ImpureAscetic

Late responses are the best responses!

The population is incredibly sparse. I think it's a marvelous game and idea hobbled by an insanely long development cycle. Wait for release. Hopefully a real community will help the game survive.

@Cyrisaurus: The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. The revocation of rights doesn't happen with a bang but with a whimper. Every soldier displaced by Blackwater, every court decision like Citizens United, and each corporate denial of rights is a stepping stone to the subjugation of ordinary citizens by people with predatory interests. Sure, video games are an anesthesia, but if you're not angry you're not paying attention.

I've only been playing LoL for a short time, and I never played DotA. I haven't yet encountered true assholes except people who disconnect when things get bad. It's also worth noting I've only played one game against humans; the rest against bots. That said, how is this new or restricted to LoL/MOBA games? During COD or Halo I've been told all manner of unpleasant things about my mother and her sexual antics. Of all the hateful horrid things I've heard, I know it would be ten times worse if I were a woman.   
 
My black roommate used to scream things like, "No, motherfucker, why don't YOU go eat some chicken!" Afterward, he would fume for a while as all the racist stuff he'd heard would percolate from his brain to his gut; then he would complain to me.  
 
"You know you can mute them, right?" I asked.  
 
"Yeah, but that's not the point," he said. 
 
"Sure it is. If you know about the mute button, and there are people there you aren't communicating with except to exchange hate, then that's part of the experience for you. It's a feature. If they say something ugly, mute them, and go back to playing the game." 
 
If someone hands you a pile of shit, you don't have to put it on your mantle. You flush it down the toilet like they ought to have done to begin with. When one guy in LoL was a jackass, I just /ignored him, and suddenly he was a figment of my imagination. If you're only playing with online strangers in pick-up games, I agree with the poster above who recommended you find friends you can 5 with and just do that. For extra fun, communicate over Teamspeak or Steam voice chat so you can ignore the in-game chat altogether.

Exactly what I was searching for. Glad it's on their end, and I don't have to perform any major driver/registry surgery.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a frigging achievement, no two ways about it. This is probably one of the best games of 2011. I am still busy cataloging all the ways I hate it, but what I keep noticing is how the hate comes from odd parts in the game where my utter immersion was challenged by the limitations of the technology or, less frequently, shoddy aesthetics. That last festering nit is particularly troublesome since my highest praise for the game is an aesthetic evaluation: I was completely taken in by the world. Some of the older readers** may remember that even when Deus Ex was originally released, the character models were blocky and the textures washed out. It was a revolutionary game for a lot of reasons. It looks like trash now, like perhaps the next release of Minecraft, only not on purpose, and it looked only slightly better on its release. We loved it anyway. This game is definitely no Crysis 2 in the pure graphics department, but the art design and technology collide beautifully and successfully hooked me within the first fifteen minutes of play time. 
 
Here's a list of the game's problems as I see them, in no particular order: 
* forced boss fights with no options to reward gamers who have chosen paths outside combat. This is obviously a big one; Penny Arcade big. Alternatives should have been present. I didn't have trouble with the bosses, and the last two cyborg battles took place in, hands down, the coolest environments in the game, but it's shitty game design to corner the player like that.  
 
* Jensen is boring. Either make me Link or make me interesting. Although he seems intellectually competent (abnormally so for a SWAT guy), he is emotionally inert. 
 
* Verisimilitude of the population, character. The other characters are way more conflicted and interesting. While this is great-- how often do you talk someone out of suicide in a game?-- the instances where the dialog is wooden or cliched stand out that much more in relief against the moments of excellence. This might as well be called the Bioware Problem, because you see it in any game that attempts to introduce conflicted characters and grey morality. When people act like video game/ comic book characters (as opposed to people), all the complexity stops being interesting and seems like a writer trying to tell you how smart he is.   
 
* Verisimilitude of the population, volume. The technology just isn't there in this game. I know this. But I hate walking around "cities" with the population of towns in rural Tennessee. Assassin's Creed proved it doesn't have to be this way. In a game about the encroachment of technology on humanity, on what it means to be human, this is a legitimate issue, albeit a subtle aesthetic one. In a game that goes out of its way to showcase its environments as natural consequences of the technology run amok, this is a legitimate issue. 
 
