Jimmy Fallon + No Audience = Win
You should watch last night's Jimmy Fallon. Without a room full of people laughing, it's just a guy talking into a camera.
This is a wonderful view into reality.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Diablo 3: Fun and Profit
This weekend I played Diablo 3 and actually enjoyed it. Given that most of you gave up on the game, I wanted to pass along the secret I discovered to making D3 an enjoyable gaming experience.
Here’s the trick: You have to spend about 50,000,000 gold on the Auction House.
Since May I had utilized the same general strategy: Buy cheap MF gear to get me to cap, then farm, turn a profit, and spend none of it. The Scrooge McDuck strategy worked for a while, but as Blizzard fucked with Inferno and MF and drop rates the game steadily declined in enjoyment. Dying every 3 minutes and then porting to the Chinese gold farmer to leech kills was anti-fun. Then Blizzard introduced the Monster Power system and so there were no more public games full of Chinese farmers to join. I had to try to solo content. That did not work.
So, this weekend I got really drunk and decided to actually spend some of the gold I had obtained.
Ho-Ly Shit did it make a difference.
Now the game has become, basically, the Cow Level from D2. Run through packs to trigger them, collect them all in one big mess, and AOE the fuck out of them. Then run over the corpses to auto-collect gold and rush off to the next pack.
Since I allowed myself to spend gold, I now have a reason to farm Paragon levels. Every level increases my MF, which means that I get to slowly dump MF gear in favor of stat gear. As I progress through content I can increase the Monster Power (Think /player 8 from D2) and so increase drops, XP, etc.
If you don’t have tons of gold stockpiled, you can buy gold for fairly low prices. The current rate is about $1 for 2M gold. So, you can drop $25 or so to get a nice farming set. With a bit of persistence you can get that $25 back through RMAH sales, and end up breaking even or making a bit of profit.
So, yeah, D3 has the potential for enjoyment if you invest a bit of gold / $ in your gear. It’s still not D2, but it’s a damn better game than it was this summer.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Friday, October 26, 2012
Daily Show: Republicans and Rape
| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Republican Candidate Said What About Rape Now? | ||||
| ||||
"According to the Replubican Party Platform, and the man who wants to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency: If a woman wants to have a baby...
In vitro fertizilation? She cannot.
Rape? She has to."
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Tokitowa - Weekend Impressions
We've been playing Tokitowa -- the HD Animation RPG -- for the past few days. I took a risk in buying it based on the fact that it used big 2D sprites for all the characters and monsters, while still holding to a modern-style 3rd person perspective in 3D environments and battles.
And the battle system is kind of nice. You control one playable character against one monster in real time, switching back and forth at will to either gun or sword range. Enemies tend to hit hard enough to make watching for their unique attack patterns an important part of the game, and change their patterns depending whether your are at ranged or melee distance. At this level, Tokitowa has an appealing way of making a game out of fighting monsters, a trick many RPGs fail to even attempt.
Yet at almost every other level, Tokitowa is just fucking around. The first hour or so made us question whether or not it should be classified as an RPG or as a visual novel. This for the way it locks the player into a string of conversations with a harem of anime tropes with a few opportunities for input, just to make sure that you always feel like you're really earning your bad ending.
The 2D animation, i.e. the only reason anyone is paying attention to Tokitowa, is only partly a good idea. The sprites are generally big, expressive, and nicely detailed. Unfortunately, they are also on pretty short loops, even the main character, meaning that you'll see the same movements with tiresome frequency. This is made worse by the developer's apparent need to run some sort of animation whenever one of the main cast is speaking. A hair tossing animation might not seem so repetitive if it were not, in fact, repeated at every opportunity.
I think it's unfair to fault the game for not producing infinite animation rather than merely lots and lots of it, but there are definitely problems with the way it fails to hide the corners it cuts. Another minor yet jarringly obvious example of this is the way the extended cast often perform one thing they weren't animated to do: turn around. There are front-facing animations, back-facing animations, and nothing in between. One second you're speaking to someone's face, then in the next frame his back is to you as he addresses someone behind him. I'd like to think that a better developer would have given some thought to how they could work around that limitation rather than highlight it.
