Patrick R

Oh man, I just made a very long post and then accidentally hit the back button, erasing it all. It was so good, I looked so smart. Brilliant. YOU GOTTA BELIEVE ME. I will nutshell it: I disagee with your take. I see the difference between GoW and MGS as "Let's have sexual content because we want our game to appeal to 16-year-olds and those with the maturity of 16-year-olds" and "Let's have sexual content in our game because it is what Kojima wants." I do not think intent matters much either way. I am a Death of the Author kind of guy. I think part of the MGS series' charm is that it takes anime tropes and bends over backwards to ground them in current events and broad observations about the military industrial complex. I think the "Quiet has to have her boobs out because nano-machines!" angle is both gross and also totally part of that approach that also applies to nonsexual things, like Ninja robots and transplanted arms possessing evil dudes. I have only played the first three MGS games, so these opinions may be out of date. I think the sex in GoW games (of which I only played the first two, and not nearly as much as the MGS games, so I might be completely wrong) feels less integral to the actual gameplay and world building and more something that someone thought would drum up publicity/get the hormones of 16-year-old boys raging. All of this is based on my reading of the games themselves, not any behind the scenes stuff of the authorial intent.

Do you mind expanding that thought a little bit? I don't think I agree with you, or that that was what I was saying, but maybe I'm just misinterpreting this post.

I'm no fan of the pervy elements of the MGS games (of which I've only played the first 3), but I will say a big part of the series' appeal is it's tonal dissonance. I don't think Kojima is half the artist that someone like David Lynch is, but those MGS games at their best captured a similar kind of pleasurable disorientation of his films. They feel like really personal idiosyncratic works, with a strong authorial voice, which I think is so rare in video games of that scale. The downside of that can be you see the gross fucked up parts of the artist as well. It goes back to the Robert Crumb conversation that was going on in the Ms. Petman thread. Not that that necessarily justifies anything (what I heard about Ground Zeroes certainly seems beyond the pale) but I think the sex in God of War feels grosser because it feels more callous and calculated.

Love Live!: The School Idol Movie is playing at a theater near me. What is this? Occasionally The Music Box will play anime but it's generally an Evangelion or Trigun or Escaflowne movie, something that's pretty mainstream. I've never heard of this.

If you are using the Steam version, check all the options before you start. I was breezing through Dark Forces first time I played until I realized that a "Super Shield" option that made me impervious to laser damage was on by default.

Jack Black and Tim Robbins are some of my favorite celebrity friends! Jack Black was in Robbins' acting troupe. They end up in each other's work a lot.

I always thought of handheld electronic games as video games, even though there is no video.

Oh man, I used to be friends with Max Landis on Facebook. That guy was something.

I think I beat Limbo in one sitting, but it might have been two.

This sounds like so much fun. I can't wait to try it.

Gravity: directed by Alfonso Cuaron (of Y Tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men fame) Interstellar: directed by Christopher Nolan (of Inception and The Dark Knight fame) The Martian: directed by Ridley Scott (of Prometheus and Alien fame) Marooned: directed by John Sturges (of The Magnificient Seven and Bad Day at Black Rock fame) Robinson Crusoe on Mars: directed by Byron Haskin (of War of the Worlds and Treasure Island fame) Mars Attacks: directed by Tim Burton (of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Edward Scissorhands fame) Mission to Mars: directed by Brian De Palma (of Carrie and The Untouchables fame) Total Recall: directed by Paul Verhoeven (of Robocop and Starship Troopers fame) sung by The Undertones (of Teenage Kicks and Here Comes the Summer fame)

That trailer makes the movie basically just look like Marooned.

The Idle Food thread is nothing but yum-yucking.

I don't know what you'd consider PRO (like, are most the competitors in Smash Brothers really professionals making a living?) but two other notable competitive gaming docs are King of Kong Mostly fictionalized in order to fit into an underdog sports movie formula, but it's an undeniably effective version of that. Probably the most successful mainstream competitive gaming doc. Ecstasy of Order Low-stakes Tetris doc reveals less of a competitive scene than a group of people who suffer from the same mania and come together to celebrate it. But it does all build up to a final tournament so I'd say it still fits the bill. Focuses exclusively on people obsessed with the Nintendo licensed NES version.

Did you ever beat DooMTM?

So what would the Star Trek villain be called?

Have countries other than America experienced the trend of vocal fry? Other languages?

My point was that maybe college kids are just the loudest and most obnoxious, regardless of how progressive or regressive their personal politics are.

On the flip side I live near DePaul University and 99% of the shitty hateful things I hear people say in public come from the mouths of those college students.

Ok, I barely graduated high school (a science teacher of mine literally forged me a better grade so I could graduate and protect our Catholic School's grad-rate) and don't know anything about anything, but I have been obsessed with this Sesame Street animated short for the past 24 hours and figured it might be of interest to you math nerds. Maybe it's mostly of interest because Philip Glass wrote and recorded a new piece of music specifically for this short, and he is the best. At any rate, I present to you and any 4 year olds who might be hanging around, "Geometry of a Circle". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH7c3F3a--U

I actually have guilt about how Steam has enabled me to have such a huge library of games while paying so very little, but on the other hand there was a good 2 years of my life where I stopped playing video games altogether because I didn't have a console and didn't think my computer was good enough to run anything. Now I just buy things when there are sales and if my computer can't run them I can be confident that they'll be in my Steam library later on when I have one that can. I generally don't pay full retail price for anything. The last time I bought a 60 dollar game was Left 4 Dead 2, because my laptop came with a 50 dollar Microsoft store gift card. Other than that, last games I paid full price for were Gone Home and Spelunky and both were under 30.

My last partner did this! It was weird!

I think if I was trained to use it at an earlier age, it would make sense. But as is it takes way more effort to remember the insert key exists than it does to delete text and then write text.

Out of curiosity I would like to hear examples of this. I'm not entirely sure what you meant. Do you just mean like, "All the cool kids are playing this game and it makes me feel like I need to as well?"

Do you really object to this?