Gormongous

Okay, that's fair enough. I understood your comments -- "I think they did a lot better job with Dragon Age 1 than Dragon Age 2 with that" and "Dragon Age 1 was such a more interesting exploration of a lot of those things" -- specifically in reference to how the game handles in-world reactivity to player decision-making, which I think Dragon Age II does do more interestingly than Dragon Age: Origins. I'd agree that the former is probably an inferior game to the latter because it does even more stuff less interestingly, of course.

I'm totally used to hearing Dragon Age II denigrated, but I'm surprised Chris didn't have good things to say about it in the context of the reader question. Both games handle an ensemble cast reacting to binary player decisions really well, but while in Dragon Age: Origins you only really reap what you sow in the final act, the nature of scale and setting in Dragon Age II means that you're constantly confronted with the consequences of your choices, often in surprising ways. The magistrate whose serial-killer son you killed in act one becomes a political enemy of your family in act two; a party member's promotion through the guard can either be boon or bane, based on your relationship score. In a lot of ways, it's like the Citadel parts of the first Mass Effect stretched into an entire game. Even the way the NPC influence system works, with different bonuses based on love and hate, helps with more granular verisimilitude in player decisions, as opposed to Dragon Age: Origins, where I just left Morrigan in camp and fed her spellbooks because otherwise she'd hate everything I did and that was bad. But maybe these are among the "interesting reasons" Chris mentioned for others liking it. Certainly Dragon Age II is not always a very good game, the recycled levels and stupid ending in particular. But I like it so much replaying it a year or so later, save for the DLC weapons that totally break the game. If I ever manage a third playthrough, those are getting sold to the lowest bidder day one.

Is that where everything's the same, except that it's Jeff Goldblum's house?

Use of Weapons is by far his best. It's better to get to know the Culture, if you have the time. Consider Phlebas is big and weird, while Player of Games is more conventional, both of which set your expectations for Use of Weapons to blow them out of the water. But if I had to choose one, there's no contest. Use of Weapons. EDIT: God, I just clicked on your link and am floored. Between Banks, Ebert, and Satoshi Kon (who died three years ago, but I just found out today), the world seems like a pretty cold place right now. I hadn't liked the last couple Culture books very much, but parts of Surface Detail were showing something of a revival. I should probably feel blessed that he got one more written last year and that his fiction fans will get the same in a few months. Jeez.

It's always discomfiting to see companies begin to marinate in their own hype. Like Rodi said, first Sony, now Microsoft. I know of no company ubiquitous enough to say, "This is just how it's gonna be from now on, so deal with it," but way too many try anyway. I guess it's the holy grail of tech companies. At least, if this ends up being the harbinger for an online-old NextBox, we can look forward to another round of accusations masquerading as apologies.

I'm more a fan of his genre work, but I agree that we should read something by him. He's incomparable as a writer.

After reading this, I sought Blow's tweets out and I'm really taken by his argument. I think he's probably right that regenerating shields reduce tension between battles, require annoying design choices to counter, and teach players to ignore feedback. I'd be even more interested in alternatives, beyond a brief reference to Goldeneye's health mechanics. In general, the Bioshocks have worked for me, though I haven't touched Infinite yet. But man, they have a bizarre enjoyment curve, especially with Bioshock 2, which bored me to tears for two hours, rocked my world for five, and then bored me for one more. There's a sweet spot where your options open up but haven't overwhelmed the game that I wish I could stay in forever. The whole of System Shock 2 felt like that, unless you got the Crystal Shard or whatever that was hax.

It also has pretty poor timing, being the first piece of (free) DLC after a harrowing launch. Maybe something that isn't a weird corporate-branded cheat code should have led the way?

I'd be all for a Nissan Leaf charging station with the signs written all in Simlish. As it stands, are there any other buildings with writing on them?

He looks just about to ask an incredulous question.

See, in Japan, there are plenty of people who'll buy everything with a popular anime/manga/light novel franchise's name on it, even if they're charging five thousand yen for a set of pencil boards, but I've only met a couple people like that stateside (and even then over the internet). In the strictest sense, it must be nice to be able to count on that sort of customer, but I can't imagine it being too profitable. If you or anyone else is comfortable talking about buying habits with a stranger, what does completionism look like to you? I'm really curious to know one not my own, which mostly just consists of buying the nicest and most compact format if I enjoy the show enough to rewatch it someday.

