the last couple. The kill conditions and extra objectives helped make it not-so-straightforward. I will second the No Goblin Cheffo runs. I started making a series of contracts that was inspired by them, but when Dan solicited viewer contracts, I submitted them. On PC: 1-02-6626125-93, 1-03-3041984-93, 1-06-1633125-93, 1-08-6072938-93, 1-09-4360804-93, 1-10-4758242-93. They're not all that hard, mostly just fitting a mission around a dumb narrative thread, but I had fun making them.

The Borderlands 2 glitch exhibition was neat because it was showing off things that were just crazy and didn't have any speedrunning purpose at all. The Shovel Knight race was great because a couple unlucky deaths from both racers kept things close almost the whole time. I think the final times were only 6 seconds apart. It looks like the GDQ YouTube channel is doing a pretty good job of getting footage up quickly. The only things I'm interested in today I've missed because they happened in the early hours, so I can hopefully spend this evening watching those archives.

In Super Mario Land 2, Wario has taken over Mario's castle, and Mario eventually defeats him and reclaims the castle. Unfortunately for your wild theorizing, Game Informer ran an interview with Miyamoto where he talks about the whole cast being more of an acting troupe, and every game is just a different story: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/09/24/miyamoto-tezuka-interview.aspx

They're in the ghost trainer's trial area. You'll have to defeat the totem Pokemon first, of course, and they have a low appearance rate, but they're there.

Definitely looking forward to DOOM. Interested in FEAR Extraction Point, but that happens in the middle of the night, so I'll have to catch the archive. I'm curious about The Turing Test. Although it's a Portal-esque puzzle game, it doesn't really have mechanics that would allow the crazy movement and out-of-bounds things that Portal runs use. I just hope it's more than being able to complete the puzzles quickly. Salt & Sanctuary, because, like the Souls games, I want to see how someone can speed through a game that I found incredibly rough and unforgiving. Half-Life: Blue Shift, because what?

To be fair, you can do tag/word searches or even just browse your friends' contracts, but yeah, being able to find and bookmark things from a webpage would be a welcome addition. Hell, that stuff's so feature-bare that you can't even delete contracts that you've made. We could probably come up with some sort of dumb keyword to make Thumbs contracts easier to find. Eliminated the elusive target, also with a remote explosive (duck). I'm a bit ambivalent about the last couple of targets. They've been relatively straightforward, which is disappointing, but it seems that's mostly because I've become familiar with the levels, and the whole mastery aspect is interesting.

Yeah, Jim has said in at least one interview that he didn't want the framing game to be something badly-done or throwaway, so he just got a friend to fully develop something that was already in progress and put FF2 inside it.

Recognized the target's area from the briefing video, did some sneaky climbing, and downed him with a few silenced pistol shots through a window. Got recorded by a camera, and somebody witnessed the target's death, but no one got past the "Searching" phase. A bit messy, but effective.

The Santa Suit is crazy: It makes more sense if you think of each level as a sort of clockwork, interactive diorama. Most things will loop more or less indefinitely until you do something to change it. A lot of the depth comes in the discovery of what kinds of things you can mess around with. If you're having some trouble getting into the groove, I would suggest looking for those Opportunities. The first time I played each level, I would take the first opportunity I found for each target, and they do a pretty good job of leading you around and showing you what kind of nonsense you can get up to. And completing them helps you get level mastery unlocks, which just adds to your toolbox for later runs.

Yeah, I was hoping that she would at least be moving around scoping out good kill spots, maybe wandering up to a roof or two.

Despite sniping the target from a far rooftop with a silenced rifle, somehow all the guards in the area immediately knew where I was and went into combat. Managed to get clear after killing about 6 of them.

I had been interested in this, but was holding off because I haven't really gotten along with the Hitman series historically. I bought it a couple weeks ago when it was on sale after the first season wrapped up, and holy shit, this game. I've spent almost 40 hours on it, completing each main mission at least twice and doing a whole bunch of challenges and custom contract stuff. I really like the idea of the escalation missions, but the few I've completed so far have been really hit-or-miss. I really like when they put my knowledge of a map to the test. The one in Sapienza that ends with the "Katana Plague" modifier is amazing, because it starts with difficult but straightforward goals and then ends with careful consideration right from the planning stage in order to figure out the best path. Then there are garbage ones that end in "there are just mines everywhere, try to find a disarm device I guess!" I either waste a bunch of time trying not to explode while completing objectives, waste a bunch of time trying not to explode while finding the disarm device, or spend 30 seconds on Google finding out where it is so I can just get on with the mission. It's not a real challenge, it's just a bullshit fail-state using the inconvenience of reloading the mission as punishment. I'm really looking forward to the second season now, playing along when it's still brand new. Getting in on all those elusive targets. Oh, man. Can't wait.

Oh, hey, this came out! YO WHY CAN'T I JUST PICK THAT AWESOME MEOWTH THAT'S MY FAMILY PET AS MY STARTING POKEMON

Dishonored used Unreal, but Dishonored 2 uses the "Void Engine," which is apparently a modified version of idTech 5.

I played through A Crack in the Slab, and... I... didn't really like it. The concept is neat, but they didn't do anything very interesting with it.

I've been having come minor performance issues. Auto detect set everything to high, but even after tweaking things down a bit I get some chop every once in a while. Also:

Umm...

Just finished replaying the first game to get ready. Managed a no-kill ghost run. Trying to decide if I want to play through the DLC or start a KILL EVERYTHING run on the base game.

Don't know how reliable my sources are, but I hear there's one IN THE HOUSE RIGHT NOW!!!!! http://store.steampowered.com/sale/halloweensale/