Codicier

I agree with a lot of what you say here, at least partly because the paradox model is based on European civilisation that has always seemingly developed a lot more like the model based interaction and consolidation of power and impermanence. Both of the systems are based on the perspectives of the civilisations they come from. The main difference I feel is that paradox's model postulates that empires are inherently unstable, you can never truly win history like you do in Civ. Have you ever took a look at Fate of the World? I'd be interested to know if you think the way they try and base their model of gameplay around different scenarios of how climate may affect civilisation is any better.

We had a similar discussion back when the gods & kings expansion came out after i tried to articulate some of my issues with the way Civ models history http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/7887-episode-175-gods-and-kings/?p=197471 The things is, as far as I'm concerned it fine to have a superpower simulation game, after all its just one lens and there are other companies out there like Paradox (who has European take on the theme that focuses on the interrelation of nations) producing game that apply different ones.

CK2 has dlc for custom portraits for the different factions in the game, I decided to grab them during the summer sale since it gives a bit more flavour to the game. Iron man is just Ragnar looking appropriately norse. Trying to get Ragnar to a position of power reminded me of one of the problems I have with the game. I get very attached to the story of one character, & when it comes to a end I sometimes struggle to find the motivation to carry on. To me the alternate history which resulted in that picture feels the authentic one. Yes I could go back & use what I've learned to make a better shot of it, but I feel in some strange way that would lessen the memory of Ragnar his wife Jaquelleine Rodkin, and their children, not just their first born son Sean (named by the game not me), but twins Lee & Clementine, and their two youngest girls little Christine Remo and Breckon.

I took a damn good shot at giving Ragnar his rightful position as king of ireland & true heir to sean, but couldn't quite raise enough support still he lived into his 80's and had 7 children with his wife before popping his clogs his ambition of passing the kingdom onto his kids unfufilled

So yeah this happened http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/595883498976677856/B1BB7F0ABBBACE18D004B749815066FC24E5ACBD/

Someone was good enough to give me a link to a really nice walk through of the same Irish starting area http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/7575-crusader-kngs-ii/?p=198550 It along with some help from Gormongous and a few other thumbs in the CK2 thread really helped me get over the notorious paradox UI, and allowed me to create the situation which created one of my favourite ever characters in a video game whom I affectionately referred to as "The Duchess" Believe me if I could have switched to a matriarchal succession at this point I would have, she was the greatest ruler Ireland never knew.

I've always bounced quite badly off the whole supernatural horror mystery thing. My first exposure to that sub genre was Higurashi When They Cry, which i absolutely loathed despite the fact at the time everyone seemed to love it. Since then I've been unable to shift the impression that the core of the whole genre is a highly contrived conceit that it is these characters fate to suffer, not because they are part a convincingly uncaring world, not because their own actions and the natural progression of their story arc leads them there, but simply because the creator likes to watch them suffer. Speaking of which i just watched the 3rd of the Berserk remakes, and ugh i don't think I've watched such a uneven piece of work for a long time. Gormongous your absolutely right when you comment on the battle scenes occasionally dropping to sub PS2 level rendering at times, but on the other hand i love the way they have chosen to draw Guts. Traditionally hes always been drawn all hard lines & spiky where as the golden age version is far softer and more rounded. He actually looks young! As for the story ..... i really think i am getting to old for this shit, and there are a few scenes i find particularly troublesome in a way i don't remember feeling with the manga or previous anime adaptation.

We are coming to the end of the current season of anime so now is probably as good a time as any to have a chat about some of the shows. Attack on Titian is so earnestly shouhen that at times I feel like I'm watching a parody of the genre. I don't know perhaps i'm just too old and to cynical to take something like it seriously. I still think its one of the most gratuitously violent shows for a while which perhaps adds to my feeling this really is a show just for boys. My feeling on Gargantia have ended up decidedly mixed, it creates a interesting world then populates it with uninteresting and unsympathetic people. My interest in Aku No Hana initially came from the animation style it employed, its been a long time since I've seen rotoscoping used but now I've seen the story they chose to tell with it i think it was a good choice. The series also bucks the tendency in anime to romanticise small town rural life, i think because of that (& my own small town upbringing) i sympathised more with the central character than i expected. In many way hes not that different to the way Syntehicgerbil describes the protagonist of Tatami Galaxy, however instead of going through a typical character development arc, he spent most of the series not learning from him mistakes and instead just making things worse for himself. I'm also kinda interested in the way the show treats its protagonist (& therefore its own) earnestness, It tells the whole story seriously while at the same time mocking its lead characters tendency to see his own troubles in a melodramatic way. Finally we have A Certain Scientific Railgun, which although not without its faults is probably my favorite show this season just dude to its sheer enthusiastic entertainment value. My only gripe with it is the occasional appearance of Toma (The hero of railgun's parent series A Certain Magical Index), who remains as annoying and blatant peice of shouhen wish fulfillment (the whole world must follow a certain set of rules apart from him, and all the heroines adore him) as i have ever had the misfortune to encounter. Overall not a bad season with a few enjoyable shows but not sure there was anything truly outstanding

