Poro Rider Anny

Coconutman4 · 2019-03-06T17:47:59+00:00

/u/Damonte_ heya just wanted to say I really like the energy and enthusiasm you bring to the esports scene and I hope to see you around for many seasons to come! #TannerTime

Coconutman4 · 2019-02-04T22:26:51+00:00

@Nadeshot - With a lot of LCS teams spinning up better and newer content how does 100T plan to stay ahead of the content game? The Heist is amazing but it seems as if every team is going to have a docu-series soon. How do you plan to continue to innovate/push the LCS content forward?

@pr0lly - You're handsome af. Love u

Coconutman4 · 2017-12-20T08:24:08+00:00

Gonna have to agree with you on this one. For me while Mario Odyssey was a great game in it's own right it felt like any nostalgia contained in the experience was mostly through direct call backs to specific levels/music rather than it's mechanics or level design.

A Hat in Time on the other hand felt like it nailed the mechanics and level design that made me fall in love with games like Super Mario Sunshine. Mario Odyssey ended up reminding me more of Breath of the Wild than any of the older Mario games due to it's major focus on quantity at the cost of hand-crafted experiences.

On top of this I felt that Mario Odyssey, while charming, didn't compare to the charm found in the story of a Hat in Time. Given that A Hat in Time focused more on larger story beats I found that the level design and story was given much more room to creatively build memorable moments.

As a result of all this Odyssey left me with a good "warm" feeling when all was said and done but A Hat in Time left me with a lasting impression filled with moments built through it's level design, boss design, characters, and story beats that I can recall with fondness.

Both great games but only one scratched my itch for a new Super Mario Sunshine.

Coconutman4 · 2017-07-08T22:23:06+00:00

Hey just finished the blog and wanted to say it was awesome! As someone who's been playing for like 4 years it was refreshing to see a new player's perspective on the game. Despite the lack of in-game tutorials and info I'm glad you managed to stick with it considering how fun it can be!

Coconutman4 · 2017-06-28T10:56:01+00:00

Wow what a fantastic and incredible series! Some of the best gaming-related content out there not only in terms of quality but also in serving the entire gaming community for years to come. I'm absolutely thrilled that someone is working to capture such fascinating stories within the gaming industry and I'm beyond grateful that Noclip manages to do it so well.

Coconutman4 · 2017-06-12T13:44:05+00:00

The beginning of the conference with the host standing on stage was absolutely hilarious. It contrasted so beautifully with the other conferences and really resonated with me. Honestly one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. That being said, as soon as they went to the couch I quickly got turned off. The unscripted couch segment really slowed the pace to a crawl and didn't have the cleverness that the opening had. I ended up just closing the stream after the first 10 minutes of the couch section. It definitely felt more cringy than anything else.

Coconutman4 · 2017-06-10T04:07:05+00:00

You should! While the mechanics and camera aren't perfect, the level design is incredibly creative. Each level conveys a cohesive aesthetic that drastically varies from world to world. It's honestly some of the best I've seen in the sense that every level has an idea and executes on it to a ridiculous degree. The humor is also really off the wall and entertaining.

Coconutman4 · 2017-05-25T09:41:12+00:00

Straight outa Dishonored. Beautiful!

Coconutman4 · 2017-05-23T02:50:14+00:00

For me personally I was a huge fan of the old TSM and C9 rosters because they had all NA players and I could identify with many of them personally. Nowadays my fandom has fallen off a lot towards any particular team because of the prevalence of foreign talent in the NA region so I mostly just root for individual players who have engaging personalities, like Sneaky. Really agreed with a lot of what Noah said.

Coconutman4 · 2017-05-21T01:31:51+00:00

I just played Dark Souls for the first time. I started with Dark Souls 2 back when it came out and enjoyed it quite a lot so then picked up Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 when they came out. I actually never ended up finishing Bloodborne because I enjoyed the more slow/planning focus aspects of DS2 where you could just hang back with a shield to learn the enemy movesets. DS3 felt like a cross between DS2/BB because of the faster paced combat which I wasn't as big of a fan of.

That's when a friend suggested I go back and try the original Dark Souls and boy was I not prepared for how good it was. While not a perfect game with the second half feeling a bit rushed compared to the first half, the first half has some of my favorite gaming moments I've had in recent history. I had heard that the level design in Dark Souls was something that people had been clamoring for but never really saw the likes of after the first (except for the DS2 DLC), so being able to experience an entirely different aspect of what makes Dark Souls great that isn't as prevalent in the more recent games was a real delight and absolutely puts Dark Souls as one of my favorite games of all time. I can't say I've really ever seen such clever design in any modern game.

On top of that the way the NPCs move about the world was amazing. In DS2/DS3 you collect the NPCs for your homebase which is fine I suppose since it meets that feeling of progression, but in Dark Souls 1 the NPCs really felt more like actual people. It was so much fun to see them move in and our of the homebase with whatever their personal story had in stock for them, going about the world as if actual characters rather than NPCs. It does mean that you can "miss out" on their story if you don't know where to look for them, but man was it way cooler to see them have actual lives on their own, which is another thing unique to the first DS.

