Jay Barnson, in talking about the difficulty in rating open-ended videogames, has this to say:
After all, how WOULD the ESRB rate, say, the Star Trek holodeck?
Geeze. I bet Riker has a few password-protected holodeck programs that would make Larry Flynt blush.
He also has some great observations on Oblivion. Read the whole thing.
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
This Game is Too Videogame-y
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Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
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It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
T w e n t y S i d e d
Ayup. Flower-picking simulator is about right.
(Goes back to copying blogs from DoSed server to the one that just has a flaky boot drive…)
(Goes back to copying blogs from DoSed server to the one that just has a flaky boot drive…)
I swear, mu.nu is the website equivalent of the Millenium Falcon.
Yeah, well. It’s better than the old server. Hardware RAID-1. Both drives failed at the same time.
I dunno about Ryker, but Lt. Barclay sure must have. We saw a couple of them, in fact.
I dunno about Ryker, but Lt. Barclay sure must have. We saw a couple of them, in fact.
This is why it is always important to clear program history (and mop up) after using the holodeck.
BTW: Barclay was my favorite Star Trek character. He wasn’t one of the relentlessly beautiful, talented, highly-motivated super-people. He had flaws. He was far more real to me than most of the main characters.
Yeah, there were times when he was painful to watch, because I empathized with him too much. The one episode where he got to cut loose as a super-genius was funny, just for contrast.
Gotta agree with you, Shamus… Barclay was the only character with flaws (at least until one achieved the rank of Starfleet admiral and went insane) in the entire series. Most of the rest of the plastic, perfect people never really interested me, and I think it’s one of the reasons I never got into TNG very much. Other than Barclay, the only characters that seemed human were the ones who weren’t.