Gyokuyoutama

Nearly two thirds of SPUF visits are from Finland. Discuss.

Did they actually release Aliciarone or did they just decide to say fuck it, this thing ain't get released soon, might as well mine our design documents for orange juice DLC?

Sometimes I remember that dumb SPUF wiki and I feel kind of bad for being involved in something so pointless. But then I remember that it's just wikia, so pointless stupidity isn't really out of place.

To give you a better idea of how this specifically affects the game, consider Unseen Elder. He's a leader card, meaning that if you choose him as the leader for your deck you always get him in your opening hand, and so he's clearly meant to be built around. What does he do? He can kill three of your creatures to add their power to his own. In GWENT all that matters is the total power of your force, so all that you actually gain in power when you play him is his 5 base strength. Many grunt infantry type units with marginal abilities have strength of around 8, so that isn't very impressive. What benefit do you then gain from this? In the old days, the benefit was that all the strength is in Unseen Elder, who is gold and thus can't be targeted by most effects. The grunts that you ate might have been killed off by various effects, but Unseen Elder won't be. With the current rules you've basically done nothing but shoot yourself in the foot. They can just scorch to kill all the units with the highest power, which will be your Unseen Elder and almost certainly nothing else. Thus they not only get a huge swing in total strength, but they also 4 for 1'ed you and in GWENT card advantage is far more important than it usually is in card games. By removing the natural ability for Gold cards to have immunity to most effects, they turn an interesting leader into something completely useless. And that's just one small example among many.

I don't play a lot of GWENT, but even from my perspective it looks like the last update completely fucked up the game at a fundamental level. Basically you have bronze, silver and gold cards. There are restrictions on how many silver and gold cards you can have, and these are very important because there's no mana cost for cards so this prevents the most degenerate decks. Additionally, gold cards were immune to most card effects. In the last update they got rid of that mechanical property of gold cards; they now can be affected by anything as normal. What's ridiculous about this is that the game was clearly designed around gold cards having this property. For example, the mascot card Geralt was useful primarily because he was big and gold, meaning that once he was on the table it was hard to nullify him. There are plenty of cards that have as much of a numerical threat, but they could be damaged, bounced, stolen, etc. making them far less of an actual threat. You could even play Geralt and then play a board sweep, keeping your Geralt. And the same sorts of things applied to every gold card. On the flip side you can now pump your gold cards, which you couldn't previously, but in most cases this is not nearly as good as having immunity from opponent's effects. If anything I think that having the ability to use your own abilities on gold cards is most likely to lead to a degenerate bounce or reanimate interaction, which previously could be avoided without needing special text. There were even cards that had the effect of turning gold cards into silver cards. What is the purpose of those cards now that gold doesn't really mean anything outside of card limits on deck construction and in the text of a few random abilities? I'm trying to think of what a similar change would be in another game. I guess something that gets to the heart of how much this changes basic assumptions about how cards work and how much it changes balance would be if they made it so in Magic lands and artifacts had summoning sickness.

Speaking of the SNES, does anyone have any experience with those custom pirate SNES cartridges with various ROMs loaded onto them that are floating around everywhere? I'd love to play Gundam Wing Endless Duel, Seiken Densetsu 3 or The Violinist of Hamelin in English on my actual SNES, but I'm worried about the cartridges being of low quality or causing damage to the system.

Here's an essential video to watch if you're interested in chiptunes: Fitting all of that into three channels requires a lot skill.

I think that, as an experience, Homestuck reminds me quite a lot of Omikron. An ambitious work with many unexpected shifts in genre, mood and gameplay/presentation. A work that frequently breaks the fourth wall. And in both cases, those fourth wall breaks are used to make you question why you are still keeping up in the first place (with nearly outright mockery from Hussie, and Omikron's plot involving the conceit that it's not a game but a real connection to another world that literally drains the soul from your body.) Omikron had better music though:

The problem is that it becomes impossible to tell when something new is posted. Things get buried in topic threads inside of topic threads inside of topic threads. You might be able to follow an exchange between one or two people, provided that they aren't assholes who jump to all the threads at the same time, but it's impossible to follow the conversation as a whole. As a result, everyone ends up trying to understand what anyone is saying and instead most people will just put whatever slogans or shitposts they think will get them the most e-points. If you compound it with sorting by likes or upvotes everything becomes exponentially worse.

