Gormongous

Yeah, I only made my peace with it after having a hard think, so maybe I just talked myself into what I ended up feeling. I really don't know what kind of ending I wanted from Fargo, but that wasn't it. Also, someone pointed out to me that one of the few storylines about "justice" in the fourth book of A Song of Ice and Fire was removed from Game of Thrones season four. I can't believe I'd forgotten it.

I remember the RPS review faulted it pretty heavily for being aimed at children, both in terms of story/character complexity and system depth. I can say from experience that The Banner Saga has neither of those faults, though it does have others.

I heard it was surprisingly good from two blogs and a friend, but I haven't gotten around to watching it. I despite JC Staff fantasy stuff, see A Certain Magical Index, but the art for this one is attractive and I have high hopes. Good to know!

Aww man, you stole the joke I was going to make. I get the emails all the time, though never reliably, and think of them as my "you should remove this item from your wishlist" reminder.

Well, until the Vegas games, Rainbow Six had always had male and female hostages, as well as male and female officers, so it's more of a step forward after a step back, but the rest of your post is ace.

I liked Edge of Tomorrow, but it was a gut feeling more than anything analytical. Did anyone else stick with the Fargo TV series until the end? It turned out to be good, but not great. Endings are hard, I guess.

Yeah, I was just thinking this same thing because RPS posted an article about how Ubisoft specifically picked a female hostage for the new Rainbow Six demo because they wanted the audience to "feel empathy" and "want to protect her" and "care about the hostage". And the comments are equal parts evolutionary psychology (apparently all humans are programmed by their genes to care more about women than men) and white-knight accusations (apparently Nathan Grayson is an asshole for not letting women fight their own battles against sexism). Making sure you're an ally for diversity without attracting attention to yourself is important not only so that you don't make it about you, but so that you don't make yourself a target for people to malign your intentions as an ally. That said, it's all shitty and I don't know.

I always like reading your stuff when it goes over a few paragraphs, Bjorn, because there's always something I like and want to quote. I think most discussions about the relationship between creator and work get tainted by absolutes. Either your opinion of an artist should entirely inform your appreciation of their art or it should inform it not at all. It needs to be said more that most people, even people who argue that they'd never let the evils of an actor or writer taint their opinion of stuff they like, have some kind of threshold, a certain combination of acts and statements that would turn them off from it forever. It lets us keep in mind that the relationship between creator and work is complex, and moreover that it's a relationship, vulnerable to emotions and opinions and instinct, much as we'd like to have a solid rule for when we've become morally compromised for liking something. EDIT: Dammit, I don't want my dumb little blurb to bear the burden of a new page.

I don't know about anyone else, I'm personally having trouble engaging with the torrent of crazy coming from the XSeed rep. It's such an ugly little ball of insecurity and entitlement that I'd rather have thought a grown adult would be beyond.

Well, it's a Japanese phrase borrowing from English and then borrowed back by English, so it's bound to be not quite apt.

Well, I bit for Nidhogg. Don't know much else besides DLC that'll grab me at this point. Yeah... Clunky save implementation, dodgy interface, and poor theming were the main complaints, if I remember.

I missed this the first time around. I have a friend who does media studies and she has a lot of interesting things to say about how hate for shipping and fandoms is really just hate for the ways women most often engage as fans. Too bad she's not here to elaborate better than that. To be completely fair, it's the episode about how people get caught up in minor details to the point that they forget about or even mess up the thing they actually meant to be doing. In that case, maybe a thoroughly pointless and derivative fight scene that distracts from the episode itself is good commentary? I don't know, I'm not going to argue it hard.

Actually, my computer wasn't fixed, but it is now. Sadly, my Lanka game was corrupted in the process, but it's okay because I was reaching the snowball point of forming my first empire, all of which are huge in India and would certainly signal game over. So instead I'm playing the count of Cornwall at the 1066 Stamford Bridge start. Man, is it fun! You just can't match how good it is to play a Catholic in Crusader Kings II. Everything else just pales beside it. I actually was pretty badly stymied for the first twenty years. My starting ruler had high intrigue and a spymaster with even higher, so I was trying to use plots and factions to destabilize England while I united Wales and declared independence. Nope! Every plot was cancelled, I spent a good five years in jail, and I was twice forbidden from joining factions, so... yeah. Cadoc ap Cerneu was kind of a disappointment. But his son, Eozen! He grabbed a corner of Wales through a lucky claim, then had a series of good events give him incredibly high stats for a first-generation product of the breeding program. I was just killing time assassinating the children of my enemies while I waited for the next claim on Wales to fabricate, but then the king died in combat with some heretics and Eozen was next in line! I didn't even know England had electoral succession in the 1066 start. Of course, I could care less about holding onto England with its two multi-duchy vassals using only my three counties, so I did something I've never done before. I used the manpower and money of the crown to finish the conquest of Wales, revoked and banished a bunch of people whose lands I wanted, and started waiting for the revolt to bust me back down to duke, where I'd rather be right now anyway. Oddly enough, it hasn't happened yet, but I ultimately want Wessex, Hwicce, and possibly Hereford to complete my vision of Greater Wales, so I just have to keep going and see where it runs out. The heir apparent is the infant son of the former king, so I'm sure history will just see Eozen's brief rule as usurpation during a minority. I can't ever imagine getting tired of this game, I love it so much.

