Bjorn

The specific themes of this game (police militarization, etc) may strike a personal nerve with someone that the more war oriented shooters do not, which could then provoke more of a reaction. That's not to say the other games are totally okey-dokely fine, but their existence doesn't preclude someone having a problem here.

I'd definitely watch some of that as well Cine! Watching epic invasion fails is one of my new favorite things with DS2 vids. This is the best that there will ever be:

Yah! SC2 is up there as one of my favorite games of all times. The only real complaint I have about it at all is the whole fixed time thing, which forces you to rush through some stuff.

I keep being amazed that this hasn't been finished yet, one of those indie game/ideas that just seems like it's been floating around for awhile. It has the requisite Kickstarter now. I backed, because the world does not have enough games staring asshole cats.

I'm torn on responding to this, because the last thing I want to do is to potentially get in an argument with you. But that said, some of that stuff is just...wrong. Like, for a guy who hates and is mean to asexuals, really surprising that he's had the founder of Asexuals.org on multiple times to speak about the asexual experience and answer questions about asexuality from a more learned perspective than someone like Savage is capable of. And the thing at Chicago, wasn't a "motivational speech", it was Institute of Politics seminar on the media, and Savage was invited to speak about a variety of topics and was asked about the shifting landscape of gender/sexuality slurs, reclamation and his history with certain words. And those words/slurs have been constantly shifting for decades. The slur in question is actively being debated right now, and was even before Savage ignited his part of it (which is probably part of the reason he was asked about it specifically). What we predominantly have in the descriptions are one student's account and Savage's account. Personally I don't fully trust either, and am not going to condemn either side on what are both sketchy and subjective interpretations of the same event.

So the live action trailer for Let it Die was perplexing and disturbingly gruesome. But one of the components of it has me pretty interested: That seems like the kind of mechanic that could show up in a Souls game, and is the rare attempt to capitalize on a kind of asynchronous player interaction. If the design/fashion element is strong, the idea of being able to customize a character and then die, letting it loose on others is really intriguing.

Using crime and law enforcement as background for violent media seems so thoroughly entrenched in our media history, I'm not sure what makes any one particular example stand out over another, unless there is something really specific and problematic going on (like racism).

Man, I was in high school when "Cop Killer" was the flavor of the week for music that pissed old people off (super NSFW if you've never heard it before): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5gRIud57jQ&feature=kp

Blackmail and self-destruction, also excellent components of a healthy relationship.

Deception, the foundation of all good relationships (kinda not kidding about that).

No offense all, but this conversation has huge shades of the "adults reading YA books" conversation to me (both are relatively pointless and inflammatory discussions spending your time arguing about how others spend their free time on a forum that's dedicated to playing video games, something others are super judgmental about).

I've never quite understood the hate that Savage gets. I can get not personally liking him or his work, that's fine. But some people feel the need to then turn that into painting him as some devil in sheep's clothing who is secretly one of the great evils working against feminism, or transgender rights, or whatever.

Apparently there has been an Expendables game, and it was terrible. That's a missed opportunity there.

I did not know that! I think you could point to several areas where it could have been tightened up in general to make a better movie. With any movie where you spend a considerable amount of time watching the protagonist descend into madness, it can be a very fine line between making sure you spend enough time there for the audience to really feel what it happening, but avoid the audience feeling like they are being bludgeoned with it. I'd guess that they wanted all those minutes with Pegg alone, but then split it up with the restaurant scene to give the audience a breather. There's a tiny detail at the end I loved, more easter egg than anything. Also, I just realized that Claire Higgins was in the first two Hellraisers. Holy crap. I haven't watched those since I was a kid, kinda makes me want to go back and see them again.

That's pretty fantastic!

Watched a couple of movies with the fam last night to polish off Father's Day. Odd Thomas was...meh, entertaining but kind of terrible. Ripoff of The Frighteners, which is a much better movie. Supposedly the novels are better, I wouldn't know. Then watched A Fantastic Fear of Everything, which was pretty fantastic. It honestly kind of becomes a different, not quite as good, movie in the second half. But Pegg's performance, the first half, and the high points in general make it worth watching. Seems like it got a lot of hate from people when it came out. Might have helped that I knew next to nothing about it going in, and so had no expectations.

