Gormongous

I tried to recolor mine, too. It was... painful to look upon.

Guys, this is actually sounding really great... It might be beginning to detract from my future enjoyment of Fullbright's (better, but less insane) game.

I see it as a self-teaching tool, mostly. A lot of times, someone makes an argument on the internet (like, "Complaining about this certain thing is pointless when there are starving children in Africa!") and, at that point, it's very helpful to be able to look at an extensive chart or list and say, "Oh, that's a fallacy of relative privation, with overtones of a false dilemma," rather than just be like, "Your argument seems a bit overstated." At least, that's how I always use them.

To make it not all stuff from Sid Meier, I'll put in something from Tropico 4. It's hard to pick just one, it's all so important to the zone that you get into with the game.

Some eclectic ones from me. First, the "Land Battle" theme from Sid Meier's Pirates is probably the most addictive song I've ever heard. I don't know, it just gets stuck in there (or rather, it has been stuck for almost a decade now). Also, "Baba Yetu" from Sid Meier's Civilization IV is the best menu music ever, full stop. I went the extra mile to find one on Youtube with the menu as the video, just so you get the full experience. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb-jk6Ftx7o

The notes for Crusader Kings II beta patch 2.0.2 include two bullet points: Added a "Depose Antipope" Casus Belli Added an "Antiking" faction. The leader usurps the liege's primary title, deposes the antipope and passes papal investiture. The Pope can be called into the resulting war. I am losing my mind. Never have we gotten closer to being able to recreating the Investiture Contest ingame! If the Holy Roman Emperor changes to free investiture, gets excommunicated, raises an antipope, and then his own vassals depose him to return to papal investiture, I will strip off all my clothes and run naked in the streets for hours.

I usually look down my nose at accusations of conspiracy, but cheap and plentiful energy would strike at the foundations of every exploitative power structure in the world. There's no reason for anyone with any modicum of power to support it.

One would think that, had they not enough resources to do breast jiggle properly, they'd just leave it out, rather than code it like fabric. Many body parts that should jiggle don't in video games.

Feminism doesn't have to be serious business all the time. Sometimes, we can just look at something and shake our heads together. Oh Crytek. Never, uh... something.

I don't think it will, to be honest. Almost all of the show's worst moments come from the first three or four episodes, before its impressive imagery had cohered into a tone and the dominant motif was Ryuuko-as-titillation. That's almost completely in the background now, replaced by other magical girl and shounen tropes out of which they're getting more mileage, so I think it'd have to be a colossal failure of imagination by the studio to revert back to the less interesting and less developed stuff from the beginning. I think they're too smart for that. Well, if I were being really honest, I'd replace "think" with "hope" in the above paragraph. But Trigger is all ex-GAINAX guys, right? GAINAX was crass, but it was never dumb. EDIT: Hoooly shit, never mind. I take it all back, I don't know what I'm talking about. Twenty-five episodes? By all appearances, it's on track to end with twelve (one episode for end of Nonon fight and beginning of Satsuki fight, one episode for end of Satsuki fight and epilogue), but no, we're not even halfway! Where is it going to go? A timeskip and Ryuuko as the new big bad?

I kinda like the black-and-white ones better? He's redoing a lot of the art and I'm not convinced that all his efforts to go back and "fix" stuff are a wholesale improvement.

... Looking at it, I actually think that the School Rumble episode might have been a parody of Inazuma Eleven? The more you know. I watched a couple episodes of Lucky Star the other day and found a pretty extensive Cromartie parody that I didn't even remember at all.

I think they play it in one episode of School Rumble. That's about as interested as Japanese culture is in soccer.

I can get behind that. I just wish I knew what it was, so I could try and think about it that way than just dwell on my own reaction of discomfort.

I guess I meant more that it "plays it straight" in just going for blatant titillation, rather than it "plays it straight" in just copying magical girl imagery. I would really really really like to believe that they're trying to make me so titillated that I become uncomfortable and am prompted to reflect on what titillation even really means to me, but I'm not sure that's how titillation works. Surely they have to know that and/or worry about that? And no worries, it's society that has the double standard, not you. No one's expected to be getting hot and bothered over the over-the-top male nakedness. It's played purely for laughs. Female nakedness is never played purely for laughs. It can't be. Any time you show any woman-flesh above the ankles and below the neck, there are always going to be at least several thousand dudes getting their rocks on. It can't be ignored the way the consequences of male nakedness can be. It's probably a power thing, too. I don't know. Thinking more about KILL la KILL's gender tropes, the weird predatorial teacher is great, but only because we know Ryuuko's strong and independent enough to put him in his place, though him always being more interested in himself than in her doesn't hurt. Even so, they waited three or four episodes before revealing that side of him, both for comic effect and to make sure all the characters were established enough to prevent misinterpretation. There are some smart people in charge of the show, it just feels like they're out to lunch during Ryuuko's transformation, which only operates on the level of sexual titillation. I've mostly resigned myself to ignoring it, starting from the episode where it was revealed that you need to abandon all shame to tap the full power of the Godrobe.

