Presence

I liked the lack of ingame sound. It provided a good alternative to the ambient noise websites I sometimes use when working. Just cherry keys clacking and Ross talking about stuff. Not quite as good as "Sitting in cafe next to a firepit with a light thunderstorm going on outside", but not bad.

I was rewatching the test drive 3 episode and I noticed that the music seems to be playing at normal speed even though you had it on a faster clock speed. Was I mishearing? Is that normal for cpu timed games?

That was really worth the wait. I do think you should have put the "Ed Wood" stuff at the beginning. There was a certain loss of...something, maybe optimism...as you start to get into how you hated the game, so I would have liked your thoughts on how someone must have poured their soul into it a little earlier. If that makes any sense.

You know, VR would probably be a great way to fish. Sonar isn't exactly elegant on a 2d screen, but vr would let one visualize the waters in 3d realtime. Plus it'd be dirt simple to make the hook trackable. On top of that you could skin the data any way you liked to make it more interesting. Lovecraftian deeps to pastel fairylands to minecraft water bricks. Yes, we at last live in an age where we can mine for fish.

Now me, I want the full 3.5 hours.

Septerra Core's setting is really quite good. The world shells all have strong theming and they do a good job with the mood. It's a shame beating the game is a grueling chore that results in a crap ending. Ross thinks he hates turn based combat. Play Septerra Core, and then you will know what it is to hate turn based combat. Avernum: Escape from the Pit's setting is somewhat interpretive since the graphics are incredibly basic. So some people might not count it as being a good setting. For me it was a real leviathan of a game to sink my teeth into, and it had all kinds of different areas to visit. I think it took me about 80 hours to 100% it. Admittedly it took longer since I was on the highest difficulty for the achievement. Plus I took an extra hour to kill every living person in the bandit town. Brutal Legend...I'm surprised no one's mentioned it. It's a flawed but good game and it really is like a journey through a bunch of 70's album covers.

I don't have a mic, how common is that and how significant is it for teamwork?

What are your criteria for good game footage?

You know, there isn't a hundred percent overlap between wanting to just jump in and shoot dudes and being a good for nothing CoD player.

This is a very good idea and I completely approve of the work you did.

Thank you for the thoughts. I don't plan on playing too much more aside from if Ross's vision comes though, but always nice to hear ideas. I'm pretty much only into engineer as of now. I'm not great at it, but it can contribute to most situations pretty well. I don't know what an average exp gain is per life, but I had a nice run of around 8500 doing suppressing turret fire on a fortress today. Then I was slain by an elf. I mean tank. I imagine that the opposition must have been totally uncoordinated for me to last that long, but it was interesting.

I've played a bit more and remain crap at this game, but I think I have a few thoughts as a newbie. I won't fact check, since this is about impressions from an actual novice. You'll have about....1500 certs to use before your progress basically stops around br 15. The common advice is to buy gear instead of weapons. I'm glad I got that advice, although if you love heavy assault or engineer you might want to think twice about it. Manning vehicle weapons can be superb exp sometimes, though sometimes I worry about taking the spot from a more competent gunner. As for the main classes: 1) Light assault. It's alright. You've got mobility, and that's 80% of not dying too much. I can't shoot, so it's not for me. 2) Heavy assault. Seems like garbage. I just can't hit with the default loadout. Unless I hold still which equals death. The base rocket launcher is insultingly bad. I get that it doesn't seek, but it drops, and it drops fast. That on top of the many hits to take out a slow vehicle. There's seeker launchers one can buy for around 1000 which I'd bet would be game changers. 3) Infiltrator. I hear you can do some amazing things with terminal hacking behind enemy lines, but as a sniper class it's the worst I've ever seen. Breath hold doesn't kick in for like a second, and only lasts for about two seconds. No prone position. Being cloaked and trying to fire doesn't drop the cloak and fire, it STOPS YOU FROM FIRING. Holding still equals being sniped yourself, so it's a high danger class. I understand the concept of balance, but this is balance through annoying mechanics. These futuristic snipers are inferior to a redneck with a scoped rifle and some leaves in his hat. You know you've done a shit job designing something when rednecks are the example to be admired and respected. 4) Engineer. I like engineer a lot, although the exp sucks. Between turrets and ammo boxes, conserving shots is a non issue. The three turret options are all pretty interesting. Even the starter one is good for racking up kills in certain situations. You will eat sniper shots, but at least it has some shielding. On top of that you can weld yourself to a maxes ass and still help out if you can't shoot well. A good class for all seasons, complete with sticky grenades. 5) Medic. Medic is decent. Very good exp during pitched battles with level 6 healing gun. Sometimes medic can get in the way and create very visible rocket targets though. Toggle crouch is your buddy.

