Merus

Yeah, but what counts as kicking down or punching up gets real hazy, real quick, thanks to your friend and mine, intersectionality. Like, is mocking the Westboro Baptist Church punching up (because they're the pointy end of homophobia and the logical endpoint of a particular strain of Christianity) or kicking down (because they're poor, badly educated, and are trapped in an abusive environment)? Similarly, there's lot of comics who skirt the boundaries because they want to satirise soft bigotry. For all of Dame Edna's faults, the act has, at its heart, an attempt to highlight the soft bigotry of the middle class by just making it a little too obvious that there's something nasty at the bottom of these nice-sounding sentiments. But that dragging it kicking and screaming into the light also means that you're reinforcing it. Honestly, I'm not equipped to work out where the line is, and I still believe that good satire can change people's minds (especially not after "Bill Shorten's zingers" has become a thing) so I'm not willing to say that comedy should stay away from topics where it might do harm. Like, Bill Cosby's become a pariah (although somehow not actually arrested yet) because of being outed as a serial rapist, and it took a comedian for people to take it seriously. But people should have been listening, and it shouldn't have needed to be a man saying it. I don't know.

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem when talking about whether a game's theme justifies violence, because the themes we see the most are the ones where purely violent mechanics requires the least explanation. The themes are chosen because they allow for violence. Of course, did the violence come first, or did the themes? 1) Looking at pre-NES games, for instance, where having a coherent theme was never much of a priority, you had a wide variety of themes and a wide variety of game styles. As it became increasingly important for games to be intuitive and for their themes to fit the gameplay, we saw a race towards themes that would fit the gameplay, and at the time gameplay was still relatively limited. There's a reason why games with genuinely new mechanics tend to have very unusual themes - Myst, The Sims, Katamari Damacy, hell, even GTA. 2) Speaking of GTA, it's interesting that you almost never see pedestrians try and leap out of the way of a car, when that used to be quite common behaviour.

I think that's the thing with building your career around offensive humour: even if you're good at it, your strike rate's not going to be 100% - you're counting on getting a high enough strike rate that people will give you a pass for the rest.

Well, even with comedy, that's a fine line. Like, I think Sarah Silverman's very funny, and she's definitely offensive, but her shtick is that she's an expert at working out where the line is and crossing it just enough, then milking her audacity for jokes.

Honestly I think dating sites based on one shared interest tend to death spiral - the people who can choose between the specific and the generalist sites will choose the generalist sites, which leaves only people for whom 'gamer' is a core part of their identity, which means the dating pool is lousy, so people leave, so the dating pool is lousy, etc. I think out-of-game matchmaking's probably going to be more useful than a ChristianMingle but for people who identify as 'gamers'. (And if you do things right, people'll meet and fall in love anyway) I appreciate that you appear to ask whether a player likes to take their time and soak in the details. Have you heard of the Bartle player types? It might be a good thing to take into account, especially when taking into account what kinds of players mix like oil and water.

Idle Thumbs has made it very difficult to take Jurassic Park seriously.

While they're not region-locked, mingling only works amongst games in your own region. You probably won't manage to get a lot of PP out of mingling.

I finished Axiom Verge. It had somewhat interesting upgrades although only a few were genuine surprises, but coming off Ori and the Blind Forest, which had moments that were definitely overtuned but an environment that was a joy to explore, this didn't do it for me. It didn't help that some of the puzzles were obnoxious, the music wasn't built for sound systems with a quality subwoofer and the plot was rubbish. I think I've got some problems with the glitch aesthetic, as well - there are places, the secret worlds especially, where the glitches feel like glitches, but too often in games that want to incorporate the idea of a game 'glitching' they tend to feel fairly rote. Glitches are undefined behaviour; they should be a little more adventurous than different colours, or drawing from the wrong position on the sprite sheet.

It's too goddamn late for me to make a coherent point, so mumble mumble like Kotaku running stories on what Stormfront thinks about the latest video games mumble grumble

I was on the development team (for Journey to Rooted Hold and The City Beneath, at least) That's why I'm so upset - imagine Firewatch had been out for six months. (also, I understand VGHD didn't really care for it, it's got a long-standing problem where the graphics are kind of basic and the controls are... legacy (although the undo and the reverse action button make a big difference) but I don't care because it is filled with unique ideas. It doesn't sound like VGHD really got to the point where some of the design decisions made sense - I heard them complaining about how the puzzles are laid out in a physical layout and how it feels like it's wasting time, when that's critical for the way the game paces itself and gates puzzles. It's just that the first handful of puzzles in a DROD game tend to be fairly linear because it needs to teach foundational concepts one after the other.)

