Gormongous

Hey Jiggz! Good to have you on the forums now, you were one of the only people stopping Chris and Nick from starting a civil war over nothing.

I have the same feeling. I'm something of a homebody, so my only time abroad has been the four months I lived in Greece, but my least favorite part was all the people in my program running back and forth to all the tourist traps. I think, if you can't have someone to show you the private side of the place you're visiting, it's best to take it slow. Anyway, I know Athens and southern Greece pretty damn well (or at least I did before all the austerity and anarchy shit went down the past couple years) so that's what I can give advice on, if anyone's curious.

The rock version of Pachelbel's Canon at the end was somehow the greatest, guys. Good job with this show!

Argobot, if you find Crusader Kings overwhelming, with its mechanical focus on one character and one family, I wouldn't hold out hope for a Hearts of Iron spinoff to be much better. The latter is no Victoria II, which has a massive and inscrutable economic system driving it, but it's still on the high end of the Paradox complexity scale that ranges from Europa Universalis to Victoria. As for the patriarchy stuff, it's great how the game turns you into Henry VIII almost instantly. "Why haven't you given me a child yet? Why have you given me only daughters? Why have you ta-- Oh, a son! You're the best wife, so meek and mild..." And then your son dies of typhus and you're back to hating your wife's guts.

This was seriously the best five hours of my life in a long time. Now, for you to spread the line of Vanaman across Europe and into the fifteenth century!

Oh God, a five-and-a-half hour stream... That was so much fun, I wish there were a way to record the chat. Every time Chris and Nick would do something ill-advised, the chat just exploded. Yeah, some of it was me, I typed caps a lot to get their attention and then some random dude chewed me out. EDIT: More possible episode titles: Jake I RodKing of Munster.

I am losing my mind. I had no idea how deep and specialized my knowledge of this game was until I watched two guys who know nothing play Ireland. I was pulling my hair out at first, when an unjustified arrest (-40 opinion), an exposed plot (-30 opinion), and two banishments (-20 opinion each) turned their entire realm against them. This game is so much about playing by its own "rules" that the vindictiveness of Nick (and most of the chat) nearly sunk the game. And now they've pulled out of it! A good hunt and feast saved everyone's opinion, now they're helping out with a war in England. Can they get out of Gavelkind before the succession breaks apart their small kingdom? I hope the Thumbs continue this over more sessions! EDIT: Possible titles for the episode where they discuss this: My Son, Sean Vanaman or The Social Event of the Season. Maybe Are You Coming to "Kill Brian's Wife?"

There's some interesting discussion in the RPS comment thread about Kickstarters kneecapping themselves by asking for pounds instead of dollars. I wouldn't know from experience, but apparently the process for the majority of American backers is a much greater hassle than just logging into their Amazon account and clicking okay, if the former is the case. Thoughts?

Man, I went to a hippie liberal arts college, I'm fine with body hair. TMI, but it's more like, "The parts that make stink tend to stink a lot more than usual." I brought it up and she plain didn't believe me. I'm retreating and regrouping, for now.

I think I've said it before in the Wasteland 2 thread, that Brian Fargo's framing and tone when communicating with backers (and more pointedly, fans) has been my major and only gripe about the Kickstarter he led. I mean, in this case, thanks to the title of the update and the hurry I was in, I only really realized their ship date had slipped when I read through it again after work. I kinda wish Fargo was more willing to appear firm on anything, good or bad.

Do you have any inkling what the story is with that? All the commentary I can find about it on Google is neutral to bad. Is it from the favorite band or little brother of someone on the show?

Nothing has made me feel more like a shallow douchebag than realizing that I'm not connecting with a girl almost entirely due to different hygiene standards.

