Gormongous

Yeah, I brought it upon myself. Rurouni Kenshin was the death knell for my decision to watch all the shows I'd heard were good back when I started anime. Parts of Rurouni Kenshin are good, but you can get most of them out of the OVAs without the shounen flavor, so why would you ever put thirty-five hours of your life on the line? It's just made me super sensitive to a shounen show wasting my time. Even Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, which keeps taking the piss enough to keep my attention, has long stretches where it begins to buy into its own mythos more than it'd probably like to admit. While it ended fantastically, KILL la KILL also did the same thing a bit too often to be considered a perfect show by me. Why do we have to spend so much time on fights dictated by twist after twist when we know who will win? Surely only one " surprise upset" per fight is necessary, didn't anyone learn anything from Dragonball Z? The writers could use that spare time to explain to me why exactly Ragyou is obsessed with the genocide of her own race or why the Pillar Men really even need to be stopped. Both confuse me still, especially the latter. The Pillar Men are haughty and callous, but I'm not under the impression that they are evil or have any ill intent towards humanity. Sometimes I think I think too much for shounen shows, but it's really just that I don't enjoy the fights anymore and am always looking for why they're even happening, which is not usually the writers' concern. EDIT: I was talking about the first Jojo, from the nineteenth century. He was goofy and naive, but it paid off throughout the first arc and enabled him to win in the end. The only thing that really changed was how he felt towards Dio, which should have been the way it ended up from the very beginning. The second arc is a lot better so far, but it still felt like they spent years in that bunker trying to stop Santana.

The new Daft Souls podcast with Matt Lees, Quintin Smith, and friends is really good, albeit only two episodes in. Listening to it reminds me of how much more I like Quinns' video games writing than his board games writing. His video games writing is hard-nosed and to the point, eager to find out what works and what doesn't in a given game. Hearing him dismantle why he enjoys Luftrausers and yet why he thinks he might not always enjoy it is the high point of the first podcast. It's in so much contrast to his work on Shut Up and Sit Down, which almost feels like advocacy. I know that Quinns believes board games deserve better cultural visibility and hosts a site celebrating the fun they offer to that end, but I'm frustrated by his extreme hesitation to voice any sort of authoritative criticisms against a game that he enjoyed even a little bit. I mean, I understand his reasons for never wanting to call a board game broken or bad, because the point of a game is to entertain and if it's done so than what else matters, but it means that his reviews are good for telling me that he and his friends had fun, not that I will, in which case I'm probably better off watching them just as sketch comedy instead. It's nice to have him back as a reviewer on Daft Souls.

Embarrassingly, this is the exact reason I got into Star Trek. It was the summer before my seventh grade year, PC Gamer used the excuse of Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force coming out to do a pin-up edition of Seven of Nine, and my hormones demanded I watch a show with such a nice pair of tits in it. I actually think Jeri Ryan's quite good, but they don't give her much to work with except in scenes with the Doctor.

I honestly like it a lot, to the surprise of no one. The callbacks to Far Beyond the Stars initially left me cold, because I wanted that episode to stand on its own, but the way everything gets pulled together in the end, albeit in a Lord of the Rings sort of way, is really satisfying to me. So many arcs find grounding in those last few episodes, so I guess it really is just a matter of emotional investment. I also liked the stakes of the final episode, which is what keeps it from being more Lord of the Rings than Lord of the Rings.

It just takes a lot of work to capture such a huge number of fundamentally different societies properly in a single game. Honestly, I think Paradox tries, but since they know in advance and from long experience that they can never please everyone, they tend to stop at what works for them, which is often stopping a bit too short, since none of them are historians or political scientists with an awareness of how far off they can really be. Many of the fans on the Paradox forums are surprisingly anti-intellectual for the games they play and will back Paradox up against actual experts with professional training, even when they get things wrong, so there's not much incentive for Paradox to change. Ever since the launch of EU4, the leads at Paradox (Johan Andersson and Henrik Fåhreus) have been really into intra-office multiplayer as a means for testing the game's balance. Viewed from a multiplayer perspective, gaming the Ruler Designer is a pretty huge exploit. Of course, maybe 0.001% of CK2 players would view it from a multiplayer perspective, but Paradox really wants to change that. That's why they ditched GamersGate support with this latest patch, after all, to allow full Steamworks integration and matchmaking. Honestly, "balance" is becoming an ugly word thrown around on the Paradox forums. So many fans support restricting or even removing large sections of the game in the name of a chimera called "balance". I believe in balance insofar as it means making every religion and government type fun, interesting, and authentic to play. There's no shortage of ideas for gameplay mechanics in the pages of a good social or institutional history. However, I definitely do not support balance that punishes or otherwise coerces the player for not playing the game the (incredibly narrow) way that Paradox wants their game to be played, which is where changes like fixing the Grand Hunt "exploit" show it to be headed. I will be the saddest person in the world if CK2 becomes anything like EU4, where there's nothing to do besides wait for timers to tick down between wars. It might make for better multiplayer, but who the hell is going to play CK2 competitively with strangers who don't understand house rules and fair play? Whine, whine, whine. Sorry.

