And then I looked at the equipment list. There was a 3 MDC bra for women (jungle camo?) Someone tell me how does that work exactly?

Anyway, Rifts was a fun game and Amber diceless was an amazing concept. I played Amber a couple times and had a lot of fun – our GM insisted on having everyone act out each sword blow or whatever, and it felt very dynamic.
Big difference from sitting around with some cereal rolling to hit AC 0 every five minutes.

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And why shouldn’t fanboys have orgasms too? Having wizards fight giant robot armies was awesome, there’s no denying it.

That’s a kind of freedom you don’t get elsewhere. Of course as a system Palladium RPG rules were completely broken, but that’s another matter.

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I think Jim’s defence of such excesses is pretty much “Why not?”.

And that’s why “why not” is also known as The Great Discussion Killer!! ;)

Permission to break whatever rules of good taste is an interest and freeing permission. Or, at least, it can be.

Sure, for a bit. It’s a bit like watching excruciatingly bad films on purpose – it’s fun for a bit, but then the realisation dawns you could spend the same time actually watching something better.

I come off sounding like a hardcore, driven RPGer now.. Thanks, Kieron.. ;)

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Permission to break whatever rules of good taste is an interest and freeing permission. Or, at least, it can be.

KG

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Alex: Well, in the eighties, deliberately mashing stuff up in the way Palladium tended to was a relatively imaginative compared to what everyone else was doing. Stuff like the TMNT mutation rules were brilliant.

(Generally, I didn’t have much time for Palladium’s actual rules – the combat ones especially made no sense to me, they were that foggy. And I’m someone who was okay with Rolemaster, y’know?)

I don’t know, mashing stuff together didn’t seem very imaginative to me – it all felt a bit too much like a fanboy orgasm, “let’s put magic with big guns with mechs with cowboys!!” (well, maybe not the cowboys, but maybe that’s what I was missing – Rifts needed more cowboys).

It’s a bit like how Who fans used to fantasise about the Daleks showing off against Cybermen, how AWESOME that would be!!! Except that it wouldn’t, it would make all the elements seem weaker and cheaper (just watch those Daleks vs. Cybermen Who episodes Russell T. Davies fangasmed on the screen).

You could see it most clearly in those silly combat rules you mention – I mean, Mega Damage Capacity.. really? “My gun goes POW!!” “Mine goes KA-BOOMMMMM!!” etc.

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What it DOESN’T do is any addressing of issues. It doesn’t really talk about what bias is, how it interacts with the final text of a review, how that differs from what the omnipresent call of “Bias!” is talking about . . . there’s a lot of talking being done, but not a lot of analysis.

. . .

I also don’t really understand what, exactly. Mr. Rubefield’s point is. He goes from “You guys aren’t doing anything interesting in this!” to “You guys are spending way to much money on this!” to “You guys should be doing something else entirely!” to “Consoles are pretty cool!”

I understand that his points aren’t strictly contradictory, but following “You guys aren’t trying hard enough” with “This field doesn’t even matter, so you guys are spending way too much time and money working in it” doesn’t make for a cohesive point. What this works out to is “Make more games with cleverer ideas instead of tremendous budgetry,” but he doesn’t even TALK about that anywhere!

If anything, it’s the polar opposite of the “Bias” article. The first one was a lot of quiet, reasonable, and cohesive journalism that didn’t actually come out and make a point, and this is a series of loud, dramatic points that doesn’t fit together into anything cohesive.

. . .

The Top 10 British Video Game Journalists article is a series of loud and dramatic statements wrapped around a proper thesis. I liked it.

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I would love to see a game of any Miike film, so long as it was designed by Suda 52.

Is he Suda 51′s evil twin?

Hmm, what would Suda’s evil twin be like? Would that spectrum just wrap around to good again, where he’d design elegant and straightforward games with minimal story?

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