Gwardinen

Yeah I'm seeing a couple strong, dedicated pushers on a team win more and more games recently. It's funny how reading those lists of pushers I was often thinking "huh, but they don't have any strong attacks..." - it's taking me some time to mentally transition from the League of Legends thinking that very few abilities actually work on towers. The idea that Leshrac's AoE would hit towers didn't even occur to me until Twig said it.

Just want to second both the core Sandman series of comics by Neil Gaiman and Kingdom Come. The Sandman comics literally got me into comics, and Kingdom Come may be the best mainstream superhero story I've ever read. As for other stuff, I thoroughly recommend both Ex Machina and Y - The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn. The first is the story of a guy who gets the power to control technology, but also becomes the Mayor of New York City, and it balances the two in really interesting ways. The latter is about the last man alive on earth after pretty much everything else on the planet with a Y chromosome suddenly dies, and contains some really interesting characters. If you're looking for something short but worthwhile at any point I thoroughly recommend WE3 - it's only three issues long but affected me profoundly after reading it. Anything I said about it would lessen its impact, though.

Holy crap, some of those lines are so familiar to me they practically triggered sense memories! I had completely forgotten until just now that Civ II had FMV advisors. Also, Elvis being the cultural advisor is still kinda funny.

I've downloaded it. My GameCenter username should be Gwardinen, as usual. I attempted to start 2v2 games with both of you but I don't know how successful it was.

Not necessarily! That's uh... that's pretty much my contribution right now. It is also mostly non-serious as that is a Cracked article and I haven't chased down the sources myself to see if they're even reliable.

Ah, yeah, of course. For some reason I forgot Egypt was in the game for a moment. Yeah, that's probably the one with the most thoroughly traceable history that far back.

Yeah, although to actually get the American experience you'd have to suddenly get a large nation with plentiful resources built for you at the beginning of the industrial era with a little over 200 years left to go. I'm not exactly arguing that you should be forced to play civilisations that actually existed at 4000BC (not least because information on that time is so scarce) and then "evolve" into later ones, or something, but it is interesting how earlier Civ games are so into the modern American concept of superpowers that they retroactively apply them to the span of human civilisation. Are there even any "nations" as we would understand it that have existed unbroken for the last three or four thousand, let alone six thousand, years? China maybe? I'm not even sure about that.

That's interesting. I wonder if that's actually a reflection of the changing American (as I presume most of the Firaxis developers to be) view of their own country and what it means to be a superpower in the modern world.

Presumably the other end of the scale is GMT-8, for the American west coast. That means around 18:00GMT is probably the earliest realistic time.

Am I right in suggesting that this may be best done on the weekend? Does anyone have any objection to that, or suggestions for a good time? Since we're pretty international 'round here, I figure the weekend will allow us to have it be at a time at which North Americans have woken up and Europeans have not yet gone to sleep. If you're in Australia you should probably speak up now.

Brilliant.

Honestly even that doesn't necessarily require micromanagement per se, as you can queue commands. So if you just set up your targetting order at the start of the battle, things are often fine unless your opponent is doing weird juking stuff.

That's intriguing if true. I haven't heard that claim made before, can you provide/direct me to more information?

Yeah I've used OnLive's 30 minute trials of games more than once to quickly check if I'm interested. The demo that was up on the service of FTL a while back was also a great use of the system - it's a game that doesn't require particularly low latency and is graphically simple, so lag and video compression artifacts are both irrelevant. That said, graphically simple games aren't really what cloud gaming should be best for, since low end computers can probably run them anyway. The dream is that Battlefield 3-esque powerhouses could be run on cheap netbooks, and while OnLive and the like have shown they can allow you to play AAA games on that kind of hardware (or really, any hardware), those kinds of games tend to be ones that still benefit most from being rendered directly on the machine and having as little input latency as possible. So cloud gaming is in a weird place for me where what it is best at is what it is least useful for, as there aren't many computers out there that can't run Luxor (or FTL) directly.