* Graphics not up to the task. Hopefully they'll just license the Crytek engine next time. It's obviously doing the EXACT same stuff (invisibility, physics, deformable terrain), and would not generate involuntary laughter.  
 
* The "twist." You know the one. Jensen would never have lowered his gun long enough for that character to pull that panic room bullshit. Disgusting instance of plot overwhelming sensible character behavior.  
 
* The endings. Such let downs.    
 
Some complaints people have don't bother me. For instance, stealth game AI is always weird. Why would the guards drop from alert after exchanging fire with an intruder? Still, for whatever reason that kind of gameism doesn't bother me like the stuff above. If games used real military tactics all protagonists would be dead. ("Simmons, get me a blueprint of the building.... Okay. We got man-sized vents here, here, and here. I need you to get to work welding them shut. Take Dawson.") Some of the stuff above is just me hedging what I know to be flawed, like the boss fights. How can I complain about the last two cyborg boss fights when I loved the environments so much? Also, sure, they didn't fit. That's fine, I just switched into gaming mode as opposed to Deus Ex mode. I would prefer not to have to do that, but it's not the end of the world. The absence of a counter-hacker or social cyborg boss is far more annoying. Also Yelena's outfit is fucking absurd. 
 
I loved this game. The dozen places where it failed are only frustrating because it has so much to recommend it. The developers tried to tackle hard issues in smart ways and to render those issues through characters who seemed human most of the time.  
 
When most games fail, they fail for pedestrian reasons, trying to achieve pedestrian goals. When Deus Ex: Human Revolution fails, it fails like Icarus. As such, even in its flaws, I respect and love this game. 
 
 **-- I'm 30, so I'm asserting that that makes me an "old" gamer. If the rest of you challenge that notion by being 31+, fine. I'm just assuming-- baselessly, perhaps-- that most Giant Bomb readers are young enough not to have been cognizant of the original game's release.

A few of you may have read my last SFIV blog, about my lady who was practicing Super Street Fighter IV to earn a trip to Key West from me. If not, uh, read it so this makes sense. 
 
Last weekend she hit a new plateau. We both sensed it. She worked really hard at hyper armoring through fireballs and crossovers. She stopped using Juri's jumping special when she knew I would block it... and started to nail me with it every time I threw a fireball. Don't get me wrong, I still beat her about fifty matches over the last two days, but that doesn't change the deal. The deal was three matches in a sitting. And she did that this morning, 4 September 2011.  
  

I don't know about you, but I've had trouble finding cute girls in the world who also love to play video games. I've been to a bunch of public gaming events, and while there are women there, they aren't usually the most attractive sort. Yes, yes, get good and angry. Name the exceptions. Yes, they're hot. Go ahead and tell me I'm shallow. Good to go. I'm a dude, and I take looks into account. I'm an awful, awful person. Whatever.  
 
Anyway, earlier this year I concocted a plan to create gamers from whole cloth. I had started dating a pretty Taiwanese girl, and I thought, "You know what could make this relationship even better? Virtual domestic violence." I made an arrangement with her: if she can beat me in three matches of Super Street Fighter IV in a single sitting, I will take her on an all expenses paid vacation to Key West. She had already shown herself to be extremely competitive, so I had a sense she would bite. And she did. Hard.  
 
When she first started playing, she used Girlfriend Fu, i.e. mindless button mashing. She figured the odds were on her side. Didn't happen. Slowly but surely she started learning how to perform the fireball motion, how to perform her character, Juri's, mid-air specials. Then she figured out EX moves. She started reading SRK and watching YouTube for tips. She about lost her mind with happiness when she won her first match. I did too.  
 
Now, I'm no slouch in the Street Fighter department. I was in good fighting form because I had a strong rivalry with another friend going, but that was just normal escalation and pattern recognition. Every week or so one of us would introduce a new combo, the other one would learn how to combat it, and we would generally smash any challengers, my friend and me. But when this girl beat me, suddenly there were stakes. I hadn't really dug into SRK since vanilla SFIV was released, but here I was in the Chun Li forums trying to find everything I could. I watched VesperArcade's excellent Street Fighter tutorials and figured out, yep, I need a stick. That's turned out to be a good thing since you can't do half the stuff OneHandedTerror recommends without a stick.  
 