I took another crack at the game and put about 10 hours into it. I got acceptable enough to function as a strictly healing medic and provide a net benefit to pitched battles. I would've been happy...I mean willing...to play once a month for a few hours. I guess that's unlikely with the recent update, which is doubly a shame since Ross obviously put a ton of work into his tutorial video. I've never played a less rewarding game, but I'd still have loved for this project to succeed.

I'll field this one. https://isthereanydeal.com/ It monitors game sales across lots of sites and keeps histories for bundles games have been in and "regular" sale price charts. You can look up games individually, or have it email you when games are in bundles, are on sale, are below a particular price, or only when a game is at its lowest price ever. It can sync with your steam or gog wishlist, or you can create a waitlist on the site manually. You're welcome.

I tried it out for an hour and couldn't figure out how to identify enemies before they killed me in 1-3 seconds of fire. I imagine that's a feature one is intended to learn to deal with, but it's one that won't see me playing the game, sorry.

I think there may be one he's spent half his life playing.

Ross, Diane Reitz once told me about a procedurally generated game she almost got published called Multiverse. It basically used a random number grid to produce infinite playspace, on the C64. She recently put up a detailed look at the game on her website, with lots of screenshots. You've GOT to take a look at it, it's right up your alley. I don't know if it would have been good or bad, but I do know it looks amazing. Also, she has GOT to get that prototype disk copied.

Thank you Daniel.

Absolutely fantastic episode. Basically perfect. Another Sierra musician who's released high quality versions of his soundtrack is Aubrey Hodges I did not like Rama II due to how stupidly it progresses.

Reitz is a misanthrope in the same way Bill Hicks and George Carlin were. She likes plenty of individuals, but has lost hope for the species. She's said that's her stance quite explicitly. I guess if one thinks that flavor of misanthropy is unforgivable, then fair enough, but if that's the case one should probably stop watching all stand up comedy, listening to music, reading books, playing video games...

That was really good.

Emergence is in my opinion the most important philosophical concept the average person can learn about. I'd go so far as to say that learning how r-pentomino works is like learning about the theory of evolution. You can learn the basics in ten minutes, and it doesn't just explain a complicated looking system, but complexity itself. Thing is, I tend to think computers and programs work against emergent properties in themselves. It's inefficient to have data interacting with every other bit of data and also arbitrarily being processed by many different rules. Insanely inefficient. We're talking many orders of magnitude of speed loss for no useful reason. Programmers don't do that. There won't be a point when it's useful to ask a law manipulation program to be so broad in its data correlation that it could even potentially decide judge shopping is despicable. Maybe some year there will be genuinely opinionated systems, but not soon and not by accidental emergence.

From what I've read of the historical Luddites, they were producing high quality goods and stood in opposition to the kinds of people I'd set fire to if the day were slightly chilly. And if they'd somehow succeeded on a global scale, life now would be far worse for essentially everyone. I expect ever increasing automation will help all the wrong people, but even so the only possible hope of a post-scarcity society relies on it.

Did something happen?

Yes, I was getting a little worried. Just fyi, some routers support smartphone tethering, so you just plug your phone in and the household has internet access again.