Gigelinho

This game does Super Metroid better than Super Metroid itself. One of the best game soundtracks I've ever heard. Great story and atmosphere. It's fun through to the end.

Nice visuals and good music (including some tracks from Yuzo Koshiro.) Meh story, too much teen angst, not enough substance. Most of the games are okay reskins of old arcade games, except the last two. I don't want to spoil the last one, but the second-to-last is an endless runner, which is a genre that AFAIK started on mobile platforms, so it's very anachronistic here. Not to mention it's by far the hardest and least fun of the minigames (in my opinion.)

Indeed. This year has been slow even by Ross standards.

Here's my full review of Discrepant from shortly BEFORE it came out of early access. They might have updated it and fixed some of the quirks but it's not obvious that they've changed anything major, so I don't feel like playing it again. Posted by me on Steam in November 2019: First let me clarify that I don't recommend buying this game in its present state. It's very clunky and awkward and buggy. I bought it on sale for less than a buck so I can't really complain. I'm giving the game a thumbs up because I want to encourage the devs to finish this. I think the game has atmosphere and a great premise and I'd like to actually be able to, you know, PLAY this at some point. Right now though... well, here's a rundown of my first 30 minutes with the game: - After a brief intro, the game starts & immediately there are plenty of tutorial messages with lots of text to read. - It's super dark, I need a flashlight to get around, but the flashlight has limited batteries and I can't find others. - Literally the first room I walk into has a large moving force field that damages me when I walk through it. I find a side-room in the dark (remember, I'm trying to save battery on my flashlight) where I won't get damaged, but as the door closes it somehow pushes me out of the room and I get damaged by the force field. - I go back in the side room and pick up a backpack and a clipboard. No idea what I'll need them for. Go out, get damaged by the force field again, but I manage to find a thing on the wall to disable it. - Where to next? I find a weird map thing on the floor but it's useless. I'm standing next to an elevator but the doors won't open. However I can jump in over the railing and press the button. Nothing's happening. - Wait, something IS happening. Turns out I'm not actually IN the elevator at all! The elevator is on the upper floor and is coming down on top of me. I run and jump out of the way just in time to not get squished. Who the hell places an elevator call button IN THE ELEVATOR SHAFT? - I go to the upper floor and get out of the elevator. (here the door does open, guess the one below was bugged?) Immediately the ship starts shaking and I start taking damage apparently out of nowhere. This happens every few seconds on this floor. I walk around sparingly using my flashlight and find the cryo control room. The door is stuck. - Another quest marker sends me off to find something heavy to bust the door open with. It looks like it's on the bottom floor. I go back down to the bottom floor but I can't get to the object. I go back up. It kinda seems like I have to go through a detached floor panel. The moment I step on it I die instantly. OK I guess I'm replaying the tutorial... - Except apparently I'm not. You only get one shot to beat the tutorial. What? - After a loading screen, the game displays something like an old-school game manual. Walls of text. It's telling me I'm playing some guy named Sebastian. Wait, I saw myself when I died and I was a woman. Whatever, I'm not reading all of this. Click "Return to Game" - Now another cutscene plays, except it's no longer in space. The camera slowly pans around to show me a weird purplish planet with a bunch of watchtowers all around and some trees. It's still dark. There are a couple of bodies on the ground with glowing eyes. There's a person sitting on a grave or something looking out into the distance. Okay... when does the game start? The cutscene plays in loops. I click the mouse buttons, press space, enter, escape... nothing works. I have to hit ALT-F4 to exit the game. So yeah. Not exactly a great first time user experience. I really hope they fix the game and make it playable because I can tell something's there. The atmosphere and the story seem like something I'd like. Posted 5 November, 2019. Last edited 5 November, 2019.

Hey, let's play Game Dungeon Trivia. The rules are: someone posts a question whose answer must be found in a Game Dungeon episode whoever posts the first correct answer wins and they get to ask the next question I'll start with an easy one. Which game reviewed on GD has a soundtrack by a band of time travellers?

KKnD Xtreme is probably the RTS I played the most at the time. I liked the atmosphere and it felt satisfying to wreck mutants.

I played quite a bit of this back in the day. It's a pretty generic racing game, but a competent one at that. Good graphics, smooth performance, nothing not to like.

Thanks! I guess I didn't find it because I was searching for "Polaris" in the title too. So, uh, any tips getting this to run? Under Win10 it doesn't even try (of course) while under Win95 in a virtual machine it crashes immediately on launch with a protection fault type of error that isn't useful at all.

Since it's almost Christmas, I'd like to play Polaris SnoCross. Is there anywhere this game can still be downloaded as abandonware?

Good analogy! I don't really have a PLAN for dealing with this, so much as the idea that whatever plan we come up with, it has to exert a LOT of leverage. To run with your analogy, if you use the small paddle to actually paddle with it, you'll get nowhere. But if you stick it in the right place in the steering mechanism, you can get the ship to turn without much effort. The difficulty is knowing where to stick the paddle. So, getting back to the corporations example (and it is just an example,) the current (low-leverage) solution to curb the nefarious behavior of corporations is that the court system punishes individual cases of misbehavior based on existing legislation. My high-leverage proposal is to come up with a template for a new kind of company that will behave properly on its own. Such a company has to be successful enough (and its success visible enough) that other people start founding companies based on this same template. Think of it as an ecosystem, where if this new "species" of company is more successful, it gradually replaces the publicly-owned corporation. I'm pretty confident a lot can be done with little actual power IF we can identify the fulcrum points. That's a big if, though.

