Bjorn

Yes, one of them did! I had forgot about that. Found this article on Kotaku about gamers obsession with making dicks in games. So there's that. It's actually kind of a dumb, if funny, article. I'd like to take a couple of the experts to task for some of the assumptions they make. What have I done to this thread?

Did you enjoy this? It's the most attractive thing to me about the bundle, but I don't know a lot about it.

In my limited experience with academic conferences (four total, one a disaster), I consider anything that isn't an epic disaster to be a total win, so I'd say you made out well. I've always rather liked nightclubs, even though I don't fit in at all. But a nightclub in the basement of a union at an academic conference kind of sounds like it's built on a foundation of awkward.

Technically true, but a particular kind of Midwest accent is viewed as the most neutral of the American accents and the one that people are mostly likely to describe as being "not an accent". It skews closest to the dictionary defined pronunciation for a lot of words, and so many accents are really defined by breaking the correct pronunciation in some ways.

I've never known anything about the Shin Megami Tensei games. I feel like I've missed something important and vital in my gaming knowledge.

A google search for "dicks in video games" was not nearly as entertaining as I had hoped. Although it did result in finding this quote (no link, it's funnier just by itself): I was thinking I had played one game that had a demon with a giant schlong, but then I realized I was remembering the movie "This is the End". Has there even been a mainstream game with full frontal nudity on a dude? This probably deserves its own thread.

Oh shit, I didn't mention it in my original post. The patch doesn't come out until next Friday. On your spoiler: Your armor is probably fine. It looks like they are nerfing the strongest armors, but leaving everything else alone I would guess the strongest are still going to be really good, just not as good. There have been setups (combos of rings, spells and armor) in PvP that essentially let you cut physical damage to a tiny fraction. It looks like they are trying to cut down on that without nerfing any one thing into the ground.

There's definitely a fan contingent that believes she is a female. We could wage a wiki war and start fixing all the wikis. My default assumption was male for a long time until I saw someone point out origin of the Sif name and that she's never given a gender in game. As that's the case, I lean towards female. Oh gawd, I'm refreshing my memory about some of the stuff I read about this a couple of years ago and this is hilarious and expectedly awful. People complaining about how gross it would be to have a giant dog dick flopping around in that fight. There's also a lovely, "I don't know how much you know about wolves, but I'm an expert and you would never call a female wolf Great" poster.

Reddit had better formatting than the official notes, but you can see the official ones here. You could make an argument that there should be separate balance changes for PvP vs PvE, but that would get super unwieldy. The balance changes need to happen for PvP, where certain top tier weapons or combos emerge that can crush most of their competition. Like I tried the dual Helix Halberd build weeks before it caught on with the wider community, and it was god mode. My win rate in PvP jumped up to 90+ percent from about 50 percent with any other build. Buffed, I was tearing through some bosses in two stamina bars. I had to stop using them because they were so grossly overpowered. I was passingly familiar with every single weapon and had deep knowledge of several dozen weapons. There are weapons that I thematically liked, but were just too underwhelming to use extensively. Looks like some of those are going to be better now. If you're a new player, nothing has changed, this is the world you are entering, you'll just be learning like normal. If you're an existing player, maybe there are things you tried that you wished were just a bit more powerful, now you can go back and try again. This is all just number adjustment, it's not like movesets or combos are changing. So if you tried a setup that you hated because of the moveset, that's not going to change. I think it's a positive for new and old players alike. Actually, I think they are as clear as they ever are by then. By the time you've seen the king, you'll be in two states. Either there are paths you haven't explored, in which case you should do that. Or there was no where else for you to go that wasn't previously blocked. But throughout the game, you would have found (this isn't a spoiler for Dewar, more for people who aren't at this point yet):

Edited to add: Patch doesn't come out til next Friday. Holy mother of all patches Batman! Beyond dozens of fixes for issues, they are rebalancing like half the weapons, spells and armors in the game. A ton of things are getting buffed, a few things are getting nerfed. Bunches of spells are getting adjustments to uses and damage (looks like quite a few things are getting fewer casts at more damage). It also looks like the scaling bonuses on a bunch of things are being improved. Giant change to PvP is no more healing for anyone using items, though I'm guessing that spells still work. I'm a bit split on this. I actually think the idea of healing in PvP is fine, the problem is the sheer quantity of healing that is available to players at high level. I'd have preferred something like each person limited to 2 Estus drinks or something. The summoning range is being extended, which is probably a net good. The only nerf I see that makes me want to cry a little is to dual wielded Channeler's Tridents. This looks like they are trying to diversify the overall weapon and armor usage, particularly in PvP. A lot of the things getting buffed are usable now, but definitely at a bit of a disadvantage. I forced myself to take a break from DS2, it was basically all I played for three months. I may not jump right back in when the first DLC episode drops, but will definitely be back by the second one. Looking forward to a bunch of new toys to play with.

The Godfather is the gaping void at the center of my cinema blindspot.

Ha! That NPR story is awesome. And yeah, going to a great theater to watch it with an engaged audience sounds fabulous in every way.

It seems inevitable that Valve will make a TF2 at some point now (if anything is inevitable at Valve). They've made a documentary, and their TF2 videos have been among the best video content ever made from games.

