Miscellaneous Links from 2013

[AndrewRogue]

http://dicetowershowdown.libsyn.com/

Whee! My episode of the Dice Tower Showdown is up. Want to hear a bunch of amateur chumps argue about boardgames? Click on the Podcast button for episode 4 and hear me trash talk Arkham Horror. From inside a cave, apparently.

[Captain K.]

Sexy Nibelung Valesti?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqGvkbeBSY0

[AndrewRogue]

Honestly, that was near the bottom of my list of games I expected to ever get localized.

But hey, can't deny a fightan games with Underwater Ray Romano in it.

[SnowFire]

Move over, RWBY?

http://observationdeck.io9.com/heres-the-official-internet-explorer-anime-youve-alwa-1459547468/@laurendavis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHTUlF7NA2o&feature=player_embedded

wat

[Nitori]

fitness quotes over pictures of people drinking

http://imgur.com/a/i0Wt7?gallery

[Lady Door]

http://mannequindepressed.tumblr.com/

[Grefter]

From a friend who mentioned when I linked the above.

http://meowtfit.tumblr.com/

[DjinnAndTonic]

http://xkcd.com/1283/ See the Webcomic that's making every Internet Advertiser Pissed Off!

[Meeplelard]

I can't say that is inaccurate at all though!

[Fenrir]

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2013/nov/07/climate-change-keystone-galilee-queensland-coal-mining

"Two Queensland mines would emit triple the greenhouse gas emissions of the Keystone XL pipeline, or six times the UK's annual footprint"

[Captain K.]

"I'll cover you."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlGrkX_1EGY

[Dark Holy Elf]

So the new Phoenix Wright game deals with gender identity; reception is divided, though certainly worth reading.

(spoilers, though non-critical ones, are present in both the link itself and to a lesser extent in the link URL)

Link

[Grefter]

Sounds like this one is going to be a big debate over interpretation and might end in authorial intent shit fight.

Edit - http://allmarios.tumblr.com/post/64100614618/phoenixsbigassmouth-and-what-do-you-want-to-be

For the Ciatos.

Edit Edit - Holy shit browsing this tumblr

http://allmarios.tumblr.com/post/62874932438/livingbeard-sighs-wistfully

WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME AND WHY DO YOU PLAY AS MARIO IN THIS GAME

Edit Edit Edit - http://allmarios.tumblr.com/post/62040656500/sirensongfashion-jasmine-tookes-for-dsquared

Oooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmgggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg you guys.

[Grefter]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/14/look_at_how_many_ways_we_ruin_your_life_redmond_boasts/

Corporate life.  Remember these kinds of things every time you think my job sounds like I have done anything positive with my life.

[superaielman]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/2013/11/death_of_duquesne_adjunct_margaret_mary_vojtko_what_really_happened_to_her.html Interesting article I cribbed from another person's FB. Hey OK, any comments! IIRC you went to undergrad here, did you know the teacher?

[SnowFire]

Some crazy person on the Internet went and made a giant spreadsheet of game rankings and ran it through some formulas and came up with this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_considered_the_best
Pretty heavily slanted toward AAA big budget titles, which isn't surprising, although many of said AAA titles are actually good, so whatever.  The use of "best game of the most recent gen" lists gives a rather noticeable slant for PS3/360 games, too, but I am vaguely amused that the poor PS2 - which sold way better than the XBox or GC - just gets the multiplatform GTA3, while XBox gets Halo & GTA3 & KOTOR, and GC gets Wind Waker / Metroid Prime / Resident Evil 4.  The article talk page has the aggregate "scores" if that floats your boat.  (Critics really love BioShock & Half-Life 2, it seems.)

Anyway...  does anyone know solid Asian sources for their top 100 lists?  You'll surely note the WRPGpremacy of the recent era according to North American / European critics as well (Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls, ME2, etc.) and clearly we need to find an excuse to stick more anime drama in or something.  I mean, I'm sure I could find some Japanese lists and use Google Translate, but I'm not sure they'd be the "right" lists.  (Not that I imagine there's THAT much overlap, there'll be fairly little backing for top of all time ranking DQ5 or ToHeart 7 or whatever.  But it might help out Final Fantasy X, who knows.)

[Dark Holy Elf]

Resident Evil 4 was a PS2 game as well (and PC?), and I'd be stunned if that isn't where the plurality of its sales were.

