Gormongous

I felt the exact same way when I beat the first Fallout a few years ago. I convinced the Master to kill himself through my godlike speech skills, then I reloaded and shot him in the eye (along with everyone else in the base) just to prove to myself I could. It's really weird how combat is implicitly the fullest consummation of a game experience.

I'm glad Troy mentioned Crusader Kings II as an example of the fun to be had giving away control in a game. Besides my first game as an Irish duke, which had the benefit of wonder and discovery, hands down my most enjoyable CK2 campaign was as the Billung duke of Saxony. I wasn't exactly powerless, since I held the majority of northern Germany, but I definitely jumped when the emperor said so. I chose to play the perfect toady, helping him in all his wars and using the rewards to tempt fellow vassals to my banner. It was really cool to have my current ruler be appointed Senechal or Chancellor despite sub-optimal scores in the relevant skills, simply because I was on such great terms with my liege. Of course, that fell apart after about two hundred years when the sudden and unprovoked revocation of my primary title forced me into revolt, but I think we can chalk that up to bad AI without disparaging the mechanics involved.

This is going to be a dumb question for me to ask, but have you tried right-clicking on the .exe and setting it to run in Windows XP SP3 compatibility mode?

I just passed my doctoral exams with distinction. It was especially weird, because I remember having no clue about my performance during my masters exam, but this time around I caught myself in the bathroom mirror during the break and just knew I was nailing it. Of course, I'm going to maintain that I got lucky, that they happened to ask me questions I actually knew. If I'd been pushed about the development of scholasticism or post-1212 Spain, I would have looked like a total fool. Still, feels good. Oh man, totally printing out some of these. My current city is full of madmen and idiots.

If any of you listen to the Quarter to Three movie podcast, this is one of Kelly Wand's best synopses. He has to pause regularly to insist that what he's saying isn't his stoned misinterpretation of onscreen action, it's actually what's explicitly happening.

I first started reading "serious" gaming criticism (I hate those scare quotes, this is all going to be so damn po-faced) because (shamefully) Penny Arcade turned me onto Flash of Steel and Three Moves Ahead, which made me aware of Quarter to Three, Idle Thumbs, Rock Paper Shotgun, and No High Scores. I really don't differentiate between written and audio/video content, except for the circumstances in which I consume them. The difference for me is the site itself: Tom Chick rubs me wrong every so often, Three Moves Ahead veers into stuff I don't care about sometimes, No High Scores seems like it's dying by fits and starts, Rock Paper Shotgun throws up more articles than I can usually read in a day. In the context of all that, the last thing I need is another game site, especially one that seems so self-serious. Hasn't that "coming soon" placeholder been around for a couple years now? I'd really prefer they just make some real content instead of trying to drum up their own celebrity.

Ooh, so this is set in the north of England around the 1360 truce in the wake of the plague? Officially fifty percent more interested in this now.

I'm not saying people are forbidden to make jokes about sexism. I'm saying that care has to be taken to tell jokes about sexism that don't just serve as a blind or even an excuse for sexism's ubiquity and acceptability, however inadvertent. I rarely see would-be comedians and humorists willing to take that care. I mean, look at that poster. Really, if there is a joke to be had besides a nice set of cartoon breasts and hips, what is that joke? Is it just supposed to be funny that sexism and the male gaze are pervasive enough to make their way onto an unrelated wanted poster? How does that raise awareness? Minstrel acts reinforced that racism existed in the early- and mid-twentieth century, but they weren't exactly an asset to that cause. In the end, I feel like it's a little cowardly to hold humor as sacrosanct when it is such a powerful normative force in society. "Chill out, it's just a joke" is a nightmarish statement for a lot of people to hear about a lot of things.

A little. It trivializes sexist acts by making them seem normative, a commonplace thing you can joke about and everyone gets it, like airplane food or bad drivers.

Yeah, but even when successful, the creative decision to reinforce non-participation as an audience choice still feels like a weird form of entrapment. I mean, I have a friend who refuses to watch any film by Michael Haneke because she knows she'll be told in the course of the movie that she's a terrible person for watching Funny Games or whatever. By refusing to watch any Haneke film, she's supposedly learned the lesson Haneke was trying to teach, but somehow I don't feel like he'd be satisfied with that. Like... I don't know, if I never buy or play Spec Ops: The Line because I don't want to commit heinous crimes and them be blamed for them, have I cooperated with developer intent or subverted it?

Have I mentioned how much I love having you as a regular on the podcast, Sean? Of course I haven't, we've never spoken before. But that Progresscast where you and Jake hashed it out over themes of race and alienation in The Walking Dead was the first Idle Thumbs installment I could proudly play for my girlfriend, and that's awesome. Wait, actually I tried to play her "Episode Forty-Five" a while ago, but the Thumbs said "rape" a ton in the course of that podcast, so that was a bust. Good job improving on that too, I guess. I agree, though I didn't mean it quite in the sense of that developer needing to take one for the team. I just wish that the games industry (and Western culture in general) was at a place where people could differentiate between condemning the action and condemning the person. One allows the offending party to acknowledge the mistake and learn from it, the other demands they bluster like an NPC in Henry Hatsworth until the problem goes away. P.S. I just looked up "Henry Hatsworth" on Wikipedia to make sure I wasn't missing some secret crazy spelling, and apparently he's a "quirky, light-hearted character" who "occupies the #1 position in the Pompous Adventurers' Club". Looks like I have my next guild/clan/band/committee name.