There are so many way this could be happily misconstrued But I'll interpret it in the spirit that I think it's intended and say generally I fully agree that harem anime are a scourge that are best wiped from the face of the earth asap, although I do believe Tegan pointed out a notable example of a very enjoyable reverse harem a few pages back with Ouran. May I ask which series particularly earned you ire?

To put it bluntly there are days where i'm just too damn tired, or stressed to wade into many strategy games. Not wanting to worry about my reaction time when tired rules out a lot of RTS's, and after a bad day many turn based strategy games just seem a bit more intimidating than they do after a good one. But that doesn't mean that i just want to load up a action game, i still want something with that distinctive satisfaction that comes with playing with fascinating problems inside a interesting system. It something which has been rattling around at the bottom of my brain for a while, it bubbled to the surface first after watching the Idle thumbs Kickstarter 'party'. Pikmin seemed ideal relaxing game in some ways, sadly it wasn't exactly easy to get hold of. So i opted for what seemed be a bit of a Pikmin clone, Overlord. I was pleasantly surprised with how much fun i had with it. Perhaps the virtues of 'lean back gaming' are sometimes bit overplayed by some console evangelists, but oh boy after plugging a wireless controller into my PC i really did find the experience of playing qualitatively different in a way i didn't expect. Restricting a search to PC games with joypad controls wouldn't get me very far, but i think it has given me a clue to what kind of game i should be looking for. Constraints of the joypad control system seem to naturally a fair amount of streamlining in any design that most PC games don't have to do. So anyway I've just picked up Euflouria which looks like it could be just the thing i need. but i know there must be a few others out there.So if anyone can suggest either games or ways of playing games conductive to a nice relaxing evening i'd love to hear. Alternatively: If you find complex games or multi-player RTS's relaxing id love to hear why too.

This game really swung around completely on a few occasions at least twice I genuinely thought we had a winner, fist you Swiz & then Bargo when his ship production went stella. I guess early on I was probably the from runner because of my extremely early elimination of Vgames (i almost feel sorry for that guy, but he did attack first so i don't really ) followed by my annexing vgames territory and fighting a limited war v's Boost after he appeared to be collaborating with the remnants of vgames (would love to know if he actually was or not). also I love the fact I genuinely believed what I said to Swiz as well, and that he then went & did the exact opposite Honestly couldn't have got a better result if it had been intentional. I guess the big lessons are is: don't be the front runner, and tell the truth (no one will believe you). I'm going to try and do a little summary of it from MY PoV tomorrow (&i'd encourage others to do the same) it should be interesting to see how our perceptions of what was going on differed from what was going on

I am the WOLFMAN goo goo g'ghoo. Truth is, i was really reeeeeeeeeeeeealy tired & actually did just send it by acident. No master plan just a mistake of a tired man

I'm beginning to wonder about the choice to remove the increased travel speeds hasn't solved one problem (that things got too hectic to work around any sort of real life), with another (that it's harder to break a deadlock, and there's less combat tricks to play)

I imagine there may well be a period where everyone from the first 3 games is feeling to shell shocked/bitter/madly happy to even contemplate a 4th game. But maybe as the stories of triumph and horror begin to leak out it will lure a fresh crop of players to their doom.

100% agree. For me the way they played with the way water behaves at small scales in a few scenes really was a gawd damn joy to behold.

I do wish we'd get more shows like Planetes. Weightlessness and the problems surrounding it on-screen seem a obvious reason why we don't get more live action drama set in space. It's expensive to simulate and it's absence is tricky to explain in plots unless you jump straight into magic doohicky territory, but that's not something that i feel should bother animators, sure it can be tricky but it's not as mindbogglingly impractical as it would be for live action. It can't help wonder if it's just a market issue. That this particular kind of hard sci-fi is stuck half way between traditional drama & the spectacle driven sci-fi of space operas, and probably struggle to appeal to enough of either audience to justify its budget. That said we do have thing that are sort of 'edge cases' of hard(ish) sci-fi plus drama that have succeeded, Summer Wars, Ghost in the Shell, and Patlabor, and Eve No Jikan, being the ones that springs to my mind which have a semblance of plausibility and have technology as a key theme (although I must admit I'm stretching it with Eve & GiTS). Of those Patlabor reminds me most of Planetes, and perhaps it's existence helped pave the way for other sci-fi shows that focused on the lives and jobs of their protagonists more than the machines they were operating.

