@alex Not only is Jay Weinberg Max's son, he filled in for him with the E Street Band when Max was tied up with Tonight Show duties. Yes, Slipknot and Bruce Springsteen have shared a drummer.
Re: the Ph.D discussion - to my knowledge most honorary degrees bestowed on entertainers or celebrities or famous alumni of an institution are not PhDs, but a “Doctor of Letters.” These honorary uses are the most common of that degree, but some places do have courses of study for them.
I'm generally more positive on the game than the staff even though I agree with most of their criticisms. The biggest things for me, all addressed in the Quick Look are that the loot is boring/uninteresting/inconsequential, Moze's skill tree is full of skills I have zero interest in and I couldn't know that before chosing her without going to some other website, and Moze's "I'm suffering from a status effect sounds" are fucking terrible - too loud, too distracting, and just miserably unpleasant without communicating anything I'm not already getting from just seeing what I see. I can deal with bad dialogue and poor story, but those sound effects have turned this into a game I'd play and listen to to one that I refuse to play without a podcast or music on and the sound completely muted.
I doubt staff will see this, but the item in BL3 that has red text that says “Want to see a magic trick?” also has text right under it that says something about “Healgasm all over yourself...” so I think their read of it was SUPER charitable.
This will go down as one of my favorite series done by either coast, and I just wanted to say thank you to all the Crime Crew for the work that went into making it, and a special thanks to Vinny and Abby for persevering through the back-end challenges to turn it into something watchable and the fantastic editing. I'd love to see more, but am glad for what we've got.
This may end up as a blog post, but I have a slightly different reaction to Gloomhaven's digital release than Vinny had.
First off, I don't dispute a lot of what he says about things feeling not as exciting as when playing the tabletop game. I think that's due to a lack of emphasis on showing the random result of your attack "roll" in the game; I've trained myself to not watch the character animations but to watch the VERY SMALL bar above character names where they surface the attack base and modifier.
Where I take issue with Vinny's reaction is I'm pretty comfortable with the streamlining they've done to make this a digital product. I think if I had to watch a long/showy card flip animation, I'd lose patience. For reference, I have a Gloomhaven tabletop group that's been playing for just under a year, damn near every Saturday. Vinny's dead right that there's a TON of set up for each scenario, there's action/card maintenance and item management during and after scenarios, and playing the tabletop game is an investment of money, time, and patience with your fellow players. I LOVE my group, but we spent what felt like 20 minutes one time discussing line of site and ranged attacks when the board/tile set-up included an area between tiles where there weren't other hexes. It's not easy to explain, but we really spent that time honestly discussing how to handle the enemy activities because we wanted to get it right. It can be exhausting, and it's also exhilarating when you overcome a tough scenario by the skin of your teeth.
Digital Gloomhaven, in Early Access, is far from perfect but shows an incredibly promising application of the tabletop's core ruleset to make it accessible for people without a dedicated group and/or the time and/or the space for a full Gloomhaven tabletop experience. The "Adventure" mode that's launched is a rogue-lite-like creation that hints at the full campaign, but still allows for bite-sized adventures that, for me, tide me over from Saturday to Saturday. I think there are certainly improvements to be made to the UI/UX aspect, but I wouldn't write this off based on what's available now.
This game has been at or near the top of my Steam wishlist since it was announced (too early by Klei's own admission) and I got to play it at PAX West...2017? I understand some people may not be into card battlers, but I've put a TON of time into Slay the Spire, and if this marries up that combat with the dialogue/negotiation stuff they were talking about at reveal...I could see this becoming a personal favorite.
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