Gormongous

Hah, I don't think we're arguing, just spitballing. I know that my corner of Facebook went nuts over the trailer, so maybe Batman somehow still has some magic for people, unlike most other DC superheroes? I thought The Dark Knight Rises would be the tipping point, like with Spiderman 3 or X-Men 3, but people seem to have just forgot about it instead.

Well, I ought to post, because I feel like this thread has been overwhelmingly critical of Far Cry 2 as a game experience, as opposed to just a game-design talking point. I've played Far Cry 2 three times through, twice on the hardest difficulty, and it's still the only shooter I'll load up just to pop off a few guys. I think it's so different from anything else along the same lines that it feels a bit silly to focus on what other games did what specific mechanics "better". What worked about it for me? Most of all, I like that it's a game about an environment and how you learn to interact with it. Most open-world games, most games in general, follow an arc of empowerment and then subjugation. You get this skill or that gun and the game opens up for you. Even Dark Souls, for all its inaccessibility, has a point where you can simply outlevel the game's difficulty curve and are able to start disregarding its systems. Far Cry 2 resists that in interesting and fascinating ways. There's no must-have gun, although the bolt-action rifle feels so damn good that it might as well be must-have, and no way to exterminate hostile NPCs in order to make the game easier or more convenient for you. It's about waking up in a safehouse, getting a loadout that you enjoy, and then driving through jungle and savannah along a path that avoids what guard posts you can and puts you in a position to take out the ones you can't. That sort of environmental traversal is the core loop of the game, so I understand if someone who wants to shoot dudes gets frustrated with Far Cry 2, which has you spending as much if not more time not shooting dudes if you're able. There are important things to do to make it a better game, things that I think are mistakes on the part of the developer. You should do as many gun dealer missions early on, because the starting guns are crap. You should buy a stealth suit as soon as possible, because it doesn't make you as stealthy as a sane person like Nachmir would expect but it does make the AI's aggro range something more in line with reality. You shouldn't bother hunting every single diamond unless it's something you enjoy, because the game's missions and assassinations will give you enough to buy two or three decent loadouts. You should use bus stops and rivers to circumvent checkpoints, because otherwise it is all dirt roads like you say. You should set fires as much as possible, because goddamn. So yeah, I don't blame anyone for quitting, because there's no one-size-fits-all game and, even if there were, it's certainly not Far Cry 2, which is almost entirely about frustrating you horribly and then letting you try to overcome those frustrations. That said, I'd take it any day over Crysis, which I felt like was an incredibly conventional shooter in terms of its aesthetics and themes, just with unprecedentedly wide corridors. No other game's let me use my jeep as a makeshift roadblock to stop a truck convoy by some IEDs I'd set, while I waited at the treeline to pick off the survivors fleeing the gasoline flames. That was something else. Then one of them got into said jeep and ran me over. Video games!

You're right, but that says to me, why does this show need to be made at all, if there's nothing particularly "Batman" about the setting without changing stuff around. I know the answer is spelled out in dollar signs, but it still bothers me on some abstract level.

A bit off topic, but I kind of hate the doggerelization of fictional works that something like this represents. There seems to be the assumption that a preexisting setting needs to collapse its characters down to a few universally recognizable characters in order to be viable for a large audience, like people aren't meeting new people all the time. It just reminds me of the Assassin's Creed games, where all the famous figures of a given period all live next door to each other and are friends because we can't be bothered to have a Renaissance-era inventor who's not Leonardo da Vinci.

No, I think you're right. I held back because I haven't been up-to-date on the video editing scene for some years, but it seems to me, Ben, like you want three things (compatibility with modern containers/codecs, professional-level features, and free to download) and you'll only be able to get two with any given product.

I'm SL140 and most of the way through NG+ and the lightning zweihander +5 is still the best weapon in my arsenal. My claymore +15 is only just starting to catch up at 50 STR and 30 DEX. So many things in the game have resistance to fire, it'd probably just be better just to have a pyromancy flame or something in the rare cases when fire's useful. Once you get the zweihander up there in terms of damage, it's able to stagger most enemies with one R2. By the time it's fully upgraded, it's able to knock all humanoid enemies flat with one R2 and kill almost every single one with a second R2, including Black Knights. It's an unbelievably powerful weapon and pretty much ended my NG game in terms of combat-based challenge.

It actually ended up being more defensive than threatening. "Yes, I know I have sixty books checked out, some of them for almost two years, but I'm dissertating and I need all of them so what are you going to do to help me with this problem?"

Friday nights are for writing a threatening email to my university library because they have restricted my ability to request books through interlibrary loan.

"Yeah, I'm sure there are many kissing customs." Such realistic and appropriate dialogue for a high-school girl! Man, someday there are going to be great dissertations written on the Bowlderization of nineties anime...

I think we have different thresholds of plausibility, because it's not difficult at all for me to have an easier time explaining away extreme hyper-protectiveness of one's own "private journal" than explaining away a list of every single inexplicable death in Japan over the past two months with detailed instructions on the inside cover for how the possessor of said list caused said inexplicable deaths. Sure, there's a sense of hyperreality at play, because the show cares a lot that you're never bored and therefore is often ridiculous toward that end, but it's never stupid, at least not to me.

I rewatched it with some friends a few months ago as part of our weekly social club. It holds up, but it's certainly not "proper" fiction like we sometimes want all anime to strive to be. It's pulpy melodrama, but carefully and smartly crafted, so that you're never ever bored and you never know what a character's going to do. I think it's well worth it, I don't know anyone who doesn't at least like Death Note, even if they don't love it. It's funny, because I'm not this way in any other medium, but I suppose I have a taste for the cute here as something acquired. My first year after moving to St. Louis for grad school, I was very isolated and overworked. Watching extremely mundane stuff about inoffensive girls going to school and having tea came to serve as a way for me to set my bar for normalcy somewhere that wouldn't drive me crazy. I'm glad, because great stuff like Girls und Panzer uses the "cute girls doing cute things" as a pastiche to cover for a really excellent take on a subject like armored warfare. I feel sorry for the people who can't get over the cute girls (and in anime), not that I don't understand why.