Jin-Roh's getting a Blu-ray rerelease after Discotek rescued the license! Finally, one of the two rarest and most expensive Blu-rays ever released in the US (the last eBay auction I saw for one six months ago ended at $999 and a copy on Amazon is going for $1,250) is overthrown. Discotek's come out of nowhere the past couple years, haven't they? I know they specialize in DVD rereleases of seventies and eighties anime, but lately they've been doing rescues of pretty big series from recently: Golden Boy, Diebuster, GTO, and now Jin-Roh. Looks like they're a company to watch now. Wow, really? Is there any more information than just that they're doing one? I really disliked Monster, but a good adaptation could cut out most of the bloat that killed that anime for me. The big question is, do they have the gumption to keep the main character Japanese? I don't know if the language-barrier-cum-sore-thumb scenario would work as well with an American or Brit...

I just realized that I've gotten 100% achievements on two games, which doesn't have an effect anywhere else in the Steam ecosystem. It feels strange that something like cheesemints has no bearing on getting at least the first level of a game's badge, but sheer time spent in a game, coupled with a willingness to spend a little (or a lot) money on the marketplace, does.

Yeah, it's pretty much both. The Irish were poor because they were lazy, lazy because they were stupid, stupid because they were primitive. It was the same logic used in India and Sub-Saharan Africa, so there was a racial argument being made, even laying aside various attempts to paint the Irishman as the "white Negro."

Most of the Anglophone world discriminated against the Irish at sometime or another. It was a bad time to be a poor person and, as far as Britain and America were concerned, Ireland was a nation entirely of poor people. When I read in college about political cartoons depicting Mr. G. O'Rilla and Mr. O'Rangutan, I almost couldn't believe it.

I could beat it maybe three times out of ten at the end of my run, mostly by pushing incredibly aggressive military strategies to short-circuit the AI's preferred efficiency engine. It teaches you to go for the kill, which maybe isn't the best thing in the long run, but I had my fun.

Congratulations, Zeus! Welcome, Nolan!

Yeah, I was wondering about that. Didn't Valve already fight this battle, in some other part of its massive, invisible innards? I guess, since there's no metagame or community surrounding trading cards, there's no reason to penalize idling, but it's still very odd.

Yeah, I really don't know how to address this properly. Even were the United States as regressive as its most conservative, fundamentalist elements say it should be, it would still be a long way from a place where people are thrown in prison for their sexuality. Let me put it this way: a lot of America, including many members of law enforcement, is deeply and deplorably racist, but even so, it doesn't have a law on the books that makes it a crime to be a person of color. Even at the height of Reconstruction, it didn't. And even if (unimaginably) it did, its victims wouldn't be guilty and its execution wouldn't be justice.

Race for the Galaxy has a really good computer implementation, hosted for free here. I had a great time playing it for several weeks, to get a good feel for the cards and the systems they represent, but of course it's missing your friends' smiling faces across the table.

I don't think anyone's saying that Tom Bissell is simply an apologist for bad game design. Well, someone somewhere probably is, but I think the thrust of the Medium article is that Bissell's (and by extension, games journalism's) willingness to wallpaper over the little things that don't work, in order to highlight the big things that do work, is sometimes even more detrimental to the critical discussion. Bissell always sees the big picture, sometimes strikingly so, and it's what's made me love his writing, but he does occasionally miss the forest for the trees, even if it seems a little petty to call him out on it, like Sean says. Still, there's tons of critical discussion about night scenes in films, but there's very little (that is critical, at least) on all of the "gameisms" that pervade AAA games, so I think the Medium article is well taken.

Torchlight II is on sale as a daily deal. Time to bust out the email account and harass all my friends who don't own it. It's a biannual event for me.

One of the professors in my department loves to "catch" people on that in their papers and presentations. It's effectively cured me of ever using the word again.

Yeah, I wouldn't have gone to bat for it at all, except that she was calling it a poor man's Final Destination, which sells it too short by half. Deep character dive Another is not, but there was at least some thought going into the plot. I can't think of the last anime that really scared me. Some moments in Monster gave me brief existential discomfort, but nothing that would ever have kept me up at night.