The Genki Rocket song they play in Lumines is also the music that plays in the clothing store in No More Heroes. I know because I thought it was a great song and hunted it down back when NMH came out.
I can confirm to @unastrike that the IDW comics are great. They do some mucking about with the origins that is weird but in a good way, and I've really enjoyed everything about it.
The game looks very...adequate, in a way that begs for it to rise above. At least it's not a complete shitshow like Out of the Shadows was? I'll pick it up after a price drop I guess.
@regular_kirk: WW1 is treated as taboo because it is not a clear good guys/bad guys conflict. It was just a bunch of runaway nationalism, treaty-making, backstabbing and technology. It was the first modern war, and the horrors of that (the shelling, the machine gun, and chemical warfare) was sufficient to fuck up an entire generation who spent their remaining years suffering from severe PTSD and disillusionment with their previously sunny views of both the power of technology (remember, at this point the narrative was "science will only ever benefit us") and the beauty of war (which was seen as a gentlemanly affair). In some sense the media coverage of WW1 opened a lot of eyes, and the stories that came back were not those of putting down savages in some colony, but of massacring "civilized" Europeans. That and the aftermath of the war demonstrated the sheer inability of old-fashioned notions of what winning and losing a war meant when it came to securing a lasting peace (the Treaty of Versailles is an absolute shitshow).
I know Drew's mentioned it in the past, but the Hardcore History podcast has a pretty fantastic series on the causes of the war and goes into depth as to why precisely it is treated with the sort of gravitas it gets.
In the year I spent in Wales doing a master's degree I spent an embarrassing amount of time and money being decimated by my friends in snooker matches (and also drinking). Lovely way to spend an afternoon if you ask me.
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