CollegeBaby

Xenoblade is one of the reasons I decided to buy a Wii U, but honestly I don't know what that game is yet. I just liked Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenosaga. Also I love stupid anime acronyms. The more forced and unnecessary the better.

I loved DA:O but DA2 really soured me on this series. Since Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin have come out - and with Pillars of Eternity not far off - I don't really care anymore that Dragon Age isn't classic PC RPG anymore. But this game just seems to have zero identity. What does Dragon Age as a series actually stand for anymore? Inquisition just looks like a laundry list of Fantasy RPG game features rolled up into a big lump of video game blah blah. I hope this game is good and I'm going to give it a try, but only because this year has been so barren with high profile releases worth playing.

Yeah I also used to watch some WTF Is... videos before this shitstorm, and I will give him this pass. He has talked about actual issues in journalism and consumer rights on a number of occasions. It's arguable whether or not his attitudes were actually valid and well thought out, however almost no other high profile advocate of gatergate can actually say they have had a voice on "ethics" that didn't have something to do with anti-feminist temper tantrums. But all this crap about trying to absolve himself from death threats and doxxing just because GG is a leaderless formless hashtag than anyone can use is a complete and total cop-out. If GG has no leadership, no manifesto, no stated values, goals and methodology outside of "it's about ethics in games journalism" then nobody gets to decide what is and is not the responsibility of GamerGate. If you want to be the voice of GG you need to have the responsibility as well. Otherwise you're just trying to have your cake and eat it.

Can you elaborate? I've only read the first book but I don't remember the Bene Gesserit explicitly being sexualised, and their history was integral to the narrative and themes of the book overall so I don't think one could say it was primarily to justify sexualisation.

I don't know, it seems to be the approach of several YouTube GGers I've encountered who profess to exemplify rationality and skepticism, then go on indignant tirades and "gotcha" type character assassinations that is more characteristic of Denialism. It's the same rhetoric used by Climate Change "skeptics" as well as a list of other conspiracy theorists. Whatever. It's the Dunning-Kruger Effect isn't it? Ignorant people are oftentimes too ignorant to understand the extent of their ignorance. Assuming they genuinely believe their views and aren't just being contrarians. I wonder if this post-Wikipedia age has exacerbated it. I know I've learnt things I never would have known without the Internet, but I wonder that other people might take this access of information for granted and assume they are instant experts on any topic by virtue of them knowing how to use Google.

Using a sock puppet - masquerading as a straw man - to create a false flag? It sounds like children's school play.

I guess it depends what you want from a shooter. Splatoon will probably be the casual local co-op party game equivalent of a shooter (just speculating, I don't really know for sure), but I think it would be very bold for it not to be. Wii U doesn't have a large player base to support much of a competitive online community outside of massive titles like Mario Kart and Smash Bros, which have been building their fan bases for over a decade. On the other hand the casual audience haven't exactly been flocking to the Wii U so maybe they should be making it more competitive? I don't know, Nintendo these days seems too conservative for that especially on an unproven franchise.

I am in the mid stages of getting dangerously addicted to buying old big box PC games. It started with buying games that I already owned in the past but were lost or damaged in time (Half-Life, Baldur's Gate, Wing Commander). Then it went to games that I had always wanted but never got around to owning (Mech Warrior 2, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter). Now it's getting into a buying multiple versions of the same from different regions because sometimes they have different components or box art and I'm getting more picky with having sealed originals and I have no money for any of this because I'm a college baby!

Oh man when Nick off-handedly said he was rewatching The Wire with his girlfriend in my head I was screaming The Wire Rewatch Podcast!

I'm pretty sure the game autosaves at the beginning of missions. Am I the only one that had no issue in the Medical Facility? Sure I died a few times, but I was always making progress. I guess it is just the sort of game that either clicks with you or you just bang your head against a wall until you brute force through it.

Soren Johnson, Rob Pardo and sweet jazz. Aww yeah.

Solaris is still worth reading if you have seen the films. The Soderbergh film is non-essential anyway, and the Tarkovsky one is fine but in my opinion takes a different interpretation from the book. It shifts the core theme away from the incomprehensible nature of alien intelligence/consciousness and the limits of human knowledge in favour of the less interesting relationship drama between the male and female leads. I read it in highschool almost a decade ago but got the new English translation from Audible this year. I don't know much Polish so don't know for sure how faithful it is, but it is more coherent here. Listening to it in audio form also makes the "Kelvin reads a book" chapters easier to swallow the jargon.

I think it's telling that they are fighting a completely fictional animal. Also... half of them are dressed as white knights. So we continue GG's complete ignorance of irony.

I decided to buy a Wii U almost a year ago, but still haven't actually gone ahead and done it yet. I think this game will push me over the line. It's a shame the Wii U isn't doing so well, for my money it has the best exclusives on it so far of the new consoles (at least until Bloodborne comes out). Third party doesn't matter to me I just play them on PC.

