Gormongous

I think that, in almost any game, riposte/counter mechanics represent the most satisfying and empowering point of player interaction. It's a way to take something the game is doing and say, "Nope, I'll have the exact opposite thing happen instead, through my own practice and skill." I'm sure there's more to it than that, but damn. One thing that's turned me off Dark Souls is actually my inability to grok the timing of the riposte, but that's on me. My gut was that it belonged as a linked rant in the Feminism thread, but who am I to tell people where to post their stuff? I can understand getting mad about the cavalier treatment of rape in popular culture, though. It's gross and I hate South Park for it, too.

Whoa, really? I didn't know you were hating it that much.

Man, I agree with almost all of this. It seems like Trigger swings back and forth between being above the fray and in the thick of it, in terms of its artistic and tonal choices for this anime. I'm really not sure anymore that they're doing anything coherent with it, but they're certainly doing something. Also, if I were ten years younger and a lot more shameless, Mikisugi cosplay would be the right thing at the right time for the summer con season. How could I ever sneak past the staff with just the tactical vest and belt, though?

You really had to get the last word, Pony?

I finished my Victoria II game recently, so I've just been kind of mulling it over for about a week. Overall, it's my best game since I tried to carry the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to Italian unification, which had the result of a weak and backwards Italy that needed France's permission to exercise any power on the world stage. For the curious, this is how maybe two third of Victoria 2 games go, coming stillborn into modernity and waiting for a Great Power to stumble so you can kick its shins for brownie points elsewhere. Anyway, like I've said here and elsewhere on the forum, Belgium is a great starter country. You are densely populated and have good relations with everyone you need to get a booming economy. Even playing not at all efficiently, I still managed to secure a permanent position among the great powers by 1840 through low taxes, subsidized imports, and education spending, ultimately becoming the richest and most literate nation per capita from 1860 to 1900. After that, it was all downhill. I'd predicted that the communist Britain I'd helped create was going to wreck me, but that never came to pass. I was always able to sell some small portion of my international prestige to postpone the showdown another decade, but thank heavens the game's timeline ended when it did. No, the problems I had were more just fundamental to playing a small, rich country like Belgium. I never had enough population, hence enough money, to keep my industrialization going up that exponential growth curve like France, Britain, and the US could, so even though I ended the game with thirty million citizens, almost three times the current population of Belgium, I was still just small potatoes, with a half million-man army mostly of illiterate Yoruba conscripts and an economy that was, pound for pound, the equal even of the United States but only one tenth the size. Wars were still happening and I was one of the winners, but I wasn't the winner anymore, so a decline was inevitable, even if the game didn't make me play it out in full. I wonder if I could have prepared for Belgium to have unlimited growth somehow, back when I started my game. If I promoted population growth early on, rather than controlling it to make universal literacy easier to achieve, I might have been able to spin it into a baby boom that could have kept me ahead of France, but it would also have kept me out of the Great Powers for a few more decades. Who knows if that would have made no difference or if Belgium's wealth would have been siphoned away to French factories and markets, leaving me forever impoverished. It's such a huge game, how could anyone know? As it turned out, I'm just fascinated that my determination to be both a liberal government and a Great Power made me into Cecil Rhodes overnight. That's video games. Anyway, here's the world as it looks in 1950. The United States of America is still a slave-holding nation, the only one in the world, and is mostly uninvolved in global politics, so scared are they of another slave revolt and of fellow Great Power Canada deciding to do something about it. Britain is called the Worker's Commonwealth and is the second-rank Great Power, despite having lost two world wars and much of Africa. They are friends with fascist Germany, who lost the next two world wars and not much else. Russia is also fascist, but not even a Great Power anymore, having been dismantled in the fifth world war over the union of Yugoslavia with Bulgaria. China broke into civil war around 1900 and no one's bothered to put them back together again. Probably more helpful is the map just of my own direct holdings and satellites. What this map doesn't show is my sphere of influence, which represents economic but not political control. In addition to direct control of the Republic of Kamchatka, all the Turkic republics are in my sphere, along with Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and most of South America. With them all together, I control closer to three quarters of Africa, rather than just half. Good game, good game. I immediately wanted to start another, but I don't think I have the time or the energy, not after this... EDIT: Looking at Germany's flag, they actually aren't a fascist dictatorship anymore. When did that happen?

