electricblue

It's a weekly thing on the Bombcast. Super weird and cool and good.

I couldn't tell how much of that is just satire of the AAA game development culture in general and how much of it was critical of Ubisoft in particular (and maybe that was the aim, to keep that a little vague). Obviously certain elements are a dead giveaway, such as the CEO and assistant using french and english interchangeably and the ultra subtle jabs at uplay, but what about the management taking the super good Kenway story and turning it into a by-the-numbers pirate adventure called Devils of the Caribbean or computer security being laughably lax or IT people being saboteurs. How much of that is what they think of Ubisoft and how much is just "wouldn't it be funny if..."

The trailer for Devils of the Caribbean was pretty great. It kinda breaks down with Freedom Cry because one would suspect that the message of Freedom Cry runs contrary to the goals of the Templars, they don't even attempt to tie any of that DLC back to Abstergo Entertainment with any out of the animus sections though. I think the DLC would've been stronger if they did try to add a similar layer of meta as justification for the 'slaves as an upgrade resource' part of the game.

I'm fine with Beyond After Earth losing the pessimistic quality of Alpha Centauri but I hope the Technology quotes maintain the same feeling from AC and don't have that awe inspired feeling from Civ V. Does anyone have the Civ V trailer mash up mentioned in the episode? I was unable to find it.

These are all subjects Eddie Murphy might've included in Raw that are no longer cool/funny to you (I think he and Pryor were always on the right side of interracial marriage though). You're just making my point.

Its okay, by the time the robots take over world government and starve off half of humanity in order to keep bees from going extinct or something we'll totally probably have it coming

I think the consensus is the "natural born citizen" thing would not hold up well in court because it's so vague. I think it's merely there to discourage immigrants from seeking the presidency, it would do little to stop someone like John McCain or Ted Cruz (God help us) from becoming president.

That would be an extremely short standup routine, and ten years from now it would likely be even shorter. It seems the arc of the moral universe bends toward more shit striking us as vile.

It is an incredible movie for all the reasons you mentioned but If they were political nazis and were awful jew-hating people but still went through the same harrowing drama and met the same ending I don't think that automatically means the film's message is that these were role models were should aspire to be like. I wish we could be grown up enough to acknowledge that people can be awful but they are still human beings and that can go through harrowing ordeals and grow as characters even if they start the film as the worst people in history. I wish I could watch a film that had the balls to take that on, even if ultimately it falls short I think it would be way more interesting for the attempt.

I think the reason that I personally don't find the Luftrausers controversy interesting is because it seems to have less to do with a particular offensive thing in itself (and how the offensive thing is delivered) and more to do with who is offended. To expand on Jake's point on at what point is Luftrausers okay if they included Soviet, Japanese, or Americans I think there's nobody you can portray from that era whose hands are clean. All the nations in that era are guilty of being horrible monsters and murdering innocent people's families and that memory is still there today, it seems to have more to do with who they are and how they are perceived in popular culture as being good or bad. For example, I doubt any of us really gave much thought to the movie Memphis Belle other than it's a cool story about some WWII good guys' last mission but if you were the only surviving family member that lived through the bombing of Dresden you might have a completely different feeling about that movie, why is your feeling less valid than the guy whose family was in a concentration camp or Hiroshima? Is it okay that we respect one more than the other? And more than that I find it much less interesting for creators to limit themselves to only create stuff that is palatable to the public and won't raise eyebrows. Despite my love for his movies I think that's something Tarantino does and it's really boring to me to see another movie of his where society's good guys win and the bad guys are killed graphically. That's not to say that creators shouldn't think about these issues, but the idea that a story showing a Nazi as a hero is totally off limits because it will offend someone is boring to me. It's why a movie like Grave of the Fireflies or The Wind Rises is so infinitely more interesting to me over something like Memphis Belle, because it's something im not totally familiar with already. And I know those two movies are very intentionally avoiding the controversial stuff but at least it's from a point of view that hasn't been done to death.

I guess the boards management would bother me more if it wasn't accompanied by the nearly constant conversation between Joel and Ellie. I don't mind repetition as long as I get the sense that the characters would actually do this and comment on it rather than you will have to grind these mobs for x hours to beat this next boss, which has resulted in me quitting many a RPG

Fair enough. I felt that way about the clickers until I got the shiv upgrade to face shiv 'em if they are about to neck bite you to death, so it wasn't such a "oh boy i'm screwed" if they hear you. I'd love to hear what you guys think about the winter section though if any of you get that far.

