Bjorn

Finally had time to read that now that work is done. Everything in that interview is really exciting! This is impossible not to get hyped up about.

I should try them then! I've only played WDS1, Wolf Among Us, Sam and Max and Back to the Future. I didn't dislike any of them, just decided that I could spend my gaming time on other things. I think I own Puzzle Agent 1 out of a bundle.

I really need to play This War of Mine, I keep forgetting about it.

Halle-fucking-lullah! It's about time. I'd praise them for this, but seriously, they're a few years too late to get any real credit for having a policy in place that should have always existed. In the fine print: That's doubly fantastic that they are partially offering a 14-day price matching window as well as a refund policy (given that you still have to meet the other criteria, it's not a full price matching policy).

I don't know if a Telltale game is what I'd prefer, personally. It turns out that the Walking Dead Season 1 is the only actual Telltale game I've really loved. I don't think the rest of their games are bad, just that they don't really engage me and what I enjoy. A story I would love to see is something like a group of civilians trapped in a city with a terror mission going on, where the point is to survive a fixed amount of time until Xcom can show up or something. A kind of Dead Rising type game in the Xcom universe. It would let a writer explore the idea of being a civilian in a war zone (something super topical), but that we're unlikely to see in a real world setting in a game, but sci-fi can get away with that. Like I expect/hope that XCOM 2 will explore some ideas about using guerrilla warfare and terrorist tactics when a marginalized force has to take on a larger, more technically developed military force. Similar to how the third (I think) season of Battlestar Galactica depicted similar themes.

I know, I'm completely familiar with all that. The game was a trainwreck, but a trainwreck with some interesting ideas in it and I liked the idea of having some of the more personal, ground level stories told within the XCOM universe.

The Chicago Bulls just hired Fred Hoiberg from Iowa State. I'm happy that Hoiberg is getting a shot at coaching in the NBA, but I'm personally bummed we won't be playing against him anymore. KU v ISU has been the best rivalry in the Big 12, with great tense games and he's just one of the classiest guys in all of NCAA sports.

Oh hey guys, since we're getting Xcom 2, do you think we'll get a companion sequel to The Bureau?! I am probably the only person in the world who would be excited about that.

I was going back through this thread, seeing if anyone had talked about Fury Road's themes more in-depth (because seriously, the shit going on in that movie is way more interesting than whether or not a steering wheel flying at the screen looks real or not). The more I've ruminated on Fury Road over the last couple of days, the more and more impressed with it I am. Obviously everyone keeps calling it a feminist film, but I went looking for anyone who had explicitely written something about how the entire plot of the movie is about how the Patriarchy and Rape Culture are hunting down women who don't want to be raped anymore. This is one of the only things I could find that really got into that. And then there's the whole subext of consent, bodily autonomy, and (something I didn't recognize) the rhetoric of the pro-choice movement: I really want to go back and watch it again, now that I've witnessed the spectacle to watch it more closely.

I can't wait for the buzzfeed listicle on the listilicization of documentaries.

Wow, I hadn't heard about that movie at all. That's just the dumbest thing. Oh, hey, another article on this mentioned he's long been in work on a Marvin Gaye biopic. Maybe he can cast Tom Cruise as Marvin Gaye. That would be a bold move.

I feel like the "internet of things" has probably had its time and is done as a phrase. I think it would feel oddly dated to hear it mentioned now.

That is a great picture! As a kid, my monitor often had smudges on it because sometimes I would use the wall-poster-tacky-stuff as reference points for some puzzles on PC games (I distinctly remember mapping out the rainbow planets in StarCon2 this way to find the two that I was missing).

That sounds like a fascinating story, but honestly it's not compelling enough to make me want to fund a documentary about it. It's an urban legend I've never heard of, and I have no frame of reference for even imagining how much material there is to gather/present about it.

Did you guys see this in 2D or 3D? I'm curious because this thing with the wheel flying at the camera didn't even register with me, at all. I saw it in 2D. I went googling to try and figure out where this scene even is, and found several people talking about how distracting/bad it was in 3D.

I'm not really sure what I want out of a Fallout game. Assuming this is 4, I'll probably play it, but I may have to take a different approach. The Bethesda games are just too sprawling for my tastes, but they have things in them I really want to experience.

