CaptainFish

That comic might be Gunshow by the talented KC Green. He did some baby Rorschach strips here.

Having played a little Hitman Go after hearing several positive impressions, it does remind me a lot of Absolution (a game I did not like) in the way that game was highly focused on vanilla stealth game sneaking around guards in levels rather than the sort of ideal Hitman gameplay hiding in plain sight and unique assassinations. It's much more palatable in Go though because it doesn't even make a claim to that legacy, while Absolution seemed like it pulled it off well in a few spots and then made a completely different game in the majority of the rest of it. Also these Go levels design around that basic guard sneaking purpose in a straightforward way, while I think a lot of guard placement and level design in Absolution was haphazard and muddy mostly by virtue of the disguise mechanic and reliance on the instinct ability.

From watching the Quick Look it seems like the articles scattered around the janitor's office after the mission ends are how they convey how well you did.

I used to watch Dinosaurs on the Family channel after it's initial run. I'm only just now realizing what a preposterously expensive and skilled production it was.

Fun cast. Loved all the Civilization talk, and will probably fall into another hole of playing it nonstop!

Looking at Navajo Wars it covers conflict with 3 different enemies over their existence so I can see how that would be really awkward to design around. Had it been about the Navajo and Spain only, for example, I think there's an interesting game to be made there that could depict that conflict in a true palpable way to the players by making it a conflict between people rather than a person and a system. Tangentially, I have a hard time accepting that it's generally okay to make games where all you do is kill and you're the hero, but there are so few that contextualize negative actions in a historical (or at least less fictional) context to show what it really means to be the villain. Papers Please did this extremely well by making it possible for the player to experience large range of motivations for your actions as a guard.

I'd argue the mystique around Nazis and the occult and their easy status as villain was a lot of why they were chosen. Which parallels Luftrausers' player faction regarding their strange military tech and instant identification as antagonistic.

While the aesthetic is divorced from the terrible things the Nazis did, it does tie in very specifically with their invention and manufacture of all sorts of bizarre weaponry/vehichles during WW2. They didn't only choose it because it looks cool.

As I said in my first post, the Churchill appearance is the one thing that really doesn't jive with the alternate reality explanation. It pushes it towards the way the Red Alert games are alternate histories, which do use real factions, rather than just a wholly imagined set of factions. It also might be worth noting that as far as I am (one challenge away from getting a 100% completion) it is the only depiction of the people behind the enemies you fight. There are no other representatives, each other cutscene simply shows the vehicle you've taken down being destroyed, or your scientist reacting to the new experimental parts you have. Edit: I forgot the 1st cutscene shows a couple light haired men freaking out about seeing you on their radar. The characters don't really evoke a specific faction like the others do.

This is actually why I liked the Vlambeer response. It didn't try to dismiss that a Nazi interpretation was possible and apologized earnestly for conveying that even if it was accidental. I feel like a lot of other responses would have the purpose of discounting the issues raised, rather than just going over how it happened in hopes that it helps frame the interpretation.

I actually like a fair amount of them. I wouldn't play on 4, 6, 7, 12 or 15 and I think 13 and 14 are on the edge of acceptable. I pretty much only play on 9: LANIGIRO. It uses a dark blue palette for the sky and makes the planes bright cyan so they pop really well. Makes the whole thing feel like a night mission.11: YNITSID, the alternate greyscale scheme to 2: DISTINY, is also similar with a dark grey background and light planes. I think those both have a good feel and work well. 5: BEDNAR and 8: CAINE are really awesome as well. Rather than using shades of one colour, these use all sorts of colours together and have great bullet and plane contrast over the sky and background and foreground clouds. The issue with these two is they don't have a feel like how the default scheme has sepia, LANIGIRO has a night feel and YNITSID has black and white. The remaing ones I think are all playable. 1: VIDEODREAMING is cool cause it evokes the CGA graphics of , a game LUFTRAUSERS reminds me a lot of. On the other hand, the unplayable 7: DENNISWEDIN is a disappointment for me because it uses a scheme reminiscent of a CGA mode I used to use a lot (Mode 4, palette #2, high intensity on this wiki page), but the enemy plane colour is so unsaturated it can blend in a lot especially when crossing sky/cloud boundaries. A lot of my draw to LUFTRAUSERS was how it reminded me of games that used to only use a handful of colours on the pc, so I guess I had a lot to say about it.

The Luftrausers discussion was intriguing. Unlike you guys, I don't think the Nazi imagery was lost on me. There was an internal debate about whether it was WWI era or WWII era Germany being aped, but both definitely came to mind. The Red Baron-esque man in the Steam equivalent of box art probably pushed me more towards WWI. The thing I still can't reconcile is the Winston Churchill look-alike in the blimp destruction cutscene, something I saw before I bought it in the Giant Bomb Quick Look. I posted about it in the last podcast thread. Obviously the point that I think it was well considered is not agreed upon, but perhaps the idea about their emotional space rings true. I still feel like the anger and aggressiveness Rami talks about lead to you being the 'bad guy' rather than the opposite, or the game just not having any of that stuff at all. I definitely see the issue of having this design that uses specific imagery, and to have it described in such vague terms. I do feel like some of that vagueness does come across in the game, and that's what lead to some people not seeing Nazis until they are told. Although that could be impacted by how the game just pushes that stuff to the very periphery while making the player focus on 'mashing up to replay' like Chris said. This stuff is honestly disappointing to me, because visually Luftrausers is very striking and holistic, but it seems like that asethetic doesn't really point to the 'thesis' of a game about superweapons, like they wanted it to. I would be really interested in reading more reactions to the Vlambeer blog by those who presented the initial issue, or any responses at all, if you guys have links.

