Gormongous
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Posts posted by Gormongous
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To extend the traffic light metaphor, the whole voting/percentage system feels like that button you can push at crosswalks to make the light change. The light will change, you can congratulate yourself for your hand in it, and meanwhile the system hums on invisibly.
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Sorry, are you saying Halo's music is bad? Because the music is one of the best parts of the franchise.
Nah, I was more making light of wording in the announcement itself, as if the orchestra deserved most of the credit for the Halo soundtrack, rather than whoever composed it.
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Maybe my perspective on him is less common then I thought then. As I said having done pretty much no reading on him, or seen films about him, all I remember when I hear his name is what I (vaguely) remember from school, against enclosures, poor act, good with crown's money (?maybe? can't remember this one) executed via conspiring at court against him, king regrets his death. Having a few brothers and sisters go through the same-ish curriculum and seeing the same stuff come up then, I was just assuming most people have the same sort of perspective.
Honestly, if I were to put on my historian hat, I would say that it's probably the tendency to blame bad kings (or more tellingly, the bad parts of good kings) on their advisors. A king cannot fail his people unless his people fail him, etc. Whoever taught you and your siblings must have done a good job focusing on what Cromwell did, and not what he failed to do, but that's certainly not the impression I've gotten in my time teaching college students.
Although... What were you taught about More? Maybe he was the bad guy in your curriculum, if not Henry VIII himself? There must be a "bad guy" somewhere, my job would be way too easy if there weren't.
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I don't think Cromwell's image is negative, whenever I did Tudors at school, and for most school children after going by my younger brothers and sisters, you pretty much learn him as 'cool guy that was best buds with Henry, then the king gets angry and kills him - immediately regrets it.'
Though I've not seen A Man for All Seasons, so maybe I'm not aware of how much impact has. (or read Wolf Hall for that matter)
I'm nearly positive that, should you ask ten people on the street about Thomas Cromwell, six will not know who he was, three will say he was a bastard, and one will say he was misunderstood. A popular drama piece that sets him in opposition to the world's most ethical man, along with a general impression of him as the enabler of Henry VIII's excesses, takes a lot of rehabilitation to efface, and I'm not aware of many people taking up that cause.
It's like how most people I know think of Henry II as an immature lout, if they've seen Becket, or an impotent old man, if they've seen The Lion in Winter, rather than as perhaps the second most important English king of the Middle Ages, after William the Conqueror. Subtle, complex characters just don't make for good drama, essentialism does.
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Oh god no!
But it's the orchestra responsible for Haloooooooo
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Thank heaven that the fad of historical psychology has died down over the past few years, it was brutal reading any purportedly historical work, for fear it might indulge in some noodly speculation about a figure's personal thoughts.
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Yeah, that's what kind of burned me out when I played Warcraft III semi-competitively almost a decade ago. I had the perfect build order for quick-teching to flying units, which either was performed perfectly, leading to a win, or imperfectly, leading to a loss. If I was really firing on all cylinders, I might get lucky and have some time around second dawn to creep, but chances are I'd be watching my ally scout, in order to decide whether I'd research Storm Hammers and then Reinforced Leather or vice versa.
It's fun to perform such an advanced series of tasks to perfection, like playing an instrument in concert, but I think it takes a very specific type of personality to thrive off that and not get bogged down by the interference of external factors or the importance of memorization/muscle memory.
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Spoilers.
God, has it really been thirteen years since Fight Club came out?
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Yeah, same. Despite me outgrowing it in a strictly intellectual sense, my careworn copy of Salamander Books' Warfare in the Classical World by John Warry is still treasured by me to this day, not least for its Osprey illustrations and detailed maps. I'd almost rather Rob not mention the title of the battle atlas he was so impressed by, since I'm almost certain to buy it.
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(That also falls apart simply because their voices in the new game sound like anime voices, which have nothing to do with anything in the Half Life aesthetic.)
I think it's just a symptom of bad direction in general. The clips have way too much padding and silence, the VAs seem to be unaware of what lines precede and follow, and the tone jumps all over the place. It seems to be a classic case of putting your friend alone in a room with no training or direction and just using the "liveliest" takes to stitch together a voice track. It's cheap as hell and easy to excuse, which is why the American anime licensing industry made do with it long enough for "anime voices" to become a thing, but like FUNimation and friends finally did, it's worth noting how much quality voice acting elevates the fidelity and immersion of a media experience, in a way visual spectacle never could.
Case in point:
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A united front against piracy does not run counter to denying that DRM is an effective countermeasure.
Yeah, but denying that DRM is an effective countermeasure means acknowledging a problem with no ready solution, which is commercial suicide for a business.
