Gormongous

Man, whatever. The closer we get to Salacious Thumb, the better off we all are.

He's probably just too embarrassed to speak up.

I feel like your arguments throughout this thread have been a bit black and white. The one you've been making for the past page or so could be applied just as easily to difficulty. Challenge in video games, especially challenge that leads even to temporary setbacks or failure, hold backs the scope of a game's design by making success dependent on the player. Better to eliminate all challenge to allow for a greater range of players to experience a fuller, more forgiving game, right? I vehemently disagree. While I don't like most "ironman" or "permadeath" design choices, it would be ridiculous to say that they're a mistake in every design, if only because that assumes, like your arguments seem to do, that the end goal of a game is to complete it, which I would argue holds back the scope of a game's design even more.

I just played Left 4 Dead 2 for a couple hours and got all four drops. Two were duplicates, so I sold them for $0.60, and now I'm wondering if I should sell the rest, because I don't think I care about booster packs and badges at all.

I'm pleased (horrified?) to find out that Ben the Hedgehog has a wiki page: http://sonicfanon.wikia.com/wiki/Ben_the_Hedgehog It's got a nice deprecating tone to it: "Ben is an 8 year old hedgehog that came from a different world. He is good at sword fighting, but doesn't excel at it. He doesn't really have many abilities to speak of. He can also determine the hardness of his quills, but that doesn't come in handy often. He's very happy usually, but whenever the situation gets frustrating, he can get really angry. He isn't in very many most of the time, so he's usually cheerful." Sounds like someone just learned what a Mary Sue is.

My grandmother is dying from a brain tumor, she's got about a month maybe. It makes me sad of course, even though we weren't terribly close, but what makes it really hard is my aunt, who was also not close to her but is using Facebook to broadcast her grief in really unpleasant, self-indulgent ways. For example, here's probably her least personal status update, of which I get about ten per day: This is how my little sister found out about it, by the way. My aunt broadcast it on Facebook before my father could even find the time to call. I'm all for letting people cope with loss in their own way, but the intensely public nature of the internet means that I am being embarrassed by my aunt's histrionics daily and am not able to express my own feelings on the matter. Ugh.

Also, according to Steam, I've put 546 hours into Crusader Kings II. I've never uninstalled/reinstalled it, but it's still worth a mention.

I think Miffy's got it. Factually speaking, we know absolutely nothing about Cromwell's life before he returns to England in 1515 and marries Elizabeth Wyckes, besides his birthplace, the record of a stay in Rome in 1514, and whatever he told his friends. I've said before in this thread that I love how Mantel preserves the mystery of her main character's past while not leaving him the complete cipher his youth is in actuality.

Way back, I had a recursive loop where I kept reinstalling and playing Sid Meier's Pirates! It was the same every time, I'd get three frigates, fill them up with guys, and start flipping Spanish ports for the French. I think I just really liked the tactical battle minigame? I don't know, college is full of weird ways to waste one's time. I also played the first Mass Effect to 100% five separate times, even though I only remember doing it twice, because I do remember installing Mass Effect 2 and having to figure out which of five level-sixty characters was my main.

God, I would have terrified your mother. I had constant headaches as a kid, for no discernible reason, and still get a bad one every week or two. At least I have only had one migraine in the past four years!

Finally, an opinion on the Coens in this thread with which I can agree!

I didn't mind spoiling anything for myself, so I looked it up. Yeah, they just adapt twelve episodes out of the book starting from junior high, with little or no reference to earlier events. I wonder why.

Give him a CAPTCHA!

This is my last comment on the topic, because elmuerte's right that we're talking about a sweet ghost-hunting/haunting simulator, but no one's obliged to suffer assholes. No matter what I say, no matter my intentions, I will never begrudge someone to throw up their hands, tell me to go fuck myself, and walk away. I mean, it would distress the fuck out of me, but still. The burden of education is entirely on the offender and not the offended, though sometimes the latter are selfless enough to put in the time. Hey Steve (if you're still reading this thread), whose handwriting is that on the envelope and on the letter? Is it too "inside baseball" to ask? I'm always curious how one would art-direct handwriting, since it's so distinctive and so hard to fake.

I'm thinking of a similar instance, mostly in RPGs, where you take the clearly wrong branching path because, chances are, when you take the right one, you'll be locked out of backtracking and getting all the content. "We're looking for a famous wizard, right? Let's go ahead and meet with the queen. I'm sure she knows right where he is and that'll be the end of our quest. No need to go tramping around in a swamp looking for a rumored hermit, that can't be him. It's probably the easiest, most straightforward option."

See, I'm very familiar with that dance myself, because I have a couple friends who are assholes. They'll say something unkind or inappropriate, others will get offended, and one of us will have to sit them down and walk them through why they're an asshole this time around. The problem with Krahulik is that, unless the person sitting him down is Holkins or Khoo, his response to being told he's an asshole is to be an asshole some more. It's like, consciously or not, he thinks that tormenting anyone who gets offended by him until they shut up or go away will prove the invalidity of being told he's an asshole. It's ridiculous, because being an asshole in polite society means owning your shit, even if it stinks. I honestly just think it's beyond poor character for a thirty-something year old man who co-owns a multi-million dollar business to not be able to say he's sorry without bringing in "some of my best friends are trans" non-apology bullshit, let alone to encourage death threats against those who disagree with him. The accidental bigotry is almost beside the point, except that it keeps coming up and some PA fans soak it up like sponges. I mean, did people seriously wear their Dickwolves shirts with pride to PAX? That plan was pretty fucked up in my book.

