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I have no comment, other than the fact that I’m really enjoying this season. This game is good enough to be fun to watch, but flawed enough to make for interesting discussion.
Netscape 1997

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Starcraft 2: Rush Analysis

I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
DM of the Rings

Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
Denuvo and the "Death" of Piracy

Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
What is Piracy?

It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
I really enjoy these video’s, I’m basically just nodding my head with every comment while enjoying Josh’s playstyle.
I have to say, this has actually been my favourite series so far, which is not what I was expecting. It is probably because I only recently played HR for the first time (I didn’t have a computer that could run it until a bit after launch, and by then there were other things on my list so it sort of got forgotten until now). In general I prefer series in which I haven’t played the game in question, but this one is turning out great so far.
This one has gotten off to a nice start. Everyone has interesting things to say and the game is a good jumping of point for lots of discussion. Though I really hope Mumbles returns, I think not doing this season was a good idea because if she didn’t play it, she probably wouldn’t have much to say. We don’t need a repeat of AC2 (as hilarious as I found that season).
True. It’s a shame there’s just the three of you, though. Have you come to any conclusion about that?
If all goes well, we should have another host joining us in early February.
That’s wonderful news! :D
…Is Mumbles going to go the way of the Randy? I miss the Randy, but I’d miss the Mumbles far more!
Although after watching that SR3 stream with Josh and Jarenth? I wouldn’t mind some Jarenth.
He’s like an upgraded Rutskarn.
He didn’t ask for this.
I’ll never stop looking.
Both of you gain +1 Internet reputation. :D
Unfortunately,you now have to pay a fine because you are sharing copyrighted material.
…hold it right there criminal scum?
amIdoinitrite?
Don’t worry, Mumbles is just taking the season off, she isn’t going to disappear forever or anything like that.
help help! im trapped in some kind of car trunk that smells like buttskarn!!!!
But are you being repressed?
Let me get this straight.
You force her to go through stuff like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Bioshock, but when you get doing fun stuff like Half-Life 2 or Human Revolution, it’s without her?
You monsters.
But she liked bioshock.
Stockholm syndrome.
Inverse Temporal Stockholm Syndrome!
Is this host Jibar? Please say it’s Jibar.
(Although I have to wonder how much of the hilarity he generates is as a result of him and Rutskarn being terrible human beings at each other whilst playing Co-Op things, which will be lost here.)
I would go co-op for those two any day.
They may end up doing a coop game someday….
I don’t understand why things are as sparsely populated as they are. I mean, sure I figure you gotta prebake the non important npcs like you would in the Final Fantasy series, or to make them plausibly repetitious like in Ass Creed but for every street to feels like you’re strolling through it at 3 am in the morning is weird; it takes me out because I feel like I’m just walking in a room with a really, really vaulted ceiling.
EDIT: I figured it out. Jensen only visits elaborate office parks, so of course there no one around.
ALSO: Jensen should use his pheromone thing by busting out a bottle of High Karate and splashing some on.
See, this is where the Deaf Protagonist comes through. You only have to create conversations for people who know ASL. Everyone else can be just a model and some idle animations because you can’t hear anything they say anyways.
And there’d be no combat taunts.
Doesn’t all of the game take place at night? It might actually be 3am in-game.
I think what drove me crazy the most about these city levels was what convoluted mazes they were. Jeez Louise…
Detroit wasn’t that bad, I loved running back and forth there because the size and design felt right.
Hengsha on the other hand makes you feel like a freakin’ lab rat running through those alleyways. >_>
Yeah, Detroit wasn’t too terrible but I’m still not a fan; I actually got sick of running back and forth.
Definitely agree about Hengsha. Most of my bile is probably heaped on that.
I eventually found that gun vendor, but it took forever and I don’t remember where he was. In one of those apartment rooms somewhere. That’s the first place you can get the silencer, which you can’t get for a while otherwise.
