Gormongous

Man, fuck off. Western imperialism can happen without white people present, that's what's so fucked up about the world. Besides, if I punch you, but say I didn't mean to hurt you, does it not hurt? If I say the N-word, but say I didn't know it was a racial slur, is it not a racial slur? Intent is not fucking magic and the author is fucking dead.

Yeah, that sounds like the best possible scenario of what Far Cry 4 is shaping up to be — and precisely what I said Ubisoft wouldn't have the courage to do. Oh well, my foot fits fine into my mouth. I guess I'll be watching with keen interest!

Having a backed-up toilet after a bad meal of Taco Bell is the worst thing. I feel better now, but only because my entire bathroom has been bathed in bleach.

First, I could really care less if some writer at IGN thinks it's perfectly okay to use the centuries-old and utterly horrific history of Western imperialism just to flag a character as evil. He can even try to use the "games should be art" argument, it's still stupid, because very rarely in good movies or books is a character a Nazi or a rapist or something blatantly offensive just to make sure we know to hate them. I'd call it out there and I'm calling it out here. It speaks to me of the tradition at Ubisoft of careless and facile writing in the name of supposedly "deep" stories that really go nowhere. Second, and this goes back to some earlier points, you don't get to tell someone they can't be offended. If I open a random book and find a racist diatribe against American Indians, I get to be pissed off. I don't have to read the entire book to make sure the diatribe isn't properly contextualized and dramatically appropriate, then start being pissed off, and even if it is, I'm still allowed to be pissed off. It's the same here. If Merus' Indian friend finds the Far Cry 4 box art to be offensive because it's chock full of imperialist and blasphemous imagery, not to mention if anyone else does for any other reason, then it's offensive, no matter Ubisoft's entirely assumed but no doubt milquetoast good intentions. Third, thank you, Argobot. The only way there's not something racially shitty in Far Cry 4 is if the player character is non-white, too. A game entirely made up of native characters doing their own thing without a white savior or white oppressor would make me take back everything I've said about this game, but I'm not too worried, because there's no way in hell that Ubisoft's going to lose the valuable "subconsciously racist bro" market by having no white character with whom to identify. I also just find it problematic that the Far Cry series has somehow established itself as being about heavy issues like colonialism and imperialism when no game has actually handled it well. Far Cry had virtually no commentary, Far Cry 2 left a lot to implications but took no clear stance, Far Cry 3 was a pile of "white savior" bullshit, and Far Cry: Blood Dragon was bacon turtle ninja laser. When exactly did Ubisoft show us that they could tackle such a huge and thorny issue?

I just saw Grand Budapest Hotel and this is going to seem really dumb for me to say, but as much as I enjoyed it, which is saying something for yet another movie steeped in Wes Anderson's obsessive love of visual symmetry, I would have enjoyed it even more if it had taken place somewhere real. I mean, it was obviously Liechtenstein by way of every other country in Europe east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, but you get what I mean. Only in this twee land of pure imagination, safe from the actual shit going down in Europe during the thirties, can someone who is revealed to be the emotional core of the movie die offscreen from a ridiculous-sounding fictional disease. That probably encapsulates every problem I've ever had with Wes Anderson's scripts.

After a really long boss fight where I only swung when I thought I had a shot at Kalameet's tail, I decided that I didn't need two Obsidian Greatswords in my bottomless box just for charm points. I killed Artorias and Kalameet tonight, I can kill Manus and Gwyn tomorrow, so that'll be me finishing up NG+. I had a lot of fun the second time around and I'm glad I did it, but I cannot imagine for the life of me why anyone would do it more than twice. I'd much rather go the way of Bjorn and make a new character who plays completely different.

No, I think it's really interesting to have grouped series of interviews with developers working on similar subjects and systems. Would it be possible to have something pre-modern as the next one? I would love to hear people talk about ancient or early modern warfare (or politics or economics or anything).

I have a Dragon Age 2 and a Mass Effect 2 re-playthough each stalled about halfway through the game. In my head, I desperately want to finish both, but in my heart, I don't know if I can. I might just be gassed out on big games for the foreseeable future.

Reading this, I discover that I maybe played Escape from Monkey Island long ago, or at least watched a friend play through most of it? What a strange sensation... Keep going, Zeus! This thread is the best.