The apologists pouring out of the woodwork to shake their jowls at the mean ol' Fullbright Company for blackening the Penny Arcade name are really getting to me. I don't know what it is, but every controversy surrounding Krahulik and Holkins leaves me sick these days. I just can't believe there are so many people willing to defend the right of a guy who draws pictures on the internet to say cruel and ignorant things whenever he feels like it, without any repercussions.

I love the whole gang. Jim "Boost" Carrey, "Fuck" Dwayne Johnson, Richard "Video Games" Dreyfuss, Taylor "Hot Scoops" Swift, and Paul "Famous" Walker. They're all great people.

That's a fucking fantastic announcement, though. It's nice to have someone take a stand on that, instead of circling the wagons like most gamers do with Penny Arcade.

"We released our new multi-song album as one long track to discourage skipping over anything."

I'm really glad to hear that, whether or not I see the movie. I've been a fan of Michael Shannon since before Jeff Nichols got ahold of him, even back in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, and I was worried that Zod would be the kind of thankless role that would hound a great actor from the public eye. If he turned in good work, that's wonderful news.

I know I'm late to this conversation, but on the topic of authorial responsibility in fantasy, I think it's telling, at least in terms of intended audience, that most fantasy works enshrine an inequality between the sexes, in which almost all medieval people believed, but not the positive existence of God or heaven, in which almost all medieval people believed. In the past several years, the presence of a coherent and non-strawman belief system has become my touchstone for whether a fantasy work is going to piss me off or not.

Paradox's current policy is to patch everything into the base game, but only unlock new playable character types through DLC. So Sword of Islam added decadence and invasion mechanics to Muslim characters, but only people who pay for the DLC can play as them. The exception is Legacy of Rome, which added standing retinues for DLC owners only, but Paradox says that retinues are not part of the core game experience, which might explain the lack of attention paid thereafter. My main complaint with the DLC is not that Paradox continues to expand their game, but that in doing so, they have upset the balance in a way that is uniquely hostile to new players, as well as often counterintuitive to history. For instance, factions! They were added in Legacy of Rome as a way of replacing revolt plots, which were ineffectual to all but the newest newbie. On the surface, the change was straightforward: factions were simply standing plots, with the same mechanisms and goals, but reorganized to allow for more concerted action against the player. But time and experience has shown that, since factions cannot simply be broken up with bribes and arrests like plots could, they turn an obvious system (AI who hate me and have something to gain will plot against me) into a black box (AI will join factions for various reasons, often beyond the game's ability to convey). Now, if you go on the Paradox forums, anyone will tell you that managing factions is child's play. You simply keep all your vassals' opinions of you in the 80+ range and assign your Spymaster to intrigue against faction leaders. But I say, in addition to that being an incredibly boring way to interact with a system, it's nowhere documented or even reflected in the game. It's one of several systems bolted on post-release that deviate from the game's original vision of "personal relationships are everything." Many mods have fixed factions by making them more like abstract advocate blocs for certain playstyles, but Paradox seems uninterested in adopting that thus far. Instead, they've moved onto the next DLC concept after patching the factions just enough so that the king of Sweden wasn't getting made Byzantine emperor through some random plot. ... Wait, did you want to know about The Old Gods in particular? My bad. I don't think it changed much for the vanilla game, though. If you're playing as one of the Rurikovich princes or Hungary, you might see a little of the new raiding system used against you, but otherwise it's just a slight change to how rebels work and a more active point-buy tech system, both of which are slight but not really appreciable improvements on the base game. Nothing like the messes that are trading posts and factions, at least.

I have to say, I finally bit on The Old Gods DLC and I'm pretty disappointed. The 867 start is full of inaccuracies and compromises, plus I had no trouble uniting the British Isles as Ivar the Boneless, a four-county duke, in twenty years. It's no Sword of Islam one-county world-conquest on my first try, but it is pretty bad, especially since it cost twice, even three times as much as the other major DLCs. I wonder. On a recent Three Moves Ahead episode, Rob commented on the demise of the Paradox "publish and patch" mentality, but in some ways, it feels like it's alive and well, just in the balance and theme of their DLCs. The Muslims, merchant republics, and now pagans all got ludicrous boosts that ruin the game for everyone else, so that people who play the base game regularly just have to wait for Paradox to take in fan reaction and pare things down. Is that what's going on here, Paradox pleasing the power-gamers and then kowtowing to backlash? Honestly, I should just stop buying Paradox stuff at launch. The vanilla game is a total mess now, with the real historical outcomes all but inconceivable, and the mods take so long to catch up, I could almost just wait for a sale. I've definitely hit Bruce Geryk's "educated wargamer disenchantment" with the Middle Ages and it's making me feel constantly ripped off. I don't know if this will be the case with Europa Universalis IV.

Fifty-fifty split, gruesome ladies and sexy monsters.