Diecast #67: Unrest, Mailbag

By Shamus Posted Monday Jul 21, 2014

Filed under: Diecast 97 comments


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Direct download (ogg Vorbis)
Podcast RSS feed.

Hosts: Josh, Chris, Shamus, and Rutskarn, and Mumbles.

Show notes:


00:30 Intro, wherein Campster makes a joke about fedoras.

For the record: I joined in on the joke, but I actually think the fedora is a fine hat when worn in the right context. It’s gotten a bad reputation online from some people attempting to build their persona / establish a character around a simple hat, and it’s been rightfully maligned because some people insist on wearing them with otherwise casual clothing. A fedora is a “dress up” hat, not a “dress down” hat, and wearing it casually is like pairing a bowtie with an Ed Hardy shirt. (PROTIP: DO NOT.)

But if you don a fedora with proper slacks, a dress shirt, and a vest? Ignore the haters. That shit is dapper.

01:00 Let’s talk about Unrest.


Link (YouTube)

19:00 We talk about food for no reason.

I feel like a failure as a host. When Josh started talking about how the appendix was a vestigial organ, I was kind of torn. Do I let him know that the appendix has actually been found to have a purpose, thus dragging us even further off-topic? Or do I let him go, thus increasing the number and intensity of the corrections in the comments? Maybe I made the wrong call. I guess we’ll see.

21:00 Back to Unrest.

Get it from Steam, Humble Bundle, or from the developer’s website.

23:00 MAIL TIME!

Hi,
I have heard Shamus say several times that YouTube ContentID can identify cutscenes but cannot identify gameplay.
I understand that you do not have inside knowledge of Content ID, but do you as a gamer/programmer see any issue with IDing a game by its UI/HUD? It is distinctive for every game (or franchise) and it is always in the same place on screen.
Thanks

Josef

So sales of the Xbox One appear to have doubled since June 9th, which is when Microsoft stopped making the Kinect mandatory as part of the package. My question is this: how much do you think the increase in sales is simply because of the price cut and how much do you think it’s because people flat out didn’t want the Kinect and didn’t buy it because of that?

Best Regards,
Jared

Dear Diecast,

I’m curious why Assassin’s Creed 2 is the only Assassin’s Creed game that has been done on Spoiler Warning. As dumb as the series has gotten it’s usually at least been an interesting kind of stupid so it seems like it would be good for the show.

Best Regards,
Jared

Dear Diarycast, I am a huge fan of the show. I love you, Shamwow, Mumblo, Bogo, Peepants, and Buttskarn.

I have been wondering for a while, what do you guys think of linearity in games? Aren’t game supposed to be interactive? Why are linear games (Half Life for instance) praised so highly when they offer very little player input beyond shooting?

Basically this: how do you feel about “corridor shooters”?

Thanks.

~Forrest.

Rustkarn,

As one of the people incredibly interested in both writing for video games and Unrest, I’ve always wanted to see a sort of detailed description of the process of writing for a narrative-heavy game. Would you be interested in doing a sort of ‘The Writing of Unrest’ series once the game is out?

Keep on writing,
Gilfareth

 


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97 thoughts on “Diecast #67: Unrest, Mailbag

  1. WarMachineDD7 says:

    Hey, guys, maybe it’s been asked before, but could you upload the diecast to the iTunes store? It’s just that I listen to a couple of other podcasts regularly and it’s much easier for them to automatically download to my device instead of having to download to my computer and then to my device. It’s also easier to find out when a new podcast is added. Thanks.

    1. Sean says:

      What’d be really awesome is having a separate, proper RSS feed ( with audio enclosures and whatnot ) so that any podcast downloader can pick up the show and download the episodes automatically.

      I think iTunes requires that anyways ( pretty sure that’s how they pick up new episodes ), so maybe step one could be the RSS feed?

    2. Ranneko says:

      You can actually add the podcast RSS feed to iTunes. The instructions for doing so can be found at http://www.manythings.org/podcasts/how_to.html.

      I think iTunes does want some technically non-standard tags in the xml, but it is at least worth a try.

  2. TMTVL says:

    Fedora? I prefer Arch, myself.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Fezzes are cool.

