Gormongous

Playing FTL the past few hours, the Zoltan cruiser has rapidly become my hands-down favorite. You start out with the Halberd, a disgustingly effective beam weapon, and a light missile launcher. Get a better launcher to knock out the shields of bigger ships later on and you'll carve a bloody path of death from day one. I only started upgrading shields and engines as an afterthought, since most enemies weren't even getting one shot off. I can't even imagine what would've happened if I'd had a pre-ignition charger...

Witcher 2 did this so hard. "Hey, remember that vendor trash back in the first act? Guess what, they're components for the best items in the game! What, you sold them when they didn't prove useful during the first twenty hours of gameplay? Didn't you notice they were marked 'quest', like half the junk in the game?"

Atari's a little suspicious of digital distribution, I hear. You might be even further up the creek, since the whole NWN2 package doesn't appear to play too nice with Windows 7.

In a weird, completely non-serious way, I kind of love the whole mess. It's like some mad Caligula proclaiming to indie devs, "You say the people will buy your game? Then let the people choose!" And he just lords over the battle royale, eating grapes and rubbing his hands. He may publish the winner's game, he may be taken with the 'spirit' of the loser, he may execute the lot of them. It's not like there are rules here.

To extend the traffic light metaphor, the whole voting/percentage system feels like that button you can push at crosswalks to make the light change. The light will change, you can congratulate yourself for your hand in it, and meanwhile the system hums on invisibly.

Nah, I was more making light of wording in the announcement itself, as if the orchestra deserved most of the credit for the Halo soundtrack, rather than whoever composed it.

Honestly, if I were to put on my historian hat, I would say that it's probably the tendency to blame bad kings (or more tellingly, the bad parts of good kings) on their advisors. A king cannot fail his people unless his people fail him, etc. Whoever taught you and your siblings must have done a good job focusing on what Cromwell did, and not what he failed to do, but that's certainly not the impression I've gotten in my time teaching college students. Although... What were you taught about More? Maybe he was the bad guy in your curriculum, if not Henry VIII himself? There must be a "bad guy" somewhere, my job would be way too easy if there weren't.

I'm nearly positive that, should you ask ten people on the street about Thomas Cromwell, six will not know who he was, three will say he was a bastard, and one will say he was misunderstood. A popular drama piece that sets him in opposition to the world's most ethical man, along with a general impression of him as the enabler of Henry VIII's excesses, takes a lot of rehabilitation to efface, and I'm not aware of many people taking up that cause. It's like how most people I know think of Henry II as an immature lout, if they've seen Becket, or an impotent old man, if they've seen The Lion in Winter, rather than as perhaps the second most important English king of the Middle Ages, after William the Conqueror. Subtle, complex characters just don't make for good drama, essentialism does.

But it's the orchestra responsible for Haloooooooo

Thank heaven that the fad of historical psychology has died down over the past few years, it was brutal reading any purportedly historical work, for fear it might indulge in some noodly speculation about a figure's personal thoughts.

Yeah, that's what kind of burned me out when I played Warcraft III semi-competitively almost a decade ago. I had the perfect build order for quick-teching to flying units, which either was performed perfectly, leading to a win, or imperfectly, leading to a loss. If I was really firing on all cylinders, I might get lucky and have some time around second dawn to creep, but chances are I'd be watching my ally scout, in order to decide whether I'd research Storm Hammers and then Reinforced Leather or vice versa. It's fun to perform such an advanced series of tasks to perfection, like playing an instrument in concert, but I think it takes a very specific type of personality to thrive off that and not get bogged down by the interference of external factors or the importance of memorization/muscle memory.

God, has it really been thirteen years since Fight Club came out?

Yeah, same. Despite me outgrowing it in a strictly intellectual sense, my careworn copy of Salamander Books' Warfare in the Classical World by John Warry is still treasured by me to this day, not least for its Osprey illustrations and detailed maps. I'd almost rather Rob not mention the title of the battle atlas he was so impressed by, since I'm almost certain to buy it.

I think it's just a symptom of bad direction in general. The clips have way too much padding and silence, the VAs seem to be unaware of what lines precede and follow, and the tone jumps all over the place. It seems to be a classic case of putting your friend alone in a room with no training or direction and just using the "liveliest" takes to stitch together a voice track. It's cheap as hell and easy to excuse, which is why the American anime licensing industry made do with it long enough for "anime voices" to become a thing, but like FUNimation and friends finally did, it's worth noting how much quality voice acting elevates the fidelity and immersion of a media experience, in a way visual spectacle never could. Case in point: [/url]

Yeah, but denying that DRM is an effective countermeasure means acknowledging a problem with no ready solution, which is commercial suicide for a business.

