Gwardinen

Yeah the textbooks I've had to buy for university have often set me back pretty substantially. More than one has been over £100, as Nappi mentioned, and that's even taking into account that they tend to be about half the price the university itself is attempting to charge me! All of this said, I think another thing worth taking note of is that Waterstones specifically does tend to just overprice things fairly heavily by comparison to other retailers. Especially ones that can afford to work with a similar distribution model to Amazon.

Damn youuuuu. I want into the SpyParty beta so hard.

I did a quick search in this forum and didn't find a reference to it, so forgive me if this has been brought up before; does anyone play League of Legends? It's a free online game from Riot Games, the creators of DotA Allstars, and unsurprisingly enough it's a DotA clone. What it also happens to be is a really fun DotA clone, and I'm enjoying it a lot right now playing with a small group of friends. I'm looking for excuses to play more matches to get more exp and IP so I can buy some sweet Champions (you can also buy shit with real money in microtransactions if you're so inclined), and I'd be much more into it playing with some Thumbs than the usual LoL community... as a lot of them are dicks, simply put. I'm not sure exactly what the cross-region situation is with this game, my experience is that the website is a bit fragmented but I don't know whether it causes any issues for actual games. Anyone interested? My LoL name is Gwardinen, feel free to shoot me a friends request if you sign up. Or if you feel particularly nice, I think following this link will put me as your referrer, which might get me some time with boosted IP if a few of you register: https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c9d159cabe20329040180

Not in a war setting, but yeah. Fisher does at least beat people up to get them to tell him things, if I remember rightly.

Yeah someone who has Dota 2 can buy an invite from the Dota 2 store for £25. Not sure how much it costs in other regions. Alternatively I believe you can still just sign up at the Dota 2 blog and may eventually get an invite. Theoretically the game will actually be "released" at some point too!

Me too! Although I didn't consider that until just now. Also, you are potentially a terrible person for thinking that.

Well there may or may not finally be an ending to Assassin's Creed at some point, but there have definitely not been any hints that Assassin's Creed III is going to be it. So if that's what you're waiting for, don't bother. I would be extremely surprised if that series were to end without the marketing making a big deal of it, and since not a word has been said in that direction and the game is only 5 months away, I suspect this is not the last planned AC game.

Due to replaying it a few times and the voice acting just being spectacular, there's a scene early on in the 2000ish game Sacrifice that really sticks with me. You are in the astral plane, listening to the gods bicker over the foretelling of a blind prophet. I remember both the prophecy and a little of what comes after. It goes on from there but those lines in particular stick in my head a dozen years later, and if I was a better imitator I could replicate the exact cadence and stresses of the voice acting. It is that clear in my brain.

I think Warlock's a great starting character. All his abilities excepting the slow are very obvious and easy to use, while still being very beneficial to the team. If Chris intends to play him more regularly, I would recommend to him that turning on unified unit controls in the options and then just holding ctrl when giving commands in order for the golem to follow them as well may be an easy (though obviously not always perfect) way to use it somewhat effectively.

If you happen to notice the saving indicator, yes. If I remember correctly it looks somewhat similar to YouTube's loading indicator, with thin slices of a circle being lit up in series.

Surely that's not real. It's a fan film, or something? Maybe, maybe a TV movie by a very small network which somehow managed to dodge the rights on the name a bit? Surely. Come on.

Yeah I agree that those endings kind of immediately flip over the table of slow buildup of remorse that might have been created by the rest of the game. Also the suggested dialogue in them is pretty out of place, it's kind of trying to be funny, and is also very contemporary, and in neither of the cases that included dialogue are the scenes actually funny or contemporary. Additionally the gimmick concepts in the first two ideas are probably bad choices, because 1) they will rely on technical aspects that probably won't work well (getting photos and shit to play nice is regularly completely out of the question, and trying to get a program to even auto-delete in the first place will be somewhat difficult in the age of UAC and so on, but even if you manage it it will barely slow down a player who really wants to replay the game) and 2) really are gimmicks - again undercutting any seriousness or profundity attempted with the game. Especially when someone uses a picture of their dick, as would inevitably happen. The basic idea is interesting though, and could work as a very short game. If you try to make this take several hours it is going to go from sad to irritating and boring very quickly, I suspect.

For my part I read it as the Dota 2 Witch Doctor every time.

If you're still looking for someone to buy things for you, I can do it. I presume toblix's icy heart eventually melted, though.

Trine 2 is £3/€3.24/$3.74 on Steam for the next two and a half hours. It has online physics based puzzle co-op and I just had someone buy it for me as an early birthday present. I hope some of you will buy it too so we can engage in said online physics based puzzle co-op hijinks together!

