Gormongous

I'll listen to the podcast more thoroughly later, but I figure I'd duck in here to tell a quick Civ story so I don't miss this contest like so many others. I don't own Civ V, but I tend to play on small-continents-and-large-island maps in Civ IV, mostly because I like stumbling on whatever political situations have developed on other landmasses by the time I'm advanced enough to cross the sea. I was playing the Byzantines in a game where I had every player's nightmare scenario: alone on what had to be the smallest island. Thankfully, I figured it out soon enough to bootstrap to Astronomy and contact the neighboring islands before I fell too far behind. By the dawn of the modern era, the Byzantine Empire spanned a handful of fairly rich islands to the west of a single, giant continent filled with infidel nations that would dogpile me the moment I tried to carve a foothold in any of them. At this point, I was the most technologically advanced, but I was maybe half the size of the biggest of my enemies, and half my territory was recently conquered, to boot. I had to find some way of destabilizing that continent while I retooled for a Space Race victory. Then I discovered Arabia in the cold and barren north of that foreign country, the only non-Buddhist nation besides my own. They'd clearly been losing border wars for the past hundred years, but that stopped once I began funding money, matériel, and technology their way. I've always been really stingy with gifts to enemy or neutral nations, so I was amazed how effective this was. Gifting the Arabs with two nukes and a handful of tanks stopped the Buddhist riflemen of a half-dozen hostile nations in their tracks, while my money and tech allowed the war as a whole to stalemate for almost fifty years, plenty of time for me to build every part of the rocket and launch it before anyone could redirect their war machine my way. As I closed down the game, I marveled at what real-life parallels even an abstracted simulation like Civ could produce. I'd made my own Israel, more or less, though I think I profited from it more than actually was the case.

Boo, someone changed my fancy Latin thread title to plain old readable English. Oh well. I have a beast of a PC I built a year or so ago, so it doesn't make a scratch. Like Orvidos says, some of the map overlays piss off older cards something fierce, and in general a larger kingdom is fairly RAM-intensive, though if you have an x64 system you can follow this tutorial to allow the game access to more than 2GB of RAM (targeting "ck2.exe" instead of "eu3game.exe" of course). I am having a heck of a time justifying a purchase of the Sword of Islam DLC. I rarely if ever play non-Christian powers, and ten dollars feels a bit steep for a lark. Then again, all the CK2 DLC has seemed a bit off in pricing for what it does. Two dollars for a sprite pack or a three-song addition to the game's soundtrack? Five dollars for a barebones character editor that barely works anyway? I don't know.

I wouldn't recommend Sins, which for all its 4X trappings is really just a macro-scale RTS, but the first Sword of the Stars and Galactic Civilizations II both offer great space opera moments. I bounced clean off Distant Worlds myself, so I can't comment. I just wasn't able to make peace with automating any part of my empire, even if the computer is better at running it than me.

It's really a balance mod masquerating as a historical accuracy mod. The important features are increased character mortality, slower levy regeneration, and more disastrous civil wars. These, along with trait rebalancing to make the other stats like Martial and Learning useful, mean that going to war is a true risk and keeping a happy kingdom a real reward. Basically, it short-circuits the snowball effect most people eventually notice in vanilla, where successful conquests fuel future ones and the bubble never bursts. With CK2+, I can't crush the Duke of Lancaster and extort his relatives for ransom if he revolts. He's married to the house of Norfolk, plus Gloucester and Cornwall still nurse grudges, so I have to conciliate him right now, but I'm low on cash, so my only choice is to appoint him to my council and give him my daughter to foster. Fingers crossed that this satisfies him, or I've put him in a great position to abuse me further. Double-binds like that rarely happen in vanilla. Paradox's design is towards maximizing player choice, agency, and empowerment. CK2+ doesn't take those away, but it imbues them with consequence. I wouldn't recommend jumping straight into the modded version, but sooner or later everyone's going to want either a more challenging or more verisimilitudinous experience, which is what CK2+ offers in spades. Still, I've had great vanilla games too. The tug of war with the King of France when playing as the Duke-turned-King of Aquitaine was pretty damn fun in and of itself.

