While we're on this broad genre of asymmetric team-based shooters, I'm always a little surprised Natural Selection 2 never became a bigger deal.

It is said that preview audiences sacked Hakodate after the innuendo of The Taste of Pike failed to deliver.

Get this….they're not allowed!

Bog Bodies 2: Iron Age Boogalo

In a few classes in college we read various Russian "boulevard novels" from the early 20th century, and although they weren't particularly great works by and large, it was interesting to see how practically indistinguishable a lot of the content and characterization was when compared to all manner of current romantic…

I think I've made this argument before but I feel like the period where literary fiction "of merit" and popular tastes were vaguely aligned was more the result of a lucky confluence of conditions rather than a long-term norm that was ever going to be sustained or emulated in any other period.

Yeah there's so very damn many of them every year it's near impossible to tell which ones rise to decent or better, but people seem to have reacted positively to this one.

This weekend I watched 2012 nature-industrial documentary Leviathan. Featuring no narration and scarce little dialogue by the crew, Leviathan's aim is to largely to immerse the viewer in the cacophony of surreal sounds and sights of the fishing trawler, of this peculiar mating of an age-old profession and industrial…

I feel compelled to post a link to Twitter's most prolific strongman, Azerbaijan's Ilham Aliyev, who in between more mundane tweets regularly drops things like:

That'd be an interesting tack for a game to take but is it is still you after all that fights said final boss and while impotency to influencing larger events can be good dramatic material, if the game is going to ask you to get involved and play a role a seemingly active role in them there arguably needs be a…

The Leinsters send their regards?

I'm not sure that's quite fair. One of the biggest complaints about DA2 was the fact that it spends all this time setting up the local context of your choices and political wrangling but then invalidates a huge chunk of your work at the end so that it can still fulfill its requirement for a traditional final boss…

I can only assume you are exceptionally lucky or exceptionally patient or perhaps I am exceptionally unlucky and inpatient.

Trifling works all compared to Puppy Love in Thunder Canyon.

The trajectory of a prolonged game of Risk can be second only to perhaps Monopoly in starting out as a fun trifle and ending when everyone in room sufficiently hates each-other and has lost all hope.

I did my first playthrough as Novgorod and found it pretty enjoyable and manageable, you're surrounded by a lot of conflict prone areas and eventually the Mongols will come right to your doorstep but it's relatively easy to make oneself a bastion of stability amidst all that.

Some developer out there really needs to make an RPG that embraces the pulp aesthetic (played completely straight of course) of Boris Vallejo or the original Conan the Barbarian movie and put it into game form with all that modern hardware can provide.

I'd really like to know what that part of the script looked like.

My memory is a little hazy but if we compare XII to say Star Wars then Bahamut is basically just the death star. A dragon death star.

This being many years ago I was of course playing it in the living room, so it was either that or die of shame.