Aperson, I know you aren't going to read this, but if you do, you should know that this sort of behavior is exactly why you got banned. You argue every little thing to death, in the process insulting the people who disagree with you far more than they ever did Ken Levine, and when you're asked, then told, then made to stop, you create another forum account just to get in the last word (by calling Doug Tabacco, a professional in the video games industry whom we know and respect, a bully, a coward, and a Nazi, which certainly qualifies for "ridiculing" and "talking out of your ass" in my book, whether or not you're serious). I sincerely hoped that you'd find a tone and place suited to you in the Idle Thumbs forums, but since you don't seem interested in that, I now sincerely hope that you find a different forum where you don't feel the need to insult others when talking with them. I think everybody, yourself included, will be better off for it.

What's wrong with you guys? It's wearing a sweet mask like Corvo.

My favorite game to talk about was when I had six beers in short order, then walked home and decided to continue my Empire of Francia game. At one point, I was simultaneously at war with England, Aragon, and the Holy Roman Empire... and was convinced I was winning! I felt like the Kwisatz Haderach playing harpsichord with one hand and chess with the other. I saved my game, fell asleep, and loaded it the next morning to find that I'd lost all of Navarre, all of Lotharingia, and most of Burgundy. How drunk was I to miss the hatching covering my kingdom? Good times. One of the best times I've had drunk, actually.

Sadly, I don't really think you're wrong about any of it. In a thread on the Europa Universalis 4 forum, when a fan asked the devs what they used to inform the history of their games, the lead dev for mod support responded "Wikipedia & Google". When the reaction proved to be total incredulity from everyone, especially that they didn't have any historians as team members or even part-time consultants, he did add that "a number of developers are interested in and fairly well-read in history". Yeah, if I haven't said somewhere on here, Wikipedia is at best fifty-year-old scholarship and more often hundred-year-old scholarship, so most of what we know Paradox to be using to construct their games was written when colonialism and imperialism were still going concerns. The worst parts of Crusader Kings 2 and pretty much all of Europa Universalis 4 are chock-full of "rise of the West" bullshit, although usually seasoned with Guns, Germs, and Steel or Collapse or whatever other Jared Diamond-style environmental determinism makes it sound more up-to-date. That's why Europe is given tech bonuses, unit bonuses, and MP bonuses in EU4 and that's why Muslims in CK2 are stuck with fratricidal succession, which only applied to one Muslim polity for two hundred and fifty years entirely outside the game's timeline, without the governmental sophistication that is now known to be much more characteristic of medieval Islamic society. Everyone was rightly concerned when Paradox announced the India DLC, because India's been a mess in every other Paradox game in which it's appeared and it's not like the history is better known and better understood in the medieval than early modern era. I was hoping that they'd at least open their pocketbooks for the New Cambridge History of India series, but no dice, just big empty counties ruled by indistinguishable brown people following goofy caricatured religions. The "big empty counties" part is all that matters in the end, because map-expanding DLC sells like nothing else. New lands to conquer, like you said, neonrev. I'm really sorry that I wasn't able to argue against you. I've more or less accepted that the moments of actual historical authenticity in Paradox's games are accidental, a result of good game design moderating or altering the received opinion of popular history enough to approximate something more subtle and more interesting. For the most part, Crusader Kings 2 is about satisfying what the average Paradox fan believes to be true about history, which is why we have homicidal Game of Thrones intrigue factions and a thousand percent more incest than ever happened. What you gonna do, make something better? EDIT: On the other hand, speaking of "balance", the patch did remove the possibility of gaining positive traits during feasts, fairs, and hunts, because one of the devs evidently watched a video Arumba's YouTube channel about how power-gamers abuse it and got their undies all twisted up. Yeah, Paradox and I are having a bit of a spat right now. Victoria 2 is four years old, but it knows what it wants to be so much better than either CK2 or EU4.

Drunk Crusader Kings is the best Crusader Kings. Start as the king of France or something and watch the disparity between how you think you're doing and how you're really doing widen ever deeper.

My problem really was that, last year, I pushed myself through Rurouni Kenshin. The Kyoto arc made it worth it, but just barely, and the rest of the show is shockingly garbage. The schoolyard rhythm of all shounen anime, with the "my scissors cut your paper" and the "my paper's made out of diamond and breaks your scissors", is just something I have no patience for anymore. No one ever grows as a character. Even Jojo is still a naive dipshit at the end of his first adventure.