Is anyone here still playing Crusader Kings 2? The big 1.06 patch has finally hit and -- perhaps more importantly -- the CK2+ mod has been updated to incorporate a lot of the new features. I'm currently playing as the Ynglings of Norway after an ahistorically successful invasion of England. Harald Hardrada's son Magnus was a worthless wretch who spent his short reign fighting border wars with Sweden and putting down revolts among the Anglo-Saxon lords, though that left his son Svend with little to do besides look longingly at Scotland. He hasn't bothered to produce a son, so I may be facing a fail-state in a couple decades. If not, I'm hoping to annex most of my Scandanavian neighbors and recreate Cnut's North Sea Empire. Or, you know, die in battle and watch the north explode in civil war. It's not as fun as my first game, as King of Ireland and self-professed High King of the Free Peoples, but I'm optimistic. How about you guys? Do you reload when stuff goes to shit? Do you roleplay your rulers? Do you hate how the vanilla game is full of immortal kings and unshakeable empires?

You don't need to apologize for bringing up Far Cry 2, at least in this instance. I regularly mention it as an example of themes and mechanics reinforcing each other, usually in response to someone's po-faced belief that CODBLOPS2 is the final evolution of the modern FPS or something. Even though I haven't played it in months, I continue to think about it, which feels like a more practicable definition of "art" than most. For my part, I loathed the combat all the way through the first Bioshock. I was one of those philistines who froze Fontaine with a plasmid, shot him twenty-five times with electric buckshot, and called it a day. For the first few hours, I felt exactly the same way about Bioshock 2 when I played it years later. Once I got clear of the heavy progress-gating, my mind began to change. At least in Bioshock 2, the imperfect and imperfectible combat feels like it's meant to work hand-in-hand with the extremely granular equipment/character customization options. Like a wargame where you draw up the battle plan and then let the AI simulate the outcome, the game here obfuscates and frustrates in order to ensure that decisions made before the battle have more impact than decisions during it. Sure, the outcome is typically to make the player feel like a clumsy oaf who bungles every encounter, but I think there's a philosophy at work here, and I like the idea of a system where the choices you make going into combat matter more than your skill at resolving it. The STALKER series tried something similar, and I liked it there too. Or maybe I'm overfinessing floaty controls and weird hitboxes when they just weren't a priority for the developers, I don't know.

Nah, I can see it as a great framing device! A small group of carefree revellers retreat to a lonely bunker in a radioactive swamp to escape the slow march of the world into oblivion. They choose to pass the time before the nukes finally drop spinning tales of the wretched lives lived by others in this war-torn and Orwellian future.

Oh, I thought someone had just made a movie version of Boccaccio's Decameron, which is what I was screaming at my speakers while Sean castigated himself at length for his own ignorance. Also, great to have a podcast where "baffle" and "boost" are used within ten seconds of each other. It's like old times!

Well, you'd hope they'd err towards caution, because I know that several devs have struggled to accommodate such a low memory ceiling on the 360, mostly by resorting to tricks and compromises that undermine the overall technical operation of the game.

Every time I've talked to a former Gamecube owner about Pikmin, it's always been a game they were interested in but never prioritized. For some reason, the eccentric collection of launch titles like Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin intrigued a lot of gamers, but Nintendo didn't really follow through with them. Instead, industry commentators whined about the system's "weak starting line-up", Nintendo responded with an onslaught of core brands six to nine months later, and everyone's like, "Thank God the drought's over!" It saved the Gamecube from the lackluster launch the Wii U seems headed for, but it killed a lot of great new properties in the cradle, and that's a shame.

It's purple, yeah. But it's towards a sense of pacing and atmosphere, at least in Miéville's earlier novels. I wouldn't dismiss them as overwritten any more than those of Dickens or Melville -- not to say his prose is on part with them, but still. Of course, I can only speak for his first few books. I got dead sick of him after The Iron Council, in part because I could feel him heading down the path of bloat for bloat's sake, which I'd condemn here as I have elsewhere. Edit: Also, Tycho mocking someone for an exaggerated style of writing, particularly one characterized by neologisms, is almost as funny as the comic itself.