Exclusive, that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

Hey now, you misunderstood him before I did! I also didn't read that entire thread, scanned the first page. Ben's increasing attempt to keep his idea on track in the face is adversity is commendable. We could always try to reboot the game in this thread, sans party poopers. I will try to not poop at this party! I brainlocked on your Ace Attorney cross examination of my time travel claim. I couldn't think of anything clever enough to respond to it when I saw it. I am terrible and did poop that party thoroughly. I still can't think of a clever way to respond to it. And I would put Tron on that list, dated as it is, I like it and it's a super fun movie still. So three of those examples are video game movies that weren't based on an existing video game, just drawing inspiration from games. None of them are coming from particularly cinematic inspirations either. I think about the games that might make good movies, and I immediately go to the most cinematic games first. But those are already movies in many ways, just with interactive bits between the movie bits. So if I was going to make a video game movie, I'd look towards the best non-cinematic arcade games. Look for games that have powerful emergent narratives, and then just explore one of those. I think you could probably do a Groundhog Day style looping experience that draws on the repeat play nature of an arcade game and come out with a great movie. Take Spelunky. Start with an explorer/scientist type who is going into this cave for the "purest" reasons, to find new knowledge and bring it into the world. But tempted by treasure he discovers, he violates his own ethics and morals. Sacrificing maidens. Killing rare, never before seen animals. Hoarding gold for the sake of hoarding. It's like the reverse arc of Groundhog Day. His greed kills him, and he awakens tangled in repeating loop, dying again and again, unable to escape the cave. The movie becomes increasingly surreal as he discovers the magic of the alters and aliens, causing him to question whether this is all a final dream state as he lays dying. Ultimately he reaches Hell, and becomes increasingly convinced he is trapped in his own personal Hell, reliving his ethical fall from grace day after day (similar to Judgement Night, a classic Twilight Zone ep). Is it a dream, hell or something else? I...have no idea how I would end it.

Yeah, that would make sense too, but it just didn't read that way to me. More like you'd be in the general release copy.

I actually have an odd soft spot for RomComs and for soap operas, so it's not impossible. But I'm assuming these are sub-titled only and not dubbed? My wife can't do subtitles, she finds them super distracting, so I don't get to watch as much foreign stuff as I would like since I'm unlikely to sit down and watch anything without her (would typically read or game rather than watching stuff by myself). I think some stuff like this ends up being temporal. You find a show, or fanfic, or something at just the right time that you are open to it. and had you found it at any other point in your life, it may not have clicked at all the same.

The creator of Flashback is making a new game, Subject 13 (announced awhile back), and the requisite Kickstarter for it just launched. The highest tier is for $10K, and they (might?) will make you the protagonist. It's really vague. But the $10K pledge level can be bought 4 times and says: My kneejerk reaction was that it's kinda gross to sell your protagonist's identity to the highest bidder, but on reflection, it would totally work for some games. And it's not clear at all if it will just be an option and the original hero will also be available or what. It's certainly an interesting take on the standard "be in the game as a very minor NPC or background art" option that is offered on a lot of games.

Yeah, you nailed it! That's exactly the vibe. And I feel like I'm being completely unfair when I feel that way, because nothing in his career or life I know of justifies how I react to some of his interviews. The opposite, in fact.

Sean's mixture shock, enthusiasm and sadness at the Jaws movie revelation is incredible. That's one of my favorite movies ever. I also have this deep, deep affection for the song they sing on the boat ( ). I did study abroad with a guy from Boston who was also a crazy fan of Jaws. We took to singing that song drunkenly on our way home from the bars on the weekends. So now that song, and the movie by extension, are inextricably linked to one of the best periods of my life. A few years ago I was wandering through an antique mall, and found an original printing of the sheet music for that song and had to have it (it's crooked cause I'm lazy about taking the glass apart to get it back into place and it shifts occasionally). The song has all these crazy alternative lyrics you can sing too: The accent talking about cyberpunk had me in tears laughing so hard. I had to pause it to catch my breath and not miss anything.

I'm fascinated by this personal character arc where clyde has gone from discovery, to confusion, to curiosity, to fascination and finally to obsession all in one day.

I did not know that both Nariko and Dante got modeled after the owner and his wife. That's weird. I've only played a bit of DmC, but watched my kid play a bunch of it. I'm not into the DmC games at all, but it looked fun and well made if you're into those kinds of things. Hey, I also bought and played your games! And not even on a Steam sale, bought them direct back before they were on Steam. At least the Ben and Dan games, as I think Justin McElroy had a huge crush on them back when the came out and pimped the hell out of them on the Joystiq Podcast (or someone on the podcast did, if not him). I also quite enjoyed them. They were the first games of the resurgence of the adventure game genre that I played.

I don't want to oversell the Renegade path, but if you really like ME3, it's worth playing a bit of. I actually think the Renegade script is just a lot more uneven and more poorly edited than the Paragon script, which results in the deranged/unhinged element. I don't know if that was intentional or not. As an example, one time I talked to Joker and the Renegade option resulted in some dark and edgy, but otherwise good natured, banter. The very next time I talked to him, the Renegade option made Shepard snap and start screaming at him about how she was sick and tired of his shit. It bugged me at first, but I finally just reconciled it by deciding that the pressure of the previous few years was finally bringing my Shepard to her knees mentally and she could barely keep her shit together to get the job done. I do try and do a similar thing as you and impose certain limitations on myself in open world games like that, but it usually only lasts for a little while. At some point I get impatient at following traffic rules in a game where I have to drive and just start running over shit (I'm looking at you, LA Noire).