BobbyBesar

It's not a question of making it appear necessary. It's a question of making it appear normal. The core concept of the game, the elevator pitch, if you will, takes the equivalence of Law Enforcement and Military for granted. The fact that is treats it without seriousness is basically expected. A Battlefield game wasn't ever going to be a Very Special Episode about Police Militarization. If they were going to make this game, it was always going to be this. But deciding to go forward with the project in the first place exhibits tone deafness and poor judgement.

Remember a while back, when a couple of people asked for examples of the militarization of the police? Well, "fortunately", you never have to wait long for it to show up: http://mashable.com/2014/08/13/ferguson-police-protests-vs-iraq/ That sniper rifle picture? The demonstrators they were "controlling"? Peaceful protests of the shooting of an unarmed black man. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/another-police-shooting-in-ferguson/article_7fb366f0-2f29-5bdd-b18b-34c9d8c688e7.html More pictures: http://www.stltoday.com/gallery/news/multimedia/protests-arrests-continue-monday-in-ferguson/collection_3cb71990-8eb8-5328-aeda-bd0d4bed7198.html#0 Some Editorial: http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/america-is-not-for-black-people-1620169913 To tie this back into the gaming discussion, this is a good example of why game developers need more diverse teams than just white coastal males. I'm pretty sure nobody who has these kinds of interactions with the police would think Hardline was a good idea. Also relevant, if you want a more rigorous analysis, the ACLU put out a general report recently: https://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/war-comes-home-excessive-militarization-american-police-report

That's nothing: http://grantland.com/features/a-scenes-look-mr-olympia-phil-heath-2012-title-defense/

I find this thread bewildering but charming, which, I guess, is much how I regard pokemon in general.

Also, the "Star Trek name" discussion was just a little off: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sebulba

I suppose there are newspaper layout jobs where "crossword puzzles" might be relevant.

DoTA is an sport, like Football. Is there a magic "GG" button in football? Of course not. YOUR MOVE, POLYGON!

You guys are all so serious. Not sure about the advice to "make sure you bring" a Legendary for the heroics. Besides which, while it may be good on paper, by the time you're at turn 9-10, if you don't have pretty good control of the game state anyways you'll be hard pressed to even do the last 15 points of damage, and she's been cluttering up your hand in the meantime. She might help shorten the game on Maexxna, since if you run a battlecry/survival deck, you can basically play forever, but you may not have enough damage to take her down in good time. I managed to beat all Arachnid Heroics with fairly cheap decks that were custom built for the purpose, I don't think I used any legendaries.

Such as? The author of that piece is actually a good friend of mine. He's generally happy to chat. Unless you mean questions for the developers. I don't think he can help with that.

At this point, my ideal endgame for this thread is for Olly to create an account, and just post "Hey guys, what's going on in here?" and never post again.

Some hair salons are run this way, with outside stylists renting a chair on certain days. The idea of a restaurant being run that way is...interesting.

Ohhhhhh.....now I get it.

DoTA has so many problems as a spectator sport, I don't think changes like rat vs. teamfight are going to solve anything.

I would listen to a full hour of the Chris Remo Internet-Culture-Analysis podcast on a weekly basis. Edit to add: The Dashcon discussion reminded me of Magcon: http://gawker.com/the-instant-rise-and-nearly-instant-fall-of-the-vine-id-1568369061

Every time I see Gibbage, I assume it's a pun on Cribbage, and that it's some kind of ultra-violent card game.

A lot of people have difficulty holding contrasting views about a single subject in general. E.g. "I enjoy this movie" and "This is objectively a terrible movie" = "This is a good movie". When the subject is your own self, that becomes that much more pronounced because it starts to play with my conception of my own person: "I am a generally nice person" and "I did a shitty thing" = "The thing I did must not have been that shitty".

Chrom is kind of a tedious stuffed suit anyways. He's the least interesting romance option in a dating sim. I don't care much about Ganondorf or MetaKnight, but Ice Climbers provide a unique mechanic, so it would be a shame to see them go. (Although it looks like Rosalina and Luma might provide something similar,)

This is something I've particularly noticed recently, on account of having a 1 year old daughter. Another odd data point: during the Pokemon promotion, boys got Pokemon, and girls got American Girls stuff. Which is ridiculous, because everybody loves Pokemon. Besides the fact that they're (traditionally feminine) adorable animals. I'm not sure why Fennekin is somehow coded as more masculine than Twilight Sparkle. Also, this: http://comicsalliance.com/mcdonalds-happy-meals-the-amazing-spider-man-2-gendered-toys/

I think it just means your tones are terrible. (Actually, I can hear the difference when listening, but can't describe it. And I have a pretty bad accent myself.) Accents are fun! Having gone to school in R.I., I have a soft spot for the R.I. accent: Backest Realizations in the USA, boyeeeee! I have to say, I'm a little sad that we don't see more explicit American accents in gaming media, while British accents are widely celebrated. Probably a result of a lot of games types being in California, which doesn't have a particularly rich aural history of its own. I'd be perfectly happy if Danielle used her regional accent in all future episodes, hooray for local flavor.

Oh, also, I didn't realize Robin was the canonical name of the PC in Awakening. IIRC, the faqs had some other term they typically used to refer to the PC, since it confused me when I tried to look it up (it might have been MU, for My Unit). Also, it's interesting to see Nintendo reacting to the community, particularly the clearly-afterthought-ed "also, Female Robin!" Which is cool though, because "I wonder if the female version is an alt costume" was my first thought on seeing the character.

Who knows when the Ubi-Smash talks started, and what their relationship was like at the time? Rabbids and Just Dance did pretty well on the Wii, and Ubi was fairly warm on the WiiU at launch (ZombiU). Could be that the 4th FE character was supposed to be Rayman until the relationship soured, and it was slotting in another character in the Fire Emblem mold was the easiest replacement.

Given their Wii release catalog, it would have to be a Rabbid, right?

I'm certainly not an expert on Hearthstone, but I found the comparison to a trick taking game fairly apt, although I probably would have used Bridge instead of Hearts, since there's some added complexity there (i'm not familiar with Euchre or Whist, so I don't know where they sit in the complexity scale). There's a huge amount of skill, but that's largely about vicariously guessing what you think your opponent has, and tweaking your order of play to accommodate that (of course, bridge has the teamwork aspect as well, so it isn't a perfect analogy) But the point is, based on what you think your opponent is going to do (revealed by their bidding in Bridge, or their class and first few turns in Hearthstone), you have a set plan, and then you deviate from that plan based on what they actually do. It's not that there's no skill involved in the play phase, it's that the overall sequence of the game is fairly predictable. This is partially due to the fixed growth resource model, but also due to the smaller possibility space due to the small card set. Also, I think this is pretty dependent on the skill level and also the class. At lower ranks, you see a fairly limited set of cards and deck types, so it's more predictable, while at the very upper end, the meta means that you have a pretty good idea of what you're going to see. The game is probably most interesting in the juicy middle where you're seeing a range of different types of decks and experimentation. Similarly, I think arena suffers from this less (although not entirely) because there's such a significant random element to it that vicarious thinking about the deck structure is less effective, although you still have some general class guidelines that you can tend towards.

Not sure why you'd lose system data if you buy a new one, you should still be able to do a system data transfer if it's possible to charge the old one at all. Since the battery is user removable, even if the old ones port is 100% dead, you could even charge the old battery on the new one, then swap it back in to get one last go for the system transfer. Edit: oops, nevermind, misread your post. Yeah, there's no reason you'd lose data if buying a new one, I'd just wait and not bother repairing it.

I guess "Alt-F4 Delete Local Content" doesn't have quite the same sting.