Gormongous

I really wonder what they censored. I remember the last MadTV show I watched having a sketch about plutonium-powered Christmas lights, with the punchline that a kitten given as a present had been melted into half-dead goo. I never watched MadTV again. Yeah, just like every other liberal arts skill, people don't appreciate it unless it's totally beyond their means.

Especially with podcasts, the banter has to be earned. If the hosts are joking back and forth with each other on episode one, I'm probably going to feel alienated, not titillated. It's been a real obstacle to finding another gaming podcast that works for me like Idle Thumbs does. Even GFW Radio took almost a quarter of its run to click with me.

Me too, although the few opportunities I had, it wasn't really an option. I was too deep in the hole from my handful of honest mistakes to risk going against the system. Maybe that's the point?

I really hope the full game continues to reinforce such dehumanizing behavior from the player.

In particular, I liked how, once you get the option to detain someone, there's never a good reason not to detain them. There's no penalty for wrongful detainment, but a severe one for failing to detain, so anyone with an incorrect detail on their passport gets taken away by the secret police. It's effective.

Hilariously, the demo on Steam does not include batteries among the available parts, meaning that liquid fuel engines are useless. On my fourth try after realizing this, I somehow managed to get in a stable Kerbin orbit with twenty or so solid boosters, but that's where poor Jebediah will be living out his days. EDIT: Or I just didn't know what the "throttle up" button really is. Man, liquid fuel is easy mode. I actually don't know what to say about the Kerbal Space Program demo. It doesn't seem to be representative of the game I saw on the stream, if only because they give you so few parts, some of which don't even work right. I can't imagine it selling the game to anybody alone.

I'm pretty sure that strategy game designers have found that people will skip tutorials for the campaign, then quit the game forever when the campaign doesn't tutorialize. At least, that's how my non-strategy-game friends behave.

I think there's a copy called The Phantom Edit, which was rare even when I looked for it a couple years back. For the most part, it pares down scenes with Anakin, Qui-Gon, and Jar Jar to make Obi-Wan the clear protagonist, or so I've heard. It doesn't leave behind a very long film, just over an hour or so. EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_edit

I've watched the Despecialized editions of Star Wars and the Gangs of New York recut that removes Cameron Diaz's character entirely. Those were a while ago, though. Has the download process changed? Back then it was just a torrent or a Megaupload link for an ISO to burn to disc, last time I checked.

Okay, I finished the beta after a false start where a misunderstanding about fingerprints sent me into a death spiral. It reminds me a lot of a game called The Republia Times from a year or so ago, but turns out that was by Lucas Pope too. I'm really interested to see how this becomes a full-length game. I was intrigued by some of the story hooks but didn't have enough money to break the rules following them up.

Downloading now. I'll play it tomorrow, for the glory of Mother/Father Arstotzka.

I just finished the stream while getting ready for bed. Nick's fury during the second video at 52:30 is nothing less than cinematic. That was an incredible stream, guys. I was going to post last week about how I could watch you play Full Throttle for an eternity, but I could watch you play Kerbal Space Program for several eternities, especially with musical accompaniment.

The tagline needs to be "It's a container... for storing men."

It's kinda just a thing. Like, it captures the feel of Eva really well, the aura of pervasive psychological oppression that a lot of people (like Twig) process as obnoxious, but it changes Asuka from Shinji's perfect other to Shinji's perfect lover, which misses the point. I don't know, I enjoyed it, but if I woke up to find that End of Evangelion had been replaced by Re-Take, I'd be pretty darn upset. That's a mixed recommendation, but one nonetheless.

Yeah, those are pretty much my feelings too. Good to know.

What made it for me was my friend leaning over to me and saying, "Oh man, I got too excited and spilled the frosting for my toaster strudel!" But yeah, issues of consent pervade Shinji's relationships with women, probably because he is in part a critique of passive but voyeuristic otaku. The many ways that Shinji's impotence is experienced as power have their own gross fascination. Tegan (or anyone else), have you ever read the Re-Take doujin? I was told that it's what Evangelion's ending should have been, but I found it kinda whatever, though I haven't had anyone to bounce those feelings off of.

