Bjorn

On the female characters, it doesn't matter that it's called Brothers. Like, how is that even a defense? That's somehow justification for an otherwise pretty terrible cast of characters? Do women not play a significant role in the lives of many boys? Okay, they can have the damsel trope, but it's also okay that they fridge the mom and use the evil-spider-succubi all in the same story? That those are the only 3 plot critical females? I mean, I'm not complaining about a single damsel here, the entire female cast is a trainwreck. Also, to quote myself from the Brother's thread: Do young boys have more goats in their lives than women? And I've played Another World from start to finish a good 6 or 7 times in the last 20 years, thank you very much. I own an original PS1 disc version of Heart of Darkness, but have never got around to playing it.

I played both the 360 and PC versions, and the PC version was a much better experience, which is one of the reasons I'm excited for it being the only/lead platform. The game went much faster on PC, just thanks to hotkeys and not having to do things like cycle through all your soldiers. Plus control was much better. I lost a couple of people do to slight innacuracies in the 360 version, something that never happened in the PC version. And assuming they do it well, procedurally generate maps will be a godsend. I've played 5 or 6 full campaigns, and map repetition/similarity were real downers even by the third playthrough.

I'll just repost here the two quotes I pulled out in the random thought thread, which are some of the really exciting things to hear about this sequel (super exciting things bolded):

I saw a barebones reading/performance of Rapture, Blister, Burn on Sunday up at the university, organized by a friend of ours. Before the performance, she told me that the main reason she wanted to stage it is that she found it to be a really frustrating work, but she had only read it, and wanted to see if seeing it performed changed her view at all. It's certainly an interesting play. It's structured around a feminist academic who is the author of a best selling book about porn, torture and how Internet pornography helped shape some of the abuses and war crimes of the Iraq War (if this book doesn't exist, I really want it to). She takes a sabbatical to go home and take care of her mother who is recovering from a heart attack, and takes a teaching job at a small, local college to give her something to do. An ex-boyfriend is a dean at the college, and helped get her the gig. Much of the first act is structured around a small summer seminar she teaches which has a 21-year-old student, the ex-boyfriend's wife and the author's mother ends up sitting in. The 3 generations of women discuss and argue about feminism with both covert and overt personal stresses and dramas informing the conversations. At the end of Act 1, I was ign.com Blown Away. My initial reaction was that it could be easily become one of my favorite modern plays. Then it just totally falls apart in Act 2, losing all the momentum, charm and character developed in the first half. The second act focuses almost exclusively on the personal dramas of the characters and drops the arguments/discussions about feminism and how it fits in the realities of these women's lives. Anyone else seen it (I'm not sure how many performances it's had, or even how old it is)? Even with my frustrations with Act 2, I would heartily recommend going to see it if you happen to have the chance.

Did somebody just discover Hunter S.? Because that Polygon piece is just fucking weird as hell for a game preview there. I can actually see being irritated by it if I had just gone to Polygon to read about RB4, and this is what I got. I find myself irritated by it. Though not because he didn't have the proper enthusiasm, there's something else. It's dismissive, envious and perhaps even angry at people having fun with a video game. And those are all interesting things to express, but perhaps it's just packaging? If it weren't billed as a preview, but as a column, people wouldn't have read it with the expectation of getting some basic facts about the new RB? At any rate, that preview is way more interesting than any drivel about how a gaming journalists job is to be a fucking corporate cheerleader all the time.

Bridge is like the Dark Souls of old lady card games. Looks simple, but has impenetrable mechanics that some people become obsessed with, is also full of low level twinks and people take it way too seriously. Okay, sorry for the Bridge derail, please, carry on with the Splatoon talk.

Very possible, as I think it is a fairly popular game there. I have never played Bridge in my life, but I'm fascinated by the culture that surrounds both amateur clubs and high level play. Also, it has things like "infamous foot tapping scandals."

Bridge, which even has some semi-ridiculous table devices to eliminate communication between partners.

I had wondered how MP had evolved. ME3 certainly evolved quite a bit, particularly with new classes and powers being added. Perhaps I should give MP another shot. They lady and I have been seriously jonesing for a new horde-mode-grindy thing to play.