      1. WarMachineDD7 says:

        All my knowledge of hats come from Team Fortress 2. Also, I’d like to point out that both the Fez and the Fedora are Spy hats in TF2.

        1. Adam says:

          Ah! I wish I could “like” comments to express agreement or approval, because if I could like your comment, I would.

          Get on that, Shamus!

    2. Bryan says:

      LFS! Automation is for wimps!

      (Let’s start a distro war in the comments! …OK, maybe not. :-P )

      1. TMTVL says:

        Oh good at least someone knows what I’m talking about, this scene is so dead.

        We need a Twenty Sided LUG.

  3. “Unrest, Mailbag.”

    Yes, but which causes which?

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Revolting peasants,of course.

    2. Naota says:

      The postal service is the backbone of any good revolution.

      1. Isaac says:

        The revolution will not be postalized!

  4. Am I the only one disappointed in the Unrest trailer, at least in the first few seconds?

    It implied that, “In Unrest, you play as… PYRODACTYL!”

    I thought the game had taken an odd turn from its initial concept, but hey, video games, right?

    1. Naota says:

      That would be a mixture of Arvind’s subtitle, my placement of it, and the speed at which I had to combine the two. On the other hand…

      Burninating the countryside!

      Burninating the Bhimra!

      Burninating all the people! And their plaster-walled cottages!

      1. I smell DLC!!!

        And it’s on FIRE!

  5. Dovius says:

    “Play as a grizzled, 30-something with a shotgun.”

    This just be my conscious avoidance of shooters these days, but somehow this sounds like an Old Man Henderson DLC pack more than anything else.

    Although that would accurately describe the havoc wreaked by a shotgun in ancient India.

    1. 30 is old to you? You’re going to be suicidal when you hit 40, kid.

      1. aldowyn says:

        “Old” is a moving target.

        1. syal says:

          But it doesn’t move very fast, because… well, it’s old.

      2. ET says:

        I’m so old! Thirty is the new retirement age! (I wish. :P )

  6. C0Mmander says:

    So I wanted to have a conversation about something in the unrest Demo but since I don’t know anyone you played it I think here is as good a place as any for it. Naturally this will contain a few spoilers for the demo so you have been warned.

    So you mentioned there was an implied romanced in the game and I was wondering if it was the peasant girl and her friend who were lesbians. If it was it might be considered a bit cheap to uphold that information from the player when he’s about to make a decision which doesn’t seem to be reversible. And I’ve been wondering if there were a lot of decision in this game wich as you said seem reasonable at the time but have bad consequences in the end or if there were any way to change them once you had all the required information.

    1. Thomas says:

      Shamus doesn’t want the twentysided forums to cannibalise his blog comments so this is probably the best place to have an Unrest discussion for now, but for future reference you could totally talk about that sort of thing here. Naota is actually one of the guys who made Unrest which is super cool =D Bugfixing occurred

  7. Garrrrrett says:

    I know in all the official Unrest descriptions it says based on ancient India but its really funny when outlets say based in instead of on and then they show you a snake person. Because everybody knows ancient India was just full to the brim with snake people.

  8. Daemian Lucifer says:

    And that one guy will be?

    Im tempted to say krellen,because he is so old,and old people dont like changing their habits.

    1. Humanoid says:

      It means to ‘win’ the last listener standing award though, I’ll only need to outlive him.

  9. Bubble181 says:

    It’s also worht noting that most people wearing fedora’s in the “modern” fashion, are actually wearing trilby’s. Which is NOT the same type of hat. But eh, I Don’t mind either way. Hipsters (or would-be hipsters? Apparently that’s a thing now too?) won’t change my enjoyment of a product because they like or hate it.

    That said, as Shamus said, a fedore can be a very stylish piece of headware.

    1. Humanoid says:

      What about the etiquette of wearing bonnets? What kind of clothing should a man wear to maximise the appeal of a bonnet?

      1. Bryan says:

        Power armor. Obviously. :-P

      2. Hitch says:

        Combat armor and a flamethrower, obviously.

      3. ehlijen says:

        Chinese stealth armour excuses many a fashion faux pas.

        1. Gavin says:

          If you could summarize that season of Spoiler Warning in one line, this would be it.

    2. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

      OK -I’ve been wearing a fedora (an actual fedora) for 15 years now and was never aware there was a joke attached to them. What on earth is everyone talking about?

