Gormongous

Oh man, I'm already there. So far, it's a pretty good teardown.

Listen to the podcast! We talk about it there!

Watching him fumble through a historical argument and then a social one about how women should wear their hair, I strongly suspect that he's just not particularly bright and no amount of gameplay experience would have provided him with sensible justifications for his rage.

Yeah... I had my aforementioned game of Savoy-to-Italy go to the 1750s before the patch broke it, and I just kept thinking that the biggest design flaw of EU4, the most unalterable one, is that the most limited and most powerful resource in the game cannot be anything but monarch points, the lion's share of which are determined by purely random chance. The overwhelming drive in the game is to get your nation's economic engine up to the point that you can hire top-level advisors to keep the inevitable stint as a low-level monarch from crippling your game for several decades, and even at that point, monarch points are entirely too valuable to be used for anything besides tech and maybe ideas when the ahead-of-time penalty for tech is more than a decade. Everything in the game is ultimately devoted to widening the bottleneck of monarch points, if only because tech is king in EU4 and only monarch points get you tech, so the new "national focus" mechanic helps a little, but it's still a design that strongly discourages particularly creative play, even when compared to other Paradox titles like Crusader Kings 2.

Poe's Law, now and forever.

Yeah, I enjoyed the writing. It's just that everything in Borderlands 2 has that sort of unsteady relationship between humor and drama, to the point that Handsome Jack didn't particularly stand out for me. I enjoyed my time with him, but the revelations about his character at the end of the game mostly convinced me that a lot of that enjoyment was accidental or inadvertent, so I couldn't help writing him off.

Statements like that make me really bummed out that Handsome Jack totally failed to land for me. He was cleverly written, but at no point was I able to read him as anything more than a video game villain.

Also, it's here! Key Frames, Episode 01 - Gasbag and the Bomb Guy (Trigun: Badlands Rumble) Show notes are forthcoming.

Oh, I agree completely. The outcome of 96.74% ethnic and racial homogeneity is not some kind of historical accident, but a process beginning in the fourteenth century with the growing awareness of market dynamics, closed national identities, and political boundaries. Occupation by the Nazis and the Soviets almost certainly was an exclamation point rather than a period on that, owing to their brutally exclusionary ethnic policies. The current state of affairs is not the fault of Poland or CD Projekt Red, but when people say stuff that boils down to, "Oh, we tell stories mostly about white people because we're a nation of white people and always have been," it shows a disturbing lack of cognizance about how that sort of thing could possibly have come to pass, given the way the world works. And yeah, it's not exactly poor odds that CD Projekt Red will step up where their would-be apologists won't. I'm mostly harping on this subject because it's something I know well and something that's easily avoided. Hire a medievalist, fantasy writers. Hire one that's fresh out of grad school. For ten bucks an hour, all your fake Latin will be perfect and nothing in your setting will be fresh out of Ivanhoe.

I can't tell if this link has been dropped before, but I have an acquaintance arguing vociferously on Facebook for "artistic freedom" and "cultural heritage" in defense of racial representation in The Witcher 3, linking primarily to this letter: http://elysianshadows.com/updates/love-letter-to-person-who-demands-racial-quotas-in-witcher-3/ Reading it brought into relief two separate but interlinked problems that I have with race in The Witcher 3, one buying into the game's world and one critiquing it from the outset. I'll restate them, because I can't sleep. The Witcher 3 has very few characters that are people of color in it. No matter the state of this made-up world, if there exist people of color within it, then it strains plausibility that virtually none of them would have made their way to the Northern Kingdoms. Even in the lands bordering the North and Baltic Seas of real-life Europe, people of color were far from unfamiliar during the Middle Ages, and even an inhabitant of the most remote village would have seen at least one or two during their lifetime. For the rich and cosmopolitan cities of the Baltic on which in-game locations like Novigrad are based, it would have been downright common to see people of color, but CD Projekt Red has decided instead to keep up the whitewashing done by decades of lazy video game world-building. What better way to make it feel like it takes place in someplace like medieval Europe than to cram it to the gills with white people? The above letter brings up the possibility of a later Witcher game taking place in Arabic-flavored Zerrikania, unfortunately focusing on how exotic its setting would be, and yet how utterly inconceivable would it be for that hypothetical game to include no white people at all? If Geralt is kept as the protagonist for that future Witcher game, which is possibly the most certain thing in the world, then there's already one white person right there. Still, make no mistake, there would be white merchants, white courtesans, white mercenaries, and white expatriates of all types, mixed into the game's setting for (ahem) color. I certainly wouldn't fault them for it, because that's how the world works, except somehow it doesn't when it takes place inside Poland's own little bubble of neo-medieval fantasy, where it's wall-to-wall white people because that's how big-budget games have always been made. The Witcher 3 exists in a fantastical version of the real world where people of color who actually were neighbors to Poland have been erased from the map. Instead of the steppes, there's just desert and mountains, so mercifully there are no Cumans, Mongols, or Turks invading, raiding, or trading in this analogue to Poland. The distant realm of Nilfgaard, based on the historical Holy Roman Empire that also spent centuries waging war on and exacting tribute from Poland, exerts substantial influence over the Northern Kingdoms throughout the three games made thus far, but the people just over the northern and eastern mountains, mere dozens of miles away, are so separated from the world of The Witcher 3 that they aren't even filled into the maps included among the supplementary materials to those games. People have a right to envision whatever fantastical alternatives to reality that they want, but if they end up envisioning a version of their not-so-distant history with all the people of color situated so far away as to effectively not even exist, then they're going to get the side-eye from me until I hear some reasons, and those reasons better be something less self-serving than two centuries of undeniable hardship somehow giving them the right to present their past (along with the pasts of others) with whatever additions or subtractions happen to strike their fancy, no matter how unjustified or distasteful, which is the going excuse in the above letter and among most people defending the racial representation in The Witcher 3. I had a lot more bile to spew about several implications in the letter, most notably this persistent notion that Polish developers have a right (or even an obligation) as a formerly stateless culture to create works that feature that culture exclusively -- with the natural exception of whatever borrowings from Western European history and mythology appeal to them, so long as they don't feel pressured to represent the reality of people of color in Polish society since Varangian routes connected the Baltic Sea to the Black and Caspian Seas in the ninth century, if not before during the Avar Khaganate of the sixth century, but... uh, I guess I just did. As someone who's been reading fantasy novels since he could read and studying history intensively for almost a decade now, I'm so bored with this bullshit being the current state of affairs. The only reason that all-white settings are the standard for works of neo-medieval fantasy is because they feel more authentic to most people's misconceptions of the past, and it's time to start calling out that feeling as white supremacist, however unintentionally it may have come to them, so we can recognize its basic historical dishonesty and move on to newer and better things as a subculture and a fandom. I like The Witcher 3 a lot, but I hate that good games are expected to get a pass for the shitty things that they do in the process of being good games. Cultural criticism only seems to stick when the games themselves are terrible, and then it's always overshadowed by the fact that the games themselves are terrible and of course they shit the bed in other ways, too. I'm sorry. I'll stop.

