Gormongous

Oh! Meanwhile, Ballmer is taking over the Xbox until they can replace Mattrick. The upshot for everyone else is that Microsoft had no plans to replace the latter, but we here at Idle Thumbs know that it's all an excuse for some premium Ballmer DLC to start landing now.

"Galaxy Fucker" to me and mine.

But it's not that slow, right? It's just under eight months between Anne of Cleves' arrival and Cromwell's execution, which Henry openly regretted not a year later. It's going to be an interesting take on the whole matter, even more so than the downfall of Anne Boleyn.

Dammit, you're right. There you go, Tegan.

Yeah, in terms of them stating that a phrase would be the episode title and then that phrase being the episode title, I think it's unprecedented. Well, unless you count Episode 45: Episode Forty-Five.

It worked a lot better when everyone belong to a religion. Now, often as not, it's just an excuse to exclude people for various arbitrary reasons.

That's true. There's a scene where Henry visits Cromwell at Austin Friars that I found to be the most affecting example of this. It's been long enough that I can't remember the page number, but Henry has dinner, flatters Cromwell's nieces, and engages in small talk. Cromwell is just so moved by the king's pride in being what he thinks is an everyman that I couldn't help but be moved as well.

Didn't uPlay already have one hacking scare? I guess they didn't learn.

There are a couple of mechanisms to combat what you describe that my group overlooked at first. The biggest is that most new players in Galaxy Trucker build too fast. It's what sank both Quinns and Paul in the video I posted. There's no time limit until one player decides that their ship is far enough along to flip the timer, so you really only need to build fast enough to make sure you aren't being shut out of certain components. I just try to ensure that my ship is as close as possible to spaceworthy with every tile I lay, which has gotten me at least second place four games out of six. There's also a rule that you can hold up to two tiles in your discard square for later placement. You can't put them back and they count against you if you don't place them, but it's useful if you find a tile you know you want but just not yet. I love Cosmic Encounter so much in theory, but I'm abjectly terrible at it. I think I just have a way of phrasing my arguments that makes people want to be contrary?

There was also Episode 33: "The Kane of Lynch" or "This Crazy Robot" or "Rock the Mouse", wherein Jake read off a list of things Chris had said that could be episode titles.

No, I definitely found a disgust of the English nobility by the end of Wolf Hall. I actually had to get a biography to remind myself why we think of King Henry VIII Tudor as anything more than a lustful spendthrift (answer: one of his children turned out alright). I was even a bit pleased in a perverse way to find that Thomas Howard, Lord Norfolk had become my favorite among the rotten crowd by the end of the book, for the very pride and backwardness that left me hating him at first.

I might be wrong, but I think Wargame: AirLand Battle doesn't have star points. Everything is available from the start, with your choices more restricted by the synergy requirements than a thinly veiled XP grind. I personally had a blast with Wargame: European Escalation, but blew out the moment I did the math and realized that completing every objective in the (at times quite frankly sadistic) campaign wouldn't give me enough stars to unlock even half the units. That's pretty much why AirLand Battle is sitting on my Steam wishlist and not in a mental dumpster somewhere.

Agreed, the best New Games Journalism I've read all year.

For once, everyone in my department is staying in town for summer vacation, so I've been able to get a weekly board game night going on. For the most part, it's been Battlestar Galactica and Arkham Horror, since most of the regulars consider themselves non-gamers and are very adverse to competitive play. I've sold Pandemic a couple of times, but the guy who hosts the nights prefers the chaos of Arkham, so it doesn't come up as often as I'd like. For my part, I've discovered King of Tokyo and Galaxy Trucker. The former's a fun and chaotic dice-rolling brawl that takes no time at all, but I've really fallen for the latter. So, Galaxy Trucker! You have a spaceship-shaped grid in front of you and a pile of face-down tiles in the middle. Someone says go and you all start flipping tiles, one by one, revealing spaceship parts. Each part you either place on your grid in a way that connects to all the other parts, Pipe Dream-style, or you put it back in the middle face up for someone else to take. When someone's satisfied with the ship they've built, they flip a timer and everyone has thirty seconds left to finish their design. Then everyone sends their theoretically perfect but practically broken ships on a cargo run, simulated by a deck of random challenges. Whoever makes the most money from three such runs is the winner, although the rules are keen to point out that everyone who made any money is a winner, because you were being fucked from the beginning. This game is never not hilarious. You build these flying masterpieces of crossed fingers and compromise, then congratulate each other as the game shakes them to pieces. My friend built an amazing Starship Enterprise-shaped ship for the third round, then a rogue meteor hit it at the joint between the saucer and engines, sending his cargo, his batteries, and all his engines save one drifting into space. He limped into the docks at third place with one cargo, but still pulled out a win! I went home and bought the all-in-one "anniversary edition" that very night. I can't recommend it enough. EDIT: Shut Up & Sit Down! has a decent Let's Play of Galaxy Trucker, which I'll embed here. Keep in mind that both guys are kinda terrible at it (but aren't we all) and the game is not nearly so hard (but every bit as fun) as it looks:

I'm still not sure how I feel about the new Berserk movies, most of all the third one that just hit the internet. They're all stunning movies, full of incredible art, but I'm constantly being blindsided by the occasional seams that the computer-generated animation process lets slip because of the fast turnaround. There'll be a gorgeous treeline, then a drab marionette will traipse through it. There'll be an epic duel, then it'll pull back to reveal them surrounded by PS2-era CG dudes. At the very least, there's been marked improvement between each movie, so now that they're almost all the way there and through the material covered by the 1997 anime, the fourth movie will be the one to watch. By the way, http://animebytes.tv/ is currently holding a week-long freeleech for all the new invites they've gotten. If anyone needs an invite themselves, I've got ten in my quiver that I'd be happy to send over PM. It's a great site for anime as well as manga, art books, J-pop, and visual novels. Nothing else I've found online has been larger or more complete, plus every two weeks they pick an anime that's free to download. This fortnight it's Nyanpire the Animation, which I downloaded as readily as I downloaded Chi's Sweet Home despite an equal unlikeliness to watch it. This was just too good to pass up:

This is great news, Miffy. You're so damn passionate and informed, I'd love to have you teaching my kids. Good luck!

This thread is the best because it has people talking in hushed tones about the very things that made my life miserable on our biannual family road trips from Texas to Iowa. I don't mean that in a cynical or sarcastic way, it's actually kind of cool that stuff like Stuckey's can thrill people, even if it's like being excited about Cracker Barrel to me. You guys know about Cracker Barrel, right?

It actually was on sale last week, but you can count on it showing up again for the Steam summer sale. Honestly, I can't imagine playing Crusader Kings II without all the DLC content, not really because it improves on the base game, but because there are a dozen major features the game now expects you to have available that you need the DLC to access. Wait until it's on sale for seventy-five percent and buy it all, then play an Ireland 1066 start and cross your fingers.

I've just formally given up on Expeditions: Conquistador and Reus, the former because it was trying to do too much with too little and the latter because I was playing multiple two-hour sessions that I didn't enjoy in hopes of unlocking something that made me enjoy them. Both very interesting designs, both somewhat flawed. Oh, and while I'm at it, I'm going to quit Shira Oka: Second Chances because it's a twenty-hour visual novel that has multiple playthroughs as its central gameplay conceit.

I've been playing this game for almost a month and I finally had to quit it. The "tutorial" island was fun, but by the end of it, I'd out-leveled any reasonable challenge the game seemed prepared to throw at me. I figured that the mainland would either abound in silly battle objectives (like "Don't let anyone get to the edges of the map") or pointless overmap vignettes to make up for this. To my surprise, it had both! I might seem presumptuous to say so, but I think this game was made by very smart people making the classic mistakes that smart people make with their first game. The size of the game is amazing, but it's a bit empty and even frustrating, especially when your only means of interacting are dialogue trees and a tactical battle system that's not quite deep enough. The best moments were those when I had to deal with a morale crisis because of my followers' beliefs and when I'd trigger unique conversations with them based on said beliefs, but the game spreads these moments too thin. As I realized while trekking for two minutes of real time between Tenochtitlan and an outlying village for the third time, there's no reason this game should twenty-five or thirty hours, especially when picking and winning fights smartly obviates any real difficulty. I'm disappointed, to be sure, but I look forward to their next game. I just hope the scope is deeper, not wider.

I thought Django Unchained's final crazy shootout was a perfect example of Tarantino betraying the tone he set because he loves crazy shootouts. It's great that it didn't bother you, but it bothered the heck out of me, even though it worked for me in previous works of his. And anyway, all characters overcome obstacles on a journey, whether internal or external. That's the definition of a story, leaving out postmodern stuff. What I'm saying is that, while I haven't played The Last of Us, any comparison of a video game pretending towards emotional realism with a Homeric epic is probably pretty tenuous. Odysseus navigates a magical landscape, filled with gods, monsters, and myths. The people he encounters don't behave like real people, they behave like the legends they are. Apart from the zombies, which a lot of fans have told me are the least consequential part of The Last of Us, there isn't really anything fantastical in the game to parallel that, right? I mean, there's not even any pretensions of grindhouse or spaghetti western aesthetic that explain the crazy shootout in Django Unchained. There are complex thematic underpinnings to certain stories that make a mass-murdering protagonist workable, but it sounds like The Last of Us is missing them, which is why the comparison rings false to me. Plus, Odysseus is definitely not an everyman. All the obstacles he faces, he overcomes with preternatural cunning and charisma, while his everyman crewmates die by the boatload. We meet a true everyman in The Illiad and his names is Thersites. He's beaten to shit by Odysseus for his lowborn and presumptuous nature. Odysseus may seem more human, but that doesn't mean he's not another classic Homeric hero.

I see what you're arguing, Daesin, but not only is comparing The Last of Us to The Odyssey kind of a stretch, but comparing an alleged everyman like Joel to the epic hero Odysseus -- great-grandson of Hermes, beloved of Athena, and consort to Circe -- is even more so. These two characters are native to two different mediums and part of two different stories with very different themes, so I don't see how the presence of certain elements in one makes the criticism of them in the other any more or less valid.

Which trigger a sweet mini-cutscene of Garrett mantling up and over the obstacle in a way that won't be tedious at all the twentieth time you've seen it.

That happened to me once on Chrome. Updating to the latest stable version fixed it, I think.

Did we go to high school together? My friend did the exact same thing. Wait no, no one could have had Mrs. Threadgold as their favorite teacher. Your charade has been unmasked!