Top Gun

It was definitely weird stuff. Pretty much the same sort of crazy stuttering/jumping you get when your own connect is on the fritz, only this was server-side and affected everyone at once. I wish that many people hadn't bailed so quickly, considering how soon it ended, since the server kind of died afterwards.

And you don't even strictly need a credit card. I have a Visa debit card for my checking account, which works just the same. Of course, with a bunch of banks starting to charge monthly fees for those...yeah.

I'd be happy to go through at least the preliminary level with someone, if not the whole thing. There's an achievement where you have to beat the game and then play with someone new through the first level, and I haven't had a chance to pick it up yet. Come to think of it, I'll have to find time to sit down and play the new stuff with my brother, since we went through the entire co-op campaign together.

I think I'm through attempting solo JK runs. Last night's made me completely rage. I kept having quick shield raises not register when fighting Lumbers, so I had to burn two revives in spots I almost never do, so I was already in a foul mood when I got down to the boss. And once again, I had little to no luck in taking it on. It's a boss that requires you to get right up in its face and constantly damage it, but that also leaves you open to the 15-20 small jellies swarming all over the place, so you lose health at an alarming rate. Plus, they have an amazingly-annoying habit of getting in the way of vial throws. I have no idea how someone could pull this one off on their own. The worst part of all is that I had a much better run going earlier in the night, but I had to cut it short right before reaching the JK. I really wish there was some way for the game to remember what level you'd reached and save your status for you, at least if you were playing solo.

Not entirely TF2-related, but I just pulled off the Moustachium 608 level in SpaceChem after over two hours of tinkering with it tonight, and who knows how many failed attempts previously. I glanced at one or two solution videos on YouTube a while ago, but I actually solved it on my own, which is something very rare when I get that stuck on a game. Man, I earned that little pin.

I've actually managed it with just two people a couple of times, though I think most of my runs have been three or four. The benefit of fewer people is that the JK doesn't regenerate health as quickly, and I think there aren't as many little jellies to deal with. Solo, however, is another story...I tried two or three separate times during the most recent power surge, and I just couldn't break through.

It played about the same as BLU does for me, i.e. pretty darn smooth. Surprisingly low ping considering the box is out in Chicago, too. Speaking of custom maps, there's a payload map called Boundary I've played several times that I wouldn't mind seeing added to the server. It has a fairly similar layout to Badwater.

Hoopy and I ran into some rough luck a bit earlier, precipitated by my stupidly deciding to attempt a Tier 2 danger room. I never learn. (Srsly, though, those big Wolvers do way too much damage there, even considering it's a danger room.) The most frustrating moment for me was my final death, when a Howlitzer projectile from a level at least ten feet above me managed to kill me. Oh, and that was right after another Howlitzer's head magically bypassed my shield. I was not happy. Oh, and Garian, I did send you a friend request; I'd like to get tossed into the guild too.

I'm in the Northeast (PA) myself, and I haven't experienced any significant lag issues since the previous server move. Guess I'm just getting lucky. And sweet, Pyro boosts. I can get behind that.

This paragraph works perfectly tongue-in-cheek if you take it as the other game with that abbreviation. I can't say I had any complaints about Braid myself. I was generally ambivalent about the story bits, but the gameplay and art style were great.

Oh yeah, I've done one or two that have taken a ridiculous amount of time. If you're unlucky with how they're moving or miss an opportunity, you can be stuck waiting for five minutes between hits. Here's something else that I don't think has been mentioned in here: the game's soundtrack is now available for purchase via iTunes, Amazon, and the like. I'm planning on getting it myself, since I really enjoy a lot of the tracks. Now we just need a ReMix!

Yeah, Roarmulus relies much more on strategy than just brute force. I actually found those levels to be much more fun solo, mainly because the graphical lag isn't nearly as brutal then.

Y'know, it's funny how this game works. Over the past two days, I've tried a few different times to pull off a solo Jelly King run, since I've already soloed the Roarmulus Twins without dying and wanted to try it here too. I was able to get down to the JK himself a couple of times with maybe one or two stupid deaths earlier on, but I couldn't deal with the swarms of little jellies he spawned, so I had to retreat to Haven each time. I then tried jumping in a group run, which whittled down to myself and this other person who was either the worst Spiral Knights player in existence, or else his lag really was as bad as he claimed, because he was dying every minute or so. I burned most of my health trying to keep him alive, and then wound up spending way more energy than I wanted reviving on the JK, but to no avail. I kind of snapped at him a bit before leaving...if you have lag that bad, you shouldn't be a dead weight around another player's neck. Just go solo or quit. And then today I jump in with a party of relative newbies, who aren't carrying anything above two-star gear. One of them leaves, so it's myself and two others, one of whom has never even done a JK run before this. They died quite a bit and revived once or twice on their own, while I managed to stay alive for the most part but was perpetually low on health. Somehow, we make it down to the JK, and besides having to revive a couple more times than we should have, it actually winds up being a fairly easy run, and I get the killing blow myself while the other two are dead. I thought this run was going to be a disaster given the relative experience of the rest of the team, but we pulled it off, and it made all the earlier failures seem almost worthwhile.

I wasn't seeing any lag on IJ's server myself last night (besides the usual 100+ ping sort), even though I'm on the other side of the country from him. What's stranger, the brutal net loss I was experiencing on BLU/RED over the past couple of days disappeared as suddenly as it arrived. Who knows what's going on at this point.

Heh, the announcement must be why I saw prices spike something like 600 crowns over a couple of hours yesterday. I'll definitely get my game on.

Oh wow. This is fantastic.

Freaking finally. Edit: Oh, and here's a thing. Anyone playing when I was last night probably remembers me complaining about some wicked loss going on that was muffing up the audio chat, and a few people giving me handy console flags to take a look at it. I thought to enable net_graph while hopping between a few other servers earlier tonight, including one in Europe, and as it turns out...the only time my loss indicator moved above zero was on BLU, where it constantly stayed between 10 and 20 or even higher. Whatever weirdness is going on, it looks like it's only happening here.

Bugfixes, a couple of new promo hats, the usual.

Gamemaster is crying somewhere right now.

Yeah, that's a great little feature. And to further the TF2 analogy, it's something I really wish that game had.

Woo, Lockdown's out! And it's basically TF2 in Spiral Knights!

I haven't seen anyone playing it recently, which is a bummer.

I know I took a long time after first buying the game to actually start playing it, mainly because there wasn't even as much as a tutorial back in those days. That was when there were far fewer weapons, too.

I think the significant differences in gameplay styles for each class also requires a pretty significant learning curve. I've managed to get a couple of people into the game, and I started out each time by walking them through how each class operates, since understanding what you're supposed to be doing as a given class is almost as important as actually doing it. I know the Battlefield series has different classes to some extent, but from the impression I've received, I don't think there's quite as much difference between them than there is between, say, the Heavy and Spy. The sheer number of weapons options in the game now doesn't exactly help matters, either.

I think the only full-length movie I've seen was the Santa Claus one, but the short Spring Fever is almost indescribable.