Good cast About stealth in Last of Us: there are plenty of indicators of how stealthy you are. There's visual and audio queues from every enemy type as well as a sound effect that builds as you're about to be seen. I found it quite good. Actually I found the whole game to be great. Kind of disappointed nobody finished it on the cast and they gave the sort of general 'games are too long' spiel that I don't think applies to the Last of Us. Other than that first act in Downtown Boston, which may have felt a little long if you were going for all stealth the rest of the game is really compact and focused on the incredible narrative. I cared way less that I occasionally have to boost ellie up or find a pallet for her to stand on to cross water as it just seems like a thing you'd obviously have to do in that world.

Seems like they stalled out on Wolf Hall and Dota 2, maybe the cast never caught on who knows.

They are a lot like This American Life in that sometimes they just don't have anything good content wise and it shows. When they have a good theme though they nail it.

I second this. Iain M. Banks is one of my favorite authors his work is consistently great over many many novels even if he arguably peaked after Use of Weapons and Player of Games.

I was really excited until I saw the behind the shoulder gameplay videos from PAX and saw all of the video gamey 3rd person shootery gameplay that seems completely different from that amazing E3 presentation. Now I'm only cautiously optimistic.

In a bizarre coincidence the great podcast Selected Shorts is reading The Distance to the Moon this week read aloud by a broadway actor Liev Schreiber and introduced by the hosts of Radiolab. You can find it here... iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/selected-shorts/id253191824?mt=2 XML: http://selectedshortspri.pri.libsynpro.com/rss

I felt really unsatisfied with the book's ending... but I agree the addition of the voyeur made an otherwise boring story a great deal more entertaining

The voyeur/professor/narrator is the most interesting character by far which is unfortunate because the novel does a poor job of explaining where he's coming from and instead he's just a conduit for these tired cliches (the WASP mom, the lipstick lesbian, the hardcore feminist, the german with holocaust guilt, etc) that drone on endlessly with very little substance or development. The cause and purpose of the narrator's obsession with the lives of these people didn't make sense to me. The author offers small glimpses into his past but does nothing to flesh them out and make them a real part of the story. The only thing that really changes for him is he starts to think maybe his abandoning therapy was a bad idea otherwise there's hardly any development at all.

are you talking about creeper piero?

I don't remember reading what year it was in Cavendish. Seemed like it could be near future from how English society had deteriorated so

I figured out that they were reincarnations about halfway through the Zachary part when he's talking about how the Valleymen have no fear of dying because they know they will come right back as the next baby born if they lived civilized lives. I knew right then that David Mitchell was talking about his six characters because each one is living a life to further or fix civilization in his or her time in their own way and that then gave them the 'right' to come back as a new reincarnation. I loved how each story was told using a different form of writing that was very endemic to his particular timeframe: Ewing = Personal Journal Frobisher = Letters to a lover Rey = Trashy pulp novel Cavendish = Memoir Somni = Interrogation Zachary = Oral Folktale I thought just that by itself was a brilliant way to describe each era without really saying anything. Like other posters have said each one has its own plausibility or implausibility built in with Rey it is the hardest to see but when Cavendish described Hillary V. Hush as a fat man it reminded me of one of Rey's co-workers, also a fat man who maybe wrote the novels under a pen name describing the real Rey? Per the Sonmi discussion of product names taking the place of products "driving a ford" or "snapping a kodak" it reminded me a lot of Jennifer Government which had a very similar Libertarian dystopian future landscape where people's entire identity is predicated upon the company they worked for and the entire system is set up to encourage as much economic activity as humanly possible. The language Zachary used was very interesting to me. Its similar to pidgin english that people speak on Hawaii today but sort of devolved as if the people speaking in that manner only had each other to talk to for hundreds of years, which I thought was really smart of Mitchell. I felt the conclusion of the novel was a bit preachy in terms of pretty much coming out and saying competition = bad cooperation = good. I felt he was belaboring the point a little too heavily there.

once you've got a handle on the strategy of how to use each weapon most effectively normal isn't really that bad

I've never had a battle that was "impossible" not once