Well, someone from 2K also made a good argument on the other side of things:

I'm not even an XCOM fan - never got into it, though many friends have - but when I read what they're doing with it even I want to rage. If a strategy game "isn't contemporary," then don't name your game after one. Really, all you're doing is trolling FANS OF A STRATEGY GAME, and presenting some name no one's heard of…

Ah, no - TMR is Takenori Nishikawa, he just did Heart of Sword. The background music in Kenshin and Tenchu are both Asakura's.

Yes, TM Revolution! I loved Rurouni Kenshin back in the day, watching those atrocious Shinsen subs... (or rather, broken Realplayer rips of dying VHS dubs of Shinsen subs!)

Nice. I'm going to have to catch up on Moloko - I knew about them because I was a huge beatmania nut and heard that they had a special edition of the game in the UK.

Not that it makes it alright, but there's a very long history there, starting with Japanese moving to Brazil to work on coffee plantations, and basically being treated like slaves. I guess that kind of became the default way of interaction when migrating between the two countries.

Here's one! I've mostly been staying out of TAY since the old site was sealed off.

I live within reach of the "+15" system in Calgary. There's nothing radical about it - it's a series of raised walkways connecting a large number of buildings downtown - but some consider it an arcology as you can go on and on without ever going outdoors. The obscure comedy movie "Waydowntown" was about a group of…

Well, it'd surely tie into Google Adsense, so based on your + posts, Gmail, search history, and what RSS feeds you read, it'd target specific ad banners to you and take note of what sites you're visiting by seeing who it's showing you ad banners for.

I'd promote this if the promote button wasn't broken for this specific post.

If I were doing a beta test like this, I'd have it log all the action for easy review. These days, even commercial releases of games often track a lot of statistical data about how they're played.

Smart. This doesn't sound like a promotional thing to me - it's very practical. As a programmer, the best tester you can find is the one who tries things you haven't thought of and has a knack for breaking your program.

Even if the glitchers decided to try that, it's very easy to record mind boggling amounts of data with a custom build of most games. They could just log the whole sessions and look for anomalies or patterns in play.

TAM is great live - I saw a bunch of clips from a performance at Melonbooks; it's hard to believe he improvs most of it! Only guy I know of who could play Native Faith full speed on a violin! It seems like lately he's done a bunch of Puella Magi stuff too.

Cool. That kind of reminds me of YMCK or Perfume.

It's Princess Xevious! ;)

That's fair - it's really a personal preference. In my case, it doesn't matter how it's presented, I know I'm not that character, but an actor fitting that role, so if a character is blank, they just stay blank. It keeps me from caring enough about most of those games to get into them.

It is pretty rare for multiplayer characters to have a detailed or canon plot too - a lot of older games like Doom just had the hero in different colors fighting each other. That's interesting about TF2 though - I was thinking mostly about single player characters and how they're presented.

Kind of like when Final Fantasy became one of the longest-running games series, haha

Well covered. A big problem in FPS is that too often they give you an empty shell character to fill, and if that's not your style, then you're just playing a game about some generic dude with no personality who shoots a guy, then shoots another guy, then shoots some more guys. That was AWESOME in the 90s, I've just…