Gormongous
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Posts posted by Gormongous
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7 hours ago, Roderick said:I was surprised to find a mention of Jojo in recent posts, as I came here to briefly blurt about exactly that just now. After seeing a few key people in my environment absolutely obsessed with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and especially one of its characters, Dio, I saw the first episode of - I gather - the latest version. I thought it was a miserable experience. What an un-fun story, and weirdly, badly told too. The characters are heinous and unlikeable, the story made me cringe and I had to wash the whole thing down with a binge of anime short Senyu just to cleanse my palate.
I'm sure it gets better after this - it must! Otherwise I don't see how this would garner any attention at all! - but I'm certainly not watching it further.
As a counterpoint to Twig, I've watched all of the latest JoJo's Bizarre Adventure through Stardust Crusaders and I don't think it's worth your time if it doesn't immediately grab you as something great. There are some fun and interesting twists to the formula, but deep down it's still an extremely rote shounen battles-and-friendship anime, just one that doesn't take itself terribly seriously (while still being perfectly happy to be taken seriously by the viewer) while showing off a lot of sub-Fist of the North Star beefcake. There's a lot of pressure online to watch and enjoy JoJo, and I know from experience that it's hard to ignore, so I'm always willing to raise my voice to say that there are dozens of anime that are better to watch, no matter what your tastes are.
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19 hours ago, syntheticgerbil said:Is there anyone who has access to substantial episode credits (maybe even the Japanese release and not translated credits)? Did Satoshi Kon writer or direct episodes 11-13 (or 4-6)? Also Imdb lists Katsuhiro Otomo as codirecting 11-13 which seems fucking bonkers and extremely wrong. I'm pretty sure I would have known about that already. I can't seem to find any information anywhere else on Otomo's involvement in this series which means it's probably another overzealous fan. But... maybe is it possible Otomo had involvement as well?
IMDB is the worst source for anime production credits, sadly. It's usually, as you said, overzealous fans working off of the back of a DVD or pausing the translated credits, both of which can be incomplete or over-generalizing. If I need to double-check production credits for specific episodes in an anime, I tend to use AniDB, which is better-curated than MyAnimeList and AnimeNewsNetwork and has more granularity in how it credits people per episode. According to the AniDB listing, Satoshi Kon is credited with script, storyboards, and direction for episode 5; "composition assistance" (which I haven't really seen before, but I assume means helping on script and/or storyboards) for episode 6; and key frame animation on episode 2. Hopefully you're not collecting everything that Kon did key frame animation on, I imagine that's a pretty long list! I can find no evidence of Otomo's involvement in the 1993 Jojo and I think that that's someone conflating Kon and Otomo, honestly.
Anyway, over the last month of anime viewing, I finished Turn A Gundam, which had a predictably Instrumentality-like ending but then had an extremely powerful and emotional epilogue that completely resold me on the series. After that, I finished my watch of Space Runaway Ideon and its two movies. I liked those a lot less: there were intermittently some very clever ideas about humanity's predisposition towards violence and how peace can be achieved in spite of that, but they were hampered by a highly episodic "mecha of the week" format and one-dimensional characters who, by the second movie, openly admitted that there was no rational motivation for their self-destructive escalation. It's actually kind of uncanny how much the second movie, Space Runaway Ideon: Be Invoked, is a prototype for End of Evangelion, and that's probably where I got most of my enjoyment. Finally, I watched all of Hyouka, KyoAni's 2012 take on the series of mystery novels. Being more serious than most other offerings from that studio, it feels like Hyouka is often overlooked, but I thought it did a great job of using high school slice-of-life trappings to tell a series of extremely low-stakes mystery stories. The initial mystery, an investigation into the meaning of the titular hyouka or "ice cream," is probably the best, although I'm fond of the one about the horror movie because it was one that I was able to solve in advance of the characters, and the second cour of the anime slowly de-emphasizes the mysteries in favor of character moments, finishing with a somewhat abrupt (but not unexpected or precipitous) ending. I enjoyed it immensely, and it was a great palate-cleanser after Ideon.
The question, now, is what to watch next? I have a friend pushing me to watch Rozen Maiden, but I was also thinking about Bubblegum Crisis 2040. Those are pretty different anime, but that's just how worldly I am!
