Gormongous

I don't have a problem with developers listening to fans. My problem is with how Fargo has twice now ditched a perfectly reasonable design choice at the slightest whiff of outcry and without a fight. It doesn't mean anything yet, but it hints at a lack of conviction, which I feel okay being a little worried about.

Luftmensch, you always do this, man. It's great that you have liberated yourself from history and can now see characters without any preconceptions, but that's just not how the world works. You can't depict a woman receiving violence in a fictional work without engaging, even implicitly, with the centuries-old culture of violence against women and the sexualization thereof. If you create a character that fits into that discourse in any way, you are responsible for the consequences and can't just call it a "fault" in the perception of others. Art cannot exist without context. To say that it can and should is the grossly limiting attitude, to me.

This might be doing a bit too much shoot-from-the-hip psychoanalysis, but it seems like Fargo is really anxious to have this game championed as a true sequel to the first Wasteland and has decided that validation lies in the crustiest forum denizens, who have their memories of the game pickled in glass jars with formaldehyde. It'll be interesting in its own way, like Fallout 3 designed by No Mutants Allowed.

Saying "certain male brains" is just as disingenuous, though. If you're going to position an attractive woman as the head of a triple-A video game, there will be implications and you should be aware of them. The PR equivalent of a shrug doesn't cut it when sexism is such a hot-button topic.

Isn't everything a young, beautiful, athletic woman does inherently titillating on some level? I mean, we don't have dumpy fat dudes selling us soda and cellphones on TV.

Yeah, I got an inkling of this back when Fargo announced social features for Wasteland 2 and abandoned them when the response was mostly negative. He didn't even really try to pitch to anyone, he just gauged the gut reaction of the internet and then wrote off what seemed like pretty cool Dark Souls-style multiplayer. I mean, at the end of the day, I don't know how to make a game, so my opinion means fuck all next to a design doc from a group of experienced developers, but if Fargo and company have decided that the vox populi is playing the role of the publisher, they might find it a harsher master than the AAA game companies. Seriously, their solution to the keywords outcry seems to combine the worst of both systems (extra work for full dialogue, plus less usability for keywords).

Yeah, wasn't there a great moment in that episode where Chris was talking about moving from Zuma Deluxe to Zuma's Revenge, but the slight aesthetic shift forced the latter into some uncanny valley that freaked him out, right? I remember.

I can't recommend Kid Fenris' "The Gallery of Hideous Box Art" enough. I don't know the guy personally, though it seems he was a contract writer for 1up and wrote a few articles on failed systems and mascots, but his sense of tired horror and displeasure at the ugliness the nineties produced is hilarious. Not that the box art doesn't get laughs all on its own.

Yeah, it was good enough that I found it really weird to have all the half-joked rumors of Scientology conspiracies borne out when it was shut out of the Oscars.

Yeah, if you want to watch a movie about someone who loves what they do so much that it's all that they do, you going to want to watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

Totally resurrecting a dead thread here, but I found another Pac-Man ripoff while reading about kusoge on some random site. Check it out: The best part is that they simply cut to the chase in the Japanese release: There's some other real gems to be found out there, like Tagin' Dragon:

It seemed to me that most of the perv comments were framed as "This game is great! The developers have given me so many opportunities to look at an attractive young woman in compromising positions!" I mean, yeah, the jokes about the handbag and trying to look thin were just dumb sexism, but I thought Conan did a pretty good job of implicitly damning this game about a supposedly strong female character for being all about the male gaze.

Hah, wow. I've kinda hated some of his other reviews for being all about what a hapless gaming chump he is, but this one was great, calling out all the unnecessary eye candy.

I'm glad I could help. I haven't played CK2Plus for a couple versions, since maybe November, so I'm running a game in the background at a slow speed while I do dissertation reading. This time, I chose dukes of Bavaria. I think I've decided that the five stem duchies of the Holy Roman Empire (Saxony, Swabia, Bavaria, and Upper/Lower Lorraine, with Carinthia sitting in for Franconia) offer the best gameplay, at least in the mods I've played. They start with more land than the average king, so there's not the mad dash to fabricate and press claims before crown authority goes too high. Instead you, as the player, have two straightforward goals: switch out of gavelkind and dispossess your vassals without causing a revolt. You can either use the plot mechanics against them and come out smelling like roses (maybe), or just revoke as much as your prestige will allow and hope your ruler kicks the bucket before the other shoe drops. I don't know, I'm probably not selling it well, but it's been a blast as both Saxony and now Bavaria. Using free investiture to disqualify disappointing sons from the succession, voting in imperial elections, and pushing towards the closest kingship (except if you're Swabia, in which case good fucking luck forming Germany or Burgundy) feels like the best-case scenario for experiencing what Crusader Kings II has to offer, which is weird because I remember the Holy Roman Empire being a goddamn wasteland in the first Crusader Kings. I never thought it would be the stage for my most memorable playthroughs in the sequel. Edit: I still wish some of the Thumbs would play it and talk about it on the podcast, but I think the moment's passed. The big three DLCs have overcomplicated and unbalanced the base game to the point that I despair for new players, who missed their chance to play a Paradox game that didn't start kicking you in the balls right away with revolt-happy factions and world-conquering republics.

Well, I do think that dev costs will continue to rise, at least in the rarified sphere of the AAA, because there's a bit of an arms race going down. I just don't think that newer/better tech has anything to do with it. Beautifully put, though. Some developers carry themselves like prophets descending from the mountain, having seen the true face of God and carved His new laws on DVDs to bring to the people, that they too might someday taste paradise. "And the Lord God did smile when Moses finished the design doc and said, 'Drop the "e" from "extreme" in the title and add the subtitle "Bitches from Hell". Yeah, that's it. This new game is going to kick ass.'"