The expansions for both DS1 and 2 are probably the best areas of those games, so yeah, it's real easy to get excited about this!

From what I understand, From now has 2 dedicated teams for Souls games (at least for the time being), Miyazaki's team and the B-team. The B-team finished the SotFS version of DS2 months ago, so they have to be working on something else. Bloodborne is getting an expansion, but Miyazaki may not need or want to oversee that directly.

In case anyone missed this (because I did) Sony confirmed that Bloodborne is getting an "expansion" with details to come down the road. People are hoping that expansion points to something significantly more sizeable than just DLC.

Rumor mill is saying that Dark Souls 3 will be announced at E3, with Miyazaki back at the helm. What's the character limit on thread titles?

No, there isn't a checklist, but trying to write female characters who aren't entirely defined by shitty tropes should be a goal of all writers. If that is too high a bar to cross, maybe it's time for a writer to find a new job. I don't know how many times I have to say this, as I've now said it multiple times (both in the original thread you participated in and in this thread). I'll try shouting. MY MAIN PROBLEM WITH THE GAME IS THAT THERE ARE 3 FEMALE CHARACTERS AND ALL OF THEM ARE WRITTEN IN REALLY SHITTY WAYS, ENTIRELY DEFINED BY SIMPLE AND NARROW TROPES WHICH WAS BOTH DISTRACTING TO ME AND VERY DISAPPOINTING. Do you seriously think that the game shouldn't be criticized for this? That it should just get a pass, because....well, I guess because. I still don't understand why you think this game deserves a pass on criticism when other games don't. Because you liked it? That seems to be the only thing that separates it from any other game being criticized. Do you feel it is special in some way that separates it from other games? If so, how? I think the story is mostly junk, and trying to fix it with genderswaps is like trying to put makeup on a pig. But I do think you could have a young boy afraid of water without having fridged his mother to accomplish it. You could just genderswap some of the secondary characters to have a more balanced overall cast. And I'd completely abandon/rewrite the entire spider-lady bit, because a black widow character who is also literally a spider is literally the most boring thing. As someone said earlier, a game where you're the spider lady eating boring boys is a much better story. Riddle me this, if a story doesn't have a narrative need for a cast that is dominated by one gender, then why shouldn't it be close to gender balanced? This is a nearly universal problem with the vast majority of American/European media, that there are more male characters than female. This is a thing we talk about, but we don't actually break out numbers on very often. In part because when you break it down, it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable to have it presented in cold, hard facts just how male skewed much of their favorite media is. And that's exactly why we need to do it.

That game super duper annoyed me. I wasn't going to talk about it again at all after I said everything I had to say in the original thread on it...but then I couldn't stop myself. Some days I have poor impulse control. Edited to add: Part of my annoyance with it is that I was really looking forward to it, and the hype around it only made that worse. So when I finally played through it, there was a double blow of both too high expectations plus all the problems I did have with it.

Bolded part pretty much nails my irritation with it. I also don't consider irritation to be an inherently negative experience. All sorts of things irritate me that I ultimately value or enjoy, and I wouldn't mind seeing Polygon try some more pieces like that.

It sets up the trauma for the younger brother which explains why he can't swim. He was so traumatized by watching his mother drown, that he's terrified of water. And thus his fear is broken by having witnessed his brother get murdered, somehow. Given that the only real purpose of her death is a) harm a male protagonist and create an obstacle for him to eventually overcome, I'd say it counts as fridging. I can't believe I'm about to reply to a post that includes Dostoyevsky and CK2 with Borderlands...but if you want an example of some care going into the secondary cast, it's hard to find a better example in gaming right now than the entire BL series. I'm floored by the attention, thought and detail that goes into a pretty good chunk of their secondary cast. And now I'm going to go think long and hard about how I reached a point in my life of drawing a parallel between Dostoyevsky and a video game with midgets riding alien ape-boar-things.

I've never played Ico, but I own it. I can go bust it out and hate on it real quick if y'all want. Also, I meant to add, I think it's important to criticize something like Brothers because it's not obvious low hanging fruit, but it's got the same problems with gender representation that a lot of shitty games have. It's easy to bag on a GTA or Dead or Alive, because obviously they've got sexist content. But when a beloved darling of the gaming community basically has the same problems with female characters, it's arguably more important to talk about, because these are the games that almost everyone else is going to give a pass to.