TychoCelchuuu

It was only tentative!

You've come to the wrong place if you want to have arguments, I suspect, although perhaps the vitriol of the LoMas will flourish even here of all places.

I mean the panels that aren't those things.

You can send me money though.

I don't know if either of those would garner very many views on YouTube.

I sort of question your distinction. There's not more stuff on Star Citizen ships that doesn't do anything - it's just that the designs are less geometric and spare. The Elite ships have tons of shit that don't do anything - look at all those panels!

Ooh, Felicia Day cut her hair! I was going to post this article only to realize that it's what made Day speak up in the first place, so I'll just note that it's a pretty good article and move on.

This is all quite good.

I'm thinking no.

I could write stuff too! I have experience writing objective things!

Another milestone: the site's first pre-release review code (for Jazzpunk)! I feel like an official reviewer right now. There's an embargo and everything! The embargo is just on video reviews, though, and I haven't thought of a great way to make those without buying a text to speech program to make a robot do the reviews, so it's not really an effective embargo.

When I hear "evil," I don't think "a bloated grotesque game that kills players via a thousand tiny cuts." That sounds like a shitty game but it's not evil. When I hear "evil," I think about what syntheticgerbil brought up: free to play games with business models that rely on lots of income from "whales," people who are psychologically inclined to spend way more money than is reasonable on these sorts of games. That's what makes a free to play game evil in the same way casinos are evil and yeah, I think they're pretty evil. If your business model relies on exploiting vulnerable people then you're doing a bad thing. I don't care if your game is shitty or not - that's not an issue of good or evil. So I agree with Latrine that the Blow article isn't really about good or evil.

I think describing my level of excitement as anything other than "indescribable" would be unwise.

You mean nobody else heard them talk about Nick Breckon in swim trunks in the opening and decided to Photoshop Nick Breckon into swim trunks? Well this is awkward.

Yes. edit: I actually don't know what pelagic means.

The writing's not overly subtle in The Stanley Parable unless your definition of subtlety is just "implies things that it does not outright say," in which case it's extremely subtle. But I think things can be unsubtly implied, which is what I think The Stanley Parable does, but even that depends on my belief that my reading of the game is more or less the obvious one, and to the extent my reading is contested, then what The Stanley Parable is doing is to that degree subtle, because not everyone gets what I get out of it (if that is indeed the case). Now I'm realizing, though, that we've gone two pages without talking about what subtlety is, which is pretty silly. When I think "subtle" I usually think "there are layers to what is going on that are not obviously apparent," and subtle dialog is thus dialog that communicates more than just the bare meaning and obvious implications of what is said. So, for instance, in The Walking Dead episode 3 or 4 or something, when you first meet whatshisname and whatshername, the couple on the bride, there's what I consider some moderately subtle dialog about because that is implied but not outright stated and it's possible to miss the implication. But as I pointed out above, subtlety isn't just about implying what isn't outright stated and the obvious implications of this. It's also about how obviously it implies these things, how many things it implies, how it implies them, and so on. But there's another aspect to subtlety (maybe even another term which uses the same word, "subtle," but means something else), which is "draws fine distinctions." So, for instance, if we're having a discussion, and I draw out a distinction that was latent and that people had missed, you would call the point I made "a subtle point." Maybe I'm making a subtle point in this post by bringing this issue up, for instance. In that case, even fewer games have subtle dialog, because game dialog is typically pretty to the point and simple. Few games want to get into complicated issues - even games that deal with complex topics, like The Swapper or Spec Ops: The Line treat their points either lightly or with a cudgel - they don't dig deep either because they skim the surface or because they didactically push one point of view. One game I'd say is subtle in both ways is Dear Esther, although more so in the first way than the second. Kentucky Route Zero, The Entertainment, and Limits & Demonstrations are subtle in both ways, sublimely so in fact. Very few games are subtle in the second way and I'd almost be tempted to write off that notion of subtlety entirely except that I think it's inextricably linked to the first notion, because just as we must draw subtle distinctions to decipher subtle-in-the-first-sense dialog, subtle-in-the-second-sense dialog is, if it's not dreadfully boring, is typically subtle in the first sense too, because it's just flat out good.

It's everything I could have hoped for! Has anyone discovered the mystery message?

You're telling me you don't recall episode 78, where the Idle Thumbs crew spend half an hour debating whether the HDR in Far Cry 2 or Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is better, or episode 106, where they gave their game of the year award to BioShock Infinite because of its amazing graphics, or episode 121, where they ragged on Crusader King II's ugly character portraits and said they were done with the game until Paradox adds DLC that makes it not look like shit? Really I think Idle Thumbs dot net is actually the website on the Internet where we would most expect people to think graphics are king. Someone who played Far Cry 2 on console and liked it less than Crysis because Crysis, the game where you can turn invisible and punch a truck to death, "felt real" more than a game where your guns jam at inopportune times and you have to use pliers to yank a bullet out of your thigh is pretty much a perfect fit for the Idle Thumbs forums!

BRECKON BRECKON BRECKON I'M EXCITED

A disappointing end:

Is that scene in KR0 as striking for everyone else as it was for me? I almost cried at how gorgeous/perfect it was.

Both of those things (the tat and the Gaynor) are really cool.