Merus

Have you looked at the Australian Club Nintendo recently though it's sliiiiim pickin's

Yep, pretty much. Kinda dark for a kid's book but that was always the appeal - they're kinda dark for kid's books. Like, people enjoy pointing out that Wonka's kind of terrible, but honestly Gene Wilder understood how to play it far better than Johnny Depp did in that dodgy remake: in the original books, Wonka's surprisingly sinister. Even as a kid, I found the song gloating about Mike Teevee's accident and saying that kids would rather read pretty condescending. You mean authoritarian; the Oompa Loompas were clearly not unionised.

Wouldn't gamergate be thrilled that Idle Thumbs people were posting potentially embarrassing pictures of themselves on the internet. That'll teach those SJWs.

What Levine needs to do is shut the fuck up and listen. He cannot help by tweeting, especially after Bioshock Infinite.

Selma got a bad wrap for supposedly taking liberties with Lyndon Johnson's support for civil rights, but its depiction of well-meaning white people who'd prefer the civil rights movement not antagonise the situation is important. What's being demanded isn't some new thing. Zoe Quinn did nothing groundbreaking by making a text-based game. What's being demanded is behaviour that should be assumed: make a game, put it up for people to play, people enjoy it, move onto the next one. It's also pretty fucking ironic that this petition is apparently demanding the enthusiast press not report on scandal when Gamergate's figleaf was that the enthusiast press refused to report on scandal.

I watched We're Back - how exactly did a movie about friendly sentient dinosaurs in 90s New York become a movie about an evil circus? I mean, normally I like movies that start off as one thing and then end up as a completely different thing - Australia is not a good film, but I still enjoy it - but We're Back just... doesn't work. Roald Dahl is a goddamn national treasure and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is honestly one of the tamer ones. He relies a lot on the grotesque, which is probably good to expose kids to so that they can recognise it later in life. I remember The Witches the most, which is a book about monsters that wear human skin that hunt and eat human children, and while on holiday a boy and his grandmother discover the witches are having a convention at the same hotel. The kid does manage to kill the witches, although he's turned into a mouse, and so he and his grandmother become witch hunters. I wonder how misogynistic it'll end up being as an adult.

midichlorians

Let's be fair, it's not just the intro to Twilight Princess that's slow. The first dungeon keeps pumping the brakes, and then there's a mound of bullshit to get through before you can go to the Goron Mines.

Sounds like you reached the Goron Mines, which is the second dungeon. You get a wind boomerang in the first dungeon. Twilight Princess' big thing was that returning items all supposedly had a new use, so the boomerang made tornados and the iron boots were magnetic. Iron Boots have several applications, actually; their big thing is they send you to the bottom of water bodies to get what's on the bottom, but they're also used to make you heavier in situations where being heavy or having a strong stance is important. The key/lock item in Twilight Princess is the Spinner, which is in the Arbiter's Grounds and lets you ride on grooves in certain walls and over sand and that's about it. The dungeon it appears in uses it the best, and it's a glorified key after that. I guess the Command Rod also counts, except that dungeon also sucks. It's interesting how Zelda keeps butting up against the problem where the games feel very similar while Metroid, which has a structure a lot like Zelda, feels really different from game to game.

Ah, thanks, that makes a lot of sense - I took it as given that the Fertile Crescent was a unique bounty for the people who lived there. Thanks to you both for having the patience to explain such a wide-ranging topic and doing most of the heavy lifting in this conversation.

Also is this stuff made out of the same extruded grain slurry that Froot Loops are made out of? I'm confident my parents wouldn't have a bar of this, and these days I can buy cereal with actual fruit in it. (I do, occasionally, decide I'm independent and can buy Pop-Tarts, then immediately burn them, then get worried they'll go off for some reason even though I bought them at the confectionary store, and resent the two Pop-Tarts left.)

I played Twilight Princess a couple of months ago, and I think there's some value there. Like I said, I think it's got some great dungeons - Twilight Princess' Water Temple is a great callback to Ocarina while being its own thing, the Arbiter's Grounds takes a mediocre item and really wrings all it can out of it, with one of the series' most memorable boss fights, the Snowpeak Ruins have actually difficult puzzles in a really striking location (although camera issues make it less impressive than it should be) and the City in the Sky feels like unexplored territory for Zelda. Twilight Princess really stretches to find ways to do the staples in a fresh way, which isn't that common for Zelda games - most of the games have a volcano dungeon, for instance, but the Goron Mines rapidly become about more than just lava rooms. Everything else I'm happy to concede - Midna might have been great at the time, but it's clear going back to it that she's mostly propped up by novelty. A character that you have an uneasy alliance with at first? What a shocker.

It's open-world exploring but gear gating's a key part of the sub-genre.

So I saw Selma, which has come out at the traditional time in Australia for Oscar bait that soberly reflects on American history - mid February. It's well acted and the script is great (using FBI logs as scene setters is a stroke of genius), but the directing... the directing's not that great. Scenes that could, and should, be electric, are poorly staged, and it often overplays its big scenes, ones that were working just fine before the production designer went nuts with the smoke machine. I can kind of understand why this wasn't nominated for Best Director, although it was still robbed on Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay. I didn't spot Oprah, although I should have because she of course bought herself a pivotal role. And here's Brad Pitt as producer, although thankfully he doesn't take the White Man Who Thinks The Whole System Is Morally Wrong role again.