Did you make sure to sneak in a jar of peanut butter onto the table for that picture?

So I played through Ground Zeroes this weekend. It was, something I never thought I'd say about a Metal Gear game, completely underwhelming. The voice acting is minimal, and mostly forgettable (I didn't listen to all the cassettes, but most of them just seemed to drone on). The plot is even more impenetrable than previous Metal Gears, and I say that as a relatively knowledgeable fan. The sound design was surprisingly muted. Not saying it was bad, but MGS4 is a sonic treat, at the time I'd argue it was one of the best sounding games ever made. It may be that this is a very quiet experience, which is true, but I'm still disappointed that the sound didn't really leave any impression on me at all, other than the storm being really nice. Of course, I already had the story completely spoiled for me, so nothing it in came as a surprise. But it was mostly just, to use this word again, disappointing to watch it play out. Mechanically, this is as good as an MG game has ever been, but then the base design didn't particularly make me feel like I needed to use any of those mechanics very much. Firing an unsuppressed gun would immediately alert everyone, so there wasn't much of a difference between sniping or opening up on a group. And almost every guard could be eliminated one at a time, particularly once you figured out how to lure people out of a pair or a group. There were just a couple of moments when I felt like there was some true authorship going on in design, mostly in the final escape. MG is known for its epic cutscenes, which have never particularly bothered me, and in fact I actually liked most of them in 4. But when a huge, exciting and fun looking gunfight breaks out, and I just have to watch for a couple of minutes, fuck that. There's literally nothing going on in that scene that the player couldn't do. So yeah, it achieved the opposite of its goal for me. Phantom Pain has a hill to climb for me to regain a ton of interest in it.

Fixed the link, thanks! I don't have much experience with the older generation of roguelikes and their features, really have only played the current iterations, so that's interesting!

Happy Father's Day to all the idle parents out there! Hope you have a great one. We're going bowling to celebrate. What are you doing for your papa's day?

Maybe this time of year is just when he has some freetime on his hands, cause it was a similar time last year that a bunch of stuff went up in a row on it.

I don't think that's an unfair thing to say, Roberts has been out of games for a long time, and his last project didn't even end up finished by him (Freelancer). But, speaking with rose-colored glasses on, I remember being totally in love with the first three Wing Commanders, which I played before getting into either X-Wing or Freespace. I'm personally more fond of WC than other games in the genre, but I recognize that is due to personal fondness and familiarity with them, not because they were objectively better space combat games.

There are some videos floating around of a gank squad composed of sonic, tails...and whatever the red one is. For gankers, it's surprisingly amusing.

I don't disagree with any you, but I tend to think it's more complex than any one explanation. It's just easier to lump them all in together. A recent Freakonomics episode covered people's problems with saying "I don't know," how a significant percentage of people will make up an answer rather than admit ignorance. This tends to be age correlated, children do it the most and once you're well into adulthood, you do it less (though a lot of people still do it). I wonder if with issues like this, it never occurs to people to acknowledge their ignorance, just as it never occurs to some people to say "I don't know" when asked a question. Part of the issue of wrapping your head around social issues is realizing that you will never really know what it's like to be another person. To be a woman, to be an immigrant, to be of another race. There seems to be a built in or developed resistance to acknowledging personal ignorance (I don't know if this is mostly an American thing or not). So what I wonder is how much that plays into people's reactions in situations like this. Unfortunately I don't know if it's going to get better anytime soon. I think the only reason we don't see racist comments as much is that race just doesn't get as much coverage in gaming circles. Go check out some popular sports blogs and let the rampant racism wash over you. I suspect that if gaming sites wrote about racism with the frequency they wrote about gender issues, we'd see comments sections full of racist bullshit.

I just played through it, as this screenshot pretty much sold me instantly: