Gormongous

No, I don't really see your point. Arguing for restraint and impartiality is just arguing against the victim, whom the judicial process historically hasn't been very good at defending anyway. But I don't want to get into this on yet another internet forum. And I'm begging you, get a better understanding of what sexual harassment is. For instance, any one of Brad Wardell's alleged actions are sexual harassment. Hearing someone else get called a "cunt" is not.

I really hate to say this, because such statements have been the ruin of many internet communities, but "haters gunna hate" is one of the building blocks of rape culture and "the truth will come out" has silenced countless women. Boycott the game or not, I don't care, but let's not just write alleged sexual harassment as "a culture of lewd jokes" in the name of impartiality.

Yeah, the tutorial is not great. The information's all there, but not presented in a very coherent or compelling fashion. The best thing for a new player to do is to pick one of the larger lords in Ireland and play it slow, working on uniting the island. The only power you're at risk from is Scotland, which usually takes a century before the king there is strong enough to present a threat. In an ideal world, I'd wish for a tutorial mode that had a smaller geographic scope and the ability to toggle in game mechanics as the player became ready for them, but I know that there's no way that's going to happen. Once you've grokked one Paradox game, you've pretty much grokked them all, so better just to force new players to climb the learning curve alone.

I might be the only person still playing this game regularly. It's just perfect to have on in the background, running at the lowest speed, while I'm doing research or chores. I'm playing as the King of Mann and the Isles this time around, after a late night a week ago reading about the Crovan dynasty. I've had the best run of ruler names: Aslak the Seemly, Gudrod the Hunter, Tormod the Silent, Erling the Monk... I've praised a lot of things about this game, but never the algorithm that quietly chooses an epithet based on your ruler's traits and ability scores. It's the little things. Also, my rainy little kingdom in the north exists in a horrifyingly shattered world. The Mongols made it to the Rhine before a last-ditch crusade led by me and Sicily threw them out of Germany. The whole Middle East save Turkey and Africa up to the Straits of Gibraltar are under the Ilkhan. These are the end times indeed.

Sometimes it can be fun. For example, several strategy games, two of which I mentioned in my first post, do a good job of encouraging you to roleplay a historical society or culture in a way that's not always logical but certainly feels authentic. In Crusader Kings II, it doesn't matter if my son or my brother inherits, because I keep playing either way, but of course it's got to be my son, I've groomed him for the throne, he'll be a perfect ruler, he has to have it.

I think you can incorporate history into video games two ways. Either you recreate a historical moment down to the last detail and let the player explore it from their own modern perspective, or you try to create a situation where the player must consider and make choices in an appropriate historical mindset. The problem is, both of these approaches take a massive amount of work and can easily produce games that are not fun if not handled correctly. See at least half of the "accuracy" mods for any Total War and Paradox game. "Magna Mundi" in particular was a great idea, making the player-as-ruler balance atop the tottering edifice of state, that was just miserable and boring to play in practice.

I'm sure I just misinterpreted. The way it was phrased on the podcast, it sounded to me like, "I'm supposed to believe that three people were familiar with this book I hadn't even heard of until now." Those were probably two separate thoughts.

I know they weren't being dismissive, I just couldn't think of a better word and forgot this is the internet.

I've mostly given up looking for games that depict historical events accurately. You take all the preconceptions and biases people have regarding the past, squeeze them through the restricted informational sieve of most video games, and you don't get much back. At best, you get the fuzzy history of the Age of Empires games. At worst, you get every other game set in the Middle Ages. Vikings! Now, games with historical verisimilitude are something else entirely. I've always praised the movie adaptation of Name of the Rose for capturing the feel of living in medieval Europe. Games have a lot harder time capturing that, because they require the active involvement of a player who is typically educated and self-aware, but I've found a couple that hearken to different priorities and worldviews than our modern sense of positivist progress. Crusader Kings II often leaves me obsessed with finding the right wife to bear my sons and sustain my political alliances, with little else matching my despair when the wrong child is heir. King of Dragon Pass sees me raiding other tribes even when it's probably the wrong decision, just because that's what my people expect, and I spend the winter agonizing over what sacrifices to which gods will ensure prosperity in the coming year. Both of them don't really contain historical events, but they feel more historical than the goofy shout-outs of the Assassin's Creed series anyway. Speaking as an expert in these things, Acre in the first Assassin's Creed was as accurate as they could make it, though they're forced to do a lot of guessing beyond the harbor and the Templar quarter. They fudge Jerusalem a bit more, except around the Old Quarter. Damascus is largely an invention. I can't speak for any of the cities in the second game, since it's outside my period, but I know my advisor was pleased by how much of Venice looked. Probably the most accurate city was in Assassin's Creed: Revelations, if only because they had access to the Byzantium 1200 project when recreating Istanbul. Funny story, my advisor is one of the bigger names working on crusades studies in America, so Ubisoft approached him with an offer to get on board the first game. He was interested, because he's a huge dork like that, but they just wanted to put his name in the credits in exchange for $500 and four copies of the game. No creative control or anything. So yeah, I don't really know what to say about the game's accuracy. The one guy I know intimately, William of Montferrat, is portrayed horribly as Richard the Lionheart's right-hand man, rather than an octogenarian Italian who came to the Holy Land to see his grandson Baldwin V and die where Jesus lived. Others might have fared better, but I take it all with a grain of salt now. By and large, games are only interested in the appearance of historicity.

