Gormongous

I hope you get it, Twig, if only because then I'd be able to meet another Thumbs person during my Christmas or summer break. It's so lonesome here in the middle of the States...

I don't think you are giving Killzone 2 its due

Teeth are funny. You use them to smile. The more teeth in a comedy, the funnier it is. Teeth! This is my first post in this thread. I really like your recaps, Zeus.

Yeah, having just gotten around to watching the first episode, I think I also have to reserve judgment, to my regret. At first glance, the uniform's just cheesecake, but I want to believe it's in service of something more, mostly because Trigger seems like such a great, fresh studio and I'd love to see them capture the old GAINAX spirit. Question: The Internet keeps talking about the Revolutionary Girl Utena vibes that Kill la Kill is giving off. Now, I love Utena like nothing else, but I'm not feeling it here. Is anyone else? I'm getting more of the vintage GAINAX feel myself. The teacher? Totally the coach from Gunbuster. Aww, yeah.

Yeah, I think that Nick has an impulsive streak that's rewarded in some hyper-punishing games (I'm thinking Super Meat Boy or Hotline Miami) but not in Spelunky. I haven't played it myself, but it seems like you can't brute-force a plan that "feels" right in it like you can in the other games I mentioned.

It immediately got reposted by me on Facebook with the caption, "Man, I miss owning a cat..."

Spoiler about a major plot point of Gravity below: Actually, on the topic of Gravity, did anyone read the review of the movie by Buzz Aldrin? It was the only thing about the movie I'd seen/read/heard going in, so it dominated my brain during the (scant) downtime during. EDIT: Heard on a movie podcast that Bullock insisted that she cry but never scream. God, so much love for all of it.

See, that's my feeling, but especially the last part. I'd like to believe everyone has something to contribute, but I can't think of a single positive thing I've gotten out of the past twelve pages. What's the point of talking to people on the internet if all it does is make me mad and sad?

Suffice to say, I could not be more pleased that Gravity is so good (and it is very, very good). I really need another hard sci-fi movie to put on my shelf alongside Moon, the first half of Sunshine, my faint memories of Apollo 13, and... uh, what of 2001: A Space Odyssey isn't monkeys or trippy alien space magic? It's a very full shelf, you see.

Hey, me too. I've never heard of either of these games!

I'm getting eyestrain just thinking about it.

The unbelievable irony and arrogance of that statement, coming from someone who has been lucky enough to have a dozen people explain feminism to him over a dozen pages with incredible patience and hope, makes me think that I should probably give up, too. If you want, thestalkinghead, you should start a different thread about Feminism 101, where you can hash out with better people than me exactly what feminism is and isn't. I'd prefer this thread stay open for feminists to talk with each other about their own thoughts and issues without having the very basis of their ideology repeatedly and carelessly (from my point of view, of course) questioned.

The darkest art of thread necromancy! A public service announcement: all digital and retail copies of Bioshock 2 now register on Steam, regardless of their origin. This includes physical disc versions, too! The new patch strips out Games for Windows Live completely, adds full controller support, and enables Big Picture mode. Also, if your copy of Bioshock 2 was purchased before today, you get the Minvera's Den DLC for free. This feels really unprecedented, an incredible goodwill gesture.

Speaking as an academic who has spent almost ten years total in university settings both small and large, the idea that academia is somehow inhospitable to men is really hard to swallow. Two women were accepted into my program this year and the department is losing its mind with glee about the gender ratio now being 1:5 among grad students. And this is history, one of the more women-friendly fields!

Whether backer-exclusive content (and pre-order bonuses in general) is coercive is an interesting question, so it makes me sad that it's devolved so quickly to the tired old saw of "gamer entitlement." Personally, I think that the onus is on the developer to provide some assurance that any such content is cosmetic or at least superfluous. I checked out The Long Dark kickstarter yesterday and, while scanning the rewards tiers, I saw that backing would get me "an exclusive in-game LOCKET" with gameplay effects. But the description went on to say that it would have the same effect as a Polaroid that comes in the release version of the game and is just a nice bit of art for backers. More developers should take that approach. I don't know why most kickstarters have to have hooded allusions to "an exclusive in-game item with a surprising and incredible effect," which definitely comes off as coercive. Well, I do know, but I'd like to think it's more because they don't have what the item is planned out and not because being deliberately vague tempts more people to put down more money. If that's the line between a kickstarter's success and failure, I hope the slight loss of goodwill from me and others like me is worth it. Also, even just implying that someone doesn't deserve to pay for a piece of content because they weren't there for the developer when the latter needed them sounds more like developer entitlement than gamer entitlement. I don't even know where to start with that. EDIT: I keep coming back to the book/movie analogy, even though I know it's flawed. How would we all feel about a limited edition that is marketed as being "different from the regular edition in important and surprising ways," with there being an even chance whether the differences are entire scenes or just a nice cover?

I just read that this morning! Good job, it put the game on the map for me.

