bigstrat2003

That's a good point, and definitely an angle which had never occurred to me before. Gives me something to think about, thanks!

Even if you are still a Bears fan, and I am required by Wisconsin law to profess loud public hatred for you. ;)

I think that part of what murderbunny might be getting at is that, if someone is getting basically universal praise from your peers, then writing a piece which is positive towards them seems "safe" and kind of like the writer is just joining the choir. I totally get what you're saying though - that you get a lot of flak for some of the pieces you write from readers (I heard you ruined GB singlehandedly! ;)), so they're not at all "safe" in the sense that you're writing something which will get you nothing but props from people who read it.

The other thing I think murderbunny is saying is - if you look at someone like Anita Sarkeesian, one would generally think that at least someone who writes for a game website would disagree with her arguments (and write about that), just by sheer probability. But that hasn't really happened (not on any sites I follow, at least), which makes it easy to start writing off the people who praise her work as being a chorus of yes-men simply because you haven't seen any dissenting opinions. I think that your point is totally fair that as a writer, you're going to write from a perspective that is colored by your own opinions on things. It's unavoidable, and I don't think it's any writer's fault that they do so. But I also can understand the frustration that can result from feeling (albeit unfairly) that "man, all these writers are tripping over themselves to agree with Anita, and nobody actually critically examines her arguments and points out the flaws in them" (or any other controversial figure, of course, not trying to single out one person in particular here).

They aren't... but now that you mention it, I kind of want them to be. That would be amazing.

@wolfgame said:

@alex said:

@jerseyscum: We've all latched onto bad ideas at one time or another in our lives. Anyone who says otherwise probably just hasn't recognized the bad ideas they're still latched onto. Learn from it, and it won't have been a wasted experience.

I wish my impression of you had been this reasonable on twitter, all I could see before blocking staff tweets were a pattern of hate breeding more hate, contempt and anger in the most disrespectful manner. my expectations of staff responses are different because I feel that in a position of authority on the site and the fact they are mirrored on the homepage should demonstrate a level of respect even more so then expectations for the community. Behavior is frequently emulated from the top, if anger is the response we project we can't be surprised when it nests in the forums.

I wonder if that isn't just the inherent difficulty of expressing oneself well within 140 characters coming through. I don't know the context because I don't read Twitter, but I can easily imagine that in the right context, Alex saying "any of this" specifically meant death threats and harassment, not GG in general. And if that's what he meant, then... fair enough really. But in the space that a Twitter post affords, it's not easy to communicate a nuanced idea effectively.

@vinny: @patrickklepek: @alex: Thanks for being so damned reasonable on this topic. I don't really feel that there is a massive problem with journalistic ethics as the GG folks do, but it's been really upsetting to me to see some incredibly vocal (and influential) people dismissing all of them out of hand as "those are just a bunch of misogynists". While I have no doubt that some pro-GG people really do just hate women, to dismiss them all in that way seems to me to be unjustifiable and incredibly unfair. So I don't have a dog in the fight, as it were, but I'm happy that you guys are willing and able to rightly treat the topic with the nuance it deserves (and, though you may not agree with someone's views, treating said views as sincere and not merely a rationalization to be a jerk). Thanks guys, it's refreshing to see.

It's not Monster Bash, is it? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/7/78/20130619150337!Monster_Bash_level.png

Alright, I have a game which has been driving me crazy and I hope you guys can help. This game was one I played somewhere in the early 90s, although I don't know that it was a new game then. I played it on my family's Apple IIe (I'm pretty sure it was for the IIe, although we might have played it on our IIgs). All I remember of the game is that it was some kind of game where you flew planes from city to city on a map of the US (I think, but am not sure, that it was an edutainment game intended to teach geography). There was a two-player option (as I used to play with my dad), and the players had some ability to interfere with each other (for example, I very clearly remember dropping a smoke bomb covering up a city that my dad needed to travel to). That's really all that I can remember, apart from the fact that (as you'd imagine) not all cities were on this map of the US, and for whatever reason I remember that Fresno was one of the cities you would have to travel to.

Anyone got any ideas?

Why not go wiimote + nunchuk? The Mario Kart button mappings are the same as on the GC controller (unlike for Smash Bros), so you can slide right into using that combo seamlessly. That's what I did for MK Wii, even though it had GC controller support, and I have to say it worked great. Arguably better than if I had used GC controllers, as my wavebirds are kinda finicky.

@falcomadol: You are working the wrong jobs, mate. Most people I know aren't asked to do work stuff when they're not on call (for which there is a rotation) or in the office... and I work in IT, one of the worst industries for that sort of thing. Some people choose to, sure. But they aren't expected to.

I think it's silly to be unwilling to play a game because it isn't coming out on the newest hardware. Unless you sold the old console to pay for the new one or something, you lose nothing by playing the game on the older machine. Particularly in this case where it's not like the game would even be any better on the newer consoles, due to not being graphically intensive. Even if you put your 360/PS3 away, it can't be that big a hassle to bring it out and hook it up. Even with my horrible rat's nest of cables and shelving units in the way of the power strips, that's a task that'd take just a few minutes.

Tangent: similar to this, I've never understood on the Bombcast when the guys were like "Yup I put my old consoles away, I'm done with them." That is crazy to me. There is going to be a period of time where games come out for older machines but not the newer ones - we saw it last generation, we'll see it this time (and that's not even getting into how there are lots of already-released games on those consoles which are still great and should be played). It is far too early to talk about retiring the last-gen consoles in favor of the current ones.