I think that disconnect comes a lot from the tone of the game, maybe? Like Trine and Trine 2 are just as guilty of this kind of world design, but they are so delightfully goofy that it doesn't matter.

I'm sure I've said this in another thread at some point, but with the case of OTC specifically, I'm willing to give Soren some leeway and don't begrudge anyone for buying it. There were some signs pointing towards Wardell being an asshat years ago, but he didn't go full on dirtbag (as far as I know) until gamergate. And in business, sometimes you work with people who are asshats. Soren's business partnership with Wardell predates gamergate by at least a year (and probably more, that's just when Mohawk was announced). I'm not going to be as generous with my opinion of anyone who elects to go into business with Wardell now though.

Ergh..blerghl....I'm literally drooling over this.

That's a great mechanic! It could just be as simple as sometimes a particular food or drink just really hits the spot and gives you a great emotional boost.

Ha, that's incredible. I get a big kick out of how incredibly dark a lot of Nintendo games are if you either really think about them, or dig into the actual lore/story of them.

True. Also, I just looked at Hatred's steam page. At the bottom, one of the recommended games is Gynophobia, a game about the abnormal fear of women.

I wouldn't count on that. GG doesn't necessarily support the things it latches onto in any kind of significant way. Watching free YouTube streams doesn't equal paying $20 for a bad game. The primary people who cared about Hatred are gg, and on KiA there's literally no mention of it on the day it launched, not four pages deep. Supporting Hatred was about irritating people, but that job is done.

Wait, there's not a secret login with a 3 digit password that makes a nuclear bomb go off in a highly populated city?

I'm with you, one of the few people who really didn't like that game (given that it got such universal praise). Besides the design elements you mentioned, the entire thing felt really manipulative, like the point of it was the twist, not a natural exploration of a story of two brothers. I was also incredibly frustrated that all the female characters in the game were dead, evil or damseled. That's something I wrote about in the forums here.

That's just...wow. I mean there's bad, and then there's trainwreck bad.

Hey guys, have you heard, Fury Road's really good! (super late to the party, finally saw it this afternoon) I don't get the complaints about Hardy's acting, as is said in the movie he starts off half feral and the implication is that he hasn't even had much human contact in quite awhile. Being gruff and short makes sense both with everything that's going on, and with the context of his character at that point.

Oh man, I'm watching Sean's stream of Bloodborne and this is fucking delightful! I'm impressed he lasted as long as he did against the first wolf. Has anybody watched Danielle's streams? Those are on my list to, but there's a bunch and I don't know if there are some particular highlights that are best to watch.

You can make the cat meow whenever you want, and I unlocked a farting cat that you could make fart on command. Based on that, I'm assuming there is a reasonable chance that a puking cat variation does exist. Oh, you can also just pick shit up in your mouth and carry it around the house and drop it wherever. There does not seem to be any point to this, besides that it's awesome. And you can open doors and cupboards, but you have to just sit there and keep banging on them with your paw from different angles until you finally get them to pop open. Which is perfect. I don't want to oversell it, it's a super simple game. But cute. Unless there is some sort of secret, dark side to it like Hatoful Boyfriend or something (WHICH WOULD BE AMAZING, but I don't think that's the case).

Twister is a surprisingly popular movie in Kansas (probably because so few movies actually happen in the midwest in the first place). I'd say there's something cathartic about living in a place where a natural disaster can occur, and facing that fear through fiction. The towns that have lived through devastating tornadoes might feel differently, but for majority don't.

I wish I had good advice, I'm a terrible cat parent about being able to adjust the behavior of our cats. Mangus, as previously mentioned, is a night howler. And now that it's spring, Girlfriend is picking up the same habit, wanting to go out at 2 or 3 in the morning and howling until she gets what she wants. Using a squirt bottle doesn't even dissuade her in the slightest.

This seems like the most appropriate thread for this. Catlateral Damage came out this week! It's a game whose entire point is to wander around your human's dwelling and knock their shit over. I backed it when it Kickstarted. It's a neat toy, I spent about an hour playing with it last night. I'd be hard pressed to recommend it at $10 unless you are super enamored with the idea, there's not much to it beyond knocking things over. But it sure as hell is cute, and you can play as backers' cats and find pictures of backers' cats in the various houses/apartments.