Native Jovian

Yeah, the $5 gets you a 30-day subscription. I did see that there was a two week free trial on their website, but I didn't realize that the client was free. Well, it was five bucks. I'm not going to complain. I'm tooling around (still working on the tutorial missions, didn't play for very long after downloading it yesterday) as Jovianios Noa, if anyone wants to say hi in-game. It was really hard resisting the urge to have my character wearing aviator shades IN SPAAAAAAACE, but I managed it.

So EVE is $5 on Steam today. I bought it because, why the hell not? Time to noob it up until my 30 days run out and see if I like it enough to pay for it then.

I must be the only one who doesn't have that many hats/miscs. I have exactly three non-event/achievement hats (one of which I had to trade for) and no misc items. Anyway, I wanted to ask: what servers do people play on when the OCR ones are empty? It seems like every time I want to play recently, there's no one on the OCR servers, and I could use a good place to hang out when that's the case.

Tauntswitching is fun. It made me sad when I couldn't do it anymore. Is there any reason not to allow it? Also, inventory has been behaving since the update. Huzzah!

I don't think it's down (or at least not entirely), it's just flaking out. I was messing with my loadouts and sometimes they wouldn't load, while others they would just take a while to show up. Apparently, suddenly having four times as much data to track didn't agree with it.

Interesting episode. I don't have much to add on the topic, so I won't, but one thing did strike me. I was intrigued by the short bit on "Anti-Japan War Online". Specifically, the phrase used to describe it's setting: "the 1937-1945 conflict between Japan and China". To most people, this conflict is better known as World War II. China was one of the Allies during WWII, and its people suffered horribly during the Japanese invasion, during which the Japanese army committed numerous atrocities against the Chinese people, including the Rape of Nanking (during which hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and POWs were murdered and tens of thousands of women were systematically raped) -- most of which modern-day Japan still publicly refuses to accept responsibility for. Now think about how many WWII games there are. Do Americans get tired of killing Nazis? Not really -- it's easy to feel good about playing as a member of the righteous liberators fighting against a group of people who were responsible for genocide. Hey, wait, that applies to the Republic of China fighting the Imperial Japanese Army, too! Not that I'm actually defending the game. I'm sure it's loathsome. But my point is that it struck me how a video about games as propaganda would use such a euphemistic phrase to refer to WWII and imply that the game is bad just because it has Chinese people killing Japanese people, when there's at least as much (and probably more) justification for having Chinese games about the Japanese invasion of China than there is for having American games about the Allied invasion of Europe. Hell, there's plenty of American games about the eastern front -- the Soviet Union (also communist!) fighting against Nazi Germany -- and people are generally okay with looking at the Russians as the "good guys". But not the Chinese, apparently. I just thought that was interesting, is all.

He said A Game of Thrones, the first book, not A Song of Ice and Fire, the series as a whole.

Txai, keeping it awesome up in here. I'll help! I'm pretty sure this is a repost, but it's been months and it's awesome, so you get it again anyway!

I still haven't done the original Portal 2 multiplayer.

Well, this sort of thinking certainly doesn't help at all. All new media takes time to come into its own. Movies, for decades, were considered novelties without a shred of artistic value -- nowadays you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would argue that films cannot be art. I don't think we're to the point where we have real video game art yet, but I also don't think you can say that we won't get there eventually (if not necessarily soon). On the subject of pro gaming: given the points seph brings up in the video, I think we're way closer to games-as-art than we are to games-as-sport. The biggest obstacle in my mind isn't the fact that games change rapidly. They do, of course, but you get games like Starcraft that hang around with a major fanbase for a decade, and is only really displaced by its sequel... You could probably build up a fanbase around particular genre, rather than a particular game. "RTS" would become something more like "poker" as opposed to "card games" -- where as Starcraft would be 5-card stud and Starcraft II would be Texas Hold 'Em, for example. The analogy gets a little stretched, but you see what I'm getting at. Build a following around the genre rather than the game, and you can make a jump to a new game much more easily. Anyway, what I think is the biggest obstacle to pro gaming (given the points expressed in the video) is that you would have to have a game designed with spectating in mind. Deep gameplay with a healthy metagame is something that game developers already try to create. But spectating? As the video points out, no one in the video game industry gives any thought to spectating their games. And they'll only do so when they're convinced that there will be a return on their investment -- which is unlikely until the pro gaming scene is already established. It's a chicken-egg problem, and I don't think that there's a good solution to it. My prediction? If pro gaming does take off in North America (which is far from guaranteed), then it will do so by accident. A game will come along that just happens to be spectator-friendly rather than that being a specific design goal, and when it gets popular with pro gaming, then others will start to copy it. I just can't see any developer deliberately trying to create the first pro gaming friendly game... and rightfully so, because the chances of it bombing horribly are much greater than the chances of it becoming the first pro game.

I like how this thread has become "recent games don't let me do [insert your favorite thing here], therefore it's crap". The difference is that modern graphics are much more time-consuming and expensive to produce. Graphics have always been a selling point of games, yes, but the ratio of "money spent on graphics" and "money spent on everything else" has been leaning more and more toward the graphics as time has passed. The major exception to this trend has been the fairly-recent phenomenon of indie games on things like Xbox Live, iPhone/iPad, and Steam.

