lobotomy42

That lime green is pretty sweet. Did anyone here get one of those cheese yellow GameCubes? Those were super-rare, although it wasn't so hard to find the yellow controllers.

:tup: :tup: :tup: :tup:

The way Nintendo drip-feeds out new colors of consoles and controllers as if they are special "rewards" can be insanely irritating. It basically condemns you to having the ugly color if you buy at launch. I got my Pink 3DS (regular sized) a year or so as part of their Valentine's Day promo. (Now I have pink controllers for all my current consoles!) Though my pink 3DS is less neon than the 3DS XL, and I think I'm glad for it. However, I do wish the the inside top panel of mine was the same pink as the rest of it (like the 3DS XL above) instead of randomly black. That's the one.

It's funny, because I think the core mechanic is a clever one and I quite like the idea of the game. But constantly being harrangued by sound effects and pop-ups had a very stressful effect, much like the dreaded low-health beep in Zelda. I can't tell if stress is fundamental to the mechanic, or if changing some of the UI elements and sound effects would have alleviated that.

A few levels after I figured this out, I realized that this game was more stressful than fun and stopped playing.

They already made a sequel to A Link to the Past, it was called Four Swords Adventures for the GameCube and it was AMAZING. (The best ideas from FSA - cooperative-competitive mode and assymmetric information - ended up in what is now the New Super Mario Bros games and NintendoLand.) This new thing is...we'll see. I probably won't play it, to be honest. Rodi, I disagree that the 3D zeldas are like the 2D ones, though, if only for the fact that I generally love the 2D ones and rarely finish the 3D ones. tegan, regarding the thread title: Bravo.

This is really not that different from most creative fields. People LIKE working in them, so there's very little incentive to pay people very much, because there's always someone trying to get their foot in the door who's willing to work for less money or in worse conditions. Have you tried being a novelist these days? An actor? A filmmaker? A musician? Most of the people who try these things will simply never get paying work in these fields. Many of them will spend many many hours working on their masterpiece and never see a dime. A few get lucky. As it becomes easier and easier to makes games, the games industry will probably also move in this direction. Most games will be made by people with a passion working in their spare time, and a lucky few will have a career making blockbusters. It's sort of sad, but on the other hand, it wouldn't happen if people fundamentally didn't enjoy (or believe they enjoy) working on these sorts of creative projects. If being an accountant were fun, we could abuse them more, too!

Seconded!

I have to say, I'm actually surprised at how frequently I StreetPass people. I live in a city and take it with me on my very short walk to work, and I usually pass one or two people a week - which is far more than I would have guessed!

I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I have pre-ordered this. My copy should arrive today - I'm more excited than I should be. I will try to play tonight or tomorrow to get some first impressions.

I never even noticed that!

It's been a decade or more, but I remember enjoying Luigi's Mansion on Gamecube quite a bit!

Man, all the reviews made this sound like a bit of repetitive chores. Now I don't know who to believe!

In general, I think reading translated works is fine and I agree with you. The "loss" in meaning when reading something in translation is usually minimal, at least for most conventional prose fiction and non-fiction. In poetry or any kind of writing where the emphasis is more on the language itself rather than the content, this probably fails to hold, but that is really a very small portion of what most people, even avid readers, read. Also, most of my favorite literature is fiction in translation - Camus, Sartre, the Russians, Bolano and a few others. I don't feel like I'm reading something that is unfaithful to their intent or work. I realize that there is a whole school of literature scholarship for which this is view is heresy - "a translated work is A NEW WORK" etc - but I just disagree. On the other hand, I seem to be coming from a very similar background as you - native English speaker whose primary "foreign" language is a few years of university Russian. So take my opinion with whatever salt you want!

I'm no great fan of Mad Men, but Downton Abbey isn't even in the same league. Mad Men at least attempts to maintain some consistency within its characters and some faithfulness to the world & time it's drawn from. Downton Abbey falls back on caricature with a frequency that makes it hard to believe the producers care about much more than pretty scenery and getting zingers out of Maggie Smith.

It's not like you're using those play coins for anything else...

It's hard for me to hear "Broken Age" as anything other than a sequel or prequel to Dragon Age. "Finally, the Dragon was broken. And then for the next two thousand years, we entered....the BROKEN AGE."

Frankly, Downton Abbey is terrible. I agree with everything Rodi said, but there is an even more fundamental problem with the series, as I see it. The show exists, as far as I can tell, to whitewash not only the British class system but also to portray most of the major social conflicts of the 20th Century as just a series of giant misunderstandings. As the show would have it, virtually every problem could have been solved if only someone had had the foresight to tell Lord Grantham about it and then have a brief heart-to-heart chat. Characters rarely object to the social changes occuring around them with more than a minor tantrum before deciding that "Oh well, perhaps I was in the wrong after all." (If only people could be persuaded of their complicity in injustice so easily!) The effect is twofold: First, the struggles of the past are erased by portraying gradual social change as inevitable and always positive. There are never any winner or losers, hold-outs or stalwarts! No one ever fights tooth and tail against or for change, it just sort of happens in consensus. It is a viewpoint that flatters the former oppressors (making it seem as if they were not nearly as active as oppressors) and also renders invisible those who fought and took real risks - not just a mild scolding from Lord Grantham - for their causes. But the second, more insidious, effect is to pat the viewer on the head for having the "correct" opinions on all the social issues that arise in the show ("correct" is defined by the show as "whatever views are mainsteam and moderate in the early 21st century" - views that will likely be seen as bigoted and wrong-headed in all new ways fifty years hence.) It's flattering to society as a whole, both past and present, in a way that is, well, wrong.

I just read The Next Time You See Me by Holly Goddard Jones and it was fantastic. The novel, like her earlier short story collection Girl Trouble, does a great job of immersing the reader into the minds of residents in a small town after a woman goes missing. That description sounds very "crime-y," but the book isn't remotely crime fiction - it's primarily concerned with painting a picture of daily life in the rural South across a range of characters in different positions. The novel's strength comes from its radical empathy - this book, like Girl Trouble, is exceptionally good at getting in character's heads in a non-superficial way and making the reader feel bad for everyone. It is not perfect in achieving this, but it succeeds more often than not.

One of the characters in your party. Meaning: Avellone will write much of the dialogue for a single major character that he will also design. (Obsidian and Bioware both often break up writing duties by character this way, to keep the voices consistent.)

From the update: It may not be *much* writing, but it sounds like he will have some direct involvement with at least this one companion.

Agreed! This video looks great, in spite of its obnoxiously aren't-we-in-love-with-ourselves jokey narration.

Why?

Not unique to this video at all. One of the things that bothers me about the "identity politics" (for lack of a better phrase) fields in academia is that they seem to have one foot in academia and one foot in progressive activism, and the two don't always mesh very well. I get why these fields evolved this way - the academic departments were the outcomes of specific progressive political movements - but I don't think it's entirely intellectually honest to "study" something you're also actively participating in, for basic conflict-of-interest reasons. And the result shows up occasionally in videos like this, where some basic, honest diagnostics are immediately followed by a moral judgment. Granted, this is the sort of thing that academics have probably always done, and there's no such thing as pure objectivity, etc, but at least most disciplines have moved in the direction of trying to avoid this sort of thing. As for the video itself, it seems....mostly fine? I don't have much to say about it yet, but maybe that will change as the series progresses.

He added some hover-text to the keyword system -- I don't think this counts as ditching the keyword system. It does add a bunch of writing workload, but otherwise it seems like a reasonable compromise. He also sent out a pretty long kickstarter update detailing and implicitly defending the keyword system.