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After letting my viewing of it lapse for months, I've been back into Turn A Gundam in a big way. Something that you don't get when you only watch one- and two-cour anime is how many different themes a longer-running series can tackle over the course of its running time. Turn A spends twenty episodes on the fog of war and the inherent factionalism of human beings in times of conflict, then another fifteen on the absurdity of mutually assured destruction and who should have the power to make that call anyway, and now the final fifteen are returning to what I think of as more traditional concerns of Gundam: whether certain people, objects, and ideas are inherently violent or not, and whether you risk repeating history more by educating people about past atrocities or keeping them ignorant of them. Except for the last phase, these themes have been remarkably subtle and underplayed, mostly coming through the well-realized characters and the intricate politics of the show.
I have to admit, I always suspected that I might enjoy a full-length Gundam series, but Turn A has really knocked my socks off. Except for a tedious interlude about an adventurer who was searching for a way to travel to the moon, it succeeds with almost all of the many ideas that it tries: invasion of a relatively primitive society by technologically advanced colonists; the process of discovering and using lost technology; fighting a guerrilla war against technologically and numerically superior forces; nuclear disarmament; an ancient civilization built around an abandoned space elevator; moon colonies and their society; and, perhaps the greatest achievement, a fascinating prince-and-pauper dynamic between the two main female characters, Dianna Soriel and Kihel Heim. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Japan has a different (and largely superior) take on doppelgangers, when Kokoro Connect was such a good story about body-swapping and Golden Time's amnesia plot wasn't terrible, but still. The queen of the moon and the daughter of a mine owner switch places on a lark, during one of the filler episodes, and then are forced to maintain their new roles for most of the ensuing episodes, and they both learn and grow so much from the expectations and relationships that hitherto surrounded the other that they've both become my favorite characters in the show by a long shot.
Even if Turn A Gundam continues its apparent trajectory in the final six episodes towards typical anime "gee whiz wouldn't it be great" pacifism and falls back on platitudes about compromise, communication, and humility, the sequence of events that led a queen to learn about the kind of life of her own choosing she could lead and for a young woman to learn how to wield authority even when it's not given to her has made this one of my favorite sci-fi anime of all time... You could say that I'm over the moon, even.
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26 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:Those people are berating you because they're slowly going insane from all the lying and conspiring and murdering they're doing. They're getting increasingly nervous about your destructive capabilities because they know they're going to betray and kill you, and they're worried about whether that is going to be successful. They are also starting to feel increasingly unsure about this series of events that they've touched off. As the body count piles up, they're starting to worry that the wheels are coming off the wagon and that they don't have control any more. Things are growing more chaotic (this is why the game says it's tracking "chaos," rather than something like morality, which is what everyone accuses the game of tracking). The developers are obviously not speaking "through" the generals/admirals because those guys turn out to be the bad guys all along and in the end you either kill them or they've killed each other. Those guys are the villains, not the developer mouthpieces! The only guy who's not obviously a villain who berates you is Samuel, and he's clearly just fed up with all this bullshit, which I think is pretty understandable.
I haven't really thought a lot about this because I never really saw the point behind the criticisms people made, but the more I think about it the more I think this game is really unjustly denigrated for the chaos stuff.
You're absolutely right, Tycho. Never in the history of storytelling have the words or actions of a villain been a means for the storyteller to convey their beliefs. I know you're really invested in negative critiques of
Dishonoured being wrongheaded, but stop and think for a bit: if all the chaos and death that you cause in the game drive the villains mad, isn't that the very definition of a negative signal? Not to mention, Samuel is also disgusted by your violent actions and, although not to the extremes of the rest of the conspirators, also takes direct action to interfere with you. If both the nominal villains of the game and an unaligned everyman move to oppose you as a result of what you've done, as the world begins to burn down around you, I think that sends a pretty clear picture of moral judgment on the part of the game and its developers.
Also, the developers didn't just find this story in a book somewhere. They wrote it themselves, and they chose to write it in such a way that many of the game's most plentiful, interesting, and fun mechanics are inextricably tied to a narrative that incriminates you for using them. Whatever the broader fictional gestures being made here, I feel okay criticizing the game for that. -
10 minutes ago, osmosisch said:That's the thing I'm an outlier about. It's the way other games let you get away with abhorrent stuff without so much as a finger-wag that bugs me.
