BFrank

That's pretty much true, but the big secret is that it was pretty much true of the Wii as well. It's just that it comes with a twin stick style controller (the tablet) in the box now. Also, since it came up in the cast: the wheel in Mario Kart is awesome, and I regularly get beat by people in MK8 who use it. Giving yourself the ability to turn using your large muscles instead of your small ones (shoulders vs thumbs) is worth trying if you haven't yet, especially in a game with familiar mechanics and physics.

Even after it's dismantled (partly? entirely?), it's still impossible to know who had merit and who had advantages. I think it's a footing we'll all move away from eventually. The world is too big with too many people to really believe that any one of us deserves what we get in life. I'd rather see lots of viewpoints/backgrounds represented at the top of every field instead of a narrowly defined 'best and brightest'.

It's just in the air. The militarization of police is a big topic, and this game (from the name and pedigree) naturally invites people to make connections. That said, it wouldn't stop me from enjoying it. They didn't make a game about SWAT teams with no-knock warrants shooting your dog and throwing a flash bang into your baby's crib. It's all just movie violence from what I've seen.

As soon as I heard that Hyrule Warriors could be played 2 players, one on the TV and one on the tablet, I was kinda sold. The Zelda wrapper over it isn't a big deal, but I'm not mad at them for making a Dynasty Warrior game where you aren't killing 30 human beings every second. Replacing dudes with monsters seems like a solid choice for a button mashy game that kids might like.

The problem is, in creating a way to opt out of miserable games, you up the percentage of miserable games for people to opt out of. 'Surrender' works out better for the people who are playing 5-6 games a night, but for someone like me who wants to commit to a single full game (win or lose), every abandon/surrender is the worst possible outcome. Much worse than getting creamed but everyone hangs around and tries anyway. I'm kinda convinced that making a 'I want a surrender option' matchmaking queue would result in games that look a whole lot like low priority queue games.

I was kinda glad about Other M, which seemed to restore the balance of adventure/action to the original ratios. Bad cutscenes, though, for people who care about that stuff.

I think of Prime as the first and last game where I enjoyed the 'turn on scan vision' mode.

When I switched from LoL to Dota2, the lack of a surrender option was definitely part of my thinking. In my experience, it wasted more of my time than it saved and encouraged people to bail out of games with matchups they didn't approve of.

The thing that makes me scratch my head is when people start talking about new processing power being used for 'better AI'. That seems like a design problem you could solve today, not a tech problem that we're waiting on better hardware for. Great show!

I guess I took the huge sales number and ongoing multiplayer community as some evidence that MKWii did a bunch of stuff right. The DS Kart was not balanced well for online multiplayer, and DD (while great in local) probably wouldn't have held up. So, to me, MKWii is the first entry where the online really worked. Plus, I loved the wheel, especially after a couple of drinks.

Which is crazy, it was one of the best online console games of last gen. Chris Kohler kinda shouted about it and gave people the impression that his POV was universal.

I thought the writing in FC2 and 3 was really great and self-aware on all of these subjects. It's always been a decidedly euro POV (it's got some of that post-colonial Tin Tin style adventure story theme going on), but always complicated enough that you couldn't really accuse Ubi of working racist tropes unambiguously. Or, at least, I couldn't. I assume that people are making projections about how 4 will turn out based on their feelings about the last 2. I put them in the 'brave for engaging with this stuff, and at worst a little corny' category, personally.

I think I watched too much Laugh In growing up. I get a little thrill out of referential humor and nonsensical catchphrases from an earlier era. Sometimes a thing being dated and a little impenetrable is a sign that it's distinctive and worth figuring out.

With 2 generations in a row of the big publishers pretty much ignoring every kind of input device other than controllers and sometimes KB/M, I think we're in a weird spot. The publishers don't make enough money to do anything but play it safe, so they're opting out of every kind of innovation other than 'graphical' and sometimes 'weird new pricing model'. I suspect that indies and a new breed of mid-tier developer are going to come along and do for motion controls, music games, and VR what the big publishers can't. If you guys happened to hear Jeff Gerstman on the bombcast this week talking about the state of AAA development and the new consoles, I think we're in for a very long generation.

