Gwardinen

I may actually use that. I might end up with a mixture of friends, family, thumbs and celebrities on my team.

I think this is beneficial for the (fairly significant number of) people who have been telling me they'd happily play Hearthstone, but just feel really behind on actual collecting cards.

I still have a Steam gift of XCOM: Enemy Unknown knocking around if anyone wants it. Edit: Gone.

It has single player missions outside of the dark zone, but only a handful in the beta. I blew through them in about half an hour and then quit because anything else would require me to play with people I know to have fun, I suspect. I definitely get Destiny vibes too, and as a result if sufficient people I know get it I likely will too, but it is entirely based on that requirement.

This thread is tempting me to go back to my Star Trek rewatch. I really, really enjoyed my time with TNG but became a bit stuck once I hit DS9. It may have been Star Trek overload, it may have been that I've never quite connected with DS9, I dunno. I might dig up which page of this thread the Voyager skip list is on and give that a shot, see how I do. The downside to Voyager, though, is that I was the perfect age to have seen it rerun quite a lot on TV already, and therefore won't have nearly so many new experiences as I did (semi re)watching TNG.

Most of Brendon Chung's games have weird but wonderful names, I mean Thirty Flights of Loving has to be a favourite around here, right? If Life is Strange was actually called Tween Peaks it'd probably be my favourite ever game name, but sadly that glorious reality only exists in these forums.

It's pretty cool! I think the (hopefully) inevitable iOS port will be a big hit too. I think my record so far is surviving 7 weeks, but that was by the skin of my teeth. No idea how anyone makes it through all ten.

Also perhaps this is just my experience or perhaps the "real" journos are just better at hiding their skeletons, but it seems like there is a higher proportion of well-known YouTubers who are problematic than there are of traditional games reporters. At this stage I feel like every time I hear about a YouTuber it's due to a discovery about them being troublingly bigoted or at least wildly ignorant.

To put a (somewhat) positive spin on things, I've done the unrequited love thing with a friend before and it was fine as a friendship. It wasn't until we became friends with benefits that it all went horribly sideways. So uh, yeah, friends might work as long as you understand that's what it is, like Bjorn says. If anything more seems like it might be going down, think twice!

This video highlights a few of the broader changes to the gameplay, though I'm not sure I go along with their "biggest changes" titling:

I get the chicken quesadilla there when I need something quick in the middle of the city. It's actually not bad.

I was thinking that myself, but diplomacy obviously requires a decent bit of typing. Frozen Synapse and Frozen Cortex are asynchronous with simple UIs, but it's possible some of the mouse stuff will be too fiddly. At least in Synapse, I think you have to drag to change facing. That may not be the case in Cortex, though, if I remember rightly. Hero Academy isn't bad, though strategically it's a pretty big step down from chess, heh. There is actually a way to play Civilization V asynchronously! Look up Giant Multiplayer Robot. I'm guessing devices other than the PC are out?

A little late to the party, but I've added my picks to the list and I'd be interested in joining the rewatch. Are we starting with Toy Story this coming week?

It's Giant Beastcast 31.

I hope that Snoke guy turns out to not be in any more films at all.

For the record it's actually £25, not $25. The equivalent boost in the North America PSN store is $30. So it's even worse value than you thought for Americans, but it's really terrible value for Brits because £25 converts to $37.

I mean, yeah, of course it's a weird fit for Star Trek, but three films into the reboot universe I'm getting over that now. I guess that is exactly what they're saying, and I just found it unexpected. It seemed like they were trying to go another way with the second film, and while it didn't exactly pan out I didn't click play on that trailer expecting to see them not only utterly reverse their position but actually try to go further into comedy action territory. I'm not 100% against it, although I'm not certain I actually want Star Trek to be Guardians of the Galaxy or that Star Trek can be Guardians of the Galaxy, but I'm surprised. Putting qualms about the film aside for a moment, though, I'm not sure about the trailer as a trailer. It seems... incoherent? Perhaps because it's an announcement trailer and they want to put as many big ticket scenes in as possible without showing any hint of story, but it seemed to jump around all over the place with no clear theme or message.

What a tonally bizarre trailer.

Yeah I'm not crazy keen on it, but when someone I know wants to do a couple laps as a change of pace it doesn't bother me overmuch. At least thanks to the quest I now have a sparrow other than the starting model, so I move around maps a little quicker.

Definitely go to A&E. Do not go to a GP, because they'll just refer you to radiology and then you may or may not get transferred to A&E if they actually find something, but no matter what it becomes a bureaucratic mess.

Yeah if I could get Jeff and Drew on the Giant Beastcast I would be so pleased. I'm glad they got the entire crew together for this podcast and GOTY stuff. I'm genuinely excited to listen to the GOTY deliberations this year.

Are you guys all playing on PC now? I saw something on Steam this morning that said "preorder and play now" so... isn't that just pretty much buying the game?

I'm using controller because the way the grappling, wingsuit, etc. work seems like it'd be more difficult with m+k. As for performance, Korax, I'm getting some issues too. A couple of quick fixes I've heard are to get the latest game-ready driver from nVidia (if you have an nVidia card) and to start the game with Steam in offline mode. Apparently it's making a lot of calls to servers and it can be a bit problematic for performance. Additionally, this guide is good for figuring out which options have the biggest performance versus image quality impact.

Yeah I've played all of them, though I haven't finished DS2. I just killed the cleric lady boss this morning, which may have been a mistake because I apparently hadn't done an "optional" area called... something alley? I say "optional" because that seems to be the only place to get an item that lets you use powerups at the altar in Hunter's Dream. Anyway I still don't feel like I know where the hell I'm going or what I'm doing (perhaps because I played UP TO the lady cleric months ago on someone else's PS4, so I've forgotten the entirety of the first couple of areas) so if anyone wants to hook up with me and at least lead me through to the right areas, I'd definitely appreciate it.

How easy is it to play with people deliberately in this one? I wouldn't mind having some more experienced Thumbs to hang with as I make my way through the game for the first time.