Gwardinen

Well I dunno how solidly implemented any community stuff is yet, but my username should be Gwardinen if anyone wants to add me (if that is even a thing yet).

Anyone still playing this? A friend of mine mentioned he fancied trying it so I think I'm going to give the beta a go.

ul4CZrnEFxU Hmm. Sort of interested in this film, but it does send kind of a weird message.

Yeah, the music when you're fighting the first boss is crazy, but then so is the fight. Looking back the fight itself leaves me a little cold, but the way it's presented makes up for it pretty well. It's certainly better than some of the other set piece fights I've run into so far.

Maybe I'm just a European asshole but this doesn't interest me at all. Americans often reference stuff about about their war of independence or their civil war, but it's totally meaningless to me. I don't know much about either and what I do know has never interested me. There are plenty of other sections of history that I also don't care about, the only reason this one feels weirder than those is because, like I said, it gets referenced all the time. A lot of popular media comes from the US and it often takes for granted that people understand and care about these two points in time. That said, I still haven't finished Revelations and I'm already feeling sort of burned out on Assassin's Creed so maybe my patience for the series is just running out.

By the by, is there still no other way into the game than just having been signed up for the beta and waiting?

I just read the last issue today. Pretty short series, but I enjoyed it. Vaguely considering starting to read the Authority due to the tie-ins, but I saw the first couple of issues a while back and wasn't too thrilled.

Ho-ly shit. Awesome. I've missed Sim City. Also, it looks from a quick glance like they might be going down the eco/industry choice route that Anno 2070 did, but perhaps they might make it matter or be in some other way more interesting.

I actually stopped watching the video because it made me sad and a little uncomfortable. I often ask myself whether that's the right thing to do though. I wonder if I should subject myself to things I find unpleasant to try to understand them better. Anyway, yeah, important things have already been said. Hopefully this being news and so on is one step closer to nobody feeling intimidated or unwelcome in the games industry and its spin-off communities and cultures. Edit: Actually I found something I had to share. The new Penny Arcade Report guy, Ben Kuchera, wrote a post about this which included reference to a comment from the Shoryuken forum: "The comments go and on, and very few make for enlightening reading. “I bet money that Miranda wouldn’t have been so offended if Aris was better looking, that is the sad part,” another member wrote, and I’m not even sure who to pity after reading that post: Aris, Pakozdi, or the person who decided that thought should be shared with the world." That's just... bizarre. Right? If I'm not nuts, that's the weirdest thought I've heard all day.

Feeling a bit better today because I finally figured out where Nachimir's avatar picture is from! Bwahahaha.

Yeah. It's especially useless right now because hard drives are sticking people's scores down. If you have a non-solid state hard drive at this point, your score is essentially capped, regardless of whether your CPU, GPU and memory are blazingly fast.

I've had a couple of false starts trying to watch Breaking Bad with other people, but every time I see these totally redacted posts with just "Oh my god, right!" in between it makes me really want to give up on other people and just watch it on my own.

Interesting stuff going on in your life, Miffy. As much as I'm sure it's sad to leave a job that you once loved, I hope moving on from it and distancing yourself from its fall can end up helping you overall. Speaking of distancing yourself from bad things and such, I have more things to complain about! Yay! This will mostly only make sense to those of you who were reading my posts about my adventures in love recently. After all the events of last episode, she seemed to start trying a little harder with me and things were looking at least a little bit up for a few weeks, but I was still gradually coming to the conclusion that nothing was really changing. Then, all of a sudden, she actually broke up with her boyfriend. He'd been lying and seeing that other girl of his again, and she caught them in bed on Valentine's day and so on and so forth. So she kicked him out (and apparently punched him in the face for good measure) and yadda yadda. Shitty that it went down that way, but at least it's some movement in the situation, right? You'd think, but no. Now, a couple weeks after that, I discover he's actually basically still saying there because "he has nowhere else to go". He's staying in the spare room, or at least so I'm told, but she didn't even really tell me this until I basically found out on my own and point blank asked her to start properly keeping me in the loop. When I eventually asked her what the situation was between them, she said she doesn't know. When I brought up how this just keeps reinforcing how I have no surety or security in the relationship or her feelings, she eventually got to the point where she was just saying "I want everyone to leave me alone, I don't want to talk to anyone". Great. I pretty much see things going this way, now; she doesn't figure out or deal with her situation. She slowly just lets him become her boyfriend again. He learns that even as he continues to lie and manipulate for the things he wants, the worst he gets is a temporary setback. As they get back together, I finally feel like I can't hang on anymore hoping for anything better, and let her go. Commence my soul trying to exit through my abdomen for a while. The exhausted tone of this post probably belies how much it bothers me and worries me right now. I am far from accepting of this situation, but what the fuck else can I do at this point? I don't think she's actually going to step up and make the choice to change her life, even though she theoretically already did, and I think attrition will end up with the same situation coming back. I don't think I can handle that. Also I'm getting more and more convinced that the constant worry, stress and disappointment created by this situation in confluence with how unhappy I have been about work and study over the last couple years is resulting in up and down bouts of various physical symptoms. I'm beginning to wonder if it's even physically healthy for me to subject myself to this anymore.

Yeah, now that you mention it those are exactly what they remind me of too. They remove all the coolest shit in the game (breaching random dudes and making them blow themselves up/attack their enemies and so on) and just make it about avoiding death for long enough to whittle the people down. The first agent fight, with the teleporting dude, was somewhat enjoyable just because of its speed and and craziness, but it got a bit boring and irritating towards the end. However, the soldiers with multiple layers of armour that you just have to pound your way through while trying not to die do not feel fun. I spend most of my time against them running in circles around cover in some kind of stupid child's "catch me" position until my health is up again, then I go slowmo, bust another clip into their face and repeat. It's not interesting at all. I do not look forward to the next inevitable crazy enemy type/agent fight.