This makes me sad, because it's pretty much the #1 reason why I'm still in love with Nintendo games. Story isn't at all antithetical to good gameplay, but taking the lightest possible touch approach when making mechanics-driven games is still (in my opinion) the best way to go. Basically, he's been pushing back against a trend and it's given the work a distinctive quality. I'd hate to see them lose that.

That's still true, and the default melee weapons are still kinda the best too. Most people don't use them enough to notice, but the standard weapons have a really high rate of critical hits, which tend to one-shot people and end the encounter. Valve did a great job of spreading out the abilities of the classes through the alternate weapons without having those classes overlap much and lose their distinctiveness. I can't think of any other multiplayer game that's been quite so well-balanced with so many different options. It's pretty amazing, IMO.

Really great episode!

There's a bunch of etiquette about Dota that's still shaking out as it hits the bigger audience (including people like me, who only pub). The old guard, who I assume came from Warcraft, seems to think it's totally OK to demand a certain loadout from you and then throw a temper tantrum when they don't get sufficient 'cooperation'. They're playing their game, and they want to play yours for you as well. Personally, I report people in pub matches who get too intrusive and rude, which happens all the time. There are definitely cool, flexible people who are willing to alter their gameplans to account for the quirks of their teammates. But it feels like neither 'side' has reached a tipping point. The whole thing is like a weird experiment in democracy, where some people try to shout down people who don't agree with them and others get practical and figure out how to get a win. But we're all stuck together for an hour, and that drives some players totally bonkers.

I get the same feeling about the extended universe as I do about Nintendo grudgingly saying 'fine, all the Zeldas connect, I guess? You guys seem to really want that to be true, so have at it.' Get it together, nerds, not everything needs to have continuity. Stop being weird!

I really liked Remo's answer in the email section to standardized features/controls in games. I don't mind genre games cribbing from each other, but the expectation from the audience that there are 'standards' that have to be adhered to is a little counterproductive. When people start thinking of controls as 'optimal' rather than 'interesting', you dump all the idiosyncrasy and creativity out of action games. I spent an absurd amount of time with the latest Kid Icarus game because it had weird controls. It's all about that tension between people who want to 'finish the story' and people who want to master something new. It's hard to please both crowds.

Civs with a high culture output are also going to passively generate some friendship with the city-states. Once you hit critical mass you'll be getting alliances without having to work hard or spend much, even from city-states that aren't in your neighborhood. City-states vote for the people they're allied with, and I think you need 10 votes total. It's a 'friendship' contest. If anyone gets 10 votes, it's game over.

On fundamental appeal: I had an English professor who loved to make the argument that art isn't as subjective as people tend to believe, that it tends to have a basic appeal that transcends language and culture, even if language and culture definitely tilt the reader/listener/viewer experience. In other words, art works because it's designed to communicate to people and people are more alike than not-alike. Which means there are fundamentals, there are relatively 'right' readings and 'less-right' readings of a text/show/game/piece. Which is why you can't just replace art criticism with anthropology, even if anthropology has some important stuff to say about art. This view also kinda wipes out the (IMO very cynical) idea that popular things are 'just marketing'. I'm willing to give Rowling (for instance) some credit and say 'you made a thing with fundamental appeal, and that made someone willing to spend marketing dollars getting it out to the public' rather than 'marketers shoved Harry Potter down our throats, we had no choice in the matter'. Great show!

If I were going to make a bet, it's that the 599 phone is not a permanent thing for most people. Prices are going to come down because smartphones already do most everything that people want them to. There's just been a huge premium on getting 'the best' in the last few years because you needed something high end to get basic web functionality. As more and more devices catch up to that, there's not much reason to keep chasing new tech.

That's totally not hyperbole and I'm not in low priority or anything. I'm always completely relieved when I have a quiet team. Maybe we just have different standards of acceptable chat behavior.

Does it really matter when I have to mute 1-2 people a game anyway? Everyone has the exact same game information available to them, there's not much need to communicate in pub games. And if you're playing with friends, that's a whole other issue.