The Bard

What race/class did everyone start off with? I always start shit off with like a melee based soldier class cause I like to hit shit until it falls over, but I went with the magic user, which isn't as satisfying to me for some reason.

Fall Out Boy are awesome. Discuss.

Ah, I remember the good ol' days when T_K was just a pubestachioed thirteen year old. Time goes so fast Anyway...there seems to be a gap in my emotional chronology.

Hmm...I'm repeatedly stunned by the simple perfection of this song. If I could, I would experience my entire life through the lens of the mood it creates:

Love you too

I'm fairly sure that was me: Letty: "Everyone listen to Owl City" Me:"You could do it if you have a high tolerance for annoyance. You could also watch Freddy Got Fingered, try to have a socratic discussion with a Jehovas witness, listen to Insane Clown Posse or shoot off your testicles." They are bad. Like...offensively so.

Ecce Homo - Friedrich Nietzsche. This is the funniest book I have read for a long time. An autobiography of sorts, with such chapter titles as "Why I am so great" and "Why I write such good books," gives an inkling of the at times biting facetiousness of the guy. Funny/ very intelligent man.

Default victorr brah. Yet again. Occam's razor. Cuttin that shit Gotta stop using that haha.

Well, teebs, if you're looking for grandeur you should look elsewhere. A lot of the songs are fairly minimalistic, but thats from where their beauty derives. Its the sound of doped up playful serenity. The layers are subtle and suggestive, not overt. That said...it wasn't a grower, it hit me immediately...so I guess you just ain't into it.

To be fair to the guy, he does mix well, and kudos on taking pretty much the most sensual part of anything Imogen Heap has ever done (and thats saying something), and basically putting it on repeat, interluding it with enough boredom that you're practically rearing for her voice by the time it comes back. That's just one way of looking at it though

You find that the Singleplayer brings the score down? What would you rate it if you were scoring the Multiplayer on its own?

Anyone a fan of Chris Clark?

Good call Danimal. The XX is fucking great =D.

