Gormongous

In my memory, if there were enough enemies in a given area, one would fire constantly at your position to keep you from seeing the rest as they moved around. I don't think they'd really try to close, except for the shotgun guys, because the player's avatar got immensely more lethal the closer it was to an enemy, but it was cool to have your hearing and sight blocked by fire for a little while and then have half the enemies in new positions.

The thing is, Christianity is obsessed with icons and images in a way that no other religion really is. There are some Jewish and Muslim relics, certainly, but nowhere near as ubiquitous and never with the power imputed to them by Christians. That's what makes it attractive for the sort of urban fantasy that feeds on apocrypha. Granted, hearing that there's a preponderance of mystical Christianity in The Dresden Files makes me much more eager to read the series, It was the best part of Hellboy, after all.

The argument is that treating the fact that someone is trans as just another piece of information to discover is irresponsible and a bit heartless, in light of many situations like the article I posted on the second page about a reporter driving a trans woman to suicide through his investigations, When people suffer and die every day because of something, I'd really hope its inclusion as flavor in a game would actually be thought about, as opposed to just being thrown in by a developer who thinks of it as a non-issue. Also, I'm beginning to dislike the implication in Watch_Dogs that all secrets are created equal. Isn't it an incredibly shitty thing to put "declined credit" on the same level as "transsexual" in terms of "random information that pops up when I look at people", especially since there is no follow-up for either?

This was true in the original Battlefield: Vietnam, too. What an amazing memory for me to have played it at a LAN party where each team had spontaneously adopted a certain song as their own. I remember hiking through the brush, in a deep and lush valley, and panicking as I heard the enemy coming. I knew them by their war cry... a well a everybody's heard about the bird, b-b-b-bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word, a well a bird, bird, bird, the bird is the word, a well a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word, a well a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word And then I was dead because a jeep ran me over

I'd have agreed with you about Fargo until the last ten minutes of last night's episode, but it's worth knowing that a timeskip has given the show the opportunity to double down on its better themes. It's only a few episodes left and then you can be done with it forever. I think it's worth sticking through. Also, the more I'm forced to say the words "Edge of Tomorrow" the more I wish they'd left the title as All You Need Is Kill.

Agreed. Also: Forum size. The ultimate sign of significance. Never mind the quality, feel the width.

I like you, Dium. Don't make me call you names.

That's a nice pull. I always think it's weird but also great to be reminded that Cibo Matto was/is a real band and not just the worst track on Jet Set Radio Future.

Come on, be fair. He contributed one post to the Quitter's Club.

I just noticed that there's a star rating at the top of every thread and someone has taken time to rate this one at one star. Interesting and helpful!

Nah, being "high and mighty" is when you act like a total dick in correcting someone over a minor detail about a video game, to the point of inventing an extreme and unflattering agenda to explain a perfectly natural misunderstanding, as if you've never once been wrong in your whole life.

Yeah, you can't join internal wars unless you're a kinsman and it's an independence or succession war. It's WAD that both sides of the war are hostile to you, but it's still the best time to take the Holy Roman Emperor down a peg. As far as I remember, the rebel AI will be hostile toward you but will not actively seek you out, so if you can be careful and lift a couple claims while the HRE's manpower is depleted and tied up elsewhere, that'd be great. Best case scenario, you get your land, the rebels win their war, and the HRE is permanently weakened. I say, go for it.

I like hearing the old stories. It keeps me from having to dig back through old episodes for the funny or interesting bits, plus it saves time that the Thumbs don't have to spend hand-wringing about whether they've talked about something before, of which they occasionally go through debilitatingly boring bouts.

Do you ever wish you could rewind time?

I kinda like saying "not gonna lie" and then telling an obvious lie. Using it in good faith is ridiculous, though.

If the good essays aren't enough, the Gallery of Hideous Box Art, complete with artistic critiques, should put it on anyone's bookmark list.

This makes me wonder. At what point is Ubisoft crossing the line from all of its franchises working together to build a brand over to all of its franchises competing with each other because they're all relatively the same? If all of their games are annual or biennial franchises that are going to tend broadly towards "dude wrecking shit in an open world with an unlock system and free-running", it might be bad just because I don't know anyone who has a belly for more than one every couple years.

I feel good that I can actually contribute some original content to this thread. One of my favorite video game ephemera blogs recapped the Metal Gear series' history of using rape as a plot device, then explored several other games to see if there's a better way. It's a bit short and gets tied in a bow at the end, but overall I'm glad it was written.