I am disappointed with that list in a lot of ways (the only Mario game of the past 16 years being Super Mario Galaxy 2?) but my being disappointed with reviewers is nothing new.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

The PS2 port was kinda shit from a technical standpoint and that turned a lot of people off if I recall. Then again, shit ports apparently allow you to net acclaim sometimes (like the Xbox KotOR port) so who knows.

Still I think the lack of representation last gen is pretty fair. It was a gen that kind of lacked standouts, outside of the GameCube's astonishingly solid first-party lineup and maybe a handful of other games (whatever flavor of GTA3 you prefer, RE4, MvC2 are the only ones that come to mind).

[Luther Lansfeld]

http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?cid=94989&pid=83397&tid=3622

A radiation research scientist discusses Fukushima and the concerns associated with it. The conclusion being that it is a problem but not as hyped, as you might expect.

[SnowFire]

Yeah, I know that RE4 technically came out on the PS2 & Wii as well, but much later, and it was a pretty iconic GameCube game.

And yeah, for all that the PS2 is great, it weirdly kind of lacked an A-List headliner "you must buy this system for this game" title, like Halo was for XBox or SoulCalibur was for the Dreamcast.  The next runners up for a broad-consensus PS2 title are probably something like Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 3, Final Fantasy X, and other flavors of GTA3.  Longshots being God of War, Silent Hill 2, ICO, and the cross-platform Okami.  And all of the above have issues - SotC is a tad too arthouse, MGS3 has backlash from MGS2 combined with lower sales than MGS2 despite being awesome, FFX doesn't quite have unanimous support among RPG fans (some people hated the voice-acting and characters, even if they're wrong), etc.  Of course this really shouldn't matter as at least some of these should be able to matchup to the likes of Fallout 3, but whatever.  (Also insert usual sigh that Fallout 3, not New Vegas, is the one that gets the nod.)

So what's the Elf list of favorite Mario games post-64, then, filtered for public consumption (e.g. would recommend to a random gamer rather than personal favorite)?  From the critics, SMG1 was right on the bubble, actually, but the next Mario game after that was SNES Super Mario Kart I believe, although it was notably a bit below the bubble (7 points when 9-10 are needed).  After that the Smash games which sort of count, and after that it gets really misty.  I personally haven't played enough recent Mario games to say if the critical opinion is rational or not - I played uh New Super Mario Bros. DS, and that's about it.  (and these best-of lists seem to have huge amounts of portable disrespect for some reason.)

[NotMiki]

http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?cid=94989&pid=83397&tid=3622

A radiation research scientist discusses Fukushima and the concerns associated with it. The conclusion being that it is a problem but not as hyped, as you might expect.

Good read.  My two concerns regarding Fukushima are: what are the chances and what would the potential be of an event that would destabilize the reactors?  I know there have been some sensationalist answers floating around that grossly overstate the danger, but certainly there IS danger.  I would feel a lot better if someone would come out and say that there's no risk of disaster if a 30-year storm hits.  And, what are the dangers, if any, of the amount of radiation from Fukishima combined with the probability of contamination from future nuclear disasters causing long-term harm?  Radiation is scary because it lasts a long time, so is Fukushima priming the pump, in essence, so that future disasters which would not have been harmful in any meaningful way standing alone will now be harmful?

[Luther Lansfeld]

To answer the second question, cesium-137 is the primary long-term concern because most of the other radiation products have a low half-life(meaning that they turn into non-toxic stuff quickly). From what I've read, in practical terms, the biggest problem with respect to cesium-137 is making sure that fish and other aquatic things don't have an excess of it, although even the fish with the highest level of cesium recorded near Fukushima had like... 0.74 MBq of radiation and the lethal dose is 140 MBq(I'm not sure how rigorous the studies about long-term effects are). You can also treat cesium poisoning reasonably effectively and it leaves the body relatively quickly. Obviously you don't want to expose yourself to more of this shit than you have to but it's gotta be a lot worse than the Fukushima incident to be truly deadly.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Yeah, I know that RE4 technically came out on the PS2 & Wii as well, but much later, and it was a pretty iconic GameCube game.

