Gormongous

Have Rockstar and the Houser brothers ever shown any real ability in writing female characters? I know that all the ones you meet in GTA IV were shrews or floozies.

Don't worry, Skylar is not actually cool with him.

Yeah, I'm usually a proponent of games trying to have some kind of narrative structure, but it's baffled me, Remo-style, since day one that Ubisoft just doesn't make the series a historical sandbox that the player can fuck around in as a badass assassin. When my friend played through the second one, after I swore off the series, he blazed through the bog-standard revenge plot to unlock enough areas to play the game he was actually interested, "Free-Running Around Renaissance Italy".

Hah! Yeah, that's Yakitate!! Japan. God knows why he chose that as your gateway anime. I had a friend get introduced to anime through a series about a puppeteer and his crime-solving marionette. The way I see, it only goes up from there.

I can take or leave the Ghost in the Shell movies, because they're really only as good as your taste for cyberpunk, but both seasons of the TV series are a near-perfect fusion of police procedural and near-future conspiracy freakout. If I were to recommend generally excellent dude-oriented anime, it would be Planetes, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and the Fullmetal Alchemist reboot subtitled Brotherhood, although the last of these is a bit too shounen at times to be an unqualified mention.

So you like stylish, slightly pomo anime that hit hard in the music and animation department? I'll go look at my shelf.

I bought CS:GO despite Orv doing a good job talking me out of it this summer, played Arms Race with a bunch of bots, and instantly got my money's worth. I only feel a little foolish.

Baccano! also has one of the best anime OPs of all time, up there with the first season of Bleach and the second season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

It's explored very strongly during moments in season five, if I remember.

I've been very disappointed in general that the Assassins and Templars have been portrayed in such black-and-white tones. Playing the first one through, I had hopes that the series would switch between hunter and hunted through the centuries, based on the moral equivalency preached by your master, but it ends up that he just says that because he's secretly a bad guy and all Templars are bad guys and kill them all and don't worry about their blood on your hands because we're the good guys blah blah alien progenitor punch the pope.

Nothing has revealed to me more the tendency for mid-tier writers to assume every character is familiar with each other after a certain point in the script than rewatching Deadwood with a friend. That show is so careful about keeping track of who has met/liked/trusted whom that my friend is occasionally confused that two major characters meet each other, apparently for the first time, half a season in. I just don't think it pays in lower-stakes media to remember who knows what.

If I were to make a defense of Trigun's weird pacing, which it shares with Cowboy Bebop and other contemporaries, I'd say that it pretends to waste your time for ten episodes to make the tonal shift in the teens hit home harder, but I'm not sure that's intentional and it certainly doesn't work for everyone. But hey, at least it was a third as long as Monster.

I keep writing that off as a poor man's Planetes, which I think of as the gold standard in hard sci-fi. That's probably unfair, right?

I finished watching Monster a week ago, all seventy-five episodes of it. I've always heard it talked about as the high water mark of dramatic anime, but I was horribly disappointed. Far, far too much of the series was spent in the protagonist's shoes as he agonized over whether he, as a doctor, had the right to take life as well as give it. It just wasn't an interesting question because, problematic god complex aside, the life he'd be taking was that of a serial killer who murdered a half-dozen people directly or indirectly while our hero sat wringing his hands. I don't know. I feel like this thread I'm reviving should be about good anime to recommend, not bad anime to avoid, but I was just shocked by how bland and boring this was. Every time the protagonist would go into hiding, I'd get excited, just because there was a chance I'd get to spend some time with a minor character not caught in a cartoonishly black-and-white dilemma. At least Trigun had the decency to couch the same themes in a space western. Also, the Serial Experiments Lain remaster just got released last week and it looks just amazing. Even the Blu-ray menu is great, with a Mac OS-style presentation layer. If only FUNimation didn't publish it, which means cramming fourteen episodes onto two discs and front-loading both with forced previews, like we're back in the VHS days...

I get that all the time when using italics or bolding. You can ctrl+i and ctrl+b to turn it on and off, but the moment you hit delete or use the arrow keys, you'll jump to the end of your italicized or bolded phrase. As far as I can tell, it's unique to the Idle Forums with Chrome.

That's probably the case, but I feel that a good composer can probably circumvent it. For instance, Sid Meier's Pirates! is what comes to my mind right after Arcanum when thinking of small-scale musical arrangements that play well with the theme. Sure, there's a massive synth orchestra when you're sailing the high seas, but walk into a tavern and you get a fiddle-and-pipe version of the same, or flute-and-horn during a land battle. And I second the hate for Latin choruses. At first blush they're dramatic, but that ready-made bombast is the least durable thing in the world. These days, I just listen to the weird un-Latin most composers use, which honestly sounds like this video to anyone in the know:

When my college roommate first started playing Oblivion, there was a stalking mission where you had to follow certain NPCs around the merchant district in Imperial City for some paranoid Bosmer. I left for class around eleven and came back for dinner at four to find him still following people. Apparently he was being so careful in his pursuit that he wasn't hitting the triggers for the quests to checkpoint and complete. Five hours! It blows my mind. This is by way of saying that I can only think of escort quests that failed to piss me off, rather than that I actually enjoyed.

Yeah, the best example of this is the interpersonal perk system. Unlike every other contemporary RPG except Dragon Age 2 to some degree, Alpha Protocol gave you stat rewards for being hated as well as liked. So long as you were consistent in your behavior, being an asshole to everyone wouldn't break the game like it would all the rest. That's not to mention NPCs like Steven Heck who love the crap out of you if you're just a raging douchebag, either. It doesn't have the follow-through you'd hope for in an ideal world of game design, but Alpha Protocol worked hard to discourage you from discerning an optimal path for any action.

Congratulations! It's easy to downplay a Masters as a stepping stone, but I know it's a big accomplishment all its own.

There're systemic reasons behind Walt's often off-putting behavior, but it's best for you to see those yourself. I've never seen the webisodes, but friends in the know have told me they're worth a watch. Not essential, mind.

Exactly. Tuco just appeared on the scene and possessed the violence and recklessness to elbow everyone else out of the way. I don't think it's ever implied that he's a permanent fixture, but he's certainly the kind of guy crime syndicates cough up all the time.

It may be a bit caricatured, but I think that the East Coast drug trade is a whole different ballgame from what the Cartels are up to in the Southwest. Blood ties and personal reputation matter a lot in the latter, because the goal there is not just to make money, but to assert control over every facet of illegal behavior in the area. Hatchetmen like Tuco are good for that, and when they get caught, you can replace them with someone more level-headed and the cops take off the pressure out of sheer relief. The really dangerous thing in that situation is criminal activity not beholden to the Cartels.

The context was if Frog Fractions was just its first part, where the humor is entirely in nodding and winking at how lame a game it is. I thought it was a fair comparison, but then I'm not crazy about Tim & Eric myself.

I really liked the discussion about geographical determinism in history and games. It was especially a good point Chris made about America's luck in getting out from under the colonialist thumb before the second and more intense phase of imperialism turned Africa, the Middle East, and South/Southeast Asia into the mess they are today. I mean, look at what havoc a little brushfire conflict like the French & Indian War wrought on the American colonies.

I never use the word "cunt" under any circumstances. I've never called a person by that word in my life. And I'm done with this weird false equivalency between anonymous people talking on the internet and the actual harassment of a woman in real life. If I buy the game, which I probably won't, I'll make sure to check back.