Gormongous

I'm sorry for your kitty. He seems like a cool guy, but that doesn't matter, because losing a pet is always hard. I'm sure you were good owners and are doing the right thing here, so just do your best and love him for the time you have left.

But Blambo sent the license email twice! I don't understand Wikipedia.

Can someone explain to me why? To the best of my ability to know, the license had all the requisite information. Did some passing editor just decide not to believe it?

Yeah, I don't have a problem with people having very restricted tastes. That's fair, that's human. I just don't like when people frame those tastes in terms of intellectual, let alone moral, superiority. It feels like the most perverse way for you to wage a culture war by proxy against people whose tastes are, while superficially different, still too similar to yours for any real comfort. Oh, you watch Herzog? How pedestrian, I only watch Fassbinder. It's just not possible to tell a fulfilling story in only two hours, especially if it's cluttered with all that action and drama. Gross. I also wanted to post something about how historically any private reading for pleasure was considered culturally deviant and empty, regardless of the pretensions of the author and reader, but couldn't find the quote that I'm sure is from this book, so whatever. It just feels so silly to be like, "Well, my stories about imaginary people and events are difficult and sometimes distressing, so they're good for me, while yours are just fun and only sometimes sublime, so they're not." Is this a useful function of literary criticism, picking out the best books for self-improvement through reading?

Fair enough, but it's still an argument implying that someone who reads erudite, challenging fiction is somehow living a more fulfilled and learned life, when it's all just imaginary stuff by dudes who were born and have lived the same way as everyone else. It's bearable in the context of six other dissenting opinions, but still the opinion of an elitist jerk who is worried that other people will have access to his intellectual cache without all the effort he sees himself as having expended. This should probably go in the Drunk thread, because I am, but I really am tired of having people judge me for reading fun books that expand my mind in different ways than they see as culturally legitimate. My job is reading really challenging books all day, so I don't see why someone who spends his free time reading Infinite Jest after a day of whatever is somehow more intellectually curious than me who reads Gormenghast after a day of learning about mechanisms of pre-modern familial power structures.

Maybe I didn't phrase it right. I mean to say that Excel Saga in its 1999 form, with an aggressive genre-switching format, heavy otaku references, and obnoxious female lead who is never cute or sexy, would never be made today. Excel would be flashing her panties a lot more, at the very least, and I suspect it would be a single genre-savvy format, which is much more in vogue today. One-off episodes with explicitly no metaplot discourage viewer engagement and are not nearly as popular, especially in more "experimental" anime. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying. It's not that there's less creativity, it's that there's less money floating around and less willingness for risk, which means that what good anime is being made has to do so under tighter restraints and usually under the auspices of some kind of fan service. KILL la KILL flashes them titties a lot and sometimes says something about it, in the midst of its shounen genre deconstruction, but I doubt the latter would exist without the former, if only because there'd be so much less of a market. I really wonder, though. No one I know likes fan service, but it's commercial suicide to make a show without any service. Who are these people? Why do they watch anime and not just porn?

I really don't have the time to spin out my incredibly mixed feelings about Paranoia Agent. On the one hand, I feel like it's borrowing a lot of its ideas from Ghost in the Shell (both the movie and show), Serial Experiments Lain, Boogiepop Phantom, and (oddly enough) End of Evangelion, but is only really unique in how it fits them all together, sometimes unsuccessfully, rather than in the ideas themselves. Then again, that list is five of my favorite shows, so maybe I'm just being hard to please. The four-episode burn that opens the show is unbelievable, but then it loses steam when it starts experimenting with its format and tone, so I just wasn't on board with the ending, no matter how much I wanted to like it. Fucking great OP though, agreed. Why hasn't FUNi snapped up this Geneon license along with its other rescues? There's a dozen used box sets, almost a decade old, rotting on Amazon for a hundred bucks minimum, plus Kon died not too long ago. It seems like the right time to ride the wave. Well, I'm a big defender of post-Golden Age anime myself. Even in the past few years, Girls und Panzer, Mawaru Penguindrum, and Medaka Box are just three random box sets on my bookshelf that have all managed to be shockingly clever shows from studios that aren't from among the anime royalty. But I have to agree with him, there's no chance that really experimental stuff like Excel Saga or Lain or Haibane Renmei would get made in its current form. The moe boom is still strong after a decade, even though everyone hates it and predicts its downfall, and studios have to cater to stuff that'll work in such a climate, which means everything's a thirteen-episode adaptation of something already successful with the vague promise of another season if the Blu-ray sales are high (and in the case of Medaka Box: Abnormal, not even then). There's just less money floating around, so there's a lot less innovative stuff and none that's not shot through with fan service and compromises like KILL la KILL, which I love but goddamn. Of course, we all hope that someday the internet will free us from all cost-effectiveness bullshit, but ONAs have so far proven only good for promoting preexisting franchises, so that "someday" might be a while.

