Merus

I know very little about Star Wars Galaxies but I got the feeling that NGE was essentially SOE panicking and making SWG more like a DIKU game. This was back before we realised that WoW had the DIKU design all locked up, and the only real way to build an MMO that could survive was to not make a DIKU game. edit: blah that paragraph was just the worst, I'm sorry

I don't have much to put forward here, except that the core of science is the scientific method, which is pretty clearly a system of thought. It's not unreasonable to refer to that as a 'philosophy', and that's exactly what early scientists did: they called it 'natural philosophy'. The other thing I can bring to the table is my ability to do a fucking Google search before I assert that literally every dictionary defines science in a way that supports my argument. Using how a word is defined in the dictionary as your argument is one of the least useful forms of debate - it's not much better than argument from authority - and I feel like if you can't even get that right, you should take a long, hard look at yourself before you open your goddamn fool mouth again. Long. And hard.

I didn't actually notice Strong Female Protagonist in that post the first time around, but it's very quickly become my favourite ever superhero comic.

Man, I saw that shared level thing and thought it was genius, because it allowed for players to change their roles on the fly. If you've got someone super-efficient earning XP for the team, you've got room to have a rover messing up the other team.

I think one of the reasons I enjoyed Assassin's Creed 1 over the later games is that its structure was ideally suited to playing in chunks: it was a little repetitive played all at once, you started out in the same location, warming up, and exploring a new chunk of city. It ended with a big, memorable climax, and the whole sequence took a predictable amount of time. As they tried to mix it up to get better reviews, each sequence started taking variable amounts of time, you'd get to new cities and be able to explore all of them, and for some reason they stopped doing assassinations where the circumstances of the assassination said something about the person you were killing. Hang-gliding across Venice had nothing to do with the random dude you killed when you got to the fort he spawned in.

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN Also, how the hell did Australia get too good for Neighbours before the UK did

Mark Hamill: Accomplished Voice Actor Who Also Played That Kid In That Space Opera From The 70s

The only recent show I can think of that preserves the twisty, serious nature of those two shows would be maybe Damages? The main character is still a jerk but the show acknowledges that this isn't something people are willing to ignore just because she's powerful and useful.

I went on an obstacle course, accompanying a friend. We ran for the first 4k or so until another friend's knee gave out. We still tried to run, though, thanks to: Night-time! People dressed as zombies! The water obstacles! The cool breeze! Boredom! Anyway, I pulled myself across a river on my belly and I don't intend to do that again. They started half-assing the obstacles towards the end, too.

There's an entire UI dedicated to tracking the ongoing mysteries in Layton games that fills at essentially random points in the plot, and tracking it is pointless anyway because it's not like remembering the clues will help.

This is fascinating because I was really bored in Desolation of Smaug, and a big reason why is because Jackson overstuffed the movie with lots of scenes that weren't relevant and didn't go anywhere. I thought part one needed some editing, but it was relatively constrained so that many scenes felt like they was driving things forward. Part two had the barrel escape, the heroic forging sequence, and lots of waffle in between.

I just don't understand you people.

So Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright ended up disappointing. As I've mentioned, my biggest problem with the Layton games is their tendency to present themselves as a mystery, but explain the improbable with something significantly more improbable and inconsistent. I assumed that the premise, involving what is very clearly magic, meant that they had decided to be explicitly supernatural for the crossover installment, and that using Layton's writers would at least mean the plot would hang together like they do most of the time in Layton and Ghost Trick. Turns out not! Even worse, you have to work out the idiotic twists during a court case which means the player has to decide that yes, the game is going to be that stupid. You aren't supposed to combine the worst features of both games when you do a crossover!

I liked the artifice of the main storyline of Grand Budapest, given that it's a story inside a story inside a Wes Anderson film. The punk girl bookending the movie feels more genuine than Wes Anderson's characters usually are; a great contrast to the very theatrical characters in the main plot.

The 'English' audio for Assassin's Creed games usually involves a lot of foreign language, which the game translates in the subtitles. Funimation's business model involves translating and dubbing anime as cheap as possible. They operate in a cheap city, and they hire non-union voice actors and there's only a few who'll put up with their shit.

I think Twig has the right of it - UO will never exist again because you'll never convince a disparate group of players to join the same game. I note that even Murdoc's fantastic story starts off with him being dicked over by someone; you never hear the version of the story that goes 'I kept having my ingots and ore stolen, so I quit and unsubscribed' but it had to have happened.

It may change your mind somewhat if you were aware that, unlike most countries, the FCC decided that the internet is not a telecommunications service, and so the companies that own the wires have no obligation to allow other companies to use it. Most other countries, there's still only one or two companies that own the wires, but a lot more ISPs and a lot more competition. The FCC decided that they'd prefer to see competition in the hardware, and then it turned out there's only about four ways to distribute internet at scale. So this FCC decision is them essentially saying they couldn't give a rat's arse about the mess they've made.

...they're sponsors of the show. They get paid to talk about them, and apparently Nature Box sends the podcasts they sponsor a sampler so they have something to talk about. I sure hope you didn't think they were mentioning Audible just because they really like Audible.

Apparently the story behind that was the re-release would get re-rated if they kept Han shooting first. Lucas figured the rating was more important than one scene.

It's such a shame that the song really doesn't work in Australia. It's pretty nippy today.

AAA is in the process of eating itself; at this point AAA is down to a handful of franchises, and the door has closed for basically any developer that doesn't already have a record in the space. Anyone complaining about costs at this point isn't going to survive - the faster they transition to indie, with a smaller budget and a lower price point, the more secure they'll be.

I went indoor climbing last night! I got up three climbs! I can't lift my arms or open bottles!

I think there's also a thing about it being culturally acceptable for schoolgirls to 'practice' with their female friends, with the expectation that they'll give up their childish schoolgirl love and move onto a man? Anyway Japan is a fair bit behind on the social acceptance stakes. They still have trouble with second-wave feminism.

I don't know how this affects me over here - I don't know if any of my internet traffic goes through last mile providers - but boy howdy I didn't think the FCC had it in them to fuck up critical telecommunications decisions again after their fucking up of radio and television, but I guess they did! On the other hand, I think it's sort of out of their hands now - I don't think they can kill the internet single-handedly any more, and I don't think America can convince everyone else to destroy the internet as well.

I don't know why you wouldn't mine the expanded universe for its best ideas. That's what it's for. That's why you have an expanded universe: sell new shit to the fans, and if anyone comes up with good ideas in the expanded universe, swipe it. At this point half of Batman's drawing from ideas from 'non-canon'.