Amentep

Awww, that's kinda sad. For some reason I didn't realize Stolen was the Cage film from last year.

Peggy Neal from the 1966 Sci-Fi/Horror/Action film THE TERROR BENEATH THE SEA (starring Sonny Chiba).

Maybe after leaving the area, all the corpses should be re-animated as the living dead. Giving you more reason to loot their body and carry all their stuff in the deep stash so they can't use that +7 Mace of Skull Bashing on you a second time around. And then giant carrion worms can get involved...

See - problem solved AND a useful reason to have a little used in console RPGs digging skill! Giant carrion worms - the gift that keeps on giving.

For me it was the guy from hell who hunted Cage that made the movie fun. Oh William Fitchner as The Acountant was uber-awesome, I'll agree. But Cage wasn't bad in it (neither was Amber Heard as the side-kick or Billy Burke as the villain).

Heh, just having finished my play through of DA:O, the bolded hit home for me. Denerim's supposed to be the New York or Los Angeles of Ferelden, so to speak. Crowds of people wherever you look. Instead, there's like a handful of folks standing around, but the place is otherwise deserted. If Assassin's Creed does one thing well, it's the atmosphere of the cities. They really do feel like actual cities full of people, rather than just an empty space. The weird thing about Denerim is that small backwood town Lothering appears to have more people in it simply by virtue of the blight refugees... Blight refugees that Denerim never, apparently, gets. But there are also other aspects - virtually no merchants? Virtually no people walking through? I tend to ignore these things - its a game after all (and not a game of DENERIM: THE FANTASY CITY SIMULATOR). But it does leave an oddness if you think too much about it.

Has Nic Cage been in any decent movie after 2000? I can't remember any. He's evolved into the Van Damme/Seagal of the 2000s. He was in Adaption in 2002. He did well in Kick-Ass in 2010 in a supporting role. But I prefer 2011's Drive Angry for its awesome over-the-top ridiculousness. Really fun film, IMO. I liked Snow White and The Huntsman, but I really felt like they didn't give the title character much to do. Stewart did the best she could with what they'd given her, but they hadn't given her a whole lot to work with. So that felt kind of odd. I watched THE LOSERS again, adaption of the Vertigo comic series. Never read the series, but the movie is actually pretty fun IMO with quite possibly the best "hissable" villain in modern films. If he had a mustache, I'm sure he'd have twirled it before running across ice floes. “That was a 'punch him in the face' nod, not a 'throw him off the roof' nod...It was at most a 'break his fingers' nod.”

Once a battle is over, a legion of high-speed 3 foot long carrion worms erupt from the ground devouring all of the corpses and dragging their bones underground to decorate carrion worm living rooms before the player can react. Problem solved!

I must have missed the initial public offering of stock in MCA...

Yeah, I was mostly spring boarding some thoughts I had based on what you wrote; I tend to give context to my thought so it wasn't really meant to be addressing your stuff directly. Consider me a tangent.

I'm disappointed - I thought this was going to be about the z-axis! At this point, I don't know if the lore/setting of PE supports planar travel - or if there are even other planes. So if it fits the setting...why not? If it doesn't fit the setting...no.

I really don't care one way or the other; but I don't find achievements motivate me to play any differently than I feel like playing. I've never played a game trying to get all of the achievements; if I like a game I'll replay it a whole lot but not so that I can find the path that only opens once a game that takes you to the secret area where you fight the secret boss to save the secret love interest who hates you and stabs you in the face and all you got was this lousy in-game T-shirt achievement. Or something.

I'm not really sure what case for "internet censorship" has been made; you can still comment on anything Sarkeesian posts. Not being able to post in the talkback on her videos is irrelevant; you still have outlets for your voice on messageboards, or your own personal/social sites (blog, twitter, facebook) Or am I misunderstanding you? I've not watched Sarkeesian's videos in total; what I have seen seems to be a lot of opinion and little research. I also - personally - feel that her arguments will remain unchanged even if you removed the focal point of her ire. The Bayonnetta ad commentary video that was linked early, for example, has her throwing around a lot of buzzwords but in the end had Bayonnetta been in a bikini (still revealing), skin tight outfit (might as well be nude), formless loose flowing clothing (women should be ashamed of their bodies) I think she'd find ground to complain. But - to be fair to her - I've seen probably less than 1% of her output so I readily admit I'm not at this time really feel qualified to comment about the validity of what she's doing (particularly without being able to read about her methodology in data collection and interpretation). And to tell the truth I find her work largely irrelevant to my interests in gaming, so should those things be published I'm not sure I'd bother to check it out anyhow.

I want octagons instead of circles* In terms of color, I usually just adjust to the color the game chooses - no issue with TOEE colors or any of that. As long as I can mentally adjust to ally - attacking me - not ally and not attacking me color scheme what it is doesn't matter too much to me. If they can add it with no problem - I have no problem with it being added. But if it'd take extra time to develop a solution I don't really see it as necessary. *Not really

Wait, he? Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh..... Excuse me, have to correct some things. It seems your detective skills are a bit rusty. It was a dark and stormy night...

I never actually played any of the M&M games, but I'd be willing to give this a shot - particularly if it gets good word of mouth.

