Xeneth

I've been avoiding it up 'till now because someone with as loose a grip on sanity/reality as I sometimes seem to have, carrying around some past negative experiences with Lynch's particular brand of weirdness... I lacked motivation! but I've finished the pilot now and I'm definitely along for (and down with) this ride. I can tough out some heebie jeebies in part because of the motivation to be part of a cool discussion, empathize with others experiencing it for the first time, and "hang out" by proxy with people I like. Were it just me alone in a room, maybe I'd continue to opt out, but I think this context will make it more "okay", and by the sound of it at least one of you will empathize when I inevitably freak out and start typing in all caps about how something made me unable to sleep, heh.

First time watching Twin Peaks for me... excited but apprehensive, because Lynch tends to give me a lot of anxiety for some reason. I blame a bunch of capricious stoner girls that forced me to watch some of his films while high I guess... something about the weird non-sequitur genre backdoors around one of my brain's main firewalls and reads as being terrifying, like what I don't understand will someday destroy me. So this is an experiment. I hope following the cast won't result in anything near the level of anxiety I'm capable of... is it weird that the notion of Chris and Jake as cultural conductors makes the ride feel safer to me? I could have watched this years ago but find myself admitting that I was afraid to on some weird level. Hm.

I want to pick this up on Steam SO BADLY right now, but Borderlands 2, Torchlight 2, X-COM and god knows what else have my free time in a vice-like grip. Will be watching for more Thumb impressions of Dishonored though, to see if I should buy in a bit or maybe wait for inevitable crazy Steam sale down the road...

JUST finished Cloud Atlas on the train and will be digging into the cast tonight... Clicking for Kindle Edition now, and as someone fairly new to owning a device like this, I also really appreciate the built-in dictionary action.

There's a Humble Music Bundle available until August 1st! http://www.humblebundle.com/ Re: the Spyro music by Copeland: That stuff is SO WEIRD and fanciful, perfect for Spyro but the guy has applied that treatment to some other things with odd results... I saw a movie once long ago that was scored by him, and basically sounded just like Spyro, but it was TOTALLY WRONG for what was happening on-screen. I'm seriously talking like some future death sport that resembled rollerball or derby! Having played Spyro before seeing whatever film that was... trippy and hilarious. [edit] I think I found it? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0158409/

It's not very odd, and it's probably also misquoted/mangled from some literature that a translator liked, but I often find myself coming back to a flyover of a vast Mode7 world... Pure pixellated possibility scrolling by as a haunting note fell over the narrated backstory to the world I was about to enter: "...But time flows like a river, and history repeats..."

...wait, what the he- Wow, it's like the age old game development trope of trying way too hard to shoot way too high taken to comedic extremes... amazing. I can't decide how real the notion might be.

Funny how good company can make ANYTHING work, huh? "Welcome to hell, you shall burn for eternity in a room... here, meet your fellow doomed inmates; Tim Schafer, Ken Levine, and Will Wright."

I guess I was sort of grasping a bit for quick terminology... When I think "Club" I think of some of the other experiences I've had that involved a weird level of promotional sense and some sort of whitewash mechanics, like the community at large voting on which books come next. I'm totally looking forward to this in part because I know it won't be like other book clubs I've been in any more than ThumbsClassic has been like other gaming sites/podcasts/forums, with ratings and news and console war bickering and what have you. Thumbin' Through IS pretty choice... BookBlast? The Wizard's Library? Idle Spines? ...Nah, can't quite top it at the moment.

I find it interesting that some of us appear to be viewing the bookCast as a bookCLUB prior to its true inception... We rarely seem to aggressively suggest games for the Thumbs to play/talk about. I'm trying to figure out why this is, and all I'm coming up with is that the format/medium sort of revolves around the concept of completion. It's very easy for me to say that I've experienced and enjoyed many Bethesda RPGs in my time, but I've never ever completed a main quest line in any of them. Games support (encourage in some cases) more of a dabbling approach than literature, where if I said I haven't finished the book yet you'd be likely to say "well go polish it off so we can have a conversation about it." It's also not really possible to talk AROUND the endings and spoilers as much, so you probably won't want to read an episode if you haven't read the book, potentially leading to a feeling of "I want to experience all of the episodes, so I want them to do the books I want to read". I'm going to be trying to treat the bookCast in much the same way as the podCast in that I won't necessarily be picking up EVERY book, much as I don't buy every game the thumbs are into. However, I still enjoy hearing about them even if the material isn't something that's right up my alley, in part because it helps break or reinforce my opinions and gives me more to think about before deciding to get into some media. On that note, I hope that the initial parts of each bookCast will be more about the "what is this thing" and early bits of story/setup, with a sort of "break" that then delves into the meat of it, that way if something doesn't sound like my cup of tea at the start of the reading period I can just skip it, and then upon hearing the 'cast I can decide: If it sounds like something I'd like to experience after all, I can stop the player and start reading, listening to the rest when I'm ready. If it sounds like I was right and wouldn't mind being spoiled while picking up some insight and info that would otherwise be sort of hard to come by, just keep listening. Hell, I can see massive advantages to having a super intelligent ThumbCliffNotes version of novels that I decided not to read kicking around in my head! "Oh yeeeah, I'm not really into that but I know what it's about and the conversation thread you just brought up can actually go somewhere instead of dropping at 'have you read...'!"