The theory around other corners of the internet is that they're pointedly holding the door open for another exclusivity and promotion deal with Sony. It's fully possible that the up-front infusion of cash makes for better margins than increased sales in an additional market.

Wait, it's Twig's fault? I'm totally onboard for blaming Twig, but give me a reason so we can keep our stories straight.

Lord Gaben Long Beard A Nerd Blog Bland Ogre Rend a Glob El Dong Bar

Hmm, you're right: エンディング. Oh well, next theory!

Haha, that's okay. What do you like about it, is it relaxing or funny or what?

I mean, Holkins says a lot of things. He compares Hatred to punk, he's got a brief "boys will be boys" line leading off the second paragraph, he devotes his entire third paragraph to the importance of flattering what he sees as broken and corrupt games media, he says that our current system is "vastly superior" to the old way of making games even if Hatred is one of its products, and he lays the fault of Hatred's success solely on the doorstep of the traditional games media. Just because the lattermost item comes last and most clearly does not mean it's a thesis or that it has any unifying influence on Holkins' impressionistic attempt to plumb the depths of this issue. Wasn't Hatred taken down from Steam, and wouldn't that have happened anyway without a (largely overstated) media outcry? "Banned from Steam" is the new "Rated AO for adults only" and I'm not sure Holkins is saying, "Publish only serious criticism of Hatred." When he talks about talking, his appeals are entirely negative, in favor of absence. You're interpolating a stated need for John Walker in that rant.

Is there anyone who can offer a verdict on whether Sound! Euphonium is worth my time? I have a soft spot for KyoAni after all these years, but if it's just K-On: Big Band Edition, then I'm going to pass. I'm still watching Crest of the Stars. Guys, it's really good, really inventive space opera from a Japanese author with serious chops. I'm a little stunned that it even exists.

As far as I know, it's just a weird thing where "opening" and "ending" were transliterated into Japanese, then an abbreviation made from the first "letter" of the first two syllabic characters. Hence we get something like OPening and EnDing.

I don't believe in an anti-Hatred article. I believe in serious, sober examination like John Walker did Rock Paper Shotgun, which was widely decried by various commentators as either too conciliatory to a game that should be absolutely unmentionable or as unfairly censuring of the game's several flaws owing to an assumed SJW bone to pick. I just have a problem with people saying that the correct response to Hatred is total silence, as if the correct response to anything hateful and offensive is silence. It's a policy of quietism and it doesn't work over the longer-than-short-term, because it simply allows people who don't find it hateful and offensive to dictate the conversations in a space.

Yeah, there's a strong strain of "just don't talk about things that you don't like," which has worked great for Penny Arcade in the past, especially with their own scandals, but is not terribly good or useful advice for the entire edifice of games criticism. Also, ten thousand kudos for being one of the world's most popular webcomics and making a comic and newspost about a game that, as far as I can tell, they don't feel should be talked about. If games journalists find Hatred offensive or disturbing, they should just keep quiet lest the trolls be encouraged, but Penny Arcade is above the fray, meta-meta-commentary, so they can talk all they want. I won't even get into the quasi-GG rhetoric of the third paragraph. No amount of industry-specific "ingratiating" is going to make Hatred palatable to most people, and implying that that's the major difference between it and something like Hotline Miami (which was also decried by some, for good reasons, as much as I personally love the game) is patently absurd. Jerry Holkins is possibly the densest "smart" person I've had the dubious pleasure of reading.

Best part of Baki the Grappler, the OP, which has the best fighting in a fifty-odd episode anime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAkTFFxUi1U Warning: obnoxious Japanese screamo music.

Yeah, it's incredible that there are at least two people on this green earth (the author of the manga and the director of the anime) who love throbbing, veiny, hernia-type muscles that much.

I could have gone on for a while, actually, but when it became clear that no one else had seen it or even heard of it, I figured it was a waste of everyone's time for me to wax eloquent about this bizarrely homoerotic fighting anime...