Gormongous

I personally like dirty/practical futures, but I think the aesthetic is subject to abuse and in grander space-focused games like Endless Space I tend to lean towards the "societal philosophy as demonstrated by ship design" school of thought.

This was a great podcast. I think Nick might be the secret sauce, hopefully he can make it out more. And, not to belabor The Banner Saga discussion that got beaten to death last podcast thread, but I really am curious what makes all the text in The Banner Saga so intolerable when Chris and Nick both liked Dragon Age: Origins, which had a similar presentation and density of exposition and lore with a higher average words-per-minute-of-gameplay. Not to compare what may just be apples and oranges, but is it the greater length of Dragon Age, which rewards more attention and investment? Is it the single self-defined avatar that the player is given, which lends immediacy and permanency to any decisions being made? Is it the unification of combat and dialogue in a single mode, which keeps either from feeling like a sideshow to the "real" game? I don't mean those questions to be confrontational. I'd just love to know how The Banner Saga's dialogue could hardly give me pause while almost ruining the game for others.

As someone who intentionally played a high-chaos Corvo, denuding every level of NPCs, it would still be awful. Every character comments insistently on the brutality of your methods, usually after having told you before the mission that you should take whatever measures are necessary and sometimes after having described the mission they're sending you on as impossible. It wouldn't be so annoying if there were only a few "moral" characters like that, but the developers seemed to have been eager to show you just how responsive the game's world is to your actions. The worst is the prelude to the final mission: In a completely different game, it might have worked better, but when the protagonist is as empowered as Corvo is even in the beginning, it makes the game's judgments on his actions hollow at best and a scold at worst.

I have stuff I want to say about the bathhouse scene, mostly about how most of the "intriguing" details seem more like stock anime tropes to me, but I'm holding off to see if they actually are. Yeah, I'm a coward. What's actually bothering me most about KILL la KILL right now is that there's no real consistency to Ryuuko's power curve. I've watched enough shounen stuff to expect Ryuuko to trust Senketsu more, to learn new techniques with the scissor blade, and generally become a better fighter. KILL la KILL pays a lot of lip service to that, but I have no idea how strong Ryuuko really is, beyond what the writers say through their various mouthpieces. As shown in her fights with Satsuki and Harime Nui (ugh), she is just as strong as she need to be for the next thing to happen how it does, with the only exception being her berserking out during the Devas fight. I hate to say it, but it distances me from Ryuuko and her arc not to know where she stands as a fighter, her central character trait, in relation to her adversaries. I don't know, does any of that make sense?

Like everyone else, I'd be more inclined to engage you if you didn't act like we're all frontin' when we say that we like how Far Cry 2 plays more than how Crysis looks. I certainly don't believe graphics are king. They tarnish so quickly and contribute less to a game's overall immersion than anything else. For me, Far Cry 2 is still a fascinating interaction of systems five years later, while Crysis has become an average-looking game with flat gunplay and an empty "open world" that becomes a ropey corridor shooter too soon and for too long.

Thank you for explicating a lot of what I found bothersome about Gaynor's argument. I especially liked the part I quoted from you, which refutes the most irritating assertion of most critical rebuttals to Walker's original piece. No one's suggesting that the creator of an original work be divested of the rights to it immediately upon completion, nor that the creator be forbidden from continuing to sell said original work after expiration of their rights to it, but that's invariably what is implied if not outright stated by Walker's detractors. I can think of very few game development companies that have existed unchanged for twenty years (and none at all that retain their original members and makeup). Such a situation makes copyright a thing for corporations, not for creators, in which case only Gaynor's argument about copyright indirectly subsidizing further creative works holds water. I myself can think of several better ways for us to do that besides exclusive rights for lifetime plus seventy years.

And, in a world where EA lays off entire development teams right before their game comes out, so that they don't have to pay them anymore, it's different how?

Hah, I didn't see it was St. Louis! Man, whatever. The cops are barely even here, they're so busy fighting a losing battle with the fallout from urban decay in the north (and their own corruption). Then again, they're making good money off the mass deployment of traffic cams, I can see why more automation could be seen as a positive step.

The way someone I like put it is that you don't want your enjoyment of an artist's work be construed as support for the artist, which is doubly hard in a capitalist society where art is sold as a product to consumers for financial gain. People have no problem boycotting Coca-Cola for South American death camps, but it seems like we expect artists not to be terrible in the same way that corporations are terrible, which explains why so many people have rewritten their own personal cultural histories in order to forget that Cosby probably assaulted a ton of women.

This happened with Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei when Del Rey handed it off to Kodansha, although anything's better than the quiet non-cancellation of the series after vol. 15 failed to make an appearance for several years.

