BBAlpert

I assume this is only for one-off guest appearances on other podcasts, not full shows that they're on (or even host), correct? Because if this is including full shows, that adds a bunch of things like...

• Shift+F1 (the spiritual successor to Alt+F1) (Drew and Danny O'Dwyer)
• Friends at the Table (Austin)
• Ima Fix Wolves (Jeff and Dave Lang)
• One Song Only (Austin)
• Til Death Do Us Part (Patrick)
• Panning the Stream (Dan)
• Team GFB Radio (Dave Lang)
• Still Untitled, as well as a number of other podcasts at Tested (Will and Norm)

...and surely many others.

He did, but but said that like 45 minutes before the story went up. They make a correction later in the cast, right after the get back from the commercial break, right before the news section.

"Psychologically, we find that people misbehave when there is somebody else to observe them misbehaving," Barnett said. "When it's a one-on-one game, what is my motivation for saying something awful? But when you're in a game with a bunch of other people and you say something, a bunch of other people laugh at you, so something happened. We tend to see people behave very differently in one-on-one situations."

This is such a garbage position for Valve to take for (at least) 2 major reasons:

1. It makes the willfully naive assumption that people will behave themselves if they think nobody is watching them
2. Even if the idea that people will only misbehave if they have an audience wasn't bullshit, using it as a justification not to moderate chat doesn't even address that issue because it is a fucking one-on-one game where there is always an audience of the other player. Toxic assholes don't act out because they're being watched by moderators, they act out because they're being watched by THE OTHER PLAYERS.

Dialogue boxes that don't let you skip through instantly and/or that require too many button presses. By "skip through instantly", I don't mean "skip the entire conversation", I mean "skip from one box to the next without any pauses". This is one of the things that killed Octopath Traveler for me. In Octopath Traveler, you get to the end of the dialogue box, and the game waits for you to press the button to move onto the next box. But when you press the button, it doesn't bring the next box up right away. You hit the button, then wait a second or two, and THEN the next box comes up. This pads out a conversation that would have taken 4 or 5 seconds to skim through into a scene that takes 12 seconds to get through. That doesn't seem like much, but in games where there is a ton of talking, and most of it isn't even all that important, it adds up to a maddening amount of waiting.

As far as requiring too many button presses, I'm looking at Dragon Quest Heroes (or whatever the DQ Dynasty Warriors game was). I don't mind if text animates in, as long as I can press the button to have it fill in right away. One thing that's NICE to have though, is to start filling in text quickly/instantly if you've just quick-filled the previous box. In other words (not actual spoilers, I'm just using spoiler blocks to save space)...

In DQH, it's... (not actual spoilers, I'm just using spoiler blocks to save space)

WHAT?!?

*immediately looks it up*

Oh wow, you weren't kidding when you said it was "just HoMM2 on mobile." They're not even trying to be subtle about it, either.

I think this is the key. She's not a "puts on a white hood and leaves a burning cross on Liara's front yard" space racist, but she is a "calls Wrex 'articulate' and thinks it's a compliment", "tells Garrus that he's 'one of the good ones'", "instinctively clutches her purse when she passes Tali on the street" space racist.

The elevator music from the Bill Nye FMV* adventure game, Bill Nye The Science Guy: Stop the Rock.

(go to about 11:26)

*edit: Strictly speaking, it might not qualify as FMV, as it's generally not FULL video. Usually video characters over a background. But you get the idea.

I played a ton of The Witcher 2, got sidetracked and put it down for a little bit, that little bit turned into a long bit, and then I came back to it about 3 years later.

It turns out that the place I stopped was only about a half hour away from the end.

At the other end of the spectrum, parrying isn't something you ever really NEED to be able to do in order to get up to that point. So if you have gone through the entire game dodging, blocking, and tanking attacks (like I did) instead of getting good at parrying, you might get up to Gwyn and hit a brick wall (like I did).

The final boss fight in Hollow Knight is really cool. It's a long fight that goes through a few "stages" (like most boss fights do), but the different attack patterns actually contribute to the narrative.

At the start, it's just the Hollow Knight, fighting like any other combatant. They've got a variety of dashes, teleports, slashes, and stabs. Standard stuff.

As you do more damage, they start attacking with the corruption/mutation stuff. They start spitting acid at you. They start swiping at you with weird tentacle limbs. But they're still also using standard sword (nail) attacks.

As you go further, they stop attacking with the nail entirely, opting to only use the weird body horror stuff. Eventually the Hollow Knight stops even being a humanoid (bugoid?) shape or humanoid with a weird tentacle arm, but entirely a mass of writing limbs and flesh that thrashes around and throws itself through the air at you.

Finally, it goes back to an earlier stage where it's semi-humanoid and using a mix of normal and mutated attacks. But it adds one more move. Every few attacks, the Hollow Knight stops attacking you and starts stabbing the absolute shit out of themselves. It's helpful because by this point, the fight has been going on for a while, and it gives you a very brief moment to heal and/or attack. But it also communicates that the Hollow Knight is not just some completely evil character who has some wild mutation abilities. They've been infected and controlled by this parasite thing. Over the course of the fight, you've been able to weaken it enough to loosen its control enough for the Hollow Knight to (metaphorically) say "I couldn't do this alone, thank you for helping me finally die".

All without a word of dialogue.