Roderick

UUUUUUUUGGGGGGH. Can we just forget this game exists instead of bending over backwards to find anything good in it and pretending that justifies pinching barely clothed ladies, wriggling in anticipation, in the boobs? How sad, as a person, do you have to be to either create or play this?

I am betraying you all; instead of the next LEC classic I'm playing Daedalic's Deponia. My girlfriend and I laughed so hard when this came up: http://cloud-3.steampowered.com/ugc/903255624158694952/4199EC72082D3B5565E49564AE26F176A5ADD8A6/

In my mind Jedi Academy was always the fourth game in the Dark Forces series. Also remember that this series was the worst "colon title" offender of all time.

Really? Especially MI2 had such amazing art direction. Even without the comparison to the washed-out, Photoshop-layered special edition graphics, it's immensely charming and beautiful. It holds up incredibly well across the board. (I'll agree that MI1 is less amazing, but that just goes to show what a huge leap forward the sequel was in graphic fidelity.)

I seriously couldn't play the special editions. Horrified every time I switched to them out of curiosity.

Mainstream media for feminists, like Jezebel, or The Mary Sue? I enjoy reading the latter.

Whoa hey hey whoa hey HEY now.

Well, considering Wolverine has exactly six snikts to his body (three on every hand), four fifths on a scale of ten would translate to 4,8 snikts to six. Good show.

Does he SOUND LIKE DEATH?

Yeah, when's that Billy Idol fluff game coming out?

How super depressing. I recently had a discussion with someone about whether or not Zero Punctuation falls into the category of 'angry, cynical, everything sucks' reviewing. I thought it did, but then I deliberately haven't watched it in years anymore. I guess my thoughts are echoed on this board: I am so sick of cynicism and squeezing 'humor' out of being a caustic asshole. Like a lot of sarcasm, it's the easiest goddamn thing in the world, and therefor also the most worthless thing. Ugh, damaging, stupid, destructive... go make something beautiful, add a thing to the world, instead of tearing shit down just because you can. Vandalism has never, ever been a positive force. [DISCLAIMER]: I greatly enjoy Red Letter Media and the Plinkett reviews. On the surface perhaps not very different, but look closer and you see that a. these are comedy characters, b. there is a surprising amount of sincerity and valuable criticism on display. Just rewatch the Episode 1 review. There are moments of transcendent retrospection in there, where Plinkett ruminates on what could have been and where Lucas went wrong. That has nothing to do at all with bullying a person for laughs or tearing down someone's work because it's easy.

I'm not sure how easy or hard it is to work/live in the Netherlands if you come from outside the EU, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's less hard than getting into the USA. The cost of living here is quite a bit higher than elsewhere (though nothing as crazy as the nordic countries or the UK), but this is off-set with generally higher salaries/income and excellent social security. We even having a goddamn budding game industry emerging. Of course there's the moloch Guerrilla, but we also have Triumph (Overlord, Age of Wonders) and a ton of smaller studios starting to make waves (Ronimo, Vlambeer, Vanguard). Skip across the border to Belgium and you have Larian (Divinity: Dragon Commander) and possibly the Outcast sequel. Enough opportunities, I'd say.

Wow, I'm happy that this is working out for you. That Dutch Thumbs gathering is becoming more and more necessary now!

I downed the beast. It wasn't that hard, and I was able to run past all of the monsters without getting beat up too much. I'm now on the guarded bridge, which is an awesome spectacle. So, let's see if it stays doable. At least I'm progressing!

I have all the answers, sent them in.

I like the palate cleanser argument, because the very nature of the game means you simply can't, mustn't, become angry and careless, because then even slight minions will kill you. I don't think it alone justifies it, but I get that at least. The flow argument makes less sense for me, since the bosses are so hard and inscrutable you will die at their hands many times at once. To me, that breaks the flow rather than guiding it along. It's bashing yourself like a wave on a cliff, it's a terminus. Neither point invalidates my argument that this way of design hampers experimentation by being too punitive. But, you know, maybe Dark Souls is just a tiny bridge too far for me. It stings, because I know what an amazing experience it is when it does click.

I'm tackling the first boss now, the , and I am having some real issues with the checkpoint before it. The boss is fun and challenging and I'd love to experiment to try to figure out how to beat it. But I'm not doing that. No, I'm going on the internet to read a walkthrough on optimal strategies. Why? Because I don't want to replay 10 minutes of game just to try again once. I get it, Dark Souls is "hard". But having to replay a big chunk of game before getting to a boss isn't difficult, or challenging - it's a waste of my time and hugely demotivating. There is a very good reason this outdated design isn't used anymore. They should've put checkpoints right before the boss. I know some people will be quick to see this as a complaint about the difficulty level, or point out that if you have better checkpoints, it would take the sting out of dying. But I disagree with that. The part I need to replay is extremely easy. It doesn't make the game more tense, it makes it more boring and it's a turn-off. The challenge is the boss itself. You're already at risk of losing souls and humanity. Take those things, but don't make me repeat rote passages I've already done before. Perhaps Dark Souls' biggest punishment for dying is annoying the shit out of you by making you retread old ground. Does that sound like challenging and difficult? Nope, and it makes me play the game very differently than how I think was the idea: instead of figuring out the mysteries on my own, it's safer to just look up everything online to prevent having to replay ten minutes. I want to like this game, and for the most part I do, but it's stuff like this that makes me sigh wistfully and think there are other things I could be doing right now that are more interesting and a better allocation of my time. You're screwing up as a game if that's the thinking you inspire. OR am I missing something crucial here?

I think we're glossing over my post about The Wolverine with all this talk about Alphonse Cuaron's Gravity starring George Clooney. Let's not mix up our priorities here.

Revenue wells... Orson "Wells"? Wait a minute... are you suggesting that Activision Blizzard is...?

That's shitty, Twig, but you've got good things ahead of you. Follow up on what leads you have and turn this crisis into something where you get out in a much better place than you were in before.

Christ.

Here's a surprising recommendation: The Wolverine. I was expecting dumb fun, turns out it carries a little more weight than that [for a Wolverine film, of course]. Even wrote the FIlmadeus review right away: http://www.filmadeus.com/2013/07/the-wolverine-james-mangold-2013.html

What a fantastic chronicle! I hadn't seen the stream, but Ragnar's rise and fall is just amazing. One thing I want to bring up, since I've also heard this on the 3MA podcast. It seems you both pronounce the word 'grognard' fonetically (from an American standpoint) - literally a combination of grog and nard. Considering its French origins, wouldn't a more accurate pronunciation be 'grohn-yaar'? I hesitate to nag about relatively inane stuff like this, but since grognard is such a specific loanword from a very specific French idea, it's weird to use it but not pronounce it anything like the original.

No, it's time to lift the veil. Thanks for covering for me, guys, but I am Claire.