I've been re-watching the whole Eva series to give myself a refreshed memory before trying to put down what i feel about Eva 3.33. I was watching a scene in The End of Evangelion where Misato has just hacked into a database to discover "what is second impact?", and the result flashes up on screen for half a second. Now in the past id always assumed this was Lorem Ipsum text but this time I paused it and found the nice little Gainax History Easter egg you can see bellow. (don't worry it doesn't have anything to do with the plot)

Think the headless Tux is the stand out image by a country mile, felt like the only one trying to say something about the characters and not just the era. (though i do like the illustration style on the one by Marc Aspinall).

I'm not sure deletion is always right answer to these thing, but putting some context in there would seem wholly appropriate. Have you tried talking to the moderator and explained the issue to find out if they would consider the line being amended in some way(rather than deleted) that would satisfy you both? or if you feel strongly enough about this (& as silly as this may seem) have you tired contacting Nina Power, since if your reading is correct I can't imagine she'd be happy to be misinterpreted.

I don't think they are the same. When you think your infallible you are still making mistake but you aren't noticing them, or worse you are mis-attributing those mistakes on others in your memory. I wonder if the use of 'he' was a choice made at least partially as a reflection on the tradition of the royal 'we'. That archaic tradition that when the monarch speaks as 'we' she/he is seen as speaking for both themselves and god. Making them by implication infallible. That principle is something that we see Henry use extensively, and I think sometimes in the book we see Cromwell disguising a personal moral judgement as pragmatism even to himself. His self image is someone so pragmatic that 'he' would never make a mistake, that just as Henry links his infallibility with God, Cromwell links his with his logic/pragmatism. (In a weird way he reminds me of the protagonist during the 1st part of Sense of a Ending)

I could be 100% wrong here but i always interpreted that change in the character as not Cromwell becoming fallible but as Cromwell realising he was fallible. I mean isn't it a very human thing, all plans start out perfect in our mind.

God that looks awesome (in particular the Yggdrasil design on Odins/Wotans coat), I remember watching a production of Faust on the BBC last year and really enjoying it so id love to give opera a proper try but I wouldn't know where to start and probably couldn't afford to go any see it anyway I'm in a similar position I'm planning on going to the UK Board Gaming expo in Birmingham later this month for the first time, but none of my regular gaming group can come, and the thought of sitting in a hotel alone at the end of the day in a city I don't know and feel to hesitant to explore on my own is a profoundly lonely one. So much so I'm thinking of giving up the idea of attending for 2 days and just heading down one day and getting a train home in the evening.

I don't really agree with comparing those two, they may have superficial links with the medieval germanic art design and hyper violence but i don't think so far Titan has done anything with the story of its world and characters to suggest that the violence is anything but gratuitous. Berserk's world was almost Lovecraftian with its hidden gods playing with the fate of it inhabitants. Humans were portrayed as utterly insignificant in the greater scheme of things. In berserk Human life didn't matter because well, most humans didn't matter alive or dead in the face of the timeless malice of the forces guiding that world. So to me in Berserk we have antagonists (the apostles) that are a part of the world they inhabit and who's violence is a representation of that worlds nihilism, and in the other we have antagonists (the Titans) who exist only to inflict violence on humans. It's the difference between someone stepping on a bug without realizing it, and another person pulling the legs of a spider. Now don't get me wrong Berserk isn't perfect by any means, or its violence particularly meaningful, and it has a downright hideous attitude to women. However we are given a reason why that world seems to treats it's inhabitants so terribly, something i just don't feel Titan has done. It's violence utterly without reason.

Detroit Metal City is worth a watch if you enjoy Cromartie.(doubly so if you have any fondness for the music they are parodying)

Apparently someone recommended Steve "Attack on Titan" which he has seemingly devoured ravenously. I'm not sure about that series overall, it goes for shock value scenes so often I started getting a bit jaded on it fairly quickly. Though I do endorse the following statement by him on that series. As for a golden age with a slight adjust we get 1998 to 2006 or as it's otherwise known Satoshi Kon's directing career.