I Beat Dredmor

Please don't ask what happened to Booger 1.

A single permadeath run. It lasted for thirty hours over the course of many weeks. There were so many I almost died moments, but the closest I got to a game over? Right at the very end when Dredmor busted through some random door and started to murder me. Holy crap, that dude was at least ten times stronger than anything else in the game. I don't remember a final boss ever freaking me out as much as this guy. The scariest thing was his entrance, because he had none. I just kicked open a door and out walks Dredmor, like he's a diggle, or something.

Dungeons of Dredmor is a giant, messy game, and it begs to be played in the same reckless manner; but if you want to win the damn thing then you have to turn into this meticulous robot of a gamer. If I'd known what I was getting into at the beginning, or if this had just been a regular game without permadeath, I would've approached the whole thing with an entirely different attitude.



I am never doing this again.

Day Z is Terrifying

Zeds? Sure. Bandits? Gotcha.
But if I was playing Day Z and this happened to me, I would lose my shit.

Too Much Color?

So I was redoing the text on the banner and thought, "I should add some color to this stupid logo," and then I thought, "Hey, this is fun. How about I add some blue for no reason..."

And now I have made a twelve-year-old girl's Trapper Keeper circa 1993.

Youtube Comments Are Like Candy

So Youtube already holds cats in higher regard than ancient Egypt, right? So what happens when you take a dead cat, make it into a helicopter, and upload the video to Youtube?
I was literally giddy when I scrolled down to the comments. Maybe that means I'm some kind of monster who feeds off of the misery of others, but I can't help that I have an appetite for Youtube comments. People are interesting when you give them anonymity and a microphone. They're honest.



And concerning the content of the video itself; according to the interview, the owner loved his cat, Orville, who was hit by a car. It was an artist who attached the props as both a tribute to the animal and an act of artistic expression, which is way past strange, but it's not like this guy is alone in his weirdness. Taxidermy seems to be how all animal lovers with a screw loose express love for their pets. It's weird, but it's a wonderful example of how someone can show affection while everyone else assumes the worst.


Also, I laughed my ass off.
Sorry, Orville, but you look ridiculous.



(Mostly) Youtube comments up ahead!...

Justin's E3

AKA: A bunch of trailers for games that I'm totally looking forward to.

The Best Achievement Ever

While playing (way too much) Dungeons of Dredmor, the game crashed on me. Being slightly addicted, I immediately loaded DoD back up and before I could do anything else, I got a special achievement called Suddenly the Dungeon Collapses.

Crashing the game is an achievement.

Item Consumption and Perma-Death

I never, EVER used these things.

Maybe you can relate to this: Throughout my formative years, whenever I was playing an RPG and I picked up a really good one-use item, I'd save it like a chipmunk saving acorns for the winter, because (and this was my logic) eventually I'd fight that one boss that'd be so hard I'd have no choice but to break out the elixers.

The problem was that when I finally did reach that crazy-hard boss fight, instead of using my elixers I'd just continue fighting until I'd get wiped out, and then I'd restart and try again until I beat the bastard. My logic here was that maybe the next boss would be even tougher, so I shouldn't touch those items just yet.

And then I'd beat the game with a hundred or so megalixers rotting in my inventory.






I purchased Dungeons of Dredmor: Realm of the Diggle Gods; partly because I'm always hunting for a good rogue-like (success!), and partly because I can't say, "Realm of the diggle gods," without smiling.

In DoD you're constantly picking up one-shot items, many of which are more powerful than any of your base abilities; so just like in the old days, I find myself hoarding these treasures, but unlike the old days, when I open a door and three-hundred monsters jump out at me, I get psyched because this is when the limiters come off and I quaff my Potion of Fuck Everything Up without a second thought.

And the reason is simple: Dredmor's default setting is perma-death, so if you die, no matter how many hours you've played, it's game over. This means when you find yourself in a situation where your life is on the line, you fight like a maniac and use everything you've got, because a game over isn't, "Restart at the Auto-Save." It's, "Fuck you. Play something else."


