oldhomehaibane

Plans to play Arx Fatalis or the Resident Evil remake were momentarily scrapped when I found out that Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden was released in OS X. The game affords a hilarious look into an alternate universe where basketball is actually as important as its most overenthusiastic fans believe it is. This is probably the only game where I can honestly say that my favorite parts are the save points. All of them subject you to the shrill and deluded rantings of an elitist otaku for several paragraphs before you are finally allowed to save your game, and these rants are some of the most hilarious parts of the games. I also love how, whenever you are told that you missed an important item in a previous area, it always turns out that this is just the game blatantly lying to you to make you feel bad. Actually, the absolute highlight of the game for me may be the dating sim where you must woo a rather pathetic WNBA player for a space dwarf whose skin has been grafted over with basketballs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVpgnSonGa4

Beat Shadow Tower: Abyss a few nights ago. I enjoyed the Lovecraftian atmosphere but I wish the game could have been as ruthless as the original Shadow Tower was. In any case, now I can say that I've beaten every game that can be considered a predecessor to Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. The PS2 that I sent to be modded should be coming back to me sometime this week, and when that happens I'll be playing my import copy of Forbidden Siren 2 on it. If it's anything like the first Siren, I anticipate I'll be spending long periods of time incapacitated by fear and completely freaking out. The first Siren was deeply flawed and is difficult to recommend to anyone, but for someone like me who was enough of a masochist to tolerate the game's many frustrating design decisions, its atmosphere was disturbing like nothing else and its stealth-based gameplay seemed to point to the direction that the survival-horror genre needed to go in. Although I could have done without the incomprehensible puzzles and being forced to redo missions for unforeseeable reasons, I actually mostly appreciated the game's ruthlessness and the extreme vulnerability of its many protagonists. I even liked that at any moment a sniper could pick me off from halfway across the map if I wasn't careful, as this made the game all the more tense and forced me to think strategically about my every move. Unlike other games in the genre there were no isolated safe zones where you could relax and recuperate your senses; it was just one long nerve-wracking godforsaken nightmare from beginning to end and I respected that. I do believe it is the only survival horror game to ever give me the same feeling of triumph and accomplishment upon completing a mission that I get when I beat a particularly difficult boss/area in Demon's Souls or Dark Souls. Hell, it's the only survival-horror game that I can even say was difficult at all. I'm hoping that Forbidden Siren 2 preserves much of what made the first game so compelling to me, and that its overtures to accessibility don't go too far like those of the PS3 remake Blood Curse. I'm expecting there to be some, at the very least, but nothing I hope like Blood Curse where most of the characters were armed and hence the sense of utter helplessness that made the original so horrifying was lost. I'm also hoping that the map doesn't show the player's location. That's probably something a lot of people complained about in the original Siren, but I liked the cruel situational realism and the feeling of disorientation that came with having to carefully look at your surroundings and find your bearings via the landmarks around you. While I'm waiting on my PS2 to come back to me, I might start up Arx Fatalis or the Resident Evil remake. Kind of leaning towards the former at the moment. I've been really obsessed with Ultima Underworld style dungeon crawls lately. Before I finished Shadow Tower: Abyss I went through the entire King's Field series, and I'm still craving more claustrophobic and sprawling labyrinths to get utterly lost in.

I have a Kindle Touch and I've found the advertising to be entirely unobtrusive. The only times you'll see advertising are when your device has gone idle or when you are on the home page. In the latter case, the ad takes up a small strip of space at the bottom and is easily ignored. The ads are tasteful if not generally relevant to my interests. I recall reading that Kindle users have access to a larger variety of e-books than Nook users. I don't know what the extent of this advantage is, but it's probably something worth keeping in mind. As others have said, if you are primarily going to use the device for reading you are going to want something that utilizes e-ink technology. I've actually found reading on the Kindle to be on the whole a more pleasant experience than reading a paper copy. A large part of that has to do with the ability on the Kindle to instantly look up any word via dictionary or wikipedia. Before the Kindle, I was faced with the choice of either doing my reading within close proximity of my computer so that I could easily look up anything I didn't understand, or simply ignoring such things and plowing ahead. This was so frustrating for me that as the years went on I found myself reading less and less. Since getting a Kindle I've noticed that I read a lot more than I used to, and I attribute this in large part to the convenience and lack of interruption which the Kindle affords. I also find the Kindle to be more comfortable to use than a paper copy, especially if the book is large and unwieldy. It seems trivial to anyone who has spent their entire life reading paper books, but I find turning pages on the Kindle to be easier and less distracting on the Kindle. The ability to read the Kindle with one hand only or even to lay it down and read it with no hands holding it is much appreciated, as well. If, like me, you are someone who does a lot of highlighting, then you will also enjoy the ease with which you can highlight passages on the Kindle and later look up all of the highlights that you've made in any given book. The only area where the Kindle fails for me is in rendering illustrations. Looking at illustrations on the Kindle is never a pleasant experience, and if the illustration has text (a map in a fantasy or history book, for example) you might as well forget about reading it because it's not going to show up very well.

False dichotomy. You can be mature while avoiding sexism. The two aren't mutually exclusive. Not insulting women doesn't turn something into banal Disney or "standard channel" fare. Something that is sexist might yet in other ways be mature, but I would argue that the sexism itself is actually immature. War and Peace would not have been more "mature" had Tolstoy lovingly dwelled for paragraph after paragraph on the nether regions of his countess and princess characters. Quite the opposite, I should say.

There's a sequel to that Hark! A Vagrant comic that hilariously shows how this would actually play out:

Not really. Even when men are sexualized in popular culture it is typically not nearly to the same degree that women are. See: http://gomakemeasandwich.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/tera-followup-no-male-castanics-are-not-as-bad-lots-of-pictures/ The above comic does a pretty good job of summing up why I think it's so important not to have oversexualized female characters. It just seems insulting to women that, in so many games, male characters get to be so badass and then they're placed alongside female characters that, frankly, look ridiculous/embarrassing. As has previously been said by others in this thread, though, I feel pretty confident that Obsidian will handle this issue correctly.

Another more extreme example supporting your point would be beauty standards in Mauritania: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25DxHXz8ZUQ Not related to weight, but the practice of ohaguro (お歯黒) or teeth-blackening in pre-Meiji Japan is another excellent example which shows how drastically beauty standards can vary from culture to culture.

Initially I chose the $140 tier, but at the last moment I switched to the $250 tier for the hardcover collector's book and the signed collector's edition box. All that remains now is to construct a massive shrine worthy of housing this miraculous blessing from the RPG gods (praise be to them!). It goes without saying that the entire house will also have to be ritually purified, lest I corrupt this divine artifact with the taint of impurity and thereby bring a terrible curse upon my descendants.

I'm a huge fan of all of these games except for Knights of the Old Republic (which I haven't played), but I was primarily drawn by the invocations of Planescape: Torment and Arcanum. Because of his work on the latter, I can not even begin to tell you how happy I was when I learned that Tim Cain was brought aboard for this project. It was inevitable that I would donate money to make this game a reality, but without his name attached I might not have been whipped into the sheer frothing excitement that drove me to give up $250 to the RPG gods (praise be to them!).