Gormongous

We're going to have to agree to disagree, then. While I like a lot of the themes you mention, especially the idea of alternatives, I think that those are best conveyed through environmental data and gameplay outcomes. Expanding the brief and impressionistic non-combat interludes of the first game into multi-minute scenes of characters and events reveals to me how uniquely bad the Hotline Miami engine is at facilitating that means and mode of storytelling. It feels like trying to do Shakespeare while riding somewhere on the subway. I've never said that Hotline Miami 2 is completely devoid of ideas, and if I have I misspoke, but the game is impressively bad at conveying what ideas it does seem to have, when it's not conveying them through its depiction of violence (or, in the case of Evan, the lack thereof. Evan's quick emptying of guns that he picks up builds his character better for me than any of his interminable conversations. It still feels silly for him to be beating up an entire nightclub of guys, but at least the game lets you run past most of them. You're penalized horribly in terms of score, though, because the game wants you to know what really counts, characterization be damned). The fact that the writing is of poor quality, in addition to being mostly redundant, just serves to sap my patience with it all the more. Half the lines could be cut from almost any verbal exchange without a loss to meaning and character, which was a funny quirk of the first game's writing that becomes a serious annoyance in a game that's twice the length with many times the dialogue. Did you know about the newspapers inserted into several of the levels that detail the geopolitical situation leading up to Hotline Miami 2's ending? The Dennaton guys like to over-explain themselves in really odd ways that make me feel like the first game's "secret" ending was more serious than not at all. Also, and this is just a side note, but I don't think that anyone's a dying hallucination by Jacket? I thought we see him in jail at the end of the second game. At least, the game's wiki confirms that impression for me.

I don't think callbacks to events or characters of the previous game count as "careful" writing unless they bring a new perspective to those events or characters. If that's all that takes, every Call of Duty game has "careful" writing, which actually may be true but does not stop it from being rote, derivative, or just plain boring. To be blunt, I think that the story of the sequel is the least interesting path that someone writing Hotline Miami: Aftermath could have taken. Really, you're telling me that the consequences of Jacket's violent acts, themselves prefigured by other violent acts, have echoed out, causing more violent acts as others don their own figurative masks, until the escalation causes the ultimate violent act? Even if the presence of Helmet and others in the first game weren't already a fine treatment of that theme, is it really profound and exciting enough to draft the engine's slow pacing and the writers' flabby dialogue into dragging such an obvious thing out for fifteen or so hours? I don't think so, but obviously I'm in the minority here. I just feel like, in a game like this, the story should stay out of my way, but in Hotline Miami 2, it most definitely didn't. It kept getting in my face, as if I enjoyed the brief weirdness of picking up a pizza from a guy spouting a handful of nonsense in the first game as anything more than fifteen seconds of incongruously humorous downtime between levels. I don't want to hear his fuckin' life story.

None of your comments really address the writing or story, though, which is where I think Deadpan's taking a lot of his beef. I'm not as extreme in my views, but gameplay criticisms aside, I do see the writing in this game as an abject failure to be about or to accomplish anything, or even to provide proper framework through which to enjoy the violence, if this bigger-and-better sequel to a nihilistic video game about wallowing in violence also claims that same mantle. There are too many characters and too many scenes to be thematically coherent, the timeline skips around so much that it's a lot harder to care how those scenes and characters relate to each other, several plot threads are left entirely dangling, the ending is abrupt and unearned, and the powerful motifs from the first game (especially the masks) have been diluted down to a Greek chorus of mockery. There is literally no part of the game's writing that distinguishes it as better than a hypothetical "Lost Levels" DLC with absolutely no story to explain it for me, which makes me wonder why the developers bothered. Either i) they deliberately chose to write a long-winded and obscure plot, wherein multiple minutes are spent listening more than once to minor characters muse on what they'll do when they quit the military, and happened to totally miss what worked about the first game's barely-there plot, which was full of nonsense but never wasted a second of your time that wasn't needed to set the mood, or ii) they did it all by accident, in the process of just making the game. Neither of these particularly absolves them from writing a terrible video game that is substantially less fun for me to play, so I'm okay with taking them to task. If you like the writing, like thecatamites did earlier in this thread and made good defense of it, you're welcome to say your piece, but I don't think I'm just saying that I didn't like the game. I think there's substantially less craft at work here, or at least the same amount of craft spread thinner over a much larger game.

