dium

Don't see the appeal of snails either! First time I had snails I really enjoyed it, but I quickly realized that the reason I enjoyed it was because they were swimming in loads of garlic, butter, and herbs. Replacing the rubbery snails with a bit of bread made the dish even more delicious (if also, perhaps, more transparently artery-clogging).

Was just about to post about that. A gread deal (of course), and seems like a smart move. Sucks that it's NA only, if a bit unsurprising. People are calling this the first Humble Bundle for a console, but if I may be pedantic for a moment: the android bundles probably all work on OUYA.

A reference to the delightful Worst Idea Of All Time podcast, perhaps? Although this would be a much less bad idea.

Man, I wish I'd tried harder to stick with it the first time I started watching it in middle school. That was the time in my life when I totally did dig teen angst overlaid with pointless imagery (and I read a lot of comics to that effect). And yet... eva just felt annoying and tedious to watch. I'm intrigued with eva for no other reason than it's a show that people (whose taste I respect) praise and dismiss in almost equal measure.

You may have been reading reactions not to his response-to-a-response blog post, but to his initial statements in the Radio Times (or really, the bit of it that io9 quoted and put a clickbaity title on here). ...but even that statement wasn't worth getting huffy about. People are just overly sensitive about being asked to examine why they like the things they like.

I've tried to watch eva, like, 4 times. Maybe one day I'll get past the first half dozen episodes so I can have an actual opinion on it other than "the first half dozen episodes are bad".

The humor may have been lost on some people because nobody was expressing any belief in American exceptionalism, but rather complaining about relative American shittiness. So it came off less like making fun of American exceptionalism and more like a "yeah, it really IS bad over there!" sort of rubbing your nose in it. Less jab and counter-jab, but self depreciation and an assist in further self depreciation. Nothing false was said, though.

Thumbs talked a lot about Diablo 3 in the very early episodes (eg the wizard, etc etc), but that was something like half a decade before that game was actually released.

If enough "regular people" play it, it stops being a real video game. I actually think that's what it boils down to.

Playing so many adventure games has actually created some really weird habits in me: I can actually get really disappointed when I progress faster than I intended. Like for instance, in Broken Age I enjoyed trying to combine inventory items with each other since there was unique dialogue for most potential combinations... ironically, when a random combination would actually work I'd feel sad that I now had two less inventory items to go fishing for dialogue with.

IRT Spenny I have too much nostalgic love for this kind of thing to give a real defense. Everything you say about the "friction" in these games is true, and true of almost all adventure games. Some of the best remembered games in the genre made a point not to care about friction, and indeed put more of it in on purpose. (I'm thinking of Monkey Island 2 in particular, where in the commentary for the SE they mention how they wanted to make sure that the player needed to visit every location before they could start solving puzzles in any single location, for no reason other than slowing the player down. That game is close to being my favorite game.) I think people understandably have a lot less patience with their video game entertainment than they did when these games were popular. A big part of the experience of playing an old school adventure game is not playing it: hitting a wall, walking away, thinking about what you've tried and haven't tried, coming back with a fresh perspective. It's a very slow, contemplative way of playing a game, and it's absolutely not for everyone. Honestly, it's not really for me anymore either... except when I'm in a very particular (nostalgic) mood. That said, I'm always ecstatic when newcomers to the genre click with what makes (...made) these games fun. Reading' Zeusthecat's big Lucasarts thread was a blast, and helps me understand that my childhood memories of joy may actually be legitimate.

Practical crowd-pleasing arguments aside, I don't agree that high resolution pixel art is an ugly compromise. He spends much of the article pointing out the kind of interesting, beautiful art that's come out of applying pixel art techniques to images with higher and higher pixel densities. KoF sprites look amazing once you've got it through to yourself that the visible pixels aren't a mistake... they look amazing before that too, even if the pixels are distracting. This and this definitely aren't the same aesthetic, but do you really think the latter would look "better" if it looked more like a TV cartoon? (I'm lukewarm about the look of Auro myself, but none of my negative opinions have much to do with it being pixel art)

Awesome article, and every point made is convincing from a practical business-sense point of view. From a more personal point of view, hearing him essentially say that an artist that presents a challenging aesthetic that the viewer doesn't understand has failed as an artist is depressing as hell.

