Gormongous

Fair warning that the "completeness" of that bundle is at least six months out of date, since it's missing The Old Gods, Sons of Abraham, and both their assorted cosmetic DLC packs. You still get a full game, but if you pick it up, you might want to keep an eye on Steam for when the rest of the DLC drops in price during the inevitable Steam holiday sale.

Ugh, and now Tom Chick posts a tin-eared satire of Nathan Grayson's second piece on Blizzard's faux pas. You know what millions of gamers need to be told? That things really aren't that bad, that games are better and more mature than comics, at least. Anyone who reads this, I've got an easy test to see if something is sexist. Just replace women and their stereotypes with people of color and their stereotypes, then see if you're still comfortable. If not, it's at least a little sexist. For instance, if Blizzard responded to questions about why all their black characters dressed like gangstas and talked about drugs by saying that they were "just making characters who look cool" and that they were "not running for President"? Yeah, that's racist, so having all your girls look like blow-up dolls with stripper heels is probably sexist too. Just FYI. That's a really great post. I especially liked the Ramadan thing, I'd never thought about that.

Yeah, I just downloaded the file and had it running in the background from end to end. There's no problem I can find.

Today I am thankful that we have a proper writing system that deprecates abbreviations and privileges readability, if only because I'm catching up on a research job over the break and have had to translate the most difficult Latin text so far. Here's a sample paragraph: In case it's not clear, every letter in brackets is either absent or indicated only with a dot over the preceding (or sometimes following) letter. Even though I've gotten very good at using Cappelli, it took me thirty minutes to work out from context that secundum, meaning "according to," was being abbreviated as "fm" because the dot over the M connected with the old-style medial S. I'm still pretty sure that penitus and cantari are incorrect conjectures, but I'm only being paid three hundred bucks for this job, so no single word gets more than half an hour of my time. Anyway, time to feast while translating another page! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Right? But Proxy Studios chose to copy Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri piecemeal, which makes Pandora: First Contact far less than the sum of its parts. There are diametrically opposed ideological factions, except that instead of being well-intentioned extremists with whom you can almost agree, they're insane caricatures in charge of vaguely defined factions with goofy sci-fi names. Like you said, tone is what's so important in SMAC and Pandora has none of it. There was one cool touch with Pandora, about a hundred turns in, when the game informed me that the genocide of native life was complete. That was a shocker, partly because it's just a hard realization but mostly because I expected them to copy the narrative arc of native life from SMAC, too. In the latter, the mindworms start out as a minor annoyance, but mount in the player's mind as part of the Herbert-esque world-mind that forms the core of the game's story at the same time as they become a bigger and bigger threat again. The idea that, in Pandora, you can (and do) exterminate all alien life and wipe out the fungal blooms just baffles me.

Okay, I finally had the time today to watch your video. I like the historical content a lot, especially given the tone of the show. I do agree with osmosisch that the focus should be more on the conversation itself, with the gameplay as a backdrop, so if you're committed to having the conversation while playing through parts of the game, it might be better to have a more standardized format and maybe prep the historian you're interviewing beforehand. Both those would also help with length, because there'd just be less dead air. As for games, I'm going to be a broken record and say that talking with someone who specializes in historical anthropology or early Celtic/Germanic history about King of Dragon Pass would be a dream come true for me. If Herwig Wolfram spoke English or Peter Wells weren't a billion years old, I'd specifically pick out someone like them.

Oh, I have such fond memories of EU3 Blobhemia...

I think the problem with FUNi is not so much its location in Texas as the factory-dub system it's perfected. With the demise of pretty much every other old-school anime licensor that poured money into good dubs, especially Geneon, they believe (rightly or wrongly) that using the same small stable of voice actors for the same roles in every anime is the way to remain profitable. Actually, they're probably right, although you're right that it produces shit dubs with shit tone and pacing. I'm beginning to prefer Sentai and NISA, who just release subtitles-only, but I know that they're giving up the vast majority of their market with such a choice. And if I recall, Animefest was created mostly because FUNi felt that it wasn't getting the attention it deserved at Dallas' real anime convention, A-Kon. It's been almost five years since I've lived there though, so things might have changed since then. Whaaat, like Rurouni Kenshin or Haibane Renmei?

I have the Prima strategy guide that came with the "Planetary Pack" for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri up on my bookshelf. The cover looks silly next to works of "proper" fiction, but between the technology and secret project descriptions, it's honestly as good sci-fi as anything else there.

The only genetics-related game I've ever gotten into was Crusader Kings II, because there was a whole other game outside the breeding to validate my efforts. It seems like Mew-Genics doesn't have much in the cards for that, so I guess I'm guarded too.

