chummer

Yes, absolutely. I'm not saying anything new by pointing out the ease and consistency so many popular video games use violence as a player's primary interaction with these virtual worlds and characters. It's disappointing. I think a lot of the folks I follow in video games have pointed out something similar, which I think is highlighted in the Bombcast clip- a self-awareness of how messed up this trend is. Dan Ryckert is the Malachi Constant of video games?

Finished the one season available for Princess Jellyfish on Netflix and Blambo really nailed a lot of my thoughts in regards to the show and Kuranosuke in particular. I was expecting it to dig deeper into ideas of femininity/masculinity as performance, but it's also okay having a character that is transvestite without making the show focus on that one thing. This was interesting because the other instances of a character using their femininity to accomplish things is when Kuranosuke gets the pet-shop owner to sell Tsukimi the jellyfish after the shop is closed, and Inari who is portrayed as a femme fatale. I'm not quite sure what to draw from this yet, but it's been something I've been mulling over. I think the strongest feelings I have about any character is Koibuchi. Fuck that dude. He's already so daft that he can't tell Tsukimi is the same woman when she puts makeup on, but there's a scene where he slaps a woman for not a particularly good reason. The show also let's the woman conclude "He hit me because he cares about me." That's an actual "epiphany" a character had and it was really disappointing. Aside from that huge caveat, I thought the show was really charming. I think I'm going to dive into Samurai Champloo next as Cara Ellison mentioned it in passing in the top ten list she did for Giant Bomb this year.

Oh, wait, one thing about Dan that really does bother me is how... gleeful he gets during videos when particularly aggressive/violent acts happen. Off the top of my head, it happened once during the Destiny QL and then when they were looking at Shadow of Mordor during its quick look and end of year stuff. Maybe this is the result of who I'm listening to/reading but whenever I see positive discussion of combat it's often praising technical and mechanical elements. Though Dan seems to like that stuff, he is also very into the violence of it as well. It's... gross.

Yup. Especially when those points can be used to get really useful stuff like extra potion slots and more dialogue options.

Was looking this up myself the other day and apparently there are items that automatically go to the 'valuables' tab that are used in quests. Off the top of my head, the monster research items, spider ichor, and some types of precious rock. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the series didn't continue it's legacy of very limited inventory.

So I picked this up in the Devs for Ferguson bundle and finally started playing it today. It feels like such a gigantic game, which I know is in part due to the slow pace of the walking, though I'm curious to find out how big the map is when I "finish" the game. I found a map early on and assumed that I was somewhere on it and decided to go northward after finding a compass quickly after. I ended up hitting what seems like a mountain range meant to block my passage, and since I couldn't find myself in the map, I just started wandering around. I eventually spotted the transmission towers that were on the map, and I realized that the map wasn't really drawn to scale. It made sense once I saw it as a sketch made by a human as opposed to a developer's hand giving me a tool. It was around then that I also discovered that I'm a couple hours in and I don't feel my time has been wasted, but I'm mitigating that by listening to podcasts while wandering. Not sure if that'll hold up, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Oh, I also really like that even if all the world's details haven't loaded, if you look into the far distance you can still spot the glowing globes. Hot tips. I'll keep that in mind. A question: how quickly did you guys find the bow and the fishing rod? I find the rod almost right off the bat, and I only got the bow by pure luck. Does the game start in the same place every time?

I still really enjoy RPS and that's probably the only site I got to regularly as I'll often stumble upon a good freeware suggestion or neat article. (they recently had one extolling the virtues of Far Cry 2 and another on Tomb Raider mods). Other than that I have an RSS app that I scroll through every so often just to see what headlines are popping up. Twitter is probably my main source for news as I follow a few games peeps there.

She feels like a sketch of a Jane Austen character. "Sketch" because she doesn't feel fully fleshed out yet and I'm not sure if she will be. I can get the Iron Bull love, but I've no idea why people like Cassandra.

Wouldn't "skeptic" be the most fitting word we're looking for here? I feel comfortable with that as I don't necessarily exclude the idea that gods or supernatural forces exist, I've just never seen compelling evidence for any of it.

Sites playing musical chairs again, eh? burn.

"No Qualified Women Applied," a.k.a. Go Fuck Yourself So I have very few feelings about Dan himself. He seems like a nice fellow whose ignorance doesn't come with malice but still carries a lot of harm (for example the "work hard and you're sure to get it!" belief). There's a lot of people like Dan, who hold the same beliefs about life and games, and I think he has just become an easy focal point w/in our sub-culture for the dismay other people feel about the types of views he holds. He worked a long time at Game Informer saying the same stuff, it's just that now he's at an outlet that people who are vocal about video games care about so it's a whole different audience. I'm rambling now. Ryckert is Homer Simpson:

Uhhhhh, Princess Jellyfish is slowly turning into Sabrina? I'm into the social misfit gals living together bits more than the romantic comedy bits so far. Kuranosuke's motivations to cross-dress haven't been quite fleshed out yet and that makes me anxious because I feel like that's where the transphobia may be hidden. Here's hoping it's not!

Does Princess Jellyfish get transphobic? Watched a few eps and while obviously a lot of characters are really uncomfortable with Kuranosuke's cross-dressing, I'm curious if the show's treatment of the character is going to fuck it up.

Maddy Myers wrote another post about getting and not getting jobs in journalism both in and out of video games.

Doubts are high on this. Secretly hoping they hire Cara Ellison to join the East crew, but travelling around the world and living with various game devs seems way more interesting work than telling jokes over video game footage. Who knows?

Ominous.

