Gormongous

I think so. Just like people used to demand that their Blu-rays have so much DNR that the actors looked like they were made of plastic, because noise is obviously a "flaw" in the transfer, people would rather have a full quarter of the image cut off than see black bars that only belong on "grandpa movies."

This game was on sale for Midweek Madness, so I picked it up after having chickened out during the Summer Sale. I then spent ten hours delivering car parts between Frankfurt, Strasbourg, and Stuttgart. People weren't lying, it's a unique and fun experience. Is anyone else still playing?

I assume the Ag Center is cool. Highpool is not. It feels a little spare on content, like they assumed everyone would choose the Ag Center, which I don't quite get, because I chose Highpool for it being closer. Maybe they expected people to know the Ag Center from the previews? Highpool, you just roll in, kill a dozen guys, fix three or four things, and you're done with the area. And I just fell off the game last night for the first time since starting. I got to the Rail Nomads after getting as far as I could at the Prison, and man, what a huge, empty map full of nothing. There's maybe a dozen people to talk to in what is easily the largest area that I've been to yet, but they're hard to find with the busy art design and there are no real quests anyway, besides the big one. This is exactly what I was afraid of when I saw some of the previews. I feel like people should look to Shadowrun Returns for how a kickstarter can make a small RPG that feels big, because going with this more traditional model keeps bumming me out. Sorry, I don't mean to be a downer. The Rail Nomads is the first place to make me feel like I'm playing something cheap and rushed, so I think I'm just in shock.

Finally, something in this thread I can get behind. That verges on a war crime to me.

It's really fascinating, not only his misogyny and the embarrassment it causes him, but his sheer fury that a woman gets to define the terms of the discussion by virtue of being better spoken and more knowledgeable than him. It's like he's a sleeper agent being activated when Leigh appears and posts an extremely good response to his goalpost-moving.

Okay, I'm done ruining this ruined thread.

I think it would be interesting just to have a blurry black-and-white radio topology for the unrevealed map, making it hard to tell whether the great flat area you were pushing towards was a fertile plain or an empty ice-locked sea. It would also be interesting to have the contours of the map be visible but not the degree to which they've been settled and maybe terraformed. I don't know, I'm cautiously optimistic about the game, but I'm still crushed by the repeated failures of imagination by the team. I find myself wanting to talk some more about the fictional influences, but I can't really get beyond complaining that these guys are citing authors and movies like it's twenty-five years ago, especially now that we see the game is not remotely the "new wave sci-fi" theme that would explain the heavy emphasis on Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke.

Just tiny dog eugenics.

Sex being something that "just happens" without any conscious input from the people involved is a prudish myth anyway.

You beat me to what I wanted to say this time, SAM. When I read TotalBiscuit, I see someone who'd love to be perceived as an outside mediator who can speak to all sides of the issue, but who only knows how to be that by playing a fence-sitter, even though he's one that repeatedly falls off onto the side of his own preference (or at least experience). The middle ground between "there are huge problems with sexism in games" and "there are no problems with sexism in games" is not "there are problems with sexism in games, but they're all in your head." I'm sure TotalBiscuit isn't intentionally saying that, if only because his posts with regards to #GamerGate and Steam Curation both show a lack of self-awareness at the role of his voice in the discussion, but the result is yet another "reasonable" commentator siding with the reactionaries.

Not if these damn feminists are changing the definition of rape to mean anytime you have sex with a woman who's not really into it. That's unreasonable! This is a parody of a position I've seen. It's not my position. Consent is great and necessary.

Not surprisingly at all. In general, the response has done a good job of showing what a twisted conception many people about sex. So many comments try to make the law sound ridiculous by caricaturing it as "So I have to ask permission every time I want to have sex?" Which is... yeah, you do. You probably should. It's not that hard.

As I understand it, Highpool is even more barren. Beyond the rolling battle to break the siege, which was fun enough, there was barely anything to do in the town. A couple of good deeds to make, but barely any conversation, and no reason ever to return.

The responses to what is already an old and somewhat histrionic image don't even make me mad. There's an odd lassitude in their attempts to imply conspiracy that's almost kind of funny. "I mean even i can probably make a more interesting story then [Gone Home]," "Remo only did the music for the game, but still," etc.

Yep! A failure to express a lack of consent sufficiently has often been construed as consent in the courts. I even have several friends who were advised by police and judges to drop their rape charges because they vocally did not give consent, but did not sustain it through the entire rape, which somehow makes it less viable as a case. And man, if you have a prior history of good relations with your rapist, then forget about ever getting justice (or closure). Sorry if this post is triggery for some. I'm just at a point where I can't help getting angry that rape convictions are a functional impossibility in this country except when the socioeconomic stars align so that the rapist has literally no one in the entire justice system with an interest in exonerating them.