As for carries, I'm encouraged to hear what you're saying. I definitely don't see hard carrying as much in LoL as you're implying, but when I do it depresses me. I was under the impression that Dota is much more built around making sure one person on your team becomes a carry, and if that's not the case I'm glad. Efficiency... eh, I dunno. I'm not really sure where I stand on what you're saying there. The idea of much more variable item builds interests me, but on the other hand the idea that in general you're going to get much less gold doesn't. My favourite games are those that are balanced by making everyone cool, a la TF2 for example. I don't particularly like the idea that I would ever feel like I just don't have enough gold to get the things I want, and it clashes with what was said earlier about everyone in the game being lethal. Actually my greater issue with "efficiency" will probably just be the UI and that kind of stuff. I just listened to the Thumbs Dota progresscast last night, and there were some good points made about how weird it is to have so much stuff in the game still be based around the daft workarounds that the original mod had to use because it was in an engine not designed for what it was doing. The fact that Famous spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to use the mule (and the videos I've seen about it are fucking confusing too) is kind of an indictment all on its own. Hopefully Valve's plans for the learning/teaching aspects of the game will pan out.

I played a little of Splatterhouse and didn't enjoy it. I didn't play enough to give you a really thorough opinion, but I'd just say that you should research it a bit first - if I had bought it on a whim I'd have been disappointed.

Unless he's gone to some interesting lengths, that ain't toblix. I believe it to be a picture of a guy who shares a name with miffy, though I don't think it actually is miffy.

That's not really the argument I'm making about denial. I mean, yeah, if you think about it it is a little weird but there's plenty of stuff about Dota-inspired games that is weird - why is it only the last person to hit something that gets gold anyway? It ends up being easier if you just think of the game as a series of abstractions to lend themselves to a sport environment. LoL actually makes this a little easier since its lore is basically that it is a sport that determines political disputes. The idea of that being how the real world is run still amuses me, but doesn't seem totally unrealistic some days. My issue with denial is just that I don't enjoy it. There's no grand design critique here, I just don't find it interesting. I only just about find last hitting acceptable as a mechanic to keep me engaged while manoeuvring to fight enemy champions, throwing denial in just swings it a little into the "I don't really want to be performing this action" zone. That picking cold war thing sounds like a nightmare to me and will probably mean I won't play the beta, even if I get an invite. I've already pretty much given up on draft pick for LoL, as it tends to constrain the champions that are picked and just generally lead to even less variation in the metagame. Blind pick does end up with you just getting stomped by a better team composition you never had a chance to see sometimes, but at least there's the occasional weird set of champions that ends up being entertaining. As for LoL and carries, I said in my post that it happens sometimes, but outside of the top tiers it is only sometimes. Again, while I acknowledge the flaws in LoL, I don't really want to go from there sometimes being a situation that bothers me to that situation being a codified part of the metagame. That's kind of the opposite direction. As I write this post I think more and more that what I probably want is something that is more a game than a sport. The professional level of these products is something that, in the end, only holds occasional appeal for me. I want it to be both interesting and entertaining for me and my friends on our mid tier level, and I want there to be variation and not-entirely-efficient shit going on. I already get disappointed in those desires in LoL a fair amount of the time, meanwhile it kinda seems like Dota is built around the opposite. That's fine, but I've probably just talked myself out of it as being a game for me.

I swing back and forth on whether I want to play Dota 2 constantly. I don't have an invite, as far as I know, so it's pretty much a moot point either way but I still think about it. There are things I like the sound of, such as the greater reward because of more skill involvement. But there are also a lot of things I don't really like the sound of. I don't like the denial mechanic flat out. The idea that your characters are so very prescribed by what the other team is doing also troubles me - LoL has already become a place where picking champions that aren't high in the current metagame is viewed as stupid, if not outright aggressive to your own team... I don't really want to go somewhere that's pushing that attitude even further. Additionally, while a more cautious playstyle probably wouldn't be a problem for me (I'm one of the most cautious of my friends that play LoL and consistently have the least deaths among them), I don't know if I consider it a better design philosophy overall. I quite like seeing other people do crazy, reckless shit and have it pay off, even if I don't often do it myself. Finally, one of the things that I've heard about Dota that worries me the most is that the word "carry" actually has real weight. It sort of does in LoL, and you generally need to have at least one serious AP damage dealer and one serious AD damage dealer, but the majority of games do not end up with one person being an absolute teamkiller. You will often get team strength weighted towards one or two individuals, but it's rare that someone actually "carries" a game, at least until you get to the professional level. I don't really want to go to Dota and find that, unless I'm playing a specific kind of character, my job is mostly to feed someone else on my team and hope they take us to victory. Please correct any inaccurate assumptions, as I genuinely want to be optimistic about the game.

My favourite bit of bizarre European xenophobia probably doesn't even qualify as such as it's in-country. Apparently the populations of vast swathes of France all hate the Parisians. Basically anywhere you go outside of Paris, the other French people hate anyone from there. I've actually seen French people spit on the ground in a car park after seeing a Parisian number plate!

She can't get enough of the rape jokes, huh? I'm sorry I couldn't resist.

Everyone in Germany that I know hates the Dutch for driving across the country in caravans every year. I find it hilarious, like the Dutch are secretly a migratory bird species.

Holy shit. That's totally bizarre. As a German speaker who has some French as well my brain just nearly exploded. You're totally right.

I do not know what this is, and I sort of want to.

Something similar happened to me a couple of months ago. The points were used to buy packs of something to do with FIFA 12. I believe they're some sort of freely transferrable resource, which makes them one of the few worthwhile things to scam people out of on Xbox Live.