That refers directly to why she is blocking comments on her video, not that the audience is literally being deprived of their ability to have opinions or is incapable at having discussions anywhere else. He isn't claiming that it is impossible to have an opinion about the video, he is stating that it is impossible to post one's opinion of the video where the people who made the video are most likely to see it. But this implies that being able to post opinions of the video are going to be viewed by the people who made the video - which doesn't logically follow. Frankly, if you're going to rebut the research or point out flaws in the conclusions I'd think the poster would want to take ownership of that and make a video, blog post, etc of their own rather than try to fight it out in the comments section. That would be a bit like trying to counter a research paper published in a journal by writing a stern letter to the editor - the format isn't (at least IMO) conducive to the kind of discourse you'd be trying to achieve.

Maybe its just me, but that doesn't seem to be out of the norm. Modern popular critical thought seems to boil down to snark and clever one-liners. The sad part is that discourse today is less about presenting ideas with rhetoric and more about one liners, catchy catchphrases and overall just being an ass. We had rhetoric classes at school. One lesson I remember is to leave your strongest argument for last, to make the biggest impact. In practice? Your audience will stop listening at the part they think is wrong or the stupidest and call you out on it. That was my experience, at least. No wonder rhetoric died. :D I'm not sure I really care too much about classical rhetoric so much as I'm against criticism as being solely a bunch of pithy zingers, as if life was a comic strip with the need for a punch line in panel 3. The idea that media (not just games) perpetuating stereotypes as having negative effects isn't really new. Damsel in Distress gets critiqued across the boards. Anita is just looking at it in games for this video (and her second one). Although, to be honest, a lot of the "this {thing} in new media has negative effect" studies have been horribly skewed in how they collect and/or interpret data (whether the {thing} is violence, sex, language, gender portrayals). During a flap over the rise of action cartoons in the early 90s and how the violence in them would negatively effect kids, a review of a random sample of cartoons that played on a Saturday morning found the most violent (in this case violent defined as "actions that could be (a) imitated and (b) injurious) cartoon was a near 30 year old episode of The Flintstones which the angry parents would have watched growing up themselves, most likely. Or look at the flaws in Fredrick Wetham's SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT study (which covered new media Comic Books and Television at the time). That doesn't mean that its not worth looking at the impact negative concepts in media make, I should say, but that we have to be careful to give merit to studies that use some rigor in data collection and interpretation, which means the study has to make its methodology transparent.

Maybe its just me, but that doesn't seem to be out of the norm. Modern popular critical thought seems to boil down to snark and clever one-liners.

I re-watched this one and found myself less impressed by it. The opening is very long (40 minutes to get to the well-familiar origin), the villains motivation is obscure and what evidence there is of it it doesn't really hold together. The best bits are really Parker-Gwen and Captain Stacey towards the end, but it takes a long time to get there. The movie also seems to forget about plot points and characters that they introduced earlier (the cut scenes indicate some heavy reworking of the script during filming too, which probably accounts for a good bit of the lack of focus).

One question that comes up from a narrative sense to my mind on this argument is, essentially, whether the character is a character at all or a macguffin. I'd argue in very early games the "kidnapped" characters were really macguffins to motivate the gameplay and not really characters per-se. This would be true of whether the character was a girl (Mario's girlfriend in DONKEY KONG) or a guy (Donkey Kong himself in Donkey Kong Jr.). In that sense they don't exist as characters and while I understand that some people see that as the problem, I think its actually applying the wrong standards of story to the game and finding it naturally wanting. In essence, I'm not sure narrative or character development is considered a hallmark of early video games to the point that its worth pointing out narrative or character shortcomings. The complaints hold more weight, in my mind, in modern gaming where there is room to develop narrative and character and creating characters to be macguffins for the player to be unnecessary for the most part.

Depends on the fiction. From what very little exposure I have of comic books, I'd say the Ryan Gosling imagery isn't that common. I don't know how common it is in video games either. My issue tends to come more from how the character is represented as a whole, rather than purely based on looks. For example, Isabella is one of my favourite NPCs, who dresses in less than protective clothing (though so dose Varric, the male rogue) and is clearly created to be a sexual person. However, the way she comes across her sexuality doesn't exist simply for the player character to have sex with her. She comes across as having her own nuances and just happens to like sex, and even uses her appearance with her own motivations in mind, and it's applied fairly consistently throughout the game. Lara Croft in Tomb Raider 2 is fine, right up until the end of the game Lara seems to be her usual badass self, until a shower scene.... She looks at the camera, comments "haven't you seen enough" and shoots the camera. At that point it is sort of the game developer stating "Yeah, we made her so that you'd want to ogle her." This had the effect on the Mary Sue writer that loved the first game, and then later ended up feeling as though Lara "wasn't for her" which is unfortunate. As I recall there's also a bit of cultural influence (based on Isabella's dialogue with the PC and with the other NPCs) that implies a different cultural norm where she's form in regards to sex which I think helps flesh the character out a bit from being just a "sexpot" (and I say that as someone who didn't really like the character all that much). Tomb Raider 2 was the game that turned me off the series - but more because of the move away from exploration / puzzle solving and into shooting badguys all over the place. The end bit was pretty stupid fan-service, though. As to the main topic, I'm kind of surprised - and I admit a bit confused - that Ms. Sarkeesian and her work gets the interest (pro/negative) that it does for essentially doing the same kind of things that people do in media studies fields all the time.

Solaris is a pretty good film, but not one I think I'll ever watch very often.

Its evaluation time for my employees. Always fun. Also some other personnel issues to attend to. Blah.

IMO, the ultimate problem with any economic (and political) system is always that it ultimately boils down to being based on people. And the wants and desires of individuals whose own personal motivation and interests run counter to each other. I think the big question has always been which system is the least bad instead of which is the best.