Corelli

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Posts posted by Corelli

  4. Posted

    where my Volunteer was possessed by one of the ethereals and also psychically attacked by the boss himself. When I fired a rocket to finish the boss off, I was told that my volunteer had died and that I would have to restart the mission. What the fuck?

    If a unit is being mind-controlled and the mind-controller dies, the mind-controllee dies as well. Excellent if you're killing a sectoid who is linked up with another sectoid; not so great if an enemy is mind-controlling one of your troops. That's XCOM!

  7. Posted

    As noted by Chris and Steve, Goldblum & Markie is back on YouTube.

    There's so many things that make that so crazy. Goldblum and Biz Markie's easy chemistry. Goldblum's competent piano playing. His mister-rogers-meets-mark-russell delivery. The fact that it's so clearly rehearsed.

  8. Posted

    I love that MOMA list.

    I think that, whoever is curating that, they deserve some serious props for being knowledgeable enough to put together a list that interesting. I feel like the probability of a museum putting a list together that good, even a place like MOMA, is super low.

    Edit: That's the awful intro music? I was expecting waaaay worse.

    Edit2: I mean I really prepared myself for that, I thought it was going to be soul-gouging.

  12. Posted

    I didn't get that they were being dismissive of the book, but instead that all the characters would have all read it despite the book being a pretty esoteric reference.

    (And to be quite frank, for all I enjoyed it A Canticle of Leibowitz IS a really esoteric book. Famous as a sci-fi book only in some circles, and tied heavily to Catholicism and faith. It would be like if they happened to be all conversant with what happened in the later Dune books.)

    I read it in high school English. I think it's way more mainstream than you're giving it credit for.

    Edit: And for whatever it's worth, I don't think they were being dismissive. I'm just surprised that they hadn't heard of it.

  14. Posted

    I think both those skills work. Maybe Squad Sight pays off more in the long term (e.g with Double Tap), but in the short term Snap Shot is pretty good. You can't get a good position that covers all the places you want in all missions anyway, or not quickly enough. I remember one Terror mission where one of my snipers didn't move at all from the starting position, because I had to constantly rely on his squadsight shots as I got some pretty tough enemies revealed quickly. I lost my other sniper stupidly because i moved her on top of a structure where she was vulnerable and my medic didn't have a skeleton suit and couldn't follow her so she died.

    Squad sight definitely pays off in the long term. So much, in fact, that I would say that it's the most essential skill for a sniper.

  17. Posted

    I recommend this post on the X-Com forums: http://forums.2kgame...rom-My-Mistakes

    This is really good, but I will quibble with some of it (I am on my 4th ironman run, haven't won yet but I have learned a lot).

    Africa is by far the best starting position. The extra money makes a HUGE difference as improving funding and getting more engineers are going to be your primary goals in the first few months. You need to get as many satellites up as quickly as possible. If you don't, you will lose countries really, really quickly. Two countries leaving after the first month is not surprising at all in classic. Sell every corpse you have in the early game - you will get enough to research later on, and you don't need to research those things immediately. Sell all your flight computers/power sources too, even if they are undamaged. You need the money for satellites, uplink facilities, and to get increased squad size.

    I completely agree with him on the grenades thing. They are by far the best thing to have on rookies. I'm torn on when to increase squad size. On the one hand it's obviously very helpful, but it's also expensive.

    Iron man classic really feels like the only way to play this game. I can't even imagine going back to normal now, it would be pretty boring.

    Edit: Also, take advantage of the alien move that happens when you first discover them. If you have soldiers on overwatch surrounding an area that you think aliens might be in, you can use another soldier to discover them and flush them into cover - if the overwatch soldiers are flanking them, they can get a nice flanking shot at them next turn.

  18. Posted

    I completely agree with Dave(Jon?), the initial move that the enemy gets is one of my biggest quibbles with the game. I understand why they did it, because if you don't have it then you either A)Always stumble on enemies out of cover and they automatically die or B)enemies are always in cover and they get an easy overwatch shot on your soldiers (who die, because they are most likely not in cover).

    I also really don't like the inability to control the path that your soldier takes to get to a certain point. One of the worst parts of losing time units.

  19. Posted

    A bit late here, but anyway:

    While there are things I really enjoyed about Sense of an Ending, I just can't get past Barnes' handling of (for lack of a better word) "future" Veronica.

    I apologize if this is rehashing old ground.

    Let's look at it from her perspective: Your boyfriend sleeps with your mom and you get a special needs brother. Perhaps you blame this on your boyfriend from before your boyfriend-who-slept-with-mom, maybe you don't. Either way, that boyfriend was a total asshole who sent you a ridiculously mean letter. Now you have to care for your special needs brother, AND your boyfriend-who-slept-with-mom killed himself. Total bummer. Skip forward forty years, and asshole boyfriend starts sending you some probing emails (and comes off a little skeezy). Instead of ignoring him, or telling him "You're an asshole who made my life a whole lot worse", you concoct a complex scheme to prove to him again something which you took pains to point out forty years ago, which is that he is incapable of understanding the world around him in a way that is compatible with a. reality or b. the way you see reality.

    Her scheme goes something like this: 1. Send a fragment of a journal entry from dead-boyfriend-who-slept-with-mom that uses a coded math problem to explain a situation that asshole-boyfriend is unaware of (to prove how unaware asshole-boyfriend is?) 2. Meet with asshole-boyfriend in person to see if he got it 3. Nope he didn't, drive him around and do a crazy curb-stop to show him your brother in the hope that he would somehow guess or make sense of the whole situation 4. Nope he still doesn't get it, tell him he'll never get it then go home.

    This just doesn't make sense to me. If this is really Veronica's plan, then she is not acting like a person. She is acting like a literary cog in the plot machine. That is my problem with it.

    The rest of the book is really, really good. I just feel like Barnes wrote himself into a place where Veronica could no longer be a believable character. This is a problem for me, because a huge part of the attraction I have to the book is the way it accurately portrays our ability to misunderstand not just our history - and reality in general - but also the people around us, their motivations, and their realities. But when the people in the book don't read like people, it undermines the overall effect. So the question becomes, how do you solve that problem? If you're Barnes, what do you do? The mystery of the letter works so well as the keystone of the second half of the book, and yet it really doesn't make any sense for Veronica to send it to him. Sure, you can hand-waive this away ("It's all she had kept" (I think it actually does say that she burned the diary) "She didn't realize that no one would be able to reasonably work that out" etc.) but it's hard to get past.

  25. Posted

    What difficulty did you play on?

    Give Me Deus Ex was the hardest one, right? I played on that one.

    Elmeurte: Oddly enough, I played a stealth focused character but never attempted a take-down on him because it didn't work on the second boss. I'll have to replay it sometime and actually finish the game.