Gormongous

I assumed by the jawline, the cheekbones, the blonde eyebrows, and the blue/gray eyes that he was white. Also, by the way he has his hand on the obviously more Asian guy's head (with his finger dangling a pin to the grenade the kneeling dude's holding, jeez!). Anyway, more than anything, I firmly believe that Ubisoft is racially sensitive enough not to have an Asian villain, but not racially sensitive enough not to have a white villain with Asian henchmen or an Asian hero. The Far Cry series is about white people going around being hyper-violent tourists, after all (I hate being this cynical about AAA games). Even if it weren't for the racial stuff, whether present or just implied, I'm still disappointed that this box preserves the visual and iconographic themes of Far Cry 3. I guess it's going to be the defining game of the series from now on, even though Far Cry 3 had about as much wrong with it as Far Cry 2, but less right, especially once the former's writer started shopping around his genius. Oh well, video games! Buddha statue draped with fifty-caliber bullets!

I think Monaco actually has a lot of substance. The line-of-sight and stealth systems are sophisticated and intuitive, once you understand the means by which the game's communicating with the player. The problem for me is one of overall design. The better you are at the game, the fewer mistakes are made, so the less silliness happens and the less fun the game is. I've even played it on the couch with some friends who had basic competency and it still felt similar to shepherding lowbies through an MMO dungeon. Do this, do that, stop messing around, wait here, don't run, fuck it, I'll just do it myself. The best parts of Monaco are when the heist goes horribly wrong, so a perfect game with skilled players is noticeably inferior to a bunch of idiots fucking up. But even then, you can't fuck up too much, or the game ends prematurely. Those are some pretty damning cross purposes and a virtual guarantee that Monaco will never stay on anyone's rotation very long.

To be specific, the letter grade for the scaling of a given skill is how much of the weapon's base damage is available to be dealt as bonus damage. E is from 1% to 24%, D is from 25% to 49%, and so on, with A being 100% and up. Hence, a sword that does 100 damage with C scaling has a pool of between 50 and 74 damage available to be dealt as bonus damage. What percentage of that bonus damage "pool" is actually dealt is determined by the relevant skill, with 10 dealing 5% of the pool (that is, between 2.5 and 3.7 in our example) and 40 dealing 85% (that is, between 42.5 and 62.9). It's apparently a logarithmic curve that's different for every skill, but they all have soft caps at 40 or 50, after which each skill point just gives between 0.25% and 0.5% more bonus damage. But that's all meaningless numbers, really. Basically, the letter grade just tells you how high the potential reward for wielding a given weapon with a high or at least higher given skill is. Anything below C probably isn't worth a heavy skill investment, although a weapon with decent (as in C or better) scaling across two skills can be pretty powerful (like the claymore from the first Dark Souls).

It's what I like, but what also really falls down about it. I've done multi-person co-op several time with people from the forum and, while it can be a hilarious madhouse, it was often more effective for the last surviving player to complete the level, then revive everyone so that we could all leave together. That was often me, playing the Gentleman, and though I enjoy the game a lot, it takes a really strange coincidence of things to make it tick, most of all a deep understanding of the stealth mechanics and an almost ridiculous willingness to buy into the fiction of the game.

Yeah, this is what I found out. Smough takes big chunks off your stamina and his butt-slam has a wider radius, so if you have the ability to stay between second-stage Ornstein's legs the entire time, it's a dramatically easier fight. I was surprised, because in NG I saw Ornstein's one-hit kill and said, "Nope."

Around 1:00 tonight I was ready to come here and post about how NG+ was bullshit. I was in Anor Londo and had three red phantoms (the same three guys, all with obnoxious "fire and forget" tactics that I wasn't equipped to counter) camping the fog gate to Smough and Ornstein. The trek from the bonfire to that boss fight is already annoying enough without a guaranteed invasion sometime between killing the first Royal Sentinel and summoning Solaire. But then I finally got in without any health or flasks lost and had an amazing fight. I think I might think now that Ornstein's second-stage form is a bit easier than Smough's to fight as a strength-based melee fighter? At least I went nearly the whole fight without taking any damage, which felt very different from my NG experience. And then I cleared the Asylum again and most of Darkroot Garden, because I have an unhealthy relationship with Dark Souls.

I really enjoyed the little bit of fire I could hear in Sean's voice when talking about Dark Souls II. I've missed one of the Thumbs being obsessed with a game at the same time in the same way that I am or was, so even that little bit was something great.