Part of why Deus Ex 1 is so good is that it includes every conspiracy theory it can think of, and makes the morality of most groups highly ambiguous. The effect of this is that no matter what your preferred political leanings are or what your favorite conspiracy theory is, you can interpret the game as validating your beliefs.

The first step of achieving a sensible internet is killing all people who think that nested comments are a good idea.

If they were going to respond, it might actually be best to respond with that "we used to make games, now we make money" video. At least it would show that they have a sense of humor about the situation. What else are the going to say? Obviously Episode 3 isn't coming out any time soon, and almost certainly it isn't coming at all, so it's not like they can make anyone feel any better about that.

I really can't see including Hegel without Schopenhauer. The mileage you can get out of Hegel bullying Schopenhauer is almost a series in and of itself.

I don't think that I can make them, though I can respond and react to them. Of course, it could be that I don't know where to go to make them. Sometimes I see a "what's on your mind" prompt, which I assume can be used to make a status update since it's in the status section, but clicking on it does nothing. Scratch this I finally got it to work after going through things again. Status updates were disabled, despite the fact that I'm pretty sure that I enabled them on several occasions, but I could also just be a fucking idiot.

You guys never got anywhere with this so I'm just going to do it for you: It's going to be a SOL show starring philosophers as schoolgirls. Philosophers will not be chosen based on their merit or influence, but rather by how many dumb stories are made about them which could lead to amusing scenarios. Potential Cast: Socrates Aristotle Diogenes Averroes Thomas Aquinas Leibniz Schopenhauer and Hegel (the two have to be included as a pair or not at all) Kierkegaard Stirner Camus Marx

Who was it on old SPUF that was obsessed with destiny? I need to consult my walfas comics.

I am eagerly awaiting the day when Valve is a less popular company than Konami. I would estimate three years for that to happen at the current pace. It's possible that Konami will decide to just start slaughtering babies or something and throw the calculations off though.

Happy birthday aabicus! You've really accomplished quite a lot in your time. Most people at your age would be satisfied just tackling Kindergarten.

If they wanted to end it on a somewhat hopeful ending, while remaining true to the themes of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, they could have the Combine somehow drawn into a war with a yet larger empire. One probably not any more benevolent towards humanity than the Combine, but with such a conflict the Combine would at least have their attention redirected elsewhere giving humanity a chance to regroup and focus on long-term survival. It'd also be a nice close to the Half-Life 2 arc, since it would mirror how the Half-Life 1 arc ended with the Xen threat being eclipsed by something much worse. If you wanted to, you could even tie things into Race X and perhaps even get Shepherd back into the mix. Perhaps the combine haven't encountered Race X since they come from another dimension that only human portal technology has reached, or something along those lines. The destruction of the Boraelis could end up creating a stable portal to their dimension, but in the middle of combine territory.

Is this fully automated, or only partially? (A lot of the robots automatically back away from the white boundary, so there's at least partial automation going on.) If it's fully automated then that "win by side stepping" was a brilliant way to punish people who didn't program sufficient edge detection.

One of my favorite parts of the modern gaming world is seeing developers try to sell moves like this as "good news" for the players. What's especially great about this example was that the devs announced the price hike about a week before it happened, but apparently weren't allowed to talk specifically about the deal with Gearbox until it happened. I'll give them credit for at least warning the players that it was going to happen (since they weren't obligated to), but it was pretty hilarious to see days of posts along the lines of "we can't talk about the reason for the price increase now, but the day it goes live we'll explain everything and you'll agree that this helps everyone" followed by an explanation of "we partnered with Gearbox and they said that they thought our game was good enough that we could charge more for it."

Clearly Bioware needs to make Shattered Steel 2.

Actually homing sliver could be pretty cool with all those madness vampires.

Maybe I want to know what variant of "Is X replacing Y" is going to show up in the comments of the next RedLetterMedia video.