Gormongous

I haven't been paying attention to the release news, except for RPS trumpeting that the PS4 is basically a PC, so in my head the whole event is basically just the Qualcomm 2013 CES keynote all over again. Hermie has it right though, all the things Sony has announced so far are Schrodinger's features, simultaneously good and bad until we actually see them for ourselves. Except for sharing, fuck that.

Well, the people who don't understand are going to say they don't, while the people that do are going to stay quiet, unless they want to be assholes and mock ignorance.

I don't mean to speak for BigJKO, but in my case, it's more just that I find the business of media franchises to be a very ugly thing. It's not enough simply to make a string of good FPS games or sci-fi movies or fantasy novels or whatever, they all have to be interlinked so the audience can be compounded with each new sequel until they're making WoW or CoD4 bucks. Because that's always the goal, in the end. When a product's success isn't really measured by itself, but by the future successes it allows, I start to feel weary of my role as a consumer and fan, whether potential or actual. And yeah, that's business, but I don't have to like it, especially when it's as naked as in the Activision contract.

Yeah, SHODAN is the kind of video game villain that few developers have the vision (or budget) to write these days, with not only a fully-realized agenda but a fully-realized personality separate from it. A villain that utterly despises the protagonist but is willing to use him for her own ends is always more fun to interact with than the supremely abstract "final boss" of most games. I mean, everyone remembers this SHODAN quote, because it is embodies the subjective feeling of playing System Shock 2 perfectly: The closest conterpart I can think of, which combines narrative role and performance so well, is Jon Irenicus from Baldur's Gate II, but he doesn't have the same menace that SHODAN has, which often prompted me to get up and turn on some lights during my playthrough

Yeah, I didn't want to be the first one to say so, but the text of that contract makes me feel so incredibly sad and bored. Oh boy, nearly a decade of sequels planned out!

Rematch! Rematch!

Reading a couple of forum threads about this, it looks like the BIOS that the M5 A99X EVO shipped with is really fussy with regards to RAM, even on the QVL list. If you have another computer that you can download the latest BIOS on, maybe you could flash it?

I played the demo for a few hours and found much of what you said to be true. Like Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, it's a fascinating system that really doesn't have much parallel except in some of Vic Davis' games, as a board game designed for computer play. If it drops on Steam, it'll probably be a buy for me. That said, there are a couple of little things that the game could do better, which were obvious even during the demo experience. The best child to make head of family is pretty unclear, and if you don't save at least a couple tokens as an inheritance your game ends right there. I like some of the terror of discovering board game mechanics on my own without tutorialization, but it seems a bit rough here.

If it's not the RAM, it's the motherboard. Sorry to say so.

I'd meant to answer this a week ago but forgot, because it's not an easy question. I know a host of excellent academic works on the migration period and the decline of empire, but most popular historiography is still stuck exalting Rome as the glory of the ancient world, martyred to bring about modern Europe. Even when an otherwise capable historian like Bryan Ward-Perkins writes something like The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, it's inexplicably shot through with silly theatrics about savage dirt-worshippers ruining civilization for everyone else. Still, I'll try. For a good introduction to the period of Germanic migration and Roman collapse, I'd recommend Peter Brown's classic, The World of Late Antiquity. Peter Wells' The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe is a very readable take on early Germanic society, written by an anthropologist for a lay audience. For the migrations themselves, the classic trio I've always held close are Peter Heather's Goths and Romans, 332-489, Walter Goffart's Barbarians and Romans, AD 418-584, and Michael Kulikowski's Rome’s Gothic Wars from the Third Century to Alaric. Of these, Kulikowski's is the best, Goffart's is the broadest, and Heather's is the midpoint between the two. I also understand Heather's written a brace of volumes in the past decade as a response to Ward-Perkins, The Fall of the Roman Empire: a New History of Rome and the Barbarians and Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development, and the Birth of Europe. I haven't read them myself, but they're written by a respected scholar, published by good presses, and reviewed well by peers. That might be where I'd start, actually.

I was impressed with the mod that adds in new models and meshes during my replay, but until it's complete I can't recommend it, because it makes old parts stand out so much more.

Christ, this'll do for medicine what flight sims did for piloting. Look at that. Glorious.

