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The New Comic Thread for Monday, May 4, 2009
Posts
I wanted to find one of those funny comics about Smash Brothers from Encyclopedia Dramatica
Then I realized that the problem was trying to find something funny on Encyclopedia Dramatica
And now?
No
All I remember is trying to make as many jokes about "but the man....is a midget...midget...midget..." as I could
"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but it dies in the process."
Imagine all of my posts being spoken by Alec Baldwin
GamerTag: MunkusBeaver ||||| Steam: munkus
See that?
No italics.
"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but it dies in the process."
Imagine all of my posts being spoken by Alec Baldwin
GamerTag: MunkusBeaver ||||| Steam: munkus
Wiggin, I don't think I have ever agreed with you before, but here's for the first time.
"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but it dies in the process."
Imagine all of my posts being spoken by Alec Baldwin
GamerTag: MunkusBeaver ||||| Steam: munkus
Stealing my schtick
With the right lawyer, it would be.
Amazon wish list | Please check out my wife's blog and jewelry store.
He's disagreeing with Defender, so what can I do?
It could be a pizza.
Or a... um..
Amazon Wishlist: http://www.amazon.com/BusterK/wishlist/3JPEKJGX9G54I/ref=cm_wl_search_bin_1
It could be a pie
It could be any number of circular foods!
...man now I want some cake
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | SCREENED | STEAM ID | BUY SOME STUFF!
cake flavored pie
Nigglypuff.
The ghosts are the KKK
Mutter and shuffle your feet you fool!
"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but it dies in the process."
Imagine all of my posts being spoken by Alec Baldwin
GamerTag: MunkusBeaver ||||| Steam: munkus
Whitey, Lighty, Fighty, and Clyde
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | SCREENED | STEAM ID | BUY SOME STUFF!
My mom would try to trick my brother and I into eating grilled ham sandwiches when we were younger by calling them Pac Man Sandwiches.
Damn, you could've called those poopwhiches and I'd have eaten them, they were delicious and hamful.
The only way anyone ever gets eliminated in Monopoly is by landing on a fairly large hotel, usually more than one. Otherwise it's too easy to just scrape by. And it takes a while to make money early on (which is why the game is so slow with standard rules), because you have no source of income other than passing Go, as early properties give laughably low amounts of money. If the currently losing player gets an extra $500 late in the game by landing on free parking, it's not going to do anything for him. The only ways he could have lost anyway are by landing on late-board hotels, which will still completely fuck him, and on the off chance that the $500 manages to let him survive, his opponent will have so much money and so many properties that he'll be dead in a roll or two anyway. (I'm talking about getting $500 because that's the version of the rule the people I've played with have used--you get an extra $500 if you land on Free Parking. Sometimes this is supplemented with what players have lost on the Income Tax square, but that doesn't really matter.)
The only way that extra $500 can significantly affect the game is when someone lands on it pretty early on. This gives them a boost to their cash reserves that's actually pretty damn huge compared to what other players are getting at that point, letting them get ahead in properties owned, giving them yet another advantage, and often leading to an early domination. In that case, the free parking rule has sped up the game immensely. So most of the time it will do nothing, or almost nothing, to slow the game down, because giving $500 to the current losers will extend their life by a roll or two at most late in the game. But sometimes it will speed the game up by quite a lot, because $500 is enough money early on that it will give one player a significant advantage. So I think you're wrong about that.
The other idea is that by instituting this new rule, players are fucking up the game balance. Normally, yes, that would probably be the case. But Monopoly is a crappy game. It is not well-designed or well-balanced. It is a game of luck with very limited ways (compared to, say, Catan) to mitigate that luck through strategy and choice. The only meaningful decision the player is ever presented with is "Do I buy this thing I just landed on?" That choice is itself informed so massively by luck, because landing on the wrong things will give you only truly crappy choices while landing on the right ones will give you much better ones, that it is also essentially meaningless. The only other thing the player has control over is trading, but, as the game rules itself say almost nothing about trading beyond "Go ahead and do it," whether it makes the game more fun is entirely a function of the coolness of the people you're playing with. There's very rarely any way for two players to make a trade that's anything close to mutually beneficial, which means that every trade is either useless or one player making a stupid decision to benefit another. This is because the only things you're trading for are money and property (which quickly become perfectly equivalent), and there's always going to be clear leader in that area--whoever's winning. Contrast again to Catan, where there are many resources and it's tough to get a good enough source of each one that you would never need to trade, so mutually beneficial trades are both possible and encouraged. And if you do manage to get into that position where you have everything you need, you did it through correct settlement placement and not entirely through lucky rolls.
