Gormongous

Luftmensch, you don't get to come into a thread, cast wild aspersions, then get fresh when people disagree with you. That's a troll's business and you aren't a troll, right?

Yeah, but "fast and loose with historical facts" is a lot more fraught when you're dealing with the crusades, which many Muslim public figures claim is currently ongoing thanks to the US and Israeli presence in the Middle East. I'm not saying it's the only reason, but I'm sure the political situation helped recommend the crazy sci-fi veneer. Yeah, that's why my initial comment, to which Argobot responded, was carefully phrased as "ambitious in a way I don't respect". Calling something "pretentious" tends to have a funny way of making it the artist's fault that it didn't work for you. I mean, it blows my mind that people still call Neon Genesis Evangelion pretentious to this day. It was an incredible financial success, widely imitated in multiple mediums, and still talked about well over a decade after its release. What exactly is it pretending to, again?

It kinda blows my mind that the two main complaints for this video are "not engaging enough" and "not professional enough". Saarkeesian's videos need to be full of new analyses and conclusions on age-old tropes, presented in a way that shows she did all the research herself, while still being funny and entertaining yet respectful to the games in question? You guys are tough masters, I've met maybe one or two academics in my entire postgraduate career who'd be able to please y'all. Honestly, I think the video, only the first of many, is good for what it did. It cleanly and calmly defined the trope, presented examples, and explained its effects. It'll be useful going forward as Feminism 101 for gamers who don't see anything wrong with many of the problematic themes and attitudes in their chosen medium. That's all it needs to be. First book, first chapter of Aristotle's Politics says it best: man is inherently a political animal. Politics is the interaction of human beings within a community, therefore everything is political, even your choice to be apolitical. Just because you don't believe in something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I have to admit, I am more curious about who this is than any mystery the Assassin's Creed games have managed to conjure up. Who fought against Desmond's unpopularity year after year, game after game? Who made the decision to increase the number of near-future scenes in Revelations? Are they responsible for the fiction or are they simply fans of it? Are they one or many? What are their positions at Ubisoft? Do they have a plan? THIS IS THE CONSPIRACY THEORY THAT INTERESTS ME.

I thought so too, but then again Ubisoft is willing to publish (granted, not develop) the Anno and Settlers franchises without a framing device. I wonder if it also has something to do with the potential for backlash against revisionist historical narratives, even as tongue-in-cheek as Ubi's wacky animus shit. If you're telling a sci-fi story about a historical event, you're adding one more layer of subjectivity to discourage criticism over your portrayal of crusaders or slavery or whatever.

As I understand it, Monte Cook is responsible for the "ivory tower" design school that made D&D 3.x such a divisive product. That is to say, many of the mechanics and systems he helped create for the new edition were intentionally obscure, obtuse, or nonsensical to prevent exploitation by advanced players, even though it made the game unplayable to newbies. Some people, especially on gaming forums like /tg/, think of his designs as fundamentally wrongheaded and have no faith in his abilities anymore. I guess Tibbles is one of them? A lot of his work also laid the foundation for the decades of caster supremacy that many people think ruined D&D.

Well, it doesn't look like Metacritic is going to reflect the changed Polygon score, so it remains a 95, the second highest review for the game after Eurogamer Sweden's 100.

Presumably this is a mobile game to set up Abstergo Entertainment, which Ubisoft claimed in their press conference for Assassin's Creed IV is a real-world company that you, as the player, will be working for by using your console-animus to play their games? Or not, but I just wanted to bring that up again, from the RPS article. Someone at Ubi really really really loves the near-future conspiracy shit.

I haven't had a chance to listen to the episode, but I've come to realize that the internet has shifted the definition of pretentious from "acting like it's something that it's not" to "ambitious in a way I don't appreciate or respect myself". Few words are used to tear down genuine quality and innovation like "pretentious".

Well, it's really a truism in most disciplines. I'm taking a professionalization workshop with a few of my colleagues as part of the dissertation process, and everything we're doing drills into my head that I need to stop dicking around and publish what I've got. The guy who publishes a hundred articles in his career, some of them pretty good, does better for himself, for his field, and for humankind than the guy who spends his life writing one or two perfect monographs. I guess I'm projecting that onto Valve here, too. And really? That sucks for him, that was good work.