That makes sense. I'm still surprised at the dramatic drop in the skill of invaders from NG to NG+ while I remain at virtually the same SL. I've been invaded four times since starting NG+ and I've won all of them. One was the guy in Sen's Fortress who couldn't handle the swinging blades; one was a Dex build with the Uchigatana who inexplicably tried to tank it out with me, a Str build with the Zweihander and Greatshield of Artorias; and two were mages who completely fell apart when they saw I could block most of their damage and take off half their health in exchange. I guess it makes sense that less experienced players would rush ahead to NG+ rather than playing NG to 100%, but it's still weird to have been beaten down over and over in NG and then be a death-dealing god in NG+. I'm not even that good! I fall for a backstab almost every time and my stamina management still isn't great.

Well, on topic, I just had some dude invade me while I was in the basement of Sen's Fortress killing titanite demons. I panicked briefly, then smiled to myself because I had the Slumbering Dragoncrest ring on. He couldn't find me because he couldn't hear me and, after about five minutes, I heard a crash and a groan and a thump and I got 10,000 souls out of nowhere. The fortress did its work. Why would you ever invade someone there?

I disagree, at least to some extent. The "seed" planted by the trailer on release day needs to have some soil in which to sprout, which I don't have at all. Maybe it's different if you've been to PAX, but all I know is a brief interview with Supergiant about how excited they are for Transistor almost a year ago and eighteen minutes of gameplay with some light developer commentary a month later. The game just hasn't been sold to me at all, which feels weird as someone who reads RPS and several other gaming news sites daily, so the release trailer is liable to do absolutely nothing, unless the buzz around it is just spectacular, in which case it'll still probably get filed away for a Steam sale someday. I guess I just feel that there's a big difference between a "giant marketing campaign" and "failing to market your game at all", yet Supergiant has still managed to fall firmly in the latter category for me. How hard would it be for them to sit down with John Walker for ten minutes and tell me what the game's about after a year(!) of additional development?

Maybe? It wouldn't hurt to have word of mouth plus some sort of identifiable online presence for those of us who don't live near a PAX or just don't go to one. I loved Bastion a lot but I haven't heard anything about Transistor besides the vague outlines of a game from early preliminary previews. I don't know what they're gaining by not talking with RPS or somebody just one more time before launch.

Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Wolsey...? Ah, Thomas Howard, Duke Norfolk and Thomas Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, I don't even think of them as having names outside their titles. You know, I didn't notice it myself when reading, but it is funny. Within the medieval aristocracy, you get a lot of repetition of reasonably unique names because there were no surnames and "family" given names were used to establish kinship, but once surnames become a thing there's this collapse in given names, usually down to ones with Biblical roots, so by the time we get to the sixteenth century, shortly before humanism dumps a bunch of alternatives back into the onomastic lexicon, everyone's named one of literally a dozen names. I suppose you just have to sink or swim.

The funny thing is, I know no one in real life or online who was sold on Saints Row 3 as "a game about dildos" but I do know plenty who were turned off by it. It makes me feel as though THQ's marketing department made the game stick in the public consciousness in exchange for losing a huge chunk of potential customers more or less permanently.

If Sean is curious about the history of vaccines beyond what can be found on Wikipedia, he should check out either Artenstein's Vaccines: A Biography, which is a collection of articles about the development of the different vaccines for various modern diseases, or Allen's Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver, which is a popular history with a much bigger axe to grind but greater readability too. A more serious scholarly alternative to the latter is History of Vaccine Development, edited by Plotkin, but I haven't read it personally and the cover looks dry as dirt, so read at your own risk.

Is it wrong that I'm very skeptical that Nintendo couldn't just make the marriage code gender-agnostic very simply, hence that I think that they're just trying to have their cake in America while eating it in Japan? Not that I don't appreciate a company willing to apologize in a way that actually acknowledges fault, but still.

That last one makes me really angry and upset for reasons I can't even understand inside my own head.

Thank you! I have an ex on Facebook that is obsessed with that goofy mustache shit and it strikes me as the most facile and vapid fad of all time. Facial hair, LOL!

Yeah, I bought 99 prism stones, turned off camera auto-recovery, and took it really slow. The chunks and slabs to upgrade my gear were just too exciting for me to be frustrated. If it's the last place you visit, I imagine it all seems pretty stupid instead.