Yeah, but do we really have to play them in chronological order? Wouldn't it be just as compelling to play the grandson, with allusions to the grandfather, then go back to play the latter next? I understand why they're doing it that way in this specific case, but it seems like Ubisoft has worked to preserve a strict chronological order for the franchise, which is really limiting. You know what would be amazing? Playing a Templar from Cyprus or something trying to survive immediately before and after the order was suppressed in 1307. There's so much cool stuff actually going on between Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed 2, not to mention after the latter, that we're really missing out on in order to have King Washington and whatever. Also, googling "Templar order" brings up the Wikipedia article third, after Assassin's Creed and Dragon Age wiki articles. I'm sad now.

I really don't quite see why the historical portion of every Assassin's Creed game has to take place in chronology after the previous one. It seems like a failure of imagination, but then again the series has several of those. I'd also like to see more medieval and early modern settings, but I suspect we won't due to a general belief that "not much happened" in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance compared to the last century, even though the Sicilian Vespers or the Thirty Years War would be awesome to explore as a weirdly conspicuous murderer.

Unfortunately, because of base tax and core distribution, the Baltic and Black Seas are the directions that most big countries blob towards uncontrollably. If you're not strong enough to challenge Russia one-on-one by now, which probably won't happen if you don't have Quality and Defensive ideas plus military tradition high enough to trigger the Swedish military reforms event chain, holding fire is probably the best choice. The game ends in 1815, with the historical defeat of Napoleon. To be honest, general consensus even among the devs is that province improvements are a bigger and more wasteful drain on MP, simply because they only affect one province and can be destroyed, while ideas and tech are forever and universal. Some people build temples to bump up base tax for diplo-annexing, though. The building system's kind of fucked too, come to think of it.

Yeah, I'd probably buy and play this in the near future if it wasn't South Park, but everyone's talking about how true it is to the tone of the show, so I know it's just not for me.

Yes.

On a horribly misguided whim, I have begun to read the first volume of Hawkes' complete translation of Dream of the Red Chamber. I am enjoying it much more than I expected, but it feels very unsettling to have signed away at least a year of my life to one book.

If my affinity bothers her so much, why doesn't she stop wearing the perfume? I wish she'd stop wearing the perfume. It bothers me that it bothers her. I love Perfume too. I think it's such a success for being made about a theoretically "unfilmable" books.