Yeah I saw that over the weekend. They have a really great attitude towards interpretation, and it's interesting just hearing their reasons for their design. Seems quite well thought out. One of the comments I saw about the topic suggested that it's worse than Wolfenstein or CoD because it frames Nazis as 'good guys'. But it always felt like the maniacal nature of the player's faction was conveyed. There's definitely a sense of triumph in music when it gets to the common theme a few minutes into a run, but I felt it was more just celebrating your skills than any conflict beyond that. Still it's really great that this exchange happened the way it did cause it's important to think about choices like that. Edit: Rami also wrote a really great article about their feeling of a disconnect between themselves and the game, in terms of how it kinda clashes with their design and was made when they were in a different space emotionally. Maybe that also contributed to you ending up on the 'bad' side of this conflict as well.

Aside: chick peas are also called garbanzo beans so you could have an Idle Thumbs 'Banzo Bag.

Maybe you should've just been specific about whatever you had an issue with.

I feel like the North American proliferation of this is definitely South Park related though, it's even mentioned in that link. Understanding comedy is definitely a two way street, the onus is on the satirist to present his comments clearly with context, but I think it's really fair that different people will have different reactions. I specifically recall feeling shocked and devastated when a friend who was a huge Chappelle fan didn't get what was wrong with the Michael Richardson freak out at the Laugh Factory. There are people for whom the humour won't go beyond shock words as catchphrases, which is a large part of why Chappelle had to back away from his show. At the same time I would never let that get in the way of enjoying what I do think is nuanced comedy just because it might be misconstrued by others.

Everything about video games reviews is so weird to me. The first time I heard that bonuses depended on getting good scores I was confused. At the same time, I'm sure scores and day one product reviews serve most of the people who read them. I personally use reviews a lot differently than most people who use them. Especially now, there is so much media of a game running, that I can usually make my decision based on what I see and a few comments (about how controls feel for example). It's a much different world from when the review in the magazine you liked was your only window into what games to play. I mostly use reviews after the fact to see what people thought of something, but only if it's particularly interesting or bad. It makes really dry reviews pretty much useless for me. In that sense I would be much better served by more criticism. Deep analysis from a certain standpoint is interesting, but I'd also love if there was more technical criticism and structural analysis as well. For example, right now I'm way into LUFTRAUSERS, and I'd really enjoy if someone wrote about how music is used in that game. At this point I mostly hope I get interesting insight from the various podcasts I listen to.

You could also put this text in all reviews: "Fans of Sonic Heroes need not to read this or any review as they are generally without taste." The comedy discussion was really interesting to me. I watched those two Eddie Murphy specials a while ago and was also shocked at the his jokes about homosexuals. They're not a large part of his bit but it was still super uncomfortable. He even comments on the backlash in Raw which I thought was interesting (I think it was pretty funny too, but I don't really remember it exactly). It was a weird experience for me to go back and watch that stuff because I was watching a lot of material that would talk about how Murphy was considered the funniest comedian on the stage and person off of it and that stuff wasn't funny at all. I didn't know about the Colbert twitter backlash, but the concept is really familiar to me as my Dad cannot stand that guy. I don't watch much TV now, but there were periods where I would try to always catch him and Stewart. At some point I was talking to him about it, and he told me how he doesn't enjoy or appreciate his Canadian jokes. So I went over the whole satire concept, and he said that he gets that but felt like those specific jokes weren't core to the Colbert character and were just accepted along with the rest of the schtick. I didn't really agree or feel that way about Colbert's jokes, but it's just one of those intractable things, because once you do actually think he's being genuinely disparaging and unfunny it really breaks down the rest of the concept. It's kind of a bummer because my dad enjoyed the parody of right wing news anchors, but what can you do?

Nature Box, the healthy snacks that opportunistic gluttons love.

That joke is what I crave.

I don't watch a bunch of Dendi streams, but I always found him to be entertaining and a bit of an enigma in his appearances at the internationals 2 and 3 so I found his story pretty effectual. The film did focus a lot on the emotions for the players because of the game, and I guess you could say it's exaggerated, but it felt true to me.

This is a hard question for me to answer because of the amount of baggage around it but I'll try anyway. Big ending spoilers in here too:

Legitimately horrifying, especially the fingers just articulating like mad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ivaQf1jns0

Is that the robot video they were referring to on the cast? It's what I saw when I looked it up, but I thought they said something about heels and a mirror. I wanna be horrified too! Edit: Oh, no! I found it on cnet! I take it all back.

I just finished Burial at Sea 2, as well. Uh... I don't think I wanted what this is. I really wanted them to use their parallel universe stuff as an excuse to do some sort of side story in Rapture. I would've loved an honest-to-goodness side story. This is not a side story. It feels way more like someone thought Bioshock can not stand on its own and made this to fix that. I found the combat pretty annoying starting off with limited tools, as I always do with Bioshock games. I actually found a lot of it depends on the level design. Areas where you could use the skyhooks more plentifully felt fine. Then you get some tonics that trivialize it. I think I would've preferred if they had found a way to pull the combat back even more. They did a pretty decent job of changing the dynamic by adding a stealth system, but it never felt as good as a true stealth game. This game still has a ton of amazing stylistic choices. I absolutely adored the opening of the DLC, as one of the most unique levels I've experienced. The way different musical elements are done positionally was amazing. The art is fantastic, and I love all the lighting in various areas. Lots of good sound design and music is present as well. Anyway, lots of spoilery story complaints below.