Congratulations! And yeah, I don't really recommend NG+. Without the sense and risk of the unknown, the game is just an exercise in personal excellence, which I don't find as interesting. I dismantled the Depths, including the Gaping Dragon, in thirty minutes tonight. I feel like I'm speed-running the game even though I'm still exploring every corner and getting every item. It's a little bit of a letdown. Actually, the best part of NG+ is getting invaded again by people who blew through the game and hence have a vastly worse kit and SL than me. Both invaders, I just drained their stamina beating down their shield, then killed them in two hits. There is nothing better in the PvP part of the game than getting invaded by someone who thinks they're going to fuck you up and then wrecking shop on them as they try to come to terms with the fact that they're trapped in your world and you are going to kill them. I know, it sounds a little sadistic, but whatever.

Honestly, it seems to me, and my opinion is as uninformed and intuitive as that of Chris, that many of Japanese games that actually make it to Western audiences are doubling down on culturally specific tropes for the same reason that many Western games are doubling down on near-future militarism and jingoism, namely that these appeal to their home audiences in a safe and predictable way. The large-scale games industry (for some reason, I feel really uncomfortable using the qualifier "AAA" to describe Japanese games) worldwide still seems to be really shaken up just by the prospect of the recession a few years ago popping their bubble, even though now they're really just choosing a slow death instead. I've kept an eye on several Japanese game jams recently, which are enough to convince me that the Japanese indie scene is thriving like its Western counterpart, but their output has virtually no chance of hopping the ocean and language barrier, so we end up comparing large- and small-scale Western development to just large-scale Japanese development, what of it is successful enough to get ported and translated. Of course they're going to look stagnant, even moribund, in such circumstances. I also want to point out that Nintendo is also playing it incredibly safe and sticking to anime-style tropes like everyone else, it's just that their own kind of "safe" is one that we've all grown up knowing and therefore don't find as off-putting.

From what I've read elsewhere on the internet, all of these comments were leveled against Dark Souls by people who loved Demon Souls. Dark Souls 2 might not be as good of a game as its predecessors, but I think that any game that has only been out and played a few weeks is going to suffer in comparison to a similar game that's been out for years, simply because it's less known and understood. I certainly like a lot of what I see in the other thread. In other news, I beat Gwyn today my first try, then immediately started NG+ and made it all the way to the Depths in just over an hour, including killing the Hellkite and Havel. I'd been told to expect it, but man, NG+ is so much easier compared to the base game. I'm sure it's because I'm four times as powerful as I was when I was last in the Undead Burg, while the enemies are at most just twice as powerful, but it's still a shock to make it all the way past the Taurus Demon without a single death. I think I might be right, though, in that this will burn me out on the game pretty quick. I definitely want to get my fill before the GFWL shutdown makes this a dead game, though.

I have a friend who edits professionally using Vegas. If what I've heard from him is true, I really wouldn't recommend learning it, just because it does multiple basic things differently than just about every other piece of video editing software out there, so you're specializing yourself on something that doesn't have as much broad applicability as Premiere, which shares a lot of its verbs with the rest of the Creative Suite.

I think maybe whether a game respects your time comes down to how much you trust a given game. Far Cry 2 horribly disrespects a player's time, but it does so in the name of a pervasive and interesting aesthetic that emerges after a certain amount of time invested. Until that point, you just have to trust that the game is disrespecting your time for a reason. Understandably with such an abstract game, maybe it's just harder to trust Fract OSC to do something with what feels like "wasted" time. And yeah, in other contexts, it also seems like a circumlocution for "boring" so that we don't have to have another conversation about what "fun" means. I kinda wish we could just call games boring without any sort of relativism coming into play, but I'm the most guilty of that, so...

There's the idea that a really specific and established lexicon among a small social group can actually end up becoming a bunch of thought-terminating cliches, but I think we're really just teasing. Certainly, my biggest nightmare is a group of people pointing out all the ways I repeat myself, like the Shania Twain story Jude Law tells over and over in I Heart Huckabees.

I'm actually leaning strongly towards NG+ with Dark Souls. I figure I'll burn out somewhere through that and then feel okay taking an indefinite break before Dark Souls 2. I really don't want to charge from one game into the other and run the risk of not appreciating the second because of fatigue or proximity. I think I'll make the run on Gwyn today. You should make it to the Ash Lake, Griddle. It really only has one thing there, a hydra boss, and it is very beautiful.