Gormongous

Well, that doesn't bode well. I tried hard to stay neutral for the first two acts and the game tried both through content and through mechanics to kick me in the balls repeatedly for that choice. It worked, I gave up and took a side, then got shit upon repeatedly for not staying neutral. I don't know if it's because neutrality is the "true" ending and that has to be hard or something, but it was not a fulfilling experience to try for it, so I'm not optimistic for Moosferatu's concerns about this game, either.

Eh, for a while, Paradox was also releasing games and DLC with no serious bugs, either. That's definitely gone, even discounting total messes like Rajas of India. I think they were both top-down mandates, in response to contemporary commercial and critical failures, that have drifted by the wayside as their business entered a new heyday.

I mean, they're not forced to pick the questions that they read. They've repeatedly implied that they get more questions, both funny and serious, than they could ever answer in a weekly format, so there's no need for them to pick questions that make them uncomfortable or make them look briefly like sexist dingbats. Having them go on an unfunny jag about gender roles that also fails to answer the actual question is not good, except in a live show where they can't edit it out. Actually, live shows tend to be overall funnier, maybe because they can see from the audience when a bit's not working or when one of them is going off into the weeds. And yeah, Griffin still loves to talk like some goofy parody of an early-2000s rapper. The final question for this week's show was actually about how to get someone's dad to stop trying to use teenager slang, and I was surprised that there wasn't more self-awareness from Griffin as he made fun of a mid-forties dude for calling stuff "fresh" and "dope."

To be fair, the first game also suffered badly from the problem of recommending neutrality as the proper policy for a Witcher, but not really enabling it in the dialogue choices. The plot was humans vs. elves and dwarves, but very few quests had choices that did not explicitly favor one side or the other, and once a certain number were accumulated, you'd just be informed by random NPCs that you were a partisan of one side and that was that, even if you were trying to be just and to keep your decisions balanced. That led me to go over to the humans pretty quickly, but a friend who also played the game kept it neutral the whole time and was simply met in the third act with a "pro- or anti-elves" question that summarily wiped away his previous quest history. It seems like a long-term design problem, almost, that CD Projekt Red expects the player to pick a side, whichever one it is, and doesn't really support a middle ground, even if they talk about it in the game's dialogue.

Eh, the most recent example for me was a question about helping a guy who doesn't earn very much feel better about not contributing much financially to his relationship with his successful wife. All three McElroys got stuck for an uncomfortably long time up a blind alley about how he shouldn't feel emasculated by female power and how he shouldn't feel obligated to provide for his wife so that she can sit at home and do nothing, neither of which were even close to the question actually being asked. It just felt really awkward for me to listen to them each independently reinterpreting his perfectly normal worry ("I feel bad about not pulling my weight with our bank account, what do I do?") to something misogynistic on which they could pontificate clumsily ("Women earning lots of money is a good thing, you're just an insecure jerk."). And that's not when they accidentally say something transphobic right out, of which I'm much more understanding (although I don't exactly thrill in it).

For me, Common Sense represents a set of good ideas derailed by lack of conceptualizing and testing outside of the top ten Great Powers that Paradox plays in the inter-office multiplayer games, which seem to serve as design inspiration for them. Just as an example, the development system seems fine in theory, but in practice, both its thematic significance (infrastructure harms a country's technological progress and ideological framework by directing resources elsewhere) and mechanical implementation (under best-case circumstances, it is one-fifth as efficient to improve infrastructure than simply to annex new territory; the vast majority of terrain types make even capital provinces quite costly to improve; and yet another progression mechanic is tied to the completely player-agnostic die-roll of "mana," also known as monarch points, making gold even more of a useless resource beyond supporting armies and advisors) show it to be an entirely half-baked idea that isn't very workable outside of playing an already-big nation like France or England. Even something that the podcast praised, like the potential for development to let you customize different provinces, is being rolled back in the next patch. Instead, no one part of the development value for a province will be able to be higher than the other two, meaning that your tax powerhouse will have to be almost as much a source of manpower and production, functionally making the development interface a generic "make my province better" button. It's a shame that they got rid of all the different unique buildings in order to implement a system that's turning out to be less flexible and expressive, but I guess that's what happens when most of your game's regular feature additions and changes are efforts to contain and control player behavior. Maybe after another nine months, they'll get it into working order, like they finally did with coalitions, which still aren't fun to fight but at least function as expected.

Yeah, that's maybe the biggest stumbling block for My Brother, My Brother, and Me, even though I'm somehow a regular listener. I get the distinct impression that the McElroys don't say as many ableist or sexist things now because they've been taught through experience that they shouldn't say them anymore, not because they aren't thinking them anymore. It doesn't usually bother me, but there are still moments when Travis or Justin will say something awful and then the other two brothers will make them walk it back.

The only way to win is not to play (video games).

Yeah, even just changing certain settings in the Steam app for Android, which doesn't even have marketplace access, locks you out of the marketplace for two weeks. The past two sales before this one, I'd randomly changed a few things in the app after reinstalling it in anticipation of the Steam sale and ended up being unable to do anything with trading cards instead. It's... not ideal.

The most frustrating thing about The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, beyond the myriad of little annoyances that I covered in my liveblog of the first episode, is that the supreme dullness of Kyon and Yuki forces all of the ancillary characters to be heightened in a way that's actually quite funny but totally out of character for all of them. It's most egregious with Haruhi herself, because she's still the wacky dreamer who wants to believe in ghosts and aliens because she finds normal people so disappointing, but she is also helping a deeply boring girl get together with the only guy for whom she's ever had feelings, because... uh, I don't know why. But hey, it's funny, so... yeah!

Darkest Dungeon Life Is Strange A bunch of Payday 2 DLC The Endless Legend DLC Not bad at all, I just spent more than that filling up my car's tank.

