CaptainFish

I wasn't going to comment on it explicitly, but yeah this is pretty dire. pun intended

Disregarding this, uh, stuff. '~' Purge is a decent resource with his Purge Plays videos. Honestly, how he plays his heroes is usually too greedy, he is rarely contested in his lanes and rarely plays a proper support. He does however give good examples of mistakes and items to get, and his general attitude is pretty much perfect in terms of how to conduct yourself.

Great cast so far. Laughed hard at Brad's "I love that guy" with respect to Lifestealer. That bloody grotesque monster of a man: he's a good guy! The design talk was interesting too. I was really glad to hear the design talked about from an audience perspective. Yes, from a mainstream perspective it's very punishing, but that's just because it feels like it's designed to punish errors very strongly. It's a hard discussion to have, games are supposed to be played and thus playable to some extent, but I appreciated the statement not just being "this is bad design, period." Hmm, the item hotkey thing I talked about in the last thread came up, I'm honestly a bit surprised Nick uses default hotkeys, and that probably explains some of his lack of ability in that arena. Edit: Oops, listened ahead a little more, those are definitely mapped to the number pad by default, at least they used to be. Maybe they've been changed.

I spent the entirety of my WC3 "career" matchmaking with friends in a cyber cafe and getting reamed over and over by better players.

Uh, a bit late to say this, but great cast. Just wanted to say, I imagined an adverboss for Ace Patrol coming down killing all your units, taking off his mask to reveal a cutesy xcom alien before saying "XCOM. Is premium game, it vill command premium price" in Chris Remo's russian voice, and flying away.

I tried LoL before I tried Dota 2, and all that outside the game stuff turned me off hard. Then I played Dota 2 and it was like, "Oh I just pick a hero without getting my mind destroyed by tactical possiblities before I even know what I'm doing. I can do that." Having all the heroes available helped a lot too. That's pretty much all I have to say on the topic though. It always seems so weird when I see people delve into the differences of these games. I'll hear stuff about Dota that is just flat out incorrect, so I imagine the same thing is happening on the other side. Real talk: you only have so much time to play these games, and you're gonna like one more than the others just out of preferences. I remember when PC gamer, I think, did a pretty uninformed comparison. They said stuff like denying is stupid. For me it's a nuance of the game that means that you can exercise more skill to get more out of your lane, while requiring you to still pay attention to position and map awareness. I will totally buy the argument that it's just another way to lose a lane that isn't harassment/kill based, so it's less interesting. But honestly I think most people make up their choice to play on the character selection and the art style. I guess it's just hard for me to separate the more objective game design arguments from the personal investment and personal style preferences.

These patch notes are crazy! Hope we get some talk about these, even just for heroes you guys use a lot. I think AA aghs ulti is amazing, but a lot of it is great! Edit: I missed the e-mail for questions, what is it again?

This podcast is awesome not only because it's about Dota, which is amazing, but also because it's got twice as much Nick Breckon as a proportion as the full cast. I feel like this requires charts and graphs. Oh, in terms of actual Dota content, specifically regarding Nick's comments on Blink Tinker, if anyone is playing they should definitely change from the default hotkeys for items. You don't really need the full 6 under your hand, but get at least 3 or 4 you can reach easily. Use a couple side mouse buttons, space bar or number keys you aren't likely to use for groups. Being able to use an item well can really help your team. Good use of phase boots for positioning, or support force staff can really help and give you a lot more utility. I'm honestly a bit shocked the default item hotkeys are so bad, they discourage using items early because of how awkward they are. Maybe it's not a good idea for new people to jump into having 6 different slots to micro on top of your skills, but even drilling in the idea of using one item while doing everything else is an important hurdle, in my opinion.

Yeah, Dota talk! Was hoping for a little talk about the International Quals and Compendium, but I'll settle for any.

Just made those cookies, quite nice. I'm a little iffy on the sugar coating, but the brown butter base makes for a delicious dessert dish.

You get tired of your dad's lame jokes and leave the room. You receive a text: "No lols for Dad?"

I have to give my condolences to Nick and Sean (correct order) for the game ending with cheating. I played only one game of Neptune's Pride with friends, and It was shitty just dealing with the interpersonal nonsense without bringing in anything as underhanded as that. I mean we're already talking about a game that is about forming alliances and breaking them as soon as you have an advantage, it seems unnecessary to go beyond that to pull in players that are basically understood to be completely neutral by the game systems themselves (which is what I believe going AFK does, at least in NP 1).

Wow, one of the best outros to an Idle Thumbs ever! Brilliant to just let it end instead of riffing on it. Inspired.

And as the bees envelop you, the last thing you hear is him saying "games" before walking away.

I guess that's preferable to him walking up to your door perfectly calm.

Or woman! C'mon Video Games, be more inclusive!

Games?

