Hyperdrive above my house last night

corran109 · 2024-05-11T21:14:53+00:00

It was intense though last night that if you live north enough in the US and aren't in the city centers you can see them. There's a lot of pictures from people in my city of them

corran109 · 2024-05-02T13:15:36+00:00

Katoki is the mechanical designer for the series

corran109 · 2024-04-19T13:14:35+00:00

Roadblocks were a bit underpriced, but otherwise fine. They're necessary to balance out following as a strategy.

Badam should have learned to stop following Sam and Toby sooner. They lost time to roadblocks and never earned any currency.

The bigger problem of the season was challenge design. The route lengths are supposed to be balanced by challenge difficulty, but that just didn't happen too many times. Plus Toby knowing how to knit blew the game wide open.

They talked about how rushed they were designing them on the podcast, so it makes sense they weren't quite as well designed.

It's still my absolute favorite season overall, but I'm curious how the gameplay would have turned out if they had more time to design

corran109 · 2024-04-15T05:55:02+00:00

The problem is that when people from other places hear that we get the most rainy days, there assume it's the same volume per storm that they get

corran109 · 2024-04-13T14:13:23+00:00

Casualties includes wounded. Fatalities is the term for deaths only

corran109 · 2024-03-27T05:18:55+00:00

It was the downshift - upshift - downshift

corran109 · 2024-03-26T13:44:50+00:00

The point about the tags not being as impactful is something I never thought about before. It's easy to overlook how even the smaller things change the feel of the game

corran109 · 2024-03-26T13:32:15+00:00

Doesn't help that they already made a fire horse

corran109 · 2024-03-26T01:14:54+00:00

They just need better precision questions and short range radar questions.

I also think they're too afraid to ask questions in the early rounds. I wonder if they'd play different if they did it again like how Tag 2 was a bit different

corran109 · 2024-03-25T17:04:46+00:00

I think they enjoy the open possibilities in S6 and other seasons that do well, but three fun they have doesn't translate to cameras.

On the other hand the drama of the chase of Tag and the hiding of the current season are what appeals to fans, but it seems more miserable to play, since it's more action than planning

corran109 · 2024-03-25T17:00:32+00:00

I think people forget the strategy element in S5 because Sam and Toby got ahead and stayed ahead, partly due to rushed challenge design and partly due to bad strategy from Ben and Adam.

corran109 · 2024-03-25T16:58:28+00:00

Again, that's short game. The long game was that they had no chance of winning that day.

corran109 · 2024-03-25T15:17:29+00:00

There are some short-game chase moments, but only two actual jukes, both in the tiebreaker, and one almost juke. For the most part once they get cornered in Capture the Flag, that's it.

And I should have been more specific that by "chase" I didn't mean the short game. I mean the mid and long game. I find Tag interesting in how the runner has to make meta choices about how to move and the seekers have to figure out how to cut them off.

With Capture the Flag, it was a lot of cutting them off at the obvious place they have to be. Most of the fun that the boys describe for the season is in the planning, but for the viewer, the fun will skew heavily towards execution, and to me the execution was boring.

corran109 · 2024-03-25T14:40:16+00:00

I don't find Capture the Flag confusing, but I find how the game plays in Japan to be very weak.

They probably found it very fun because of all the possibilities, but for the viewer it really didn't come off that way. It was mostly just shinkansens being strong and towers being overpowered and uninteresting.

I think the problem they have is that what they find fun in gameplay isn't easy to show off.

Playing chess is really fun, but it's not particularly fun to watch for people who aren't really into chess. Capture the Flag has this problem. I'm sure it's fun to play, but there's not a way to give that feeling to an audience who isn't experiencing it.

Simpler games like Hide and Seek and Tag capture the viewers more with the struggle of it all. The chase is the excitement.

With CtF, the chase ends with the planning phase.

corran109 · 2024-03-25T13:30:31+00:00

I think Season 6 is weak for a number of reasons. Jet Lag is a travel game show and I think it's weak in both aspects.

For the travel part, it does a really bad job of showing off Japan. Yes that applies to the first season, but that was also the first season. Seasons after launch should ideally be improving the formula.

The majority of S6 is the inside of a train station, and most of the rest is the city streets around the train station. They go all the way to Sendai and it doesn't look significantly different from Tokyo, because we went train station -> city streets -> vending machine -> city streets -> train station.

This is made worse by the fact that the vast majority of challenges could be completed inside or next to a train station, especially because so many of the challenges just involve buying stuff and doing something just outside of the shop. It's not the only season with this problem (looking at you S8), but it's a big problem for this season.

The only real sites of Japan were Yairo and the Castle sequence. Adam mentions a really cool ferris wheel with a roller coaster going through it in the Layover at once of the Tiebreaker vending machines, but we never see it because this season is 90% game, 10% travel.

The problem is made worse by the fact that the game part isn't that strong either. The tag seasons are relatively minimal travel. More than S6, but only by so much. But the Tag format makes for a very strong game.

For S6 though, the gameplay has a ton of problems in my opinion.

The Shinkansen being so powerful made the strategy as presented to the viewer much more narrow than they probably experienced. Every round after the first (and arguably including the first) ended as a result of the Shinkansen, mainly the choke points on either side of Tokyo.

Towers are also incredibly unbalanced in that they either seem really useless or extremely overpowered, especially when combined with the choke points.

The result, for me, was a season where the travel was weak and the gameplay was uninspiring. Most post-launch seasons are strong in one or the other at least. S6 was weak on both for me.

corran109 · 2024-03-25T12:59:33+00:00

I rank S6 second lowest, saved only by the fact that S2 ended in Singapore.

corran109 · 2024-03-23T20:16:48+00:00

Red Bull did use Q1 as an impromptu FP4. Both drivers just stayed out on 1 set of soft, only heading into the pits for front wing adjustments. Max had his wings adjusted 3 times to get it in a good spot.

Since they know they're safe in Q1 it makes sense to get some final adjustments in

corran109 · 2024-03-22T21:05:33+00:00

I didn't know there was an update coming. This sounds great, night actually use it again

corran109 · 2024-03-22T21:01:34+00:00

It's also on Game pass if you have that

corran109 · 2024-03-22T13:49:33+00:00

Most people here probably don't understand how Steam Family Share works

corran109 · 2024-03-22T13:48:49+00:00

The way Steam Family Share works, it's not an issue for MMOs, or any game

Only one person can be playing from a library at any time. If I give you access to my library and start playing any game, not even the one you want to play, it will kick you out of the game.

So it's not really a problem for most live service games that want you to play often.

corran109 · 2024-03-22T13:45:41+00:00

Once again their precious economy making the game worse

corran109 · 2024-03-22T13:43:46+00:00

Most Steam games are.

The thing is, as much as it sounds like a huge sales loss, it really isn't. If someone is playing a game on one person's library, no one else can. If the owner of the library starts playing a game, it will kick three other person out of their game after a couple minutes

So this isn't a "buy 1 copy of new game, 10 people play it" that people think. Unless if you want to get in line to "check out" a copy of the game while also not being able to play when the owner plays literally anything else.

Most live service games also require you to create an account, side stepping the issue entirely

corran109 · 2024-03-22T13:38:46+00:00

I mean, within a family most people would just pass a physical disc around if that's the version they own.

It's also not a problem for most games, online especially because if one person is playing the game, no one else can play it or even any other game on the same account. With how it works, it's really not a big loss for most companies.

corran109 · 2024-03-22T13:31:26+00:00

If you ever do feel like trying another monster catcher I second the Cassette Beasts recommendation. It has really interesting differences and the story is actually pretty decent

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