I've tried for a few minutes now to write something in response to your post, mostly about good intentions and all that, but I keep getting hung up on this statement. Excepting various extremes, why wouldn't you want to apologize for something that made someone unhappy? To be less general, why wouldn't you want to apologize for a statement that a large portion of the gaming community and media perceived as sexist? Why stick by your guns, especially if you want to move on? Some intangible sense of rightness?

I agree on the need for moderation in the face of the Internet Hate Machine, but at the end of the day people are responsible for how their words make others feel. If what someone says is at best innocuous and at worst offensive, then they need to own up to the full spectrum of meaning their words can have and apologize. Whether they mean it or not, it's part of being a decent human being, just like letting people feel their feelings and not subliminating them to vague notions of "reason" or "progress". Believe it or not, there is a culture of sexism in gaming and, annoying as they are, these incidents keep it in the public mindshare, where it can be better discussed and processed. I personally found the mass calls to "chill out" much more disturbing, like a dysfunctional family that won't admit to any problems. A lead developer on a major game called a skill tree "girlfriend mode" for people "who suck at first-person shooters". He didn't talk about his girlfriend or his lesbian friend's girlfriend or any other sophistry like that. He talked about "girlfriend... who suck" and then poor Randy Pitchford went to work finessing it into nothing. What I really wonder in all this is why can't Gearbox admit that, intentions aside, one of their devs said something sexist? We don't have to pillory him as a bigot or anything, just hear him admit that his anecdote was sexist as it was presented and then apologize. No one spins a shaggy dog story about how their black friend actually makes this one racist joke okay, instead everyone gets to feel nice and grown-up for doing the right thing. Would that seriously be a bigger PR disaster than Pitchford squawking all over Twitter about "sensationalism" like he once did "shoddy journalism"? Not that we really have a culture that encourages people owning up to their actions, anyway...

Almost everyone I've spoken with views it as one of those books that's amazing when you're fourteen, but now you can't get over the fact that the prose itself is never clear, concise, and interesting all at once. Honestly, I think a lot of that is the product of people trying to "grow up" out of genre fiction, along with New Space Opera's popularization of jaded cynicism (which I also love, mind you. Huge Iain M. Banks fan here). To me, Red Mars and its sequels capture the childlike wonder that I still brush up against playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to this day. I'd really recommend reading the whole series when you get a chance, Twig. Robinson never runs out of ideas or stops being excited about space, which is exactly why I'm sure the Thumbs would or do love him.

I just listened to the podcast again. "Twelve Angry Men, except with automatic weapons." - IGN.com I've been meaning to ask you Thumbs for a while. You've read Red Mars and its sequels by Kim Stanley Robinson, right? It's gotten bad press since its publication for being details-obsessed and underwritten, but when I reread it last year, it struck me as the closest anyone's gotten to capturing the as-of-yet unrealized wonder and majesty of setting foot on and inhabiting an alien world. I think I've got a good quote from the short review I posted on my school blog a while back...

Which is nothing short of batshit to me. By developing a strategy game under the Bioware aegis, you're marketing on a segment that must be incredibly slim: someone who's fan enough to respect Bioware, but not to know that this is smoke and mirrors (or at the very least a bad idea). When they formed Victory Games, I was intrigued. When they gave their project to Bioware, I was confused. When I realized that it's all jive, I was done.

Unfortunately, the two-dollar welding goggles I'd gotten off eBay and the ten-dollar respirator were made of different plastics that would fuse together under heat. The one time I did, they looked awesome until I realized I couldn't take them off without the help of a knife. Yeah, but I'm not sharing because they're anime cosplay from even younger days. Let me tell you though, you have no idea the number of people who attend conventions just to sleep with someone willing to pretend to be their favorite character. Or hey, maybe you do.

I buzzed off all my hair about eight months ago, so I don't have any current pictures that actually look like me, but here are some oldies from my Fallout cosplay a few years ago: Wearing a canvas jumpsuit and twenty pounds of gear was pretty brutal during a Texas summer, but all the attention I got made up for it, especially since it wasn't the creepy sexual attention a lot of other costumes have gotten me in the past.

Can anyone comment on whether this is worth an unqualified recommendation? Back in college, I used to be good enough to break even on clan servers, but if it's just a graphical/infrastructure update, I can't imagine getting back into the swing.

The disparity between aesthetic and mechanic is more about how Western culture perceives combat, I think. Five hundred years ago it was bold yet sophisticated young men riding beautifully through battle in shining armor, today it's callous yet relatable slabs of meat who soak up bullets and dispense death to thousands. Neither of these actually capture the lived experience of combat, then or now, but they do transform the collective insanity that is war into something comprehensible and even laudable, at least for the spectator.

