Gormongous

Two and a half hours into the game. I've had about a half-dozen battles. I'm not nearly as down on it as the rest of the internet. It's slow and ponderous, yes, but also beautiful in a way that many "improvements" would run roughshod over. I will say, however, that a "I fucked up this battle, please reset it" button would be much appreciated, especially when you don't know what any of the stats mean and just had your varl one-shotted out of nowhere.

As someone whose first Star Trek was Voyager, I think SAM's list is pretty solid, but I have such mixed feelings about your additions! On the one hand, "Someone to Watch Over Me" is amazing, like everything with Bob Picardo, but on the other, "Faces"?

Yeah, but it's also about rebooting Mokoto as a sex object. One of the producers explicitly said in an interview that they were making her younger, more flawed, and more vulnerable to bring out the moe. I'm pretty lukewarm about Arise myself. It shares none of its production crew with either the movies or the show, except the procession of key-animators-turned-directors, and it shows to me. The plots are ropey, the procedural elements is played down in favor of mystique and tension... I don't know. Maybe it'll look better as a whole at the end of 2014.

The polls say White Jesus. Man, those are the WASPiest Jews I've seen in a while.

That is racist, Tegan. You are a racist.

Combs also saved the Vorta, which were really bland before the writers began adding things to play to Combs' strengths as an actor.

I was trying to explain to my friend about everything that DS9 inherits from TNG's attempts to create a mysterious yet enduring enemy, before they settled on the Borg. That's why the Romulans are inexplicable assholes prior to the Dominion War and the Ferengi have this absurd space-Jew society that makes very little actual sense.

I used to hate every episode with Quark in it, even though he's since become a favorite of mine, so he's definitely an acquired taste. In light of that, I'll edit my post to mark out all Ferengi episodes. Actually, looking at how few of those episodes are in later seasons, I think I must be of the opinion that the Ferengi episodes are most of what makes the first few seasons watchable. They're the only really unique thing in DS9 before the writers finally begin to play up the themes of war and faith that really make the show great.