Hell, I’d rather the critics I read and listen to be artsy than to be car salesmen. The cover and the image simply reflect what you get. This excerpt is so thoroughly meaningless that responding would be pretty much fruitless. But I guess I may aswell. What do you mean, it “doesn’t mean a thing”? EDGE are not the only magazine that do so, every magazine does; they’re just one of the only ones that don’t seem to hold high and holy this internal meta-logic that videogame publications have of a 7/10 being an average score, and anything below this being unworthy. This is clearly an abstraction since mathematically a 5/10 would be the average. It’s in this fairly small idiosyncrasy that they’re addressing the collective dumbassery of game criticism. You believe that review scores from different websites are directly comparable, and this is presumably without any intermediate stage of reconciling the terms that each website attributes to its scoring system (I presume this is what you mean, from your use of the word “direct”). Right, well that’s your own personal delusion, and precisely what I meant by “abstract.” Every scale is arbitrary, and therefore does not conform to some ridiculous indisputable standard that you seem to have ingrained into your consciousness of what a numerical scale should represent. No, metacritic isn’t reliable, because its score isn’t nominative in the least. It means nothing, it, unlike the individual scores of the publications that it assimilates, is just a number. To understand a score, you have to understand the persona and respective individual standpoints of either the critics, or the publications that you read. I never claimed that EDGE is the gospel truth, only an imbecile would do so; nobody reads (or at least should read) a review with the perspective of accepting everything that it has to say. It is a mutual process, not a dictatorial one; what I AM saying is that it should at least qualify what it has to say, even if you wholeheartedly disagree with it. EDGE is not perfect, far from it. But it is one of the few that aspires to challenge and build, rather than starting every 9/10 review with “You already know this game is awesome...let me tell exactly what you already suspect!” You are a scientist, and not an artist, a writer or a critic, which pretty much explains why aggregates and reductions are so important to you. Reductionism of the kind that Metacritic provides does not help anyone; because, quite frankly, a score isn’t a mathematical and objective evaluation of the game’s content. A 5/10 score doesn’t tell you “THIS GAME IS 50% FUN!” does it? Any reliance on the idea that an aggregate will give you anything other than a number is fallacious. You are not the deity of some pantheistic faith (ooops, sorry, a metaphor. Should I cut that out, or will your scientific sensibility deem it a pretentious perversion of the collective N-Europe mood?) and the opinion of the world combined does not reflect yours. A game I really enjoyed recently, Lucidity, got a metascore of 58 based on an assimilation of 5 reviews. That tells me nothing compared to the individual opinion of one person whom I heard talking about it at length on a podcast, and whose opinion I felt would most accurately reflect mine. Chastising someone for using words that you would be expected to understand and use at GCSE is like calling someone out for having a bigger dick than you. Stop deflecting; the vocabulary I use is the same I use everywhere, it isn’t gilded in the least, and the situation is as informal as you want it to be. It’s a forum, so don’t tell me that I’m disrupting some casual ambiance that you perceive this place to uphold by writing a certain way. Don’t credit your inability to communicate what you supposedly mean (although, I doubt you’re sure on this front either) to my idiocy. Leave my idiocy alone. Secondly, you were talking about EDGE’s review being “bizarrely” divergent from the norm, which I interpreted as you telling me that, because it doesn’t mimic the general consensus of the gaming cabal (as ridiculous a notion as that is), it must somehow be broken. Well, correct me if I’m mistaken, but the whole merit of an “opinion” lies in the possibility of its divergence. So, while you just retort with the idea that you understand reviews to be subjective, and immediately contradict yourself with “wasting money on skewed opinions,” don’t try and divert me with broken syllogisms. I would continue to buy EDGE, even though it often doesn’t reflect my opinion on a regular basis for the sole reason that it tells me things that I wouldn’t have thought of, different perspectives from what you always hear, crystallisations of things that I might actually have thought, but never had the temerity to put into words, because its interested in the growth of a medium that I hold very dear, and because even when it does diverge, I can always chalk this down to intellectual difference, rather than idiocy and lack of understanding. Hmm interesting (by using sarcasm in this situation, I’m making a rudimentary attempt to communicate on a level that you can understand). I never said the game was “too D&D for me,” I said the fantasy setting was more than I could really stand, (and not even that, because fantasy can be compelling) When a genre that’s supposed to, oh I don’t know, focus on the fantastical, instead is a repetition of every stagnant cliché that the mind can conjure when thinking of videogames, one tends to become jaded. What I did say, is that it would appeal to D&D kids, for the sole reason that, hmm, they seem to be into the whole swords and magic scene. There is no D&D genre. That’s like saying there’s a hadouken genre. So what? By that standard, every time someone finds a fault with a game, you just retort with “well, you’re clearly not a fan of the genre?” Imbecilic, and unhelpful. And no, I never played the original Baldur’s Gate. Maybe I should. Maybe my opinion is worthless without it, but then, yours is worthless regardless. Yes, because this whole argument is a dick swinging competition. That’s what I intended. I don’t care about your research masters, and nobody else does either. Intelligence doesn’t come into it at all, but unfortunately you’re one of those people who seem to have developed some specific skill in some specialised sector of knowledge, and you think you can apply it to everything. No, Mr. Scientist, having a research masters does not make you clever, primarily because there exists no quantitative valuation of that particular quality (your IQ...lets say thats your genotype, rather than your phenotype. The latter is what really counts), as much as you would like there to be; your world revolving around syllogisms and observational studies as it probably does, maybe hasn’t taught you that there are things that science isn’t equipped to deal with. The area of videogame criticism is one of many. Delightful attempt at dramatic satire there by the way. Subtle, and in no way transparent.(Fight fire with fire, I always say) Grunchie. Yes, a person whom I have respect for; but here you’re falling into the trap of thinking that a man of intelligence conducts himself in a necessarily reserved and in no way inflammatory regard. Phallus-y. Stop pigeon-hole-ing people brah.

Gym's finally reopened after the chrimbo hiatus. My titties and legs are shrinking unfortunately, been doing a mixture of weights rotations and the occasional cardiac exercise for a couple years now. I would post sexy pictures, but that would be showing off . Anyone else around here on a weight training regime? If so, you should try out myprotein.co.uk. Been getting the true whey shit from there for a while now, pretty good for weight gain. Am now 5'11" and 12.3 (ish) Stone, looking to get to 13. Body fat is around 11% though, trying to get that down to around 6%, which is kinda hard if you enjoy the occasional kebab.

Actually, fuck this. I've had better conversations with paper.

