SecretAsianMan

I'm going to approach this from the opposite angle. Take a game like Mario Kart. There's a generous amount of rubber banding such that it's difficult to maintain a significant lead. While this can be seen as providing a continuous challenge and preventing a player from getting bored, it can also be seen as punishing high skill. If I spend the entire race in first place only to get taken out by a blue shell at the last second and finish in fourth, something that is entirely outside of my control, is that fair? In a game like Mario Kart which is supposed to be more about goofy fun for all, it's probably fine. In a game like Rogue Legacy, the difficulty is supposed to be inherent to the game's design. I suppose it's a matter of negative or positive reinforcement. Ideally I think good games have a mix of both. I personally didn't have a problem with Rogue Legacy's method as it kept pushing me to improve (I agree it could be better but I went to NG+++ before I stopped playing).

SUMMER GAMES DONE QUICK 2017 July 2 - July 9 I've been so busy lately I almost forgot about it, but it's time for another round of SGDQ. If you're not aware of what I'm talking about, Games Done Quick is a series of charity video game marathons with events in the winter and summer. Speedrunners from all over come together in one place and stream a nonstop barrage of high-level gameplay. This summer's event benefits Doctors without Borders. Tune in to see some games getting completely taken apart. The runs will eventually be archived if you can't see it live. Main Site Schedule Twitch Channel Donation Page Official GDQ YouTube Channel Forum Curated YouTube Playlist (click here to add videos)

A number of the VODs have audio issues that will (hopefully) get resolved once they upload the edited runs instead of the raw stream so I'm going to suggest holding off adding to the playlist for now.

That sounds nicer in a way. At first not having ground is intimidating and you worry constantly about falling, but after a while it just becomes a nuisance, especially once you have tons of materials and the only thing keeping you from expanding is the need to build the floor first.

The first time I saw gameplay of Friday the 13th, I thought that it was a mod for Dead by Daylight. A couple of clarifications from Nick's description of the game. The character that you can call in is Tommy Jarvis, who is apparently a recurring character from the movies (honestly I've never seen them). He effectively acts as a respawn for one lucky player to return to the game after they are killed. It's possible to kill Jason but the method involves several steps including I was hoping that Nick would mention one of my favorite details but I guess since he was such a terrible Jason he didn't realize it. One of Jason's powers allows him to become invisible and move very quickly that allows him to catch up to other players (and is different from the map teleporting power). If he uses this ability near another player, the game indicates this to the player with a VHS "rewind/fast forward" effect. I should note that I've never played the game, everything I know has been gleamed from let's plays.

Totally agree. There's so much stuff in Sky Factory I'm constantly browsing the catalog and discovering some amazing thing that I can't build yet which gives me a new goal. I appreciate the freedom and openness that exists in vanilla Minecraft but without some minimal guidance I often found myself not wanting to do anything (and doing stuff like questing to fight the Ender Dragon doesn't really interest me because so many other games do that better). Sky Factory doesn't exactly have a specific path to follow either, but the individual parts are really good at pointing you in enough of a direction that you can develop a goal and constantly find interesting and varied ways of doing it. My biggest complaint is the documentation is very scattered and often poor. It's so many mods packed together that a single comprehensive guide is unrealistic but often I find myself having to put my works on pause to watch a tutorial or read a wiki for even basic stuff.

Yeah I wish it was better too. I can see it being useful as a refresher but as an introduction it's woefully lacking. There is ZERO explanation on what kanji/hiragana/katakana are and they constantly mix them all in the same lesson as though being presented with them all at once is sufficient to understand everything. What really drives me nuts is that a bunch of the time there's NO pronunciation at all so I'm not even developing an ear for hearing or speaking the language.

I really dug the combat in the Arkham games. I agree they're complicated but you never need to use the vast majority of the available moves. I'm the kind of person who likes to string together as much variety in a combo as I can so I made it a point to learn and use them all and as a result I really enjoyed throwing every gadget in Batman's belt. Shadow of Mordor's combat at its core is very similar so my familiarity with the Arkham system made the transition to Mordor almost seamless. That said, with the addition on the Nemesis system and the corresponding strengths/weaknesses there's certainly more incentive to utilize the various combat moves and combos. I personally never found it overwhelming but it might just be it slots into my personality very well. I felt the complexity made the combat more interesting because I've played enough beat-em-up's in my life that I want something besides "X, X, X".

As promised, I've started a playlist that I'll be adding to as I watch the replays. It won't contain every single run, just the ones I think are more entertaining. I've added the link to the first post in the thread. I've also opened it up to collaboration if anyone else wants to add videos as well. Please stick to only videos from the official GDQ channel.

Today is my daughter's first birthday. I've been a dad for a year now. Still hard to believe.

The flask can be upgraded to carry 4 charges at max. The amount of health restored depends on which area you're in. The game restores health based on an expected value for each level, regardless of what your current max is. I recommend focusing on getting the non-weapon upgrades first. Upgrading the weapons doesn't provide a huge amount of damage improvement while getting more flask charges and money will pay off immediately. Shields are kind of iffy. They don't really function like shields in most games do, they're more like parries. You can't hold them out forever and only block damage if you time it right. They do provide a passive defense boost in that whenever you take damage they generate a small forcefield around you for a short time that lowers further damage (but doesn't negate it). This can help you from getting overwhelmed by a bunch of enemies at once but won't do as much good against a single strong enemy. Your health regain from attacking enemies is also reduced in this state but if you're quick enough you can still get most of it back. In general sword and board helps with survivability as you'd expect. I personally prefer fast, hard hitting tactics so I usually skip shields too. Two skills that really help out a ton against the Watcher are the trap and the ivy grenade. The traps can help protect you from the tentacles, especially the one that sweeps from the sides. The ivy grenade will hold the Watcher in place so you can hammer away at him. I've had fights where I was able to lock him in place and have him skip his entire attack phase. I've heard it's possible to one shot him with the right setup.

