April 24, 2020

Episode 320: Snek Ops

1 hour 37 minutes

Tom S, Chris and Marsh evade the Gull Squad to bring you takes on the trousers of tactics spin-off XCOM: Chimera Squad, tubestation construction sim StationFlow and kraken-based illusory-victory machine Magic: The Gathering Arena.

This isn’t relevant to show, but I think it’s important to say at the top of this that Tom would absolutely destroy Samuel Pepys in a fight.

Delete gulls so we can be free to touch our faces again – using the power of Nvidia RTX Voice! Watch a Games Lad bang things with a hammer silently. You can download it here. You can use it even if you don’t have an RTX card by following these instructions, assuming Microsoft decides you can edit a text file on your own computer for which you are the sole user and administrator.

Robert Yang’s forensic investigation into the authorship of seminal Counter-Strike level fy_iceworld (which was and is bullshit). And its preceding article digs into the game’s continuing legacy (of bullshit).

XCOM: Chimera Squad. Why do the snake wear trousers? As a symbol of their epantsipation.

Find your own Escalator Fuck-it Threshold in zen spatial engineering sim StationFlow.

Where does the poo go?

A Game Chris Has Found Pleasant In This Strange Time: Hitman 2

It’s krakens for days in Magic: The Gathering Arena

Wired’s article on maybe-just-as-terrible-as-everything-else investment opportunity: Magic cards

Tim Harford has good facts about Mars Bars and macroeconomics.

Nice and good art people: Paul and Leesha – behold their sky sharks! Their ligers!

Here are some JRPGs that have shaped Tom into the 17th-century-diarist-suplexing bad boy that he is today: the Persona series, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6 and the newly reconstituted 7 (currently only on PS4). Also: Lost Odyssey, Tales of Symphonia and Eternal Sonata.

Adumbric is a good word.

Games, both video and tabletop in flavour, with interesting win conditions Cosmic Encounter, Solium Infernum (which now only seems to be available through this sketchy-looking site), Blood on the Clocktower and Blades in the Dark.

What a kraken pod.

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Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.

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