Lizardsquid, maker of noises @lizardsquid@computerfairi.es

• While I generally prefer to have character customisation, I think this is the correct way to have a predefined character. You start in medias res, after a botched heist caused your gang to go on the run, stranded and starving in a snow storm. Over the course of the first few missions, you start piecing together some of what happenned, and learn about both the characters around you and the character that you're playing, Arthur.

I borrowed a copy of RDR2 from a friend, and I've played a bit of the introduction area.

I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit!

Some things I like:

• The first game had some "riding on a horse with someone, with your characters having a conversation" scenes. Those scenes are still here, but they've been improved - you actually get branching dialogue choices. They're generally not hugely meaningful choices, but I really appreciate getting to make choices like that!

reminder:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvemPyOJZEY

(take a closer look at that snout)

splonch

meow!

On its own that would be a fairly interesting story - the Doctor meddling about on Gallifrey - but the writer (Marc Platt) twists that idea on its head and goes somewhere completely unexpected.

Combine that with the excellent performances of Geoffrey Bayldon (as the alternate Doctor) and Carole Anne Ford (as Susan), and you get something great.

Yesterday I listened to the first episode of Doctor Who Unbound, which was really interesting.

The unbound series is based around various "What Ifs", and the first episode is "What if the Doctor and Susan never left Gallifrey?"

(continued)

me: wow, Clockwork & Cthulhu sounds like my kind of RPG, I'm going to get it!

me: hmm, it's a little suspicious that they don't mention the racism at all in the section about lovecraft, but it's not a super long section so it's not that suspicious

me: huh, out of the 100s of gods in the Cthulhu mythos, they only chose to include 5 of them.

me: Ah. One of those 5 is the one with the racial slur in its name.

what I think would be best is levelhead's gameplay mixed with mario maker's levels:

You get the speed and interesting mechanics from levelhead (like the different costumes, the box delivery mechanic, bonus coins actually being interesting), but without the elements that make levelhead obnoxious (the difficult enemies, the visually unclear rotating cannons and sawblades, the bullets that move too fast to predict.)

And it's something that Levelhead almost got right - restarting from death takes a fraction of a second, so you're not waiting around to restart much.

But I think it might also be too short - which encourages people to make even harder levels, often artificially hard to the point of requiring random chance to beat. Even the campaign's levels are incredibly hard, and the user levels are even harder, which ends up with the game being innaccessible!

I think that the biggest problem with super mario maker is that level editors like this encourage you to make tricky stuff, but the time penalty for dying is far too large and frustrating!

You can see this with basically everyone who plays mario maker levels - every time they die, they immediately pause the game, go down, and select "start over", because even though that takes several seconds, it's still faster than waiting for the death animation.

hi hi~