I probably would have had something glib to say in defense of Crusader Kings 2 a week or so ago, but I've recently become convinced that a deep love of medieval history is necessary to enjoy the game. Usually that's not a problem, because if strategy gamers don't start with a passion for the past, the available titles out there will instill them with it in short order, but Crusader Kings 2 suffers especially in that without knowledge of the period and awareness of counter-factual situations, it's just The Sims 3 with vastly reduced interactivity. I became aware of this playing the Game of Thrones mod that was just released a little while ago. I have never found anything more boring than the endless wars of faceless nobles over arbitrary geography that this mod orchestrates. It even incited a half-serious argument with a colleague where I tried to use it as anecdotal evidence of how important the papacy was to the civilization of medieval Europe, considering that its absence in the mod leeched all the color out of the game for me. So I don't know. I'm studying for my doctoral exams right now, and I can tell you there's nothing more thrilling than reading about a certain historical figure and then seeing him at work in your game. It's a joy that never dies, and probably the best advice I have to offer.

Is that not allowed? Insofar as it was nightmare fantasy Dickens, I myself loved it. As the early peak of an increasingly underwhelming authorial career, not so much. I read Consider Phlebas at a pretty odd time in my life, when I'd just gotten out of college and was killing time working at a bookstore slowly circling the drain. During my break hours, I was digesting a lot of genre crap I'd never felt confident enough to buy even used, so the bizarre bombast of Banks' space opera kind of exploded in my brain. The ramp-up from Consider Phlebas through The Player of Games to the fullest realization of Banks' substantial talent as a sci-fi writer in Use of Weapons was a perfect storm of interest and circumstance, as well as one of the few instances where I will not bow to established canon in defending it as one of my favorite works ever. After those three, the Culture books get pretty uneven. Excession and Look to Windward are both much more inward and philosophical in aspect, though this is only a weakness juxtaposed with the robustness of the preceding books. And I won't even try to argue in favor of Matter or Surface Detail, which are serviceable but clearly products of a writer who's outgrown his editor, much like George R.R. Martin in his latest installment. And I haven't read Banks' mainstream fiction, so I can't speak to A Song of Stone, but I don't really have such strong opinions on his other genre pieces. He mostly seems guilty of the urge to revisit and improve upon the works that made him famous, like George Lucas or Ridley Scott. You could argue that Against a Dark Background is an incremental improvement on Consider Phlebas, but only if you concede that The Algebraist is an inferior retelling of Excession that largely misses what's clever about the latter. Feersum Endjinn is probably the only non-Culture feat of imagination sui generis, but it's hard to pass judgment on it for precisely that. It's doing a lot of interesting things, but is definitely one of those novels where the process matters more than the outcome, which is invariably disappointing. And as for ship names, it's so hard to choose! Probably "Of Course I Still Love You", though I have a soft spot for "Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The". It changes weekly, really.

Ugh! I've been trying to think of a tactful way to bring up my intense love of Iain M. Banks' earlier works here, but I just can't force myself to do so through the mention of Consider Phlebas as an audio recording. It's such a strange, bloated, overblown, intimate beast of a novel, having some stranger read it to you over your iPod would be possibly the worst way to experience it short of reading sentences off billboards as you drive down the highway, Burma Shave-style.

Telltale Jake's Backseat Woodland Jamboree?

According to its Steam entry, it's owned by Rebellion right now.

I think this is a common danger with any adaptation from a literary work, though. I spent about one quarter of my time while watching the new Game of Thrones series feeling put off that Jon Snow was so much greasier and puffier than I'd imagined him.

Time has not been entirely kind, but it's hardly ruined the game forever either. The biggest issue with me picking the game back up a few months ago was the incredibly heavy tutorialization through most of the campaign. There's a good stretch where you can't do anything without the game's say-so.

Personally, some of the better Paradox games, like the recent Crusader Kings II, play great as relaxing hands-off experiences, but maybe that's just me. If you play a small count in Ireland or Wales on a slow speed setting, it's a fairly pleasant experience not unlike tending a garden or something. Actually, on the subject of gardening, I may have an actual suggestion. How do you feel about Dungeon Keeper-type games? Looking at my shelf, I see Evil Genius and Startopia as two titles I remember having a very zen feel to them. I don't think they'd work well with a gamepad, but they're certainly not clickfests.

