Korax

Metroid 2 was the first Metroid game I ever played. It's good, but the other entries in the series have sort of made it the odd one out. It's more linear than the other games, and it's the only one where actually elimination of metroids is a constant activity as you play. You also may want to download it ASAP, as at least one mirror has been hit with a takedown from Nintendo.

No skin for Mei and Lucio Ball is a pale shadow of Rocket League. The Summer Games event is disappointing so far.

The Deluxe Edition comes with some printable extras. One is a game box, so:

I'm about the same age as the Thumbs, and the first time I ever heard that use of "board" was when some people I knew used it to talk about Halo 3 multiplayer maps. It still sounds weird to me.

Also:

Just stumbled across something weird:

So yeah, just continuing into the next job fixed it. Then I did this: Putting the insertion & extraction points on the bridge makes it so that if you reset, the bridge retracts and puts the points underneath the entryway. You spawn already inside the building, but can't touch the extraction point in any way. Easy to fix with noclip mode, but unexpected.

So I somehow broke the deck. A few minutes into Bergamot Towers, the deck started automatically executing previous commands when I used the arrow keys to bring them up. After a few commands, it stopped scrolling the screen's text correctly, requiring me to use page up/down to see my input. It also seemed to screw up leaderboard updating, because it showed me at something like 1:30 for each of the 3 sections, even though I took longer than that to complete them. I finished the job, and when testing the new equipment, I still had the same problems, but the deck's text started updating above the previous text instead of below it. Saving and reloading didn't help. Saving, quitting, and reloading didn't help. I selected the job from the career menu, and it seemed to work then. I also just left the equipment test room, played through the next character vignette, and loaded the next job, and that seemed to straighten it out (at least at the outset, haven't tried playing through the job yet). The only possible cause I can think of is that in the black market before Bergamot, I tried to put down a sticky note with an ASCII face in it, but after putting a bunch of spaces in it, it stopped working and then placed the note anyway when I hit ESC to cancel.

That trailer is amazing. Kudos to Chris for the great 90's TV news magazine writing, and kudos to Erin for the great 90's TV news magazine delivery.

For a little while, the Humble Bundle system used Steam account authentication to distribute the games. You would link your account, and instead of pulling a serial key to redeem in the Steam client, it would connect to your account and add it right to your library. Then they stopped doing it. Don't remember why. Both ways were fine by me, so I didn't really think about it. There's also the weirdness of Motor Rock. It's a racing game by a Russian dev team that is a blatant rip-off of Rock n' Roll Racing, with quite a few assets that were just copied or ripped out of the original. The program was even called RRR3D for a while. The game has been delisted from Steam, but they still have a cache of redeemable keys. If you go to the team's website, you can get a key in return for a $3 PayPal donation. Part of that donation process is signing in through Steam to see if you already own it, and if not, you get a key.

Played it for a few hours, and it's okay so far. Combat is definitely Souls-inspired, if not quite as snappy. It also seems to be going for a more classic roguelike pacing - there are only 10 floors, but it's taken me multiple hours to get to level 5. One thing I wasn't aware of is that there is co-op. It seems like the sort of game that might be much more fun to jump into with a few friends and just screw around while playing.

I think it might be that the use of major glitches is more prevalent. A lot of runs use little exploits and glitches, but forgo completely breaking a game because it's hard to do, or not necessarily faster, or might just lock/crash a game. I'd say there's also a good chance that they're picking runs for how good of a show they put on. While playing a game quickly and accurately is impressive, it means that all someone is watching is a game being played quickly and accurately. Throw sequence breaks and glitch exploits into the mix, and now you can have crazy things that can be explained by commentators, and mistakes that can be joked about.

Cool plug on Colbert:

Competitive play is out! Yay? Played a few placement matches and saw more hate in chat at the end of ONE GAME than I have in the entire month of regular play that's happened since release.

Jake seems to have been playing his own secret word game of seeing how many times he could say "one piece" when talking about Zelda.

A chunk of the Dark Souls community has organized "Global Reset Day," a day when a ton of people will be starting new characters and flooding the multiplayer with activity: https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/4n9cng/global_restart_day_is_tomorrow_june_10th_reminder/ It's a good opportunity to get back into the game if you bounced off or even encourage new players, as there will (hopefully) be a ton of summons available. I'll be Sunbro-ing the Undead Burg/Parish on PC, helping people through the starting areas. This has also brought to my attention a couple recent PC mods that bring some nice improvements. There's Wulf2K's Connectivity Mod, which provides some more robust multiplayer features, including direct player seeking, a favorites list, and some general node connection monitoring. And there's eur0pa's PVP Watchdog, an add-on that monitors for possible equipment/level/stat discrepancies and blocks a lot of the prevalent curse/debuff/etc. cheats that jerks like to use.

Siphon grenade + Rich get Richer rune. When fully upgraded, the rune grants you infinite ammo if your armor is 75 or above. Siphon grenades recharge armor if your health is already topped up. I spent a large chunk of the final boss fight with the heavy assault rifle's micromissiles launching in an endless stream.

A nice hidden surprise in the soundtrack:

Also, now I want a brawl variant called "Complete Mei-hem" that's all Mei on winter/snow-themed maps. Though I don't know how well that would actually work.

Yeah, it was fun at first, but when people figured out that the greatly reduced cooldowns meant that you could always be activating an ability, it just became a mess. It turned capturing control points from relatively directed mayhem into a ten-minute-long coin flip. Mei was similarly difficult to eliminate, because as long as you had your finger on the ice cocoon button, you could just avoid killing blows left and right. This week it's "Super Shimada Bros." All Hanzo and Genji on Hanamura, with some tweaks to cooldown rates.

I immediately went into options and turned off team voice chat. I also make liberal use of the mute function in text chat. If randos talk to me, it's only at my discretion.

Just sent Battle.net requests to everyone on the Consolidated ID ExchangeTM. I'm Korax#1293, if'n you maybe want to play sometime.

Yeah, kind of dumb, but at least you get some coins from it.

I could see that as an intent, but if it is, it's not apparent. The first hiding-synth location was the Gwynnet (?) Brewery, a place that I've been to and cleared out numerous times. The second location was a place I'd been to, but not fully explored. It also doesn't make sense to me for the Railroad missions, specifically. The synths are supposed to be runaways who are hiding and need help to reach a safe spot. Having areas be a bit hazardous is fine, but in both instances they were just wandering around an extremely dangerous environment, being COMPLETELY ignored by enemies. Like a pit full of corpses and inactive, lying-in-wait ghouls that don't flip to an aggressive state until I stop sneaking and are only interested in attacking me.

They need to do a better job with the randomly-generated quests, as well. The Railroad gives quests that are more or less "take this care package to the escaped synth at location X." The first one I did put the synth right in the middle of a raider hideout, though the raiders didn't seem to know he existed. The second one not only put the synth in a ghoul-infested cave (the ghouls also ignored her), but that cave was up in Far Harbor. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like putting in a few limiting parameters (only cleared locations, only in the Commonwealth) wouldn't be all that complicated a thing to do.