Merus

Wait, how do you screw yourself over when levelling in Morrowind? Don't you just do things and then your level goes up, but everything's still pretty much driven by your skills? It's one of the few WRPGs I enjoy because I don't feel like I'm inevitably going to fuck up my character.

Kayin and I are internet friends, or at least acquaintances. He is a pretty cool guy. I don't know if it's fair to call it a bad game because it's an early hobby project, and it achieves its artistic goals, which is to make the player the butt of the joke. He is working on a real game that he intends people to play and enjoy.

I really enjoyed this, and for the reasons I hoped I would. There's lots of stupid little things that don't make sense but this is an archetype movie, and the things that needed to be there were there: the villains were the reasonable moral-compromise, end-justifies-the-means kind of people, and Cap punched those people in the face. I appreciate that Marvel is pretty comfortable porting real-world conflicts and concerns into the realm of superheroes. I'm really curious to see what happens with Guardians of the Galaxy.

I bet Comedy Central is bummed but if HBO can't manage John Oliver's new show then I'm pretty sure they're going to get a do-over.

I don't know, we used to find homosexuals and interracial marriage pretty vile. There's this clip I saw once from the BBC of a reporter going into a gay club and telling the viewer how repulsed he was at this disgusting display of guys in sensible clothes dancing with one another.

I've tried it a couple of times but never really enjoy it. Not sure what it is; I'd say it was too dark but I loved In Bruges and that movie is pretty dark.

Getting everything except level 11 Awesomeness doesn't take long, but you'll really need to step up your skills to do some of the invaded paintings. Level 11 awesomeness is what takes the time, because the only way you can get it is through daily and weekly challenges. I really like the challenges - they procedurally generate levels in a really effective way - but I can understand if you're not enthused about the game's blatant manipulation of the achievement system to encourage you to do it. There was a period where I considered streaming the daily levels but it'd require too much setup and no-one pays any attention to what I do on the internet.

I'm bothered by the 90's era voice synthesising. We can do a lot better these days, Nintendo. I have a nice Australian lady trapped in my phone.

It's worth remembering that Vlambeer acknowledged the legitimacy of those concerned about the watering down of Nazi imagery. Watering down the imagery is kind of emblematic of forgetting the scale of the crimes entirely - there's plenty of people who quite rightly feel that what happened in Germany should be the last time we let this kind of thing happen (which is why I look at what's going on in Hungary, Turkey and Russia with creeping horror).

Transistor comes out May 20th.

I got 100% in Rayman Legends, including level 11 Awesomeness, which took months. There was one invaded level, and one trophy for completing one level without being hit, that I got only towards the end. I was getting platinum cups in the dailies by that point.

Nah, it's just contrarian. Good satire represents reality so closely you can't help but see it, and shows how warped reality has to be to get like that. 'A prank with a stooge' sounds like the best satire gets is Candid Camera? There's no truth to that. I could talk about Orwell or Twain or Bierce but instead I'm going to talk about Frontline. They show Frontline in schools - the Australian Frontline, which I believe was retitled Behind the Frontline in the US - mostly so kids see how good satire works. Frontline was a show that depicted the behind-the-scenes of a second-rate current affairs program, a genre of television that specialises in celebrity fluff pieces, exposés of 'shonky' (current affairs speak for incompetent and dishonest) tradespeople, local council disputes, product comparisons, corporate puff pieces, amazing beauty and diet secrets etc. etc. Basically where journalism goes to die. Each episode focused on a different stock story, unpacking why they existed and how the producers would manipulate the facts to fit their pre-prepared narrative. It worked because after it was done you could turn over to Channel 7 and watch Real Life, that station's own second-rate current affairs program, pull exactly the same shit for real. Reviewers at the time loved to point this out, and Real Life's ratings plunged low enough for it to be canned, particularly on weeks where Frontline got lucky and dismantled a stock story that their targets had just used. The Frontline team then went and made The Castle so they were on fucking fire for a few years there.

I'm drawing my information from the Rayman wiki: http://raymanpc.com/wiki/en/Rayman_Origins#Development

I understand that's intentional; Silicon Valley makes a big deal about being meritocratic but it's somehow mostly white, young upper-middle class men.

Haven't you already paid full price for it? One would hope you'd get at least something you'd enjoy out of it.

Yep, Origins is great. The treasure levels only unlock a super-hard post-game level; they're not on the critical path at all. Apparently this game was intended to be an origin story for Rayman, but once announced they decided to make it Rayman 4, and then they decided to cut out all the plot. There's a whole bunch of dialogue that dataminers unearthed that explains that this was supposed to be either the origin story of the series' Big Bad, and then that the villain was a massive fan of the Big Bad all along.

I don't think that whoever's making the Arkham games will want to put only the best-known version of each character in their game. This is, after all, a series that has revelled in deep cuts. I think, while Barbara is the best-known Batgirl, in part it's because her once being Batgirl is part of Oracle's origin story. So Barbara tends to get used so that writers have the option to do the Killing Joke.

So I want to talk about flow. Flow's this concept from psychological studies that suggests there's an optimal balance between the challenge of a task, and the ability of a person to perform it. You can imagine game designers' ears perking up at this point. If challenge outstrips ability, a person feels frustration; if their ability outstrips the challenge, they feel boredom. If they stay in that sweet spot for long enough, they start to feel a sense of flow, a euphoria of action where they lose themselves in the task. Flow seems to be a big thing in game design theory - there's a reason why a lot of games these days deliberately dial down the challenge to try and keep flow going. What's interesting, though, are the games that deliberately set out avoid creating a sense of flow; Dark Souls is constantly challenging; it's a game where players are constantly feeling frustration. Gone Home is a game with very little challenge; there's not much to the task of moving around the house, and most of the game's entertainment value comes from the story than from the act of play. Is flow a worthwhile concept? Are games that deliberately set out to frustrate or bore their players in the pursuit of some other aesthetic worse games for it? How much should the task matter to a game?

I guess I enjoy Captain America as the Superman movies DC should have made. Captain America himself is an archetype, and Marvel understands that what is interesting about the archetypal hero is the conflict between the hero and the world that continually fails the hero. The most striking scene of First Avenger is the one where they make a super-soldier sell war bonds, because as an archetypal hero he is inspiring, but the military really needs the public inspired, not their soldiers. Eventually he finagles the opportunity to inspire the men in the field, to fight evil directly instead of the short-term revenue raising. The Superman movies struggle a lot with the idea of an archetypical hero, either making it about straight punching, or about Superman's struggle to live up to the archetype. Not surprisingly, they all suck. What's interesting about Superman is how Metropolis responds; the famous radio serials put us in Metropolis from the very opening. Superman's powers have never been the point, which is in part why they'd been frequently added to over the years.

It doesn't get too excessive from what I remember, other than standard HBO sexism; I honestly think part of it is to remind the viewer that as much as you might hate some of the S1 characters, there's even viler people out there and compared to them the Lannisters suddenly don't look too bad. It was vitally important, particularly because of the structure of Season 3 compared to the book, that they reminded viewers that they don't just have the Starks to root for.

Excellent!

Yeah, but Barbara Gordon is also Oracle. If you want a good Batgirl you have a range to choose from, but there's only one Oracle.

I think this is what bothered me about it; I got to the point where I could see what the shape of the gameplay was and at that point I had little confidence the game had anything else to show me because it had been coy about its most basic elements.

A game Australians like to play with Americans is slowly introducing as much Australian English as possible, including stuff you've just made up. It's bonza, and it's a galah crooking the buggery on their 12 o'clock. They've got Buckley's. A related game: if someone compliments you on your English, turn to a companion and start speaking in gibberish.