Gormongous

Well, you actually unpacked it, so you get the points. You're especially right that it's been most common in reference to #BlackLivesMatter lately. Fucking #AllLivesMatter... One of the biggest signs of privilege is seeing your own voice unrepresented or misrepresented in a conversation, regardless of its subject, and being able to insert it at will without fear of being ignored or abused for it, even if it drowns out the people whom the conversation is actually about. Arthur Chu compared it to crashing a stranger's funeral to talk about your dead great-uncle or breaking into a cancer fundraiser to bring up other diseases. It's not that people with privilege have no right, it's that they do have the right and they exercise it constantly and people without privilege get kind of frustrated sometimes, which is fine by me.

I don't disagree, but I think that the best thing a prominent cultural voice like Savage offers is a clear position with which more informed people can dissent, so while I appreciate Savage's existence and much of his work, I never fault anyone for speaking out against him. Honestly, like most advice columnists, he exists to be disagreed with. I have complicated feelings about what you've said here, but I don't know quite how to unpack it, so I'll just rephrase it to be about race and see if you still think that the basic sentiment holds true. If you do, that's fine.

My screensaver and power options stopped working last night. I spent three hours trying to fix them (or rather, trying to find out what had broken so I could even start fixing them) and gave up out of sheer exhaustion. Woke up today, did a few minor tweaks, and now it looks like it's working fine... except nothing I changed should have fixed it, I was just being desperate. The feeling of something seeming fixed but maybe still being broken is my least favorite part of owning a computer.

It was talked about extensively both on Daft Souls and in the Rock Paper Shotgun review, both of which said that the plot would border on nonsensical for someone who hasn't at least watched through the third season of the show. If phrases like "the Red Wedding" and "Ramsay Bolton" don't mean anything to you in and of themselves, you're going to be making a lot of decision without any context but with dire consequences. Honestly, I almost like the idea of a game using the show on which it's based to handle all the heavy lifting in terms of exposition, but I can totally understand it being annoying to want to play a game and to be told instead that you need to watch some TV first. I'll probably bite sooner or later, especially if the game turns out to be a dialogue-based political relationships simulator in a neo-medieval setting. It's my dream game, as a medieval historian, to have a player steer the fortunes of a noble family by talking to the right people and not pissing anyone off (or by pissing off the right people, or by being confusing or pathetic, etc).

I forgot about the dread/chivalry dichotomy in Medieval 2! Yeah, it was really good. I distinctly remember playing the Holy Roman Empire and shifting all my dread-based generals to my front with France once I decided to exterminate them. Chivalric generals were for defensive wars.

It was funny to hear Fraser describe the Total War system of generals as a Rome II thing specifically, because Rome II is definitely Creative's least effective effort since the system of generals was codified in the first Rome game. Retainers and items can be swapped freely between generals to increase stats that have a largely invisible effect on the battlefield. Like many innovations from Creative Assembly, generals were best when first they were fully developed. The hope for a worthy son from a great general, the ability of generals to fail to live up to their potential, and the mechanics that made generals both modifiers and characters was the best there. It's never been a perfect system, because Total War games prize player agency and control a bit more than they should, maybe, but it was certainly vivid. Maybe Rome II could have approximated it a bit more if the restrictions on the number of armies wasn't so incredibly generous... Honestly, whatever else is implemented in a system of generals, if there's not a good reason coming from the gameplay for players to put a bad general in command of their units, I consider it underbaked. It can even be just that you want to give your failure of a nephew a chance to show the command potential that you're hoping and praying exists within him.

Yeah, and I'm seeing tweets like that everywhere. "Mercedes Carrera supports #GamerGate because she is personally attracted to members of #GamerGate, or vice versa, and she will show her support with sexual favors." It's only when people rightfully call that out as horribly objectifying and misogynist that they start talking about how she's also an engineer (or a sex worker, a woman being either seems to impress them equally) and that makes everything okay. Actually, looking at Carrera's twitter feed, she seems to have put herself in the unenviable position of trying to show support both for the charity she was going to benefit and the group of people that want to punish the charity for pulling out.

You're sassy today, Nachmir! Seriously, those links you've posted are both insane. There is literally no way that anyone could have been on the internet between 1999 and 2009 and missed the rampant boys' club of hate and porn that was the internet back then. It's gotten so much better now, in terms of being an inclusive space, that it's hard to remember a time when something like "Bow Nigger" represented not the most outre of multiplayer experiences but the basic cost of entry. I've mostly forgotten myself, but even so it was never a utopia, not even when I was much younger and dumber. Also, that complaint about villains is beautiful. They don't notice when the protagonist is always a white male, but they sure notice it when the antagonist is, and listen to them howl when they do! Man, wouldn't it suck if it were like that all the time, guys?

I am incredibly excited for a vision of the future from Steve Gaynor and the rest of Fullbright, but this is all I think about when I think about Tacoma:

I love all the people in that Reddit thread saying that this will upset and offend their opponents, in turn making everyone else see how ridiculous they are. Well, that's been your plan from the beginning, #GamerGate. Be honest, how's it working out for you? Also, it's not very "sex-positive" to have a sex worker from an exploitative industry perform without pay in order to raise money for an unrelated charity. In the abstract, it's a positive thing involving sex, but that's not really the definition of "sex-positive" at all. Oh #GamerGate, fighting liberalism with literalism...