Nothing to do with the game but SGDQ this year opened with Nier Automata being run by Halfcoordinated, who is a disabled gamer that plays everything with one hand. It's a pretty amazing run and if you're not afraid of spoilers I really recommend checking it out once the archives are up.

I've actually been doing the Japanese course (for 29 days apparently) and... I kind of agree it's not great. I've never done another Duolingo course before so I don't know how they compare but a lot of the lessons just throw completely new things at you with no pronunciation or any other real way of figuring out what the sentence means other than random guessing. There's really no attempt at teaching you sentence structure or grammar either. I understand a good amount of it because I already speak Chinese which has similar structure but to someone without a background in any kind of Asian language I can't really see this helping. Maybe once the vocab has been built they get into some of that but from what I've seen thus far it may as well just be flash cards.

I had a very frustrating moment the other day where I managed to pickup two new blueprints and then got careless and died before I could cash them in. I have about 3 things left to unlock, all of which are already rare and hardly drop, plus they're only located in the Forgotten Sepulcher which takes some gearing up to get through. The thing that's currently stymying me is the lack of weapon/skill drops and the heavy reliance on shops and gold. Even at the max gold return (85%) I usually run a deficit and often don't get useful gear anyway.

It's really intimidating at first and the guidance is almost nonexistent but once you get going its kind of amazing. Melting down cobblestone in a crucible to turn it into lava that I pipe into a magmatic generator to produce power for machines that automatically hammer, compress, and sift gravel to produce the ores I need to make capacitors which increase the efficiency of my generator is way more fun than it sounds. I wish my job were half this interesting and I work at a damn nuclear plant.

I've finally gotten around to investigating the wonderful world of Minecraft mods and I'm kicking myself for not doing so earlier. I'm currently engrossed by Sky Factory 3. Sky Factory is a skyblock mod, which is a type of mod that places you on a tree floating over the void and little to no other resources and you have to create the world from scratch. Sky Factory adds a ton of other mods together to create a more complete package. I'm strangely replicating my day job by building complex power generators to automate my processes and it's far more satisfying than I would have predicted.

That's fair enough, although I want to point out that what I like about those runs isn't the games themselves but rather the run as a whole, including the couch commentary, runners, and audience experience. Normally when those games are run in the middle of the marathon I'm as indifferent as you but as an ending I appreciate the long, slow sort of finality to them.

I've become somewhat wary of FPS speedruns because they're usually about clipping through the map to skip as much of the game as possible which isn't interesting to me at all. For that reason I'm not especially excited about DOOM and Dishonored but I'm sure I'll end up watching them at some point. I'm kind of bummed about Super Metroid losing prominence as well but I suppose it's inevitable given how long that game has been run. But they've had some really great closers in the last few marathons so I can't complain too much.

Taking a quick glance at the schedule, I see that the first game out of the gate is NieR: Automata run by Halfcooordinated, which is pretty awesome. Halfcoordinated is a disabled gamer who only has fine motor control in one hand so he plays everything one handed. His runs are pretty great, my favorite being one of Vanquish from a couple years ago. Other ones I'm interested in: Okami HD MDK I Am Bread Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose Bionic Commando Rearmed (by my favorite runner PJ) Tetris block (includes Tetris: The Grand Master 8-way 100% race and a 2-players 1-controller race) The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past (all dungeons, swordless) Super Mario series warpless relay SUPERHOT Super Panga World Super Mario 64 (120 stars) Like always, once the archives start getting put up I'll compile a YouTube playlist of what I think are more interesting runs and make it available here.

A recent update has put a lot of emphasis on the shops for getting good gear so money is more important than ever. I expect this to change though. Stuff like the fire grenade can be good depending on what else you have that complements it. Oil weapons obviously pair very well with it. If you run a skill build they can also be quite devastating. I personally prefer skills that have more utility like traps or phaser as I usually run strength builds. In general strength tends to be fast but risky while skill is slower but safer. The first boss is a lot of pattern recognition and waiting for opportunities to strike. Try not to fight him in a corner because his damage aura will tear through you if you get stuck. Skills are extremely useful against him. Ranged weapons are also quite powerful provided you can get the ammo back.

The most wall runes I've found in a single level is probably around 10 but I'd say the average is maybe half that. 30 is also about an average number, assuming you've cleared the whole map. The number of cells you get depends entirely on the number of enemies and even then it's a lot of luck. You can get a bit more with some skill if you can get into a timed door or spend money on a locked door (assuming you're lucky enough to find one). Challenge runes also net you some, but only like 8. Challenge runes and cursed chests are rarely ever worth it I've found.

Considering the entire language of the wish is designed to avoid as much magical trickery as possible, I'm much more amused that the loopholes come from the humans instead. Violating the spirit of the wish to exploit infinite free energy strikes me as great irony if we assume that the genie is out to screw us in the first place. Also this is one of the first times a subject has been brought up that borders on something I have expertise in so I had to come be a smarty pants. This must be how Gormongous feels like all the time.

I might this weekend.

I'm glad you liked it. I think it's one of the better Star Wars video games. It certainly has flaws but I think the foundation is solid and a sequel could have smoothed out the rough edges while presenting an interesting non-Jedi side of the Star Wars mythos.

Burning the food as a source of fuel is still a FAR more efficient method of power generation. Operating within the 10 lb 20 minute constraint severely limits any gravity fed method. Without going into too much detail, there would also be reliability issues as you would be hard pressed to maintain steady output. Wishing for water as a substitute for a dammed lake might work but even then I still think a fuel source would be much more effective.