MrHoatzin

Christ, I just want to break into the man's house, tie him down and force him to actually play games. The nerve! The asshole!

Ebert is not a stupid person. My mind is blown by the fact that he doesn't seem to have cared to play any games before spending some 1000 words damning them for ever with no room for doubt. Within those 1000 words he dismisses Braid so stupidly, I don't even know how anyone can say anything so retarded and live to tell the tale.

Civ is a well-established niche franchise developed by a magnificent magical madman who gets to do what he wants. This is an untested team trying to restart an esoteric franchise in a big way. Doesn't pass the safe bet smell test. Safe bets are the only things that get funded nowadays, it seems.

The thing is, the story of X-COM is basically Half-Life. There isn't much meat there. There isn't anything there to really merit the revival of the franchise. As far as the mechanics go, maybe it would be interesting to have a FPS with a world map and semi-random alien events happening all over the planet that the player has to neutralize, investigate, loot and research. The locales can play out like Hitman or something, but a little more randomized. There is something to this. However, the gameplay itself is unique and what people dug about the game to begin with. There is nothing in the mechanics that couldn't effectively be transfered onto the consoles with a little effort and finesse. I suspect someone on the money side of the equation had a conniption when the developers couldn't present safe sale figures for games in the similar genre. I hope that if this is the case, they will pull as much of what was interesting into a FPS and at best create some sort of new hybrid genre. Tom Clancy games were clunky and cumbersome and had some convoluted controls that one had to master before doing anything at all. I never could get into those. I hope the new X-COM isn't this.

Good god man, have your people never heard of level tweaking?!

This isn't necessarily anything disgusting I have done, per se, but it is pretty disgusting and it happened to me and has to this day left me a little broken. So ok, this happened in Belgrade, smack in the middle of the embargo twelveish years ago. I was in fifth or seventh grade, or somewhere in between. The country was under sanctions and the economy was shot and no one had any money, and no one bought anything—which was easy to do because stores didn't sell anything. Shelves everywhere were empty. People queued up for bread and watered down milk on a daily basis, if the supplies were any kind of steady at all. A banana cost as much as a month's pension, and the pensions were slipping to the point where they were months late and the government was forced to justify time and again why this was so on their own, national, propaganda TV. Those who earned any kind of money had to change it into Deutsche Marks before the end of the day because the inflation was so astronomical that the Dinar would not be worth anything the following day. Now, this long-winded introduction sets the scene not only for the disgusting bit (which on its own is disgusting enough), but also for the vignette of misery that went along with it. For all their shopping needs and any kinds of small manufactured things, people turned to the flea markets. The flea markets seldom sold what one would expect flea markets to sell. Instead they sold "grey market goods"—new, cheap, usually Chinese-produced small appliances and clothing and pirated CDs that were smuggled into the country god knows how. This one time, I bought a pair of shoes. Generally I am a picky shoe shopper and I really thought I'd like these. They were skater-type shoes, cardboardy in color, and the material felt like cardboard too. It was some sort of synthetic pressed fiber, like something between paper and felt and tyvek (though not nearly as resilient as tyvek). They had the same color rubber bottom and a Prussian blue stripe between, going all around the sole. The first day I wore them to school I somehow spilled permanent turquoise ink all over them, and wondered why it is I couldn't have nice things. I broke the shoes in completely in a couple of days. In a few weeks the sole had collapsed and somehow flattened out. The lattice that gave the sole its thickness was actually not sturdy enough to support anything and it folded onto itself. The insole unglued from the rest of the shoe and would pull out when I would take the shoes off. The cardboardy top was starting to fray and get a little fuzzy in places. Buying new shoes so soon after I got these was really not an option, what with the destituteness. So I was stuck with these. And then the shoes acquired tenants. It was the kind of roach-like bug that in Serbia we called "buba-Rus", which means "Russian bug" (the standard cockroach we call "bubašvaba" which basically means "German bug" or more colloquially translated, "Kraut bug"). The Russian bugs are smaller than roaches and yellowish. At first I thought that the shoes were attracting the bugs. We left our shoes in an armoire in the bathroom and occasionally there were roaches in the vicinity, so I wasn't absolutely sure. But then I started noticing them around my feet at school. I stoically soldiered on, mortified of any social stigma that may befall me were this new trait of my shoes to be noticed by my peers. I would warily inspect the shoes every day before putting them on. For a while there I thought I was mostly free and probably imagining the whole connection between the shoes and the roaches. And then one morning, all the fuckers finally hatched from within or whatever the fuck and pored out of the shoe as if they were shoveled out. So then I was all, what the fuckking fuck this aarragh! I'd rather wear outgrown winter boots to school, fuck me this shit is disgusting! To this day I shake shoes out before I put them on.