At its best, Taiko is like that, but more often the main character goes from bravery to cowardice in the space of a page, with no logical sequence connecting the two. In a way, it reminds me of the descriptivist histories I occasionally have to read, where events are flatly stated with no attempt to suss out motivation. Richard I Lionheart goes on crusade, burns a castle in Messina, meets with his betrothed, conquers Cyprus, befriends Guy de Lusignan, and so on. Taiko is more abrupt even than that, but it's an abrupt book in general, which is what makes me wonder about the editor and translator. It's exactly the sort of book I'd imagine you guys bringing up on your podcast, though. If it helps at all, it's not really a book that has to be read all at once, or even to the exclusion of other books. Sure, there's an overarching argument being made about information as the fundamental building block of reality, but I think that's better presented in Vlatko Vedral's Decoding Reality. Where The Information really shines is the vignettes that structure each chapter, nuggets of interesting ideas that you can chew on for weeks. The first few chapters about African "talking" drums, the history of writing, and the creation of the first dictionaries highlighted the enormous differences between oral and written cultures so well that I found myself bringing them up in every conversation I was having (and sounding like a terrific smartass too, I bet).

I hope I'm not repeating anyone, since I only joined the forum a few months ago and have only made it about halfway through the old posts on this monster thread. As a grad student with impending doctoral exams, what I'm mostly reading are books from the hundred-entry core syllabus. Malcolm Barber's The Two Cities stands before me, with Cyril Mango's Byzantium: The Empire of the New Rome ahead and Marc Bloch's La Société féodale behind. But no one wants to hear about my academic march to the sea. For pleasure I'm splitting my time between a fiction book and some nonfiction. Currently, the former is the abridged 1992 translation of Yoshikawa Eiji's Taiko, a fictionalized biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. I'm reading it on the recommendation of Tim Stone from Rock Paper Shotgun and battling very mixed feelings in the process. For what is supposedly a character sketch, Hideyoshi's personality and motivations seem wildly variable. He is both clever and dense, sentimental and hardnosed, carefree and intense, faithful and conniving, each in turn as the plot demands. Yet it's in service to an vivid and heartfelt tapestry of life during the sengoku jidai, which I find hard to fault. I often find myself wondering if the aggressive abridgment or translation is ruining the author's presentation. I know just enough about Japanese to tell that occasional compromises are happening, at least. On the nonfiction side of things, I'm reading James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. I've had an intense curiosity about Claude Shannon and information theory since rereading Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky a year ago, and I can certainly say that this is feeding it well. Besides that, all I can say thus far is that it's surprisingly personable, but that speaks mostly to my professional distrust of "object" histories, which are way too much in vogue right now. Before all this, I was reading through Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series, though I stopped short of the full bibliography out of sheer fatigue. I found A Wizard of Earthsea charmingly sparse, reminiscent of my time reading Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel trilogy and Garth Nix's Abhorsen books so long ago. The Tombs of Atuan only managed to tinge that pleasure with the slightest unease at the presence of a soapbox. Halfway through The Farthest Shore, I'd already decided to take a vacation from Ms. Le Guin. They're not particularly long books that she writes, but the economy of her prose and the ever-present sense of parable wears on even the most amenable reader. Anyway, that's it for now. I'll duck back in once I've read the whole thread (and probably added a half dozen books to my own list, to boot).

As far as I understand it, there have been no documented cases of a session hijack according to Blizzard, even though the very nature of the exploit would not easily be documented unless an interested party was made aware of one while it was still in progress. It seems like people are saying they're being careful, so it can't be their fault, while Blizzard is saying the same thing. I'll be curious to see if this question is ever resolved.

I'm sincerely curious here, not being passive-aggressive. What exactly would constitute evidence in this situation? All I've seen so far is anecdotal evidence on both sides.

Well, it was going to be that or Byzantium. I'm more excited about the expanded feature list, fingers crossed that the AI will be able to take advantage of it.

I'm reminded of the superstitions about health and cleanliness that were spawned in the wake of the Black Death, in a way.