I don't know that it's a matter of "better" or "worse" between the two games. I enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins a huge amount, but found repeated playthroughs to be really tedious. Everything grand about it begins to feel po-faced when you see it over and over. On the other hand, I think that Dragon Age 2 handles consequence a lot better, by virtue of it taking place over several years in a single place. Everything is able to happen at a slower timescale, which empowers the writing to draw out causes and effects in a way that is more dramatic and satisfying. Other characters take time to fall in love with you or trust you or hate you, and when some random NPC shows up to thank you for saving them, it's more meaningful because it's been months since that and you can better see the good you've done there. I also like parts of Dragon Age 2's combat better, because the combo system based on brittle/staggered/disoriented was a lot more discoverable and sensical than the first game's largely undocumented combos. Honestly, the actual weaknesses of Dragon Age 2 come from repetitive art and a rushed ending, both of which are the fault of EA's attempt to push the deadline and can be ignored with little effort. The people who fault it for being an unworthy sequel (mostly in terms of "I don't like what they did with Anders" and "Who cares about this Hawke person, what about my Hero of Ferelden") dominated the discourse upon release but have largely faded into nothingness now that Dragon Age: Inquisition has shown that Bioware wants to do something different with every Dragon Age game. If these games all weren't part of the same franchise, they wouldn't be compared to each other, and honestly I think they'd all be better for it. Even if Dragon Age 2 had been Dragon Age: Subtitle instead, it'd probably be better appreciated, which it should be, because it did a lot of different things and apparently gives some of the more pleasurable callbacks in Inquisition.

DJ HeerMySeekrit

Seitokai Yakuindomo remains really good for a gag comedy that's entirely based on sexual puns, but forty episodes is frankly too many for any kind of plotless humor. It was grueling with a bad anime like School Rumble, but it's also grueling with a good anime, just slightly less so. At this point, my enjoyment of Suzu (the genius tsundere with a complex about her height, but also a really great "straight man" for virtually every other character) and Hata (the bizarrely passionless editor of the school newspaper who's got this great "old lady" voice) are carrying the show. Just look at them: Also, I saw The Tale of Princess Kaguya and everyone in the theater cried. There were only maybe ten people in the theater, but still, not a show to miss. Breathtakingly beautiful both in art and writing.

Oh jeez, voting up on this a million times. I have a close friend who grew up in a rural part of central Pennsylvania, and from sight and story it's much more suited to the "wilderness filled with guns" setting that the Far Cry series seems to think belongs to the Third World.

It certainly doesn't work as well as an adaptation of the comics, no.

I freaked out when Chris talked about people being able to read the last thought in your brain after you died, because that was something I thought was already a real technology from age six to maybe eleven. I was a really morbid child, so I spent an unseemly amount of time just trying to think of poignant things in case I was suddenly killed at that very moment.

I'm getting a Blendo Games vibe from it, really.

I was just wondering why "victory" is being used to subtitle a game with Victorian London as a setting. Now I see. Never has there been a more appropriate use of that smiley.

Either make sure you're educated in and sensitive to the non-white and non-Western subject matter of the game you're making (with Never Alone being a recent example of a foreign culture portrayed intelligently and appropriately by a Western studio, albeit with help from "ambassadors" from an Inuit tribe), or hire more minorities (rather than just asserting a diverse and inclusive studio culture, like Ubisoft did for the first few Assassin's Creed games). Brianna Wu said some interesting things on the latest Isometric podcast about the challenges of hiring minorities, both women and people of color, because most studios have a hiring process that's tailored to identify certain types of success and potential for success that are most common among white men. Basically, you have to change the rubric itself, which isn't likely to happen in a top-level gaming studio expected to make a blockbuster hit every year.

I think that's a self-fulfilling prophecy, considering what Giant Bomb was reduced to before Dan and Jason were brought on, but whatever. I'm not that invested in arguing it.

Yeah, this is what turns me off Dan most. I've stopped listening, so I can't really comment how it currently is, but what made Dan bearable for me is that his self-awareness made up for his lack of knowledge. When his self-awareness goes missing, he says some really painful stuff, even if it's just dismissing the things that other people love because they don't appeal to him personally. Also, Dan's talked before about how he just coasted through college and the like. Does he really think he's worked hard compared to most people? Eh, not much more so than other people. Maddy Myers applied and she's maybe the best part of the Isometric podcast. Dan's only really more qualified if what you're looking for is the most "dude's dude" personality, which seems to have been exactly what Giant Bomb was looking for, granted.

Fair warning, Aniplex has the rights and they're charging sixty dollars a disc on Blu-ray, with no plans to release a lower-priced compilation. I've been chewing on a purchase, too, but I'm not relishing the thought of spending $200 minimum on this series.

I'd honestly like to see a non-historical game that was as slavish when it comes to building a fiction around its UI elements and progression mechanics. Sometimes FPS games try to explain why you see a health bar or an ammo count, but if they extended that to skill perqs and checkpoints, even devoting a substantial arc of its plot to the extrapolation of that explanation? It'd be nuts (and also probably really boring, like the Animus stuff was).

Yeah, I noticed that about Little Mac, but I'm on a high enough level compared to anyone else I know around here that I could just dodge and counter, rather than get hit. If I played online, I know that strategy would fall apart, but I can't even really imagine playing Smash online? Smash is for friends.

I've only played a little bit, but they've messed with the timings of Marth and Yoshi, my two mains, so I started shopping around. I've discovered that Little Mac is basically a harder-hitting Captain Falcon with a counter move like Marth. If I actually owned a copy, he'd definitely be my main, although Lucina is okay.