Every week, I watch KILL la KILL, go on AniDB, and find out once again that Nonon, the girl deva, is voiced by the same seiyuu as Haruhara Haruko from FLCL. She's criminally underused. Also, I am watching the Valkyria Chronicles anime and it is not very good. I think Girls und Panzer has spoiled me for gunji anime. Mostly, I watch the female protagonist and think about why I like tsundere in theory, but never in practice. The funny thing is, the other transformation sequences are either free from cheesecake or subvert cheesecake in interesting ways. The three male devas are especially good for how they use little "magical girl" flourishes in masculine ways. It's only Ryuuko where it's played straight (or at least the so-straight-it's-ironic way that the show loves). I feel like anime suffers from this "just one flaw" thing a lot, though. I was rewatching Wings of Honneamise recently, which is pitch-perfect except for the rape scene, which the director really liked and defended. I don't doubt that there's a producer or animator at Trigger who fought tooth and nail to have that shot where the uniform tightens over Ryuuko's crotch, even though the rest of the show had moved toward the less facile.

I think there's also value in the knowledge of where things are going. As has been said, you only get one chance to experience something for the first time, but who knows if it's better to go in with some, no, or total knowledge of a given game or movie? Like I said in my email, now like twenty episodes ago, I went into Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy having heard the entire plot from someone and enjoyed it immensely, because I could pay attention to other things besides the double- and triple-agent hijinks that, while interesting, are not really what makes the film great in my opinion. I strongly feel that I would not have fallen so hard for the movie if my first experience had been scratching my head about Karla and Witchcraft. My problem is mostly just that spoiler culture insists that ignorance is always the best way to experience a work initially, even though that only applies to certain aspects of said work, because even the most devoted adherents of spoiler culture will listen to someone talk for hours about the feel, the quality, and even the mechanics of a game, so long as no narrative detail is spoiled. Clearly, some knowledge of a work is desirable, since we want to know a game is good before we play it, and I just wish that spoiler culture would acknowledge that it goes a bit farther, that knowing mechanical or narrative details in advance can make a game more enjoyable and prevent a bad first impression that can never be entirely subverted afterward. Not to mention, it's always painful to hear a podcast tiptoe around spoilers like a minotaur in a china shop. A simple "Gonna talk about the plot now" suffices for me. If it matters that much to me, like it did for The Walking Dead, I can wait.

Agreed! But then again, I'm the person who sent in the question quite a few episodes ago about whether spoiler culture is infantilizing. I feel like, if even revelations over the basic plot ruin a game, then it's probably not very good in the first place, and in the meantime the insistence upon total blackout kneecaps critical discussion about it at a fundamental level.

My friend and I had a weird relationship with Full Throttle in high school. I have two strong memories, the first of "playing" the knife minigame by stabbing Ben's hand over and over until the game maxes out the stab wound decals, and the other of then beating the game in two hours. I think it was the first adventure game I ever took the time to play, and I did a speed-run of it.

That's interesting. Since I'm not following the Penny Arcade network very closely anymore, can you tell me if they're giving a reason for shutting down the more outward-facing of their sites?

Having actually listened to the episode now, I think they make a good point to talk about the conflation of the personal and the political in Crusader Kings II. The absence of a distinction between the two was a hallmark of the Middle Ages, so the ways that the game lures you into a similar state through engrossing RPG elements and small-scale threats is really great. It's basically a fulfillment of every promise explicitly and implicitly made in the design of the first Crusader Kings, although I miss a little how the Holy Roman Empire would instantly blow apart a week after game start, as if the developers couldn't code a reason for such a huge and heterogeneous kingdom to stay together. Then again, there were a lot more disruptive elements in the first game, like the ability for vassals to refuse liege requests for levies and the ability for a non-de jure vassal whose opinion stayed negative for too long to go independent without a fight. But those are pretty much the only two things the first Crusader Kings did better. Best stories? Mine are kind of lame, since I prefer interesting story moments to insane implausibilities, hence I rarely play the 867 start. But I had a great moment as the Bagrationi princes of Armenia, when I managed to inherit the kingdom of Georgia, which would save my own from an Abbasid invasion, only to have my king break the personal union by dying immediately after a second son was born. As my first son, a legitimized bastard in his thirties, I started a civil war to win back the kingdom, only to die in the first battle. The kingdoms were now reunited under a one-year-old boy, who was not the one I had in mind to face down the Abbasids. I had to swear fealty to Byzantium and have him educated by the emperor when he asked. That was how his grandson eventually became king of Anatolia too, but that's another story. I also had a good time as a series of the Billung dukes of Saxony, who couldn't have a son to save their collective lives. If anything, it taught me a lot about the matrilineal marriage and claim inheritance mechanics. I think I posted a small AAR of it in the strategy forum's Crusader Kings II thread.

To quote some of the better comments from the RPS article on the issue, there are plenty of examples of basketball and football players playing charity golf, baseball, or tennis games. The idea that such an act would weaken their brand and the brand of their team is foolish. Riot has a reason to object to League of Legend players playing DOTA 2, because that is playing for the other team, but the rest is just weird corporate blinders-cum-siege-mentality.

I wonder though, is it just the ones that have been caught streaming already? If one of them streams Rogue Legacy or Call of Duty, does that get put on the list too?

I don't think that people are talking about societies built upon the genocide and replacement of native peoples by and with immigrant Europeans when they use the word "colonialism" in discourse. Those may have been colonies, but they're not colonialism. People are more talking about Cecil Rhodes, smallpox blankets, and opium dens when they use the word "colonialism." To build upon Nappi, that's why the other neighboring areas are so bad, because they only had brown people living in them and therefore had less standing in the way of total exploitation than the United States or South Africa.

In theory, I think it's really dumb to have a horror-movie homage in a game about medieval politics. In practice, I love reading about it and wish it happened to me.