hermes

@finaldasa: To tell you the truth, I have grown disappointed of many of Jim's videos because of that very thing. It is commendable to address anti-consumer practices and ask for changes, but most of the times his rants seems more interested in creating controversy for its own sake, and his savviness is more appropriate of some random forum commenter that a recognizable person in the medium with many years in his CV.

I think the last straw was at the AC Unity rant, where his response to a developer saying including an optional female character in the campaign would amount to a lot of work and pressure in the budget and schedule was basically "who cares? just do your job! it can't be that hard..."

@video_game_king: If the question is "is this in every episode?", the answer is: yes, yes it is.

Is it ironic? I don't know. Sometimes its hard to read whether he is trolling or being serious. He plays around it, especially with the closing sentences always being an hyperbolic boast of his own persona, which I think its mostly intended as a catchphrase... At the very least, it is evocative.

@video_game_king said:

I would not have respected them more, but I would have liked them more if they were able to sell me on those "breakthroughs". For example, at the beginning of the previous generation, I didn't care about features like forceful achievements, party voice chat or HD; but after a while, I got it. Without even trying it, I would not have bought a 360 if those were promoted as the "new" features out of the box, but by leading by example they distinguish that generation from the previous one and now companies that don't support them are perceived as out of touch. On the other hand, in this generation they went headstrong until they noticed they couldn't justify it, and proceed to backpedal a lot, at which point it was impossible not to notice they have a distinctive lack of faith in their own ideas...

And about Jim... it goes back to the previous intro, which was similar to a parade of Helghast troops. I guess the iconography is meant to refer to him addressing an angry crowd.

Short disclosure first: When eating cow, people in my country tend to leave nothing behind... NOTHING. So, there are weird dishes that include the kidneys, the brain, the guts, the blood, etc... what in english you call "offal".

Funny thing is, in general, I like a lot of those "side dishes" more than the asado, which is closest we get to beef.

Ok, thanks. I guess if you see them as an eBay of online games, the pricing makes more sense.

Still not confident enough to buy games there, but I will wait for some of my friends to jump in...

Hi people,

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a page called g2a, which works like a marketplace for games (much the same as steam, gog and humble bundle), but it has games from different companies (like FIFA and Battlefield), at prices that are not available even at their main venue.

This is the first time I even hear about that page, and have never heard of it from podcasts or news sites, which makes it look kind of shady. So, my questions are: Did you knew about it? Have any of you used it? What is the catch with the prices?

Willis for me.

I must be one of the few people that did NOT hate Hudson Hawk...

@yummylee: The quest of Belic is a quest for redemption and moving on for the horrible things he had to do in his home land, but it pales in comparison with everything he does on a regular basis in the game. The game does not only not punishes the player, but encourages him to be as chaotic and destructive as he can. That makes his gravitas unearned, insincere and hypocrite. One could argue that the character himself is insincere and hypocrite, which is an interesting reading, but its not the reading the script wants to sell us.

The case of Kratos is slightly different. He is hellbent on revenge and does not care about anything that might gets in his way. In his quest for revenge he kills (both directly and indirectly) millions of people (besides all the creatures around him) for his own selfish reasons and causes more chaos that any of his enemies would ever dream. He is mindless, selfish, and just does not care about anyone. That is why, when the game tries to tell us that he suddenly does, that he earns redemption and that the Olympians are the bad guys, it feels completely unearned. The game literally makes us play as the biggest genocidal in history and in the last half hour tells us "isn't he a great guy?"

I didn't play WD, but it seems Aiden has similar fallbacks: a protagonist that the game tries to sell us as unfairly wronged, in a quest for redemption and rightful retribution from bad guys, but that the game does nothing to justify him or make his motivation earned.

@mormonwarrior: I believe Marston is probably the best of that bunch, because all the time you have options that defined you as the man with no name or Lee Van Cleef. True, you had the option to rob Banks, kill deputies and tie people to train rails, but you also have the option to stop lynchings and assist people being robbed. You were never a "straight" good guy (because that is not the old west way), but you have enough variety between good and evil karma missions to help define your character as you wanted, between rough but honorable and murderous sociopath.

The rest of your examples are pretty spot on, though. Niko Belic and Kratos are so badly written as people looking for redemption that they are almost laughable... almost, but mostly are just bad. From what I heard about Watch Dogs, Aiden seems to be the exact same archetype of evil character that is redeemable only because the game says so.

@huser said:

He always ask for permission after he has some legal problems with Coolio because of Amish Paradise.