It was the same for Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth 2. They actually sold DVD and CD versions side-by-side, but I chose the six CDs because I wanted to play it at LAN parties and, like Battlefield 1942, each CD could be used to run the game, so I more or less thought I was buying five friends with whom to play the game. Joke's on me, LotR:BfME2 was awful.

I just wasted the past two hours doing some hard research on it. Apparently, like Jake said, it started in Japan in the seventies to describe sexual titillation shows like Cutie Honey, but with the rise of self-referential otaku culture, exemplified by GAINAX and the OtaKing in the late eighties, it began to refer more broadly to whatever "discourse" between creator and audience was couched in the media the former makes for the latter. Nowadays, at least when I notice it, "fanservice" refers to both things: sexual titillation when used in a negative tone, intertextual discourse when used in a positive tone. Oftentimes, they're the same. For instance, this scene from (Zoku) Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei has multiple kinds of fanservice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP-reR-VgO8 There's the "low" fanservice of Chiri dressing in a cute yukata and flashing her panties, there's the "middle" fanservice of her fighting in a cool but pointless action sequence, and then there's the "high" fanservice of her recreating Asuka's fight scene from End of Evangelion shot for shot, including bad German. Like almost any piece of terminology that lives primarily on the internet, fanservice has grown like a cancer to include an entire cluster of related meanings. That said, Senran Kagura Burst 2 looks like garbage and textbook fanservice, so I don't know where that XSeed rep is coming from. Probably a place of insecurity...

I first heard it when people were shipping Picard and Troi, so it's at least twenty years old. Actually, trying to look up the history of "saabisu", I'm reminded of how much I hate the etymology of fandom terms. It's so eager to forget where it came from in order to be up to date.

"Fanservice" is any unnecessary visual element added simply to please (or service) the audience (or fans). By that definition, it doesn't have to be sexual, but it usually is, mostly because people don't mind an awesome but superfluous action sequence or a deep-pull anime reference like they do a panty-shot. Also by that definition, a game that is entirely about arranging for panty-shots shouldn't technically qualify for fanservice, because without said fanservice there is no game, but like pornography, I know it when I see it.

It would do any public-facing company a lot of good to have a fifteen-minute delay imposed between any Twitter or Facebook posts. It would help keep people from getting stuck in a rage-post feedback loop.

For some reason, I hadn't thought of Rome, but now that you mention it, it's an even odder precedent for this behavior, because even when Rome was losing badly in war, it just kept going until things turned around. Until the late empire, there wasn't really any way to tire them out. It certainly seems like a lot of the AI in grand strategy games is designed around the same principles!

That's really fascinating, clyde. In all the games I've played, I've never found religion profitable enough to proselytize beyond my own cities and allied city-states. It's great that you found a reason to push it anyway. Are you finding any payoffs beyond the emergent narrative?

Well, I just don't like it. And, since I just formatted my computer and therefore have no machine that's been validated on Steam for at least seven days, I'm not allowed to sell my cards until early morning June 28! Hopefully there will be a card-buying frenzy on the last few days of the sale to make this actually work out for me. Fortunately, there's been nothing in the sale thus far that's tickled me besides Democracy 3, which I tamped down thanks to neonrev and some middling reviews.

I know I'm not being fair, because I'm comparing it to the high point of the Steam sale metagames, the summer carnival thing a few years back where participating in the sale or playing the featured games of the day gave you tickets that you could spend on the reward you want or put into a raffle for getting the top ten items on your wishlist. That was great because of the mix of control and randomness and, when compared to almost certainly spending money to craft a badge that gives you a random drop at some item that's probably from a game you don't play or own, it doesn't compare in the slightest. Grump grump grump.

Yeah, maybe I'm just getting older and more used to the way Valve and other companies ply their trade, but I couldn't care less about playing this metagame. Old Steam sale games always had concrete rewards behind them, whether special DLC or in-game items. Now I'm always voting or playing for a chance at something to give me a chance at something to give me a chance at something. I'm supposed to spend money and play games in order for the possibility that thirty people in hundreds of thousands will get three measly games? Didn't a previous sale give people a much better chance of getting the top ten items on their wishlist? I guess Valve has discovered that people respond to possible rewards as much as actual ones, but I'd rather just sell the cards for forty cents. It's less wearying that way. EDIT: Oops, new page I didn't notice!

Okay, continuing my mission to watch the best of 2012's anime offering (because Kokoro Connect was really good, guys), I started watching Stella Jogakuin Koutou-ka C³-bu. This show kind of got lost in the whole "new GAINAX vs. old GAINAX" kerfuffle that also buried Medaka Box a while back, but with four episodes down, I'm incredibly impressed. It starts out very reminiscent of Girls UND Panzer, in that it's cute girls doing violent/dangerous things cutely, in this case airsoft tournaments, but it rapidly becomes a whole different show. I mean, in the third episode, she basically has the identity crisis that every clumsy/useless/boring protagonist of K-On! type shows only has toward the end of a season as a climax. And then, in the very next episode... Basically, if they're going for the typical GAINAX ending, they're starting really early in the show. I'm a little sad it's going off the rails so soon, but between good art and a really unpredictable plot, it's got me for the long haul.

More like they filmed it in the Czech Republic for tax reasons, so all the Fremen parts are local Czech and German actors, but yes, its strangeness adds to the flavor. I think it's worth watching once, just to watch something made by someone who loved Dune instead of just what they could turn Dune into. I remember watching it while playing Emperor: Battle for Dune just after having finished the entire series for the first time and I think it broke my brain and made me forever a sci-fi nerd.