Really looking forward to the bookcast. This news actually came at a very opportune time for me, as my resolution this year is to eliminate more paper from my life in general, and my reading habit had all but dried up due to literally not having space for a bookshelf. So, this was the first book I bought on my brand new Kindle that I got myself as a present for a recent promotion, (Yay QA becoming game designers, Steve knows, represent!) and I've just finished it. Saving impressions and questions for when we have a more formal Sense of an Ending thread or other place that will feed more directly into the cast...

My coworkers started playing this enough that I got dragged into it despite never having played a Tribes game before... So far I've been having enough fun to warrant a little buy-in which I used to get a couple of the 100k XP weapons that take a fair bit of time to earn. I'm pretty terrible, but can be found using the usual Xeneth moniker and usually play either Sentinel or Doombringer. Thought I'd also drop the neophyte impressions into the soup of veteran comments as well; The physics feels fast and liberating compared to just about anything else currently popular/on the market, but I've noticed that the skiing mechanic does sort of seem to force them to make maps that are on the small side and they have to be very hilly as opposed to mountainous. I dunno if anyone got to play on the Temple Ruins volcanic map before they pulled it from the CTF rotation, but that map was VERY large and the action was quite stale and plodding by comparison... It was so bad that they're redesigning it before throwing players into it again. (There's another map currently on redesign hiatus and out of the rotation but I'm not sure why... it seemed super popular until they recently changed the base/generator layout and then everybody started bitching about it). Vehicles seem to need work. Rarely feel like they impact the flow of the matches, and credits seem to be better spent upgrading defenses, laying supply stations in weird places, and repeatedly calling in air strikes on the enemy flag platform. I'll have to try the grav cycle cap with my coworkers though, sounds like fun and I'd love to be like a getaway wheelman or something.

Oh yes, how IS the built-in VoIP? It's something I've wanted in LoL for a long time, (given the glacial speed that Riot develops new QoL features I'm not holding my breath) but anytime it gets mentioned people just wave the idea away, saying "Integrated always sounds terrible in every game" etc. This is Valve though, and I find Steam VoIP quite good in general. Is the DotA2 integration on par with that?

I'm generally pretty rubbish at games like this, but looks very intriguing... I have to imagine that your goal IS to get more prisoners in your prison, because as state funded "businesses" they receive funding based on their reputation as a safe place to store people until they can hopefully be reformed. I'd be very surprised if escape attempts, riots, and corruption weren't used the way 'disasters' are in many sims to shake up the patterns and provide counter-incentives for imbalanced strategies. The aesthetic on display doesn't make it look like there's going to be any real tackling of the difficult issues prisons face, (like the fact that concentrating our societal outcasts in the same place tends to cause many to withdraw further as opposed to reforming them) but perhaps it will please with a depth that surprises.

Oh sweet! Some of the best creepypasta comes from that site, I'll have to give it a go...