Well, the K-On! fiasco was because Bandai spent an arm and a leg to get the license to the most profitable franchise back in Japan, then decided it wasn't worth it to try to compete in a one-company marketplace with FUNimation and instigated the worst commercial rout I've ever seen. But in general, yeah. Japanese companies are terrified of backflow collapsing the home market. Which I think might be a little irrational, because I'm pretty sure -- in terms of visual quality, not pricing or extras -- native Blu-ray releases are better than their American counterparts. Especially at FUNimation, there's a tendency to remaster the remasters they get from Japan. Not-invented-here syndrome, I guess? Above and beyond the debatable wisdom of upscaling a native 480p digital video source in the first place, that's what made for the awful Samurai Champloo and FLCL Blu-rays a few years ago, as well as better but still oversharpened releases like Haibane Renmei recently (that said, the Lain remaster is beautiful and I want to be with it always). I'd say maybe one in twenty archive-quality fansubs use American Blu-rays for source, usually from smaller operations like Sentai Filmworks née ADV Films that don't have the manpower to waste second-guessing the original encode. It's a very unusual situation, for sure. Japanese companies charge ridiculous licensing and distro fees to keep the American market manageable because they don't have a means to capitalize on overseas growth. No risks taken whatsoever, even if it means smothering great but underperforming series like Nichijou in the cradle.

Wow, that's just jaw-dropping. I love how Blu-ray has given distro companies a chance to return to the oh-so-successful pre-bubble prices for anime. Durarara!! is being sold in a two hundred-dollar "lunchbox" and the first season of K-On! is only available in thirty-dollar singles.

Like I've said too many times on this forum, I've done Latin translations of poetry and prose on commission. Though I take the money (and don't give it back), I still despair of ever capturing in English the economy and profundity of the best from antiquity. How do I capture the rush of immediacy from a string of historical infinitives in a way that is distinguishable from the historical present or even from the plain ole perfect? I love Latin as a language because it's totally recognizable in form to any Western speaker and yet totally alien in many of the processes that drive it. But maybe the temporal gap is makes it so, rather than the linguistic gap. I don't know, I'm super-paranoid about the inadequacy of language in general. The inadequacy of translation is just icing on the cake.

Did it? All I remember is being harangued for not picking a side, then for picking the wrong side.

I mostly remember Golgo 13 as the NES game in which Nintendo censors caught mecha-Hitler and the resurrected Third Reich but not a graphic sex scene ten minutes from the beginning.

GDC '13: The Death of Nick Breckon, Part 2.

I like the idea of a character's discrete relationships with NPCs amalgamating into some sort of overall judgment on the character themselves. Like I said, kind of similar to Alpha Protocol, except with one more layer, with NPCs not only reacting to your actions but also to other NPCs reacting. Less of a continuum, more of a galaxy, to borrow current sociological terms. But that's pretty hardcore armchair design from me.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. Shows like Vandred and HeatGuy J in the early 2000s had entirely CGI sequences for vehicles, vistas, and cityscapes, like something from ReBoot, but they weren't very popular, probably because they looked like something from ReBoot, so there never was a tipping point like Toy Story in America, when full CGI became accepted as another mainstream form of animation. Anime went back to using computer-assisted action sequences, which had improved during the intervening years, and even CGI anime movies today made on the cheap invest a lot of resources in cell-shading to hide the 3D look. I'm totally blanking, there were a couple of video game movies in Japan that went entirely CGI and retained their popularity, so maybe it's a source material thing? Movies based on manga should look hand-drawn, movies based on games can look computerized (but often prefer not to).

Everything I wanted to say when reading the article, Gerbil already said. Looking at Hollywood and declaring traditional animation to be dead is no different from looking at retail AAA gaming and declaring the PC market to be dead. One can only do so by ignoring people in other industries and other countries not conforming to the big-business model. It's lazy. My anime history's pretty shaky, but I think that anime experimented with full 3D in the first half of last decade. That was when you had shows like Vandread that used CG for the action sequences. By 2004 or 2005, the technology had progressed to the point that 3D models could be convincingly hand-animated as 2D and almost immediately the crappy CGI was nowhere to be found. When 3D is used in anime today, like in the Rebuild of Evangelion movies, it's only used to coordinate complicated and time-intensive scenes between hand-drawn figures. The only recent anime to be full 3D are 009 RE:CYBORG and the new Berserk movies, for the sake of cost I hear, and everyone has been decrying them for their ugly art and stiff animation. It seems as though there's too much of an uncanny valley to abandon hand-drawn animation altogether.