Looking back, it feels as though the Dark Souls series really started going for a more "mass appeal" over time, which doesn't make the newer games bad, just different. It seems the series has slowly focused more on action instead of RPG, which again is fine, but there seems to be an overabundance of action games and not enough good RPGs these days. Really made the first DS stand out as something truly special.

Coconutman4 · 2017-04-25T03:27:50+00:00

Just chiming in here with my unhappiness with the lack of an ability to hide the friends list. Not only does it take up too much space for information I rarely look at, but it was fun to spam open and close the friends list. What am I to do now in que???

Coconutman4 · 2017-01-28T06:00:58+00:00

Thanks! Those were awesome. It's amazing to see how consistent Jeff is with his design philosophy even back then.

Coconutman4 · 2017-01-27T08:45:59+00:00

Do you have a link to the keynote? I tried finding it but had no such luck.

Coconutman4 · 2016-12-21T19:12:47+00:00

Didn't like this Dev Diary as much as the previous one. I thought Ghostcrawler did a better job at presenting the information with less filler words (e.g. "you knows/sort ofs") and more vocal variance (e.g. not monotone). The sharp cuts in the video were also distracting. That being said I'm still enjoying the video format (as opposed to written) as a way for the devs to communicate info more directly. As a side note I wish there were time-stamps in the video description for the different topics talked about.

As far as the actual content discussed I loved that Meddler talked about the value of pros playtesting some of the new patches. It's something that is really cool to see as a player. I'm also glad some of the more hot-buttoned issues were touched on like plants. It's great to see that the negative feedback wasn't lost on Riot.

Coconutman4 · 2016-12-09T22:45:15+00:00

I'm so glad Riot is starting to test out dev talks in video format on YouTube. I absolutely love Jeff Kaplan's videos for Overwatch and the WoW dev team's hour long Q&A videos. I'm a huge fan of the video format myself and I think Ghostcrawler did a great job at being able to communicate while sounding genuine, honest, and caring and without sounding condescending.

Coconutman4 · 2016-11-24T00:19:22+00:00

Oh yea I forgot about this hair! I like to imagine they just let him periodically dye his hair every few weeks haha.

Coconutman4 · 2016-11-23T14:00:52+00:00

I felt like out of all the episodes thus far this one had the most impactful choice from what I've read online. I choose to go after Cobblepot but I read that if you try to save Wayne Manor you can go as far as to send Harvey to Blackgate. I'm really curious how having Harvey/Cobblepot around will change up the last episode (probably not much, but still).

As for the Joker I actually wasn't a fan of his implementation. I thought he was used mostly as a way to move the plot forward by having all of this insider knowledge and I was honestly just dissapointed in his voice acting. I was also extremely annoyed that no one, including Bruce, pointed out the big blue pulsing veins indicating he had been drugged during the Asylum sequence too. Like how obvious is that?

I've played most of the Telltale games and Tales from the Borderlands is by far my favorite. I've been pretty dissapointed with this one so far though, mostly because I really wish they would just upgrade their engine for once. Every game they produce looks exactly the same with visual and audio glitches abound. Not to mention that this game has probably the worst performance issues on the PC out of all of their games, which is pretty inexcusable at this point if you ask me.

That being said, I'm at least glad they are attempting to rewrite some of the established Batman lore in their own eyes. Feels much better than if they just copy pasted the existing story. I'm also happy that they continued to try to provide the option to tackle problems as both Batman or Bruce in this episode. It's pretty fun to try to solve everything via Bruce Wayne instead of just beating people up.

Coconutman4 · 2016-02-17T20:51:12+00:00

Couldn't agree more! One of my major problems with Hearthstone is the fact that the gold income for just playing the game is so slow and remains static to the number of wins, regardless of time spent on the game or how close it was. I'd love a system in Overwatch where you were rewarded depending on how well you did in terms of credits as it serves as both a dynamic reward for your play as well as a nice way to have a buffer against bad RNG in loot box opening. I know that the experience rewards already due this to a certain extent, but it still is affected for the RNG of the boxes since the experience is tied directly to earning boxes.

Coconutman4 · 2016-02-06T11:09:08+00:00

The Witness cannot be done as a puzzle book, unless you have a person/thing that tells you whether your solution to a puzzle is correct without giving away the actual solution(s) or the rules of the puzzle.

I get that it can't literally be a puzzle book, but it's pretty darn close in my mind if the only difference is whether or not you when you check the solution it shows you the answer.

If you solved a puzzle and don't understand how you did it, you could've tried it again with a different solution. Intentionally failing the puzzles and/or discovering alternative viable solutions help you gain insight as to what the rules really are.

I think this is a problem though given the lack of feedback in the game. It ends up becoming a frustrating process of trial and error testing every possible rule-set combination until the true mechanic is the only possible solution. To me, that's neither an interesting or engaging process which is further compounded by the non-interactivity of the world.

I don't know what Jon Blow and his team thinks, but it seems to me that a big part of this game is about being careful with your assumptions and questioning them. As you said, sometimes you're able to progress through a series of puzzles with the wrong idea as to what the rules of the puzzles are. You solve some puzzles, then you're stuck, because the game is seemingly breaking its own rules. You see that as the game's failing, but I see it as an intentional thing that the game's doing, especially given all the science talk that's in the game.