He got extraordinarily lucky or was extraordinarily patient. After a year of watching auctions, I can say for sure that the average copy goes for at least twice that much unless it has serious wear or defects, which is fully possible since the original game's components were all thin cardboard and cardstock.

That is... wow. It is someone having an extremely drastic mental breakdown and processing it as a moral stance on privilege. It is tough to read that post and thereby watch someone gut himself for ever even daring to try and be happy when there is unhappiness anywhere in the world. I hope he gets help...

It's in Multiplayer Networking, which is a private subforum, because we were being besieged by bots and lurkers who wanted our free games. Anybody who had ever posted something to give away was getting a dozen private messages a day asking if it was still available to give to some zero-post schlub.

The answer is yes, of course, but I want to hear what people say. This is coming off of a couple of posts in the thread on Banished, which made me think that so few long-form (that is, non-iterative and non-repetitive) games actually get more fun as you get further along in a given session. All strategy games outgrow their own power curves in terms of either difficulty or complexity, becoming rote at best. Most shooters get boring once you've shot a certain number of enemies. Even more exploration-based hybrids like the Assassin's Creed series wear out once you get a good sense for the world they've created for you. Is it just a problem of resources and diminishing returns, that it's impossible to keep up with the levels of discovery and wonder established in a game's first few hours? If so, I think it's a problem closer to solved in some genres. Certainly, RPG elements do have late-game fatigue, but usually out of sheer length than a diminishing number of interesting interactions. In fact, character-building is what drives me to play most RPGs, because I love having more options as a game goes on, although if most of the options turn out to be functionally the same, then I get the same kind of burnout as with a shooter. I also think that the roguelike renaissance has made progress along different lines, not only with shorter-form design but with features that reward the achievements or skills gained from repeat play. I initially thought that I wouldn't be interested in Spelunky, since it has no advancement scheme and a skill ceiling that's probably above me, but the pleasure of developing a certain competency with such an uncompromising design nearly equals the pleasure of watching my clockwork empire tick away in Civilization. So, what do you think? What are the great games that are ruined by a poor endgame? What are possible solutions to them? Do any other genres or games contain such solutions?

Yeah, I was going to say that a good "governor" AI fixes the problem on a very basic level, but it's not particularly satisfying to write off whole swaths of your empire to AI control and I can't help but remember Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which had great governor AI 99.999% of the time and wouldn't stop churning out Soporific Silksteel Sentinels the other 0.001%. Speaking of, for some reason, I feel like SMAC had a very good endgame compared to contemporary 4X games, which granted were mostly from Firaxis anyway. If you didn't go for an early Conquest or Green Conquest victory, there was this mounting fever-pitch with the Diplomatic, Economic, and Tech victories. Part of that was because Planet started going nuts, which meant that there was more to keep your eyes on than your increasingly close objective, but it was also just the way the factions themed the endgame, where things would split along philosophical lines and they'd declare themselves for or against you. It was like the "realm divide" that Creative Assembly's always wanted in their games since Rome: Total War, but in a way that actually engaged the player and actually worked. I'm beginning to think it's hard for other developers to copy such a holistically successful product like SMAC, though.

Ugh, that would be so cool, especially if the game procedurally named the states based on terrain features, Great People, or other in-game events. Your suggestion brings to mind one of the most common complaints about Europa Universalis IV on the Paradox forums, that the casus belli and warscore system designed to model small-scale conflict in the fifteenth century is unable to deal with million-man armies and overseas wars in the eighteenth. It would be neat if most long-form strategy games had "pulse" events that occasionally wiped the old systems from the board and replace them with simpler but thematically related systems in order to cope with the mounting scale of the game. Crusader Kings 2 kind of does that organically, just by making counts and barons not plot against you once you become too powerful for them ever to have a chance, but it still falls down a lot, probably because it wasn't a deliberate design goal to reduce pointless interactions.