We had a conversation in this thread a while back about the lack of female-created anime, right? In his report on AnimeNext 2015, Oguie Maniax asked the staff from Trigger about the creation of Turning Girls, and got this story in response: I've always though that Turning Girls was a little underrated, in spite of its extreme roughness, and the above story totally validates me. Unfortunately, they're hard to find subbed on YouTube, even though the full series is available unsubbed there, so I'll just post the first and good luck with the rest! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLVA_NtUwsY

Nah, I agree with you, but like you alluded to in your first post, there are exponentially more people who worship the flag of the United States, which has always stood for manifest destiny and native genocide, even if they did get rid of the parts of the Constitution that said blacks were three-fifths the people that whites were. At the end of the day, flags have got to be a blind alley, if we in the United States will still be living under one that represents a larger if more diffuse set of historical evils. I also agree that it's a problem if the Confederate flag serves as a rallying point for racists, bigots, and white supremacists, but then again Roof had no Confederate flag on his jacket, just Rhodesia and Apartheid-era South Africa. Humankind is fortunate enough to have created so many banners of intolerance and hate over the years, enough to fill a festival hall. Most Southern cooking is way too heavy for me, so I mostly express my Southernness through Western wear, excessive politeness of speech, and long vowels. There really needs to be an explicitly anti-racist Southern advocacy group, but that's enough digressing in this thread.

As far as I understand it, and I'd have the slightest bit of sympathy for it if it weren't for the great historical and social evils also represented therein, it's because other Americans shit on the South like no other cultural region of the United States. Only the experience of the Midwest comes close, and calling that region "flyover country" or "the flatlands" points more towards disregard than active antipathy. Being from the South, even the "exception" to the South that Texas views itself to be, has been an immense social handicap anywhere else that I've lived, and I've seen other Southerners band together under any conceivable symbol of that cultural difference, for mutual support and protection. Even if it tars them with the same brush as racists, many Southerners are willing to embrace the Confederate flag because it is the most identifiable standard for Southern culture, alone and triumphant. It's undeniably gross, but the processes behind it are easy to see. Honestly, I've had a lot of trouble lately feeling okay with the tendency of people to equate white supremacy with and confine it to the Confederacy and its sympathizers. Tamir Rice was shot in Cleveland and Eric Garner was killed in New York, but somehow it's always the South that is the real heart of darkness for America's problem with race. I certainly agree that the South has older and more systemic edifices for the preservation of white supremacy, but this is emphatically an American problem to me. Even if I were to limit my focus to Republicans and conservatives as the font of racist feelings in America, which I don't actually believe in full, it's still worth pointing out that most states' constituent counties are red by majority. I know this is a bit of a derail, but... I don't know. I might delete this later.

I'd recommend it with caution. EU4 is a much more discoverable game than the series' previous installment was, so the buy-in is often nonexistent for an enthusiastic player, but it also has a way that it wants you to play that comes through the design with a lot more urgency and intolerance than in previous installments. If I sit down to play it, I usually end up having fun, but the series' increasing multiplayer focus has me less and less willing to buy the neverending stream of DLC mini-expansions.

I don't think that the term "bro" is confined to a specific constellation of interests. For me, a bro is a dude who prioritizes their own fun and comfort over the wants and needs of anyone around them. In that way, Shawn Elliott unequivocally fits my definition of a bro, sometimes being downright malicious in his search for a laugh, and the early Giant Bomb segments with energy drinks also fit, but to a lesser degree. There's definitely a phenomenon where a group of late-twenties and early-thirties male gamers get together and erect a sort of reality bubble with their talk, which rapidly pushes any conversation towards "bro" territory.

I can understand why they did it, because of ratings and the moral outcry, but I mostly agree with the approach used by Paradox in Crusader Kings 2. Incest is so hard to prevent in a way that is transparent and satisfying that it's maybe just a better design choice to let the player orchestrate it and just not tell them that they're orchestrating it.

I still am bowled over that you're doing this. It's so cool, just because I complained about something! Lazyweb at work.

It is! My college roommate, who's really into music production and now works at Harmonix, agreed some months ago to write a soundalike for our podcast from the Trigun soundtrack, which we both loved way back when, but I think the announcement of Rock Band 4 has led him to forget that promise. If a few more episodes get made, I'll probably get around to reminding him.

When I first started listening, near the end of the second run of podcasts, I had enormous trouble telling Nick and Jake apart, even though that seems unthinkable now, but Sean's accent is so different from the one that Jake has, even though their pitch and timbre are extremely close, that I'd never be able to mix them up. I wonder why it's so different for different people. Of course, I also thought that Chris' mocking "badass" voice was a fourth person sitting in the room and not saying anything except the occasional quip for two whole episodes, so what do I know?

Yeah, I feel kind of dirty that YouTube's vaunted metrics can't tell the difference between me watching Sarkeesian for enjoyment and someone hate-watching it for nitpicking.

Jesus, that comic couldn't have less awareness of who Miyazaki is or what his works are about. It would make more sense for him to have Miyazaki resurrecting the God Warrior from Nausicaä in order to exterminate the "blight" of critical scrutiny, because those people are totally the protagonists of that movie.

Depending on your circle of friends and comfort with strangers, the only must-have DLCs the Courier one and maybe the CAR/AK Mod one. Most mission-based ones can be enjoyed just by joining others' games, and unless you're big on having a diverse selection of firearms, most of the weapon packs aren't essential either. It's really to taste. Oh, right. Grenades don't come standard in the base game, so you'll want to buy Gage Weapon Pack #1 for those, too. Anything else, your call.

Also, bless all you Thumbs for keeping up the spoiler tags even when their original purpose, keeping my made-up drama from dominating the thread, had manifestly failed. You guys are the best community ever.