      Also, I wear a hat every day -fedora, Stetson, trilby, whatever. I have never thought of them as “dress-up.” I have thought of them as much more comfortable than caps.

      1. Adam says:

        It’s been associated (wrongly, as stated above, FEDORAS =/= TRILLBIES) with a REALLY toxic subset of pickup artist/Men’s Rights Activist/”Nice Guy” internet “culture”. Lots of hat-tipping/”m’lady”-ing done, very little of the “treating women as autonomous entities” thing. I’ve met women who refuse to date men who show up to the date wearing a trillby, purely because of the stereotype.

      2. Mike S. says:

        Same here. 21 years in my case– long enough that I feel wrong on the rare occasion I wind up outside without one. (And not just because I’m squinting at the sun or having rain or snow fall on my ears. :-) ) I’ve really hated to watch “fedora” become an epithet.

        As others have noted, the medium-wide brim felt fedoras I’ve been wearing (swapped out for a straw Montecristi in the summer) aren’t likely to be mistaken for the hats that are currently experiencing some popularity.

        But I’m getting mildly paranoid that people who weren’t born when I started wearing hats will think I’m expressing a midlife crisis. Or that half a lifetime’s eccentricity will be mistaken for following a recent trend.

        (In all fairness, the few modern trilby-wearers I’ve encountered have been entirely pleasant. Granted, I haven’t run into all that many. Mostly I’m just glad to see the dwindling hat shops I’ve been depending on get the boost in sales.)

        I would likewise take issue with the idea that a fedora is a dress-up hat. Fedoras were classically a very flexible hat, which could be paired equally well with a coat and tie (which during the hat’s heyday wasn’t super-dressy anyway) or an open shirt and work jacket (e.g., http://goo.gl/8rBLMB ). You might see one on the CEO, but also on some of the men in this picture: http://www.jordahlphoto.com/photohistory/images/DSCF0253.JPG

        (Thinking about it, I wonder if there’s any modern article of clothing that ranges quite that widely.)

        In the movies, it was the hat a beat reporter could jam his big PRESS card into before pounding the pavement after the Story, or a private eye could toss on the desk next to his battered trenchcoat– and optional bottle of rye– after the black bird turned out to be lead after all.

        Other types of hats are certainly dressy. I have a homburg that probably gets less than one outing a year, since there’s not much this side of an evening wedding that it really works for. (Maybe if I were an opera fan.) And I can’t quite imagine being able to pull a top hat off. I like the way they look, but on me it would be a costume, not clothing. (Even if I ever went to black– or white– tie events, which, well, I don’t. :-) )

        1. Bubble181 says:

          Hmm, I’d say jeans pants are almost as ubiquitous. Yes, some CEOs will only appear in a full suit, but there’s plenty of younger/more modern CEOs/chiefs/engineers/whatever who’ll wear a jeans shirt and a vest. OTOH, a plumber showing up in a jeans is not weird, either.

          1. Mike S. says:

            I thought about jeans, and I could go either way. They certainly run comparably across wealth and cultural differences. I’m not sure if they have quite the picnic-to-funeral formality range.

  10. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Could a watermark for a game be made with a color humans cannot see?

    But in the end,why the hell would you want to?Its free advertisement for your game,why stifle it?

    1. Humanoid says:

      You might not notice that ultraviolet watermark on your video at first, but you will notice the watermark-shaped tanlines on your forehead after watching it.

      1. Paul Spooner says:

        If the technology existed for this to happen, it would absolutely be a thing.

    2. ET says:

      It’s reasonably difficult to do watermarking in non-visible/audible frequencies, since compression algorithms are by definition trying to reduce the data not directly needed to display/play the video/audio. So, even if you got the game to output non-visible colours, it would get eaten by the video compression anyways. :)

    3. Canthros says:

      You probably don’t want EA to start watermarking their videogames with logos in octarine: it sounds like the sort of plan that unwittingly results in gamers being hosts for eldritch abominations from beyond the stars, or possibly being turned into penguins.

    4. Svick says:

      Well, screens can only show three colors (red, green and blue) and their combinations and humans can see those.

      Or put another way: you can’t express the ultraviolet or infrared “colors” in the RGB color system.