So I'm playing on the PC and was getting anywhere from 8-60fps. Disabling the Origin overlay fixed that and I managed to play a pretty good chunk of the game without too many problems. Started it up again today though and now the problems are back. At this point, I'm going to wait and just keep up with the patch notes in hopes that it'll be fixed. I actually finished DA:O and DA2 pretty recently and I'm still meh about the combat. The one particular mage skill tree in DA2 that allowed me to throw around enemies is gone and that's unfortunate because the zaniness those spells made of the battlefield were entertaining. The player-character also seems really dull. I feel like they tried to split the difference between DA2's limited player choice and DA:O's broadness and didn't quite get it right. The first game still has the best variety in player dialogue options, though I still enjoy trying to roleplay as a character with particular beliefs and opinions about the world. Doling out inquisitor justice from the Skyhold throne seems really neat, though I've only done the first one and it didn't seem there was much consequence to it? Hoping to see more of it. Not much else to say other than Vivienne is wonderful and deserves her own spin-off game where she maneuvers through Orlesian high-society.

So I've put a bit more thought into this and I think I've got 6 games I really enjoyed: 80 Days Bernband Fract OSC A Story About My Uncle Jazzpunk Desert Golfing Memory of a Broken Dimension isn't out, but it's a thing I played this year that I was enthralled with. The Wolf Among Us was something that I got to when it had all come out, so I feel like my experience with that was pretty good. Loved the visuals and style of the game, though some story doesn't quite deliver. A pretty good year for video games, even if video game culture continues to be fucked up.

I think those were the new offices of Cards Against Humanity? Maybe he's getting on board with them in some capacity. His farewell said the he was definitely sticking with editorial work, but that's broad enough to be a variety of things. Good luck to him. Really? I never noticed that.

http://youtu.be/IdSUKIFnYc8?t=6m12s Not sure how I feel about the gun and scoring as discovering the world is what really made Bernband great, but I'm willing to try it out.

While Bernband definitely feels more "designed" (I think your comparison to an amusement park is on-point), I actually felt it was representational of my memories of a place. While experiencing cool things in a city rarely happens as often/within the short time-span that Bernband presents, that's certainly the way I remember places. For instance, I've been to San Francisco once and I remember having a drink in a tall building, meeting a homeless person who told jokes for money ("I can tell you where you got those shoes." "Where?" "You got them on your feet!"), eating mac & cheese with lobster, a rude jogger and so on. Fair enough. I think arguing which is "better" isn't what's making the conversation worth having anyway; I just fall on the other side and say that Bernband hit me stronger. Bernand. Hernhand. The Yawhg. Nidhogg. It's the era of nonsense names. something something Smooth Criminal

I have a few scattered thoughts that I'm not finding a good way of organizing, so this may read jumbled b/c it's coming out that way. Is the starting area of the game inside a starship then? I didn't read it as such and I think one of reasons I didn't is because I played Bernband, which starts out almost identically with the player looking out a window (or window-like thing in Hernhand's case). It seemed more like a club to me. Looking back on it, the fall from the ship onto the planet didn't signal to me "Hey, you were on a ship" because- again- Bernband uses a similar trick, which just led me to think "Oh, I fell down just like that hole in Bernband." The other reason I may not have read it as a starship is because of the art. When I was first writing about the art, I didn't want to call it "ugly" because I think there's value in "ugliness" and it's related to the fact that I enjoy outsider musicians like Lil' B and Daniel Johnston, whose music is often called ugly. I think maybe the word I was looking for was "obtuse," which is what made it hard for me to read the environment. Not just the ship though, but the distance between me and the desert animals, the odd dip in the desert next to the subway ? sewer? entrance, the narrowness of alleys. The spatial and visual stuff often made me confused more than intrigued, which is why I posited that alienation was the game's goal.

Homey been taking a knee so long that it's losing blood.

Really enjoyed Giraffage's No Reason EP, which came out not too long ago. His claim on this album was that he wasn't sampling songs (a skill that he's really great at), but he still manages to sample song-like things and keep a similar sound to his other albums. Am I a goof for saying I really liked Makonnen's Tuesday w/ the Drake feature? I feel like Makonnen is like Drake's Lil' B and I'm kind of into the fact that they made that video together. Hey, ya'll: remember when Beyonce dialed her foot phone? That was a pretty great video, even if the song is kind of dull:

So I'm thinking about these games with the assumption that they're both going for different goals, though both seem to be drawing from the Mos Eisley cantina scene in Star Wars. Bernband feels like it's trying to be a welcoming world made for exploration while Hernhand is trying to alienate the player. With that in mind, I think Bernband does a better job at accomplishing its goal than Hernhand. When I think about Hernhand's visuals- for instance- I'm more put-off by their aesthetic than alienated. The creatures and hands done in that paper cut-out style are actually quite charming, but the way textures and some 3D objects give me a feeling that I'm looking at something that was slapped together by a developer instead of a thing that existed inside that world. But now that I've written that thought out, it has made me consider that maybe the feel of a diorama- of a human-made display- is what Clover was going for? Hmm. The most distinctive event of Hernhand's sound design is when you stand near certain aliens, an incredibly loud white noise starts playing. I can think of way more instances in Bernband where the sound worked wonderfully though. The buzz of that first club; the low rumble of hip-hop music in the parking garage that grew as you approached it; the piercing of solo trumpet. I also think Bernband's clopping footsteps are better than Hernhand's. Both games use the contrast of loud and quiet, but I think that the rhythmic way you encounter that contrast in Bernband is better because once I knew that proximity to the alien in Hernhand caused the loud noise, I just stayed away. With Bernband I was forced to encounter that contrast various times because it happened across various scenes that I wanted to explore. I have a few more thoughts, but just wanted to throw the few out that struck me the most.