Fuuuck, fine. My list is going to be less the highlights of the series and more a list that pares out bad, boring, and unwatchable episodes. I'll bold the ones that I think are truly great, though. Actually, now that I've done a bit, this list gets incredibly hard from the fifth season onward, where I think the show goes from strength to strength, with only some lighter character-centric episodes being really optional... Season One Emissary - S01E01 (not particularly good, but establishes the show) Past Prologue - S01E02 (Garak!) Q-Less - S01E06 (Q! This won't make much sense if you haven't watched the Q episodes from TNG) The Nagus - S01E10 (I'm putting every Ferengi episode that I can stand on this list, for the sake of Wally Shawn) Battle Lines - S01E12 Progress - S01E14 Duet - S01E18 Season Two Rules of Acquisition - S02E07 (Ferengi!) Necessary Evil - S02E08 Armageddon Game - S02E13 Blood Oath - S02E19 (finally, they give Jadzia something to do) The Wire - S02E22 Tribunal - S02E25 The Jem'Hadar - S02E26 (not particularly good, but sets up the Dominion) Season Three The House of Quark - S03E03 (Ferengi!) Second Skin - S03E05 Civil Defense - S03E07 (memorable for Garak and Dukat arguing) Past Tense: Part 1 - S03E11 (Star Trek does Occupy Wall Street thirty years early) Past Tense: Part 2 - S03E12 Distant Voices - S03E18 (Bashir's first really solid episode) Improbable Cause - S03E20 The Die Is Cast - S03E21 Family Business - S03E23 (Ferengi!) Shakaar - S03E24 Season Four The Way of the Warrior - S04E01 (Worf's here!) The Visitor - S04E02 Hippocratic Oath - S04E03 Indiscretion - S04E04 (Dukat first started to work for me about now) Starship Down - S04E06 Little Green Men - S04E07 (Ferengi!) Our Man Bashir - S04E09 Return to Grace - S04E13 Bar Association - S04E15 (Ferengi! This one's actually almost defensible. Quark's brother starts a union) Rules of Engagement - S04E17 Hard Time - S04E18 For the Cause - S04E12 (not particularly outstanding, but necessary for S05E13 to work) To the Death - S04E22 The Quickening - S04E23 Broken Link - S04E25 Season Five Apocalypse Rising - S05E01 The Ship - S05E02 ...Nor the Battle to the Strong - S05E04 (Jake's only good episode) Trials and Tribble-ations - S05E06 (see the DS9 cast caper around a TOS episode!) Things Past - S05E08 The Ascent - S05E09 (amazing Odo/Quark dynamic here) Rapture - S05E10 For the Uniform - S05E13 (I consider around this episode that Avery Brooks finally starts taking Sisko someplace interesting) In Purgatory's Shadow - S05E14 By Inferno's Light - S05E14 Doctor Bashir, I Presume? - S05E16 (Bashir gets an actual personality!) A Simple Investigation - E05E17 Business as Usual - S05E18 (Ferengi!) Ties of Blood and Water - S05E19 Ferengi Love Songs - S05E20 Soldiers of the Empire - S05E21 (one of the best Klingon-focused episodes in the entire franchise) Empok Nor - S05E24 Call to Arms - S05E26 (the real beginning of the Dominion War) Season Six A Time to Stand - S06E01 Rocks and Shoals - S06E02 Behind the Lines - S06E04 Favor the Bold - S06E05 Sacrifice of Angels - S06E06 You are Cordially Invited... - S06E07 Statistical Probabilities - S06E09 The Magnificent Ferengi - S06E10 (Ferengi!) Waltz - S06E11 Far Beyond the Stars - S06E13 (not really a Star Trek episode, but an amazing piece of work) Honor Among Thieves - S06E15 Inquisition - S06E18 (Section 31!) In the Pale Moonlight - S06E19 (easily my favorite episode of my favorite series of Star Trek) His Way - S06E20 (Vic Fontaine! So sue me) Profit and Lace - S06E23 (I'm beginning to feel bad about all the Ferengi episodes...) The Sound of Her Voice - S06E25 Tears of the Prophets - S06E26 Season Seven Image in the Sand - S07E01 (because you want to see Worf trash a nightclub) Shadows and Symbols - S07E02 Afterimage - S07E03 Take Me Out to the Holosuite - S07E04 (maybe the only episode where Sisko's baseball obsession works for me) Chrysalis - S07E05 Treachery, Faith, and the Great River - S07E06 The Siege of AR-558 - S07E08 It's Only a Paper Moon - S07E10 Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang - S07E15 Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges - S07E16 And S07E17 (Penumbra) through S07E25 (What You Leave Behind) are all part of one nine-part episode, so it seems silly to pick and choose. If you're into the series by this point, watch them all, if you're not, just watch the finale. Things that are probably horribly underrepresented in my list: the Kira/Odo romance (because so much of it happens in otherwise not-good episodes), the Pah-Wraith stuff (because I find it silly), Bajoran politics (because Kira's already well represented here), and the Mirror Universe (see the Pah-Wraiths). If anyone disagrees with my choices, please let me know, because I am not at all solid on any episodes not bolded.

I was actually just talking about this very thing with the aforementioned friend who's also rewatching DS9. Both Dax and Bashir don't have any strong personality traits at the start of the show... Dax is smart and a bit of a flirt, Bashir is a naive idealist, but that's about it. I don't think Dax's character ever really becomes great, although when Worf comes on the show the chemistry helps a lot, but Bashir gets a few good character episodes by the third season ("Distant Voices" is a standout) and an actual personality by the fifth. Hang in there!

I don't get your point, really. Sure, interactivity is one of the strengths of video games as a medium, but also as a part of the audience participation they also allow. You are allowed to decide the extent to, speed of, and order in which you are told the components of Gone Home's story, which is more effective high-level agency than almost any linear FPS, which despite all the low-level agency really only offers the choice between "see the ending" and "don't see the ending." As far as Katie as a framing device, a clueless intruder in a family with whom she ought instead to be intimate, I think others could argue her relevance better than me, but I think it's really up to taste.

Looking up what an oarfish is taught me that the thought of fish that don't just look like trout or salmon makes me deeply uncomfortable. Speaking of deeply uncomfortable, it saddens me to no end that one of my favorite fictional characters is being used as the pseudonym for a prolific and hateful anti-Islam blogger. Granted, that character is a self-deluding and irredeemable mass-murderer, so I don't know exactly why the blogger chose it for their persona, but still.

