Orv

The Spartacus trilogy has a slightly smaller emphasis on politics than Rome, if you just want Roman period stuff.

I feel, at this point, the same way about Danielewski, that I do about China Mieville. Potential, lots of it, some fantastic ideas, but trying way, way too hard to be interesting/different, and it blots out the parts of their stuff that are interesting. Like I said, give me The Navidson Record without Johnny Truant, or Bas-Lag without the shitty, overwrought prose and I will devour it like a man who wants to quench his thirst after a week in the sands. ...Shit. I am, however, sad to report that I cannot recommend any Navidson Record-esque titles because my typical reading fare doesn't stray into that sort of thing. That said, if you should ever find anything that does ring similar, send it my way. E: I should note that I did go back and finish House of Leaves several weeks after I posted my initial feelings. At this point, three and a quarter months down the road, I remember almost nothing of the book, save the initial exploration of the hallway and the brief, quite intriguing description of the initial "rescue" attempt.

Except that's an opinion! If the new maps didn't completely fuck the balance equations, making different people unstoppable jugglenobs, I'd be fine with them. Dominion having the same balance for all heroes as Rift just means instead of champion A being a murderous madman/woman, champion B is. If they went to the trouble of a separate balance for the new maps/modes, then bring 'em on. As it is, the few times I played Twisted Treeline it was Heimer/Amumu/Blitzcrank every, single, time. (This was a while back when Heimer was a bit nuts.)

I think it's less that people hate change and more that the changes are shit. Dominion, Twisted Treeline, whatever the names for the two HoN maps were. They're all terrible. Give me a 5v5 map with good balance and an interesting new layout, not 3v3 or multiflag KotH.

A new non-minigame map for DotA 2 will probably never happen. Look at how well it went for LoL and HoN. Even with a complete shift in how the game is played for Dominion in LoL, no-one plays it.

They were in an earlier phase of beta but have never returned, so probably not. As for iron sites, that's just how CS is. If Hidden Path put iron sites in CS:GO no-one who was still serious about CS would ever play it, and the competitive community would remain in 1.6, which Valve doesn't want.

Goddamn psichimps.

It's a weird blend of 1.6 and GO, with some odd balancing on weapons. The main tier rifles have slightly new patterns, there are a few new weapons, tier two rifles are worth using. It's still very much CS, and if you're done with 1.6/GO I can't recommend it.

Occasionally, anywhere ranging from once a week to once every few days, I look like I know what I'm doing in CS and other FPSes I'm chronically bad at. I call this a Mighty Ducks Moment. This will not happen again, and if it does, it'll be a long time. Back to being terrible!

One of the stretch goals is a single-player campaign, so...

I sometimes really appreciate my ability to have the humor of a twelve year old on a whim. (Though if I just wanted the bad puns I'd link the two minute version, the crowd really makes this.)

An LP semi-blind run that has commentators with good voices, 'blix.

Further ruinationimprovement of everything you love.

They're talking about doing weekly event type stuff where they host 40 player, multi-system (planetary) games that start everyone off with a unit cap of like 200, but as more people get eliminated everyones cap goes up gradually. They want these games to take 12 or 24 hours and I'd absolutely love that. Brutal tactical and strategic level combat that by the end of a 20 hour game is just the last two or three or four players making mistakes that would lose a smaller scale RTS in the planetary graveyard of shattered worlds as newly formed asteroids are launched through the void in last ditch MAD deterrence-esque warfare.

He really would be the best televangelist. My eldest cat, Aurelius, is sick as a dog, and I've been administering shots to alleviate the problem, and the little son of a bitch has been fine with it until today, at which point he tears himself from my grasp and I jam the needle into the fold of skin between my thumb and forefinger and tear it open. Having a pain tolerance of exactly none, today was certainly an enjoyable day, even with copious painkiller. Little bastard isn't getting any fish for a week.

I am offensively bad at Counter-Strike, and I am in.

Your problem is playing an RTS for story reasons, Rodi.

Sort of, but not really. The point of an initiator is to force a teamfight on your terms, and lock and destroy a specific hero, or any hero you can get alone. Huskar just kind of leaps in and starts chucking spears and his team has to come in behind. Real initiation like Sand King or Tidehunter is all about that initial hero removal and keeping the ball in your court if you can't do that. I'm sure there's a more elegant/correct way to explain this.

I so, so hope this gets funded. That said, I don't think any video game Kickstarter that has asked for this kind of money has actually reached it? I'm probably wrong, but I feel like all the things that have surpassed a million were asking like >500K.

The joke was that shortening barracks in an RTS setting is typically done as "rax", the pronunciation part was incidental.

Tycho, youmeyou is talking about more what I meant by "craven lust for HL3". While it's not exactly a good metric for me to be fairly unimpressed by the games and then confused as to why people like them so much, the fact that the internet at large basically hears any hint of HL3 and erupts in speculation, hype and frothing hatred that is isn't true just seems foolish to me. It happens every time, and it's been happening for years. Even the most unsubstantiated things get picked up and posted on places like PCG and RPS. Liking a game more than I do is fine, more power to you, but the stuff that happens anything HL3 is even hinted at in an official capacity is tiresome.

I can give you that. The first vista of City 17 when you walk out of the, what can you call it, customs facility, intake facility? Either way, it's pretty great. But atmosphere alone isn't enough to justify this craven lust some of the internet seems to possess for Half Life.

Having played them, they're not great. The story is middling, with interesting bits (GMan, Vortigaunts, Ravenholm), the gunplay is passable but not great, and while technically impressive in ways, the speedboat section of 2 serves to point out some nasty flaws in the Source build of the time. They're not that good. In fact I seem to remember us discussing this before with pretty much the same talking points on both sides.