Yeah from the perspective of a very regular LoL player it sounds like you just don't know the game as well as DotA when you say the balance isn't there. Those snowball items like Mejai's almost never get bought in serious competitive play because they're terrible. You pay 3x as much for a stat in the hopes that if you never die, you'll get 2x the stat you paid for and maybe a powerful side effect if you are absolutely untouchable. Thing is, for this sequence of events to take place you have to get it fairly early, when you're susceptible to ganks from the other team shutting down your attempt. It's hard to counter only if you're not in the habit looking at enemy items and stats, as somebody throwing their life away to guarantee their loss of stacks becomes quite reasonable. ...That being said, I am also not a huge fan of the design on those particular items and I think the game would totally still be fun if they just removed them, but if you work your way out of the ELO slums you'll mostly stop seeing them, and your team will punish people for buying them when they do see them. Exactly right on the counter to the likes of temp stealth champs like Akali, Wukong, and Talon being vision wards or oracles, bravo. Once again, less experienced players are likely to end up on teams that don't buy smart counters or place them in the hands of the classes those threats don't have a problem taking down quickly. I think both LoL and DotA are super deep, super fun, and quite well balanced compared to the other offerings in the genre, (and no doubt the veritable tide of imitators you'll see releasing next year in an attempt to cashe in) and as we were going 'round about earlier, your favorite seems to hinge around what you make of the greater complexity and steeper learning curve DotA offers weighted against whichever one you had a positive experience with first. (We do always seem to hold a special place in our hearts for first loves, whether they be games or whatever, heh.)

Hear hear! I jumped back to this excellent thread as soon as I heard the direction the 'cast was taking... I too would love to hear more opinions on Majora as an outlier, even if they're largely negative. I find that important things tend to be polarizing, and MM In my experience is usually lauded or reviled by those that have experienced it. I do wish that some of the handheld zeldas had been less like A Link to the Past and more like Adventure of Link. It would have been neat to see the side scrolling take evolve alongside the evolution of the top down stuff into 3D. Was anyone else randomly super inappropriately excited when Link's Awakening would flip to mock side scrolling when underground or swimming? It was totally lame and just involved floor sprites rendered on their sides with invisible walls preventing you from walking up or down unless there was a "ladder" background, but my kid brain was like "OMG it's like Zelda II right nao aaaaaah!"

Yeah, the upgrade system is one of the better things Skyward Sword brings to the table for sure. Nice hooks into treasure and bug hunting, and even though I never really wanted for rupees to purchase upgrades, the incentive to find 'another copy of that beetle' or whatever seemed like a step in the right direction. Of course, from a pure menu and UI standpoint upgrading gear is always an eyerolling process. I wish Nintendo UI designers would play a game released after 1998 some time... It's not like redundant UI even helps with new players or non-gamers, really. A 90 year old that's never heard of Zelda might balk at the 20th time you tell them that a monster claw is a treasure that can be used to upgrade your equipment, followed by an unskippable cutscene showing exactly which slot in your inventory UI you can find out how many you have while animating the number ticking up in case you forgot that having one and finding one more means you have TWO now!

<--- QA Tester making peanuts Yeeeah, if you're engineer enough to get a white box level gig more power to you, but us black box slaves paid to test entertainment software are considered 'entry level' (despite actually needing experience and/or intelligence far above 'getting a foot in the door' to be any good at it).

I hate to say it, but I think I'm just too heavily invested in League of Legends to play DotA2... As someone who learned the genre way too late, I can't help but see the design as somewhat anachronistic- Equally as deep and potentially rewarding, just more complex. I'm not saying LoL is BETTER mind you, just streamlined to the point where the idea of learning DotA sounds like more work than fun whenever I start doing research, reading guides, or watching games. Can anyone who knows both think of a reason why someone who consistently has a ball playing LoL almost every day should take the time to learn DotA2 as well, or should I just quit feeling weird about my current path and chalk all this up to 'eh, different strokes'?

Udvarnoky YES, I am not alone! Oh god the rupee systems! Thank you for reminding me of this- How the hell have they been calculating drops, wallet size, and costs recently? When was the last time money meant much of anything in a Zelda game? I recall wanting for money in Majora's Mask at times, so good call there... Was your wallet almost always capped in A Link to the Past? I feel like it was NOT... So, by far the worst abuser of rupees was Twilight Princess- I wasn't even hunting for goodies that hard, and distinctly recall being capped out AND having unsold golden insects to the tune of several thousand rupees, and I literally could NOT find anything in the world to spend them on. I'm guessing they've been tuning such that the most casual guy ever can speedrun through without breaking anything incidental and still be able to afford the core stuff they'll need, but even my more recent carefree Zelda romps at least involve, you know, finding a way to each chest I sopt with my eyes... If they're not going to put in sinks like a bow that shoots rupee tipped arrows or something, wouldn't it make more sense for Link to just barter for everything he needs? We've got all these supportive NPCs now that pretty much accept him as a hero, just give him stuff for his deeds I guess?