Haha, you caught me! I went for hyperbole, for no real reason. People should probably call me on that more. You're right, when I read the question, I thought to myself, "The comment section for this article is going to make my stomach hurt." And I was right, even though I tried to stay away!

I live in fear of your sense of "fun." The number of commenters coming out of the woodwork to scold RPS for "bullying" the richest developer of all time with a single question (well okay, one question asked three times) about their love of tits 'n' ass defied all reasonable expectations.

I was tempted to post here about the interview with Blizzard where, when asked about the cheesecake design of some characters in Heroes of the Storm, they told RPS that they weren't "running for President." Instead, the fourth Tropes vs. Women! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYqYLfm1rWA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYqYLfm1rWA

I'm really, really mixed on this game. Some of the emergent narratives are really great, but the win conditions are unclear, plus it's so easy to make one wrong click and go into a happiness/health death-spiral while in search of said win conditions. Every time I play, I max out charisma in a couple weeks and then spend months grinding miserable jobs to advance. It all just feels like it's missing... something. I welcome any theories as to what that something is. Also, I get way too attached to my first girlfriend every game, spending all my time making them happy and hence crippling my social advancement, except for one time where I made a point of dating hiring managers for the jobs I wanted. That was cool, but ended in failure, because I got trapped in a job way beyond my skills and got stuck in (you guessed it) a happiness death-spiral.

No, the tutorial actually gives bad advice now, thanks to the changes detailed above. I think the wiki's about as good as it gets right now. The Ottomans, Castile, or France are good, failure-proof countries, since EU4 is pretty much the opposite of CK2, where smaller is more manageable.

Things I've been loving about this game: My brother joining the Hospitaller Order, becoming rich, then leaving the order as an adventurer to press his claim on Scotland via our mother. Raising a perfect heir with all seven virtues, then having him decide on his own to join a monastery when he came of age. A peasant revolt freed Nubia from the Fatamids, then the Ilkhanate destroyed the Fatamids, so now Nubia stands alone as the sole bastion of Ethiopian and Miaphysite pride. If you haven't been able to tell, I really like the expansion of religion in this DLC. The first two are things that happened, while not all the time, more than not at all in history. Having monasteries be present, even just through traits and events, is damn cool.

I wonder how a game that seriously considered these issues you raise would look. Because the role and efficacy of prisons are still open questions, with many people arguing that prison sentences themselves are at odds with modern ideals of rehabilitation instead of just quarantine, it would almost have to be something like Sim City, where the variables composing the sandbox conspire to enable a select and limited number of outcomes, which wouldn't allow the full exploration of the questions you pose. Do you think it's possible for a full-featured sandbox game about the operation of a traditional prison to handle the issues you bring up in a forward-thinking way? I'm serious here.

I saw the kickstarter for this and thought it looked kind of ropey. If the execution is as good as RPS claims, then this is destined for my Steam wishlist indeed.

Listening right now. The game that Jake heard about and Chris may have played is Wallenstein, which never made it to English (wait no, it did in a 2012 edition), except as a Japan-themed version called Shogun. I'll have actual responses to the crazy sweat/ball 'cast once I finish it. EDIT: Chris and/or Sean, play more Crusader Kings II! With Sons of Abraham, the game is better than it's ever been. The thread for it on the strategy forum is full of advice, but I'd also put myself at your disposal to make sure you always have someone to talk you through the rough spots, just to have you guys playing. I'm playing a game as the king of Sicily right now that is kicking nonstop ass, I wish more people knew.

Yeah, I'm extremely right-hand dominant (and mostly sedentary, hence choosing "left knee") and I use my right leg for all leg-related things. Even before shit like driving a car could have affected my preference, I still kicked and knelt with my right leg.

I think a better point to be made is their apparent logic, if Henroid has it right. "It's too easy for quality games not to get their due in the AAA console market. We're switching to mobile development!"

I spent a good part of my childhood convinced there existed a technology to capture the dying thoughts of a corpse, which mostly manifested in attempts to think chaste and positive thoughts whenever I felt my life was in danger.

I realized this myself when I lived in Greece for half a year and took over two thousand pictures that I have never once looked at again. I now never bother taking pictures of anything, unless it's going directly into a text for a friend. Mercifully, everyone else I know is obsessed with exhaustively documenting every moment of their life, so I still have about as many pictures on Facebook as the next person, they're just all other people's stuff that I'm tagged in.

Tonight's Sons of Anarchy was good, in fact the whole season has been, but I don't trust a show that's run this long to take the plot anywhere else besides maximum drama, so cliffhangers aren't really cliffhangers, no matter how they dress 'em.

Just anecdotal, but I've spoken multiple times with my advisor's two kids (thirteen and fifteen, I think) and i) they think Bolin is great and can't get enough of him, and ii) they think Mako's love life is super interesting and not at all contrived. They're smart kids too, so I don't know.