Well, that's part of the problem with the roots of Dota 2 as a fan-made Warcraft III mod, isn't it? I thought the Queen of Pain was a badly disguised expy of Morrigan from Darkstalkers, just like Lina is... well, Lina Inverse from the Slayers anime franchise. Did they really have to keep the derivative cheesecake on board to hold their audience?

I know it's not exactly a total refutation of his point, since they're both mass-murderers if you boil them down to their basic acts, but the two greatest leaders of the ancient world, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, were obsessed with their legacy to the point of severe eccentricity. Caesar's last act while being assassinated was to cover his own body with his toga so that people wouldn't stumble upon his bloody corpse and remember him like that. Then again, Roman culture built people that way, by raising them in houses lined with ancestor masks, forever asking the current inhabitants what they would do to earn their own posthumous spot on the wall. Honestly, much as I might wish it otherwise, I don't think there's a hard and fast rule for success or even for excellence. The closest anyone's come to good advice on that count is Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics: "Excellence is an art attained by habituation. We do not act rightly because we have excellence, but rather we have excellence because we act rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." But even that's not a roadmap.

Who knows? Thirty years from now you might be able to go to a video games museum and play a stylish installation of Chromehounds (From Software, 2006) set aside other great art like Bad Dudes. Me? I just ducked in here to say that I'd heard Chromehounds had the best gameplay-based voice integration of all time, though I wasn't in a place to buy and play a 360 until the servers were just about shuttered anyway. I'll have to echo Brendon Chung and agree that the squad voice chat for Battlefield 2 was pretty great all-around. It's really a misfortune that the game assumed competent people would be squad leaders, because a lot of the features they had available encouraged great teamwork.

I imagine that the biggest pitfall with AI is that the more experienced a player gets, the more likely he is to notice flaws. Other features like graphics or gameplay mechanics don't have that going on, and it's a fine line to walk. Either the AI is omnicompetent and the player quits prematurely (probably with accusations of cheating), or the AI possesses some weakness and the player quits once it becomes obvious (probably with accusations of laziness). I don't find it a very enviable situation, being subject to the Chick Parabola in a field where there's clearly still a lot of learn.

I could tell you the story of an aged king blessed with three daughters, each married matrilineally to strong young men of promising birth in the hopes that one might bear him a grandson to rule someday. Alas, more women were all that came of these unions, and so the process was repeated for another generation. The wisest of the daughters, a duchess named Eufemia, took the throne after the death of old King Giselbert in battle, but she soon died of depression after her young son was murdered while she was away on campaign in Denmark. Her younger sister Richwara was an able schemer and stood ready to take the throne, but any suspicions of foul play were allayed when she completed the conquest of the Danish crown and made substantial inroads into Prussia and Poland. Her daughter Berta took up the reins in turn as her mother lay dying and united the crowns of Saxony, Lotharingia, Denmark, Prussia, and Poland in an Empire of the North to last a thousand years, but some say the Kaiserin Berta's greatest achievement was at last bearing a son called Hesso, the great-grandson of the beleaguered king Giselbert. Thanks for indulging me. I've finally reached the tipping point I eventually hit in every Crusader Kings II game around the end of the thirteenth century, where my realm is big enough with enough de jure vassals that I'll never see another internal or external threat, so long as I keep the feasts and tournaments coming on a regular basis. I've still had an enormously good time, especially playing as a loyal vassal with little interest in expansion for the first hundred years. I'll probably sit out the last hundred or so until the game's timeline ends just to see my crowns assimilated into the Nordic Empire I've formed, but there's no need to natter on about that here. Other cool things I've noticed? The game's hidden genetic coding works great. The Billung dukes, kings and emperors have had enormous trouble with their children all being daughters, unless I take special care to marry them to fertile wives with a family history of multiple sons. Possession, which also bedeviled one of my early rulers, continues to be a family trait, popping up every third generation and usually around the forties, but only with the men. A few of the male cousins I've married matrilineally into other dynasties with family histories of poor health have had children and grandchildren manifest the same symptoms. It's awesome to see at work. Two of my rulers, Hesso and his mother Berta, were both killed in conspiracies fomented by disgruntled barons from their own demesne. It seems like the character AI has recognized that outright rebellions are doomed to fail at this point and has adjusted its tactics accordingly, but that might be me projecting. At the very least, it's cool to see that the AI can plot to kill over bad blood, rather than only when it has something to gain. The Black Death finally popped up in my game, around 1300! I've never actually seen it strike before, but this time it hit northern Europe hard and cleaned out maybe half my court, which made attempts to breed a male heir almost impossible. You can also see that I've resorted into fourth- and fifth-degree inbreeding out of desperation. Anyway, I need to take a break from this game, since exams are coming up in a big way, but I thought I'd go ahead and share the full story with my compatriots here before I call it. I found the RPS diary a little underwhelming, though probably more because Adam clearly confused Leon in Spain, Léon in Brittany, and Lyon in Burgundy than anything else.