Hey, Moribito is by Kamiyama Kenji, who did the two Ghost in the Shell: SAC TV series (but is not doing the upcoming OVAs, hence the disappointment)! He's a great writer and director who makes tight, realistic stories... well, except for Eden of the East, which is undercut by a kind of soullessness that stinks of focus testing.

I think of it more as a mix between Hanlon's razor and the old saying, "Don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining."

A couple years ago, I got wind of a Swedish DJ and musician named Rasmus Faber putting out jazz covers of anime songs. He's up to his third volume now on iTunes and every track is classic. There's one in particular from the anime The World God Only Knows that I find absolutely entrancing. As a result, I've gone to look up the anime three times since the last album came out a year ago, only to rediscover time and again that it's a creepy-sounding show about a guy given the power to "cleanse" girls of demons by "conquering" them with love. Still, the theme music is great West Coast jazz, right? The past couple months have been weird in terms of the shows I've been watching. After finishing the first season of School Rumble, which is a great slice-of-life anime bogged down by the worst main characters imaginable, I decided to work on my knowledge of older anime (which means pre-2000 for me, when I started watching). One of those, Martian Successor Nadesico, was a bust despite a great reputation as one of the classic from the nineties. Sure, it surfs on the zeitgeist of Evangelion pretty well, but its genre-fusing parody is laid aside too early in order to devote more attention to blatant anti-war and anti-corporate soap-boxing. At least the movie, which everyone hates, gave up on the comedy angle and was better for it. But now I'm watching the Mobile Police Patlabor OVAs, which are great. I can hardly believe they were made in the eighties, to be honest. There's something about sci-fi procedurals, at least in anime, that makes them both mature and progressive. I always bring up Major Kusanagi Mokoto as a great example of a strong female character in anime, if you can overlook the cheesecake body that Shirow Masamune gave her to console himself that he wasn't drawing porn for once. Patlabor is the same: smart without being pretentious, political without being preachy, forward-thinking without being technofetishistic. I'm actually excited that there's a massive franchise -- three movies, two OVA series, and a TV show -- for me to plumb, since Ghost in the Shell has been dormant for years and is now getting a reboot that looks pretty disappointing. April's going to be an exciting month. A Certain Scientific Railgun, which is as good as the parent series A Certain Magical Index is bad, is getting a second season, plus the third Rebuild of Evangelion movie releases on Blu-ray in Japan and therefore will be subbed on the internet in short order. I thought about diving into the Gurren Lagann discussion here last week, but I don't have much to say. That show is all about ludicrous stakes, so if they don't work for you, you either keep watching until they do or you quit.

I am disappointed, I came here expecting to be attacked and got a heartfelt apology instead. The internet is a weird place sometimes. It's so much easier to communicate and so much easier to be misunderstood. With luck and patience, we all grow calmer and wiser over time. I hope you feel better after however long a break you need, TP.

Both, I think? Speaking in an ideal sense, a history dissertation should be the bones for your first book, so that you only have to publish one more to qualify for tenure at most American schools. Sometimes that doesn't work out and you end up dicing up your dissertation into four or five articles, which is seen as less than optimal from a career standpoint. If you're desperate, you can publish with Brill or American University Press, who'll take anything, but that's usually seen for the cop-out it is. I think the fact that there's not much of an industry outside academia for history postgrads means that dissertating is serious business. You can do fine just publishing a ton of articles when you're new, but there's a general perception that you should transition to monographs after ten or fifteen years in the field, which the dissertation is meant to prepare for. EDIT: My own dissertation is fascinating, of course. No one's done any research on it in English and something authoritative should get a lot of play. But I know other people who don't expect to get much out of theirs and are already making alternate plans. The politics of academic publication are incredibly boring to me, in all honesty. I just want to write about cool stuff.