Even as it stands, this sort of thing wouldn't be a problem if the rest of the game were able to support the rough edges. So much of the game consists of trivial fetch quests, an irritating supporting cast, and a story that is (so far) pretty weak. To the game's credit / as if in admission of these shortcomings, all town/worldmap traversal is done by pointing to a location and warping there, and all treasure chests, quest items, story triggers etc are marked on the map.
This all makes it mercifully easy to rocket through the parts of the game that involve going someplace and figuring out what you should be doing there. In general, I'm strongly in favor of streamlining typical RPG mechanics in order to shift the focus of gameplay elsewhere, so long as the focus is then on something better than physically walking to a town, talking to NPCs, or shuffling through menus to execute an attack. What Tokitowa winds up focusing on, though, is its 2D animation hook, the conversations that drive the story, and its battle system. The hook quickly wears out, the story is either uninteresting or wearisome, depending on whether it is a main or side quest and who you're talking to, while the battle system, again, is pretty ok. If they had just made a game in which you fight monsters, they could have saved everyone a lot of time, and maybe even used their resources to make some great-looking battle animations instead of just pretty good ones.
All in all, I give the first 10 hours or so of Tokitowa three horny dragons out of a possible 8 hours spent in a fucking room drinking tea with idiots.
What could possibly go wrong?
And the battle system is kind of nice. You control one playable character against one monster in real time, switching back and forth at will to either gun or sword range. Enemies tend to hit hard enough to make watching for their unique attack patterns an important part of the game, and change their patterns depending whether your are at ranged or melee distance. At this level, Tokitowa has an appealing way of making a game out of fighting monsters, a trick many RPGs fail to even attempt.
Yet at almost every other level, Tokitowa is just fucking around. The first hour or so made us question whether or not it should be classified as an RPG or as a visual novel. This for the way it locks the player into a string of conversations with a harem of anime tropes with a few opportunities for input, just to make sure that you always feel like you're really earning your bad ending.
The 2D animation, i.e. the only reason anyone is paying attention to Tokitowa, is only partly a good idea. The sprites are generally big, expressive, and nicely detailed. Unfortunately, they are also on pretty short loops, even the main character, meaning that you'll see the same movements with tiresome frequency. This is made worse by the developer's apparent need to run some sort of animation whenever one of the main cast is speaking. A hair tossing animation might not seem so repetitive if it were not, in fact, repeated at every opportunity.
I think it's unfair to fault the game for not producing infinite animation rather than merely lots and lots of it, but there are definitely problems with the way it fails to hide the corners it cuts. Another minor yet jarringly obvious example of this is the way the extended cast often perform one thing they weren't animated to do: turn around. There are front-facing animations, back-facing animations, and nothing in between. One second you're speaking to someone's face, then in the next frame his back is to you as he addresses someone behind him. I'd like to think that a better developer would have given some thought to how they could work around that limitation rather than highlight it.
Even as it stands, this sort of thing wouldn't be a problem if the rest of the game were able to support the rough edges. So much of the game consists of trivial fetch quests, an irritating supporting cast, and a story that is (so far) pretty weak. To the game's credit / as if in admission of these shortcomings, all town/worldmap traversal is done by pointing to a location and warping there, and all treasure chests, quest items, story triggers etc are marked on the map.
This all makes it mercifully easy to rocket through the parts of the game that involve going someplace and figuring out what you should be doing there. In general, I'm strongly in favor of streamlining typical RPG mechanics in order to shift the focus of gameplay elsewhere, so long as the focus is then on something better than physically walking to a town, talking to NPCs, or shuffling through menus to execute an attack. What Tokitowa winds up focusing on, though, is its 2D animation hook, the conversations that drive the story, and its battle system. The hook quickly wears out, the story is either uninteresting or wearisome, depending on whether it is a main or side quest and who you're talking to, while the battle system, again, is pretty ok. If they had just made a game in which you fight monsters, they could have saved everyone a lot of time, and maybe even used their resources to make some great-looking battle animations instead of just pretty good ones.
All in all, I give the first 10 hours or so of Tokitowa three horny dragons out of a possible 8 hours spent in a fucking room drinking tea with idiots.
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