This is the same hand-wringing about welfare in general, but at least in the US it's been more or less demonstrated that attempts to provide welfare "in kind" are inefficient at best. The best you can do is issue scrip like food stamps, but money takes less bureaucratic overhead and causes less waste. At the end of the day, we might as well be worrying that people take home their "earned" salary from their minimum-wage job and buy an iPhone instead of food. I don't know, who really cares that much? The point is giving people the opportunity to live how they want.

I just beat Long Live the Queen myself! Honestly, I really enjoy what RPS called a "Sansa Stark simulator". I do wish that the game was longer with more choices and consequences, but I feel like that's a common complaint for visual novels like this. Still, since the gameplay is pretty much just playing the game, losing, and making a note of what skill check killed you for your next playthrough, it would be nice for the tree to go a bit deeper. For my winning run, I basically just maxed out Faith (for divination) and Lumen (for magic), so that I foresaw all threats coming and burned them to death. The epilogue was mainly just the game telling me that that was the brute force method and there were more subtle/satisfying ways to win, by which I was kind of intrigued but not enough for me to dive right back in. I've seen a bit of complaining about the skill checks being exposed, but I don't understand it, because otherwise you'd just die ignorant, rather than your last thought being, "Maybe I should learn more about dogs next time..."

I don't have any suggestions. Despite bitching about Chuu2Koi, I watched the first episode of the sequel, which was an impressive if misguided effort to roll back all of the emotional beats of the last couple episodes so they can have more moeblob. I'm downloading the next season of Silver Spoon because I hear the first one is amazing. Beyond that, I'm just watching KILL la KILL's second half.

Maybe. I also think I'm less tolerant just because I'm approaching thirty and so the idea of being caught between two love interests isn't this titanic and insurmountable dilemma to me. Mako, Asami is the better girl. If you like both equally, go with her. If you really like Korra better, you're going to have to work at it, because she's naive, unstable, and the Avatar. I'm sure that, for a younger audience that has only dated a little and not seriously, it all seems like a really big deal, but this stuff has happened repeatedly in my life and the lives of those I know, so it's hard to view Mako's prevarication as anything other than what it is, the worst choice in the situation, but one which I'm not always sure the show earns.

I rewatched DS9 a couple years ago and am currently making that exact list ad hoc with a friend. Mostly, it involves going down the list in Netflix with her and saying "Yeah," "Hmm," or "Oh God, that's the Brigadoon episode, please no," as I read the titles and synopses. I'd certainly feel good codifying it here. And yeah, the Dominion War complicates things, mostly because during it there are long streaks of very good episodes one after another.

Yeah, it seemed like the rapport was almost tangible. On a side note, Steve, of the half-dozen people I know who played and liked Gone Home, all of them would buy cat DLC for a five-spot. Food for thought.

Eh, I'd say that three out of four of mine do, too. It's more just that there's actually no guarantee or even accountability tied to their time-sensitive shipping. Their email notifying me of a postponed delivery isn't even that apologetic. It's like, "Shit happens."

I'd (maybe) love to write you that King of Dragon Pass review, but I'm getting a 404 on your Dropbox link. EDIT: Wait, those are ones you're planning. Oops, guess I failed the secret "reading comprehension" test! Well, the 404's still there.

This feels like the pettiest thing ever to complain about, but I really hate how Amazon's one- and two-day shipping policy has become mostly a vague promise. This is the sixth time in the past couple months that they've sent me an email that's just been, "Yeah, we said it'd be there Tuesday, but it won't. You know how it is." In fact, I'm developing an actual love/hate relationship with Amazon. Not the kind of "love/hate relationship" where you actually really like something but it's inconvenient or embarrassing, but a love/hate relationship where I love Amazon's selection, pricing, and return policy, yet hate every other aspect of interacting with them.

Now that's synergy if I've ever heard it!

More to the point, they have a track record of producing games that give great first impressions, regardless of the games' true merits. I'm with you, sad as that is.

News to make everyone happy, but especially Twig: Mushishi gets a second season, starting April 2014! I'm thirty-two episodes into Legend of Galactic Heroes. It's almost unsettling to watch something that's so staid and dated, yet still mostly engrossing. I figured a 110-episode anime about two military geniuses facing off at the climax of a 150-year war would be pretty predictable, but it isn't really, for reasons I haven't yet quantified.

Whaaaaat.