Actually, the whole So basically the ending worked 50/50 for me.

I've come around to this way of thinking with the first Dragon Age. It's a collection of mostly uninspired ideas in the service of a story that plays it totally safe, as opposed to the sequel, which at least had some higher pretensions. I have a second playthrough that's been waiting over two years for me to finish, once I discovered that almost all the thrills in Dragon Age come from experiencing it for the first time.

So I finished listening to The History of Rome podcast, which I picked up when trying to supplement Dan Carlin. I have to say, for all that I found Mike Duncan's presentation a little lackluster, I'm still impressed at the fluency and self-assurance his detailed survey of the Republic and Empire bequeathed to me. Even things I'd normally complain about, like devoting almost a dozen podcasts to the Barracks Emperors and the Crisis of the Third Century, ended up benefiting me just because no one's ever bothered to cover the events in any great depth. I can't recommend this podcast enough. Anyone who wants an encyclopedic take on the history of Rome and doesn't mind a somewhat homespun approach is strongly encouraged to check a few episodes out.

Oh man. I tried so damn hard to like this when I got it in the seventh grade. It did so much cool shit that was all for naught because the gameplay was basically just stacking and jumping puzzles.

To be fair, Ubisoft has made similarly ludicrous and damning statements in their own press material. We live in an industry where everything is destroying everything else, Cold War-style.

I wonder if it isn't just the attempt to make all the ghosts follow Pac-Man in a straight line everywhere because they're all making the same decision every time.

I've been playing Metro 2033 a level at time every six months or so. I love the gas mask and bullet currency dynamics enough to keep bringing me back, but then I play for a couple hours and realize the rest of the game is all strangely unkinetic gunplay and clumsy stealth scenes. Seriously, if I had a dollar for every time I put half a clip into a guy and still didn't know if he was dead, or for every time I shot a guy in the head with a silenced pistol and still managed to alert the whole camp, I could buy and build a computer to run Metro 2033 at max settings. But I haven't officially quit that game, like with many others. One game I'm pretty sure I've quit for good though is Hegemony: Gold. I love it for being an amazing strategy game that fully captures the experience of command in the ancient Greek world, but that also means I was able to march a massive army through the northern Balkans, into a nightmare of starvation and rout, in pursuit of a campaign objective I wasn't aware was optional. Actually, through the same stupid determination, I was able to secure said objective, but it totally broke my game and left me unequipped to pursue any other objective. At that point, my options were to withdraw from Epirus and Illyria, which would take at least a dozen hours of game time to achieve, restart the campaign, which would take just as long, or tell the game to go fuck itself and play Total War: Shogun 2 like a baby. This is why sandbox games sometimes freak me out. I guess I am a baby.

This is going to be the most ridiculous quibble possible, but I've been doing enough Latin the last few days that I actually care, however temporarily. On the Extras page, the slogan at the top right is "Otiose pollices", which translates a little nonsensically to "Idly, thumbs" or conceivably to "Hey idle [one], thumbs". It should probably be "otiosi pollices" ("pollices otiosi" if you're going to follow the slight Roman tendency to put nouns first, all things being equal). Also, fair warning that "otium" and its derivatives have heavy connotations of unemployment and/or leisure time as well as idleness. Personally, I like that, especially considering that all other adjectives meaning "idle" tend to have pejorative overtones. Awesome site though, guys. Seriously, gobsmacked here. Yeah, I am also bothered unreasonably by this, as well as the podcast archive being three clicks from the main page, since those are usually my reasons for visiting it.

This is a big problem with Amazon's existing review system in general. Once upon a time, having reviews for a single product pooled across its various mediums may have made sense, but now it's ludicrous that I usually have to dig through three or four pages of often banal DVD reviews to find someone talking about the quality of the Blu-ray release. They are different products, which the complaint thread on the Amazon forums, the longest ever, can attest to.

The people who insist on "roguelike-like" remind me of the people who are really alarmed by the "watering-down" of genre terms in general, as if they represent some kind of objective reality.