Perma-death games are where the powerful, one-shot items really shine, and trust me, Dredmor has a lot of god-damn one-shot items.





Just thought I'd share this: I was looking over the mods for DoD and someone made a skillset called Brofistery.
Even better? One of the skills of Brofistery is called, "I Cast Fist."

Exit Through the Gift Shop

I have just watched the best documentary ever made. Actually, it's been about a day since I watched Exit Through the Gift Shop but I'm still constantly thinking about it. For the entire length of the film there was so much brain candy getting stuffed into my stupid face that I'm having trouble figuring out how to describe this thing without going off on thirty different tangents.


The movie is unbelievable, and I mean that in the literal sense. Even though there's plenty of proof that it's (mostly) legitimate, there are a lot of people who don't believe that even a sliver of Exit Through the Gift Shop is real, that many of the characters in the movie are fabrications, and this only serves to make the film more interesting, because the creators would have to be painfully self-aware of themselves and wicked clever in order to pull this off.


Also, it's worth watching this movie simply for the street art. There is so much beautiful crap in this movie that you won't even care about all the high-concept bullshit going on.

Jeffrey Yohalem Speaks Using Only His Asshole

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/05/far-cry-3-and-the-stranger-in-a-strange-land/

A lot of people have their idea of the perfect game, or they have a favorite genre, or maybe they just prefer real-time combat over turn-based in their RPGs. That's your thing. Your bag. Your whatever. That's okay. You're a unique, little snowflake and when it comes to what you like to play and (most importantly) why you like to play it, you're going to have your own opinions. Gamers are no longer a collection of people who almost unanimously played Super Mario Bros 2 (seriously, talk to anyone my age. We all played exactly the same shit). There's more variety, now; along with a lot more opinions on what makes for a good game.

So if you come across some dude playing Minecraft and you think he's wasting his time because you played Minecraft once and thought it was pointless, please recognize that you haven't come down from a mountain with stone tablets that say, "Minecraft is shit."
What you are witnessing is a gamer who plays video games for reasons different than yourself. That's a good thing. People with different opinions are interesting precisely because they're not like you.

Of course, if you're a gamer, I can give you a free pass on this one. Go troll a forum. It's your right.
And if it isn't your right, then just know that's where I set the bar on my community. I don't expect anything better than a sea of people screaming about the one true game. My bar is very low.



But if you're in the industry? Fuck you. Get your shit together.


“Another thing that’s a problem in this industry is the focus on meaningful choices. I think it’s a dead end. If you’re working all day and you’re making choices in your life, it’s not interesting to be like, ‘do I save my family or do I climb up this building’. That’s exhausting, that’s not entertainment.” - Jeffrey Yohalem



The industry doesn't have a problem. Nobody is driving sixteen-wheelers full of E.T. cartridges to a landfill. Activision's CEO isn't jumping out of a window. Why the hell are there so many people who think they know what the problem with the industry is? And why are most of them writers for major game development studios? More than one philosophy of game design can exist in this universe. Video games are not Highlander.


The fact that Jeffrey is a writer probably compounds my annoyance, and it doesn't help that the guy is intelligent. I don't mind when a dumbass gets things wrong, but this guy spends the rest of the interview making a lot of interesting, solid points on his craft.
Except for that bit about movies and how the forefathers of film were all artists with vision, and only now are video games beginning to ask the right questions and branch out to become meaningful. I've been hearing that shit for ten years, now; and I'll still be hearing it for another ten years. It's incredibly conceited.


Oh, and I should also probably mention that I'm butt-hurt about how Far Cry 3 is looking to be a serious departure from Far Cry 2. That's probably a factor that helped spawn this post.


And... There's also the possibility that Jeffrey was trolling on Kotaku. He seems like a high-concept sort of guy.