Ditto. In my original play through, I think I went to that vendor maybe twice – largely because I could never remember where the h3ll he was. I did use the guy at the gas station quite a lot to get rid of ‘junk’.
Found him by accident, he’s in the same building as the guys with the golden arms.
The floor below to be precise. I never got the quest on my first playthrough thanks to messing around too long in the Sarif building in the start, but found him regardless when going to “arrest” that one ganger.
Yeah, I had no idea the first time through, but I found him on my second.
I think the Hobowoman sells you his location for 0 credits, too.
Okay so technically its a bit more money than that but thats what quickload is for.
Either that or you can knock her out and take the money back.
I’m writing this as I watch the show.
I pretty much only spend credits on Praxis Kits when I’m shopping. Whenever, I go to a new city, I finish the side-quests and then visit a LIMB clinic to buy Praxis. Shamus is right, there isn’t really any else to buy with you’re (not-so) hard earned money.
I don’t know about the black lady, but there are several times where you give people money and you can turn around and knock them out to get it back. I’d assume you’re informant isn’t exempt from that. I myself did it my first time through when
you have to bribe the gangster.You know, I never really though of the pheromone thing until you talked about it. Can’t unsee.
I didn’t find that guys discounted dealer until my second playthrough. Even then, it was on complete accident and I didn’t know it until Jensen mentioned a discount. It’s in some apartment building near his own. I don’t even remember the exact location.
Does anyone else hack doors and then sneak around anyway to maximize XP? I do that all the time and I think a lot of people do.
You know, sometimes you can hack through the red piece. Doing so unlocks every node and is an instant win. I don’t think you can do that often though.
I did the same thing with the gangsters except I Stun Gunned one and meleed the other poor loser. I guess in my case, having some guy stun and punch the shit out of you for no apparent reason would scare you. In Josh’s case, its more like they would awake refreshed from their nap.
“Does anyone else hack doors and then sneak around anyway to maximize XP? I do that all the time and I think a lot of people do.”
I do that too.
Yes.
http://memegenerator.net/instance/9565785
Josh, you know that you don’t need to capture every node in a network for the hack to succeed, right? You only need the registers (green ones) :D
But… stuffs…
Only the datastores (cubes) contain rewards ;)
Yeah, but you have to get to the cube first.
Its better to capture the red one when you can,since it automatically gives you everything.
When that’s possible of course, as half of the time it isn’t.
Does (often) make an easy win condition when you can do it though.
Yeah, he could have finished it so easily, then clicked every one except the green :< Although paying attention isn't really worth it on this kind of thing, so I don't blame him.
That second vendor is in that building where you shoot the dealers from,just open the window and get in.
As for the door,you couldve gotten the jump aug,and then just jump over the gate.
Or you can build a stair case of carboard boxes. Or but on box on the bin to your right and climb up that ladder…
You should get the more fun augs (jump and strength especially) as I’m sure most people play through the sensible way and hacking is boring as all get out to watch.
Exactly! We’re suddenly getting Sensible-Josh, it’s like Sensible-Josh from his Shogun playing is seeping into spoiler warning.
Get that man some whiskey, a pink bonnet and a big gun, pronto!
Indeed.He still has undrank booze in his inventory!
I was fully expecting him to have the fridge augmentation by now.
It’s fun just ruining cinematic moments like the druggie ambush in Tindall’s apartment by blocking doors with fridges.
Later on in the game, I was trying to take out a gang without being seen, so I snuck into the living room and took everyone out, but there was one guy behind a door that was locked. So I figured what I’d do is put a fridge in front of the door and fire one of the guns I’d stolen off the gang members into the air. He’d hear the noise, come to investigate, opening the locked door, but because there was a fridge in the way he wouldn’t be able to get into the room to see me.
So I fired the gun, the guy came running, opened the door and knocked the fridge flying across the room :(
In fact, he still has undrunk whisky in his hotbar.
I’ll add to the more-crazy-playing-please crowd.
Taking out the informant was nice.
Not very good at systematic exploration, are you?