I know you're not posting this here as a help thread, but I figured I'd drop what little knowledge I have where it would be helpful. Congratulations! A hundred ducats with full military maintenance is the beginning of the midgame. The free embargo is good, but rivalries are usually used for the "enemy of my enemy" opinion boost (+20) and for the cheaper warscore costs. Embargoes is generally ineffective, since if both countries are embargoing each other it just decreases their overall trade efficiency. Nope! This is one of my big problems with the war system, too. You'll have fans defend it to the death on the Paradox forums, saying, "Well, if they're winning enough that you just want to give up, why would they let you?" It's stupid, unfun, and usually just punishment for not checking the diplomatic mapmode every ten minutes to check where your neighbors have claims. Someone suggested that a "demand" diplomatic option, where you ask a country to "sell" you a province where you have a claim under threat of war, that would be more interesting, but probably hard for the AI to grasp. They only just recently taught it how to value provinces in terms of cash. Back in EU3, it was fairly common practice to declare war on a country, give it some worthless out-of-the-way province that didn't even border them, and let rebels defect it back to you. It would break most of that country's alliances and give you five years of truce when the AI wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole, no matter what you did. Paradox fixed that by adding really harsh "length of war" and "capital not occupied" modifiers that more or less ensure any war will last at least eighteen months, enough time for the often-sleepy AI to react properly. I have problems with it, of course. Not only does it mean that the warscore displayed is not how the AI perceives the war going, to the point that you can occupy ninety percent of a country five weeks in and the AI will still refuse any concession, but also it means that wars often don't end if you're defeated yet the AI hasn't achieved its goal. It won't take anything it doesn't have a claim or core on, and if the country happens to be overextended, it won't take anything at all, which is a real pleasure, let me tell you. My best advice is just to keep as much gold stashed away as possible. If it doesn't have its wargoal, the AI will always accept 31% or 32% warscore's worth of gold. It's dumb, yeah. You're right, relations mean nothing. All that matters is a country's attitude toward you, indicated by the icon. Attitude is pretty much just determined by i) how big your army is in comparison to theirs, and ii) whether you have any territories the AI wants or sees itself ever wanting. If they didn't have a royal marriage with Russia, France probably didn't come to your aid because Russia was too far away, which overrides almost any possible relations score you could have with them. You can keep a country from attacking you briefly by keeping your relations over +100, but the AI will rival you or switch their attitude to Hatred when they want to fight, which will tank any relations score in couple years. Paradox has been criticized by some for exposing relations as a discrete and visible number, but then hiding the actual diplomacy calculations inside another, different black box called "attitudes". Most fans claim that they liked the old system anyway, so they're glad there's attitudes, because who wants to know when and why a country goes to war with you. Generally speaking, I feel for you, because you've found a ideal situation to show what a failure so many of EU4's systems are. You were attacked without warning by a vastly superior force over an inconsequential island that you were unable to concede because the AI is programmed to fight to the death over nothing at all in order to give veteran players like me a challenge, even though it's a challenge I don't enjoy or even want. In a perfect world, the AI would see that it couldn't take its wargoal, despite having you beat, and would ask for cash instead, before war exhaustion took a real dive, but no. And I don't know why!

So I have a pretty keen sense of smell. Nothing on the level of Perfume or anything, but it's probably much closer to being my dominant sense than is the case with most people, albeit nowhere close to actually being dominant, of course. I especially love the scent of amber and there's this one girl in my department who has the most intoxicating perfume of it. I love the smell, even though I find its wearer standoffish and often even rude, but now I'm definitely creeping her and others out because I can smell it the moment she steps out of the elevator and know when she's coming or when she's just left. I try my best not to make any comment, but I just like the perfume too damn much, so I'll blurt out, "Oh, Sarah's here!" a full thirty seconds before you can even hear her footsteps outside the office. I'm mostly typing this on here because my anonymity's mostly safe online and there's no way to talk about it without seeming like an aspirant serial killer.

I was going to post here how fulfilling I find it to actually do my research, as opposed to teaching, which is just how I make money and something I happen to be good at but which is not my real job, per se. Give me ten minutes with a source and I'll have three pages of a paper on it written in not too long at all. That's love, right? But then I just wasted four hours today trying to track down a reference to thirteenth-century imperial vicars for the kingdom of Arles, half-remembered from two years ago, only to find it at last in a dreadful old book called Phoenix Frustrated: Lost Kingdom of Burgundy and realize it's uncited... Yeah, great. Fuck this job. I always rely on my institution's library for summer work. If you have a graduate degree and maybe a language or two, you're more valuable than any of the undergrad workers they usually hire, so it's just a matter of finding the right person to help you skip the hiring process. I got an amazing job doing Latin translation and general upkeep for our rare books room last summer just by emailing two people and mentioning my degree. Note: this does not work in the real world, only academia.

This one made me think. What film studies books do spend a lot of time doing is hammering out the "waves" of filmmaking and what characterized each, but by virtue of the console cycle, poisoned chalice though it is, video games have a strong and effective periodization built in. In general, until the retro fad of the past five years, it's been very easy to tell what time and what technology made a game. I wonder how or even if that's been leveraged in critical studies of games, or if it's just been disregarded in favor of other more impressive-looking critical legwork.

Maybe it was just Ryan's incredible career path that almost seemed like a counterfactual history of my post-college years, but I really enjoyed this podcast as much if not more than any other, despite having never played a single Metal Gear game or Republique, although I do use the voice I learned from Chris and Steve in the early episodes of Idle Thumbs to great effect.