I don't know that I agree entirely with the rest of what you say, but I agree with this one sentence so much that finer points really don't matter. Relatedly, I just watched last week's episode of Fargo and I have to restate that Deputy Molly Solverson is the best thing happening in TV right now.

For me, and I can't speak for anyone else, it's basically a matter of escalation. Yeah, Game of Thrones has always had brutal moments, but they were brutal because there was some sort of counterpoint elsewhere in the story. Like Bjorn says, the show feels worse and worse because all the major story beats are grim stuff, but also greater precedence is being given to grim stuff in general (probably because of time and logistics, not malicious intent) and in some cases (for me, the two I mentioned, both of which we've talked about here) the grim stuff is actually written and staged to seem even grimmer than the books. . And I mean, grimmer than the books, really? It wears on me, because I hate the generic dark low-fantasy quasi-historical epic that's flooded a lot of genre fiction and the reason A Song of Ice and Fire appealed to me was that it wasn't just an author being unremittingly terrible to his characters, despite the "George R.R. Martin hates you" memes that have taken over the internet, but in the HBO show even stuff that was widely mocked for being incongruously lighthearted (I remember reading a blog deriding what was termed "Daenerys' magical dragon-riding adventure safari" as poorly suited to the books' tone) is now full of frowns and shouting. I'm not mad, just bored. Also, agreed about Ramsay Snow. What a tedious character to have, even more so than Joffrey. It must be something about psychopaths on TV. Whatever, I'll keep watching it. EDIT: And this joke article popped up on Facebook the moment I hit "Post". I feel like everyone is still just losing their shit because it's the first show they've ever seen where any character can die at any time, only that's not why I watch it.

This is the best slow-motion difference of opinion that I've ever seen. I really hope that this E3 is full of interviews half as odd and uncomfortable as this!

I'm beginning to wonder if the show isn't a victim of its own success. The books were rough, but certainly not always, since I can pick out in my memory the bleak moments as opposed to every other chapter having a "fuck you" in it. But we keep seeing hear the ugliest and most explicit interpretation of many scenes, so I'm trying harder and harder not to think that the people running the show have just bought into Game of Thrones as "that really fucked up series on TV".

Yeah, I don't mean to sell Paradox short. They're good people who want to make good games and usually do. It's just that there was this big push for there to be a "new" Paradox, from the release of the final Victoria 2 DLC in August 2010 until the release of Europa Universalis IV in August 2013. Their games had always been worth buying, but Paradox said that now they would be worth buying on release, and they were for a while. That was exciting! I could recommend Paradox titles to people without hedging or reminding them a couple years later once the game was stable and balanced enough to play. I don't know what happened, I guess they've just gotten far enough away from the old days that they're backsliding now. They have a hardcore contingent on their forums who'll praise any decision they make and buy any piece of content they release, because those fans have confused "being the only ones who do what they do" with "being the best ones who do what they do". It's hard for me not to get frustrated. I might check out Rajas of India more once the sale lets me catch up on all the CK2 DLC, which at least is not nearly the mess that is EU4.

It seems like that was a good call on your part. I haven't bought the DLC, but the patch is even worse than the last EU4 or CK2 patch. More than anything, I'm disappointed that the vaunted "power projection" system that was supposed to make rivaling other nations a more interesting mechanic doesn't actually work at all in singeplayer, because you're only allowed to rival neighbors of equal score and even an average player will outdistance their neighbors in score by the first century of a playthrough, now incurring huge penalties for even minor success, which incidentally is a theme of post-release EU4 development. It's so blatantly another feature that was devised and tested only in office multiplayer, which is the same faulty design process that inspired the huge nerf to hunts and education in CK2 and that encourages the ever-increasing AE penalties in EU4, as Paradox struggles to force a fanbase of smart people to play a game the way they play it and want others to play it. At this point, I really don't know when Paradox is going to get my money again. Conquest of Paradise, Rajas of India, and Wealth of Nations have all been barely-tested yet still full-price DLCs full of half-baked design ideas mostly intended to spite the strategies of fellow developers and overreact to the exploit of the month on the forums. Someone in the "official" feedback thread said it best: smaller patches, community testing, and a bigger focus on singleplayer. Paradox's sudden obsession with multiplayer is making inferior games and it's indefensible. I can only pray that I'll be able to come back in six or nine months and rave about the turnaround.