I disagree, the Penny Arcade and Ouya Kickstarter threads are already three pages long each, I don't think I'd prefer them being a six page long thread with constant bouncing between topics. Not to mention having them separate makes it much easier to see what's actually being spoken about from the new content summary screen. In terms of this game... the concept sounds fine but I'm very rarely thrilled by the end product in adventure games these days. I'm in love with the Walking Dead, and I found LA Noire much more enjoyable than most people, but other than that I don't remember an adventure game I've been particularly satisfied by in the last several years.

That's somewhat difficult to answer, I think, because we don't really know enough about the group and sexual dynamics of our most recent ancestors. More distant relations such as currently existing ape species aren't much help because they show a fair amount of variety in those cases. In terms of basic "dominance", though, I think most primates do have a male dominance structure. This is probably for the simple reason that most primates have quite a lot of struggles with others of their species over territory and with other species for safety, and in most (all?) primate species, males are more physically dangerous. That said, if you consider misogyny to be characterised by groups of men subjugating groups of women, that's definitely not a general ape trait. In most ape species, members of the same gender are not allies. Males compete amongst each other for females and females compete amongst each other for males. Unless directly related, members of the same gender in a group of apes usually have pretty weak social interactions with each other, and are sometimes outright aggressive. Interestingly the difference really comes when there are no females around at all, at which point male gorillas, for example, suddenly become friendly to each other. Anyway, kinda wandering off topic at the end there but basically I think misogyny is probably too complex a behaviour to really call a holdover from some previous stage of evolution, but with more evidence there could potentially be a line drawn from male-centric social structures among primates to male-centric social structures among humans. Hopefully this actually helps us, as changing needs in society should make different qualities valuable - we can already see changing social attitudes to physical strength, as it is now rarely a key to success in the modern world. Since that is one of the chief differences that may have resulted in male-centric social structures among our forebears, perhaps that means that feminism will automatically become more and more obviously sensible. However, it is worth noting that people are still impressed by muscles and men are still conditioned to believe that being physically strong is not just something they are likely to be in relation to women, but actually a kind of duty. So these things move slowly and may never be complete.

The charts that show how heroes perform with and against others are definitely interesting, but most of your criticisms aren't relevant to how I want to use the stats. The stats are "based on public matchmaking"; true, so is my play of Dota 2. Since there are no ratings I "can't weed out the low tier games"; true, but then again I play low tier games. The stats are "worthless outside of stating facts we already know about how the average dota player plays"? Well... that might be true, except that I didn't know Treant wins most of his games, and according to these stats the average Dota player doesn't even really play that character. Also, at this point, I probably am the average Dota player, so again these stats are pretty relevant to me since I don't really subscribe to the idea that "we already know" everything about the average players from anecdotal memories with no formal analysis. The match length versus win rate graphs are totally fascinating though. The ones that either veer upwards or downwards sharply at a sudden point are brilliant, though I can't say I'm surprised Beastmaster's win rate goes through the floor. I honestly can't figure out what he's useful for in most games, which makes the fact that he actually seems semi-popular at the competitive tournament level a very interesting indication of how different that metagame is. Something else worth noting is Axe's win rate actually shows a steady upwards climb with game length, which directly contradicts some of our impressions in this thread of his usefulness late game. Curious as to how that's come to be.

According to this Dota 2 stats aggregating site, Treant Protector has the highest win rate of any character in public matchmaking, and yet has been played in less than a third as many matches as the next highest character. Why does no one love Treant when he is clearly so good? Edit: I do note that Treant has not been out as long as some of the other characters near the top, but even if you switch to "last 3 days" he still has far fewer games than many of them.

Seems like we don't actually have a thread for Civ V multiplayer, and since the Gods & Kings expansion has just come out and I'm seeing a fair few people playing, I thought we might want one. I'm certainly up for some multiplayer games, and as usual I'm Gwardinen on Steam. If there's interest, should we try to set a time since it's kind of a lengthy process?

God I hope so.

I see what you're saying, but luckily I think the stats screen actually misrepresents that a little bit. It's my understanding from various comments made about how the Walking Dead tools work, and the more complete stats video that was released after episode one, that more or less everything you say or choose is saved - so even choices the designers/writers didn't think much of at the time could potentially be used in later episodes.

I read most in bed, when other devices are already switched off and other people are already asleep. Really, though, it mostly comes down to just actually deciding you're going to read or watch a film and just doing it for the full duration you planned. I say that as someone without a family, though, so for the most part the distractions that might cause me problems are under my own control. I don't know what you can do regarding your wife and kids other than committing to being a terribly neglectful husband and father - have you considered that?

Damn public, always inferring that my words and actions are indicative of my views and beliefs. Lay off the chimps, though. Chimps are neat. Although not as neat as capuchin monkeys. I swear I could watch videos of capuchin monkeys every day.