Yeah, I think one of the big problems there is that the first Hotline Miami was so inarticulate that it came off weird and confusing in a way that felt cool and deep, even if the secret ending revealed that such a feeling wasn't intentional. In Hotline Miami 2, it's still inarticulate, but it's less excusable both because it's a sequel that should have the tone nailed down and because it's so long that it becomes obvious when the writing stretches thin that it's got nothing to say. It's cryptic, I'd agree, in the sense that it's unable to say what it means... not to imply that it has anything meaningful to say.

Ever since he revealed his Livejournal, Nick has always been the most plausibly human of all the hosts to me, no matter what he says now, because I can always plot the line from Nick being pissed about college admissions to Nick being pissed about Empire: Total War and the outline is always unmistakably Nick Breckon. Although, come to think of it, Chris' multiple childhood stories in recent episodes might also do the same, after a time...

My friend, who's crazy about obscure movies, has had it for at least a year. He loves it, but there is the caveat that you have to schedule your viewing almost entirely around making time to watch whatever movie's up if you want to get your money's worth.

Yeah, true. If the goal is hearts-and-minds, then the scorched-earth policy of hypocritical harassment is the worst thing ever, which is a big part of why #GamerGate managed to turn itself into a hate group on the fringe relatively fast. But, for some, it's total war, in which case the total annihilation of a given enemy, regardless of material or psychological loss, is what's considered a victory, and it's working marvelously well for those (probably more cynical and hateful) people.

There is a definite school of thought that finds hope somewhere in WataMote, but I literally cannot understand where that's coming from. There are scenes, usually at the end of each episode, that are framed using tropes from more positive media, but they're part of the black humor. Their presence doesn't make the scene itself positive. The only possible exception comes in the final two episodes, leaving out the OVA.

It's an extraordinarily effective strategy. Time and again, we've seen that simply being the first party to make accusations, even if the accusations literally apply only to said party and not to anyone else, let alone the accused, is maybe the most powerful rhetorical tool for #GamerGate and its sympathizers. Looking at the posts about Coffin above, it's unbelievable (and unbelievably hypocritical) for them to attack him with allegations of inventing a wife and family, leaving him with the impossible onus of negative proof, but once shame as been wholly discarded, there are no limits. It's like Colonel fuckin' Kurtz lecturing about defeating the enemy by becoming more monstrous than they can bear.

I mean, my opinion on WataMote is that it is so unwilling to give Tomoko even one moment of true happiness, free from her anxieties and delusions, and so unflinching in showing how pathetic and miserable a life like that makes her, that it really doesn't qualify as laughing at the misery of others. As much as possible in animation from a publicly owned company airing on broadcast television, the audience is down there in the trenches with her the whole time, which I'd argue to be the important distinction that keeps anyone (at least, anyone reasonably self-aware) from establishing the sense of superiority necessary to look down on her in a dismissive or demeaning way. Basically, anyone who spends the entire anime laughing at Tomoko creeps me out, because the anime gives me way too much information about her situation, whether or not I sympathize with it, for me to be comfortable doing that.

Yeah, I don't entirely understand why they made the traffic simulation so deep and so fine-grained if they give the player only the most basic tools to manage it, especially with highways. Seeing stuff like Timboh's twenty-three different types of interchanges on Steam Workshop, there's obviously a well-developed base of knowledge for this stuff out there, so I'm not entirely sure why the player is expected to create their own from scratch. I guess maybe it's a remnant of the design philosophy that informed the Cities in Motion series? Also, Timboh's commentary on every single one of those twenty-three interchanges, including how common they are, where they can be found, how cost-effective and/or modern they're perceived to be, and what the advantages and/or disadvantages are is nothing short of wholly engrossing.