It's been a long time since I've read Guns, Germs and Steel, but doesn't Diamond's argument start with the environmental collapse of the Fertile Crescent region? I mean, if the only thing that made Europe powerful was their exclusive access to the New World, why didn't one of the many countries better placed to make it to the New World have access to those resources? For instance, China was capable of trading with Kenya, so they were capable of making it to Central America.

Important information: registering a trademark looks like it's $400. I really, really want to swipe the trademark, and provide a company name that will send amateur game journalists down a carefully constructed rabbit hole of crazy. I should on no account be given a large disposable income, because I would spend it on things like pranking the game industry with elaborate fictional companies who are really pleased The Last Guardian trademark is not taken.

So The Last Guardian trademark has lapsed, which people are taking as being a sign that the game's no longer coming. Incidentally, I'd be amused if someone swiped the trademark. How much do trademarks cost?

Twilight Princess is fairly weak but some of its dungeons are the best in the series. Not sure how far you got, though. Anyway, I guess Ocarina and A Link Between Worlds are probably the best places to start - Link Between Worlds is basically a 2D Zelda, and a direct sequel to Link to the Past. Its dungeons aren't amazing but there's few terrible ones there either. Ocarina is a classic for a reason. I'd avoid Skyward Sword if you didn't care for Twilight Princess - it's even chattier, the writing's worse, and there's even more backtracking and reuse of environments. Its sole high point is a dungeon based on a Buddhist folk tale that's pretty neat. I liked Phantom Hourglass - some people found the repeating dungeon tedious, but I enjoyed it as a distillation of the increase in capabilities that most Zelda games rest on. Spirit Tracks is definitely the lesser game - I did find it tedious towards the end, and I remember I soured on it after I finished it.

Oh no, that's fine! Thanks for another informative post.

I find it a little weird ewokskick's argument is presented in opposition to Guns, Germs and Steel - far as I remember, Diamond only argues that the initial advantage comes from geographic factors. What comes after that is out of scope, mostly because he's more interested in taking down the idea of European genetic superiority than he is in explaining the broad sweep of human history.

It's a little more complicated than that. NCSoft doesn't seem to trust its development staff to operate outside of their native market, and they work in a space as a public company that is notoriously difficult to get games established - too different, and people won't give it a chance, but too similar and you've made a knock-off, not a successor. There's intense pressure for NCSoft to prove that they can make new MMOs that are hits, because they have traditionally relied on Lineage money and Lineage money won't last forever. Their most notorious decision was to shutter City of Heroes, a profitable game. From NCSoft's perspective, they had two games, long in development that were coming out with huge anticipation that appeared to be big hits, Guild Wars 2 and WildStar. GW2 was made by a 'proven' MMO company, and their talk about making sweeping changes to the MMORPG formula suggested they might be able to find that sweet spot where it was just different enough to be viable without alienating players. WildStar had a great art style, a confident space opera direction, and a team that knew MMOs. City of Heroes made money, but it was a good game with a theme that struggled to grab attention, the Northern California studio was expensive to run, and they'd made a loss that year and had to show they were willing to invest money wisely to make those new IP hits. That only sorta worked out - GW2 makes money hand over fist, which gives ArenaNet a long leash - the studio's been delaying an expansion for years to try out an expansive live update model - and Washington State's somewhat cheaper than NorCal. Moreover, it's an NCSoft-developed game, which gives NCSoft a way to go to the shareholders and say that they're not a one-trick pony. WildStar... is not doing well, and is unlikely to make its money back. Is this a rhetorical question? I don't think it's totally destroyed because Nintendo seems to believe Metroid is a key franchise for them, but I do think they've realised they don't know how to handle it. Next Level Games actually made a pitch for a Metroid title which sadly got rejected, which is a shame because I'd love to see those guys take a crack at it. They feel like a real animation-driven studio, which would be a really interesting take on a Metroid game.

Link cables are technically way, way different to any kind of internet connectivity. I imagine it'd be possible, with an external interface, to connect two players running the same VC game, but that'd be it. I don't know if it'd prove to be too slow for the link cable, though, and it's hard to say that the effort would be worth it.

I think if you were going to have time/energy to find a job, you'd be doing so, so take that into account. I don't know how it is in America, but here, at least, telling employers you can start in two weeks because you have to give notice at your current job says that, when you eventually move on, you won't leave them hanging.

Huh, I saw Bill and Ted's the first time as an adult a few years ago, and I thought it was fine.

Having considered this for a little bit, I think Twig has the right of it: most of us in this thread, myself included, are being barbarous fuckwits, and we should knock it off. We're ginning each other up to keep our righteous mob anger going for no real reason other than it makes us feel good that we're saying how bad Peter Molyneux is. We're being a mob. I don't think there's a single person here in this thread - a thread that is literally called Project Godus: Don't Believe His Lies - that is unaware Peter Molyneux misrepresents what he's working on. The only new bit of information that's really come to light is the winner of Curiosity was kept in the dark for a year. Are we going to believe anything he says about his next project? No! We didn't believe a word of his last pitch either! We're not raising awareness here, nor is it within the power of the mob to turn back the clock, get that kid his money, or make Peter Molyneux be modest about his accomplishments. John Walker's leading the mob, but he's a mediocre writer at the best of times that has never understood actual development, and it shows when he mixes actual points about Molyneux's track record of misrepresentation with demands to explain why development hasn't gone smoothly, as if you just have to put enough Development Points in and you get a game out the other end. So what are we actually trying to achieve here other than pointless, righteous anger?