  11. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Black flag would not be good for spoiler warning,because sailing,the best part of the game,is also not very relevant to the story.

    1. C0Mmander says:

      I would watch a season of Assassin’s Creed 1 though. Would be short, to the point and might be one of the few game in the series where they wouldn’t be bitching all the way through.

      1. Humanoid says:

        I’d go for a hangout (it’s about time for another one anyway) with co-op AC5.

  12. Bloodsquirrel says:

    80-90% voice recognition is better than I can do with a lot of people.

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

    The Kinect could have been really cool, but MS dropped the ball. They did the same thing Nintendo did with the Wii- released a few party/techodemo-y type games for the system and hoped that some third party developer actually delivered on the promises that they were making, which remaining very conservative with their major output.

    No third party developer has any good reason to do that. In an age where being multiplat is increasing important, releasing a game that heavily relies on the Kinect makes no sense. Some developers threw a few C-grade efforts at it, and that was it.

    MS needed to have something big and ambitious for the system at launch that could create a market for Kinect games. Unfortunately, Don Matrick pretty much let MS’s internal developers languish while he spent all of his time trying to find more ways to put ads on the dashboard. He cared more about exclusive TV programming for the system than he did for games. It’s going to take the better part of a decade to clean up the mess he made.

    1. Lisa says:

      One thing that turned me off the new XBone (amongst other things) was the need for Kinect. In my setup at home, I have no room for movement based games, and I share it with a housemate’s TV, so the voice command stuff is going to be next to useless.
      Add that to the various PR issues they had over what the system was going to listen to, over internet connectivity, and over used games, and I dropped completely out of wanting one.
      I’m not really sure there’s any one screwup here you can point to. Just a whole lot of them that created the ‘Perfect Screwup’.

  13. Daemian Lucifer says:

    When pope and antipope colide,they achieve total annihilation.

    1. Chauzuvoy says:

      No, they engage in a sort of ritual combat, and the pope with the largest hat wins the keys to the Vatican. The catholic church and the various protestant denominations have been engaged in centuries of R&D to create the best hat, but the Catholics have leveraged the tremendous underground haberdashery underneath St. Peter’s Basilica into an insurmountable advantage.

  14. Oddly enough I only just saw a fedora being worn yesterday for the first time in years…by a pre-teen girl sporting a denim jacket. Clearly, this was a young lady who was not right in the head. Not ’cause of the fedora mind, you just have to be nine shades head fucked to wear a goddamned demin jacket in July in California! Mumbles can back me up on this…unless she’s a coaster.

    1. Mumbles says:

      Yeah no that’s fucking insane.

  15. Daemian Lucifer says:

    People confuse interactivity with nonlinearity.That is wrong.If you watch a movie,you watch a movie.Thats it.You dont get tactile response from using controls,you dont get to focus on stuff you find interesting,you dont get to pick your own pace,you just watch what someone else thought was the correct pace,what to focus,etc.

    The problem with most corridor shooters is not that they are linear,its that they are bad.Just how there are plenty of sandbox games that are bad,or choice based rpgs that are bad.The problem here is not the mechanics,but its implementation.

    1. Ciennas says:

      So, which are the current cream of the crop per genre? Which are the absolute worst?

      (For discussion’s sake, let’s ignore any external problems like DRM or bad marketing.)

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Dont know about current,but call of juarez:gunslinger was great linear game.Shovel knight was a great branching game.And divinity:original sin is a great rpg.

  16. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Now we need a new diecast banner,with the dudes talking to each other,while Mumbles is angrily smoking in the corner.

  17. So what’s the time frame on the inevitable Unrest season of Spoiler Warning?

    1. Naota says:

      While it may not have Josh there to demolish the game’s basic foundation (we contract this out to Mikk), the special edition actually has the Pyrodactyl team doing an LP-style commentary of the entire game packaged into it.

      Of course, it doesn’t have Josh there to demolish the game’s basic foundation, so it’s not like an Unrest Spoiler Warning wouldn’t be excellent…

      At crushing my carefully-laid scripting before my very eyes.

      1. Josh is kind of like a destroyer god of virtual worlds.

        I imagine the programs of Tron worshiping/fearing him like a kind of drunken Cthulhu.

