Keyrock

A bunch of the great Final Fantasy games (read: SNES Era) and Chrono Trigger are out on both iOS and Android. Turn-based, menu-driven jRPGs work very well on touch devices.

I don't know whether it will succeed, but it's a good idea. We honestly need something like this so that the masses aren't so dependent on metacritic, which is an inherently deeply flawed system. Something like this has been mulled over before, long before GamerGate, so it's nice to see someone push to make it a reality.

It certainly looks cool. What's the pedigree of the team behind this? Have they made this type of game before? Maybe more than any other type of game, a loot em up depends on an extremely fine tuned balance of classes, skills and abilities, enemy level scaling, and, most of all, compelling loot to give you motivation for the insane amount of grinding these games entail. As a backer of Grim Dawn and a follower of that project, that game has had its balance tweaked dozens upon dozens (likely hundreds upon hundreds internally by the team) of times since the alpha first released to backers, and they're nowhere near done tweaking.

Cat Peach on the Master Cycle in Excitebike Arena. Yeah. When she wins, she either purrs or says "Meow did it!".

Oldie but goodie

That video is tremendous!

According to Ubisoft, yeah.

It says they are making a game striving for historical accuracy and taking place in a time period when gender roles were very strongly defined and extremely difficult to defy. It's not the same as in a fantasy game where the world and the gender roles (or lack there of) can be anything you want them to be. Early 15th century Europe was a very real place with a very real and very strict social system divided by gender and blood. If you're striving for historical accuracy in a game like that it's not a trivial matter to allow the player to choose gender. It's not as simple as making a female character model and changing a few lines of dialogue here and there to reflect the player's gender roles. Almost everything would have to be written multiple times to reflect gender differences. Entire quest lines would have to be completely different or unavailable to one character or the other. It would be almost like creating a whole second game just to add the gender choice. While this may sound good to the consumer, it does to me, and I would welcome a game with such complexity and it would certainly add replay value, this would be a mammoth undertaking for the developer, even a publisher funded developer working with a budget in the hundreds of millions. For a small upstart studio working off a budget a fraction of that, it would be sheer folly. This is why so many of us gamers hate social justice warriors, this is why so many of us hate people just like you, Bruce. It's because developers are not free to express their art as they see fit, they are not free to act on their vision, not without harassment from zealots trying to cram a social engineering agenda into everything. Not every game has to be all inclusive. Not every game has to represent genders equally (guess what Bruce, the genders are different, this is a biological fact, men and women are not the same). Not every game has to include someone with every shade of skin color under the sun and make sure they're all shown in an equally positive light. Sometimes developers want to tackle specific subjects from a specific point of view. Sometimes these subjects may be difficult for some people to swallow. Developers should be free to create their games according to their vision, free from the oppressive noose of totalitarian control freaks tightening around their necks and sapping their creativity. It's called freedom of expression. This is one of the things we are fighting for.

Sweet. I can't wait to give it a spin when I get home. I hope every character can use the new vehicles and it's not just Link that can ride the Master Cycle. I want Cat Peach riding the Master Cycle.

The Cynical Brit ripping AssCreed: Unity apart:

Hopefully these are things that will be addressed in Mount & Blade 2, whenever that comes out, and it won't simply be a prettier version of the existing Mount & Blade games.

Sid Meier's Pirates! on dry land.

@namelesshero - This has nothing to do with GamerGate, but I think it's kind of funny that you mention Tim Schafer then accuse other nameless (no pun intended) devs of kickstarter frauds when Tim Schafer took a bunch of people's money for Broken Age (originally Double Fine Adventure) has so far delivered half a game, it's now over 2 years past the original estimated delivery date (I know Kickstarter projects generally deliver late, but 2+ years is pretty extreme) and the second half is still nowhere in sight. Then, to add to that, his company pulled the **** they did with Spacebase DF9.

Milo really slathered the rhetoric on thick in that piece.

Here are the games I played this year that released this year rated using the highly respected and extremely scientific gif scale listed from best to worst: Bayonetta 2 Not just my 2014 Game of the Year, it's my current leading candidate for Game of the Decade. It's the best spectacle fighter I've ever played. It's quite possibly the best action game I've ever played. It's straight up one of the best games ever made in any genre, an absolute masterpiece. Mario Kart 8 In many other years this would be my Game of the Year. As it stands, it's the pinnacle of the Mario Kart series. Finely tuned, colorful, less frustrating than ever, and most of all really fun. Shovel Knight Retro platforming goodness. Not only does it pay homage to 8-bit platformers beautifully, it's better than the vast majority of the games it's emulating. Wasteland 2 A solid, enjoyable old skool RPG that delivered on all its promises. It's not groundbreaking but it met all my expectations, and my expectations were relatively high. South Park: The Stick of Truth While the combat got repetitive and there was a decided lack of difference in play style between the classes, this game nevertheless masterfully captured the wonderfully often times crass and sometimes surprisingly sharp and witty humor and charm of the series. Might & Magic X: Legacy This game came out of nowhere and came from a developer I never heard of before. It is a surprisingly solid and faithful throwback to old skool M&M games. Child of Light Visually, one of the best looking games ever made with amazingly beautiful picture book style art. The combat system is solid if unspectacular and the battles get rather repetitive after a while, but it was an enjoyable game overall and I liked the rhyming storybook narrative style. Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure Visually a weird mishmash of super high res FMV and horrifically dated 3D backgrounds and textures, this game nevertheless proved entertaining and worthy of resurrecting the Tex Murphy series. Watch_Dogs One of the hardest games for me to judge. On the one hand, even with the obvious graphical gimping from earlier showings, the game still looked great, it incorporated some neat new gameplay ideas, did some mission types brilliantly well in how it allowed you freedom to tackle them in many different ways, and had pretty great asymmetrical multi-player. On the other hand, the game fell woefully short of the insane hype around it, had one of the most boring and unlikable protagonists in recent times, had a city shockingly lifeless for all the detail put into it, had terrible driving physics and rubber-banding, and was marred my some boneheaded design decisions.

