Merus

Far as I'm concerned, good fucking luck narrowing down where I live past that, Gamergate, especially because I picked the council area instead of my suburb.

Played Twilight Princess again. It's clear that they're drowning under their own expectations, a bit, and the economy in Twilight Princess is probably the worst in any Zelda game I've played, but I really like the dungeons. There's some mediocre dungeons, like the Forest Temple and the Temple of Time, but there's some real corkers, like Arbiter's Grounds, Snowpeak Ruins and City in the Sky. Thankfully, I'd forgotten basically everything except for the items, so I had actual puzzles to solve, it was great. Midna is not as well-written as I remember. My standards for video game plots have really gone up in the last ten years. My standards for exactly how far a character's mouth can extend before it starts getting creepy is the same as ever, though, and Midna does creepy well. Speaking of things that got old in the last ten years: this was the Zelda where Nintendo gave into people wanting a "mature" look, and so there's just a lot of brown. The constrained 3D environments with skybox set dressing to make it feel like the world's more expansive than it is does not hold up. When they pull away from that - anything involving the twilight realm, and some of the more exotic locations - it looks pretty great. I know a lot of people had problems with the plot filler between dungeons. I really like the idea that the game's trying to contextualise the world with additional story bits but it's just not done that well here. Okami does something very similar where it's just a bunch of story to push through until the next dungeon, but it's usually filling in what Amaterasu's like, and it's coasting on charm to a large extent. Beyond Good and Evil does better because 1) there's an ongoing sidequest that tasks you with poking around and observing wildlife, which does a lot to make the world feel inhabited and 2) it gates the game using platformer-esque goal collectibles instead of gear collection, so side areas don't feel quite so much like impositions before you get the next cool thing.

This isn't true, or, at least, not in the way you're thinking. If mail volumes have declined, it's not by enough to make hand sorting more viable. Think about the amount of mail Amazon sends out, for instance. In Australia, letter volumes (not parcels) haven't declined that much; there's fewer pieces of mail per delivery point, but many, many more delivery points.

I am curious to see what ArenaNet is willing to say they learned from running a successful online game without trying to do a boxed expansion, because after the first few updates it really seems like they had difficulty getting press for anything they were doing.

It's definitely not; looking up Get the Picture on YouTube, it's much closer to Acrophobia in style. I think it might have been called "What's the Big Idea", but I can't find any screenshots or footage to prove it because that is not a good name. Also, interestingly, the original heads of Berkeley Systems went on to found MoveOn.org.

How does this compare to, say, Artemis?

Good ol' Village Roadshow, absurdly powerful and fiercely protective of the Australian market. (That said, most of the prestige films come to Australia in January because they were rushed out for the American market so they'd qualify for Oscars. From what I understand, they re-release these films in the US about the same time.)

Whenever I read Liz Ryerson's work (ellaguro) about indies, game journalism or the industry, I get a strong whiff of sour grapes. Whenever I read her stuff that's not about those things, though, I get a sense that she's perfectly justified to be pissed off. She was well out in front of Gamergate, for instance, long before most of the people who make the money in game journalism had any real idea what to say other than 'don't harass people/us'. She can't get a job but Brad Shoemaker can?

I think you're understating the difference in what these people do. They are critics, not journalists. They don't do news. There's very limited room for criticism in paid games journalism because the market's just not there for it. Most of these writers have found that writing for generalist publications is a much better bet because people there are willing to read criticism and if it's about video games, well, that's kind of novel. The big enthusiast press sites serve a different market, one that's far more interested in validation and hype than analysis and criticism. So it goes.

My housemate and I had another of our trademark movie marathons; this one was 'Pretty But Dumb' to show off our fancy new TV. Tron Legacy: there's about three half-movies in here, but it never quite comes together. The decision to focus the film on the father-son relationship probably crippled it, but it's probably also a problem that the visual design led the film and there's no real way to force all the moments they wanted into one movie and have it stay coherent. But it does have great production design and probably the joke of the night: Avatar: once you put aside the film's reputation and take it for what it is, it's not that bad. It's still dumb as hell and is basically doing the Superior White Man trope with blue aliens, but it's a damn sight more coherent than Tron Legacy is, and it's hard to imagine that it can really improve from where it ended up. I can imagine a sequel being worthwhile because they can pick something that actually works with the strengths of their setting. Pacific Rim: it's actually fun! It makes no goddamn sense but you don't care because it's lively and exciting and full of ideas, it hits the emotional beats, and it uses only the cliches it means to.

I want to colonise a part of the thread for the nation of Talking About The Shittiness of Callout Culture and maybe an alliance with the people of The Downsides of Simple Group Forming as they seem related. I don't have time now, though, but the victims of the information revolution are one of those things I find fascinating.

So on the topic of the sea lion comic, David Malki ! has errata:

It comes out for real in February, so maybe that's a good time to check it out. They added an actual main story.

Oh my god, Acrophobia. I played a bunch of that back in the day. The big problem wasn't stuff like 'ass dick butt' but 'aa dd bb' that someone else would agree to vote on, thus harvesting the sweet sweet 'fastest answer that received a vote', which is otherwise a great mechanic. They introduced another one before Sierra bought Berkerley and shut down Bezerk, where you had to try and anticipate the consensus opinion to try and climb a ziggurat. Forget the name of it though.

About the same level of nuttiness in the John Birch Society and GG, too

I remember seeing that character an awful lot back in the DOS days. It was an ASCII character. Unfortunately, this means it's going to be a bugger to track down.

This reminds me why I don't like streams - there's a solid ten minutes there of nothing much happening, with thirty seconds of people giving history on the game. It's like watching cricket except cricket has competent commentators.

I am not touching this thread with a ten foot pole - most people, when arguing about free speech, argue almost exclusively for how it applies to white, upper-middle class Westerners in countries where free speech is an assumed right - but here's a post that can come around again.

How is Top Gear 5 stars and A Bit of Fry and Laurie 4 stars?

Probably, because there's a 1/8 chance of getting a useful female Combee and a 7/8 chance of getting a disappointing male Combee. (Female Combees evolve, male Combees don't, and it's not an even gender split.)

Here is the link that people used when Intel messed up: https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/forms/corporate-responsibility-contact-us.html I bet they'd enjoy some complimentary emails.

I meant the city in my avatar, I'm making an ice cream Christmas pudding tomorrow. Might even try for a gingerbread house!

I don't see why we can't use the old thread. It's not like they're going to reinvent Christmas this year.

My favourite bit is the first letters of every paragraph.

I read the first line of that premise and the fact that there's a twist and realised I've already heard it. Similarly, I thought I'd start reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, saw it had a first person protagonist, and about a fifth of the way in flipped to the last page to confirm my suspicion that I'd already heard the solution.