The second season of Seitokai no Ichizon is really good? I remember the first one being funny, but mostly a poor man's Seitokai Yakuindomo (even though I watched Seitokai no Ichizon first), but the second one has good plot development for a one-off meta-gag show and actually fixes most of the art and pacing issues I had with the first season (probably due mostly to a new studio animating it). Both seasons are coming out on Blu-ray in late spring, so I guess that's a must-have for me now? You can see how conflicted I am.

I feel you. I really want to build Dallas, with its beltway loop and slightly off-grid main arteries, but to give it the real feel of home, I'd have to find an easy way to depress property values and keep most neighborhoods one-story or abandoned. Challenges!

Do we have a corny AMV/VGMV thread, Patrick? Because you and I could ruin this forum.

I love this slip.

Oh, I don't disagree. I suppose I just considered "has the depth and maturity of thought to realize that one has nothing to contribute on a topic" to be part of having one's thoughts together, but it's true that, in most cases, a moment of introspection would probably not improve the final product that comes out of TB's mouth. He quite literally cannot conceived of a situation in which his opinion is not welcome, and that makes him both pathetic and terrifying to me. I also just wonder what it must be like to be TB, to consider myself one of the really smart people out there and to see others who seem smart like I know myself to be having brief but enlightening conversations with each other, but who suddenly lose the ability to articulate basic concepts in a way that I understand when I try to have one of those conversations, too. I wonder if I'd wonder what there could be about my intellect, in breadth or depth or width, that makes apparently smart people lose the ability to communicate effectively with me, another smart person. I wonder if I'd be as lazy as TB and just redefine intelligence as the ability to speak to me, a self-evidently intelligent person, in a way that I understand.

As he clarifies later in the tweet thread, it's any fiction where the political message is unsubtle enough for him to notice it. As far as I can tell from his words, throughout time, humanity has striven to create truly apolitical characters in artistic works in order to be appealing to everyone everywhere, but only with the power of mass media and focus groups in the twentieth century has that become truly possible. Nowadays, when he sees a character who thinks, says, or does something with which anyone could disagree, it pains him, because it threatens to drag us back into dark times like the Romantic Era, when no one could enjoy art because they were all too busy being offended by it! I'm beginning to see all too well that TB is not terribly articulate, but unwilling to hold off commenting on something until he's got his thoughts together, so he is perpetually caught defending stupid shit that he can't let himself admit meant how he said it. In this case, he doesn't enjoy characters that feel like mouthpieces for their creators' beliefs, but just to say that sounds like an Opinion, the most dreaded of all statements, so instead he spits out nonsense that looks like it could have come out of the mouth of Will H. Hays, thereby graduating from Opinion to Fact. As has been said many times before, I'd feel sorry for him if he wasn't a self-righteous dick about his own ignorance and the harm it causes.

I imagine their more studious members trolling history books, searching for fresh atrocities from the past to take up as emblems of their flagging movement. My money's on the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre next. A rash of sudden and treacherous assassinations by reactionary forces leaves an open and vital movement for reform crippled for want of leaders, forcing it to become increasingly radicalized and eventually sidelined? It's just barely dramatic, confused, and inapt enough to quality. I guess I reference the Wars of Religion in this thread a lot. They just fit the situation so well: a cultural force with a universalizing ideology, once dominant, making war upon progressive reformers just for existing, without any awareness that their moment has passed and that they should just look to their own borders. Even the bizarre fixation of individuals as flashpoints, regardless of how commonplace their views are, works to a disturbing degree: Luther was and Quinn is hated for being Luther and Quinn, respectively; even if the Ninety-Five Theses and Depression Quest were to vanish from existence, their attackers wouldn't let up.

That's a really great post, Fingus. I'd almost rather defer to your perspective on this, but I'm an idiot loudmouth. I mean, that's not entirely true for some boards. I don't know how they do now, but /tg/ used to archive some of its threads regularly and posts summaries of others that the community missed or were too unfocused to be worth the space. The use of tripcodes is also encouraged to make popular members of previous threads recognizable, especially creators of homebrew games and systems, although I know that tripcodes are met with extreme hostility on a lot of other boards. But yeah, the broad strokes of what you say are true, especially of the more public-facing elements of 4chan.