It is really curious how Sega, Gearbox, and the anonymous Timegate source are all passing around this hot potato through rumors and rumors of rumors. No one wants to let it lie that they're the reason the game sucks, but they don't want to be caught naming too many names either.

Whoever said that Chris' Danny Glover run-in was like a Voight-Kampff test was totally right. "You're in a Best Buy in the Bay area. You're looking for an HDMI adaptor. You see Danny Glover sitting nearby. You think he's getting his iPad fixed. Why don't you say hello to Danny Glover, Chris?" "I don't... I don't know him. I can't say... I don't..." "Why don't you say hello to Danny Glover?"

Come up with a sexier buzzword than GSR and you'll be in business.

As a matter of fact, the reason the Roman era is not as well understood as even the Middle Ages, with its monasteries full of charters, is because the vast majority of everyday transactions were done on wax tablets, carved upon with a stylus and heated back to smoothness once the business was finished. Only stuff that was considered Important with a capital letter was committed to papyrus, which is why there are less total written sources for all of Roman history than for a single year in the 1970s. All cultures, throughout history, have an odd obsession with only preserving what they find significant, when the insignificant stuff is just as significant. Somewhat related, did anyone see that article about how a hairstylist showed that historians have been mistranslating a word for centuries because of a fundamental misunderstanding about how Roman women wore their hair? Who knows how people in the year 2512 will interpret all our tweeting.

If so, it's positioned with preternatural awkwardness. A player's going to have to remove one of their hands to do more than feebly brush at it, that's not good.

Fair point, I forgot that Rob Zacny and Troy Goodfellow are paid employees of Idle Thumbs, Inc. But please, let's not hijack this thread more than I already have. Surely there's more PR fallout from the whole <i>Aliens: Colonial Marines</i> debacle?

But hey, I didn't know you could shake the opposing player's Pikmin off your guy. How do you do that, with the c-stick?

Please let the weird blank space on the controller be a Dreamcast-style VMU. I loved watching the pointless 8-bit animations of the character I was playing in Soul Caliber.

True, the Penny Arcade guys aren't calling the shots, but what you said is just as much of a mischaracterization. Ben Kuchera is employed by "Penny Arcade, Inc." writing on a website hosted by Penny Arcade with a comment system hooked into the PA forum accounts. There's going to be some cross-pollination, even with the best intentions.

I really enjoyed the discussion of self-discovery as a potential narrative beat in games. Jake downplayed its effectiveness in The Walking Dead, and though I can't speak to the series as a whole, I had a powerful interaction along those lines while playing the first episode. By accident, I stepped outside the drugstore before checking the back room. I thought it was a really daring choice. And then I walked into the back room and found the picture, so I'm probably in the minority who experienced things my way. But I really liked it, enough to tell my friends. I have a friend who's very involved in the "gray market" for films that have seen no efforts to be released or preserved. Beyond films that interest no one at the moment and thus die a quiet death on a hard drive somewhere, there is a definite issue of companies that own the rights to films that they have no intention of publishing, but are fully willing to spend thousands of dollars fighting illegal distribution of anyway, just in case they decide the market is ready after several decades biding their time or whatever. It's an extraordinarily frustrating situation that almost totally relies on passionate people operating outside the law for conservation purposes, just like a lot of software pirates acting as "archivists". It's not really surprising, though. If there's one thing the capitalist system doesn't provide for, it's posterity.

Penny Arcade in general has an attitude of "If you don't love all that we do, you're not a fan. Therefore, we owe you nothing" that all feels very... internet? I'm thinking of dickwolves and their weirdly flippant million-dollar kickstarter.

I loved the Pikmin 2 stream, except for all the parts where Chris was losing because he was worried about the chat. True to his .gif persona, Jake didn't give as much of a fuck, though he is seriously the best (fake) sore loser ever. The moment things don't go his way, everything's for stupid babies.

Ugh, I sympathize with anyone who has to suffer from comm company monopolies. About once a year, I have to call up Charter and threaten them in order to keep my cable connection unthrottled and uncapped. At least they mostly leave me alone outside of that. God forbid there are service outages, though. One time a utilities service accidentally cut a street line and the tech support seriously recommended I upgrade from Windows XP to Vista in order to restore connectivity. The only time I've ever lost my temper and screamed at someone on the phone...