Maybe, but I kept track of my kills and roughly three hundred and twenty people died in the course of me putting down a palace coup, which is hardly outrageous by historical standards. Certainly, it's one thing to get scolded by a reclusive inventor or a young girl, but former generals and admirals shouldn't be giving me that shit, not when they're likely responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people themselves. It really felt like the developers speaking through their mouths, and I resented it as a player, even though I understood it in the abstract.
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1 minute ago, osmosisch said:I know I'm an outlier about this game.
I enjoyed the game itself a lot, I just wish that I could have turned off the mandatory cutscenes full of finger-wagging. I understand that the writing in the sequel and the DLCs is less overt at chiding the player for having too much fun with the killy bits, so maybe I'll play them someday and it'll improve my opinion of the original with it.
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5 minutes ago, osmosisch said:If anything it made me like the game more. At least people react to you like a normal person would rather than the jubilations your mass-murdering avatar tends to get in most other games. It's satisfyingly logical to me.
Sure, but we're talking about negative signals and whether the game communicates that killing people messily is wrong, not whether those negative signals are "satisfyingly logical."
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Every single voiced character in the game berates you, some repeatedly, for choosing excessively lethal play. Hardened soldiers, who say at the beginning of the game that the throne must be retaken at any cost, verbally recoil at your kill count roughly halfway through the game, begin begging you to kill less people, and call you evil and a monster by the end. There is also a mechanical effect where you don't begin the final mission in stealth if you've gone for the high-chaos route.
I agree that, mechanically, Dishonoured bends over backwards to accommodate the player's chosen style of play, but narratively and thematically, its developers take extreme pains to communicate to you that a high-lethality style is the wrong way to play their game. That's fine, whatever, a lot of games have "saint and asshole" morality systems because good and evil are too passe, but when you make a game positively filled with creative and unique toys of death and then explicitly call me a monster for wanting to use them a lot, yeah, I have a beef.
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2 minutes ago, thepaulhoey said:In Dishonored you an totally go guns blazing/ swords swinging and enjoy it if you're not in the mood for lots of sneaking about the place.
Yeah, it's really fun like that. The only downside is that there's a lot of finger-shaking from the devs if you go for a high-violence, high-chaos route, but it doesn't impact your game mechanically.
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Triple post, because I like talking about anime on the forums as much as the slack! This past week, I finished Show by Rock!! #, which I'd picked up as a pick-me-up from the doldrums of watching too many old and long-running series. It was a really good time! The first season, minus the sharp sign, was a lighthearted Sanrio joint that mostly focused on gags about the music industry, gags about music genres, and heartfelt teamwork between band members. It was cute and fun but not essential, you know? Like most anime out there.
As I said on a recent Key Frames episode, the second season is radically different, almost as if it's the result of a blank check or open-ended mandate from corporate leadership. A universe-destroying threat is set up and executed in the first five minutes of the first episode, then rolled back through time travel so that the protagonists can try to prevent it... by growing together as a band. On the way, they participate in a bake sale, a water sports tournament, a sentai show, an interplanetary voyage, a trip to Hawaii-but-not-Hawaii, and of course multiple battles of the bands. The best gags from the first season are still in use: the ludicrous pretensions of the visual kei band, the cod wisdom and grandeur of the traditional Japanese band, the sickly-sweet infighting of the idol group... I don't know. It's really interesting that Sanrio is doing all these anime like Aggretsuko and Show by Rock!! that have these hard, self-undermining edges to them, but unfortunately I don't think that those edges make them any more recommendable to people who already aren't into cute animals and/or rock band shenanigans. I enjoyed myself immensely, even as the end of Show by Rock!! # leveled out into a fairly predictable "play music and support your friends to defeat the bad thing, which isn't actually bad so much as misunderstood" finale. Who knows what's next? Maybe Gudetama? Maybe not.
Anyway, we'll always have dumb jokes like this:
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2 hours ago, Patrick R said:Oh man, does Ryan Gosling have like, 12 nipples in this movie? That'd be a way better way of distinguishing androids from real people than some cockamamie empathy test.