I stopped playing Witcher 2 some time early on in the final chapter. I get the sense that, if I really wanted to, I could go back and finish it in only a few hours. But starting an RPG from the middle (or not-the-beginning) after a long time away is never much fun, so I'm probably never gonna finish that game.

Not a great comparison, since Hot Toys are "collectables" targeted at adults rather than children, and similar-scale figures of the other Avengers go for a similar price.

I still don't think I want to play it, but I definitely want to keep watching people play it. "Yay! Kimochii!" is the greatest reaction to video game death I've encountered.

Said it in the cartoons thread, but it's worth saying here too: Song of the Sea is good. See it in a theater if you can, it's very pretty.

It was brought up in the "ethics and integrity" thread, that a man's primary role in feminism is to listen to women and talk to other men. This has always been my (fairly strongly-held) opinion. An even more strongly-held opinion: a man's role in feminism absolutely shouldn't be in setting agendas. Men can sometimes be invaluable consultants, but necessarily shouldn't be making actual decisions for a group calling themselves "feminist". I don't know if having a man lead a feminist group is always and absolutely a bad thing, since "feminist group" could mean a lot of things and I can't pretend to imagine every situation that might lead to a man in charge of one. But even in situations where maybe I can understand a man being in charge, it would feel disappointing at best. Like, if there were ANY woman candidate capable for the position SURELY she would've been a better choice. Maybe a feminist ally group in an all-male high school? Now I'm just making up fringe situations. This all derives from a bigger point: that men interested in feminism need to fully understand and internalize that it isn't about them, and then they need to act like it. This is why I'm always a bit put off when people talk about how the patriarchy hurts men or how feminism is good for men... not because the points people make are untrue (they're mostly good and true points) but because it feels like a marketing ploy towards dudes who need to feel involved before they'll show support. And it also feels deliberately misleading; patriarchy hurts men in several ways, sure, but to imply that patriarchy hurts men on balance is pure baloney. I do not call myself a feminist, partially for the reasons above, but mostly because I grew into my beliefs with feminist friends who did not think a man should be able to call himself that. That said, I personally think the self-labeling thing is a very minor issue, and how people behave is immeasurably more important. When somebody asks me "are you a feminist" and I don't feel like getting into a discussion about semantics, I tend to say yes, because a "no" would be very misleading. </post about how men shouldn't make feminism about them, that was mostly about me, a man> </clichéd html end-tag lampshade> </ditto>

I missed Song of the Sea during it's "regular" theater run around here, but I saw it yesterday at an arthouse-type deal and I'm so glad I did. It's breathtakingly beautiful. And touching too! It reminded me that I need to see more animated films in theaters. Movies are almost always more enjoyable in a theater environment, but I'm always taken with how good animated movies can look on a big screen. (Maybe I'd think differently if there were any actual children at the screening for this children's movie. There were not.)

That's really handsome and impressive.

I would be all over something like that, except I'd skip all the horror movies because I am a wimp.

I was a big Homestuck fan all the way up until the gigapause. I have not read anything since he started again. I have a very high tolerance for complicated lore bullshit, and the second "half" of Homestuck (actually much much more than half) is the purest form of this kind of over-engineered plot wankery. It's taken to such an extent that it would feel like parody, except that it's far more ridiculous than anything it could possibly be a parody of. It's in its own league. I cannot defend Homestuck to anyone who doesn't like it, it's almost uniquely undefendable. But I will defend the "dumb" audience who loves this shit, I am one of them. Homestuck is a theater of narrative indulgence, and there's nothing else like it. There is no substitution. ...that said, I have not read anything since he started again. I'm afraid to. Part of why Homestuck worked (for me) was its momentum. That momentum has been lost, and I know it'll take some effort on my part to feel the momentum again.

Yeah, I didn't really expect anything beyond my suspicions (that he's one of the frighteningly large number of people who're still actively angry at Zoe Quinn on Eron Gjoni's behalf) but I dunno! He was acting like maybe there was something else he was trying to say. That probably makes me a sucker. ..no, that DEFINITELY makes me a sucker.

Yessssss, Gita is the coolest, we hang out sometimes (but not enough).

Brasas, (forgive me, rest of the forum, for being genuinely interested), what is your argument? That Eron Gjoni is a good man? That his actions post Quinn breakup were reasonable? Is there a specific point that you're arguing against? I don't understand why you're being argumentative, exactly. Or: I have pretty good guesses, but they're not flattering to you, and I prefer (against better judgement?) to give the benefit of the doubt.