Then she got two rounds. VesperArcade had warned me (i.e. he warns viewers) that the stick would make me worse before it made me better, and that's a fine thing to say when you're a YouTube video. When she got that second match, shit got real. I went back to the gamepad and didn't look back. Yeah, I sacrificed some combos like Chun's cF into LK combo, but I wasn't ready to spend $3k or $4k over controller pride. To date, she's never gotten more than two matches; the longest we've played was fifty consecutive matches (she got one match that night). It's funny because normally girls would never care when Street Fighter IV was on during a gathering or party. In any given social context when the projector is blazing with battle, there are usually two distinct parties: one group playing SSFIV (or Halo or CoD) and one not. Almost all the girls are in the latter group. When this girl and I play, ALL the girls stop what they're doing and cheer for her. When she manages to land Juri's U2 in the middle of my Chun Li U2, the entire place goes goddamned apeshit... even if this girl loses the round. It's funny what can happen to a game when you raise the stakes. 
 
The thing is, I STILL have the stick. I let her borrow my XBox for the week, and my only controller has been, yes, the stick while I've been playing on Steam. It's MADDENING to lose to players I would crush with a gamepad, but I find myself wondering again if it's time to switch whole cloth. She's a lot better at SSFIV than she was the last time I quit the stick, but so am I. When I quit the stick I could never get above 1200 PP online. To date my highest is 2500 PP.* I know there are a lot of combos I simply can't perform with a gamepad, and I'm at the point where my next plateau is going to be seamless execution of focus cancels. I'd rather hoe that road the right way, with a joystick, rather than learn it on a gamepad and have to figure it out all over again on the stick. 
 
Oh, and if she ever gets a perfect I buy her her own 360 with a copy of the game.  
 
*-- Yes, I'm sure you're better than I am, stranger from the Internet. I regularly get my ass handed to me by players rated 1800+, so I have a pretty good idea where I stand. Not really the point of the post.

To be perfectly clear, I'm writing this after a single game of Natural Selection 2. A single, sublime game.  
 
I first heard about natural selection from Tycho at Penny Arcade, and it sounded like the perfect mix: two wildly different teams playing an objective-based first-person shooter with two players acting as a resource supplying, structure building commander. The original game was a Half-Life mod, and the graphics have stood up about as well as you'd imagine. Still, the core concept is so delicious that I had to try out the newest iteration for myself. I pre-ordered NS2 several months ago so I could have access to the beta... 
 
... and I almost immediately crashed to desktop. This happened over about eight builds.  
 
Why do I keep it in my Steam games? Because I'm that interested in the successful execution of the concept. I love the idea of a commander calling the shots of an FPS, which is why I loved Battlefield 2 and 2142 so much. Mixing that with wildly different sides-- a formula that seems to have worked out well for Blizzard and the ____craft games-- seems like a godsend.  
 
And for the most part it was. I ran to the Alien side and was quickly thrust into the body of the Natural Selection grunt unit, a bullet soak who can climb up walls and use ventilation ducts for surprise attacks. Even after the commander planted the structures that let me turn into more powerful units, I tended to prefer this initial unit because it let me feel like I was an Alien style alien. Over the course of the next TWO HOURS the marines and aliens played a bloody tug-of-war over resources, with the final points going to the Marines because they had built robots who themselves built turrets that our guys could not successfully vanquish with enough speed. 
 
If any of the above sounds interesting, you should check out Natural Selection 2. It's far from complete. Our side was truly screwed when the turrets were grouped because we had no area attack weaponry like the rockets and grenades the marines were using. My build only became stable some time recently. The engine is showing its age. And the game took for frigging EVER. I'm accustomed to Street Fighter and Magic: the Gathering matches. It's been a while since a single match of anything took two hours. What's more, our side had a competent commander who was directing us with military precision. Under a bad command the game would either take five times as long or be over five times faster. Not sure.  
 
I'm giving the downsides their due, but I really think Natural Selection is worth your time and money. I've been playing tons of shooters that never really offer a different vantage point, and while NS has a lot of flaws it really stands out from other objective-based shooters like Brink that pretend to offer variation on shooter gameplay but rarely provide a compelling enough experience to draw you away from whatever your standard person killing simulator is.