If that's an attempt to put us off Romance....it almost succeeded How dare you, Bruce? How dare you look down upon, shun, and deny the same rights for love and romance to skinless people? These poor skinless people suffer abuse and persecution every day and you, of all people, are going to add to their stigma? That's it, I'm revoking your SJW card. You are no longer welcome to drink the blood of murdered freedom at the weekly SJW meetings you traitor! Now I want you to think about what you've done. I'm also going to set up a Patreon account. While this Patreon account is going to funnel money directly into my personal bank account, I want you all to rest assured that all the money from the account will be used to further the cause of helping skinless people advance their standing in society and will in no way be used to pay for my drinking habit and the services of prostitutes... multi-ethnic, transgender, prostitutes naturally.

My advice with the AssCreed series is to just not get all of them, but instead skip around. Play one every couple of years. You avoid the burnout of the series milking its fanbase for every drop, and you can pick and choose the best ones and skip out on the duds that way. You kill two birds with one stone. The only possible down side to skipping around is story continuity, but the story in that series is ludicrous garbage anyway, plus there's always Youtube for that.

And this has concluded this week's installment of (semi-quasi-sort of used to be) famous (-ish-esque) people suggesting unreasonable solutions to complex problems without thoroughly thinking things through. Tune in again next week for another exciting installment!

Just Cause 3 Revealed in Game informer This time the you get to cause ridiculous mayhem in the mediterranean.

I gotta give that one to you, Bruce, that's a fair point.

Sure, but the whole idea of an adage is for it to be a short, succinct phrase that's easily remembered and one can relatively easily extrapolate the deeper meaning from. Going off into a paragraph long explanation on how it's beneficial to toughen oneself's psyche against belligerent speech just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way. Not to mention that just about everyone in our western, English speaking culture has heard the adage, knows the adage, and knows exactly what it means. Hence, I propose that the adage serves its purpose sufficiently well.

Herpes. The reviews are starting to come in and they seem somewhat encouraging. The consensus, from the few reviews I've read, is that there is a metric ****ton of content and that the combat is tactical and engaging, but that the story is paint by numbers, vague, and ultimately disappointing. Some years ago, I would have considered that last part ironic, but I haven't considered BioWare's strong suit to be writing for quite a while, so it's hardly surprising. Still, what I've read is overall encouraging enough that if by some miracle this game ever gets a Linux release (fat chance) I'll buy it.

Under the recent-ish democratic regime, federal government has pushed its fingers deeper and deeper in every facet of my life. The guise of making sure everyone is covered for basic human needs has worn very thin (read: disappeared completely) in my eyes, it's pretty clear it's about control. Just how far the democrats of today (I'm speaking in broad terms, of course) have shifted away from the moderate left leaning days of decades past toward the socialist far left end of the spectrum scares me. Both extremes of the spectrum, the far left and the far right, are scary as hell, but while I've personally identified most closely on the majority of issues with the moderate left, especially on social policy and foreign policy (the biggest exception being fiscal policy, where I've always leaned a bit to the right), the far left has always scared me more than the far right, and especially on social policy. The far left, which is where I see the current democrats shifting toward, absolutely frightens me. Gorgon is right, though. The two-party system is so utterly corrupt and broken that the right having firm control of the federal government isn't going to improve things a whole lot, but at least maybe the illusion of a shift away from the socialist left will help me sleep better at night, or so I tell myself.

While it was not really surprising, it still was eye opening just how thoroughly the democrats got their asses handed to them. And you know what? I'm happy about that. In fact, I contributed to that. I've been a democrat my entire life, since I was old enough to understand the difference between democrat and republican. I became more moderate as I got older, but I always continued to identify myself as a democrat... until somewhat recently. I've been steadily losing faith in the party for many years now. I was never very hard left, in fact, there have always been issues I tended to lean right on, but even the issues I've been heavily in with the left on, like foreign policy, they've lost me. I wouldn't call myself a republican now, but I also sure as hell don't consider myself a democrat either, whatever the **** that even means these days. Hopefully the dems get just as thoroughly routed 2 years from now as they did a couple days ago. I have no illusions that a government firmly in control of the right will bring miraculous changes, the fact is that the two party system is so utterly broken that neither dems nor republicans are really the answer, but I sure as hell want the democrats out of power.

Still in the grips of my Bayonetta 2 addiction. I'm up to chapter 4 on my 3rd climax difficulty run through. There are a few enemies on this difficulty that put up force fields quite often (the centaur looking angel dudes), making it very hard to pull combos on them, even in witch time, with my big ass hammer and whips weapon set that I prefer. Those weapons are just too slow for me to pull off a whole combo before witch time expires. I should probably wise up and switch over to a much faster weapon set, like my quad-rakshasa swords set, when I encounter those enemies. That's what having 2 weapon sets you can switch on the fly is for, right? I'm also having fun with Tropico 5. I'm up to the first campaign mission that brings me into the World Wars Era and I'm getting invaded by a neighboring island. Good times. Hopefully I'll have a chance to see to it that said neighboring island's leader happens to have an "accident."