Well... this is going to be a long post. I was watching the recording of November's chat with fans on YouTube and one of the first questions that Ross addresses, actually going more in-depth than for any other question so far, is whether Capitalism threatens the survival of humanity. I wanted to write this post because just weeks ago I put my thoughts together on this same subject and, well, so far I wasn't able to talk to anyone about this. So hopefully here we can kick some ideas around. I've thought about this for years - actually more than a decade, my bachelor thesis from 10 years ago is on a related topic. Anyway, to summarize Ross' answer, the incompatibility lies in the fact that Capitalism doesn't have the concept of "restraint", which is essential for the survival of humanity, since we have limited resources and unlimited needs. I think this is spot on. Ross gives the real life example of a group of farmers from California over-pumping the shared water table under their land, in order to make the most profit as fast as possible, without regard for the future. This is a textbook example of the Tragedy of the Commons, which is a specific application of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. If you don't know about these you can look them up online, but the gist of the problem is that the optimal outcome for each individual is not the optimal outcome for the group as a whole. Everyone stands to gain MORE if they cooperate (in this case, if they practice restraint and not over-pump the aquifer). But when you don't know what others are doing, the best INDIVIDUAL strategy is to pump that sucker as hard as you can, because if others are doing it and you're not, you'll get nothing: water depleted AND no profit. In the Prisoner's Dilemma this is called the "sucker's payoff". Well, the entire world is a giant Commons and every individual is a rational actor, looking to maximize their payoff. Except it's a lot more complicated because we also have Corporations. I think the publicly-owned corporation is probably the worst thing to happen for humanity's long-term survival chances. The system of incentives inside a corporation is set up in such a way that nobody is directly responsible for the negative externalities resulting from the corporation's activities. In other words, once it gets big enough, the behavior of a publicly-owned corporation is out of human control. (I suspect that, by some definitions, corporations can be thought of as living beings, but let's not open that can of worms for now.) Corporations are made up of three types of actors: regular employees, executives and stockholders. Regular employees have no power of decision and so, in the context of this discussion, are irrelevant. Stockholders don't care (and for the most part don't know) what the company actually does day-to-day - they just care about return on investment, which hinges on the company's growth. As much growth, as fast as possible. Executives, on the other hand, are solely responsible to stockholders. Their only function, their only incentive is to bring about this growth, no matter what the cost. As long as they're able to show growth over the last quarter, they're successful and keep their positions. The thing is, while executives DO have a say in what the company does, their hand as still tied, because Investors are always watching that bottom line. If they get the feeling that a CEO is not stepping on it ALL THE WAY, they replace him with someone who will do what it takes. That's why so many CEOs and high ranking executives are psychopaths. Natural selection at work. So is there a solution to this? We've already seen that if we leave Corporations free to go about as they please, they'll over-graze the commons. They'll over-pump the aquifer. It's just the rational thing to do for everyone involved. The thing is, even if every individual person inside every company were a decent person with a conscience (which is a tall order to begin with,) that still wouldn't translate into a sustainable behavior of the company as a whole. There's no such thing as "Corporate Social Responsibility" - remember that buzzword from like a decade ago? Not much to show for it now. One idea I've been considering recently is to come up with a template for a new kind of company where the incentive structure is such that long term planning is encouraged. This seems to be the case, for instance, with Co-operatives. These are companies owned by the employees instead of external investors, which means everyone feels a great deal more responsibility and ownership with regard to the company's actions. Some of these companies have very flat hierarchies, where for example employees vote for their executive teams and are generally much more involved in how the company is run. Unremarkably, cooperatives seem to be much more resilient in the face of economic downturns and recession. Thing is I've no idea how one would go about REPLACING publicly owned corporations with co-operatives (or something of the sort.) Government regulation may be a way to do it, but I don't think it's feasible today - too many people would scream Communism. Plus relying on governments to fix things is almost always a bad idea, because of how corrupt politicians tend to be. I don't expect more than a couple of people to have read through all of this, but if you have, does this make any sense to you? How would you address the "tragedy of the commons" problem? What do you think about this concept of a new kind of company where long-term responsibility is incentivized?

Hey, remember the part in this episode where Ross is talking about Tiffany Helm - the actress playing Nicole Desjardins - and he points out that her last acting performance was Rama, and that she decided to quit acting after this? Well, she must have seen this episode two years ago, because she decided to come out of retirement and has since starred in TWO new films, both coming out this year. Coincidence? I think not!

I was studying at the time but yep, no reason to stay home and do nothing. And that's my point. I can sympathize with Ross for this problem, but I can't believe he's unable to do ANY work at all on videos, even if things are so bad that they had to relocate to some temporary accommodation. Or at the very least post an update on his situation every few days. Thanks to fan donations, Ross is able to work on videos full time. In a sense, this is his job. I don't think there's an employer anywhere in the world that would let you take a paid leave of absence of a month and a half (and counting) from your work, for ANY reason. Even in very worker-friendly countries like France, you get at most a week bereavement leave if a close relative dies. Ross has mold in his flat. I don't think us fans have a right to expect anything, but IMO there should be some degree of accountability when you're taking money from people.

Xezr, during the times when you were living in temporary quarters, did you still go to work?

I hope nothing bad happened to Ross, but if he's alright, going completely off the radar for a month is not cool. Takes 30 seconds to write a tweet and can be done from his phone in any cafe.