brkl

My town is deliciously stupid.

I've reserved my seat on NA East 4, so feel free to invite me to the region. If you wanna.

Dead Space 3 is brand new though, and a flagship game for EA. Even if it isn't great. As a peace offering it's rather a lot more than you can usually expect.

Good luck, tegan.

I nominate Toblix for Best Overall Person. I should be able to join you guys next time due to his generosity

I tried! Again and again!

It's almost certainly not better as a city simulator. It's really weird -- you have to specialize the "cities", so you start jumping from one to another, and other ones are frozen when you do. So if you have one city making money, you jump to that and wait, donate the money to a poor city and then jump back exactly where you left. It really doesn't feel like it portrays the real world in how it operates, but it's pretty and you can make curvy roads (which will cause annoying problems).

Man, I'm annoyed at the streetcars. Why the heck do you need the wide avenues for streetcars? You can fit one anywhere you can fit a pair of tracks. I just moved to Helsinki a week ago and they've laid streetcar tracks on any street that's convenient.

I've never seen this server anything but Full.

Fuck David Cage for tricking me into buying Fahreheit by making the demo good and the rest shit. I like the Bowie album that song is from.

Hmm, try prog_hume. I was looking at help.ea.com from clicking the "View Updates" link, which still says I'm proghume. Man, Origin....

proghume on Origin!

I know Lu had problems and recently my crappy Linux netbook did too. I think they disappeared for me after a while (cache got updated probably).

I installed SimCity 4 today (for the first time) and it's the music is great, although not SimCity 2000 great. EDIT: I had some weird SimCity 2000 music flashback immediately after typing that, like reverse PTSD.

I heard he had to leave because a blood feud erupted between him and Tim Schafer.

I absolutely am not. I will make the dumbest city.

So I hope this game is good or becomes good at some point, because I'm getting it and my brother is also getting it as a birthday present. Some of the stuff that's been revealed about the simulation really bothers me, but I'm hoping the team gets the chance to make it better (I'm not talking about the political stuff).

Such a strange thread. Good thing I left and didn't mess it up any more. Reading it now, I totally would not have had the patience to have some of the conversations that took place and would have just spouted off instead.

I am obliged to like Rare Exports due to Finnishness, but if I wasn't obliged, I wouldn't like it.

Goddammit, one of the first things I would have tried in that game is make a super-green city Great post, Tycho.

Oh man, TP liked the video. We tend to disagree, so I may have to examine where I went wrong. Once my internet springs back to life, I'm going to reread the thread and make a proper contribution (just in time to reawaken all this fighting once it has died down). Luftdude, I swear I'm not just hiding under a rock because I don't want to answer your post.

Everything has a context. In this context, the reaction to Sarkeesian's Kickstarter campaign was hatred and death threats. It isn't the existence of a reaction I was referring to, it was the type of reaction (I was ambiguous, I know). The reaction to this video not in the bowels of the Internet but in this thread has been strawmen ("Sarkeesian says Miyamoto is evil!"), criticism of the way she accessorizes (WTF!?) and other nit picky criticism that has nothing to do with the content of the video, new vague but very high standards of excellence that don't seem to have much to do with the stated goal of the video series, both dismissal of her as a gamer and annoyance when she proves she's played games since she was a kid, misrepresentation and dismissal of the actual content (claims that she doesn't address points when she does, claims that the video only consists of examples when it doesn't -- the transcript is there to read for people who somehow missed the analysis), claims she hasn't done any work, claims that she lies about the number of examples she has, she's not academic enough but also too boring, and also she shouldn't call something "regressive crap" after twenty minutes of discussion of why it's regressive... I'm sure reading that is as tiresome as writing it was. It's not a fair assessment of the individual criticisms that have appeared here and probably reads as mean-spirited, but it is how the mass of criticism looks to me when reading through this thread. It appears to me that there's a lot of criticism, but I don't see any specific claims of how the actual content could have been better. Only vague demands that it should have deeper and better, somehow. Of course we have talked about how crappy gaming can be when it comes to female characters, but there is no source on the internet that goes through the trouble of actually making specific claims about specific games to such an extent. When the videos are finished they (along with the backup materials) will be a very good basis for further discussion. They'll make very clear all the different ways that you can go wrong even when to rise above the more obvious tropes (for example female characters that just act exactly like male stereotypes). Off the top of my head, if I was writing a paper on the subject, I could use this as a starting point for looking at what happens to female characters when they are adapted from other works. Demanding that these videos are the final statement on sexism in games when they are the first work of this kind is ridiculous. I don't buy the claim that the claims she makes are so obvious or old that the videos don't bring anything new on the table. The specificity is important: when discussing Peach she shows that even when Peach has been given agency in past games, new games opted to make her the object again. I hadn't played the new games and this actually surprised me. It shows you how there was an opportunity to make a clean break from the trope, but Nintendo decided not to.

I was finally able to watch the video (at a horrible resolution on my cellphone because my Internet connection has been absurdly bad for a few days), and I'm going to have to re-read this entire thread to try to understand where the criticism is coming from. From what I can tell it's exactly what was promised, and judging from the response it's exactly what was needed. The defensive reaction first to the Kickstarter campaign and now to this video shows that people know there's something wrong, even the people least receptive to this, but they don't want it talked about. So what needs to be done is to reveal so much evidence about even the most cherished games that the problem can't be denied. In any case, I thought it was excellent and I certainly wasn't bored.

Hah, I'd take my Wasteland money and move it to this one.

As someone who contributed to the Kickstarter, I expect the videos to do what was described on the Kickstarter page, not celebrate how video games are actually fine because this one time a company made a game that wasn't obviously sexist. Finding examples of games with OK female characters in order to make gamers feel less threatened is not what was promised. It's also not needed as the industry and gamers are very adept at patting each other on the back.