Remember when it was a plot point in Man with the Golden Gun that Christopher Lee had three nipples and Roger Moore had to get a fake nipple to infiltrate the organization? The seventies were truly the height of filmmaking...
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2 hours ago, Ben X said:This is a problem I find with RPGs, or RPG elements - the best strategy is to push through all the boring secondary stuff at the start to get yourself powered up enough to enjoy the main game. It even leaks through to games like Psychonauts or Rage.
Yeah, the reliance that RPGs tend to have on tedium and frustration being the opportunity costs for optimal play is, in my opinion, the worst feature of the genre and its associated mechanics. It's not that bad in Human Revolution, but it ultimately made me quit Mankind Divided. So much of the content was gated by my willingness to be bored out of my skull for minutes at a time.
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5 hours ago, RubixsQube said:Video games need to communicate more to the player than game designers think they do. If they want to encourage you to use items, you need to let the player know if they're gonna be able to get another one, and let them know where that item is going to be a useful and fun tool. If the game doesn't do either of those things effectively, you end up either hoarding things, or without some key item because you didn't realize you were about to waste it.
This is the part that gets me. Often, game devs are so eager to communicate how fun and cool various items in their game are, through art and other aesthetics, that they make every non-ubiquitous item seem at least somewhat powerful and rare. Outside of RPGs, where I'm usually given the chance to see a game assign a monetary value to most items, I tend to have to rely on an impressionistic assessment of their ubiquity and utility, which is often wrong given the aforesaid efforts to make everything fun and cool.
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4 hours ago, pabosher said:What happens in those?
The Rebellion has become the New Republic, but the coalition that formed the basis of both is beginning to fragment after five years of relative peace amid rearguard actions from Imperial remnants. A Imperial Grand Admiral returns from the Unknown Regions with an expeditionary force to discover that the Empire has fallen and the Emperor is dead, seizes power among the remnants, and scores a series of stunning victories against the Republic, often involving surprising uses of obsolete technology. The heroes of the original trilogy, now important figures in the Republic's government, find new allies, Luke confronts the need for a revived Jedi Order, and all is resolved in a series of cataclysmic confrontations.
Honestly, although I love the old Star Wars novels, most of them wouldn't be suited for adaptation. They're full of obvious callbacks and overcrowded with the ten thousand semi-canon characters of the Extended Universe. Zahn's Thrawn trilogy, though, is something different, partly because Zahn was probably the most talented author to write Star Wars novels and partly because his were the first Star Wars novels and hence connect most directly with the original trilogy. Even with Disney's attempts to refashion the Star Wars canon into its own creature, you can still see touches from Zahn everywhere: Interdictor cruisers, ysalamiri, the Emperor's Hands, and Thrawn himself are things from the novels that have been confirmed in the new canon. It would have been nice to see the whole thing in action on the big screen, but we'll get it in drips and drabs instead, as Disney discovers that it's not as easy as they thought to craft a new Star Wars canon out of whole cloth, and I'll try to enjoy moments like Thrawn being the laughably mustache-twirling villain in season 3 of Star Wars: Rebels for what they gesture to than for what they are. -
1 hour ago, Cordeos said:I know exactly how you feel, I used to love Star Wars as a kid, I read all the books, I even liked episode 1 for longer than I should. I was pretty disappointing by Episode 7, it was so crammed full of cynical fan service, bad dialog and mediocre plot. Watching that trailer its obvious the dialog hasn't improved, also the first movie trailer I can remember seeing that repeats clips, that is something I expect in a fan trailer, not the real thing.
Me three. I've just come to a place where I have to accept that Disney's Star Wars (and, for that matter, George Lucas' Star Wars) is not my Star Wars. Granted, my Star Wars came out of almost a decade of watching the original trilogy, reading the Bantam-era books, playing the games, getting the toys... the whole experience. And that's just how every franchise is supposed to be experienced in the twenty-first century, so it all feels rote now. I watch the trailers and there are moments where I thrill, but it's almost entirely a combination of references to the old designs and the old musics. The new films just can't stand on their own for me. Some of the ancillary material, like Star Wars: Rebels, fares a bit better, but it's still instructive for me to compare my impression of, say, Grand Admiral Thrawn in that show versus in Timothy Zahn's books. It's all so safe and derivative, in a way that even the prequels didn't feel.