When I saw the part in the credits where you’re in the police station and Josh just chucks a grenade directly at some guy I just cracked up. That should be interesting when it comes around.
And those two gangsters are asleep FOREVER. I think it wasn’t until I’d gotten back from China that they weren’t snoozing on top of each other in hilariously suggestive positions.
On the topic of how much good it’ll do, to be fair, in the original DE, the guy you worked for in that scenario WAS a hardened criminal while this guy made it clear, he was not. Also, you took his gun. :P
One of the major Jensen twists did blindside me: Jensen is vat-grown and was given to his parents at an apparent age of five. I did understand that he was rejection-proof, though. Maybe I’d have gotten the other if I’d played DX1.
My murder-run ended up with me having all the murdering augmentations I needed towards the end of Hengsha, because while that gives less XP, there’s also fewer of them.
Also, Josh, you are a terrible person.
FUCKING SPOILER
Well, he’s kinda wrong. So it’s a fake spoiler.
Jenson wasn’t given to his parents, they stole him from the company that made/engineered him, setting fire to the lab as they went. And as I recall it’s pretty heavily suggested that he isn’t so much vat grown, like JC Denton, but rather was genetically engineered to accept augmentations.Either way it was a nice call back to the original game, and the Denton brother’s history.
Especially since Jenson is heavily implied to be the genetic “father” of the Denton clones. Which makes the name “Adam” hilariously (and appropriately) cliche.Augmentations: Yeah, one minor flaw with DX:HR is that there are some augs that are MUST-gets, and others that honestly never, ever see use. (Best example: Hacking Additional Info.) And other augs like Less/No Recoil can be totally avoided depending on your playstyle.
Pheromones: YES! I also feel uncomfortable using pheromones to win a dialogue battle, because it makes me feel like I’m not so much convincing somebody to do something else than manipulating them into doing what I want. As a result, I make it a point not to use pheromones in every battle unless it’s one of those minor ones that I have no way around.
Not to mention that pheromones don’t even work like that in real life anyway. They CAN subconsciously influence the way you react to someone (e.g. you just get a good ‘vibe’ from someone), but it’s not big enough to actually sway your decision if you already had strong beliefs against it. For example, if an evangelist came up to you in the street and tried to convince you to renounce your existing faith to join his own, even if the guy was using pheromones to himself seem more personable than usual, it’s still not going to be enough to make you undertake such a huge change to your life.
And like Shamus… I often wonder how Adam releases these pheromones anyway. :P They have to be stored in some compartment on his body, but it has to be somewhere where it can be easily released into the air. My best guess is that it’s located in his mouth, and he breathes them out when they’re being used.
Hacking FAILURE: I warned you back in the first or second episode, Josh! ;) Hacking gets much, MUCH harder as soon as you finish the first mission. You can make it easier for yourself by Reinforcing nodes that you’ve already captured though. (This often triggers the security system, so I generally only reinforce nodes once the alarm has been set off.)
19:25: And shooting people wins out! XD
Pee-G and Bee-K: Firstly… Do gangsters REALLY have names like that?? O.o Secondly, I had the double-takedown aug by this point, so I just walked up to them, went “Hello!” and BAM! Arm-swords to the chest. 8)
I agree with you on the augments thing. Like Josh, I had all the upgrades I wanted by the half way point. The rest of the time I was just getting interesting augments just for variety. Part of me is convinced that you could plow through the game without a single upgrade, but I’ll probably never try it.
For normal lethal gameplay, it’s absolutely possible. Though, I’m guessing it would have to be an aggressive playthrough. I’m not sure about the bosses though.
But the point is that you release the pheromones along with using the right type of response which isn’t exactly brainwashing as much as bonus-persuasion. You’d still fail if you tried to treat a person displaying Alpha-traits as an Omega.
Also, I like that people who know about the CASIE augment will call you out when you use it. It only works on you if you don’t know of the trick, like an illusion.
Like when you try it on Malik. Her dialogue is hilarious.The final conversation in the DLC is pretty funny when you fire it off there as well.