Ah so a magazine that tells you exactly what they think; a magazine with little or no pressure from external factors (publishers, developers, advertisers) due to the fact that they are sustained by their subscriber base, are clearly a magazine with no integrity. You talk about the /10 format being one that is universal; this is inherently bullshit since within the realms of videogames each publication ascribes its own abstraction to this meter. From EDGE, a 5/10 is average because it fits dead center into the middle of the scale. It was one persons experience of the game, and trust me, most publications, even if they felt the same way, wouldn't have the balls to post that score. They would feel that they would need to elevate it in order to in some way reflect the general public consensus. Again: This is not why criticism exists, and is also the reason why the majority of game criticism is utter trash. By telling me that the /10 scale is universal, you're trying to tell me that a 9/10 from Nintendo Power is the same as a 9/10 from Games TM? You're hilariously delusional. This is also why Metacritic is the most pointless thing on the face of the earth; it aggregates scores that ostensibly mark the same point on a scale, but mean entirely disparate things. You are also saying that "They missed the point of the game." Right because every other review of the game has been "objective," I'm sure. Let me tell you something: there is no such thing as an objective review, and hypothesising the existance of someone who would enjoy the game (a "fan of the genre") helps nobody. Go read Roland Barthes' "Image, Music, Text," and the chapter on the "Death of The Author." The authors' intention is irrelevant; “He is after all the presupposition of his work, the womb, the soil.†The work (in this case, the game) is autonomous, so far as the critic is concerned. The critic is not a psychologist; he is not looking into the collective mindset of the team creating the fucking thing. He's judging the game on its own merit, whilst judging where it stands in relation to what has come before. Game criticism, in fact, any criticism, doesn't exist to mimic the public opinion, it exists to inform it. If it gives you a perspective detached from your own, well then its doing its job. EDGE don't pander to idiots like you who can't fathom, or deal with the existance of an anomaly. Now, tell me about the core gameplay: Yes, its spell system is great and whatever, but you cannot stetch it over 80 hours of gameplay without some additional incentive. Many would argue that this is the point of the story: which quite franky does not cut the mustard. You are a mental midget, and I can see that trying to explain anything to you socratically would be like arguing the merits of animal protein consumption to your ex-girlfriend. Daft: Ah cool, well apparently its better on PS3 than it is on XBOX anyway. Maybe I'll get more into it after a while.

I dunno, I couldn't play Oblivion, for the same reason that I couldn't get past its aesthtic. Can't stand high fantasy. But I guess, for all I said, Dragon Age isn't that bad a game, and for sure it obscures the machinations of the morality system way better than Mass Effect did, but I really enjoyed Mass Effect for reasons entirely different to those I find in Dragon Age. Just curious, you playing it on PC or something else?

"Why is it that fantasy, a realm only circumscribed by the imagination, always manages to feel so familiar?" The Bard's review: Why is it that, whenever anyone makes a game involving fantasy elements (especially true of Bioware) it is always either set in some hilariously cliched romanticization of a middle age land of sword wielding, and magical kingdoms of dwarves, elves and humans...or in Star Wars land? And no, it doesn't help that the elves are slightly shorter in this game, they are still proponents of that Tolkien-esque childish myth-land of pompous speech mannerisms, flagons of ale, and any other hilariously transparent wish fulfillment of pre-teen male fantasies; the only difference being that when Tolkien wrote his take on it, retarded as it was, it wasn't so damn played out. The story is told pretty poorly aswell, and for a game that apparently gives you some highly lauded moral agency, you are nothing but a vector of altruism; it is impossible to get a sense for what your character would do, because he has no personality to speak of (not even a characaturised one), and it's impossible to do what you would do because, well, you aren't a T1000. So the only thing you can really do is say "I'm going to be a dick," or "I'm going to be a saint," thereby perpetuating this tolkien esque world of moral black and white, good and evil. Maybe it's not as binary as something like Bioshock, but then its still (to use the same mathematical metaphor) like base-4 math...there's hardly any nuance, and if you have even the most rudimentary appreciation of how to interact with people, the illusion is broken. Another thing that breaks the illusion is how incredibly ugly the game is. My god. I can understand why this game appeals so much to neckbeard D&D kids, I can. But 20 hours into it, I'm just clicking through it because in theory it is fun to click on shit. It's a convoluted version of Torchlight, for all its ambition. Oh yeah, this is my review; not Edge's.

You sir, are a dipshit. To be fair, the Edge review had some pretty good points. That doesn't mean you have to agree with it though, and say the entire publication is worthless, which by the way, it isn't.

I find the Phoenix Wright series of games controls perfectly.

Victory. Also ass groping sounds appealing right about now. Unngnh

I'm being followed by invisible men, life is good, why am I so miserable then?

No, I'm just bored.