BobbyBesar

I always played with my family, in similar circumstances: basically just a friendly game of cards with no stakes. My grandparents did have a specific padded mahjong card-table like that one, albeit a cheap portable one. I know vaguely that the flowers have something to do with points for gambling purposes, but don't really remember much beyond that.

19th Century medicine was...not good at medicine.

Like bad fantasy novel covers, old (bad) video game covers are sort of their own kitsch-art thing. the in-game art was so abstract that it needed embellishment to appeal to mass markets, but at the same time the artists available were...not good. It's actually kind of interesting to see what the various different approaches were, from translation like that pac-man cover, to actual game graphics, to the weird cartoonified representation of game assets stuff that Sega's Master System cartridges were.

Kid Icarus has a control scheme which you may or may not hate. If you're left handed, it's apparently almost impossible to play. Other than that, it's a rail shooter, but it's also fundamentally a loot chase. There are a huge number of weapons available, and they have randomized stats. You can up the difficulty to try to get better weapons. There's also more levels than you'd expect, meaning there's a lot more content than you'd expect from a rail shooter, but it all boils down to whether you can stomach the controls and enjoy the core gameplay. I got my money's worth out of it, but can't guarantee that anybody else would.

Yeah, I chose that terminology for maximum rhetorical effect, and can understand some may feel there's a philosophical debate to be had there about the role of a soldier. The essential point that we can agree upon is that the function of a solider is very much distinct from the function of a policeman. The most recent Crate and Crowbar podcast about this highlights the inherent absurdities of this game well, highlighting the difference between a soldier's role and policeman's with the flippant suggestion of completing paperwork QTEs after each match for each kill you get.

Sorry if that offended. I did indeed write that before reading the remainder of the conversation, however I didn't intend it to be directed personally (I did try to soften it a bit with "usually"), With regards to your specific question, there are a number of differences. Police militarization is, I think, a largely post-9/11 phenomenon. So, it is a relatively recent concern because it is a recent occurence. Also, (this is subjective, and off the top of my head) I think that Bad Boys, specifically, was something of a throwback even at the time it was created (Lethal Weapon being of the original period it was a throwback to). Most modern "big explosions" type movies are either about terrorists or super-villains. Depictions of police per se are mostly restricted to the smaller budgets and intimate action of TV procedurals. A lot of it isn't even necessarily the execution, it's how you get there. If you just say "what if we had cops, but, you know, moreso?", you can end up with something like Crackdown, which is mostly ok. But the starting point here is "Cops are basically the same thing as soldier, right?" This only makes sense if your only criteria is "they both have guns." A soldier's essential function is to kill. That's why we need to be careful how and where we deploy them, and the kinds of engagements we enter (from a political perspective). Ideally, soldiers don't exist at all. A policeman's essential function is to protect the citizenry. They're fundamentally different, and to suggest that they're the same is to make all sorts of weird assumptions about the role of the police. It's to just accept that SWAT teams breaking down doors and shooting dogs for no reason is a fit and proper role for the police, which is, in the local argot, gross, and the worst. ZeustheCat: basically, it's about the growth of things like SWAT teams, and how they're becoming used for increasingly routine operations. For general trends, you can look at the growth of SWAT teams, basic examples in the wiki page sources here, like this one. Not to turn this too far into a general government abuse of power thing, but it's closely related to things like the abuse of civil asset forfeiture, as the war on drugs is often used as both the justification and revenue source to support this trend. Edit: Whoops, just look at the previous post.

I'm not trying to be an asshole, but if you take the same argument and apply it to the other recent hot button topic in games representation: I think you're over-reacting just a little. To me it seems like you're reading a message that isn't there. It's just people wanting to make a cool game that's not about gender representation. They're not trying to push some ultra-conservative propaganda on how women either don't exist or are represented as sexualized objects. Otherwise, I'll just defer to Cine's post above, because it's very well-spoken. The point is that this re-skin is inherently political. The creeping militarization of the police in the US has been an absurd development and has had a concomitant waste of tax dollars and degradation of civil liberties. As for "why get upset about this instead of about pre-existing thing X"?, that strikes me as a disingenuous question usually asked by somebody who just doesn't want to talk about it at all. Yes, if a topic is a pervasive problem, we need to start thinking about it eventually. It's like asking "Why talk about marriage equality _now_? Things have been going just fine without having that conversation?" It's only true unless you're somebody who's affected by it. Why get upset about this but not upset about previous Battlefields? Because it means something when the skin is different. War and law enforcement SHOULD be different. They're governed by different rules. They're engaged in for different reasons. Even if those reasons are elided in most war games, they're implied to exist by context.

Wait till you read the Jesus/Judas slashfic. ... ... ...which I'm sure actually exists...

That interpretation (broken windows hypothesis) is not uncontroversial.

Is it possible to do something "interesting" within the Disney fanart milieu? I think it absolutely is. Disney's characters are among the most recognizable characters in our culture, and they come with all sorts of assumptions about euro-centrism, femininity and masculinity, etc. They're probably as relevant to modern day artists as representation of the Greek Gods or the Virgin Mary in their respective heydays. Although, and this may be what you're getting at as well, expanding horizons is never a bad thing in terms of creating. In order to put a unique spin on it, she probably needs to have a unique point of view beyond simply re-gurgitating the Disney style guide, and new experiences would probably help her flesh out what that point of view could be. Thanks, that looks pretty neat, but I think I may not have expressed the nature of my issue clearly. I think things like Storium could help people who want to write, but have trouble sticking with it, or have trouble with the whys and wherefores of characters and motivations, because you have a constantly evolving backstory that you can use as a prompt. That's pretty cool. The problem I experience I think is closer to: Why am I writing at all? Why take an hour out of my day to actually put a pen to paper? How is my voice unique, and what does it contribute to the reader? What is the message that wells up within me that I think the world needs to hear? (There's a saying that you shouldn't be a writer unless you can't imagine not being a writer: I can easily imagine not being a writer, so I think it probably isn't for me. ) I have artist friends who, while they wouldn't describe it as such, are probably in similar situations. They enjoy the activity of putting ink on a page and creating images. It's relaxing, or improving their skills feels good, etc. But there isn't a broader "why" to the entire thing. They draw because they're artists: it's what they've always done, they're trained at it, they can create pleasing images that most people cannot, it's how they self-identify. But there's no real reason for it. I think this is the kind of situation that leads to some of these fanart communities. Of course, I'm at least one step removed from it, so I may be way off base there.