      2. Humanoid says:

        The trouble I guess would be needing the viewers read small text on the screen – since while voice acting is a fairly unimportant part of a good RPG, it’s probably expected in a game to be covered by SW. That said, since we have the writer of said text onboard, we could just have him do the voice acting live on the episodes.

  18. Benjamin Hilton says:

    Haha I see what you did there Campster. I love Movie Bob, but his Buy my book campaign did get a little old after a while.

    1. NMD says:

      Both Campter and MovieBob were making a referene to The Critic. In which he has a cut out of himself saying “Buy my book!” over and over again.

    2. krellen says:

      “Buy my book” is actually a reference to The Critic; MovieBob is a fan of the show and imagines himself much like the main character, but Campster was echoing the original, not MovieBob’s knock-off.

      The original.

  19. Nandus says:

    Catherine had a watermark on the top right corner of the screen during cut scenes to present them as if watching an episode on the Golden Playhouse. Since the watermark isn’t present during game play I didn’t find it too bad.

  20. Nalyd says:

    Do noooot fucking bother with Divinity: Original Sin. It’s miserable dreck. It has a few neat new ideas about interacting with dungeon environments, but it flubs absolutely everything else.

    1. Humanoid says:

      The reverse psychology is working! I bought six copies!*

      * I actually did end up getting six copies via Kickstarter, and without an ounce of regret.

      1. Humanoid says:

        (Now that I’ve listened to the episode) Ruts, I can throw you a spare key I have for D:OS if you like. They sent all the backers getting a CE copy a box with two keys instead of the initially promised single key. Logistical reasons – KS backers were meant to get one key digitally and another in their game box, while the retail CE has two copies in the box, but in the end they sent the same contents to everyone.

        1. Rutskarn says:

          Chris gave me a copy, but thanks!

    2. Paul Spooner says:

      Please elaborate on the interesting things, and then the rest of us can safely ignore it forever.

    3. Daemian Lucifer says:

      By “everything else”,are you referring to the inter party banter,that is done well?The spells,that are great?The various useful skills?The incentive for exploration?The amusing stealth animations?I dont see a lot of flubbing there(meaning,I dont see any).So indeed,please do elaborate.Or is this just the “Its popular,therefore its crap” thing?

      1. Humanoid says:

        To be fair, my one sentence review of the game would read: “It’s a great game, but it’s not a great RPG.”

        Between the extreme binary dialogue (generally a choice between super sunny happy optimist response vs grumpy miserable bastard response) and the one-note NPCs, I don’t get any sense of character ownership at all. They’re just some people I’m directing to play around in a very fun playground.

      2. MichaelGC says:

        Hentzau has some very negative thoughts about it, albeit prefaced by a huge disclaimer:

        http://scientificgamer.com/thoughts-divinity-original-sin/

        I certainly agree about the info overload, although I tend to think of that as really my problem, rather than a failing of the game as such. Plus, having re-started several times, I seem to have mostly ameliorated the issue this time around by attempting to role-play as two clueless newbies who don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on! :D

      3. Nalyd says:

        the inter-party banter would be interesting if it were ever worth hearing and no a minigame. the spells are laaaaaame. they work on a basic mechanical level but none of them are fun and few are meaningfully differentiated. the ‘various useful skills’ are all take them or leave them. why bother lockpicking when you can smash anything you want? why bother persuading when there is nobody worth talking to? the incentive for exploration is. . . what, exactly? XP and loots? every rpg has those incentives. “amusing stealth animations” is not even a point worth making.

        basically? it’s mechanically functional but in no way fantastic and also absolutely miserable to sit through. most anything you do – including almost every noncombat mechanical system – is just tedium. the writing is total bullshit. there is absolutely nothing in this game that makes me want to play it.

        the interesting parts are the terrain things. smash a barrel of water to flood an area, which has some synergistic effect on some of your skills. fire traps and gas traps and you can move scenery around or smash it or whatever. that is absolutely not enough to carry the rest of the game. people say it’s a game that gives you the tools to do whatever you want but there’s nothing in it that i even remotely want to do. i didn’t even know it was supposed to be popular, and i cannot imagine who would like it. maybe grognards who think rpgs peaked with fucking ultima.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          “the inter-party banter would be interesting if it were ever worth hearing and no a minigame.”