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I can't believe that FUNimation licensed boobs-and-butt-wrestling anime Keijo!!!!!!!!. Regardless of its actual quality, deep down, it's the kind of anime that should be totally toxic for an American company to pick up and sell, but here we are.
I was also pleased (and, tragically, almost as surprised) to find out that FUNimation has the rights to my favorite anime space opera, Crest/Banner of the Stars, speaking of that anime in the above post... and they've had them since 2013. Why? Who can say. Honestly, if those series get a remastered box set of Blu-rays at a reasonable price, they'd be a day-one purchase for me. I wouldn't even wait for a sale!
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22 minutes ago, SecretAsianMan said:My interest in the Orville is as a spectacle. I have no expectations of it being good. The whole thing seems like a very highly produced SNL skit rather than a proper show.
Yeah, it's just weird that no one who's reviewed it seems to think that it's that funny, and the Galaxy Quest comparison is largely spoken of as a red herring.
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12 hours ago, Twig said:grumble grumble gorm always pestering me to write more in this thread grumble grumble
It's for the good of the podcast for you to take notes in a public space!
Looking back in this thread, I talk about Space Battleship Yamato 2199 at least four times, having started to watch it at the instigation of Rodi, but I said very little substantive about it — mostly just that it played like nationalist propaganda from the future and that the plot was surprisingly enjoyable for how repetitive and predictable it is. I remember very little, except for impressionistic takes of various characters, so I'm looking forward to getting reminded of the good parts when we next record!
Also, if you're into space submarines, there are multi-episode arcs in Crest/Banner of the Stars and Starship Operators with your name on them...
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1 hour ago, Professor Video Games said:I saw one episode of Orville. The marketing seemed to push the comedy side of it pretty hard but the show plays things surprisingly straight. It was essentially a bad Star Trek plot with quippy one liners spread throughout.
The warmest (amateur) reviews of The Orville that I've seen praise it for its slavish recreation of TOS plotting, but with better visuals and some slight winks to broader sci-fi trends. Professional reviews are overwhelmingly less charitable, like from Vox or Alan Sepinwall.
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3 hours ago, RocketDog said:Are we really going to count degrees? That's your lead argument? My criticism is of the accusation, not of the game. You see, I was using the Shadow Tactics as a foil, with which to draw out my opponent. A springboard to let not the sound die in the air, but to ring for all to hear. It is the lack of evidence with which you are Rob Zacny rest such a serious charge that I find reprehensible. " When a game omits that inclusivity, and then kind of tips its hand about other iffy positions and perspectives, it's way harder to ignore now. " From this, Rob Zacny condemns at least six people as racists, a charge that in the current cultural climate, ranks up there with pedophilia and rape. Rob shrugs of his discomfort though, "... but I don't find so off-putting that I cannot play the game." I find that juxtaposition reprehensible. "I do love the soup at this restaurant, but I do wish they would free their slaves. More tea over here please!"
You realize that we live in a society that's thoroughly racist and that, in part because of that, it's fully possible to do and say things that are racist without intending to do so? I'm racist, though I try my hardest not to be. It's the stain of white supremacy that has been passed down through our culture and history. It's not a death sentence, it's a fact of life that reasonable, mature people should be able to discuss and improve upon, instead of making melodramatic (and, as Jenna observes, extremely reminiscent of bad faith) parallels to pedophilia and rape by way of a defense. It's really the sign of an argument that can stand on its own merits when it has to be associated with unrelated things just to make a point, don't you think?
Also, it is very, very suspicious to me that you are so desperate to shame Rob into silence or apology for suggesting that some of the game's design design may be informed by an internalized culture of racism, while simultaneously exhibiting no discernible interest in investigating the validity of those suggestions first. You don't care if Rob, me, and at least three other people in this thread alone think that there is some truth to them. You've already arrived at your own conclusions, and now you just want to shut Rob up with your feeble brand of mockery, because calling someone's design decisions racist is so much worse than actually making racist design decisions.