And yeah, for all that the PS2 is great, it weirdly kind of lacked an A-List headliner "you must buy this system for this game" title, like Halo was for XBox or SoulCalibur was for the Dreamcast.  The next runners up for a broad-consensus PS2 title are probably something like Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 3, Final Fantasy X, and other flavors of GTA3.  Longshots being God of War, Silent Hill 2, ICO, and the cross-platform Okami.  And all of the above have issues - SotC is a tad too arthouse, MGS3 has backlash from MGS2 combined with lower sales than MGS2 despite being awesome, FFX doesn't quite have unanimous support among RPG fans (some people hated the voice-acting and characters, even if they're wrong), etc.  Of course this really shouldn't matter as at least some of these should be able to matchup to the likes of Fallout 3, but whatever.  (Also insert usual sigh that Fallout 3, not New Vegas, is the one that gets the nod.)

So what's the Elf list of favorite Mario games post-64, then, filtered for public consumption (e.g. would recommend to a random gamer rather than personal favorite)?  From the critics, SMG1 was right on the bubble, actually, but the next Mario game after that was SNES Super Mario Kart I believe, although it was notably a bit below the bubble (7 points when 9-10 are needed).  After that the Smash games which sort of count, and after that it gets really misty.  I personally haven't played enough recent Mario games to say if the critical opinion is rational or not - I played uh New Super Mario Bros. DS, and that's about it.  (and these best-of lists seem to have huge amounts of portable disrespect for some reason.)

Now that I take the time to look it up... the PS2 version of RE4 came out less than a year after the GameCube release, and sold more copies. I actually think of it as primarily a PS2 game... I had the mistaken belief that the two came out at the same time and that of course it is primarily a PS2 game as such, because duh, system with 150M install base versus system with a fifth that. Anyway I'd certainly say it qualifies as multiplatform.

For Mario games? SMG1 is the one which is ground-breaking in its use of 3D platformer physics and kind of a big deal I thought, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii deserves note I think, as "the multiplayer Mario game" just had riciulous broad appeal... in fact as far as a "would recommend to random gamers" game there are few you can go less wrong with than that. (It also had something like six times the sales of SMG2.) NSMB DS I'm quite a big fan of personally but it's not as important a game as those two, although still more important than SMG2... it deserves note for putting Mario games back on the map after the dud that was Sunshine and selling 30 million copies or whatever. (Though it's a portable game and as you note critics hate portables for some reason.)

I wasn't talking about spinoff Mario games, but yeah Super Smash Bros. Melee was arguably the GameCube game (and I say this as someone who merely likes the game, and has tended to find it a bit overrated at times), outselling the system's freaking Mario title and generally being widely loved. Super Mario Kart is pretty much the same for the SNES, and I'm old enough to remember it getting basically universal critical acclaim when it was released as well. I think more recently there is a tendency to not think of these (partially) multiplayer games as "real" gamer games for real gamers (with the exception of traditional fighting games and FPS apparently), which might explain them being left off some lists.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

And yeah, for all that the PS2 is great, it weirdly kind of lacked an A-List headliner "you must buy this system for this game" title, like Halo was for XBox or SoulCalibur was for the Dreamcast.  The next runners up for a broad-consensus PS2 title are probably something like Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 3, Final Fantasy X, and other flavors of GTA3.  Longshots being God of War, Silent Hill 2, ICO, and the cross-platform Okami.  And all of the above have issues - SotC is a tad too arthouse, MGS3 has backlash from MGS2 combined with lower sales than MGS2 despite being awesome, FFX doesn't quite have unanimous support among RPG fans (some people hated the voice-acting and characters, even if they're wrong), etc.  Of course this really shouldn't matter as at least some of these should be able to matchup to the likes of Fallout 3, but whatever.  (Also insert usual sigh that Fallout 3, not New Vegas, is the one that gets the nod.)

It's really the same problem that you see with exclusives not really existing in the current gen.  Porting to and from PS2 is pretty simple so why WOULDN'T you go cross-platform?  Nintendo has in-house studios but other than that...

[NotMiki]

To answer the second question, cesium-137 is the primary long-term concern because most of the other radiation products have a low half-life(meaning that they turn into non-toxic stuff quickly). From what I've read, in practical terms, the biggest problem with respect to cesium-137 is making sure that fish and other aquatic things don't have an excess of it, although even the fish with the highest level of cesium recorded near Fukushima had like... 0.74 MBq of radiation and the lethal dose is 140 MBq(I'm not sure how rigorous the studies about long-term effects are). You can also treat cesium poisoning reasonably effectively and it leaves the body relatively quickly. Obviously you don't want to expose yourself to more of this shit than you have to but it's gotta be a lot worse than the Fukushima incident to be truly deadly.

That's quite reassuring, thanks.