prettyunsmart

I've been really stressed about how to spend ability points. I'd like to give my Ranger some skills in lockpicking/pickpocketing/whatever, but will that leave my main weapon skills underpowered? Character building is the one part of this game that I'm not totally loving because I'm pretty sure I'm going to screw things up (though it is good to know you can respec later).

In one of the threads, someone (Roderick I think?) floated the idea of slowing down the pace of the film club. How is everyone feeling about that? I was going to post about my possible picks for the next film, but since the Tokyo Story thread is just getting started, it seems premature.

Isn't the idea of a Mary Sue (gender issues aside) that it is an idealized character inserted into an existing universe? I get where you're coming from in terms of characters like Shepard having no noticeable flaws, but I'd say it would be a more fitting in something like a licensed game. Something like a Star Wars game where you create a character who is a super competent cool guy who is best friends with Han Solo and everyone loves him for some reason.

I'd definitely agree that there's a greater degree of complexity in the film than my first comment would suggest. The main reason I bring it up is that each time I watch the film, my first thought is "it's been too long since I've called my parents." Then again, like Roderick suggests, there is a more general sense of false contentment and emotional disconnection going on in the film that makes everything more complicated than just "kids, be nice to your parents." By the way, Roderick, sorry if I was out of line in posting my comment before you got to write up your full post. I've just been bad at keeping up with the film club so far, so I wanted to post while the thought was on my mind.

One thing that I've been really interested in with each Ozu film I've seen (particularly with Tokyo Story and I Was Born But...) is how moral/moralizing of a filmmaker he is. In most understandings of cultural distinction, moralizing and didacticism are generally markers of "low culture" that "true artists" should avoid at all costs. Yet, Ozu's films are so often deeply concerned with domestic issues, particularly with children's inattention to or lack of understanding of their parents, but his place in the canon of world art cinema is hardly ever questioned...not that I think it should be. Is it his technical mastery that makes critics who would otherwise scorn his subject-matter, or is there something else that sets his work apart? Sort of like the discussion of melodrama in The Earrings of Madame de..., I'm always interested when "low culture" elements come up in the discussion of art objects we normally associate with "high culture," and I usually am left thinking about how unstable our categories of aesthetic valuation are. Well, that was excessively pretentious. Sorry about that.

I played as much Broforce as currently exists. I was surprised at how mechanically sound it is. I mostly picked it up out of a general love of 80s action movies, but it is actually a really solid 2D shooter with some pretty interesting environmental destruction mechanics. It isn't really well balanced at the moment. Some heroes are way too powerful, and some are basically worthless in most situations (looking at you Indiana Brones). Either way, there's a decent amount of stuff to play with in the game already and it seems like they'll only keep adding to it, so I think it is worth a look. I also finished The Wolf Among Us yesterday. I wrote up longer thoughts on the game in the game's thread, but in short, I was a little disappointed. It was still a pretty well-told story in the Fables universe, but mechanically, I found myself becoming really bored with the QTEs by the end, and some of the dialog branching broke down in some pretty noticeable ways. It wasn't bad, I just wished it turned out a little better. And finally, I played through The Blackwell Legacy, the first chapter in Wadjet Eye's Blackwell series a couple of days ago. It was really interesting to see how the game turned out after playing The Shivah not too long ago. It really seems like a refined version of the same ideas in terms of adventure game design focused around investigating a mystery. I'm really looking forward to playing the rest of the series. Having just started the second game, I'm already noticing even more polish (plus jumping back in time seems pretty cool too).

Episode 5 is out today, and I just finished it up. I don't have too many non-spoiler thoughts on it other than to say that I ultimately ended up feeling pretty indifferent toward the game. I didn't actively dislike my time with the last episode, but most of the major plot beats were expected, the action scenes more tedious than exciting, and the Telltale formula seems to be increasingly...formulaic.

