Merus

I believe the sales tail of Origins looked more like a Nintendo game, which Ubisoft realised a month or so after release. It turns out you make quite a lot of money if you sell 100,000 copies every month for the next three years.

I've seen the advice about how static stretching is bad, but I'm also really inflexible.

This story is in the game - the game presents a lot of this stuff out-of-context in the final level, and you need subtitles on to really follow it. A second playthrough helps a lot. I love that whole sequence. My favourite part: So, so good.

It's a fun movie, I enjoyed it. It's no Wall-E, but it's probably not a waste of your time.

For some reason I actually have an excellent working knowledge of BG&E's plot, and I have no idea how I know any of this.

This is particularly odd for me because here you can't terminate employees without cause. If you want to get rid of an employee but they've been decent, you have to make them redundant, and they get compensated based on their salary and length of service. But then Australia is fairly unusual. We have long-service leave, where if you've been in the same job for ten years you get two months off with pay.

Be warned: Friday's going to be fucking rough. And then when you go running on Monday you'll be amazed how much you've already improved.

Tricksy, but I think I got it.

Sigur Ros is just fucking cheating, though. Not that it'll stop me if I ever put a trailer together.

I'd like the game to try to engage with its title a little bit, that'd be nice. I enjoy the Assassin's Creed games - I'm playing AC4 right now and having fun collecting all sorts of random crap - but I don't really look to BG&E for being chased through streets by guards. I value the idea of the towns being peaceful, full of colour and life, and the risky parts are segregated away in their own areas. I like the transgression of going into enemy territory, and generally in AC games enemy territory is an arbitrary line that you've already prepared to cross.

I guess our mileage may vary because that very example was what made me quit the series. I understand the fourth one had an RPG? Don't give a shit, not falling for it again. The movie was just as bad; we had a video game movie night and watched Advent Children, the Layton movie and the Phoenix Wright adaptation, and the Phoenix Wright one was the only one we thought was half-decent. Goofy as hell, yes, but it was still fun. (Also guys my version has the UK voice actor for Luke who can actually do a convincing and appealing kid voice, it's rad)

Layton vs Phoenix Wright is pretty good, too, although if they somehow explain away all this supernatural stuff like the Layton games enjoy doing I'm going to be pretty annoyed.

Oh god, I started writing "it's not that she expects the world of you, it's that she wants the world for you" except I realised that was me projecting because my relationship with my mum is pretty rocky right now because I can't really handle the pressure.

This is the new Half-Life 3 thread. I'm sure I'm not alone here in saying BG&E is one of my favourite games. The world's so vivid and vibrant, I think because the game exposes its ecosystem for players to appreciate, and it does some clever things with its storytelling. I enjoyed the idea of a stealth Zelda. Also PROPAGANDA.

A tiny bit of research confirms that both are actually the convention centre's doing; Boston requires a gender neutral bathroom to be provided, but the convention centre, for reasons of its own, decided to turn a bunch of women's bathrooms into men's bathrooms. So PAX had nothing to do with the bathrooms, and yet... You see only what you want to see.

Amusing, but it's also fake: the survey was hit by a spambot.

Aaah, it's Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. I have fond memories of that video, particularly because it's one of the few times I thought someone succeeded with the 'children's TV gets weird' concept.

When PAX East started, I had two tweets in my twitter feed, one after the other. The first depicted a women's bathroom that had a men's sign hastily put over it, with a sarcastic comment about how well PAX was doing at making it a welcoming place. The second was of a gender-neutral bathroom, and a sincere comment about how nice it is to see PAX being welcoming. There is no cleaner illustration, to my mind, that we see only what we want to see.

I watched Rushmore, mostly to see if I enjoy Wes Anderson films enough to give Grand Budapest Hotel a go. Turns out I do! I liked it a lot. (I'd already seen Fantastic Mr. Fox, which I also enjoyed, but that might be because of Roald Dahl.)

I think a lot of the reason people turned on it was, at the time, we were starting to see games have a proper go at storytelling, and here's fucking Doom 3 being a throwback to pure gameplay with no context. It felt regressive. It's like the 2D backlash - at the time, what people wanted was to see the new frontiers explored, and like the 2D backlash, now it's been explored we're more willing to enjoy games that once felt regressive.

I agree with all of this; I think the thing that's making it work is Kevin Feige, who appears to have learnt how to pick directors who can bring something new to the material while still respecting the universe (probably to the detriment of Agents of Shield, but pfft), but they don't get too precious about the film universe if it'll make for a better story. And because he knows the comic books well, he's worked out how to encourage directors and writers to ask for minor characters they can introduce. Like the mercenary in this film; potentially a generic mercenary, but because they went to Marvel and got an actual villain you've got someone who has a backstory and a little personality to him. But man, now I'm thinking about the similarities between the Marvel universe and Fast and the Furious in terms of audience expectations.

You're a dad. You get a pass for this sort of thing.

Yes. I don't think Comedy Central needs a monopoly on John Oliver.

Your point's basically the same as the moral guardians who say that morality has broken down because our standards are so much more lax. It's really not the case; the range of behaviours we find acceptable has just shifted over time, some things that were acceptable are not, and things that weren't acceptable now are. High hemlines! People reading for fun! Satanism! Changing careers several times! Mixing with the opposite gender! Crossdressing in America! That last one is a particularly good point because crossdressing being a terrible thing is relatively recent; it's not as potent a terror in the UK, where it's been a stage tradition for centuries, and many other cultures have been far less worried about it overall. Which says something, I think, about moral standards, and how they're constantly in flux and peculiar to every society. Finding some things morally repugnant does not mean that the fun police will soon be on their way.

...so it sounds like if I play the way I normally do, with as little foreknowledge as possible and just discovering the systems and what's good and bad on my own, then I probably won't screw myself over later. So it's basically the opposite of every other WRPG I've ever played. I fuckin' love this game.