After a half-year hiatus while I waited for nubles to get his act together, I finally gave in and finished Space Battleship Yamato 2199 with a different fansub group. Man, what a show! I really owe Rodi for mentioning it in a way that made me give it a chance. It's like nationalist propaganda from the future, with the best space battles I've seen in anime. Sure, it's still a bit hamstrung by its obviously dated 1970s plot, but I was never bored or frustrated while watching it and laughed with glee more than once. I hope it gets a Blu-ray release here, although I wonder if the abysmal sales of the movie will scare off any licensors...

Yeah, I'd just been talking about this with a few other forum members. I have no problem with Dr Wookie and enjoy his contributions here and elsewhere. My only wish, besides me being the kind of person who'd still be able to sink a lifetime into Elite: Dangerous, is that they'd all be in one thread instead multiple ones all sinking to the bottom.

This is completely not germane to anything in the podcast episode, but I never get tired of hearing Chris have the killswitch built into every Diablo 2 player flipped whenever someone says anything in a weird, stilted cadence. "This is yours. This is for you. Die. Time to die. Die. Die. Whoops! This is yours. This is for you. This is for you. Time to die." Oh thank heavens, I'm not the only one. Home Improvement's infamous elevator scene would be even more cost-effective.

I've got no dog in the "Godzilla vs. Pacific Rim" fight, but a proper argument can't happen if one side refuses to acknowledge valid points made by the other, whether by ignoring them, misconstruing them, or moving the goalposts away from them.

Alright, that's fair. I might be doing the thing where I amalgamate all the Thumbs' opinions into one Frankenstein opinion of questionable accuracy, anyway.

I didn't say they were equivalent, though. I said a lot of anime tropes are really just cultural tropes for Japan. I guess I really don't see the ultimate point in distinguishing so starkly between the two, especially in a video game, which is tied up so heavily in other forms of visual media. Saying "I like Japanese video games except for all the anime tropes" feels like a really uncertain statement to me, almost like saying "I like American video games except for all the movie tropes." Honestly, I don't even know what a Japanese video game minus all anime tropes would look like, because every Japanese video game I've ever played (which, granted, isn't terribly many) has been crammed full of what I would think of as anime tropes.

No, that's my bad. I guess I don't understand why you bring up Ghibli, then? I mean, yeah, Miyazaki's movies are pretty different from anime as a whole, but you can pick out filmmakers from any country that don't fit into the mainstream cultural tendencies of that country, I'm just not sure what statement you can make by doing so.

I don't think that you're completely wrong, but I think there are some issues with what you're saying. First, anime, manga, and light novels are so much bigger in Japan than comics and cartoons are in the US, without many of the stigmas against them, so that's a little bit of a false equivalency to be making there. I also think that, as cultural outsiders, we're all vulnerable to selection bias by the international market. Saying that a handful of internationally acclaimed Japanese movies don't trade in what could be called "anime tropes", therefore they're probably not that significant in Japanese culture, doesn't actually say that much to me. If I wanted to know what was significant in Japanese culture, I'd be much more inclined to look at one of the most successful film franchises in Japan, like Otoko wa Tsurai yo, which are forty-nine movies and a TV series with completely identical plots about the same traveling salesman meeting a woman and then having her end up with someone else. These do contain a large majority of "anime tropes" like what we're talking about, but they're virtually impossible to find overseas because those tropes are (perhaps rightly) seen as limiting factors for the movie's international appeal. Not to mention, the Tora-san films are so boring, having managed to make it through two myself. Anyway, the presence and proliferation of inwardly-focused cultural works from Japan might be unappealing to many people, because fanservice and tsunderes certainly are tedious, but I really rankle at the implication that it's indicative of some kind of stagnation just because Japanese developers aren't making games better designed for international consumption. Honestly, it is also my feeling (and nothing more than just my feeling, of course) that when people talk about anime tropes taking over a given part of the entertainment industry, they're really just talking about anime tropes that they haven't grown up with and aren't used to. Nintendo stuff is full of bizarre anime shit that you can't say you wouldn't be complaining about if it hadn't been introduced to you in stages by games you've been playing for over two decades. Yeah, I didn't mean to call you out or anything. I agree with everything you're saying, I just used it as an excuse to go on a jag about people using "anime tropes" to dismiss works from Japan that really just don't appeal to them, which I'm not saying the Thumbs are even doing here. And yeah, after a certain point, I just tune out stuff like the fanservice, but then I show a friend FLCL for the first time and she's disgusted by all the panty shots that I don't even see anymore.

