What it sez on the eula.
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I liked this
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‘I don’t remember asking you a god damn thing.’ 
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Mmm tea, I like tea. Do we have cookies too?
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Anybody watching The International?
I’ve never played DOTA 2, know naff-all about it, but I stuck it on tonight in the thought that perhaps I should find out what this e-sports thing was all about, specially since it’s local and all.
Can’t say as I have much of an idea about what I was watching, but maybe I’ll try again tomorrow. Does anyone have any good links to introduce DOTA 2? I did read an RPS vs PCG story about newbies playing it, perhaps I should revisit that?
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I love gaming and tea-time, although I have kind of lapsed on both lately.
I try to start with some nice malty, tippy Assam - preferably Meleng, Duflating, Mangalam estates, or something comparable. Maybe with a few pieces of clove and/or green cardamom. A little bit of raw sugar and milk. Maybe with some mildly saffron-seasoned shortbreads, if I can get around to making them.
My game has usually been that ancient standby, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch. On a good server with competent players it can be such a brilliant environment for gonzo combat. Low gravity / high-kill settings take a certain kind of mindset to navigate without instantly dying over and over. It is better with the Rift but I only use it on smaller killbox maps because my DK1 is low-res, making long-range antics on my favorite sniper maps less than ideal, I just use my monitor for those. But being able to move, look, and aim with three different controls is brilliant fun.
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Have you seen Super Hot?
I think you might like it. It’s still in pre alpha though.
Basically, it’s a single player FPS with the twist that as long as you aren’t moving or looking around time runs around 1ms gametime per second realtime or so. Maybe slower. But as long as you’re looking around or moving time is normal.
The sound even doppler shifts.
It’s a really neat concept, but it can’t be adapted to multiplayer for obvious reasons.
It’s current incarnation is actually setup to look like you’re an 80 hacker breaking into the dev’s test server to play the game.
Here’s a quick demo by a decidedly boisterous Irishman who’s one of my favorite youtubers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fulVz6v1-CY
He evaluated an even earlier version a year ago too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMRqm2-wroM
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I heard about it way back, voted to Greenlight it, must have been two years ago. But since then I have been dirt broke and bought no games, so I haven’t been looking. It’s great to know that it is coming along, I will try to see if there is any beta or demo I can play without needing to order anything yet.
Most recent games I bought are IIRC Goat Simulator and The Stanley Parable, which are both great fun for different reasons.
My main keyboard, my Unicomp Model-M broke last spring, and I have only just been able to start fixing it this week. I’ll still need to send off for a $10 or so part I can’t afford now. My current keyboard annoys me so I haven’t been gaming with it. This is the longest I have gone without playing in six years.
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I’m not much of a gamer. I tried though. I prefer watching mostly.
In fact, I’ve bought nearly every console/handheld my younger brother and I had. And he always muscled me out of using them, all the way up to the Play Station 4. So I decided to stop wasting my money on his gaming. He’s no fun to watch, and in fact is a really bad room mate. You can hear him whooping and screaming literally half a mile away, during the middle of the day when I’m trying to sleep.
These days I mostly just build video and audio codecs from git and test them, dick around with AVISynth scripts, and play KSP if I feel like I’ve got enough motivation to setup a mission. Scott Manley makes it look so easy. I also watch twitch. I barely watch any TV anymore, because twitch is more entertaining and you can run adblockers on it so I don’t have to spend 1/3 of the time watching loud, irrelevant, poorly color-balanced commercials.
ETA also Twitch is way better than TV because you can interact with the streamer and everyone else watching. It’s like how TV used to be. Not glassy-eyed staring at the screen while the people you’re watching with shush you. Instead you get to gossip like a bunch of children (which can be really fun), ask about PC parts etc, and rib the streamer.
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There’s lots of links around. Can’t say any of them are better than others. This Reddit link is a decent glossary.
This Polygon piece captures the essence of DOTA 2.
But as I’ve been reminded in comments both here and on Twitter over and over, there’s an elephant in the room: the biggest barrier to getting into Dota 2 is Dota 2 itself. It has over a hundred heroes, with more on the way. It has a complex item system. It carries over some of the more sophisticated level mechanics of real-time strategy games. Much of the audience is toxic, full of homophobia, racism, abusive language, and sometimes deliberate team sabotage.
There is a wall that many people see in front of Dota 2, and it can be hard to climb. Like many challenges, it’s best to find some help to start.
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Yeah, everything I’ve seen of MOBAs (and my brother plays League of Legends professionally so I’ve seen more than my share) is that they’re basically a method for concentrating middle schoolers or people with the same level of emotional maturity and sportsmanship as middle schoolers.
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DOTA 2 is a free-to-play download from Steam, and it works on Windows, OS X, and Linux. It runs quite nicely on my Linux laptop. I had fun playing through the tutorials, then played an introductory online match in which the other team was insulting, which soured me on it for a while, but I’ve vaguely meant to get back to it.
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Bought a couple of games I’ve been meaning to get around to yesterday, haven’t tried them yet.
Invisible, Inc - I enjoy turn-based strategy games, even if I’m rubbish at them, and RPS seemed to like this, so I gave it a punt. Turns out it’s cheap on Steam this weekend, too.
Kentucky Route Zero, don’t know much about it beyond the way it looks, but it sounds intriguing.
Still trying to work my way through The Banner Saga (at which, again, I suck), Space Hulk (never played the board game, despite the mediocre reviews this got, I’m enjoying it) and the remastered Wings (which is just a nostalgia trip, really, but it’s still fun).
I have all 3 editions…(no I’m not an addict) Well not the 3.5 version that came out recently.
The video game plays like the board game quite well. It got mediocre reviews because it was buggy as hell when it first came out. I did the usual and waited for a Steam sale so it was all fixed by the time I got it. I should play it more.
I had the Amiga version but could never work out what I was doing…
Although I did enjoy Space Crusade (again, never had the game, or Hero Quest, although I wanted both)
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I have heard great things about it. I think I may give it a whirl, if Badassery doesn’t consume enough free time until Fallout 4 comes out.
Well I mean I have all 3 of the boardgame versions.
I did have the PC version of that though. They didn’t translate the game so well for that and it was easier just to get a friend and play the board game. Oh the days of having boot disks with special config.sys files just to play a game… no don’t miss those at all.
And the actual board version of Hero Quest (not advanced) was great beer and skittles dungeon crawl fun.
Having a hard time getting into New Vegas after The Witcher 3. World seems less immersive, game controls are greasy, dialogue is wooden.
