Gormongous

If there actually were buses, I like to think they'd be driven by the same psychotic AI. Can you imagine the terror of a massive bus running off the road to get you?

I'm assuming it's the one I posted in the Crusader Kings II thread about The Omen homage: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?736028-From-Holy-Kingdom-to-Unholy-nightmare-Why-this-is-the-best-DLC-yet

The Future of Games Commerce.

I think the utility of comparing mediums is in highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each. What's pointless is evaluating one medium by the critical standards of another. feelthedarkness' Ebert quote is great for showing how that falls down. The bizarre thing about Bogost, for me, is that he's writing an essay for a literature publication about how a video game isn't literature and how it isn't good as literature. To prove his point, he brings up some examples of literature that are literature and are good as literature. To me, all that is sophistry, so the only things left are the parts where he tells people whether or not their emotional reactions are legitimate. Overall, I don't have much use for any of it.

I have the old Samurai X-branded OVAs, which I shelve under Rurouni Kenshin because Samurai X is a stupid title and I forget it all the time. It always confuses everyone to see an immaculately alphabetized shelf, except for one box set.

The bus stops. Use them, they stave off the burnout far longer than you'd think.

It may not be "punk" itself, but it can have a punk aesthetic.

I think the difference between those (extremely specialized) devices and Amazon's (completely generalized) devices accounts for much of the Overton window business going on here.

I got The Stanley Parable and Dishonored. They seem to be talking to each other, a little.

And if you go back, there's a nice callback. I'm actually surprised how much of this game I find weirdly alarming.

A quick Google says that there's a memory leak using DX10, mostly with ATI cards. Switching to DX9 fixes almost all cases of it.

It's always been rock solid for me. One of the newer Nvidia drivers caused some slowness, strangely, but I've never had it crash.

But Twiiiiig you looooove Killzone!

I haven't heard the part to which both of you are referring yet, but if the animals behaved as psychotically as the people do in Far Cry 2, I'd feel substantially better about killing them, although if you think that killing people in Far Cry 2 is fun, per se, then you're definitely playing a different game than me.

I think he's lying, though. No one's "interested" in Killzone. It's the quintessential "nobody cares" game.

I could definitely see just wanting a PS4 because it's new technology, but it's silly to want a machine that does nothing, so he displaced that desire on the most prominent game launching on the system. Maybe that's over-thinking it.

I think the question really is (and you kinda touch upon it already) whether there's a non-"cliche" version of the story that Gone Home is telling about two kids falling in love. For me, at least, the answer is "no," simply because the experience of love is so universal (not to mention the several people I know who are big fans of young-adult lit saying that Bogost's own picks fail to make his point) so I feel like complaints of "cliche" are not that constructive. Where Gone Home has the potential to be unique, in the punk rock and the queerness and the failures of parents desperate for love themselves, it is unique, so indicting the broad strokes for being too familiar seems as though it comes from the kind of people who think that the best stories are all about a twist every act and a dark ending, both of which are infinitely more "cliche" to me.

Well, the broad strokes are, like any story, but if we're going down that road, no game (and almost no other piece of media) is going to be sitting pretty. I feel like I just don't get people. "It's a love story, about someone falling in love. Ugh, how cliche!"

There's no Rei I'd Eva Asuka you to stop, man. Anyway, yeah. The quaestio I'm translating is for a guy who wrote a book on the history of the automaton in Western culture. He's currently looking for the first use of the word "android" to refer to an autonomous humanoid construct and he thought it was in this Spanish commentary on the biblical Book of Numbers from the fifteenth century. I took one look at the text (see it for yourself here, if you care) and had to go tell him, "I don't think the word is used in this text, but it'll take me twelve to fifteen hours to translate enough to confirm that." He just wrote me another check and told me to do it anyway. Ah, the power of grants... It's all about this bronze serpent that the Israelites make to protect them from snakebites. Somehow, Alonso Tostado has it in his head that the bronze serpent moved and hissed, so he writes an entire quaestio exploring how it did so. He tends to repeat himself a lot, so the actual progression of his argument isn't too interesting, but it's basically that something more perfect than nature can exceed nature, necessarily using astrology because God's too busy and demons fuck up. I wish this was my job all the time, really. Teaching is exhausting and my dissertation is scary. Alas, it's not to be. I make good money doing translation commissions, considering, but it's just not livable money, not unless everyone starts wanting shit translated to/from Latin.

I'm actually trying to wrap my mind around what anyone could mean by calling Gone Home "cliche." I'm pretty sure it's "sappy" because feelings are talked about rather than conveyed through sex, but cliche? Maybe they just mean that it's cliche because the couple doesn't end up torn apart by some artificial tragedy? I'm thinking about this way too much.

I agree with Kojima at whatever E3 that was, guys. If it gets us stories about Reggie hulking out on stage and Jamie Kennedy getting told off by Tony Hawk, I miss "big" E3 too. I don't doubt that the desperate need for teachers not to legitimize the presence and use of smartphones in their class will keep such a thing at bay for at least a decade.

Being humane is abhorring death to comical extremes despite it being one of two universal events in the life of every human.

But they're usually interesting or provoking, even if dumb. Here, I can just feel his frustration that people are talking about the newest sexism-in-games kerfluffle instead of about Elizabeth or the new Lara Croft as Strong Female Characters, but he's lashing out in a way that rebukes only one side of the issue, the side more in the right. It's very strange and a little upsetting. I get the feeling he might have an inkling that he fucked up, though. In the comments, someone pointed out that he's just given misogynists more ammunition and he was like, "Yeah, I think I did. Oh well, it needed to be said anyway. I can't waste time thinking about how my audience will react." And then, when asked by someone else why he wrote a piece targeting the "weeping Graysons" of the world rather than the Anita Sarkeesian trolls, he said that no one listens to the latter anyway, so he didn't bother writing anything on that. Still, there's a lot of "argument to moderation" fallacy going on there, which I think does smack of just being contrary. Actually, this is the second piece he's posted with such a myopic and reactionary view of sexism in games, so I'm beginning to wonder if I should just be reading his reviews, which I find really great, and nothing else.

Yeah, although it's not just faces that are uncanny on the new consoles: https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=be85ac2b6b04154f&id=BE85AC2B6B04154F%21118&ithint=video%2C.mp4&authkey=%21AA_3XqWxbFizR1I

Wow, yeah. Those are all my thoughts, too! I can totally get behind an argument of "We should celebrate the good parts of the industry as much as bemoan the bad" (even though most of his examples are extremely debatable, it's probably a debate that should still happen). But that's not really the argument he's making, whatever his intentions. By parodying the RPS article so slavishly, his piece ends up coming out more against the so-called "armchair activism" of journalists like Grayson than the latter did against the often-unintentional sexist tendencies of developers like Blizzard, so it's really just arguing for a different kind of jadedness and cynicism, the kind where you cover your ears and let history take its time.