Finally, even if you are correct that Rob is making an unjustified and political attack on a game in the name of ideology, which you most certainly are not, how are you any better for criticizing his discussion of Shadow Tactics as a catspaw for your beef with him on a completely different game? Aren't you doing these developers just as bad of a disservice by feigning concern about their depictions of race and culture in their game, just to score what you must imagine are points against Rob? On your own terms, you are a hypocrite who seems willing to do and say anything to get back at someone for making a negative comment about a game that I hope to God Almighty you are head-over-heels in love with, and that's just sad.
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Also, and this goes without saying, but if suggesting that a developer's design choices are informed in part by internalized racism is enough of an "injustice" for you to make a forum account and repeatedly post about it, whether or not it's relevant to the conversation, I sincerely hope that you're exerting similar amounts of energy to counteract actual injustices in the world right now that involve the suffering and death of your fellow human beings.
Because, again, this is a video game, not real life, and it'll sell just fine whether or not a reviewer brings up issues of racism in it, judging from the performance of other games with similar issues.
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13 hours ago, RocketDog said:I point this out because of the egregiousness of a professional reviewer of product branding a group of people as racists, a very serious charge, based solely upon their use of only Germanic faces in their game set in a fake medieval Germany. Such a declaration is irresponsible. Such a statement degrades the speaker and his target. That this topic is taken so lightly by the host infuriates me. It is an injustice. Rob Zacny set his standard. I only ask him to be consistent. Surely this champion, who can detect a racist with just a wisp of information, can continue the crusade.
Wow, you really can't tell the difference between a fantasy setting, where the developers can choose to make any choice with regards to race and choose to reproduce a sanitized and artificially "white" expression of race in medieval Europe, and a game that is explicitly set in Edo-era Japan, a historical context that explicitly excludes non-Japanese characters? You really need some perspective, my friend.
Here, let me help you out. I'm a professional historian, currently finishing my doctorate. Message me and I'll send you my credentials on Academia.edu and Linkedin.com, if you need them to be convinced. My focus is twelfth- and thirteenth-century imperial Italy, namely the activities of the marquises of Montferrat at home and abroad, but the vast majority of my dissertation, especially in the first two chapters, directly pertains to the internal politics of the Holy Roman Empire, at least under Frederick Barbarossa and the subsequent generations of Staufer kings and emperors. From what I've read online, heard in the podcast, and played in the alpha demo, I think that the developers of Battle Brothers electing to depict an exclusively white and exclusively male cast of characters in their fantasy game inspired by medieval Germany (which, whatever white supremacists will tell you, was not all white) is suspicious at the very best and probably expresses some internalized and unexamined racism on their part. Criticism of that is correct and in keeping with the current scholarly trends in the field of medieval history.
Now, if you're willing to say that a professional reviewer of strategy games and a professional historian of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages are both wrong and that you're right, I'm willing to argue that you're the one being irresponsible by making your conclusions against the determinations of experts. What, exactly, is the basis for your belief that the depiction of an all-white Europe in a fantasy setting is not informed by racism, however unconscious? To think so is, of course, your prerogative, but maybe you need to examine the reasons why you're so sure about it?
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14 hours ago, RocketDog said:I waited through the entire episode for Rob Zacny to be disturbed by all the pale faces. I guess the developers of Shadow Tactics gets a pass from Rob Zacny's summary judgment. Why does your brand of racism stay in the fire this week Rob?
Wow, you hate-listened to an episode of Three Moves Ahead just so that you could take a weak potshot at its host for having an issue with Battle Brothers' racism and sexism a month and a half ago? That's sad, it's just a game.
Also, never gets old when "calling out racism" is the real racism. Cheers, you weirdo.
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3 hours ago, Twig said:I'd play versus, but personally I would like to get really into the coop as my primary L4D2 experience.
Same.
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I distinctly remember Jotaro starting alone, in jail, in Stardust Crusaders and ultimately gathering a party of a half-dozen others, some of them former enemies of his, in his quest to do the whatever. Like, if you don't enjoy bromance and a lot of fights where one person thinks they've won but then it turns out that they haven't because the other person is cleverer or gutsier, JoJo doesn't transcend that. It's not bad at all, and I've never argued that, but it's definitely solid in its genre roots, and if you don't enjoy that genre it's not going to win you over with style alone.