Yeah, the pheromones only work if you have a convincing argument, so it’s very similar to what you do anyway, just that you can put forward a slightly weaker argument and assist yourself.
I didn’t like using it, because I felt it meant I’d failed at convincing in normal conversation, but with someone like Tindall, where it would just give you extra stuff it was fine (except, I wanted to help Tindall, so I reloaded the game)
I think they phrase it more creepily on the PC. On the consoles it’s just ‘Pheromone options’ or ‘L1 Pheromones’, something like that. It made it a lot less weird and it felt like you were using an assisted argument rather than just mind control. It was really fun working out what personality type someone is
“Hacking extra information”
Isn’t there an issue with the game where you already get all of that info anyway without taking the aug?
Yep. They’ve been criticize for it several times. “The augment that literally does nothing.”
No! Without the aug you can’t see what’s on nodes that aren’t directly adjacent to nodes that you own.
Except than the info is usually based on the level of the node compared to your own hacking stealth…whatever it was. So you really didn’t need to know that information anyways.
As Infinitron said, you do get more information than without it; you can mouse-over nodes and get the detection chance, rather than having to click on them and mouse over the hack option (a small upgrade, admittedly), and you can see what is in datastores right at the beginning of your hack attempt, which lets you know if it’s worth going for them or just leaving them.
I mostly got them because I got every hacking upgrade there was.
Hacking stealth is far more useful: never get detected in the first place :p
I’ve been slightly disappointed so far that Josh’s playstyle has been effective rather than… Cuftbertian, but I’ve realized something.
Jensen has lots of upgrades for stealth and silent killing, but when he gets to a boss fight, he must use radically different weapons in a straight up gunfight where the odds are stacked against him.
Cuftbert lives! :D
Seeing how they can easily be bested by just grenades,and cuftbert is an expert grenadier,it will be a blast to watch.
And then, consume all the alcohol.
Yeah, the Cuftbertian grenade stun-lock is super-effective. I think the second or third time I played through the second boss couldn’t even move I spammed that many grenades and hit it that much with the revolver.
The third boss I managed to do entirely by blind-firing with the revolver and explosive rounds.
I can’t believe you are wasting praxis on the most useless augs ever like the conversation one or hacking stealth. There are many more useful and entertaining augmentations to get which would make the show more fun to watch. Given you won’t be doing a max xp run and like Shamus said you will be missing out on somethings. If you spend points on totally unnecessary augs (conversation one I can get, but the hacking stealth is epic fail) then you really will be missing out.
Strength Aug
Cloaking
Max hacking level (there’s a number of level 5 locked apartments in Chicago, and at least one contains a praxis kit)
Reflex Booster
Jump enhancement
Smart Vision
Typhoon system (for bosses and robots)
List goes on of far more useful augmentations to pickup…There’s only one, at most 2 points in the entire game you require social enhancer to convince someone of what you want. The rest can easily be done without it if you just pay attention to a person. Hacking extras are unnecessary because they can all be done without help, even level 5’s, and there’s an abundance of worms and virus’s around if you just look or buy them or get them from hacking.
I always max out Hacking Stealth. Then again I play on a system that is decrepit and input during the hacking mini-game is dependent upon your frame rate so I need that decreased chance of detection.
You can play the game too, you know. Play it however you like. :)
More importantly, we’re doing a run-though were we can’t just save & load all the time. The hacking game might be fun to play, but it’s boring as hell to watch and we want to get through it as quickly as possible. Failing to hack a device and getting locked out for 30 secs is a minor problem when you’re on your own, but when you’re recording a show it’s a complete killjoy that brings the entertainment to a halt.
A Let’s Play-through is never an optimal play-through.
But refrigerators will get thrown, right? That’s all I ask. The melee montage in the credits can only make me so happy. I don’t want the most ideal playthrough, I want the most ridiculous playthrough.