NO-ONE TOLD ME DROD: THE SECOND SKY WAS OUT IT HAS BEEN OUT FOR SIX MONTHS HOW DID THIS HAPPEN I'M BLAMING ALL OF YOU JESUS CHRIST YOU'RE ALL FIRED I AM VERY, VERY UPSET RIGHT NOW I JUST NEED A MOMENT

Screw all these other people, that is an origin story. It ha the mask and everything. I request more stories about your luchador days!

Yeah, I'm reminded of how long and loud developers complained about rentals and the second-hand market, two things that pretty much every other entertainment industry seems to take in its stride.

My feelings on the Kardashians are complicated (that is, they hold no appeal for me but I'm unwilling to write them off as being terrible people without significant evidence, in keeping with my general policy of assuming that celebrities are playing dumb until proven otherwise) but I gotta say, it seems like a pretty helpful thing for the transgender community that the relatively shallow audience that Keeps Up With The Kardashians are getting exposure to what it's really like to be transgender. It seems like at least one of the Kardashians is handling it well? It seems like Caitlyn is using the spotlight wisely, and as someone who's been in a position to have a media circus, I appreciate that it's not easy, when dealing with something difficult, to try and harness that very silly attention for something worthwhile. So I'm pleased she's ready to do so. Mardi Gras in Sydney, which is our rough equivalent of Pride, was a couple of months ago.

I appreciate that you can have motion controls on or off - I'll probably leave them on, because I generally don't have problems with motion controls, but clearly enough people do that putting it on a stick as well is the best of both worlds.

It sounds like it's similar to Ireland; you can only return it if the game is faulty (doesn't work, damaged, isn't what it says it is). The claims that are relevant can both made by the product and by the supplier, but they're claims made about the fitness of purpose of the product, not about quality, so if you don't like a game but it's functional. The supplier is protected in the case of an Aliens: Colonial Marines, if they tell the consumer beforehand about defects.

Like I said earlier, this isn't an attitude that can fly in every territory. Australia consumer protection law is omnipresent - if you take money for a product from an Australian, you're liable. This is one of the reasons why distributors exist; it's infeasible for most companies to be familiar with everyone's different laws, and different cultures have very different opinions about how financial transactions should work. (I'm suddenly struck by a thought: do any online storefronts actually support haggling?)

Steam's needed to bring their return policies in line with Australian consumer law for a while - they've been fine taking our money, but not been fine with respecting the rights that go along with that money.

I think the problem here is that you mean 'presenter' as a synonym of 'speaker', where Ubisoft usually gives a microphone to at least one person who should never be given a microphone, whereas I mean 'presenter' as a synonym of the MC, where it's the person who introduces the speakers and acts as the glue of the show. EA's presenters are usually much worse than Ubisoft, although I think everyone's taken a turn.

I think it's important to remember that this criticism is not specifically that Brothers is making mistakes that other games do not, nor is it a criticism that Brothers is out of line, specifically. In a world where stories about sisters having adventures or growing up or grieving or whatever were commonplace, very few people would have a problem with Brothers being about two boys doing things. Unfortunately, saying 'everyone keeps making stories about men and boys and there's very few stories about women and girls that don't box them into fairly boring roles' is too broad and high-level to really be interesting as a criticism, and nor does it say anything about the myriad and creative ways society has found to marginalise female characters. I haven't played the game, and so had to cut my podcast short, but it irritates me that the subtitle is 'A Tale of Two Sons'. That's not a subtitle, that's a lousy rewording of the title. That's like calling the podcast "Idle Thumbs: A Podcast Recorded After Our Thumbs Have Been Engaged". "Polygon: On Media Made Up Of Shapes" "Firewatch: A Tale Of Lookouts In The Forest"

I was going to say the exact same thing about Cara. She also was on a site that is much more indulgent for people to subvert the preview - Rock Paper Shotgun's bread and butter is weird-ass indie games, and they completely ignore console games, so their audience doesn't really expect the hottest takes on upcoming games and they're not 'behind' if they decide to ignore a game. (It helps that almost all of their reviews contain a certain amount of negativity, even for games they like.)

Honestly I thought that the guitar two seconds later was more obnoxious.

I can think of at least half a dozen mobile games that would benefit from VR, and will do so now: The Room, Epoch 2, Fotonica, Infinity Blade, Republique, Midnight Star. The thing about mobile is that the technology is a good fit but the reason people like their mobiles doesn't have a lot of overlap with the reasons people like VR. It feels like the Vita - what people want out of their mobile gaming isn't necessarily what the Vita's optimised for.

Oh wow, (unnecessary) burn on Aisha Tyler.