I don't mean this to jump all over you or anybody else, but I'm beginning to find it a little odd that people are expecting a truly great Japanese game to break away from anime tropes, if only because a lot of those "anime tropes" are actually just Japanese cultural tropes, so to fault a game for them feels like faulting an American or French game for being too American or French. I mean, no one's faulting Sir, You Are Being Hunted for having too many Victorian and/or comedy-of-manners (that is to say, British) tropes. I guess I might be saying that, if the presence of anime tropes in a game turns someone off from it, it might just be for them to admit that they don't like games from Japan — barring the subset of anime tropes in the Nintendo games that they've been playing their whole life, of course.

I think that EA's policy towards Bioware games has been the best example. They seem disturbingly willing to parcel off full characters and entire quests into DLC that remains referenced throughout the game, while at the same time giving you different gear with every different retailer's preorder package that varied wildly between totally useless and the best in the game. People have already referenced the Mass Effect 3 preorder DLC that seems to have rivaled the Batman: Arkham City Catwoman DLC for placing a substantial portion of the game's central plot on contingency.

It really depends what you're looking for. I like New Space Opera a lot, so my favorites are Iain M. Banks and Vernor Vinge. If you're into military sci-fi, you've got John Scalzi and David Weber. You can't really pass up the greats of the eighties, nineties, and naughties like William Gibson, David Brin, Ursula K. LeGuin, or Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. I recently read Peter Watts' Blindsight and found it overly cute myself, but still wildly inventive and interesting. I've got Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice on request from the library, so I have high hopes for that. I really adore Banks, his Culture novels in particular. Most of my sci-fi reading the past few years have been an attempt to find a replacement for him who's still alive. I haven't been affected by the death of an author like that in a long time...

Yeah, but sometimes life just fucks you. I really don't like a set of ontological principles that doesn't allow you to be bummed out about that. I've had bad streaks of luck on the job market, though nothing as torturous as with Twig, and I really think it's wrong even to imply the reason that I was passed over or that the company botched the hiring process is because I wasn't fucking positive enough in my daily outlook. This isn't The Secret.

Another interview with Rock Paper Shotgun: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/20/civilization-beyond-earth-impressions-interview/ A bit of an odd one, really. They talk about a lot of interesting philosophical inspirations, but pull way back on the "spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri" angle. Instead, Miller says, "It’s a Civ in space, that’s about it." How disappointing, there are mods that do "Civ in space" perfectly fine. I want something more from a developer like Firaxis. Also, their list of fictional influences continues to underwhelm. They talk about "less expected stuff like Aliens and Predator, and Firefly," whatever that means. Still watching this with quiet optimism myself, I know it's hard to tell with me. EDIT: A few of the RPS commenters hit the whole "fictional influences" thing on the head for me.

I love that scene, because it's the moment where Jodorowsky suddenly stops being a sci-fi Willy Wonka for just a split second. I was shocked in a way that I haven't really been by a movie in some time. It's just a bizarre thing to hear from someone who, like you said, is never bitter or angry, except occasionally at the injustice of a world in which his movie could not exist. “I wanted to do something like that, why not? Why could it not be made?" It's really something. I also enjoy that, of all the learned and literate men involved with the project, Amanda Lear was the only one who'd actually read the book, and she was just thrown a part for being Dali's girlfriend. Jeez, what a movie.

The person of whom I think as my most boring "friend" on Facebook (because all she does is talk about houseplants, sewing, and SCA politics) just posted a picture of two pieces of white cloth stitched together, with the caption "Yes!!" It has sixty-six likes and nineteen comments. I don't understand.

Yay, even though I don't have your internal conflict, I still think this is an excellent encapsulation of why I ended up despising Ano Hana. By the final act of the show, everything seemed to be moving in slow motion so that the characters and the audience wouldn't miss a single shred of grief-stricken pathos. It really did feel like the writers didn't believe in their own story, which was good but not exactly Shakespeare, and so just put all the burden on the voice actors to sell it with tears. I'm also guilty of Twig's "my friend with shit taste loves this anime" syndrome with Ano Hana, though. He was obsessed with its power to make him cry, to the point that it was impossible for him to believe that I didn't when I got around to seeing it myself.