I belive this might be a sports metaphor.

Due to your avatar, I read everything that you write as if you're moments away from bursting into tears.

Nival.....

Ass. A load of ass. Less ass than SMI:SE, but still an unwarranted pile of ass. Fuck this shit.

Making X-COM into a fps COMPLETELY defeats the purpose of reviving X-COM. WTF, dudes, wtf? No one makes games like that any more. For five minutes seven years ago, I thought Nival was gonna take up the genre, but they never followed through with a multiplayer Silent Storm and now they're busy helming the Heroes of Might and Magic revival. That was a really lovely game, S2, never finished it though. Maybe I should dig it out and give it another whirl. Booo FPS X-COM, BOOOO. :(

Isn't that what everyone from Australia says?

Does Brøderbund exist any more? They published it. I have no idea if they own any part of the game any more. Them going out of business is a reason The Last Express got such a shitty release and no marketing.

Holy balls, batman! This could be interesting! :tup:

I figured you guys would dig this. This is how awesome my wife is: attached is a birthday present she made for me. :tup::tup: Sorry I've been awol lately. The awolness is likely to continue. Happy birthday to everyone else, yay to the rebirth of the podcast, etc.

A befriending tip that works on romantic interests and merely cool people alike: invite people to events that you are already going to attend (gallery openings, poetry readings, protests, etc).

Holy shit, kids! This looks very fucking rad! I hope it doesn't suck. Do we know anything more about it?

Hey, some of my best friends are semites! I'm just wondering. Kroms, don't you live somewhere in the Middle East? I want to guess Lebanon, but I am very much not sure. What the question is supposed to lead to, tho, is why set the scene in a usual Noir setting with a sortof familiar Brooklyn Jewish flavor? The name does a lot of tone-setting in that passage. Maybe I am completely off-base here and jumping to conclusions regarding the time period and location, but why not set it in wherever you are/are from? Someplace you may be more familiar with, a place that will not seem as expected as a big US city in the 30s.

Why such an extremely Jewish name?

My computer got badly virused (hacked?) yesterday in spite of the firewall and AVG. The virus opened a shitton of Internet Explorer windows, turned off the firewall and installed an icon that pretended to be an anti-virus program... When I noticed the crazy shit going on, I tried ctrl+alt+delete but it told me the administrator had not given me the right to mess with the task manager. At this point AVG had flared up, but clicking DELETE INFECTED FILES didn't seem to do anything. So I panicked, turned the computer off and unplugged it from the internet. Whereupon it wouldn't turn back on. I failed to take note of which files were infected or what kind of virus it was. Plan: pull out drives, put them in this portable shell thing I have, save certain important files to the Ubuntu laptop. Format. Moral: if Chrome tells you that the site contains scary stuff that may compromise your computer, trust it. Even if the site in question is the relatively innocuous Pirate Bay.

I watched Mary Poppins the other night, for the first time since coming of age. I never noticed before how atrocious Dick Van Dyke's cockney accent was. Here's the 26-year-old-me's summary of the movie: it is a story about a magical narcissist and her insatiably sycophantic posse of enablers. I also saw Labyrinth a little while back and for the first time recognized the Humbert Humbert/Lolita overtones of the story. It is still a pretty amazing movie.

Man, can someone please leak us the IGN style guide, please?

I don't know what to think about the weird (and recent, no?) tendency of thumbites to keep many general purpose, general reference threads going and alive for ever. On one hand it is kindof nice on a conceptual level, not to litter with multiple threads on an old subject where you could as well dig out a two year old one and continue it. On the other, there was a couple of times where I didn't even post a thought because I couldn't find the old thread that I knew was there. One thing I am certain of, tho: I don't think we need to be indignant at the people who don't go out of their way digging old threads.

There is no real way to stop gaining momentum. Maybe one is supposed to try to aim for that weird grass rectangle.

I would imagine not, since those dudes when they are domesticated would lose their pointy, stiff ears.