feelthedarkness

Jennegatron nailed much of what I wanted to add! Good stuff. Additionally, I wonder how much of it is a personal decision to "not sell sexy" or really a necessity of the Nashville model. Remember that Swift is literally the only act in the world that is actually selling a lot of records. It's November and she is the first person to go platinum in 2014. I don't mean that conspiratorially so much as "this is how we do it." (all hands are in the air)

It's likely I totally misread it, but I thought the ritual stuff wasn't real, in that the Abbot wasn't really hundreds of years old, and nobody actually got immortality. I thought it was another facet of the aspect of the story that was breaking Japan out of it's isolationist, and sort of medieval outlook.

I mentioned this on FC4 thread a long time ago, but the villain's outlandish appearance to me references a lot of Hong Kong/Japanese triad action stuff. Who has blonde hair and a purple suit? (sidebar: all around cool cat(the theme he wrote for Electric Dragon 80,000v) in Ichi the Killer, which was a popular and influential movie. I can't help but think this specifically was a big influence, though that garishness isn't uncommon in different ways in those movies. Granted, that could also be giving them more credit than deserved. Kikihara in Ichi: The Judge & goon from Full Contact:

Ill post! Swift also occupies that rarefied space of a person still capable of selling enterprise level units, so the difference in Spotify's paltry royalties and people downloading it are negligible to her. She's also maybe one of the few who could negotiate a more favorable rate, and this is a good tactic for that. As for the other stuff, I'm not sure I agree, but it's such a morass I'm not sure. I can't tell we're seeing the ceiling come down a lot or if the floor coming up a little. I feel like there are more Parquet Courts in the world today, medium sized bands that would never be huge making a viable go at it. I'm not sure if they would have had it better in the 90s. So many bands got signed, and it didn't get them anywhere. Like Guided by Voices, or my personal favorite unlikely signing Jim Sheppard's V3. I think they would all be better off today. GBV has their own fancy beer with record right now! Then there are all those scenes that seem to be thriving that I don't understand at all, like Imagine Dragons or all that crabcore.

Divinity Original Sin: Fun times! Some really challenging fights! Less than inspiring story, but serviceable enough. I have the kind of broken brain where I love tweaking the gear on a myriad of NPCs for minor, idealized stat gains, and the game provides amble option there, plus a robust set of geegaws to modify your gear. One thing that never works for me is that every RPG gives you a million pots & scrolls and I just never use them.

Woo! Congrats dawg!

the silken goku is basically the gamergate tuxedo so i understand the cognitive dissonance.

While Smash TV was all single screen, there was a followup, Total Carnage, which was Smash TV meets Commando/Ikari Warriors. it was mechanically the same as STV, including the same bosses with military skins. Plot synopsis: In Total Carnage, an evil Middle Eastern dictator named General Akhboob closes off his country to the rest of the world following a war in 1999. Hundreds of reporters flocked to the zone in hopes of getting a real scoop. Unfortunately for them, one of the reporters discovers that there's more than baby milk being made at the 'Baby Milk Factory'.

Oh, I agree with you guys that there is nothing wrong with feeling slick when playing a game, but I think it's a worthwhile distinction to make that single player games are constructed to make you feel like a bad ass, and then tell you that you are a bad ass when you complete the challenges they designed to be completed. I don't know many games with challenges that are designed to actually foil a player using the tools at hand. (which makes stuff like Spelunky Eggplant run extra remarkable!)

Ooh, I just want to say I totally agree with Moddus about how great The Luminaries is! Also, if it is your jam, the audiobook is a great performance.

Seriously! They talk about this on the podcast once in a while, and I find it interesting how weird it is that you'd be like "yeah, i'm GREAT at this!" when somebody designed a thing to enable your greatness. How many of these bad asses are in the top 30% of the LoL/DoTA/SC2 curve? That would still just be one end of a standard deviation and not remotely "elite"

Not to mention that it says that "women are not burdened by Marriage/family" which is false many times over, starting from an early and still persistent idea that women are chattel to be sold, i.e. "what was a dowry?" Then you have to overlook almost all of modern capitalism where a women's career had to be halted for family. Also, the government protecting women thing would probably come as a surprise to any woman who tried to join the military in the previous 100 years, or go to a planned parenthood, or expect some kind of legal protection from being assaulted or denied equal wages.

Spinning Gamer off into a Gender seems like a mistake when they could go all in on it being a technologically derived race. This would allow them the great dream of playing their own race card. Also, A++ to the guy who said "never read the comets" on that twitter post.

Courtesy of the greatest photoblog on the internet, the Internet K Hole.

Yeah, also, case in point: Jerk Lawyer pointing at the mentally ill business guy as representative of the "anti-gg" faction, when there is plenty on non-anecdotal evidence of GG people being extremely abusive.

The GG mob has adopted the worst impression of progressives in an attempt to "use their logic against them." It's something conservatives have leveraged effectively for years, accusing somebody of the thing you're doing. Also, since all the GG stuff is anonymous, without "organized demands" nobody is responsible for anybody else's behavior, so when the mob does something awful, and a person says "man, this mob did something awful!" any random person can say "I'm not in that mob, gamergate rules!" An ouroboros of bullshit!

When you guys were talking about sci-fi world building games, and their world building, I wanted to mention one of my personal great games: Ascendancy. http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/221/Ascendancy.html Part Master of Orion, Part Civ The Alien races are all quite unique, entirely non-humanoid, like a less cheeky Star Control. They add a great deal of variety to how you play, such as sentient igneous rocks that can easily inhabit volcanic worlds where other species can't land.

Yeah, that Arthur Chu piece is really sweet and sad.

What is in the 275 megabyte "dialing software" download?

This is amazing, and they are amazing. Also, I think Cardboard Computer has the sophistication to "create art" in a way that I said The Black Glove kickstarter didn't.

i appreciate they made it all white guys except the woman they made up to hang out with them. Their first intellectually honest move?

So good! I never noticed the frowny ascii faces in between the banners!

These casts have been great! I wanted to mention the music, which I really like. I think it's meant to invoke horror soundtracks of previous years, since it seems like the 3 flavors of TP are 70s haunting films, film noir, and soap opera. The analog synth stuff that John Carpenter used in the 80s, and a million italians in the 70s, particularly anybody would worked with Argento or Fulci. Sidebar: On the idea of music nobody listens to, 2014 has seen an (relatively minor) explosion of reissue labels like Death Waltz, focused on analog synth horror soundtracks, and there have been more than a few bands popping up to create original versions of that. Steeve Moore's Zombi being the most high profile.

I backed this out of some sense of sympathy, which I do a lot. The front/back glove effect is really nice, but the other stuff doesn't seem too promising. There is a through line about "creating art" but the little I've seen doesn't make me think that there is some great conceptual work underpinning it. Making a game about making art is tough, unless you're confining the band to craft.