I wonder, and let me know if you all can't follow me, but since there's only one way a piece of knowledge can be true and (near) infinite ways it can be false, and since decision-making in groups tends to fall along lines of common and/or shared knowledge, does that mean that groups are dumber than individuals because false knowledge is more easily reinforced than true knowledge? I think I had a Phenomenon moment there...

Sorry, I wasn't trying to shut you up or anything. I was more just trying to say that your despair and anxiety is something well known and understood. I love Snopes for exactly the same reason. I would have to unfriend several superstitious relatives if Snopes didn't give me a ready response to their bull.

Over and over in history, observers and commentators complain that we live in the most advanced society, yet also the most intellectually and morally abased society. I think it's a cognitive dissonance that's been with us a long time.

I think most builder games (whether town or civilization) would be improved by an endgame of an organic, self-generated threat to which the player can respond in a number of ways. I mean, most builder games do have one, but it's usually accidental, like the ever-growing squalor of cities in Rome: Total War leading eventually to an empire in perpetual revolt.

That's a good point, bringing up Dark Souls. I haven't gotten anywhere close to that one's endgame, but it certainly sounds like a unique approach. I also wonder if the key to making sure difficulty scales properly throughout the game is designing an ideal playthrough around minimal deaths (or fail-states, really) rather than no deaths. So many games expect a competent player never to fail, which makes the ball-crushing challenge of many final bosses feel all the more painful.

I'm almost certain it's the way the AI handles the "hungry" state (and the "freezing" state too, but man, does that take a long time to kill a person in the game). They get hungry while on the job, which might be far to the east, then check their home for food, which might be far to the west, then they go to the marketplace, which might be far back east, and then go back home to eat and die somewhere along the way. After your town reaches a certain size, people are just going to die out of sheer travel time between home, work, and shopping. I imagine, if you've got enough give in your system that everyone who lives unsustainably far away from work can die off and the whole town doesn't collapse, it works itself out eventually, but it's still deeply frustrating. Why isn't there an optimization algorithm running in the background to make sure everyone lives a certain minimum distance from their workplace and a storehouse if at all possible?

Interesting, and I hadn't considered those games either! Is throwing challenge out the window a legit solution, though? I mean, I definitely enjoy it more than the old-school design philosophy that a game should be an ever-mounting challenge and that the endgame should be a boss fight that demands you execute all skills and strategies learned in-game to perfection, but is a balls-out power fantasy only less tiresome because it's less tired? These are serious questions, of course.

I just finished The Banner Saga. Beautiful, stately game, both in terms of design and aesthetics, but hey, fuck that boss fight. I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for DLC chapters, though.

To be completely fair, there's supposed to be some narrative trickery going on with The Wallflower. It's very clearly stated in the first episode that Sunako has a unibrow and acne, although it's played as a throwaway joke and of course they never draw it. She only "cleans up" when she feels beautiful on the inside (or that's how it's supposed to be, but the array of She's All That tropes are so ingrained that the writers can't help but forget). If I could have a magical anime wish, I'd wish for The Wallflower to be less uneven in general, but apparently a lot of that comes from the mangaka, who gradually lost herself to ugly-girl-wish-fulfillment rather than the original self-acceptance message.

You'd almost be better off asking whether any long-form strategy game has a good endgame. The answer is no, for me: all city-builders become about micromanaging sprawl, all 4X games lose their interesting moments in the morass of busywork, even Paradox-style grand strategy and the Total War games become about expanding because there's nothing else to do. And yet they're still my number-one genre.

The issue really is that your options diminish so rapidly as the game goes on. When the game starts, you can get food from anywhere and make a viable town out of it. That's cool, I loved it when I picked up the game and I love it now. Still, past a hundred and fifty people or so, the game gets so fussy about your supply chains that any sort of imbalance or disruption starts a death-spiral that is most definitely not fun to confront or correct. I had fun the first twenty years building my city up to a hundred people, I had fun the next forty just keeping it around that number and tweaking things, but the final fifteen trying to push above three hundred was miserable and there's no way around that. In that way, I have to agree with you that the game's sweet spot is building a hundred-person city or so that can go the distance and provide for its population in comfort over the long term. I really ought to criticize the achievements then, all thirty-six of which encourage the player to expand aggressively as if a making thousand-person city is the point of playing. It feels like the developer does not really understand the strengths of his own game.

I find the energy of Ouran High School Host Club to be a lot like Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge, which was released in the US as The Wallflower. It's got a lot more bishounen-based gags, but the frenetic pacing and a strong lead female performance make them more synonymous than they probably should be in my head.