Well, sure, art is hugely about context, and there's been both serious study of it, as well as various buzzfeed-friendly shenanigans. That's basically what I was trying to imply when I noted that there may be popular/fan art that's overlooked for consideration. But, there's a lot of "serious" art that's overlooked for the same reasons (my view is that the modern fine art world is, basically, a big con job - but now we're getting into heady waters about what makes art worthwhile or valuable, and it's the kind of nuanced conversation that I find very hard to have in asynchronous text-block form.) Stuff posted on Deviant art featuring Sonic the Hedgehog isn't ever going to be taken "seriously", the way some the same art in another context might be. Maybe the depiction of Sonic the Hedgehog as Jesus is actually a trenchant statement about the shifting relationship between media and religion and nature of idolatry. Or maybe it's just a Hedgehog on a cross. But, a lot of the work of the artist is to a) convince me that the artist had intent, and to communicate the intent to me, otherwise I'm justified in dismissing it as just noise. Lest I seem dismissive, I should note that I consider myself amongst the hoi polloi who don't have anything "interesting" to say. I'm not an artist, but I'm technically proficient in writing, for example (not that you'd know it from my posts, har har), but I flounder even at trying something like NaNoWriMo because I realize I don't have anything to _say_, so I find it difficult to justify the words I'm putting down. I start telling a story, but I realize I don't know why I'm telling that particular story among the infinite possibility space, and sputter out.

I think the core requirement for making interesting art is having something to say, which is a much rarer skill than having the technical competence to say (or draw, compose, etc) something. There may be some people who have been distracted from really compelling artwork by fanart, but I think that generally if you do have something interesting to say, that's going to come out eventually. There may be fanart that masks legitimately interesting content, and its status as fanart makes it overlooked for consideration, but I think those are rare outliers.

"Games are pretty different [from movies]." - Chris Remo The whole conversation about how (not) to pitch your game was interesting. The inability of the average consumer to differentiate between mechanics and theme is definitely something that has been an issue for a long time. Most of the time when people say "I have a great game idea" they really have a narrative idea. I think there's still a general lack of games-mechanics-literacy among those who purchase games, so people don't have the context to think about what the game is actually doing as a game, or the vocabulary to discuss it even if they did. Of course, it doesn't help that the field is so young that there's even today a relative dearth of critical thinking about game mechanics, and there's certainly no kind of consensus in the field about how various things should be considered or even a common agreed upon vocabulary for many concepts.

I do like that when they showed the 3D pac-man model I immediately thought "Boo, I hope 2D pacman is an alternate skin or something", and then 30 seconds later they show that one of his dashes or moves or something transforms him in to 2D mode. Although now I want Pacman CE neon mode to be one of the alt-skins, so i guess they can't win with me.

Given the motto "Live the Life you want", I would hope that they allow for advancement along basically any path exclusive to the other ones. So, letting you just be a Miner or Woodcutter without any particular limitations. That would be pretty amazing, in a Harvest Moon / Animal Crossing vein. Even if it does require ARPG fighting, since Rune Factory is probably dead, this fills that niche.

Woo, Mappy shoutout! I think that most mysteries about Smash Bros. come down to Sakurai's whims. He likes Kid Icarus a lot, and Nintendo seems to mostly just let him do what he wants.

You mean the one with the last scenes "accidentally" xeroxed over because Schafer hadn't finished writing it? Does anybody have a copy of that around? I didn't hold onto one, and then it got taken down.

Monster Hunter? I'm thinking Monster Hunter.

Yeah. What Prime did so well is to realize that Metroid was an adventure/exploration game with shooting, not a shooting game with exploration. This accounts for the somewhat unorthodox control scheme. The fact that they did this when conventional wisdom must have been to go to a standard FPS makes it that much more impressive.

Conversation appears to have mostly moved on, but I'll note that little girl pedo-stuff has historical precedent in classical Japanese literature:

Well, "Blackface" is a pretty specific term. "Minstrel Show" is more appropriate, since although it's most commonly associated with African Americans and blackface, it also popularized most common ethnic stereotypes of the era (e.g. Irish are drunk and angry, Germans are fat, drunk, and jolly, etc).

The podcast guys are big on the "first taste" that keeps you coming back for more. Getting a really good Witch Doctor cask-chain is one of those things that's pretty easy to do and feels reeeeeeally good.

Monument Valley was an ok audio-visual experience, but I didn't feel it really did much with the mechanics. Generally, it's just "walk the single obvious path to the destination", without much problem solving. I think you can count the times it actually used Escher-impossible space problem solving on one hand. Otherwise it's basically just dressed up "pull lever to open door." Mechanically, I feel the space has been better explored in Echochrome and Naya's Quest.

Looking at the episode title, I assumed Wilson was Woodrow Wilson, and that his "Ghoulish Countenance" was some kind of oblique poetic WWI reference. Uh, not so much, I guess.

Speculoos spread is the new nutella. It's literally made of cookies.