Merus

I believe when they started they also had a basic outline of what was important, which is why some stuff in Season 3 is there when it turns up in the books much later. Also it's a TV show so they keep the actors happy when they're in as many episodes as possible (and the actors do sort of resent how quickly their characters can be killed off). If a character's important later, they have to give the actor something to do otherwise they'll lose them.

I'm definitely in the 'ugh Metroid Fusion' camp, but it does have some things to recommend it: specifically, when they stripped out all the exploration gameplay, they realised they still had to have the surprise and discovery Metroid specialises in, and so added a whole bunch of things that unexpectedly trigger while you're just moving from place to place. When they tried a more traditional Metroid in Zero Mission, they brought all the ideas from Fusion along with them. Zero Mission doesn't quite hit the highs of Prime or Super, but it does extremely well under its heavy constraints.

Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright is apparently just what the doctor ordered, in that it's a Phoenix Wright game where the investigation portions are polished and interesting, and the Layton portions don't pretend to be a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Things are straight-up supernatural, magic exists, and it has rules that Phoenix can cite in court. Like most recent Phoenix Wright games there's a gimmick - specifically, the witnesses are now a mob, and you have to play them off against each other on occasion, but it's always obvious when you're supposed to do this. Like the other gimmicks, it's a cute way to involve the themes but the cross-examination mechanic really doesn't need a lot as it is.

That sounds less like a cause and more like a symptom. If I moved to the US, I would be at a very similar disadvantage; the problem is more to do with a high barrier to be considered a member of the culture and less to do with references being the cultural determinant. It's exactly the same problem with Middle-Eastern immigrants moving to Europe; they don't have the hundreds of years of shared history and so they're constantly at a disadvantage. Really the core problem is the use of shared history as a cultural determinant instead of all the other things that are shared.

I liked Uncharted. Sure, it was a narratively-driven series, or more accurately a tone-driven series, but it handled that well, it had reasonably good quality writing apart from the problem people always bring up with Uncharted, and it knew when to put the mechanics down to give the world a moment to breath. Sure, it's basically Indiana Jones with a more diverse cast, but that's exactly what they were trying to achieve. Part of the problem with Star Wars is that it's beholden to the license, and for the past couple of decades the owner of the license spent a lot of time convincing people he didn't understand the appeal of the setting. The new owners may or may not; on the one hand, buying Star Wars feels like a cash grab; on the other hand, it seems like Disney have some institutional investment in ensuring the appeal of a character or setting is observed by the rest of the empire. (I remember when they unveiled the 'Princess' Merida design, and then walked it back pretty quickly after people complained Merida wouldn't doll herself up like that.)

I'd hope that if future historians look at Family Guy they'll also be able to look at all the stuff about people bagging out Family Guy for being lazy. There are plenty of historians that we recognise as being full of shit but still important because their mediocrity says something interesting about the time in which they lived. It's fascinating to me that depictions of pre-20th century life often ends up being completely inaccurate because we simply don't know what things look like, and there's all these details we don't even know about. We've got actual footage of much of the 20th century but human civilisation is so much more complex that now we get things like typography wrong.

The trick here is that none of these people are actually identifying as a "misandrist" because people usually don't define themselves by what they hate.

Well, it's just the old 'feminists hate men' epithet turned into a mocking joke, and cross-stitch, despite being basically pixel art, still has that cultural stereotype of being a twee thing for middle-aged ladies. The joke is the juxtaposition between cross-stitch and the internet-derived third-wave feminist mocking.

The employee passport is a great read. You get a week off after a year of work! You can be very excited about Abstergo in social media, but here's a massive list of exclusions that you're not allowed to talk about!

You keep whacking away at that strawman, dude. It's really, really not. And whatever you believe your point to be is, based on the little you've given us it's uncharitable at the very least and fairly vile at its worst. But whatever, it looks like you've resigned yourself to being interpreted as a jerk. I don't think it's fair to privilege the kind of speech that large corporations pay for over the kind of speech that expresses how another's speech can cause pain. Requests for silence aren't censorship, quite apart from censorship only ever applying to governments.

Then maybe you should learn to express yourself appropriately and not assume that you're entitled to be taken seriously no matter how horribly you come across. I'm not going to entertain someone who sounds like a Holocaust denier, for instance, even if they really want to talk about the extraordinary difficulty of photography in post WW2-Germany. Especially given that the point you presented was "social justice is garbage and Danielle brings it up too much" which is exactly the kind of thing we'd get from someone who expects to be taken seriously no matter how horribly they come across. And that you then immediately blamed the moderation team and then everyone else for not giving you the respect you feel you are entitled to.

Apparently Maurice Lamarche does an amazing Orson Welles impression, and basically they wrote an episode around his impression of the peas rant.

http://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=well%20that%20escalated%20quickly

I am reminded of the Letter from a Birmingham Jail; shit-stirring is usually the most effective way to get white people to not ignore the concerns of people of colour. You piss them off enough that they overreact and show their ass, and then suddenly you've got the moral high ground and can hopefully use it to force them to the table to confront how shitty they're being. From the death threats to the complete refusal to engage because it's a liberal hero being attacked, to Colbert essentially taking the same joke (and justification!) from Bill O'Reilly, to Film Crit Hulk's entire criticism essentially being about Suey Park's tone... the more response I see to this the more I feel that Suey Park was right all along. It feels like marginalisation and ass-covering to me.

Honestly I'd see Amazon hiring actual game developers to be a good sign as it suggests they recognise game development is a skillset they don't have internally.

Irony!

No mention about how Danielle brings both love for Pikmin 2 and weird-ass indie games to the table? No? (Also she sounds different to the other hosts which is useful to me because sometimes I get Jake and Sean mixed up.) But no, Idle Thumbs has never much cared about the acceptable range of opinions for video game people to have. And social issues that games fuck up is very much in Idle Thumbs' wheelhouse: bullshit in games is a frequent topic; the hosts were key staff members on Gone Home and The Walking Dead; here's a clip from Idle Thumbs 3 mocking how games show women that are evil by putting eyeliner on them; it's fucking creepy that a discussion about whether Danielle is allowed to be a cast member is even happening; things in list format are more likely to be read; .

I would hope that if Jerry Seinfeld did a bit about dragons it would at least be a bit about how you wouldn't want to put them in your luggage.

YOU KNOW THE RULES, BJORN I WOULDN'T GET THIS FROM ANY OTHER GUY

I don't know what's meant by Freudian overtones, but it's constantly working to create an atmosphere that feels like the subconscious of the player character breaking through without ever being clear. That irritated me when I played it, but reflecting on it now, there's no way that could have been handled that wasn't shitty.

I have underestimated Amazon twice and I am not keen to repeat the experience.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/04/02/a-goat-farmer-reviews-goat-simulator-goats-love-champagne/

Being obnoxious in a new episode thread feels like playing with fire. This thread is going to be pretty weird when that guy's post is deleted. Anyway, if there is a new Thumb I feel like we might need to arrange an appropriate portrait.

Educational supply stores sell blank playing cards, often in bulk. They also sell the sort of tokens you'd be looking to use.

I play Zombies, Run! when I run. I have the zombie chases switched off because I'm a wuss but having a little storyline play when I go running is quite compelling. I recommend the 5K app they did, which looks a bit janky compared to the real game but it has a program that's more sophisticated than most start-to-5K apps, and the storyline is pretty good. I was fascinated to discover that Russia is apparently trying to realign itself to become a fascist state.