          Turning a conversation in a video game into a minigame of its own?How dare they!

          “the spells are laaaaaame. they work on a basic mechanical level but none of them are fun and few are meaningfully differentiated.”

          Because the burning from the fireball and stun from lightning are essentially the same,and functionally indistinguishable from ice.And the way the impact the environment in as different way as the characters is just as irrelevant.Not every game has to be magicka,just a few spells that act in different way can be enough for different games.

          “the “˜various useful skills' are all take them or leave them. why bother lockpicking when you can smash anything you want?”

          They actually dared to make multiple solutions for a problem,instead of forcing you to use !!vun und precisely vun!! path through everything?!How dreadful!

          “why bother persuading when there is nobody worth talking to?”

          Ok,this is the only one Id agree with you.With a few exceptions,most NPCs are bland.

          ” the incentive for exploration is. . . what, exactly?”

          And this is where those few exceptions come to place.For example,right near the beginning you can stumble upon a talking sea shell.

          “XP and loots? every rpg has those incentives.”

          And if our game is not different from every other game in every single detail,its not worth mentioning.

          “amusing stealth animations” is not even a point worth making.”

          Because if its not important to you,its not important to anyone.Heck,why put any effort in it when the old *puff* from baldurs gate was the peak of stealth animations.Topped maybe only by the genius of skyrim.

          “there is absolutely nothing in this game that makes me want to play it.”

          And of course,you are the measuring stick for everyone else in the world,so no one else would ever want to play it.

          ” i didn't even know it was supposed to be popular, and i cannot imagine who would like it. maybe grognards who think rpgs peaked with fucking ultima.”

          A simple “yes,I hate it just because its popular” wouldve been just as good an answer.Thanks for clearing that up.

  21. Damn! Chris freestyles some Errant Signal at about the 46 minutes mark. ehehe!

  22. Peter H. Coffin says:

    N.B. The Fedora is not a Trilby. Does it look more like its wide brim is keeping rain or ruined-temple cobwebs from one’s face? Fedora. Does it look like it’s coming back to Park Slope from a weekend in the Hamptons with its narrow brim allowing the wearer to easily knock back a couple of ironic PBRs? Trilby.

    1. Klay F. says:

      I don’t even fucking own either a fedora or a trilby, but I just cannot take people who can’t even be bothered to know the difference between the two seriously at all. If a person can’t even get THAT right (as 99% of the people who beat this joke into the fucking ground can’t), its going to make me despise them even more than the stereotypical person their making fun of.

      1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

        For years, I just knew the Trilby was the Bear Bryant Hat -but I suppose it should be checkered for that.

  23. Gilfareth says:

    “I absolutely intend to” –Rutskarn, in response to my question

    Oh man, I am insanely excited to see this as it comes out. I apologize that my question/request was worded strangely, but I’m glad to see it answered and even more so to see it answered in the affirmative.

  24. Paul Spooner says:

    I know I’ve done around 10k words per day. It does require really good typing discipline to avoid injury. Like Shamus says, it’s usually only when I know exactly what I need to type. In my case I’m transcribing my podcast.

  25. I actually do have a Fedora (only hat I own), it’s a cheap thing for sure. But now and again when I do a full headshave (a millimeter stubble left) it’s perfect to wear as it sticks to the head perfectly then. Other than that I also wear it when I feel like it. I bought it on a whim so I’ll use it on a whim as well. I never cared about fashion, the types of clothing I wear are determined by two things, what I can afford to wear and what I want to wear, the two rarely line up though. *grumble*

    1. I have this great leather wide-brimmed hat I got at a ren faire that I purchased for two reasons: I needed a wide hat to keep the sun from burning my ginger skin/scalp, and it actually fit my apparently freakishly huge head (I think I’m almost a size 7&1/2, depending on how long its been since my last barber visit, and that means most “normal” hats ain’t gonna fit).

      It keeps the rain off for the most part, and it doesn’t look pretentious with whatever else I’m wearing, be it cargo shorts and sandals or my usual jeans and jocular t-shirt.

  26. Wide And Nerdy says:

    I got Black Flag for free with my last video card, probably not something I’d have bought otherwise (though I was eyeing the earlier installments because thats what I do when I don’t know about a series and want to try it cheap.)