Still slogging through this game on expert. Got to a part where the melee is basically required, and the QTEs are not only really difficult to time, but sometimes they don't respond. I think my main problem with dealing with guard laden stealth sections is the total lack of options. The only thing that seems to work consistently is throwing an item to make noise, and then killing/subduing that person when he goes to check it out. And that becomes downright impossible to do with the number of guards in some points. I also wish it had saves, having to clear out the top floor that I can do every single time only to die on the actual tough part is just annoying. I really enjoyed the return to Chinatown triple assassination. Really great location and ideas there. The club assassination was pretty good as well. However, the way this game is balanced gameplay-wise I honestly don't understand how you could call it a generally positive experience.

Just started playing this the other day after getting it on sale. I'm a big fan of the Hitman series, so I assumed I'd like it. However, after the decent tutorial and super fun Chinatown mission, I've found myself in an unfun mushy stealth game, in which you play a man who isn't a hitman any more... Hitman is at it's best when there are free areas and restricted areas, they connect in a large non-linear fashion, and you can explore them to find the fun ways to complete your target. The Chinatown mission accomplished that, but now I'm going to a club and hiding from cops!? Why aren't they leveraging the advantages of the formula, allowing me to go to really distinct looking locations to do fun murders before walking out with my suit and silverballers? I was all psyched to play a new Hitman. I even started on expert, but all that seems to mean is that there are more guards in these terrible sections. I like the improvements to the system, with various soft failstates rather than going from undetected to being murdered by everyone on the map, but so far they haven't been used to do anything that I'd want to do in a Hitman game. Probably gonna lower the game to normal and just playthrough on that, outside of the assassinations, which I imagine are coming up at some point...

Finally beat this after putting it down last October slightly before unlocking . Seems like I stopped before an awesome part of the game because all those abilities are a ton of fun, and give you really nice surefire options for dealing with threats, and disrupting enemies. Great stuff. The ending is super weird though. I never tried out the SHIV, and I'm sort of tempted to go back and try to get that earlier to try it out, but I honestly enjoyed the game a bit more near the middle and end, where it feels like you aren't so stacked against. It was also interesting seeing some of the modifiers they allow you to switch on for new games after a clear. Some of them really harken back to old X-Com (rookies having random stats, and gaining random stats on level up, for example).

Jake Podcast? Mega McCheese? I do really enjoy achievements in multiplayer games that act almost as extra stat tracking. Especially valve achievements. Tracking how far away you tongue lassoed a survivor or dinging when you get bunch of kills while ubered as a scout is really awesome, and does that great game thing of rewarding the player for specific play, making you feel like the designers know you did something awesome. It's part of why I lament some stat tracking stuff being tied to random crate drops :\. I think it would be awesome to know, for example, how many times I've used Shallow Grave to save a dota hero from death, but I'll never bother interfacing with trading or crates to get that one stat tracked. I also enjoy exploring all the achievements in a small game I'm already enjoying interacting with, just to prolong the experience. Early examples include stuff like Trine, where I was ecstatic to try everything in the game and mess around with the physics. Of course, they then added in weird seasonal achievements so I probably don't have the 100% that I was kind of happy I got. A recent example is The Cave, which I also got all the achievements in, mostly on my enjoyment of the tone of the writing, and only slightly because of wanting to mess around with different abilities in different spots. If Papers Please released with a bunch of achievements that were just alternate ways to mess with the systems, I'd probably do all of them too, after doing a playthrough on my own. As for the whole looking at everything in a space question, I find it's not even limited to rummaging through stuff for loot. Jake mentioned "look at" commands, and I always use those on everything in a point and click or text adventure. Even in a game like Runaway, where I didn't enjoy anything the protagonist had to say, I would still look at things I could probably just pick up and know how to use. There's rarely any reason not to experience all the content in a game space. Even in survival horror games where there are motivations to avoid lingering, there's almost greater pressure to find everything in a space before running away, for fear of having to return later with less resources.

Yeah, I was super confused... Glad to have Nick back on the cast though! And congrats on the new Telltale position!

I really wish he knew about Tokyo Crash Mobs, because it is a truly ridiculous Zuma Puzz Loop clone spiritual successor.

It's weird, the last tomb raider reboot series dealt with Lara coming to grips with having to kill people as well in Anniversary, I believe. But you only kill one or a couple humans (I forget exactly how many). The rest was just animal murder and exploring large intricate spaces, the human encounters were confined to boss like encounters which I think were quick time laden. Sorry, I don't have a more accurate recollection of those games, it's been a while, and that stuff wasn't what stuck with me. I actually enjoyed that last trilogy of games quite a bit, especially where you are puzzling out large areas using freeform platforming rather than the sort of obvious platforming of more recent games like Prince of Persia, Uncharted or the Assassin's Creed puzzle areas. I only remember this because at one point Jake said Zumar, which still makes me laugh.

Well if you use the time traveler you bypass the key, but you still need the knight down there to distract, but the monk can just telekinesis the key and then telekinesis the treasure all on his own.