So basically: One, I think you're wrong about the effects of the free parking rule. But two, it doesn't matter because Monopoly is a crappy game and there's no real balance to fuck up in the first place.
edit: ahaha nice cloudman
That's a good defense, too, Wiggin. "It's just a fucking X" where X is the category of the thing you don't understand because you're a goddamn retard. It's just a movie. It's just a comic book. It's just a painting. All that means is "I don't understand it, but I assume that it must be completely shallow and meaningless based on what medium it is."
Also, Wiggin, try reading my actual statement. It wasn't just "you don't make games and therefore don't get it." I did mention that, but I also gave actual information.
Monopoly is a criticism of unregulated capitalism. It purposely has feedback loops built in, where one player buys property which both makes him money (so he can buy more property and be insulated from bankruptcy/defeat), and takes away money from his opponents (so they cannot buy property and are pulled closer to bankruptcy/defeat).
Giving large chunks of money to players at random fucks up the balance, draws defeats out even longer than they already are, and weakens the statement that unregulated capitalism creates socially-dangerous corporate juggernauts.
But hey, you're a fucking idiot who barely has two brain cells to rub together, so of course you wouldn't notice these mechanics at all and would just assume that it's "just a board game" and that games are designed by randomly throwing arbitrary rules together without trying to express any meaningful ideas or construct specific mechanics.
And arguing that you like it better and therefore it is better is fucking stupid. It's like a world-class chef has prepared a meal, and you've taken that meal, dunked it in the toilet, and said "I made it better! I know more than the chef." Seriously, you took a world-famous game that's been around way longer than you, put in a rule that actually fucks it up in several ways, and claimed you know what's up.
Just as a general life hint, people who are regarded as experts in their fields are only very very rarely complete morons in those fields. You, on the other hand, are an idiot. If you vehemently disagree, it's probably not because the expert is wrong.
The new comic thread looks like D&D
Get out while you can
Let me tell you about video games. Let me tell you about Homestuck
In terms of the final deathblow, yes, that's usually the killer. However, people generally bleed out gradually because of this feedback loop:
1) I weaken myself in order to buy property.
2) I now have a spot on the map that randomly weakens you and makes me stronger.
3) You cannot buy that property.
As long as I don't run out of money entirely, I am at an advantage. As I continue to buy property, the odds of you being weakened (and me strengthened) on every move increases. Eventually, you are in a position where you are essentially running a vampiric gauntlet, strengthening me at your own expense. Ultimately, yeah, you'll probably die on a hotel that your money helped build, but what really killed you was the slow, snake-like crush that was applied over a long time.
In the "house rule" mentioned by Speed Racer early on, it was $500 plus "fees," which I interpreted to mean "any penalty money assessed by the game itself (i.e. not rent paid to another player)." Regardless, I agree with you here on both counts. The early game is a little bit slow. I think that it's meant to represent the difficulty of getting into the capitalist game, almost putting the start-up entrepreneur in a sympathetic light. I'm not sure about that. It could just be some annoying thing like Blizzard giving you incredibly few resources at the start of Starcraft (I don't know if they meant the early game to be that long or what, but they changed it drastically for Warcraft 3). I also agree that $500 in the super-late game doesn't do anything.
However, that second argument means that it's a bad mechanic. It doesn't do anything! It doesn't improve the game! Don't add rules that don't make the game better. What it does is simply drag out the lame-duck ending, which is bad, while not really giving a reasonable chance for a comeback.
I don't think I'm wrong about that. I mentioned that there are already mechanics in place to give money to players based on traveling the board. There's the fixed money, $200 for passing Go, and the random money in the chance/chest cards. In other words, the game already has this feature. If you are "redundant" at work, you get fired. Redundant things in game design should be treated the same. Once again, this rule does not make the game better.
Wow, that's a massive assertion. I do not agree at all. The game purposely includes feedback loops and has lame-duck endings. Those are generally regarded as "bad things." (I guess this means I don't actually completely disagree!) However, the game includes those things for a special reason: It intends to portray the crushing power of unregulated capitalism that later showed up with companies like Standard Oil. Showing that players are powerless to fight the big capitalist leaders of society via these feedback loops was entirely necessary and was, in fact, the point of the game. This game traded in a little bit of "fun" in order to make a point. A lot of movies have sad endings, you know, when they could just be "happily ever after." These movies are making the audience feel sad, but it's very much done on purpose, it's not because the stupid writer/director couldn't find a way to make everything turn out OK.
I snipped that last bit because the things I've already written address why I disagree with your assessment of Monopoly. I think that you basically looked at one element of the game, saw a few warning signs of design flaws, and concluded that these things were actually flaws and not deliberate attempts to make a social statement. I disagree. The game is balanced, but it's balanced purposely to show a flaw in the balance of a real-world economic system.
knowing defender, he will ruin that too.
I think you and Wiggin both said that, and I know that you said that you actually "know better" than the original game designer: