SomTervo

What's the original cover like? Haven't seen that. I voted #4. It's the one that is most stand-out, most attention grabbing, most well designed (the aesthetic of a kids drawing- but a kids drawing by a very smart kid indeed- I actually feel is more Bioshock than #6 which is pretty hamfisted, #4 has got a bit of subtext going on), and is the one I'd be most proud to pick off a shelf and show to a pal. Not to mention, I think on a physical box it will look a lot better than just an embedded image on a website on a computer screen. The canvas is what makes the painting, yo. I also actually like #5 just as a throwback to early cinema and hammy post-Victorian/ Industrial advertising. Cool as shit, though yeah a questionable design dynamically. Can't wait to play the game just to find out what the deal is with the bird thing. What's he called again?

I seen crazy shit, man, crazy shit.

Most folk I know think it peaked at S02, and that S03 is good but a bit much. Imho, for what it's going for, I can't imagine it getting much better than the latter parts of S01. Anybody here watch Louie? Fucking great show like.

I can appreciate what Smallville was going for, and how it all started out, but I just can't forgive it for how... shit it is. Like, some of the worst writing I've ever seen. Remarkably well acted and directed despite being like Hollyoaks with superpowers writingwise. Right now, as it's heavy essay/exam period, I've been on a binge of comedy shows. The guitarist in the band let me grab a plethora of comedy series' from his hard drive, SO MUCH WATCHING: - It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia: just getting better and better, just started Season 4. - Community: OMG doesn't just get better and better, but gets better and better exponentially. Nearly finished Season 1, it's just fucking unreal. The first few episodes are genuinely fairly "meh", but by this point every episode is an unadulterated joy and pleasure to watch. Leaves me feeling so uplifted. - Louie: probably the most intelligent sitcom I've ever seen. If I want something a little more challenging, and fucking incredibly well produced (like, cinematically stunning), I put on a Louie. Walks the fine line between good, down-to-earth comedy and truly harrowing serious-shit drama so perfectly. One minute you're genuinely laughing out loud, next you're staring in stunned, shocked silence. - How I Met Your Mother: good enough, casual easy-watch. Plus the new season of Peep Show is wayyy better than I expected it to be.

I haven't even played the game but YESSSSSSSSSSSS One of my favourite features a dev can put into a game. Loved it in Assassin's Creed: turn everything off once you've mastered the game, get immersed in the world, unreal. Loved it in Dishonoured: tweaked the shit out of the UI until it basically looked completely bare, but had a very translucent crosshair which you only notice if you really have to aim, and a fading health/ mana bar. So I can take in the gorgeousness without any inhibitions, and the gameplay mechanics aren't comprimised. Amazing.

Nobody understood FarCry 2 and they all hated it I'm with spork, I fucking loved that game. Put it on Insane difficulty, turn the music off, put on some great headphones, dark room, play standing up: one of the most immersive and challenging and realistic and liberating shooters ever made. Once in the right 'survive or die', 'take no prisoners', 'be fucking deadly' mindset, all the "problems" people have with the game actually become good things. Becomes a huge exercise in strategy and survival. It's so goddamn great. So atmospheric and tense, like a game version of No Country for Old Men (especially with the music turned off). I told everyone this. I told everyone this repeatedly, and nobody listened. It's been clear from hands-on's/ previews for years that this game had the same open-world bones as FarCry 2. But everyone based their opinions on the attention-grabby scripted-bit trailers. I'm am dying for FarCry 3, just looks like FarCry 2 but significantly more gameified, which should make it a lot more accessible and easy to get into. Think it's gonna have to be an xmas ask for me, though.

Dude... Dude... Dude. Yes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujLPT1NPPbw&hd=1 "Now I done grew up round some people livin' they life in bottles- grandaddy had the golden flask, backstroke everyday in Chicago Some people like the way it feels, some people wanna kill their sorrows, some people wanna fit in with the popular- that was my problem" Fucking unreal. And the chorus. That whole record, man. DAYUM.

Amazing. Though you should have said your girlfriend went as Cake.

Yogourt is silly. Could be Canadian French yeah? EDIT: I reckon the removal of the 'h' in 'yoghurt' was probably a conscious decision in america, the removal of superfluous or unnecessary letters in words. The favour/favor, color/colour paradigm, etc. I love verbing nouns (just like I just did), but GIF is a bit of an obscure one to use. Especially when other more commonly used words like 'animate' or whatever suffice. Never heard that. Weird. Probably tumblr, yep.

I've never finished one, except GTAIV's story only, but we gelled like shit. Always have. Love the gameplay, and never feel compelled to finish. That Tumblr is legendary. I have several faveys. Like this one:

Another factor on the 'potentially touched up' graphics front is the fact that the game is over multiple discs. Apparently GTAV is over three discs on 360, which lets them do all sorts of fun with bigger spaces or textures. I did GTAIV on 360 because I prefer the online functionality there- but PS3 will be really tempting to evade muchos disc swapping. While Just Cause is big in terms of space, the simulation is fucking static in comparison to GTAIV's, which is running so much more shit at once, even over a small area. Better lighting, better audio, better physics. GTAIV just crazy.

JSR's one of my favourite games of all time. Got it on the XBLA and reviewed it. So amaze. My PS+ subscrip ran out around April this year. Never had the money to rekindle it. I have the money now, but probably shouldn't waste it on something like that. MAN. But IT SO GOOOD!

Accent means how words are pronounced. That is all. Dialect means a variety of a language which may have different grammar, accent, lexicon. More like a sub-language of a language. So you can have an Irish, or Northern, or whatever, 'accent', and that's just how you pronounce stuff. But if you're thinking or analysing the Irish/ Northern 'dialect' you look at a lot more than just the accent. How they use words or morphemes (that is, suffixes/ prefixes etc.) differently, different phraseology,different syntactic constructs etc. For example, most varieties of English have about 3-5 uses of the article 'the'- the Irish English variety/ dialext has seventeen. That's a dialectical difference. And they still pronounce the 'the' weird. I didn't know about the 'bap' thing until very recently. Not used in Scotland. Really confusing, this woman was all like 'I'm gonna be all up in there, showing off me baps' and I was all like, 'on a night out? and you're a baker?!'

The Housers would lose nothing, nothing from watching shows like that. It can only give them more inspiration. It's not like it would kill their creativity or ruin their originality. That attitude is pretty reductive. But I suppose, yeah, they're satirizing American culture, which isn't just in niche shows like that, it's a lot more pervasive and all encompassing, so in that sense it isn't necessary. But to avoid shows like that is a bit of an empty statement. I can imagine though that if they watched The Wire or The Sopranos or something, they could really see the utmost heights of artistic and thematic achievement in storytelling like this. It might make the Houser's realise how much better they could do, how the sky really is the limit. GTA's stories are always pretty basic. The point is that biology is sexist! As I said, that's a core tenet of feminism. That biological bias, which is heavily pro-male, has to be overcome by society. But yeah, the whole argument I'm putting forth is totally nitpicky, I'm just taking it to an extreme to provide some argumentation. A potential reason as to how it would affect gameplay. I think the creative reasons behind the decision are probably their primary reasons, and obviously their own, and will be totally justified; I'm just speculating on how, in an effort to keep gameplay totally balanced, three male protags might remove some possible contentions.

Yeah it was a really bad tutorial tbh. So, what, you choose a homesteader, choose some materials, then send them off to a trade thing? Really badly told. Doesn't help that the interface is an actual joke, as I said. Even the weapon/ assassin choice wheel is an utter joke. They should have spent more time on that. It's like they're going for minimalist UI, but that's not how you do a functioning action-game UI. It has to be big and clear and chunky and easy to select things and navigate. It's all too small for me.

It's generally true, it wouldn't make that much of a difference if they really wanted to make it so. But obviously it wouldn't just be physical strength, as I said, but lots of parameters like stamina, temperament, bodily functions which women have that men don't, yadda yadda. Basically, having three dudes removes having to think about any of that, or even thinking about there's an imbalance in the first place. I suppose that's my main point: R* are pushing the boat out on this one, structually and narratively. They're going into uncharted territory, for them at least. So just having three guys removes the issue of having to worry about any of this. They wouldn't have to worry about the unliklihood of females doing stuff like this with men in the same capacity, wouldn't have to worry about any physical differences between them, wouldn't have to worry about any narrative differences in terms of writing etc. It's totally something R* could do in the future, it'd be a great thing. But I'm personally totally happy with three guys who are different types anyway. And R* are keeping in their safe zone in at least some way. We know they can write male protags, and we know they can design gameplay for male protags. All should be good.

They totally could be. They shall be told. And I shall report upon the telling.

Yeah same. I just left that shit, and nothing's happening. Doesn't help that the interface is godawful.

'But this is GTAV, a video game, where the laws of our world do not apply' But R* are trying to make those laws apply! In the story/ world at least; maybe not gameplay That's the whole point. It's a decision to do so, but a jusified decision. I said this in my last post. R* have explicitly said the GTA's of this generation are about trying to capture real people dynamics and situations, despite the gameplay ridiculousness. It's about the story and gameplay matching! Preferably, our player characters will be very strong individuals, capable of beating most people in a mano y mano. This is a necessity in a game where we need to do all the things they want us to. So R* make it so. PC's with the peak of strength- which would be men. Now they want three protagonists. They make it so also. But introducing a female character, even one at peak strength, wouldn't be as strong as the three male protags. But yeah. Seriously. I don't even disagree with your guys. Just love a bit o' the old cut 'n' thrust. And I think it's obvious that R* had their reasons for making it three dudes, and that more standardised/ equal/ level playing field could have been one of those reasons.

Eh. The main issue is the physical fact that females aren't as strong as males, or as biologically geared towards conflict. This is a fact. It's part of human biology. Females, at peak, aren't as strong as males. Sure, it's a sexist thing. But it's totally accounted for. Even feminists totally acknowledge it- a core argument of feminism is that society should build on top of this basic inequality to create equality. So if in a game like GTA, you press B or O or something to punch a guy, and two of your three characters are tip-top-shape males, the female character's punches just aren't going to be as strong or damaging as the punch of one of the male characters. In a game which is going for the same core gameplay mechanics for all three characters, this would ruin the balance. R* are trying to keep things both realistic and consistent across the characters we're playing. With this in mind, a fem character wouldn't be biologically equal to a male character, from a gameplay standpoint. And they have to be here. If R* weren't going for consistency, just realism it wouldn't be an issue- but they are. In order to maintain the gameplay standard. You're saying why wouldn't a video game female be as strong as a video game male, the issue is that R* aren't seeing them as 'video game' males or females, but real life males or females. They don't want to warp the rules of reality (as much as they already do it with the action, but that's relegated to action only) to make a female character equal, so they would logically keep it to male protags. So I mean, obviously it's a decision made by R*, what isn't to do with the game, but it's a decision made to try to parallel the realism of the characters in the world with the gameplay which the player is in control of. Which has to be completely standardised. Again, the strongest a man can be is far stronger than the strongest a woman can be, and presumably in GTAV we'll be playing pretty damn strong guys. R* need to make every PC just as strong to maintain the gameplay continuity. ('Strength' is an arbitrary example to pick on, but the same principle will apply to every physical way that the male characters behave, not just strength obviously. There are different paramaters for everything between men and women. And R* having to account for every one of those differences for one protag? Not gonna happen.) Sure, there will be female solo criminals IRL- but how many of the top brass criminals, or most savage aggressive offenders, will be female? A tiny, tiny percentage in comparison to men. The standard is male. It's a male dominated industry, though you obviously will get females who do it. It's like complaining that none of the big advertising honcho characters in Mad Men are females. The creators wanted to capture authenticity which existed in that industry at that time- so it is mainly men (but there are a couple of females. The percentage is still heavily weighted to men in that period.) My whole two lines of argument here are arbitrary anyway. There are tons of other reasons R* might choose to do it. Different banter between the protags? The idea for an overall story arc which, when it came to it, wouldn't fit with a female character? Fuck knows man. There are tons of possible reasons they did it this way. Sure, it's a missed opportunity, but just as much as it's a missed opportunity they don't have a transgendered character. It's their choice, and I'm sure they'll do fucking great things with it anyway. @Waldy: my attitude in these situations is 'just keep arguing until a compromise is met or the other person lets up'. Never seems to work with you, Dean, haha!

The Bonnie and Clyde thing is a good point. But in reality females are only ever in crime in support roles, as sexist as that is. Just like B+C. She didn't, couldn't strong-arm folks to any big extent. He did that part. While it would have been great, fantastic, interesting to have one of the three player character's a female, in real life she would never get in on the violent, fast action which is what GTA has always been about. Or at least, if she did, it would be destined to failure/ death. Especially with R*'s contemporary focus on reality. From R*'s perspective, all three of the protags have to be, relatively, equally strong/ fast/ capable in a physical sense. They just have preferences/ temperaments which are different and lead to different minigames and dialogue. In terms of gameplay, they all have to be able to do the same thing to the same degree, when the player is playing them. In reality, a female protag wouldn't be able to keep up. She wouldn't be able be a physical equal with three fit, strong men. It's just a classic contention between reality of simulation and reality of story. You can't have the best of both worlds, yet at least. A female protag would have to be a lot weaker or less capable in some way, to fit with reality, and seeing as it's an action game, that can't be done with. It would ruin the even balance between the three protags. It's a shitty, biologically biased thing, but for what R* are doing it's kinda justified.

Still haven't seen Skyfall D: And I'm dying, dying I say, to see The Master. Paul Thomas Anderson is undoubtedly my favourite director, just as There Will Be Blood is undoubtedly my favourite film. OMG I CANT WAAAAIT Also, desperate to see Beasts of the Southern Wild. Apparently it's totes amazeballs. And tomorrow I'm watching Bladerunner (with a girl, yeah boiiiii) for class. That's right, for class this semester I have to watch Bladerunner, Alien, and the Truman Show. Shit is too good.