Jordan A

We played a -lot- of Quake at school in 2000 or so, big sprawling games that ran as long as possible. We had people connecting from all over the campus, from the computer labs, the library, computers in classrooms. You'd have people of all year levels jumping in and out of these games. Because everyone was so dispersed across the school physically and also in terms of age there was a big element of "whoa, that person's doing really well, who are they and where are they sitting?" Once that happened and it turned out the person dominating everybody else was the school's psychologist/careers counselor. It turned out that guy also played a lot of Counterstrike in his free time, which was probably the coolest thing you can learn about an adult when you're almost 14. It was revelatory, that this 28 year old man was in there mixing it up with the kids in a Quake deathmatch. Which is weird to me, looking back on it, because I'm 28 now and I work in a school. It's fun to watch a 15 year old's face light up when I tell them yes, I have played World of Warcraft since Molten Core.

This is a sort of a hard game to talk about because of the non-linear nature, right? Like, where do you start? I watched about 75% of the clips last night before I had to put it down and go to bed, but there's no guarantee that someone else who's also watched a similar percentage of the videos has the same information as me. Depending on what rabbit holes they went down with the search terms and what assumptions they made about what might yield new information, they might not have the same context for things. Really cool game. I would definitely recommend it.

I wanted to comment on the use of the phrase "bubble hearth" in Life is Strange - Max doesn't just say that apropos of nothing like it's a bit of cool teen slang, in that scene she's talking to another character (Warren) on the phone. We can't hear his half of the conversation, but Max is like "Warren, we need your help" and Warren must say something to the effect of "I'm busy playing Warcraft" to which Max replies "Oh you'll be fine, just bubble hearth." So like, in that context I don't think it's super weird. It's still a phrase that'll be pretty badly dated when nobody remembers paladins could do that, but it doesn't just come out of nowhere. Spaff bringing that up led to a nice bit of discussion about what you can get away with when you're referencing other things in the same medium though, so that was good.

The guitar guy from Mad Max is the Coma-Doof Warrior. "Doof doof" is Australian slang for heavily bass driven electronic music. "Doof" in this case rhymes with "woof" (like a dog) not "goof" (like a silly person.)

Underneath your inventory you should have a row of boxes that function like a quickbar, I think you need to drag your gun into that before you can draw it.

Don't fix it.

Regarding the "you suck" sign: "Why would they come to our concert just to boo us?"

This is a game in which I was quite happy to turn off iron-man and just do manual saves. I won't save-scum through story stuff, but I'll manually save and reload to prevent myself being killed in zee combat. I think after enough repetitions the early game stuff becomes a bit tedious (especially because it's heavily story-based, whereas with something like XCOM which is more mechanics-focused I'm happy to do iron man games) and I decided to just keep going without the stress of losing all my progress.

Whoa, cool. I'd not seen this before. You know how sometimes you see a robot walking and you can sorta see it trying to process where it puts its feet? This thing just walks, which is very scary.

Chris was doing some delightful laughter this week. Ha-haaaa!

I was trying to describe this to some friends last night and I started off pretty well with "London fell into the ground" and "it has a boat" but then I got into the weeds rambling about "collecting colours" and "memory honey." I don't know if I sold it to them or not. I certainly wanted to go home and play it though.

I wonder if this could be seen as a way to encourage people who are new to the Lucasarts style of adventure game to explore the game more fully? I know from experience that in a game like Grim that exhausting every dialogue, using-everything-on-everything and trying-to-pick-everything-up leads to interesting or funny interactions, but someone who's new to that sort of game might not. I mean, maybe not, maybe they are just meaningless.

The cut section in year 4 with Manny's brother sounded pretty interesting and probably bittersweet, but I think the game's better without it. It's a real cruel irony that Manny says he's got nothing to go home to in the Land of the Living but he has to go there for work every single day anyway.

I like the rewind mechanic a lot, actually. With Telltale's games, your dialog choices do branch you (super) briefly down a different path, even if they don't have much of an effect on the outcome of the narrative, but it's usually not worth playing the whole episode again just to see those other tiny choices. With Life is Strange, though, you can just... go back five seconds and see the other option. It's great, for convenience. You can see the immediate effect of all the choices in one play-through. I really like this game and I'm very keen to see where it goes over five episodes. Episode one narrative discussion in spoiler:

I'm very much enjoying playing through this again both as an adult and also remembering (mostly) how to solve all the puzzles - I'm picking up a lot of the clues in the dialogue that I either just didn't get, or that are just more apparent in the context of the solution. Some of them are really clever or funny, too. Year 2 spoiler:

Here's my solution to the level with the TVs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t96VzHVVgLk

Yeah, I can see why you'd be understandably frustrated. I personally love patch notes and keep an eye on which games Steam is updating (particularly for early access) so I can dive in and see if there are any changes. In fact, it's more annoying for me to have a game update and not have the patch notes readily available.

They changed the way rotator blocks work, which I think involved changing the layout of one of the puzzles. If you finish the first level that introduces the rotator blocks, everything else you've done should unlock again.

I liked Spacechem a lot, but I always found it a little abstract (especially because I don't know a lot of chemistry) but Infinifactory is great. There's something extremely satisfying about running what you've built and having it spit out an actual object - oh cool, I've made a giant TV! Or like, cool, I've replaced the broken engines on this shuttle! Even the messiest factory is super fun to watch as it turns blocks into objects. Yes, it'll make you feel dumb (and it makes me feel very stupid, sometimes) but the payoff is once you iron out the kinks in your factory it'll make you feel super smart.

I bought this the other day and I'm yet to try it online (only really played it vs. the AI which is pretty rudimentary at this point) but I agree. Matches are short, and it has a really interesting bluffing element that I think would be great with a group of people who weren't strangers.

I'd suggest Save the Date.

I've only just started playing Shadow Warrior today and admittedly I've only played a little over an hour of it, so I don't know if it's gross in the same ways the original game was. It's certainly a bit gross in the same way that a game from the 2010's can be.

I realize that. I shouldn't have used the word "ban," I suppose that wasn't terribly clear.

I guess I was really just Devil's advocating myself, you know? Probably needlessly. I've thought about it and I don't think I'd lose a second of sleep if Hatred were not to be sold on Steam.

I'm not really sure how to process this. Like, on one hand, I really strongly object to the game, and the response from those Steam threads is disgusting. On the other hand, I guess if you ban this one game, where then do you draw the line, who gets to decide where that line is drawn, etc. But on the other hand (back to the first hand, I guess), woof.