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You eventually make your way to a little village. The story at this point is centered around something, I don't know, a whole bunch of diamonds, or maybe a briefcase full of documents. Come to think of it, it could have been a briefcase full of fake passports, but I can't say for sure. Anyway, your GPS thing tells you that the briefcase is just sitting there in the middle of the village. When you pick it up, you are ambushed by (you are not going to fucking believe this) your old buddies! That's right, those people who, for no reason at all, decided that they were willing to brave machine guns, forest fires and RPGs to pick your body off the ground and revive you suddenly decided that you had to die!
After an intense gun fight you make your way to the border, where there are a bunch of refugees who are desperately waiting to get out of the country. Then you are faced with a choice: help the refugees or don't. I don't really remember if the "don't" option included you getting a bunch of diamonds or something... in any case I choose to help the refugees (these mythical people of the land of Far Cry 2 who are not constantly trying to kill you at all times). Then I got some ending that was like "you did the right thing, good for you!" or something like that. I wasn't really paying attention, I was so distraught over how my old buddies tried to kill me, not because I felt like I was betrayed by them, but because it made absolutely no sense at all in the context of the game.
Actually, the whole
"having the buddies you thought were dead come back as your enemies" worked a little for me. I'd chosen to go to the bar during the mid-game confrontation with the hopes of saving them. Somehow I lasted an absurdly long time, but that only meant that I watched every single one of them -- Yosip, Marty, Hyppolite -- bite the dust before me. Then they show up near the end, saying shit like, "You didn't give a crap about us, you bugged out the first moment you could. Well, this is payback." It worked, if only because I had gotten out alive and hadn't gone back to check. I don't see how it would have worked if I'd gone down immediately upon getting attacked at the bar, or if I'd chosen to defend the church instead, but whatever.
Also, I think the diamonds the Jackal offered to give you were bribes for the border guards to let the refugees through, which he had been selling guns to raise (!). Inexplicably, you were informed that you'd have to commit suicide after delivering said diamonds, since "there is no way they'll let you out of the country." He even included a pistol in the diamond briefcase for that exact purpose, what a nice guy. I chose to blow the bridge and die from that, because at least it wasn't explicitly telling me DON'T YOU SEE ALL STORIES END IN DEATH EVENTUALLY.
So basically the ending worked 50/50 for me.
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I'd have to dig deep to find games i rage quit on or literally could not finish because of technical issues. (I never finished Dark Messiah because of technical issues.) Mostly, it's just that i get bored with it, put it aside intending to get back to it, and never do. I put Dragon Age: Origins aside a while ago fully intending to get back to it, but after ruminating on it for a while, I decided that it just wasn't a very good game. (I think it was a pretty boring and lifeless successor to the whole infinity engine legacy.)
I've come around to this way of thinking with the first Dragon Age. It's a collection of mostly uninspired ideas in the service of a story that plays it totally safe, as opposed to the sequel, which at least had some higher pretensions. I have a second playthrough that's been waiting over two years for me to finish, once I discovered that almost all the thrills in Dragon Age come from experiencing it for the first time.
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So I finished listening to The History of Rome podcast, which I picked up when trying to supplement Dan Carlin. I have to say, for all that I found Mike Duncan's presentation a little lackluster, I'm still impressed at the fluency and self-assurance his detailed survey of the Republic and Empire bequeathed to me. Even things I'd normally complain about, like devoting almost a dozen podcasts to the Barracks Emperors and the Crisis of the Third Century, ended up benefiting me just because no one's ever bothered to cover the events in any great depth.
I can't recommend this podcast enough. Anyone who wants an encyclopedic take on the history of Rome and doesn't mind a somewhat homespun approach is strongly encouraged to check a few episodes out.
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Oh man. I tried so damn hard to like this when I got it in the seventh grade. It did so much cool shit that was all for naught because the gameplay was basically just stacking and jumping puzzles.
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To be fair, Ubisoft has made similarly ludicrous and damning statements in their own press material. We live in an industry where everything is destroying everything else, Cold War-style.
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I wonder if it isn't just the attempt to make all the ghosts follow Pac-Man in a straight line everywhere because they're all making the same decision every time.
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I've been playing Metro 2033 a level at time every six months or so. I love the gas mask and bullet currency dynamics enough to keep bringing me back, but then I play for a couple hours and realize the rest of the game is all strangely unkinetic gunplay and clumsy stealth scenes. Seriously, if I had a dollar for every time I put half a clip into a guy and still didn't know if he was dead, or for every time I shot a guy in the head with a silenced pistol and still managed to alert the whole camp, I could buy and build a computer to run Metro 2033 at max settings.