Hacking stealth is entirely because we won’t be doing any save scumming to get through hacking, and – especially in the late game – it makes things a lot easier to get in one go if all of the base nodes have a 15% detection chance rather than an 80% chance.
As for why I’m getting those early? There’s a lot of hacking involved in the Megan investigation quest. Rest assured, I’ll soon be picking up the far more ludicrous augmentations.
I look forward to the return of Adam “Reginald Cuftburt” Jensen. May he continue the long reign of chaotic-stupid.
Every now and then you should go through all the pocket secretaries you get. Quite a bit have codes on them and just scrolling through ’em should be enough.
Just going to say this in case you didn’t know (because I didn’t for ages): if you hit disconnect just before the trace gets you then you don’t get the 30 second cooldown and can go straight back in; the number of times you can do this depends on the rating of the lock.
I haven’t watched the videos yet, so if you’ve been doing this all along then sorry for the unnecessary info.
At the very least you’ve helped me, I never realised what the attempts counter even meant :D
Why do people always moan about how Josh plays…you know he is just gonna troll you and lug around some huge weapon he never uses, has no skills in and take him half his unaugmented inventory….its Josh…Thats what he does.
Damn lovely bastard, that Cuftbert guy.
So… the silenced sniper rifle.
The rocket launcher!Its perfect,because it takes up half the inventory,which he will never upgrade.
Typhoon is pretty much useless as well.Everything it does,you can do just as well with weapons.Plus,you dont need to get close for a grenade to blow shit up.And robots go down so easy with an emp burst,why try anything else?
This. A stun gun can easily take you through the entire game.
The stun gun laughs at your boss fights. LAUGHS I say!
Fully upgraded Typhoon does take out bosses in two hits though, and you can pack five ammo into 2 inventory slots – more space-efficient than EMP grenades. So between that and its panic-button functionality, it has several uses.
Sure,but for that praxis cost you can upgrade your inventory,and not only be able to stack a few grenades,but get more room for other stuff as well.
Also, if you convert the grenades into mines they stack; can’t remember the stack limit though as I never had that many at a time
Three mines of the same type. After that it goes in a different pile. Its still a good way to save space as mine templates and grenades don’t stack, so the “ingredients” needed to make three mines would take nine slots instead of the mine stack’s two.
And even if you don’t include the mine templates 3 mines are smaller than 3 grenades, which is about how I remember it.
I preferred mines anyway; you couldn’t throw them as far, but they had more tactical use. Also, attaching an EMP mine to the ass of a box guard and then running away is hilarious.
Oddly enough, I don’t think I ever used a mine. Plenty of EMP grenades and a couple gas ones…but no mines.
Maybe I just enjoyed shooting/sniping/takedown…ing a lot more.
There’s always the “You’re playing the game wrong!” guy…
I mean, except the epic fail that was Rutskarn playing Dark Messiah of Might and Magic without any magic (by far the most entertaining thing about the game, ignored to the point of trolling), I really don’t care what they do as long as they’re discussing the game.
“There's always the “You're playing the game wrong!” guy”
That complaining was especially ridiculous during the FO3 run when people complained about Josh not having any points into energy weapons, even though he still killed everything with ease with the Metal Blaster.
As for Dark Messiah:
Actually magic in that game is rather weak in terms of damage. If you just want to win instead of messing around (instant ice, wee!), you don’t need anything more then a sword, a shield and your mighty boot. In fact at higher difficulties you really don’t want to use anything but that.
The games throws plenty of scrolls your way anyhow.
I think its better with 3 – i mean any 3…nothing against Mumbles or Randy, love those guys. The commentary just flows better with 3 people.
THIS.
The three-host seasons have been the best ones because there’s enough room for you to stretch out and give your thoughts without interruption.
You’re all dumb.
Does this make you feel better?
edit: I remember there was bioware in Shadowrun that actually helped make some of your bodily functions, like farting, less offensive. It gave some kind of like charisma bonus or something (this was over a decade ago, so most of the details for it are lost to my bad memory).