I enjoyed the tone of this article if not the actual content... It's very much a 'beehive kicking' piece intended to stir up conversation and debate, and in that it has obviously been quite successful. Link to the Past and Link's awakening actually DID have this- Not every bombable spot was marked with cracks, (typically only the critical path ones that would prevent you from finishing the game if not found) and you could check for the more secret ones by holding your sword out and pushing it against the wall to hear a more hollow 'tunk' sound. This meant you still scoured for secrets, just a without expending ammunition, and I think that's a GREAT design compromise... Weirdly they left the 'sword check' mechanic in at least up to Majora's Mask, past the point where they stopped really trying to disguise bombable points. I don't recall trying it much in Twilight Princess, but Skyward Sword did away with the audio cue and it kind of messed me up on a dungeon with a fake wall that they tell you about- As a veteran I kept hitting it with my sword and thinking that I must have mis-seen the hand holding cutscene! So funny thing about Majora's Mask... *this would be your cue to scroll past the wall of text like usual, heh* It really is my favorite Zelda game now, in hindsight and with experience, but this was not always the case! When I first got my hands on MM, I felt betrayed- I had acquired an N64 RAMspansion pack just to play this game, and not two hours in it had completely lost me. Not lost in the locational sense, mentally and emotionally lost. The plot dragged Link kicking and screaming from his natural setting and way of operating and plopped him down in a frankly creepy place that resembled a sort of warped mockery of Hyrule. The newness and relative lack of hand-holding was thrilling at first, but it wasn't long before I was feeling like I just wanted to be the hero in control of everything from the actions of townspeople to time itself again. My normal method of completing these games was to go as SLOW as possible, noting EVERYTHING that looked like it could be accessed later with an item not yet in my possession in a handy notebook. I was so careful and methodical that I obtained every single thing in most Zelda games up to this point with no hints or guides of any kind. I don't know how I can stress enough how GLACIALLY PATIENT I was; I don't think that I had actually had my hearts depleted to 0 since A Link to The Past. Majora pushed me out of my comfort zone. The clock was ticking, there was no time for hand drawn notes and maps. There was no time to explore every inch of Termina, because the world was going to end soon. The second time it forced me to witness defeat at the hands of a sadistic child and a nightmare-inducing moon, I was ready to quit; Never mind that the clock had been turned back, forget that something I obtained the last time around came with me, shit was NOT Zelda and I was done with it... Well, that holographic gold cartridge sat there taunting me for some time. I didn't have anything else for the N64 at the time that I wanted to play, so it just stared at me while I played vapid snowboarding games on the PlayStation... "What kind of Zelda player are you?" It seemed to intone. So I got angry and purposeful about it. "I'll beat the crap out of this game if for no other reason than to legitimize my endless ranting about what a betrayal it is!" Hah! Flash forward 10 hours in or so- I'm tracking villager patterns in my in-game notebook. I've forsaken the handwritten completionist notes because I just want to destroy it ASAP. I'm mastering the various forms of the creepy mask system. Most importantly, I've finally got a handle on the looping time system, and have been rewarded with some more of the control I was originally seeking... but not TOO much. I still need to plan my treasure hunts and dungeon runs around that infernal leering moon, fucking thing WATCHING my struggle to stop it, LAUGHING at how little fun I'm hav- ...Wait. Actually I WAS having fun. A different kind of fun borne of mastering new systems using a familiar springboard. This really surprised me at the time- I literally caught myself cursing the moon out loud and realized that this game had challenged me and sucked me in to a degree that no other game in the series had managed, (and none since). I no longer plod through Zelda games with slow, paranoid, completionist sweeps. I dive into them and take risks, seeing if I can eke that Majora feeling or challenge out of them. Sadly, they haven't been living up to the new ideal. I actually had a decent time with Skyward Sword- Mastering the new motion mechaincs was a little like mastering a new way to manipulate time, but the feeling was fleeting and easy. I had some fun, but I doubt I'm going to remember SS fondly in 10 years...

Okay so apparently we ARE "dead" serious about the guy that designed the Pringles container/packaging system... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24948534/ns/business-retail/t/pringles-can-designer-buried-his-work/#.T0cMa_Egeuo

Over $80k?! YES. And there's going to be some sort of a bookcast? I should read the fine print or something but must have gotten too excited. How is that going to work, we have like three weeks to read something plus a week to send questions and then a pod gets cast in our faces? +1 for "What is book?" See also "The Wizard's Improved Spectral Library"

Randomization seems like a weird fit for this, but the numerous reports comparing people's first playthroughs confirm it. I'll have to give it another go and see what I make of it...