SecretAsianMan

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Everything posted by SecretAsianMan

  1. What is the value in "Randomness"

    So does that mean that the next 10 are going to be guaranteed hits in order to produce 12/15=80%?
  2. I got my rewards a few days ago, but I've been working the back shift so I haven't had time to open it. Last night/this morning I finally opened it up. Among the many wonderous items inside was a postcard signed by Chris, Jake, and Sean with a note that read "Thanks for your support! 71% of it has been spent on nerds ropes for Jake" However, my sleep deprived brain read it as "Thanks for your support! 71% of it has been spent on nerd rapes for Jake"
  3. Putting Items in Characters' Butts: Why?

    I always liked the way Grim Fandango showed the inventory with Manny reaching into his coat and pulling out items. Do skeletons even have butts?
  4. Putting Items in Characters' Butts: Why?

    Beat me to it.
  5. Like many others, I also have a bunch of humble bundle games that I've barely touched. Beyond that, I don't have a lot of games I own but have never played. I used to subscribe to Gamefly so that helped out a lot. I felt like I had to get the most out of my money so I'd play through the games quickly then move on to the next. That's actually why I cancelled it. Playing games with a time constraint like that takes a lot of the enjoyment out of it. On the other hand, the number of games that I own and never finished is depressing.
  6. Difficulty and balance in Video games.

    Same I find this interesting because I feel almost the exact opposite. I experimented a lot in Bioshock and found it to be one of the more rewarding parts of the combat. Granted, I wasn't ever forced to do it, but my personal preference in FPS games is to avoid melee at all costs, so I never used the wrench when I could avoid it. Halo, as you can imagine, took a lot of getting used to. With Torchlight II, I didn't feel as though the starting skills were becoming ineffective, but rather by the time you reach a high enough level to unlock another skill, that new skill isn't effective enough to use especially since you already put points into the lower tier skills. Both of these may be just be personal taste. As for the respec, I wish that Torchlight II's limited respec worked in a different way. I'd like to be able to refund all the points in one specific skill rather than the last 3 points I spent. Maybe have the respec cost a lot of gold or require you to trade in uniques to do it. Getting back 3 points is usually useless to me because if I decide I don't like the way a particular skill is working, it's usually too late for me to undo it and now I'm stuck with it. I suppose it does give the decision more weight since you can't take it back easily, but I feel like there's a better solution than the existing one. The Halo pistol probably wasn't the best example, but it's 3AM and I'm at the office posting this inbetween getting work done. Or not done depending on who you ask.
  7. Difficulty and balance in Video games.

    I actually thought that's how it worked, but I'm not bothered if it doesn't (I'm playing on Veteran myself so it wouldn't even really effect me). I do sort of understand how people can get into this mindset though. A few months ago I was really into Dungeon Defenders, a tower defense/third person action game where your character actually exists in the world and has a heavy loot emphasis. Higher difficulty meant better drops so natually no one played on anything but the hardest difficulty. I really got into it for a few months, but then once I stopped and looked back, I realized how horrible the experience actually was. I stopped having fun and it became all about the next piece of loot. I would spend hours doing the exact same map over and over, which would have been ok if I was having fun the whole time, but because it's a tower defense game, a lot of that time you don't have to do anything and just let the towers do all the work. So eventually the game was about finding a good enough setup to let you be afk while the game played itself. The best way to play the game involved not actually playing the game. Torchlight doesn't suffer from this exact problem, but it's easy to fall into the trap and get swept up collecting loot instead of enjoying an actual game. I guess this sort of ties into my point above, but more generally, I think it's a commentary on how many big AAA games are designed to push the easy pleasure buttons. Achievements, loot, gear, hats, skins, etc. Those are all small, quick payoffs now rather than longer, and hopefully more fulfilling payoffs later. When I think back on the times I enjoyed playing a game, they never involve getting an achievement or unlocking a weapon (with very few exceptions). What I remember is how much fun I had playing the game. I suppose such things can contribute to the overall experience, but when they become the point, I don't enjoy the game anymore.
  8. Difficulty and balance in Video games.

    You can extend that idea out to most any game with certain kinds of systems. By the time I stopped playing the first Torchlight, I had several characters, but a lot of them were almost exact copies of each other. It was because I had found what seemed to be an optimal build (at least to me) so the next time I made a character I ended up going down the same path. It could be a personal fault of mine, but I experimented with different setups and still ended up doing the same thing. Another example I can think of is from the first time I played Halo multiplayer. I didn't have an Xbox at the time and I was visiting some friends at college. They were playing Halo 1 on the dorm LAN. I had never played Halo at that point so I naturally got my butt kicked, but what really surprised me was the way they were doing it. They were using the Halo "one-two" punch of a plasma pistol to deplete your shields, followed by a pistol headshot. The plasma pistol I could understand but the pistol headshot boggled my mind because to me a pistol was a weapon of last resort, not a primary weapon. And yet it worked extremely well. So we kept doing it. My point is that once players discover the "optimal" way to do something, it's not very likely they'll deviate from it.
  9. Idle Thumbs Ruinationcast

    "I can't think of anything intelligent so... puffins" Best $200 I ever spent.
  10. Idle Thumbs 77: Our Neighbor Scoops

    Did Sean's GDC talk that almost was ever get posted?
  11. Difficulty and balance in Video games.