EDIT: Part 2 EDIT: Part 3 EDIT: Part 4

At first I wrote "consistently depressed" but it didn't feel right at the time. Annoyed made sense in terms of an eSports organization making a stupid decision based on trying to look like "real" sports organizations. The comments, on the other hand are generally horrifying, which is why I didn't read them in the first place.

This is probably too small of a detail to focus on (and too much of a "movies these days are bad while old movies are good" sort of thing too), but I was so impressed by the use of long takes in the film to build tension. The average shot length of Kanal is 22.38 seconds. To compare it to some films from the same year, the ASL of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood is 12.5 seconds and Bergman's Wild Strawberries is 9.5 seconds. Most Hollywood films of the same era come in around 7-8 seconds, and more recent big-budget films coming in even lower (Iron Man: 3.66 seconds, Saw II: 1.74 seconds). I couldn't help thinking how some of the scenes filmed in a single long take would have been filmed by a director of a recent big-budget film. The scene on the rooftops as the company runs frantically from cover to cover while the camera just slowly tracks along with their progress is so perfect. Today, it would likely have been filmed on a handheld camera with shots lasting about a second and a half. Anyway, I've become Andy Rooney now. Get off my lawn. P.S.: All ASL data shamelessly stolen from Cinemetics.

In other news, there are more gender-related conflicts in the world of digital sports. I can't say I'm surprised, but that doesn't mean I'm not consistently annoyed about most video-game-related things.

I'd be up for it next you want to get a group of people together. I got a steam invite from SgtWhistlebottom, but I've away from my computer for a few days so I didn't even see that this was all happening.

It is clearly too early to be watching for possible sightings of Frog Fractions 2, but this is the first game to make me think for a moment, "could this be it?"

See now I'm torn. I have severe anxiety about drowning (since I'm a baby and never learned how to swim), and that sounds like the worst. At the same time, a tense cool, cool game for $5 sounds like the best. EDIT: By the way, since this is the second week in a row of mentioning Justin McElroy, it seems worth pointing out that he is a really funny dude who, in addition to writing about video games for Polygon, hosts a podcast called "My Brother, My Brother, and Me" where he gives listeners and people from Yahoo Answers awful (and occasionally unsolicited) advice. The clip below is one of my favorite moments from the podcast.

So this is a stupid question but now that Infinite is on sale, I was thinking of grabbing it and Burial at Sea for $15. I already own the game on Xbox, but I figure DLC never goes on sale for it. Is Burial at Sea sufficiently weird and interesting to justify repurchasing the game?

I don't know how much the rest of you know about bird noises (I'm an expert), but I've never actually heard a bird say "baboo." EDIT: And this stupid post starts a new page. Lovely.

I choose to believe that he is off crusading against the menace of subjective video game reviews.

By the way, Patrick R: Any thoughts on what your movie of the week will be? I just wanted to get a head start on ordering it in case it's something that will be a bit harder to find for those of us without Hulu+.

Rocksmith 2014 is one of the one of the only things I care about getting in the summer sale, and it's 75% off on a flash sale right now. Conveniently, this is happening while I can't log into steam because of a server error. Blerg. ...And it works now. Disregard my complaining.

I lost my S1 save when my PS3 crash so I've been looking for a way to make a new save on PC for season 2. After the game went on sale today, I searched again and found this reddit thread. It isn't perfect, but it will probably be good enough for me.

I bought one recently and have yet to regret it. There were more games for it that I was interested in playing than a PS4 or XBONE, so it made sense for me. If there are more than a couple of games you want to play for it and you can see yourself playing them over a longer period of time (as I do for Mario Kart 8, 3D World, etc.) then why not? (assuming you have the available disposable income and all that)

And now I imagined the cube opening up to see your version of Dinkelroy. That is a mental image I never needed. On a more serious note, I think casting McElroy in the role for Destiny 2 is a good choice, .

It's not going to happen, but what if part of the love and war update was female character models for all classes. Not going to happen, but it would be fun in light of the "women are too much work" thing.