Yeah, I didn't include sequels, but obviously if you like a show, you might want to try its sequel. Also, its movie sequel-sequel.

Unless it's the tower in Majula. I haven't played the game for long, but I love that it's literally covered with bloodstains from people convinced they can drop down to one of the ledges below.

Yeah, I think it's more that Madman doesn't seem to see anime as a product that needs to be stripped of features until it turns a profit. Sure, they use FUNi's sweatshop dubs, but I think that's smart, because who can compete with the way FUNi does business there? It's more that they don't want to screw over their customers that's so disgustingly unique in the international anime market. No six hundred-dollar price tags, no triple-dip box sets, no poaching dead DVD licenses and rereleasing the same product as an upscale, and so on. I've spent all day doing paperwork, so I don't really have the mental space for a crafted response, but I sorted my anime I've watched spreadsheet by date and found a lot to offer. Fair warning, I do like cute girls doing cute things, which begins to overwhelm anime around 2009, so I won't include K-On! even though I think it's great. Planetes (2003) Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) Samurai Champloo (2004) Genshiken (2004) Mushishi (2005) Ouran High School Host Club (2006) The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2006) Death Note (2006) Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (2007) Baccano! (2007) Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009) Shinryaku! Ika Musume (2010) Nichijou (2011) Joshiraku (2012) Girls und Panzer (2012) These are series I'd recommend to anyone without knowing their tastes better. Movies are a different matter, but both the Berserk movies and the Eva movies have been a great time, plus anything Hosoda Mamoru's done.

Okay, check it: old man with a sexy daughter, plus the initial "gaining ancient power" scene heavily implies that the daughter services you in some way.

Wow, this is exactly my prediction of the game's plot. Also, an old man/woman teaches you some crazy form of zen that lets you slow down time and pull off sweet kills, but in the end they reject you because you used it for violence.

I'm actually saving my plans for an alternate build until Dark Souls 2, but I'm having trouble letting go of how much fun being a big stomping STR dude is. I'd planned to go DEX/INT and wield a magic rapier or something, but I just had so much fun tanking Sif in NG+, it'll be hard to let that go. Who needs to roll when blocking the hit takes the same amount of stamina and has a faster recovery? Not me (actually, I really need to learn how to roll better, bad)!

Really, I think Madman is an awesome anime distributor in general and I'm jealous that I have to deal with FUNi and Sentai and goddamn Aniplex instead of them.

And in this other shot culled from the preorder image? Yes, he has almond-shaped eyes in the first picture, so do many actual white people – it's called smiling. In all seriousness, I know it's pointless to speculate, but even beyond the images, Ubisoft's press leak talks about a "self-appointed tyrant king" of the "untamed land" of Kryat. It feels a little weird to describe a native ruler as a self-appointed tyrant, though granted not beyond the typical tone-deafness of AAA games press. Besides, the Far Cry series has always been about foreign mercenaries terrorizing the natives of a pristine wilderness. Why would they change it up now, with some East Asian gangster ruling a mountain in the Himalayas? I also wouldn't want us to get away from what a weird and yet totally predictable image this is for the new Far Cry. I'm sure they'll tell all again and again come E3.

Honestly, for me NG+ is about doing everything over but with better equipment and complete knowledge. It's not the same kind of joy and fun as the first time around, but it's pretty good, especially going into boss fights knowing all their moves. I didn't take a single point of damage against Sif, although I had to eat my pride fighting the Four Kings, who are crazy hard on NG+.

When I think of real-time games with pausing that actually works, I think of the Total War series and the Infinity Engine RPGs. Both games have extremely intricate battle systems that can theoretically controlled in real-time, but include a robust and full-featured pausing mechanic to allow the player to throttle that complexity down to a level they're comfortable with. As a player gets more fluent in the game, they tend to pause less, so the beauty of the real-time systems can grow on them. Honestly, I think a designer ought to plan fully around a useful pausing system that allows the player to stop, assess, and take action, if they intend to include one at all. Nothing's worse to me than a game that allows and expects you to pause, but doesn't allow you to take the full breadth of possible actions while paused. It yanks me out of the game, to the point that I'd rather them not let me pause at all and tune the game accordingly.

The anime community still doesn't have the critical chops to speak authoritatively on Otomo's career, and I don't think the film community at large has the familiarity to know that he's tapped out. That's the only reason I can explain the warm reception to Short Peace, which is really uninspired. Also, it feels like the past ten years have been studio after studio trying to make 3D cel shading work, assuming that other companies just hadn't tried hard enough, and all of them making the same mistakes and the same ugly movies. I really can't believe that anyone can look at the Berserk movies, which have all the money and the love in the world behind them, and think that it's a viable technology to replace traditional animation, now if ever.

The problem with a game sending up or even just having fun with the industry's shitty racial politics is that you can't make an annual franchise out of it. The wrong sort of people would catch on eventually. If we're going for non-cynical expectations, I will enjoy seeing another developer's take on Nepal/Tibet/Bhutan/??? after the Uncharted series. I don't expect it to be substantively different, but the little things can be quite pleasant and interesting.

From my experience with a friend who posted on Facebook in confusion between Peter Stormare, Mark Strong, and Jason Statham, you can get a large minority of the internet to back up the perceived similarities between any two actors of the same gender.