    I like to adjust difficulty in games by giving myself personal "challenges" without changing the difficulty level. For example, I'll play an entire level of Halo using ONLY human weapons. I love it when games support this kind of thing without necessarily making it a menu option. Some games even encourage it. I can think of 2 examples from Half-Life 2. Both of them are tied to achievements. I'm not going to go into a rant here about achievements because frankly I don't care about them, but I will say these were 2 of my favorite achievements because they encouraged interesting gameplay. The first one is going through all of Ravenholm in HL2 using only the gravity gun. It made me approach each situation differently and added to the atmosphere of the level. Without an accurate long range weapon, suddenly every headcrab and zombie was a much bigger threat and I had to conserve my "ammo" by carefully aiming my projectile (usually a sawblade) in such a way that I could recover it later. Obviously I could ignore this challenge at any time and just start shooting everything in sight (at one point you are literally handed a new weapon). But playing it this way made the section more difficult and the end result was much more satisfying than if it simply took more shots to kill a zombie. The second one is similar to the first but still different enough to mention. In HL2: Ep1 there's an achievement for completing the episode using only ONE bullet. This leave you with the crowbar, gravity gun, and explosives (I think, can't remember if explosives count for this achievement or not). This makes you much more reliant on Alex and changed the tone of the episode for me. In a way, it almost felt like a reverse escort mission. Instead of me having to protect my AI buddy, suddenly I was dependent on her to take care of a lot of the enemies, something she did remarkably well I might add. Again, I was free at any time to just pull out my guns and shoot everything. But it was so much more fun to try and maneuver my enemies into a position that allowed my companion to finish them off. I'm also reminded of a tale Chris told about playing Splinter Cell: Conviction, where he would line up headshots instead of using the game's mechanic of getting melee kills, then tagging enemies and auto-headshotting them. Whether or not this changed the game's difficulty I can't say, but it's a different way of playing the game without changing anything in the game. I sort of got off topic there. I guess my point is that it's possible to change the "difficulty" of a game without modifying the game in any way, but sometimes it's up to the player to figure out a way of doing it. I'm not suggesting every game should support this, and it's certainly a challenge to come up with a system that allows it, but I really enjoy it when they do.
  12. Idle Thumbs 77: Our Neighbor Scoops

    Oh man, Number Munchers?! I can't wait to hear this episode! (That's not sarcasm by the way)
  13. Idle Thumbs 76: The Three Antidotes

    Great, now I have Space Asshole stuck in my head. Not that that's a bad thing. Also, to interject on the pronunciation discussion, one that's always bothered me was zealot. I never really used the term outside of Starcraft and all that time I never heard it said out loud. Then one day I learned how it was "supposed" to be pronounced. I always read it in my head as "zee-lot" rather than "zel-uht" since zeal is pronounced "zeel" (rhymes with seal) not "zel" (rhymes with bell). I think I even argued with Chris about this on Twitter many moons ago.
  14. Idle Thumbs 76: The Three Antidotes

    Great episode. Makes me feel less lonely working the night shift, although I did get strange looks from the 3 people here besides me as I laughed at "How am I driving".
  15. Torchlight II

    I love that. I'd probably be several skill levels lower without those reminders.
  16. Torchlight II

    I'm always surprised how many people don't use the options when making a game. I see a lot of games called "don't join unless you're john" or "my level +/- 2", and yet those games are all open with no level restrictions and no passwords. My Runic name is SecretAsianManz if anyone is interested in playing. Also if you see a game named Baboo, it's probably me.
  17. Torchlight II

    Same here. I'm going to be working a lot of overtime during the next few weeks and I'll only have room for one game to consume my free time. I might get Borderlands during the inevitable Steam holiday sale if the price drops.
  18. Torchlight II

    I've started pre-loading the game, so I figured now would be a good time to revive this thread. Anyone care to get together when it comes out? I didn't play any of the beta (unless you count the 15 minute demo I played at PAX) but I had a lot of fun with the first Torchlight. I've never played a game of this type with other people, so I'll probably be asking a lot of stupid questions and doing dumb things. Hopefully some kind soul will take pity on me and let me tag along on their grand adventure.
  19. Idle Thumbs 73: Pegasus Launch

    He was the only one that didn't come to the meetup, although to be fair, I think he was required to go to Bethesda's crazy mansion party.
  20. Idle Thumbs 73: Pegasus Launch

    I was sitting in the front row refreshing the site on my phone as it was being launched. I even got the error message before it was fixed. This makes me think of a Thumbs Last Supper. Also, here's a shot from the meetup after At one point, I saw Sean and Jake at the Double Fine booth playing Happy Action Theater and the game turned Jake into a hotdog on a bun. Sadly, I didn't get my phone out in time to get a picture.
  21. New website!

    I'm totally loving the new site. I was actually sitting in the front row of the PAX panel with my phone out and refreshing the page as it was launched. It was a glorious launch, perhaps made even better because it didn't work the first time.
  22. New people: Read this, say hi.

    Greetings Thumbs (and any other digits out there) I've been listening to the cast since the beginning and I even registered long ago but I've been too lazy/stupid to actually participate. But after meeting the Thumbs in person at PAX Prime 2012 I've been inspired to stop being idle. Also, I apologize to Chris/Jake/Sean/Steve for being a fanboy and repeatedly telling you how awesome you all are. I'll stop that now. Nick wasn't at the Thumbs meetup so fuck that guy.