I've always thought this, too. In the space of a few years, both FEAR and Bioshock suggested to me that the FPS had moved beyond the boss fight (well, except it hadn't, because both games had actual boss fights after their cool, subversive "boss fights"). I'll never forget firing frantically at Fettel the moment I got back control of my character and watching him slump over. For a second, I thought I'd broke the game and that I'd be dumped into the skybox with an error message at any moment.

Marc Went-in-(to-the-elevator-to-leave-Microsoft).

I'm sorry, I really don't understand where you're coming from here. When has a female game designer ever been censured either by the industry or by the press for being too masculine or working on a male-oriented game? Sexism is a very real and present problem in the games industry, but unless I've been missing something all along, women there get shit for being women, not for how feminine they are or aren't. There are ongoing efforts to whitewash the presence and experience of women in the games industry, but never has Rock Paper Shotgun neglected to cover an incident of sexism because the woman concerned didn't fit John Walker's idea of femininity. And honestly, I'd go ahead and say that Amy Hennig being as or more successful as Neil Druckmann is a more impressive accomplishment because she did so in the face of massive, widespread, and institutionalized sexism. That's something I'd like to hear about, as it seems several other people here would too.

I don't know, increasing visibility is always a good thing for the oppressed. You might as well argue that Black History Month perpetuates racism by implying that black history is not everyone else's history. And yeah, sure, in a very limited way, but the truth is that black history is really not everyone else's history. Millennia of bigotry and oppression have made sure of that. Similarly, women in the games industry are not everyone else in the games industry. They're underrepresented and disregarded, so should be celebrated, that's all. More practically, we've heard how thirteen or fourteen dudes made it big in video games, it'd be cool to hear how a woman did the same, because we know it'd be a different road at least in some ways, so I'm curious.

I found that discussion very perplexing in general. It seemed like Sean intuited rightly that games had competitive and even professional scenes before streaming blew up, but couldn't articulate how, and Chris' categorical statement that the money had to come from somewhere just stopped everyone cold. It hasn't been the case with video games for very long, but collective card games have a sufficiently high buy-in that tournaments more than pay for their prizes with the purchasing they stimulate.

I could hear it in my head the moment I read this, down to the little hitch where the different sound files are joined up imperfectly. That'd be a lot of extra dialogue to record, though.

Proposition: Gankutsuou is the most successful anime adaptation of a literary work, if not one of the most successful adaptations period. Its changes to The Count of Monte Cristo are thoughtful and insightful, most especially changing who is the protagonist in order to give a more interesting perspective on the Count's revenge. Though Dumas certainly makes the reader aware of the human cost in the book, the anime makes that its centerpiece. The garish Baroque art style works perfectly with the early 2000s CGI binge that has dated every other show from that time horribly. The use of static patterns for texture fill is entrancing and beautiful. Gonzo's always been known for kind of just adequate art, but here they make their weaknesses a strength. The anime revels in the Frenchness of the book, even when scaling it up to work on the scale of space opera. Paris is an entire planet and there are Arc de Triomphes everywhere, but even better is that the show's recap is delivered in immaculate French by some Japanese guy who's never done another gig in the industry. The sci-fi setting is not gratuitous like Samurai 7 and Romeo x Juliet, both of which Gonzo makes immediately after Gankutsuou to much less success. Space opera is used to give the modern viewer the same sense of madness, chaos, and impossibility that the Hundred Days, the Second Republic, and the Second Empire represented for Dumas' contemporaries. On a less impartial-seeming note, I also just enjoy how it's clearly a labor of love by Maeda Mahiro, who was the director for Evangelion 3.0 but before then hadn't really done anything other than key animation. He did the character design, the key animation, and the storyboards all himself. It's nice to have a glimpse at someone who's not always an auteur except in this one case. I just finished rewatching it with a friend who loved the book, a year after a different friend talked me into seeing it after a decade of excuses, and it's been enthralling both times. I'm truly sorry I waited that long, because I think it's the best-case scenario of how an adaptation can turn out, so that it critiques but also enhances the original work.

It really depends. The base game is usually five to ten bucks during a Steam sale, but SEGA is very fond of discounting the main game deeply and then barely taking anything off the DLC, which is often the better part of the game in latter-day Total War titles.