Tragically, I'd find it far more likely that studio executives would find the black or female side character at fault for the failure of a Green Lantern movie or some other underpowered comic property. I'm sure it's happened before, actually. I agree that people are allowed to like what they want, but I don't think Syn really meant to be shaming anybody. I mean, he did start like that, but by the end, it's apparent he's more about criticizing the culture and economics of big-budget comics, which I can get behind as much as with AAA video games.

That sounds awesome! I'm trying hard to remember what the curriculum for my gifted program was, but all I can remember are 1) a set of "math university" worksheets that were written expressly to trick you in every way possible, and 2) several different roleplaying scenarios, like representing the different international leaders of a putative Mars mission, that required cooperation as well as teamwork to be able to succeed. The second, at least, was enormously successful at getting me out from under my own sense of "success" and it's one of my clearest memories from elementary school because of it. It's really great to hear someone thinking critically about how to teach smart kids critical thinking.

Yeah, I sometimes think about gifted programs and how they're often just a way to quarantine smug little twerps away from the rest of the student population. I was in REACH for DISD since the first grade and I remember enjoying it a lot but never really learning anything. If I weren't an avid reader, which grew into a passion for autodidacticism as I entered college, I could see myself being pretty lazy in terms of my own intellect. It would be nice if gifted programs actually tried to teach the value of hard work and of knowledge for knowledge's sake, but I'm sure there would be massive backlash among kids who just want to sit around and feel smart. Still, even knowing that, some of Dan's ignorance seems like a terrifying lack of curiosity to me, with which I cannot sympathize. How do you manage to go without the knowledge that you can't breathe in space?

The funny thing is, a lot of indie RPGs that have come out in the last decade as the online market for .pdfs has become a reality are much closer to a literal definition of "role-playing games" than those that were around when the term first started being used. Dogs in the Vineyard, Bliss Stage, and Engine Heart are just three I've read that are almost entirely cooperative storytelling engines with group-created characters in which dice are used only when two players disagree about the direction of the plot or when they agree that randomness is the most interesting way to resolve a task. But the majority of people still play D&D and the term "role-playing game" has drifted so far from a literal meaning that people accuse heavily narrativist games as "not being RPGs." Video games! Pen-and-paper games!

This is less esoteric and more just bad, but one of the first books I had to read in my grad program for medieval history was Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, which was an enormously respected book at the time but was really a mostly middling attempt to reevaluate evidence from the fourth to eighth centuries AD in the most pessimistic light possible to refute arguments that the "fall of Rome" was more of a social and culture transition than a military conquest by so-called barbarians. However, near the end, the author becomes increasingly shrill as he tries his hardest to figure out why anyone could be anything but upset that Rome fell fifteen hundred years ago. He suggests that something of a conspiracy exists between speakers of Germanic languages: He suggests that it's a PR campaign to rehabilitate Germany by proxy after the Second World War: Later, he blames Mussolini and the Fascists for souring everyone on the glory of Rome. He suggests a political agenda tied to the European Union: This goes on for three pages and mostly focuses on the popularity of the word "Charlemagne" in both France and Germany. And, amazingly, his final point is that Americans are just sore from being part of a certain other empire just two hundred and fifty years ago: I can't even bear to type out the whole thing. He basically says that, with the Roman Empire at least, the ends justify the means and we should all just be grateful for the gifts of their culture. His reason for thinking so? He was born the son of an archaeologist in Rome. I should feel lucky that his biases are so obvious: Self-important and self-satisfied, you say? This is possibly the most flatly dishonest thing I have ever read. The scholarship's no good either. He uses arguments from silence constantly as well as statistical analyses where the sample size is only one or two digits. Attacking the fad book of several professors, like I did, turned out to be a rough way to start my upper-level academic career, although not ultimately ruinous.

Oh, #GamerGate, never stop trying to purchase the moral high ground for yourself. It'll work someday.

Oh, I don't know him either. I tried to get into Giant Bomb, but a year's worth of amateur junk food and energy drink reviews wore me out before I found the charm. I'm just easily irritated by successful people who think that "work hard and keep trying" is useful advice. I know so many people who don't make it big doing what they love, and they're all working hard too. Most of them kept trying for years and are still trying. It's true for the vast majority of humanity, whether successful or not. Accordingly, when people attribute their success to their own hard work, what it tells me is that they don't really understand how they succeeded, so they're just going to attribute it to themselves. I have to say, I really am nonplussed by the stories about Ryckert I'm reading here. At least tell me he has interesting opinions about games or wrestling or something.

That is a bannable offense? I mean, compassion is always the high road, but really? Unrelatedly, glad to have you here, Smart. Or Jason? SJ.

I don't know, I think maybe a dozen people can succeed like that, whereas a hundred thousand other people fail like that, and meanwhile the dozen tell everyone else how easy life is if you really want to succeed.