Joe Fielder explains here that Space Minotaur was his first game idea as a kid but never got a opportunity to make it. That's an explanation, but I don't think it makes it any less off-putting. I agree, I was more interested in the game when I thought that thing was just minor side content. Honestly the game made more sense to me until that thing came up - it just looked like a Sleep No More version of The Black Lodge if it were a video game - now I can't wrap my head around what purpose it's suppose to serve. Maybe they were expecting it to pull the nostalgia angle? To me it just reminds me of bad Atari knock-offs.

That's what reminded me of it as well, but the back story is basically the point of all the other events of the film so I don't think it would apply. I still like the Fifth Element as well. I like how campy it is, and I think the visual design is amazing. I just have conflicted feelings about it now.

I agree it's a justification, my point was just that it was a subversion, or lampshade hanging otherwise put. It should be included as an example, just with a caveat.

I don't have anything meaningful to add, and this has probably been pointed out by someone far smarter than me somewhere else in the world over 15 years ago, but I just needed to vent. As a kid one of my favourite movies was The Fifth Element, but I had not seen it since I was about 13 years old. Well I decided to watch it again recently and was kind of horrified to be reminded of what it was as an adult. Throughout the movie Mila Jovovich's character is described as this "perfect being", created from a superior race of aliens, the person who will save the world from evil and destruction, so on and so forth. However as a character she does almost nothing for the entire movie. She makes no choices, doesn't affect change on the plot by her actions, and apart from a 2-ish minute fight scene she can't even defend herself without the help of Big Strong White Man Bruce Willis to save her. She is basically a human MacGuffin. So what does the movie actually do to portray her supposed perfection, other than being told so by every character? By men constantly remarking upon how good looking she is and what a perfect example of the female form she is. Nude scenes are played for comedy by men being shocked by how good looking she is. She is instantly the love interest of the main character when they meet, and On top of this there is no single positive female character in the rest of the movie. Women fall into one of two categories of either being a dim-witted object for the desire and servitude of men such as the flight attendants, McDonald's workers and so on. Or they are completely sexless and undesirable such as the butch female military officer or Bruce's nagging mother. The female alien opera singer looks like she might go somewhere interesting, however... Obviously this is nothing special about films and there are worse examples, but I was just kind of embarrassed for having liked this movie so much as a kid while being completely oblivious to the kind of ideas it was portraying.

I don't think the problem is with whether or no the justification is good. In the language of TV Tropes, the Jessica Rabbit example seems more like a subversion to me. It doesn't explain away with a weak rationalization, it spells out exactly why characters like this are portrayed the way that they are. It's just luck that they get to have their cake and eat it too.

Aside from the Kickstarter boom apparently being over, it looks like a problem of too much money for too strange a game. People fairly critique the typical publisher model for being adverse to risk and a reluctance for projects that have no set precedence, but the crowdfunded projects that make big money (over $500,000) are still the same easy sell projects that bank on nostalgia, existing franchises or otherwise a rather simple idea that is easy to digest. Unfortunately this game had none of those.

I noticed that too, and Tim's slightly uneasy face sells it even more. I feel like there must a tumblr of images made funnier by loading slowly in 56kb style.

Man Red Dead Redemption is a great game. Too bad RDR isn't on PC and probably never will be. The best hope is that they do an updated version for new consoles as well as PC. Anyway I would echo Sleeping Dogs. I actually prefer it to any GTA game I've played. As a massive and ridiculous sandbox game it doesn't have as much originality or variety as GTA (although the hand-to-hand combat is pretty good), but it's so competently put together with a clarity of vision that is rare for open world games. It also doesn't retread the same worn out digs at "The American Dream" that GTA has been trading on for over a decade. I think Saints Row gets an unfair reputation for its sense of humour, at least 3 and 4 do. I can definitely see why people would be turned off by it at first because I was as well, but once I started playing it I realised it came from a place more intelligent than it presents. I would loosely compare it to something like South Park - although the sense of humour is quite different from South Park - it does have a similar weird dichotomy of crass humour, clever satire and warm hearted drama. Chris Franklin has a good video on how Saints Row 4 handles its tone, and I may as well give the Sleeping Dogs review as well (spoilers at 10 minutes)

OK it sounds similar to Dark Souls soapstones, except it must be matching people up randomly instead of leaving/finding marks on the ground. I guess they are trying to further distance people from meeting up with their friends, unless there is another item for that not in the alpha.

I am about 13 hours in and getting rather tired of how much gating there is and how almost every objective is related to unlocking a path to where you want to go next. The levels seem designed with a degree of openness that is part-way between Bioshock and typical linear games, but your actual path through the levels is limited by so many different types of locked doors. I suspect this is done to facilitate the amount of backtracking it wants you to do but it just feels like filler, which is disappointing because in my view this game would be more effective if it was shorter. At this point I am just getting numb to the drama of the game. I am wishing I had just stopped playing the game after... I... uh... fulfilled my purpose as bait.

By this do you mean there is passive co-op? That's interesting, but I hope they can balance the AI for it. Summoning seemed to break a lot of boss battles in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls since they appear carefully designed for a single player. It was noticeable on occasion when they couldn't seem to make up their mind about who to attack.