They have stuff like that for 4th Edition in Augmentation. There’s one called Clean Metabolism that makes your colon more efficient and eliminates all unpleasant body odor, and plenty of other implants that have purely cosmetic purposes, like having perfect skin.
That was it! That was the piece of bioware I was thinking of!
This sounds like a short story by Philip K Dick. Actually, I know there was such a story where the population was split between people who had augmented themselves to not sweat, fart or smell at all and people who gave up even using deodorant and bathing because the augments were unnatural.
And the poor central character just wanted to keep living like normal, but everyone wanted to recruit him to one faction or the other.
Regarding the pheromones: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/critical-miss/9130-Deus-Ex-Rodent-Revolution
I want to curl up in a ball of shame and embarrassment every time I think about the pheromones now – it was the first aug I got! XD
I’m not so sure that the cutscenes are pre-rendered as you can clearly see aliasing in them.
If they where pre-rendered they’d crank up all the goodies (especially anti-aliasing).
My guess is that they just add a lot of post effect shaders and whatnot. (blur, depth of field).
It’s possible the cutscene’s uses a pre-set gamma too instead of the normal play gamma.
I read some people commenting on different poly count. But it is not unusual for game engine cutscenes to bump up the poly/detail during cutscenes as they have set camera paths and actions. Compared to player control where the engine need to look good regardless of what the player is doing/how they player is moving.
Now if I’m wrong and they are pre-rendered then why the heck isn’t there any anti-aliasing?
A quick way to check is to see how many .bik (BINK) video files there are in the game folder(s).
bink video has caused many games to crash or bug out in the past for me and I personally prefer games to use the game engine for everything including the cutscenes.
There’s been a few games over the last few years that has used Ogg Theora for video (pre-rendered) cutscenes, I can’t recall ever seeing issues with games using that.
One thing is clear regardless, the cutscenes in DX:HR are not seamless, which is a great shame.
It’s also possible that the only reason they would use pre-rendered cutscenes is to show off Tesselation (which not all systems would be able to support), hence the different “polycount”.
Edit:
By reading/searching around it does seem like bink is used *sigh*.
So if you see .bik files or a binkw32.dll or similar in te game folder, yep bink is used.
Please note though that some games may have bink intro/logo videos but otherwise use game rendered cutscenes or some other video format.
It’s really obvious they’re pre-rendered on high resolutions screens (I’m using a 2560×1440 resolution). That and the lighting is not just darker – it’s completely different.
GRAH! Josh skipped along right by the ‘dogmentation’ pun!
Yeah,he did.Really guys,eavesdrop on the conversations,some are pretty funny(like the robocop one,for example).
This is the best series so far. Not only has DX:HR got the right level of flaws, it’s got the right flaws. Short tonal things, whereas, for instance the thing most people complain about HL2 is how repetitive and long the journey sections can be, which is an awful flaw. It’s only going to get bad right at the end, where the last level drags a bit too much. Maybe you could just binge on energy and cloak right through the level?
The other thing is DX is really really varied. There’s something new to discuss in every quest, every location and every level. (Even if Shamus is still content talking about the things in the future :D)
Josh, when you go hack, screw subtletly and just hack every single node as much as possible. While hacking points ahead, you should re-hack already owned points to increase their strenght and slow down the tracing.
Practically, your mouse should always be in motion.
As I recall fortification carries a ridiculous chance of detection for a relatively minor benefit. If you’ve maxed out Fortification, then it’s kinda worth having, but it’s rarely worth the risk before you’ve set off the alarm.
It is worth doing once you already have triggered the alarm,especially while you wait for some node to finish.
I… didn’t really get a bad vibe from the pheromones, really I felt they were no different than any “level up your persuade skill,” mostly because the way it plays out, isn’t really like pheromones or mind control, really it’s all about “reading” people and what tactic would work best, if you misread than the thing does nothing, so your pheromones aren’t really doing much
So unless a Bard using Diplomacy in DnD is really that creepy, this doesn’t feel creepy to me at all