Questions you want answered.

oilypenguin wrote:

carrot posted something in slack about Kim Jung-un tossing board game pieces at his brother when he was losing. I assume, of course, that they were playing monopoly.

So what would be good North Korean propaganda flavored monopoly spaces?

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oilypenguin wrote:

carrot posted something in slack about Kim Jung-un tossing board game pieces at his brother when he was losing. I assume, of course, that they were playing monopoly.

So what would be good North Korean propaganda flavored monopoly spaces?

I'm assuming they play the original incarnation of the game, meant to demonstrate the evils of capitalism.

Anyway, either Boardwalk or Park Place needs to be that giant unfinished concrete hotel.

Tanglebones wrote:

Any given show that has Sara Moulton on it. Also, America's Test Kitchen has a creepy guy as its frontman, but their recipes are good.

Chris Kimbell? Not anymore. He left last year. Never thought of him as creepy, though.

MechaSlinky wrote:

Did you know that I haven't been here in a while but coming back and seeing some familiar names still posting in a thread I created years ago is literally making me cry right now and I don't think I ever want to leave again?

How did you leave? I thought the fence was too high. And too electrified.

I hate boss battles. I hate boss battles that break the rhythm and flow developers spent hundreds of hours of, well, developing. What games do bass bottles appear and don't feel jarring to the mind?

Strangeblades wrote:

What games do bass battles appear and don't feel jarring to the mind?

There's a Guitar Center near my house. I've heard from some of my friends that the bass player from Korn (Munkey?) and this homeless guy who looks like George Clinton have had some epic bass battles there.

Though I've never witnessed it, I would imagine that it's pretty mind jarring.

Oooo fun game!

Strangeblades wrote:

bass bottles

IMAGE(https://www.owliquors.com/image/cache/data/beer/bass/bass-ale-bottle-500x500.jpg)IMAGE(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2Fi0ejOfL9k/hqdefault.jpg)IMAGE(https://cdn0.rubylane.com/shops/1362534/GS-106.1L.jpg)
Seriously though, almost all I can think of is boss battles that suck, like the ones in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Screw those boss battles. Maybe the dragons in Skyrim would qualify as OK - those were pretty fun and not really jarring, at least to me. Perhaps boss battles are less jarring and ruin the rhythm a little less in an open-world game with little direction anyway; there's scarcely any pacing to ruin.

In all seriousness, the best boss battles ever were from Super Mario World. Every boss battle since then has been trying to capture that same lightning in a bottle. Perhaps a bottle of Bass.

The only other boss battles that I've ever enjoyed were from Metal Gear Solid (PS1). That game stands out to me as one of the greatest video games ever created. I'm sure it wouldn't hold up in today's gaming environment, but for its time it was revolutionary.

Boss battles in Megaman were pretty interesting. In fact, many Megaman games featured a boss rush sequence near the end because those were some of the best parts. Boss battles in Monster Hunter are cool, though arguably the entire game is a boss rush so...

I see lots of people are playing We happy few. Am I odd for having zero interest in playing this until its actually finished?

strangederby wrote:

I see lots of people are playing We happy few. Am I odd for having zero interest in playing this until its actually finished?

No. I've got several games I have beta access to or backed on Kickstarter, but because they lean narratively or I want to wait for their systems to settle down I haven't played them yet.

On the other hand, I've got 100+ hours in Factorio.

Shadow of the Colossus has some great boss battles...err...is a great boss battle?

I suspect boss battles come from cabinet games, where the player would get into a pattern of rhythm and timing during the level, and then have to change it up entirely to get past the end of the level (and thus have to pump more quarters while learning). By nature, they are disruptive, and a mechanic I can deal with but don't really enjoy. I guess Path of Exile has the boss battles I kind of like, but even there, they are more of a chore to me than a pleasure.

I like a good boss battle. One that takes the skills you've just been practising and finesses them in some clever way. But I'd say boss battles that do that well are in the minority. Super Meat Boy's boss levels work really well in their context but in real terms they aren't much more than regular levels but with time limits applied.

I really appreciated that Batman: Arkham knight essentially dispensed with boss battles altogether. The pacing of the game was greatly improved for that.

The one thing I hate is a boss battle being inscrutable. I hate getting to them only to find there are zero cues about what to do next. I played something recently, which for some reason I've blanked, that for pretty much every boss battle I had to stop and look up online what-the-F I was supposed to do. That really kills it for me. I'm bright guy so it doesn't have to be spelt out but sometimes I find it eye rolling.

Eh, I love the boss battles in the Souls games, but maybe I'm weird. Ultimately, mostly the game winds up being a test of how well you can avoid everything except the boss, or as much as possible, to make your boss runs the real meat of the game, while the trash mobs are just there for farming equipment/experience/materials.

I loved boss battles in World of Warcraft, too.