One of my favorite poems, because I like feeling sorry for myself: "A Short History of Judaic Thought in the Twentieth Century", by Linda Pastan

I'm happy to hear it, then. I wanted to give my friend across the country a copy of Supreme Commander 2 without having to ship him the disc I'd bought, figured why not try it the hard way. It was a two-dollar copy of a game I'd already bought for five, but it still bummed me out a little.

The one time I tried a Steam code for a game I'd already bought through Steam, it ate the code and invalidated it without giving me a second copy. That was almost two years ago, maybe they've gotten wise to that now.

Nah, it's only for pre-orders with the Steam store itself.

In the meantime, the mod scene has stabilized after the slew of (partially broken) features that the Republic DLC for 1.09 introduced have been incorporated and in some cases circumvented. CK2Plus is still the best if you want to play a game like vanilla, but with balance and pacing. This might change someday, since the mod developer has been hired as an AI programmer at Paradox now and has stopped development on his mod. Other mods to look at? The Prince and the Thane is the roleplaying mod for people who want to be an impoverished medieval lord squatting in his drafty castle and laying down justice. There are a million and one different custom-built events for all kinds of situations, so about as much time is spent looking after one's own lands as plotting over others'. I like it a lot, except I think the SWMH map it uses is kind of a mess (double the number of counties in Italy and Germany, but only a few more added to France, England, and Spain, means that the Holy Roman Empire is the monster under everyone's bed) and the events go off the rails a fair amount, leaving me independent in one instance as a four-county "king" of the Lombard League that kept getting money from the pope in a bugged message. Still a fun time, since it makes the RPG underpinnings of Crusader Kings' dynasty system more obvious and tweakable. And then there's the fantasy mod, Lux Invicta. Not much to say about the mod itself, except that it cares way too much about its lore but makes a good excuse for every ruler to start with only two or three counties and a different religion. On the meta level, I actually like watching this one develop, because it's being handled by a "regency council" of modders, self-appointed when the mod creator vanished from the forums. It means that some newer core features like factions haven't gotten much attention, out of respect to Shaytana's original vision, but it also means that there's more a public dialogue about what works and doesn't than the more auteur approaches of Wiz and idib816. I'm not going to talk about the Game of Thrones mod. I hate it. All it does is prove how boring the Middle Ages would have been without religion in the mix, plus the fan wank it inspires is even more toxic and shrill than the "why didn't Byzantium conquer the world with their cataphracts" threads all over the main forum.

I think he's referring to this comment made by Tim Sweeney, who says that, judging from the team size needed for the UE3 and UE4 tech demos, dev costs will double if not triple in the next gen.

Yeah, there's this vague sense that she's "he" to refer to Cromwell the same way she'd use "I" if the book was first-person. So not only is there an omniscience, like you said, that Cromwell always seems to be vaguely present, but there's an intimacy in its use, because there's no urgency in the text to signpost the viewpoint character's presence in a scene. Once I figured it out and got past my initial distaste over it being different, I've grown quite fond of it. I keep having other media tell me I need to read Murakami. I've been a big fan of the anime & manga Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, the creator of which references and parodies Murakami, with character names like Fuura Kafuka, almost as much as he does Dazai Osamu and Japanese parliamentary corruption. Then last week I watched Haibane Renmei and loved it, only to discover it's a loose but thorough adaptation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Would the latter title be a good starting point, does anyone think?

I got stuck thinking about this for a few hours today while I nursed a fever. A book on anime criticism I read last year made a good point about how speculative fiction tends to revel in the liberation of imagination from context and purpose. I think that's why a lot of low-grade sci-fi crops up in mass market fiction, CGI-heavy movies, and video game plots. You just write/draw/say some cool shit and you're done. But I think most people who spend even a little time around that breed of speculative fiction get tired of it, to judge from the response people have to things like the sci-fi wrapper of Assassin's Creed. Sci-fi as a genre is theoretically independent from human experience, but it's invariably populated by human characters, which possess a past and a consciousness, unlike all other life on this world. Building a speculative world without history or mythology is an empty exercise and the human mind grasps that in short order. Just like the best fantasy adapts the different strands of human experience that already exist to weave a different cloth, like Tolkien and his Middle-Earth, the best sci-fi is all about extrapolating out the historical forces that have shaped humanity to this point. I'm thinking of Red Mars and its sequels, which are so deeply embroiled in contemporary politics, yet without stripping them down to allegory or cheapening the reality of human beings. I don't know. I think there's a wealth of good sci-fi that speaks to our past and present selves just as much as our own history does, but it's smothered by the myriad authors and creators who are interested only in telling a story without having to do the legwork. Edit: Maybe still a little feverish? You be the judge.

I think a lot of US cities are planned grids in theory, but save for those under serious space constraints, like New York, I don't think it bears out in practice. I mean, maybe I'm just blind to it, but I don't see too much difference between Amsterdam and my hometown of Dallas, TX. Sure, the suburban developments on the outskirts of the latter are neat and orderly, but the city at its core is a lumpy, haphazard thing, courtesy of the cattle, oil, and telecom booms that were punctuated by long fallow periods. Maybe a tradition of urban planning is enough to influence US vs. Euro design, but if so it's far better realized in the hypothetical space of game design than in reality.