Ironik

Are you also a homophobe like Card?

Ender's Game? Not that good. I can't imagine anyone not seeing that ending telegraphed.

It's pretty clear the DCUO devs had no connection to superheroes the way CoH's did and do. They spent at least $50 million making DCUO and the game is basically -- at its heart -- merely a generic fantasy game with different skins. Unsurprisingly, it seems most of the devs were from fantasy MMOs, such as lead dev Chris Cao who came from EverQuest. How you spend that much money. miss your deadlines and have a beta that abbreviated and still turn out a lame game is beyond me.

It LOOKS great, and the travel powers are pretty decent (although acrobatics was a pain to use), but it is incredibly cliche in terms of gameplay. Especially when you stack it up against CoH. The backstory was more attractive to me than the all-singing, all-dancing Magic Wishing Well this game was turned into, what with a time-travelling Lex Luthor using advanced tech to turn millions of regular folks into superhumans... even if it was far too limiting for original concepts.

Oh well, at least it features some of the coolest short films Blur Studio has ever made. I would log in to the game simply to watch those.

Part 1: http://youtu.be/-2ZA1D3GHOQ
Part 2: http://youtu.be/1DHND7rS35w

Firefall has Orson Scott Card writing for it. Automatic fail. Firefail.

If by "great" you mean "terrible fantasy knock-off", then sure, DCUO is great.

Moonbase Alpha's records were destroyed in the explosion so we're not sure how it started, but Paragon's heroes were able to keep the moon from escaping entirely.

Anime guys really need to buy themselves a blow-up doll. That's just stupidly embarrassing.

Silly woman, you don't need a car. Have your knitting delivered!

That **** is unreadable, man. Stop it. You aren't a unique snowflake.

Yeah, I can't imagine a good outcome for Paragon Studios. Maybe someone can salvage the game's code, but I'm not holding my breath. All my experience with corporate politics tells me there's rarely any second-guessing when a decision has been made. You can't be seen to be a waffler because you're perceived as weak. That attitude is probably a thousand times more powerful in Korean culture.

It sounds more to me like you're saying, "I reject reality and substitute my own."

Those are clearly characters designed specifically to have the proportions and appearance of kids. From a culture that has done this sort of thing in a manner so creepy that it's a widely-acknowledged issue even within that culture. So it's hard to blame people when that's the first thought that comes to mind when seeing such characters from said culture.

That whooshing sound you hear?

That's the point zipping just over your head.

First of all, you need to take screenshots during the day with your character facing the sun. Your eyes adapt to the night shots and your brain will fill in what you can't actually see.

Secondly, no, you can't emulate that sort of look. I've tried to make a kid for one of my MA arcs and I can't get them to look like anything younger than a teenager. Children and adults have different proportions both in body structure and facial structure that's immediately apparent at a glance. If you take your head as a measurement (as artists do) the average adult is somewhere between 8 and 9 heads tall. A child, on the other hand, is generally about 4 or 5 heads tall. Doesn't sound like much, but you can instantly perceive the difference. Even when you shrink a CoH toon down to the smallest size of 4 feet tall, they're still 8 heads tall. You aren't even consciously aware of it, but your brain says, "adult."

He *is* a cop after all.

Unfortunately it took American car makers more than a decade to finally get on-board with smaller cars and even then it required a restriction on Japanese imports and laws passed by Congress forcing them to make more fuel-efficient cars. That sort of thing isn't going to happen in entertainment.

I think marketing just reinforces what we already have preferences for. It's an actual psychological quirk called the "familiarity principle" or the "mere-exposure effect," where we tend to prefer things that are similar to what we're already familiar with.

I once heard a comedian say, "Have you ever noticed that you forget how ugly your friends are? Then when you try to fix them up with someone you realize your buddy doesn't have a face?" That's the exact "familiarity principle" happening: the more familiar you are with someone and the more often you see them, the more attractive they become to you. It's the "I've grown accustomed to your face" thing in action.

Pop songs are so dominant because they sound similar to what we already know. (And the reason we get hooked on them is because our brains *love* to predict what the next note or lyric will be, and that's what pop -- and country -- music does. It doesn't matter what kind of music you like, every song in that genre sounds pretty much like every other one in that genre.

So I think police and medical shows are popular because they're familiar. Some of them are actually good, but we really don't have anything new to say in those genres. Fantasy MMOs are popular because that's what people are familiar with. No revolutionary game has become a blockbuster in the past 15 years. They're all just evolutionary iterations on what's gone before and what's familiar.

Pole-vaulting.

Can't tell you how often someone shows me that cartoon.

I have no idea how prevalent it is, but it seems to pop up in the work of major game and movie companies. I recall watching an otherwise pretty cool anime back in the day called Riding Bean (made by the Gunsmith Cats guy and it features the prototype versions of those characters) and then completely out of the blue it has the little girl character propositioning some guy. As a result I have never once been tempted to even look at Gunsmith Cats, and it happened often enough back then that I completely gave up on anime altogether aside from known "safe" stuff like that of Masamune Shirow and Studio Ghibli. It was just too risky that I might turn a corner and be confronted with this incredibly vile and repulsive element that enrages me to the point of wanting to drop MORE nukes on Japan.

Basically these guys come across as gross dudes making creepy pedophile porn in their basements, and somehow others approve it.

Don't get me wrong, I hate kids as much as anyone, but I'm not down with the sexualizing of them.

I don't really care about the cause of it, just as I don't really care why someone has become a serial killer. It just needs to be stopped.