I've enjoyed every Civ game since Civ II, and I really have no problem with V. I play it most now because of two simple factors; firstly, it is what most of my Civ-playing friends play, secondly, it has the best UI. By which I mean the most friendly, easy to use interface. It was touted a lot during development, but I really believe Firaxis did learn a lot about what to show and what not to show, and how to present a user interface, from making Civilization Revolution. User interfaces are actually my number one problem with trying to go back and play older games, not graphics or even weird options or technical problems. Maybe they just fit my tastes more, or perhaps I'm just so accustomed to them now, but I think user interfaces in games have improved vastly during the most recent console generation and they bug the hell out of me in older games now. My story is pretty short, it's not really about the narrative of the game so much as how it affected me afterwards. I occasionally play Civ V multiplayer with my friends, and in one of our early games I played as Germany. Having been born in Germany, and still being a German citizen, is always one of the first things people learn about me here in the UK since differences from the norm always get zeroed in on. A tie-in to this is that jokes within circles of friends often revolve around the established "known attributes" of the members of that circle. So when we're talking about one of the gay guys, the jokes are often vaguely referential towards that, or the fact that one of my friends had a full beard at 16 gets brought up a lot more than it probably really deserves, for example. So it also goes for me and being German. So obviously, cue lots of friendly jokes about me taking Germany in this game. Then it settles down as we're all getting further and further into it. However - since I'm playing Germany, a civilization with a marked lean towards military might, I'm playing a fairly warlike game. I begin to conquer city states and even absorb some of the smaller civilizations. Eventually I roll up to the borders of one of my friends. I begin to demand resources and gold from him in return for not attacking him. He appeases me. Eventually appeasement is not enough, and I begin a campaign of incredibly fast conquest by way of huge numbers of panzers followed by infantry waves. You may be beginning to see certain historical parallels. Unlike in history, however, my Germany goes on to conquer the entire world and win the game. It happens, right? Someone has to win. No reason to feel guilty, even if the way I bizarrely recreated the bad faith beginnings of World War II are a little uncomfortable for a moment. Sure, but then I really think about it. In Civilization, unlike most competitive multiplayer games, the field is genuinely not even. It's not chess, you don't have symmetrical abilities. Even if you did, the very rules of the game effectively allow you to be playing different games. What I did is not a complete world away from full body tackling someone who is trying to hit a tennis ball. This actually brought to light one of the things I dislike about military victories in Civilization; they're consuming. Once one person goes completely military, everyone has to, or they will simply lose. You can't keep happily building culture buildings in your three city empire when there are twenty military units knocking on your door, much as you couldn't keep focusing on your slice if your opponent had people tackling you in tennis. This is also one of the problems of war in real life - when a country goes to war, many of its resources have to be diverted to the war effort, and those resources obviously are then not going to be spent on improving the lives of its domestic citizens. Yet, this is not just the tradeoff for the country starting the war - the country that has war declared upon it must spend as many or more resources to defend itself. War, like all forms of violence, is insidiously self-perpetuating if allowed to be. Anyway, not trying to preach a message of "no one should ever declare war in multiplayer Civ", but it has certainly made me choose to go military much less often since.

Haha, yeah. The secret nemesis of episode two! Definitely a great episode, this game continues to deliver. Really did not feel good about some of the choices I made, and the hurried shit-is-happening-and-all-your-options-are-bad framing keeps working for me.

Just want to note that it would take a lot of trust for me to stick my dick through a letterbox.

What exactly does CK2+ do?

Speaking of which, I'm downloading a 957MB patch for the Walking Dead on Steam right now. If this isn't episode two I'm going to cry.

Happy birthday toblix!

Video was put up of a bunch of the choice statistics, pretty interesting: I also just watched the fourth episode of "Playing Dead", which has Sean and Jake in again. It's older so some of you may have already seen it (though I don't think it's been linked in this thread at least): In it Sean mentions someone making a forum post to the effect of "I'm not going to save Carly, she knows!" - he then attributes it to SomethingAwful, but I wonder if he was actually thinking of this post by Tanu: Although that said I do seem to recall someone saying something more emphatically "SHE KNOOOWS" but I thought it was on a PC Gamer podcast or something. I dunno, maybe a number of people had that reaction. Supposedly the second episode drops for PC tomorrow, but only for North America? Does that mean my Steam just won't update or what? If so I might have to do some proxy jiggery-pokery, as I presume if I just get the game to update it will then run the episode fine once I switch back to a standard EU connection. If Telltale actually coded the game to continuously check region before allowing you to play a given episode I will be equal parts surprised, impressed and pissed off.

Thoroughly envious, Speedy. Good job taking advantage, though!

Yes! Holy shit, I had this game and loved it, briefly. My computer couldn't really run it and then I lost it and since then I've thought it probably wouldn't hold up too well anymore. But it was a great concept.