I think there's a web of mystique surrounding Valve, which makes people hesitant to question them, because they don't know what's going on. That's no accident. As for my own analogy, I meant to say that I've done a lot of work with not much to show for it, but Merus said it better: great artists ship. Cancelling projects doesn't make you a better artist, just a perfectionist. Only one of those is really laudable, to me. But you agree with me there, so never mind.

I don't know. I have worked hard on several novels, short stories, and articles, all of which remain in various stages of incompletion, but that still doesn't make me much of a writer. Long periods of silence and inactivity are valid points for criticism, because in the end what they do for the most part is spin a web of mystique and power that Merus references, the same that surrounds many reclusive authors, musicians, and filmmakers. It protects them from questions, and that rankles me. And yeah, maybe some of that is a knee-jerk reaction from me, having left behind my admiration for companies that polish things to perfection. That's a luxury most people don't have and do fine without, not to mention it didn't help Blizzard with Diablo III and hasn't helped Valve with Half-Life 2: Episode 3.

I backed this as soon as I got home and found out it was going on (side note: in a small way, it's kind of a bummer that these popular kickstarters are almost finished before they've started, leaving me feeling like a 29,381st wheel). As I voiced in the Wasteland 2 thread, I still don't really trust Brian Fargo to make the game he wants to make, rather than the game he thinks other people want him to make, but dammit, the games he thinks other people want him to make are the games I want him to want to make. Uh, yeah. Also, looks like Avellone isn't part of the stretch goals (no surprise there). Instead, we get Tony Evans (yay) and Mur Lafferty (hmm) at $1,500,000.

I think it's a legacy from the British miniseries it's based on, maybe? I watched that last year and, while well written and shot, it was basically six hours spent watching a smug British man manipulate everyone with no scruples or setbacks. Overall, the plot and characters almost had a "Sense of History" feel to them, I'm beginning to wonder if that's in the Netflix remake. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9G2y7KEVSk

Looks like Tom Chick is putting off his review for at least a week, pending a patch. The not-a-review he's posted in its place claims that most of the inter-region mechanics are broken on some level, making the game unplayable in its current form: http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/03/05/why-this-is-not-a-one-star-review-of-simcity/ I've come a long way from the high of Polygon's glowing review. This has become the wait-and-see title of 2013 already. Hope that doesn't end up biting EA and Maxis in the ass.

I agree, but it sounds like you have to optimize aggressively to unlock all the buildings and features, since the final city hall addition unlocks at 290,000 and the Ars Technica article reported difficulty pushing past 200,000. The tools can be as robust and expressive as you please, but if the canvas is lacking...

Yeah, what's with how small the cities look in reviews? Watching Chris and Jake play, while it didn't seem like there was tons of space, there was enough, but every screenshot I've seen of the final game seems to show the same twelve-by-twelve-block mini-borough.

That Ars Technica article is so disheartening. I was hoping this would be the game that would force me to end my Origin boycott, but it sounds like there are some serious issues with the game as a long-term mass-audience phenomenon. No saving and reloading, really?

I thought that was an attempt to evoke a Heart of Darkness feel from the game, which I believe Clint Hocking has talked about before. There's a mission you're on and a bunch of shit you should be doing, but instead you're just wandering around and killing people. I can see how that would feel aimless to some.

I always figured that "AAA" means for games what "blockbuster" means for movies, a certain level of overwhelming critical and financial success. The terms also go well together because they both started out describing effect and ended up describing cause.

I don't think there's any area of my life quite like computers, where I'll ruin everything only to realize I was quite content with how things were and my attempts to change them are the definition of hubris. Good luck with that, elmuerte.

Well put, TP. There's a world of difference between me expressing reservations and me demanding change, so it bugs me that the Wasteland 2 devs in general and Brian Fargo in particular haven't displayed much awareness of it. Maybe it doesn't even exist for other people, but there's just too much in games that I bitched and moaned and then totally fell in love with for me to think that my opinion deserves that much credence in the game design process.

I thought this was a show about the great thinkers of the Enlightenment and got really excited for the time it took me to google it.

I don't mean to be a pedant, but saying, "We're using a keyword system to halve our dialogue workload," then adding full dialogue to the hover text, does kinda count as ditching the keyword system. And his Kickstarter update was two-plus screens of text explaining how their keyword system isn't really a keyword system, thanks to fan suggestions. I don't know, it seems to me like buying a space heater to save energy and then running the central heating anyway.

Dude, I don't even know how to respond to this post. You put a bunch of words in my mouth, then gaslight me. So not interested in having this conversation anymore.