RawkGWJ wrote:

The only other boss battles that I've ever enjoyed were from Metal Gear Solid (PS1)

Personally I like the boss battles in MGS3 more, but MGS1 would be a close second for that series.

I could probably spend all day just naming games with boss battles that I like, but the major standouts like Mario and Mega Man have already been mentioned. I don't think anyone mentioned Zelda so I'll mention that.

RPG boss battles don't usually feel jarring because they tend to operate pretty much exactly like the rest of the game, and the best ones are the ones that add an additional wrinkle to the fight like needing to rely heavily on status ailments when normally you never use them or needing to work around some sort of special defense unique to that boss. As much as I don't like Final Fantasy 13, I felt like its boss battles were consistently excellent because each one needed a different combination of skills to take down.

Then there's stuff like Mother 3's final boss, where winning requires doing something that in any other battle would be the worst thing you could do, but since that battle is so much more about the story than it is about the mechanics it's actually not nearly as counter-intuitive as it sounds. I love that battle because it subverts what would normally be terrible boss battle design to make something emotionally impactful and narratively satisfying.

Also, I recently finished Dragon Quest 5, and there was a boss battle in particular that I loved not because it was all that interesting from a gameplay perspective but because the boss was named Bjorn the Behemoose.

Dakuna wrote:

Eh, I love the boss battles in the Souls games, but maybe I'm weird. Ultimately, mostly the game winds up being a test of how well you can avoid everything except the boss, or as much as possible, to make your boss runs the real meat of the game, while the trash mobs are just there for farming equipment/experience/materials.

Good call.

By and large the boss battles in the Dark Souls series are really well designed and a good number of them work just as well as a single player challenge as they do for 2 or 3 players. 4 players tends to break the mechanics of them in my experience, mostly making them too easy but in the odd case making them really hard.

Gremlin wrote:
strangederby wrote:

I see lots of people are playing We happy few. Am I odd for having zero interest in playing this until its actually finished?

No. I've got several games I have beta access to or backed on Kickstarter, but because they lean narratively or I want to wait for their systems to settle down I haven't played them yet.

On the other hand, I've got 100+ hours in Factorio.

I'm with you there. I could have played We Happy Few a year ago, but I just don't want to until it's some level of done. It could be fun to run around the randomly-generated levels, but I'd really want the narrative structure around it.

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island had some of the best boss battle ever IMHO. They all tended to have some funny goofy twist to them like the boss you embarrassed to beat by knocking his pants off.

Agreed. That team had something special about them.

I generally despise boss-battles as an unnecessary throwback that disrupts story and progression.

On the other hand, I recognise that many people enjoy them, and I've occasionally enjoyed them myself. The most impactful ones that come to mind are:

Well-done boss battles: Nioh. The entire preceding level hones the necessary skills, which are then tested thoroughly by an unforgiving boss. Good stuff!

Terrible boss battles: Deus-Ex - Human Revolution. Here was a game where I was thoroughly enjoying a non-lethal, sneaky playthrough, and all of a sudden run into mandatory, run-and-gun kill scenarios that completely break what I was trying to do (not to mention what I was specced for). The fights were too trivial to be fun for people specced for combat (who presumably wanted that), and extremely difficult for those specced as far away from combat as possible. Bloody terrible.

How do feel about people cross-posting on their social media accounts? If someone posts to a photo Instagram and then auto-shares it to Twitter, does that bother you?

If so, is it a deal-breaker or more of an annoyance? Would you consider unfollowing on one of the two services?

Asking for a friend.

I'd pick one. Can't blame them for getting their message out all the ways they can...

Depends on the service. I disabled auto-posting my tweets on Facebook because Facebook isn't really structured to handle a thread of tweets all at once. Instagram and Twitter are more at the same speed. Tumblr to Twitter makes sense because it's announcing new content.

Generally, the more rapidly that stuff is getting posted, the less I care about seeing something twice.

Though I follow a couple thousand people on Twitter, so my flood of a feed may be a slight outlier.

These days I only tweet so I have twitter set to cross post to FB so my FB folks can catch up with my inane thoughts too.

FB disgusts me, and I don't use Twitter at all. Instagram doesn't have too many spammy spammers who spam all the time, so I use that from time to time. I have lots of family who use FB but not Insta, so I do auto cross post to FB if I think it's something that my family would enjoy.

I have a fair bit of overlap so I tend to only cross post when I think it's something extra good or something I want to get out there. I do find it a bit annoying following people that cross post, especially when on Facebook that means a squillion separate posts together on the same topic.

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What is the Burger King slogan?

I'm pretty okay with double posting because I'm very aggressive about curating my Twitter feed. Only a very few people. It's mostly broadsheets.

As a person who crossposts, I do it because I have different follower groups on different services.

Tanglebones take is how I read it too. But thousands of people followed? You need some kind of filter in place... And how did you notice one feed's content was showing up multiple times, out of all the others?