Roderick

My guess at the hidden word is "REMO", complete with quotation marks. Bioshock: Infinite "REMO"

The real question is obviously, why is there a Rapture in an aquarium in a miniature city located inside Andrew Ryan's ear canal?

The link to Bioshock is that the whole city actually belongs to a miniature race of people and the city floats in the ear canal of Andrew Ryan.

Thanks! I had the lowest of low-key birthdays yet though. My little brother is getting married next week so that kind of overshadows everything. But then I am a party-hating hermit anyway, so I guess that plays right into hands! I look forward to my birthday-related Starcraft II tournament tomorrow evening, which will surely end in tears (I'm counting down to them)!

What a freaking sweet trailer. Punch to the face, but super classy. Bioshock "Infinite" seems as absurd as the setting itself, which I guess is fitting. I'm on board with everyone else here who says that I want this to be a different game than Bioshock. I want to actually have real human NPCs to interact with, not just the debris of a cataclysm littered with audio book. But crikey man, that BALLOON BUILDING!

Yes, intense fans can definitely be the worst.

I'm pretty sure Remo's first game at Irrational will be "Dr. Jesus" starring Bob the medical professional.

Only when I replayed Psychonauts earlier this year did I fully realize what a fantastic game it was. The first time around I had all those complaints about difficulty and collecting, but it ages just so well and it takes a second playthrough to appreciate its subtlety. About this game, I have no idea what to expect. When you don another costume (I hope there's a silken Goku), do you get appropriate powers? If you do, it reminds me of a terrible PC deathmatch game I used to play called H.E.D.Z., where you swapped heads to gain different powers. I would link to Youtube, but upon revisiting this quaint memory the game turned out to be so ugly I just couldn't post it here.

In the fifth sequel, College Baby goes up against a silken goku-wearing mo' cap artist.

What a great podcast, guys. You had me in stitches multiple times. What the heck is a goku, though? I only know the Dragonball Zet character.

So if I get this right, there's just a slightly more serious theme going on in Warhammer connecting to the human condition, as opposed to Warcraft being just zug-zug, so to speak? I do see the point emerging, but I'm not entirely convinced yet.

That sounds like pretty interesting DLC, but the blurb on Eurogamer is hilariously/atrociously 'IGN' More dangerous Splicers that command the power of the elements, upgraded Security Bots that throw rockets and lightning bolts, and even a never-before-seen type of Big Daddy!

I don't know a huge lot about Warhammer (I tried my hands at the miniatures several distinct times, but it was always too much effort and too little incentive, I think I still have a boxed Chaos army somewhere, not even unpacked), so I'm curious to know exactly how much more 'subtext' it has in comparison to Warcraft. Is it really that much deeper? I didn't really get that vibe from it at all, so I'd be interested to learn more.

I once took a girlfriend to Der Untergang for a first date. We both loved it.

I feel a little disenfranchised by Warcraft too nowadays, but I wouldn't say it's the overt goofiness. Warcraft always had some small bit of humor in it: a case could be made that percentage-wise it's still the same. World of Warcraft is just so big that the humor plays a bigger role too. But rather than the comedy, in my case what happened was what happens with all fictional universes at some point: it just became too big to register. With the old Warcraft (as with the old Star Wars, for instance, or Dune) it was possible to know everything about it. But there's this point in which especially the expanded universe (books, comics, etc) gets so big and important that it becomes impossible to know everything. This is why Blizzard has dedicated loremasters who do nothing but check if everything is according to canon. When a job like that is created, it's no longer fun to follow it as a hobby. So with Star Wars my reaction was to only take the core canon into account. With Warcraft (where the game itself is so huge), my instinctive reaction was unfortunately just to give up on the lore. I just can't be bothered to know everything about every unique dragon aspect and faction anymore. Doesn't mean I can't enjoy the fiction, but I don't feel the way towards it I did when I knew FUCKING EVERYTHING about it around the time of War2.

In the director's commentary on the DVD they clearly state they're all fans of anime and incoroporated some elements of it, at least in the animation of the cinematics. To be fair, I didn't think it was that Japanesey. I thought it was more directly reminiscent of Mass Effect infused with a dose of Warhammer 40k.

That's terrifying and relieving at the same time: good job.

I would LOVE to see Wrath of Khan in theatres. Easily the best Star Trek film.

Obviously, Remo is going to be taking up the newly created post of game-advisor for the Obama administration.

Wonderful to read your experience in Japan, Kolzig. Wouldn't mind visiting Hiroshima either. I always thought the radiation would still be quite high, a mere 65 years after the explosion?

Warcraft Adventures was produced in some Russian house, yesno? In any case, its story (Thrall escaping Durnholde castle and Blackmoore's grasp, becoming the leader of the Horde) was later released in bookform, Warcraft: Lord of the Clans. A pretty nice recounting, even.

I've not reached the end yet with the terrible news, but I alredy profusely apologize for this:

I'm completely with Sombre on Spirit Tracks and anyone who killed the final boss at the first try is a robot and a fraud.

So this is a bizarre thing that I discovered while watching the cutscenes on DVD. There's a UNN broadcast somewhere with some quick snippets of news, and then there's THIS FRAME spliced in at some point. I managed to capture it on my camera. It appears to be a flying Matt Horner being ridden by an unidentifiable other person. Obviously designers having fun with the models, but what does it mean?

Nothing beats the cinema, especially a near-empty one. The most annoying thing about cinema is still unruly visitors who don't have the courtesy to stay quiet! Fun cinema fact: during every single viewing of any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in theatres, there would always be one time when an empty bottle of beer was kicked over in the back and rolled all the way to the front. Coincidence, or the hand of Sauron? You decide.