And Evangelion! Although there was a huge exodus of creative talent immediately following Gurren Lagann, so it's popular on the internet to talk about Gainax before and after as different companies. Myself, I liked Medaka Box well enough, so maybe that's just typical "change is bad" pessimism. EDIT: Yeah Tanu, that's the TV ending. As the conclusion of a character study, I kinda like it a bit more than End of Evangelion, but you can't beat the pure mindfuck spectacle of the latter. Trust me, you'd remember it (see above, re: vagina eyes).

One of us! One of us! They look like they're just colored corn taco shells. I think it's bad brand synergy. It would not be difficult to color-coordinate the entire taco and its contents with Kyubey or the series' school uniform, then they'd be cooking with gas!

Yeah, I'm scared, but also curious. Being an insomniac should give me a real edge!

My dad, who's big into Western stuff, liked Bury Me at Wounded Knee a lot, but it's an oldie that's also really heavy on history. Useless quasi-advice!

You make some good points, and I don't discount Metacritic altogether, but I really take issue with the notion that marketing doesn't have more to do with a game's Metacritic score than the game itself. Maybe in the long run, yes, but in the first month or so? Also, don't forget, as Wikipedia Brown pointed out, that Metacritic weighs scores from different sites differently, supposedly to provide a "true" aggregate rather than a base average. This is much less transparent and straightforward than Michelin ratings, which is why I brought up student evals.

I'm going to go ahead and beat the same drum I always do. It's useless to talk about authenticity or accuracy in historical representations. Such things have been widely deprecated in scholarly circles for some time now anyway. The inner lives of persons past are lost to us today, so all we can do is construct characters who move through our existing understanding of events with some degree of verisimilitude, but never reality. In that respect, Mantel writes excellent history, though the lack of citations is somewhat damning, as is her ability to make us hate a beloved figure like Thomas More after some intimacy with his enemies and a few conversations. You tend to lose the people in the events of history. I'm currently revising an article now about one thirteenth-century lord's motivation to go on crusade. It's a grueling business where I look at all the charters he ever witnessed and try to connect the dots in a shape that resembles a person. It's been three years now and I still don't really know him at all, whatever I might say while drunk at parties. Historical fiction does a better job, I think, because it's accountable to people rather than events.

Raw sales would be more honest, at least. If the bonus is money, why not tie it to money? Is there some scenario you can think of where a developer doesn't deserve a bonus for making a commercially successful game? What I meant by "poisoning the pot" is what you see on Tom Chick's site all the time. He gives Bioshock Infinite three stars, for perfectly legitimate reasons, but it pulls down the Metacritic aggregate six points, about which the fanboys flooding to his site rant and rave. If we all agree that the average review aggregate for a generally competent AAA game goes 70 to 90, he's singlehandedly lost the Obsidian guys their bonus, just for speaking his mind on a game that he does like. It's enormously problematic, because it discourages games that have anything at all objectionable in them, leading to the gross plastic stuff that Hollywood specializes in.

Except that there's no meaningful distinction between critical and commercial success in video games at a mass-market level, plus a strong tendency for Metacritic aggregates to drift to the mean. Video games already have a huge problem with all imitating a handful of successful business models. There's no need to incentivize that. I would say it's more like being a teacher and having your bonus contingent on student evaluations. You may have done a good job all around, but evals don't always reflect that, whether because of shortsightedness or other personal biases. A few minor but legitimate complaints can poison the pot completely.

I finally uninstalled the Windows Live Essentials 2011 pack (using the Fixit forced uninstaller, of all things) because Windows Photo Gallery kept claiming file associations it couldn't run. Unfortunately, that means that my webcam doesn't have software to capture images anymore. I tried VLC's capture mode and found it too buggy. I tried the widely recommended CamStudio and found it overcomplicated. The rest out there sounds like malware waiting to happen. ArcSoft WebCam Companion? Your computer's never gonna boot again. I see a lot of selfies around the forums. What do you all use?