Yeah, it pained me just a little bit to hear it spoken of dismissively.

Namco as in Namco-Bandai, right? I can't speak for games, but Bandai staged a catastrophic withdrawal the US anime market completely a little over six months ago. They're just letting their licenses lapse. Apparently, western consumers want too much too fast and too cheap. I wonder if it's the same philosophy in their other divisions.

This book is actually part of one of my fondest in-class memories from high school. Sorry, I know those are some pretty severe ending spoilers, but it's my favorite thing ever.

They put it in the demo, though! Actually, the FEAR demo was a pretty strange beast. Like Half-Life: Uplink, it was a stitched-together but narratively coherent sample of the game that didn't fit into the actual continuity. I kinda miss demos like that, though not for horror games.

Wait until you're in a place where you can respond with a level head and not with the giddy joy of finally hearing back from her, but yes. Finding that place may take ten minutes or a couple days, though. On my own end, I broke up with my long-distance girlfriend over the phone yesterday. I thought it over and decided I couldn't stand to wait two months to tell her a choice I'd already made. The conversation lasted nearly five hours as she cycled through emotions, at the end of which I was exhausted myself, but in sum I think it was the right thing. My only regret is allowing myself to be put on self-harm watch for her, but she is my friend as much as she was my girlfriend and I couldn't live with myself if something happened to her, whatever my role in the matter. Hopefully tomorrow she can go see her therapist and we can start giving each other some space for healing to take place. Ugh. This never gets easier.

The worst part about the Red Dawn remake is that they've made the Wolverines chase after some stupid EMP macguffin. The one good thing about the original (I didn't like it very much) was that it was just a slice of life, common to the experience of resistance fighters everwhere, but in the new one they're the only ones who can save the USA. Ugh.

Well, the problem there is that the lived experience for most of us is the threat of violence, rather than violence itself, but games have quicksaves and such that make postponing or averting violence somewhat ineffectual as a thematic element.

I meant more that I spent my formative years around people with beliefs different from and hostile to mine. If I wanted to live like a normal person, I had to make my peace with them, and I did. They aren't some abstract "other" to me, so I don't need a drunk psycho on the internet to give me a peek into their psyche.

I grew up in Texas. I understand Republicans fine. It still doesn't make that video anything other than a painful, embarrassing experience for me.

She rants for almost half an hour about how people who disagree with her are stupid and should die. There's pathos there for sure, but the only tragedy is the attention it's getting from us.

"Kiss my ass, you fucking libertarians! Go to hell, you think you voted for something but you are fucking stupid! You think four years of Obama are going to be better than four years of Romney? You are too fucking stupid to live here! Go to hell!" Yeah, sorry man. Just ain't seeing it.

After skipping around through that, I think we have different meanings for the word "poignant". Me, I've already had a bellyful of impotent election rage. No thank you on seconds.

Ah, DFW... I have such fond memories growing up there. It really drove home that E.B. White quote from Civ IV: "Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car."

I played through the majority of the first Neverwinter Nights three times, running into the same closed-off exit at the end of Act 3 every time. By the end of that whole fiasco, I had ceased to be the guy who beat every game he played, like I was the guy who finished every novel he started. I still have a nasty habit of seeing bad games through, bitching all the while, but a serious loss of progress that isn't my own fault is pretty much a dealbreaker now.

Death Cab sold out a while ago, which is sad because I still like them a lot.

I can attest that the original version on Ghost in the Shell 2.0 is terrible. It's lazily upscaled and aggressively compressed, to the point that you're probably better off watching the Manga DVD release (horror of horrors) with any old Blu-ray player and letting it do the upconversion.