And only you, dear Twig. In all seriousness (okay, maybe half seriousness) I enjoyed Doctor Who for three seasons but got bored because there were never any rules laid out, and I liked One Piece enough for a few dozen episodes but get shounen burnout so easily in my old age. I mean, I'm starting to get it from KILL la KILL, and that just ended!

I am at the office after a department happy hour. I got very drunk and came back to my desk to find that I'd left a translation of a charter half done, so I tried to finish it. I think I am stuck, because I can make exactly zero progress on the Latin with this much alcohol in my bloodstream, but I cannot get enough focus together to pack up and go home.

I am glad that we are talking about two different shows, both of which I have tried to start and quit in the end because I am no longer the kind of person who can sustain interest in a middling show over hundreds of episodes!

This might just be my own rule of thumb, but if the writer of something ostensibly dumb or racist or sexist has to go around explaining how it's really subversive, then it's not subversive. No one needs to explain what's subversive about something actually subversive, like Crime and Punishment. In fact, doesn't the need to explain what's subversive actually make something not subversive?

I think that's why cyberpunk is dying/dead/undead? The worlds of Gibson and Sterling are fucked beyond belief, but most fans of them think they're the coolest thing ever.

In general, I'd expand this to a lot of "subversive" games the past few years that claim the evocation of negative emotions as their goal. "You're bored because the game is supposed to bore you!" "You're disgusted because the game is designed to be disgusting!" It's the biggest "so what" I've had with games lately. What is the point of eliciting a certain emotion if it doesn't serve to cement a larger ludic or narrative theme?

Yeah, that is one of the more interesting and difficult techniques that Mantel uses, although I came to love it. Cromwell is suffused in every scene, present but not always visible, even when talking or acting. It took me a few chapters to figure out, too.

Again, I'll just state it simply. If your game presents you with one or more racists who believe that all black people are bloodthirsty savages, and then later it turns out that they are right because all black people in the game become bloodthirsty savages, then the game is racist, because it presents racists as right. It doesn't mean that Levine is racist, in fact I think he isn't because he sought out such a thorny topic to tackle, but I don't think he has the best understanding of racism, considering that his DLC "fix" for his unintentionally racist game was to make Fitzroy a bloodthirsty savage not for her own sake but because she wanted a little white girl hate her, which is... I don't know, sad? Exhausting? Still racist? I think we've wrung enough blood from this stone.

Herrherrschaft.

"Most revolutions turn bad" is really different from "revolutionary unjustly accused of murder becomes mass-murderer monster before the revolution's even won". What happens in the game is the Reign of Terror beginning immediately after the Tennis Court Oath has been made, with the Marquis de Lafayette as the perpetrator of both. It ain't good storytelling and it ain't good history.

Funnily enough, Alec Meer over at RPS had the same reaction, but less for your specific criticisms and more for the audacity of trying to handwave one of the game's worst plotholes in a DLC.

I've watched a couple of Desert Punk episodes after finally buying the thinpack reprint last week. Man, I don't think there's a show that encompasses more of the reasons why I hate and why I love anime. It's a long-form post-apocalyptic anime with several inventive twists, it has a main character who's not likable but still interesting, it has a different and unpredictable dramatic arc, and it's genuinely funny at times, to the point that it surprises regularly. But the art swings between adequate and stitched-together key-frames, there is one pure fan-service character who ruins every scene she's in, whenever the writers don't have good jokes they just have the main character perv out, and the ending is abrupt, if still good. The fact that it's not all good and not all bad, not even along lines of taste, means I can never show it or recommend it to anyone. It's just going to sit on my shelf now like a dirty secret. Anime! I never responded to this post! I guess I mean "literary" in the sense of a written work with no preferred visual mode (so, not a play and definitely not a manga, that would qualify ninety percent of all anime made in the past five years). I haven't seen Princess Tutu but it's so very high on my list, after I finished slogging through the 2012 Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Is there much from modern novels in anime? I'm sure I'm just blanking on obvious ones, because all I can think about is Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei's obsession with Murakami and Dazai, which is really just confined to references. Also, I have been totally transfixed by this .gif from Robot Girls Z, to the point of wanting to watch its "season" of three episodes, even though I don't know the franchises at all. It just looks like it applies to so much of my life right now...

Lord's management.

Is Civilization 5's workshop a mess? I just bought the game and probably will mod it in a month, but I'm not up on the scene at all. Also, speak ye no bad about Paradox, but I do find a game about a given country's forefathers in which the current state of said country is depicted as the worst-case scenario of said forefathers' accomplishments is... suspicious.