I figure this'll be a great place for some stories. What were the marketing campaigns of your childhood (and young-adulthood) that totally overrode your common sense? I'm asking because my mother just sent me a birthday care-package containing eight (8) packs of Juicy Fruit gum. I don't chew gum, the stuff is gross, but it suddenly came rushing back that it was something I always demanded when I was six years old and waiting in the grocery store checkout. I guess the commercials for Juicy Fruit, where some dude chewed some gum and then biked down a mountain, were super effective. And the jingle (the taste the taste the taste is gonna move ya). Youtube videos welcome:

Says the "individualist" who believes that ideologies should be one hundred percent consistent and labels should be one hundred percent accurate. You seem as though your greatest concern here is someone thinking that you believe something that you do not believe. Therefore, you refuse to call yourself a feminist (or anything else, I imagine). I didn't want to say it, but since the words have already been bandied about, that does sound like someone who lacks principles to me. "I don't consider myself a supporter of civil rights because someone might then mistake me for a Black Panther. Better than segregation continue than someone misunderstand who I am and what I think."

This strikes me as really naive, if not obtuse. What intellectual or ideological movement isn't and hasn't always been heterogeneous to the extreme? Even going back five hundred years to Renaissance and Reformation humanism, that wasn't the case. Did the Protestant reformation "stand for nothing" because there were Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists, Anglicans, and fifty million different kinds of Anabaptists? Well, in the eyes of dyed-in-the-wool Catholics, it did, but I really shouldn't take this analogy any further.

I personally think that a small-scale systemic game about different political factions vying for control of postwar Germany, with the only disincentive for extremist tactics and rhetoric being the player's own moral revulsion, would be an interesting insight into the narratives and values of power. Well, until the press and public would blast it into oblivion. If Paradox leaves out all mention of Judaism from Crusader Kings II, fearing the bad publicity of a game where you can borrow money from Jews and then kill them, I can't imagine anyone ever having the stones to make a game where you can be Hitler (or even a Nazi). Fifty or a hundred years from now, maybe. But it's a shame, because I kind of agree with tberton that pretty much the only reason Stalin isn't up there alongside Hitler on the monument to genocidal monsters is that Stalin was our ally at one point and that we couldn't claim to have taken him down.

Can we talk about Lydia?

Yeah, those were my thoughts, too. I don't have a problem with it myself, but I know some people (it seems like Chris was among them) were expecting/hoping/fearing Which I'm glad it wasn't, personally. But I can understand dissenting opinions.

Welp.

I need to make a new promise not to go on the Paradox forums anymore. My active involvement in the Crusader Kings II mod scene had left me with the belief that they were something other than an exclusionary bastion of self-congratulatory pedants, as the furor over the 1.2 patch changes reveal yet again. Long story short, a controversial AAR began about six weeks ago, detailing what would turn out to be a second-try Ironman world conquest by Ryukyu, which is generally thought to be the poorest and most isolated country in the game. The author, DDRJake, talked at length about the many loopholes and exploits that made such a theoretically impossible feat actually quite doable. Almost certainly in response, Paradox released their first major patch for Europa Universalis IV, the majority of which changes were devoted to closing said loopholes and exploits. Overnight, the most accessible game in the series, perhaps in their entire catalog, became infinitely more foreboding and unforgiving. For my part, I'm on the side of the 1.2 detractors. Sure, there was a lot of easy cheese in Europa Universalis IV at release, but trying to eliminate it gets the wrong message from the Ryukyu WC. DDRJake mostly showed that, although many of EU4's built-in disincentives to gamey or cheesy play involve hitting the player with a heavy initial malus to force them to backtrack or reevaluate their choices, an advanced player should weather the maluses in order to enjoy the outcomes that they supposedly disincentivize, which are almost always a net gain on the part of the player. Thus you get hit with overextension and aggressive expansion if you take too many provinces at once, but if you ignore the negative results and just keep taking provinces, you eventually break the power curve of those maluses and become unstoppable. Likewise, there's a -5 stab hit to breaking a truce, but if you're good enough to keep your income high and your revolts low at negative stab, you can break all the truces you want and wreck your enemies with nonstop war. Instead of tweaking the mechanics that these maluses protect in order to encourage less gamey or cheesy play, Paradox's solution in the 1.2 patch has been to increase those maluses even more, to the point where a single lost battle or a year of negative stability will send a country into an unrecoverable death-spiral. And yeah, that stops the power-gamers from conquering the world by 1700, but it also makes for an extremely unforgiving game that hardly ever explains to you why your country went to shit in the span of a single week. My first 1.2 game as Brandenburg (actually four separate tries, with the same outcome) ended because my first non-core conquest -- Danzig, as recommended by the game's own mission system -- caused all my allies to break with me and put the entire Holy Roman Empire into an anti-Brandenburg coalition. They all declared war within the year, took away Danzig, and put me a hundred gold in debt. As an experienced player, I'm a little miffed. As a newbie, even just to EU4, I'd be flabbergasted. Paradox has not only decided to cater to the hardcore, but to the perverse, with stuff like a "Claim Throne" diplomatic option that now only gives a country a -50 opinion modifier except under extremely specific and undocumented circumstances. I can't imagine this all being a sustainable decision. Ugh. And with Total War: Rome II being such a humongous flop, I was really enjoying my time with EU4. I guess I'll finish Papers, Please or something.