The new season of Chuu2Koi is four episodes in and nothing's happened, nothing at all. I'd quit the show if I weren't already a third of the season in with nothing else to watch besides Shinryaku! Ika Musume. It's telling to me how much relationships in all anime are, to quote my favorite (and only) blogger on the medium, "a perplexing celebration of celibacy and prudishness bordering on gynophobia," that the new threat to the so-called happiness Rikka and Yuuta found last season is Yuuta's childhood friend who hugs him on occasion. I wish I were kidding, but apparently a healthy relationship can't exist in Japan if either party has ever touched a different member of the opposite sex.

I don't think that need is created. I think that it's implicit and a lot of effort/good faith must be taken to dissociate ourselves from it. That's why there are pages and pages explaining how you can enjoy occult Nazi metal without being a Nazi or a Satanist, while acknowledging that the default stance is to assume both.

I guess. I believe in death of the author as much as any good academic, but I'm still going to look askance at someone who insists we evaluate Hitler's paintings on their artistic merit alone.

We should probably get into the deification of the founding fathers in another thread. And no, as a work of art, I'm not terribly enamored by the Declaration of Independence, certainly not enough to say we should divorce it from any and all conversations about slave-owning and slave-molesting eighteenth-century white men. In all seriousness, can you go into what about this is ridiculous? Do you mean that celebrity worship is ridiculous or that this side effect is ridiculous?

This is just me and I don't hold anyone else to this expectation, but there is certainly enough amazing and beautiful stuff in the world never to need to patronize the works of a molester or rapist.

You obviously have researched this better than me. All I really know is from my own fitful participation in the CA forums, where Lusted's only visible post-modding roles were appearing in Let's Play-style promo vids and refuting any/all criticism of the AI. He was never able to speak to any of his specific duties on any particular game, which led me (as well as many others) to suspect that he didn't have many and that his hiring was a PR move. Whatever the case, there was a lot of frustration that he went so quickly from "a handful of smart and simple tweaks can improve almost any AI" to "we're always looking for ways to improve the AI, but it's not easy" after getting the job. It's refreshing to hear Shenandoah and Soren Johnson talk a different talk.

Jack Lusted does community relations on the forums. They didn't hire him for his skills with the engine, they hired him for his popularity with the fans.

That is also the final boss for the first FEAR (minus fleeing from Alma) and it was one of the few moments where I realized something was truly great at the same time I was doing it.

I'm not watching Space Dandy because... well, I don't know, but I'm a little comforted that another medium is having problems with the whole having-and-eating-cake thing when it comes to deconstructions of itself. Was Spec Ops: The Line more successful at what it's doing than Space Dandy is? Sure sounds like it.

The "quick" games I have as palate cleansers between more substantial fare are Love Letter (a genius design that anyone can learn in seconds), Resistance: Avalon (although I've seen groups get caught playing it for hours instead of moving on to other things), and King of Tokyo (no one dislikes King of Tokyo, people who say otherwise are lying). I'm trying to see if Fairy Tale also works in that rotation, but I've been turned off so far by its extremely mechanistic rules. There are plenty of guides online on how to coach your friend out of such behaviors, if you find it worth your while, but it really depends whether it's genuine analysis paralysis or a more conscious fear of looking stupid or doing the wrong thing.

Okay, point of order, not that I'm taking either side of this debate, because Nintendo's always done its own thing, but "best-selling console of 2013" does not equal "most profitable console of 2013". Do we know the markup on the 3DS and that represents the revenue from the 3DS, rather than the software sales that a substantial install base allows?

I know what you mean now! That was probably my favorite episode of KILL la KILL so far, except for thirty seconds that almost put me off the whole thing.

Yeah, same. This was going to be my treat tonight!

Yeah! And the cool thing with the heroquest stuff is that you need to know the lore well enough not only to emulate it, but also to get everything back on the right track if something randomly fails and the heroquest goes off the rails. It's all so strange and fun, it makes me wish that heroquests weren't basically something you have to grind near the end to beat the "long" game.

Now that's something with which I definitely agree. All the truly important decisions are made at the towns, all at once, when you decide whether to spend your renown on food or gear/leveling. I had posted a similar opinion in the thread for the game, but I wish there were a greater density of discrete event chains while your group is on the move. The conversations get better as you keep playing and get a better context for everyone, but the long stretches of watching your group cross the distance between towns becomes too familiar and a bit too dull. Anyway, there are quite a few interesting things being done between the battles, but for some reason, the developers don't put them in lights, so most of the big plot twists could pass right by you if you're not reading every word of the text. I suppose they expected a greater initial buy-in from most players, even though RPS complained about it in their previews of the game.