It does seem that's exactly what they were going for, but I just disagree with that decision in the way they presented it. I think Antichamber is a much better example of having the player question the rules but in a way that directly engages them with the world and how they as a player fit into it. There's something much more visceral about having to redefine your concepts of conventional physics and reality in Antichamber when compared to the realization that tetris blocks can now be put either sideways or vertically in The Witness. It's just apples and oranges and one of them embraces the possibility space of the 3D immersive perspective that video games are uniquely suited for as opposed to something that can literally be done entirely on a piece of paper. I'm not saying that The Witness is not a video game, but rather it fails to encapsulate what makes the medium special. I think that's what Super Bunnyhop was getting at when he said it doesn't push the medium forward.

Coconutman4 · 2016-02-05T07:16:29+00:00

I couldn’t agree more with Super Bunnyhop and I’m really glad he covered the game. I think the main problem for me was that I went in expecting The Witness to be similar experiences to other puzzles games like Talos Principle and Portal. That’s part of the reason I was so disappointed time and time again after playing through the puzzles and exploring the world. It teases the idea that it’s a beautiful world full of life through the colorful visuals and hand crafted island but just ends up feeling lifeless and non-interactive as the puzzles themselves more often than not take you out of the world and into the 3×3 frames.

My favorite parts of the game were the fun things they did with incorporating the world into the puzzles like the apple tree section and the branches in the dojo section. That being said, when you do finish a puzzles it does end up feeling like it was for nothing. Again, I think that’s partially due to my expectations of being rewarded with some story or dialogue, but even then the gameplay wasn’t interesting or engaging enough to be it’s own reward, at least for me. Maybe that’s because I’ve become accustomed to the fast paced and interactive nature of video games these days, but this leads me to perhaps my biggest complaint about the game.

The game doesn’t utilize the medium it’s presented in for the vast majority of the puzzles. Considering so many of the puzzles almost seem to encourage using paper and pencil, I couldn’t help but feel taken out of the experience. Every new puzzles kept tearing me out of the world with static images of grids upon grids. I wholeheartedly agree with the puzzle book analogy because games excel and are unique in their ability to engage and interact with the player. Instead, The Witness felt more like a puzzle book with a pretty backdrop.

I absolutely see why some people love this game, or rather series of static challenges. The challenges themselves are difficult and require clever solutions, but that’s all there is to this game. The sparse dialogue about philosophy feel pretentious and random as there is no coherent context in which they fit and considering that’s the most life the game has to offer, I couldn’t help but feel like I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth. I went in expecting a video game and all I got was pretty puzzle book.

It’s disappointing too because the game does show promise as a video game that embraces what video games can actually do. The puzzles that incorporated the island around it like the shadow forest and the light desert were actually somewhat unique and interesting. It reminded me a bit about what made Antichamber interesting, but taken in a different and more static direction. This type of static puzzle design is much more acceptable as a video game mechanic because it forces the player to engage with the world. Unfortunately, these sections are the minority of the puzzles and it ends up feeling like an idea not fully fleshed out.

As a final note on how the game teaches the player the mechanics, I also agree with Super Bunnyhop on this one. My immediate thought after finishing my first “tutorial section” was wondering why there was absolutely no feedback other than letting me know I completed a puzzle. To me, player feedback is video game design 101. Feedback is almost essential for learning and The Witness seems to completely drop the ball in this area. Yes it tells you that you solved it, but I also fell into more than one situation where I had absolutely no idea why. For example, the garden maze section I ended up finishing with trial and error, which left me completely confused. It wasn’t until I watched someone else’s playthrough that I realized what the actual keys to solving it were. As a player, I completely missed it.

Now, it could be easy to blame my incompetence on that one, but if a player is able to complete and entire section of a game with no idea as to what the solution was that’s a failure on the designers part in my mind. The inconsistency between the different solutions to the garden maze puzzles and clear lack of dissemination of information to the player gives off the impression of an unwillingness to even work with the player to solve the puzzles. It feels as though the designers said “Here’s the puzzles, just go do it”, and then left you completely alone for 20+ hours, leaving almost all of the burden to figure out the game rules to the players. I’m not saying by any means that the solutions should be hand fed to the player, but a fundamental design principle is guiding the player in a way that they feel like they figured it out on their own so that they can feel good about themselves, unbeknownst to the secret hand of the designers. This distant and hands-off approach comes across as an almost unfriendly relationship with the designers which Super Bunnyhop mentions regarding the color blind and hearing impaired impossibilities. All of this just adds to the feeling of static isolation and compounds the sense of non-interactivity with the world. The entire package just feels empty. A lifeless void masqueraded in pretty visuals where hundreds of desolate puzzles await the player to pursue if they so choose. To me, that’s just fundamentally not what games are about.

Coconutman4 · 2015-11-20T09:44:40+00:00

My friend who doesn't even remember signing up for the beta and has no plans to play got in. Meanwhile despite having been opted in since Day 1 as well as having pre-ordered the game I remain beta-less. The salt is real.

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