I don't know, there weren't all that many great board game communities online in 2007. Eight years ago, there was barely an awareness of board games as a thing people do at all. Regardless, my point is that there were (and maybe still are, I don't know) non-toxic communities in 4chan, so generalizing the entire site as a "trash thing" that has done and made absolutely nothing worth saying in its defense is an overreaction, albeit understandable. I am deeply suspicious of people who see the whole of 4chan and everyone who's ever contributed to it as an unmitigated evil. I've never seen that attitude towards Reddit, which has a similar dynamic between its different boards and members, even though it lacks the anonymity. I don't know. I'm regretting speaking up, because it sounds like I'm defending 4chan, when really I'm just objecting to any site being condemned on the basis of being (or appearing to be) "a horrible website that allows awful people to get together and post awful things." That's a fuckin' broad brush that could paint just about any site. Fuck RPS, assholes say gross things in the comments!

Yeah, sorry. I thought speaking generically would be enough. That's actually my problem with the show, though. In seven episodes, it's already established this pattern of an initially dumb or greedy action by Saul initiating a crisis, him agonizing over it, and then him doing the right thing in the end. There's no texture for me there, which makes the slow pacing a huge problem. It really is a little bit like my broader issues with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, as Badfinger said, although they have poor craft making them unbearable rather than just disappointing, as is the case with Better Call Saul.

That's fair. I really don't have an interesting in defending 4chan as it is now. It's clearly the foundation for a pretty terrible part of the internet, and there's other sites doing what good it does just as well. I'm just uncomfortable saying fuck the site and all the people on it, just because it enables incredibly toxic behavior among a certain subset of users. That's a brush that would have included me four years ago, and I didn't believe in 4chan at all, but it was a place where I could go to talk about board games with smart and passionate people. A less self-aware Gormongous might still be there, unhappy about the ever-increasing levels of hostility within 4chan as a whole but content to ignore it. Yeah, and in that respect I agree completely. Poole definitely tried to let the problem solve itself, and looking at some of the talks he's given in the past, he thought it had. That's a big mistake on his part and I'm totally willing to see him catch heat for it. I just don't know what to think about the implicit argument that his mistake wasn't failing to moderate 4chan when its lawlessness started to become a cultural problem, but bringing 4chan into being in the first place.

That's diving pretty deep, I feel, and I don't know that either of us can substantiate our arguments there. Is 4chan's influence on internet culture so strong that its very existence shapes user behavior on other sites? Possibly, but at that point the area of effect is so massive that I have trouble laying it in its entirety at Poole's doorstep. He hasn't been proactive at all, for which he is hugely at fault, but who could have foreseen their own website being so culturally significant (and culturally toxic) that it basically becomes a cornerstone of the culture itself?

I admit, it also makes me a little uncomfortable to paint all of 4chan with the brush of /b/. I spent about almost years on there, mostly /tg/ and /x/, starting in mid-college and ending after my first year of grad school. It's a fucked-up place with a lot of ad-hoc rules that only work because of a culture of irreverence and fear is so strongly in place, but I also saw a lot of good in the people there, most of whom hated /b/, with its raids and doxxing, and wished it didn't define how the world saw the rest of 4chan. Not that they did anything about it besides pretend /b/ didn't exist and that doesn't excuse any of the awful shit that's come out of it, of which there's a lot, but acting like 4chan (and subsequently 8chan) is anything besides a symptom of the problem is extremely silly.

In my department, it's generally given that you can use either Latinized or Anglicized form of popes' names in your writing, so long as you're consistent. The exception for Latinization is Pope Hilarius and the exception for Anglicization are the Popes Eugene. Medieval historians as a whole haven't figured out how to handle Pope Lando yet, besides laughing every time someone vandalizes his Wikipedia entry with pictures of Billy Dee Williams and descriptions of Cloud City.