The nostalgia level in this thread is over 9,000.

TF2 is different than most other FPSes. Not so much easier or harder, but just with a different focus. While in the big FPS franchises -- Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield -- you can do pretty well as long as you're a good individual player, Team Fortress 2 requires... well, teamwork. The best player in the world will still get his ass kicked if he doesn't work well with his team. Even if it's just something as simple as sticking together in a group when you're moving across the map (as opposed to letting the scouts blaze ahead and the heavies lag behind) makes a huge difference in TF2, way more than in other games.

Or you're not playing enough TF2. I forget how it works with Powerlord. But the point is, you're not playing exactly the right amount of TF2.

Huh, I didn't even know there was a group besides the public one. My Steam profile is at http://steamcommunity.com/id/NativeJovian/ , can I get an invite to the private one?

I'd be totally down for some Prop Hunt. Is it something we have to download and install ourselves, or is it entirely server-side? As far as scheduling, pretty much everything but Saturday night works for me. For something like this, I'd recommend leaving it up on one of the servers for a weekend or so, but still have a specific time for people to jump on and try it so we know we'll have a full server at least once.

Party hats are the best thing ever. The gift that keeps on giving!

Good stuff here. Are different tracks inspired by different series? I'm definitely getting different vibes from some of them -- Five is Average sounds like a Megaman song, Bright Dreams from Empty Vessels sounds like something out of SNES-era Final Fantasy, Need Insurance Get A Bullet reminds me of Chrono Trigger for some reason...

3 - Larry 3000 (Time Squad) 29 - Tachikoma (Ghost in the Shell) 43 - Can't remember its name, but it's from the Judge Dredd movie 75 - Sonny or one of the other identical-looking robots (I, Robot) 90 - Haro (Gundam) 106 - Marvin (from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series)

But but but, he's awesome! Wait, A Song of Ice and Fire doesn't have cool new systems of magic or types of deities for him to mess around with. You're right. Damn.

I'd be okay with that if it meant Brandon Sanderson finishing off the series. No, I don't mean that I hope GRRM dies. I just really like Brandon Sanderson.

Sure, I don't expect absolutely everything to be wrapped up two books early. But the overabundance of cliffhangers that lead nowhere (eg, Tyrion drowning after falling into the river; nevermind, they just pulled him out) plus the complete lack of any sort of resolution when they actually end the book on those cliffhangers is annoying. Good: Kevan's death. You know what happened, you know what the implications are, but you don't know how it's going to play out. It creates anticipation and pulls you further into the story without leaving you feel like you have no idea what's going on. Bad: Jon's stabbing. Is he alive? Is he dead? We have no idea and no reason to believe one way or the other. Kevan's death leaves you going "oh shit, what the hell is going to happen next?" Jon's stabbing leaves you saying "oh shit, what the hell just happened?" That's the difference. That said, I did like the book. I just didn't like the ending.

I just finished A Dance with Dragons. Overall it was good, but left me somewhat disappointed. It was much slower than I had hoped, with half the chapters being recaps of old events from new POVs, or else just not really going anywhere in general. Dany has far more screen time than she needed for what actually happened in her story, and Davos didn't get nearly enough. Jamie only got one chapter, and all it added to the story was that Brienne is probably still alive (though it might have been someone pretending to be her), while calling into question whether Jamie is still alive or not (since he's explicitly mentioned to have disappeared, and last we saw Brienne she was being given a choice between killing Jamie or dying). Jamie got way too much badass character development in the last book to not follow up on it this time around. Quentyn's subplot was interesting at first, but turned out to be entirely pointless, which made the whole thing seem like a retroactive waste of time. Bran's chapters didn't add much besides the fact that he's wargin' it up. Victarion's chapter was good, but there was only one. Jon had some good stuff, but ended on a cliffhanger. Which reminds me. Dear George R. R. Martin. Please stop ending every single chapter on a cliffhanger, especially when they turn out to be bullshit at the beginning of the next chapter by that character. We are already emotionally invested in your characters, and the series is sufficiently entrenched that you no longer need those sorts of cheap tricks to keep our attention. All they serve to do is annoy those of us who actually want a bit of resolution now and again. Major cliffhangers as of the end of Dance with Dragons: 1) Jon Snow 2) Stannis (plus Theon, Asha, and Jeyne with him) 3) Dany 4) Davos (okay, he's definitely still alive, but where the hell did Manderly send him -- and by extension, where are Rickon and Osha?) 5) Jamie and Brienne Major cliffhangers resolved by Dance with Dragons: 1) Tyrion 4) Davos (sort of) 5) Brienne (sort of, maybe.) You begin to see the nature of my complaint.

That's pretty cool -- but how would I go about making these desktop backgrounds? Is there a good program for turning .vtf/.vmt files into standard image files?

That poor engy... Also, I'll totally take a reserved slot if they're being handed out. I always seem to find the server either completely empty or completely full, so either there's no point in joining or I can't.