    Enjoyed the pirate stuff until the first time they pulled me out of that and put me in a cubicle. I guess I knew that this VR thing was a framing device for the franchise but it still killed it for me. I put the game down telling myself that I’d pick it up again later and I just never have. Maybe its a good game but I really dislike the office sequences. Its just feels completely unnecessary whether its a core franchise element or not.

  27. HeroOfHyla says:

    The cheese-filled Doritos aren’t available in Arizona. I am incredibly sad.

    1. Humanoid says:

      It’s amazing to me that it’s possible to fit a volume of anything into a two-dimensional object. Maybe a Doritos chip has a hidden fourth dimension. :D

  28. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

    Having written both fiction and non-fiction, I note the process is very similar, but writers block is much more of a problem with fiction. When I was writing my dissertation, everything except the theory part could be written very easy. Talking about previous work is pretty easy -its like cribbing the introductions. Talking about data and analysis is easy -it’s just reporting what you saw. The theory part -ie, the creative part -though, required a certain amount of inspiration to get into words.

    I think that chapter was written more or less fully formed, without much revision. On the other hand, the other chapters were revised numerous times. Ultimately, I think they were easier -once you get the words on the page, you can see how to move them around to make the connections better and clearer. But the creative parts -getting them on the page was hard.

    Same with writing fiction -I keep trying to just put something on the page, but I always come up short because if I can’t see where this part is going, I have no idea how to write it -and skipping ahead means I have no idea how I got here. I begin to get tempted to write “and then something happens…” just to keep the writing process going.

  29. silver Harloe says:

    All I know is I could do a lot worse than taking all my fashion cues from Humphrey Bogart (which is a goal of mine, not something I currently do. I don’t do hats at the moment. Or ties. But I probably will someday).

    1. Humanoid says:

      If I tried I’d probably end up looking more like Inspector Clouseau.

  30. hborrgg says:

    Hey, unnecessary tangent about swords and spears!

    In short, the main advantage of a two-handed spear in a duel is that extra length means extra leverage means extra speed. When the speartip is moving faster than your opponent’s sword then he can’t catch it, he can’t close the distance, and he’s going to get stabbed. The man with the sword can still win but that generally relies on the spearman making a mistake, it’s the spearman’s fight to lose.

    A large shield or lots of armor though goes a long way to evening the playing field, but the spearman is still always getting the first strike in.

  31. Tom says:

    For like two solid minutes, when you guys were talking about “sales of the Xbox One” going up, I was utterly confused and thought you were talking about sales of the original Xbox, and trying to figure out why there might suddenly be a rush on those (especially since Yahtzee’s review of the new generation of consoles pointing out that they basically have nothing to do except revisit and remake old IPs anyway, because we’ve essentially hit peak muddy brown “triple-A” bro-shooter at this point). Dumbest name choice ever, Microsoft.

  32. Paul Spooner says:

    So, the book “Cheaper By the Dozen” has a lovely solution for the getting off-track problem. Anyone who thinks the conversation is getting side-tracked just shouts “Not of general interest!” It’s a surprisingly effective way of saying “I don’t want to talk about this, and I think most of the other people also don’t want to talk about it, but no one else is saying it.”

  33. Trix2000 says:

    I should note that 10-20% error rate for voice commands is not THAT bad. Most of the standards for passing I’ve worked with are at 10-15% error rate, because voice recognition is hard. :/

  34. harborpirate says:

    Actually the current prevailing theory is that the appendix is a backup storage mechanism for the good bacteria that your gut needs in order to digest food. The theory goes that it increased survivability in the face of the various kinds of diseases that cause deadly diarrhea. Modern medical treatment has made this function irrelevant, meaning that in rich nations it now only serves as a potential time bomb.

  35. Galad says:

    I have a (probably stupid) question. I just bought Unrest via the pyrodactyl site, got an email from amazon payments with 2 different transaction ids(what’s up with that?) and everything. What do I do next to, er, actually download the game?

  36. Arctem says:

    I do feel like dropping the Kinect requirement probably killed the chance of any actually good games coming out for it in the future, since developers can no longer be sure that everyone will have a Kinect. So that’s one negative to finally getting rid of the extra device that none of their consumers wanted.

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