But I haven't officially quit that game, like with many others. One game I'm pretty sure I've quit for good though is Hegemony: Gold. I love it for being an amazing strategy game that fully captures the experience of command in the ancient Greek world, but that also means I was able to march a massive army through the northern Balkans, into a nightmare of starvation and rout, in pursuit of a campaign objective I wasn't aware was optional. Actually, through the same stupid determination, I was able to secure said objective, but it totally broke my game and left me unequipped to pursue any other objective. At that point, my options were to withdraw from Epirus and Illyria, which would take at least a dozen hours of game time to achieve, restart the campaign, which would take just as long, or tell the game to go fuck itself and play Total War: Shogun 2 like a baby. This is why sandbox games sometimes freak me out. I guess I am a baby.
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This is going to be the most ridiculous quibble possible, but I've been doing enough Latin the last few days that I actually care, however temporarily. On the Extras page, the slogan at the top right is "Otiose pollices", which translates a little nonsensically to "Idly, thumbs" or conceivably to "Hey idle [one], thumbs". It should probably be "otiosi pollices" ("pollices otiosi" if you're going to follow the slight Roman tendency to put nouns first, all things being equal).
Also, fair warning that "otium" and its derivatives have heavy connotations of unemployment and/or leisure time as well as idleness. Personally, I like that, especially considering that all other adjectives meaning "idle" tend to have pejorative overtones.
Awesome site though, guys. Seriously, gobsmacked here.
Just noticed I can't find an easy link to your twitch.tv page from the site.
Yeah, I am also bothered unreasonably by this, as well as the podcast archive being three clicks from the main page, since those are usually my reasons for visiting it.
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Sorry, because this is a bit of a tangent, but this drives me absolutely batty. I can't deal with how Amazon has the one pool of reviews for every printing of a book or release of a movie or whatever. If you dig down into them, sometimes you'll find the one with a subject like "KINDLE VERSION IS BROKEN."
It can be really difficult to see what the word is on the actual thing you're trying to buy when there have been a bunch of editions.
edit: I have seen them remove especially bad Kindle editions when it's pointed out. It may take a certain critical mass of complaints.
This is a big problem with Amazon's existing review system in general. Once upon a time, having reviews for a single product pooled across its various mediums may have made sense, but now it's ludicrous that I usually have to dig through three or four pages of often banal DVD reviews to find someone talking about the quality of the Blu-ray release. They are different products, which the complaint thread on the Amazon forums, the longest ever, can attest to.
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Trying to deliniate generations is also dangerous to me. What is a third generation roguelike? Fourth? Fifth? Barf. Can we just say "it is a roguelike," and then have a conversation within that definition?
The people who insist on "roguelike-like" remind me of the people who are really alarmed by the "watering-down" of genre terms in general, as if they represent some kind of objective reality.
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I recently just finished Fall Out New Vegas for the PC. That last guy with the sword was IMPOSSIBLE, my speech skill was high enough that I could talk him out of fighting which I did, but not after A LOT of tries to kill him. I feel like I "soft" beat the game. Still a lot of game breaking bugs 2 years on, I guess after they didn't get the publisher bonus they shelved any ideas of fixing the remaining issues, can't say I blame them.
I felt the exact same way when I beat the first Fallout a few years ago. I convinced the Master to kill himself through my godlike speech skills, then I reloaded and shot him in the eye (along with everyone else in the base) just to prove to myself I could. It's really weird how combat is implicitly the fullest consummation of a game experience.
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I'm glad Troy mentioned Crusader Kings II as an example of the fun to be had giving away control in a game. Besides my first game as an Irish duke, which had the benefit of wonder and discovery, hands down my most enjoyable CK2 campaign was as the Billung duke of Saxony. I wasn't exactly powerless, since I held the majority of northern Germany, but I definitely jumped when the emperor said so. I chose to play the perfect toady, helping him in all his wars and using the rewards to tempt fellow vassals to my banner. It was really cool to have my current ruler be appointed Senechal or Chancellor despite sub-optimal scores in the relevant skills, simply because I was on such great terms with my liege.
Of course, that fell apart after about two hundred years when the sudden and unprovoked revocation of my primary title forced me into revolt, but I think we can chalk that up to bad AI without disparaging the mechanics involved.
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Has anyone had any luck getting Tacke Command: Second Manassass to work in Vista? I missed this one, and it sounds awesome. I got the ad-supported version from Gamersgate, but it crashes on startup.
This is going to be a dumb question for me to ask, but have you tried right-clicking on the .exe and setting it to run in Windows XP SP3 compatibility mode?
Steam Greenlight
in Video Gaming
Posted
In a weird, completely non-serious way, I kind of love the whole mess. It's like some mad Caligula proclaiming to indie devs, "You say the people will buy your game? Then let the people choose!" And he just lords over the battle royale, eating grapes and rubbing his hands. He may publish the winner's game, he may be taken with the 'spirit' of the loser, he may execute the lot of them. It's not like there are rules here.