On one hand, Diaz wants the pure, unadulterated psychopath-like attitudes of the previous issues in the series.

But then, he complains over the lack of nuance and depth, of how GTA could be, but fails to be, the art that finally offers us with how to understand 9/11 and the modern U.S. experience.

What I get out of the article, then, comes down to one of the oldest saws out there. The Godfather could be a heartwarming saga of loss and redemption. It's not. That doesn't necessarily make it an inferior work of art. However, anyone with an artistic bone will often see how maybe, just maybe, there could be a much better way to do it.

I think that Diaz is right. Still, I think that what he's really complaining about is that GTA is merely excellent, rather than incredible.

Seriously, where's the chicken and where's the egg? If a movie is bad, but uses sci-fi source material, does it mean that it's bad because it used the material? Because, really, the sum argument of this is that "it's wrong."

Oh, and bonus points for squaring this with the Watchmen article that basically complained about direct translations that didn't put in some sort of reinterpretation to convert between media. Ideally, said squaring should use arguments other than "them's different bloggers."

Also, needs more Fight Club

The point isn't that the Stupid Game is fun to play, or less 'quest rich.' The point is that there's a Stupid Game at all. If you want the shorthand version of what makes Fallout & Fallout 2 at least in the top ten games of all time, the Stupid Game is the ultimate exemplar.

The Stupid Game shows how much the developers cared about the game. They could have made Fallout and been done with it. No one would have noticed the stupid game. Or they could have made the stupid game into something more resembling an Easter Egg, where it'd be nothing more than an idle curiosity that your character loses all ability to speak. Fallout would still have been great.

They didn't do this. Instead, they went through and practically re-wrote a whole sub-game within the game. They developed all sorts of different ways that being stupid changed things. And, yes, a lot of times it was bad, because, yes, putting any attribute that low should be penalized somehow. But what was so amazing was discovering this whole new game, tucked inside the existing one.

That's how much care was put into Fallout and Fallout 2. The attention to detail is unique. There are so many odd nooks and tidbits, which can turn on the slightest of character traits, and not just positive, but negative ones. There's so much buried, and it's not just in one or two places, but nearly everywhere across the game.

And so many are not inconsequential. It's not an Easter Egg, it's not meant purely for laughs (well, sometimes), but most of the time it can lead to something new, or some different way of accomplishing something.

There are games that are as well written or otherwise as good as the Fallout series. I can't think of any game with as much attention to detail.

AHH!

Er, thanks for the run, good job, cool blog, and best of luck.

I do, however, keep some bad games around sort of as a Mark Of Shame. Whenever I think about buying a game at launch, I look up, and see Jaws, looking back at me, mockingly.

It gives me pause.

Or, it could be...well, that's weird, I can only think of the SW band sounding like The Who.

Simply put, if Colonization is racist, then Civ in general is racist. Sure, you have the option of who and how it's racist but - no, wait, in the current Civ 4 version, the very notion that every type of people has its own sort of special attributes strikes me as pretty damn racist. "The Indians are an industrious people," isn't exactly content neutral.

But, beyond that, Civ itself is a racist exercise. The point of the game is to fashion your people into the ultimate world power. Doing almost inevitably means smashing about some of the other races. And that's what proves to me that Fritz really hasn't thought it out.

The act of colonization happens all the time in civ games. There's land, it has valuable resources, and so you do so. Maybe there's not a focus on the topic, but I certainly have had games where the equivalent of the grab for the Americas took place. Moreover, what he's really disturbed by, the sort of "we can use this better than they can," is pretty well the basis of any game of civ.

Play civ long enough, and it becomes a given that you have to go to war with your neighbors to get their stuff. If you don't, they will want to take yours. This is the way the game works. Beneficial trading relationships are possible, but, especially if it's a weaker party, conquest is almost required to avoid getting screwed over, and is required on the harder levels.

To begin to complain about it just because of the name change is disingenuous. Let's not even discuss all the other bad lessons that Civ teaches. Things like how history is linear, or the sort of techno-fetishism of progress.

But here's the other kicker: I know it's dangerous to say on Kotaku, remembering what happened before, but he brings up the Croal/RE5 issue. To me, the most dangerous thing that occurred in that discussion was the screams of "WAH! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" This is, to some extent, the same point Alexander was making in the "not just a game" discussion. Put simply, that RE5 had (arguably) racist elements didn't bother me, but people's unwillingness to even accept as a colorable argument the presence of such elements did.

This, then, is the flipside to that. If, and I don't really agree with this because of the history, but if colonization=racism, then any game about colonization is necessarily racist. If so, then Fritz's theoretical "non-offensive" game about colonization is worse than Meier's. It's equally an impediment to discussion.

See, to my thinking, the real goal isn't to tell us as gamers the moral high ground, it's to cause us to question and talk about what the high ground should be. A game that comes off as "colonization bad" is just as useless as a game that comes off as "colonization good." In some ways, the "good" version is better. It's much more subversive, and I trust the audience of game players to get the joke, as it were. No, really, what we're looking for is "colonization is," a simulation of the game that aims for fun, but also looks to include the beauty and the warts.

Something, in short, that isn't going to tell people what to think about colonization, but will get people thinking about colonization.

And, in closing, colonization=racism? To call that facile is an insult to shallowness everywhere. The colonizing people thought they were superior. Strangely enough, the "colonized" thought they were superior also. The history of colonization isn't one of one vast European Anschluss. There were many, many more subtle interplays, both between the Europeans and between the various aboriginal peoples. Not everyone was hot to decimate the natives. Likewise, not every native was disinterested in getting the settlers in.

We don't want simplification. We want conversation.

#2 is good. It's the way the jokes are supposed to work.

#1 could work, but it's way too long. It dwells on the list and then the joke, but, overall, it dwells. It tries to extend, but the extension doesn't fly. The comedy is straightforward. It has to be hit and run to work.

#3 is lacking in an actual joke. Why is it okay? What's funny about him saying so? Beyond the joke, I don't understand. The power of telepathy for the purposes of cheating on a test isn't exactly a surefire talent. Precog, sure, but not cheating. Or is the joke to talk to him? I just don't get it, and that might be me.

All in all, these are overproduced. Done more simply, they'd work a lot better. What I really don't like is the tone of "THIS IS FUNNY NOW, 'K?" Now, it may be that such a thing works for the intended audience of ABC Family. But the fake PSA is a goose well cooked, and has to be pretty overboard to work. It tries to sell itself as funny, which doesn't really work.

That's what I think, nameless friend. The idea is sound, but I don't think it will earn much in the way of mass appeal without it being tighter. Get in, do the joke, get out. Leave 'em wanting.

Now, all that aside, while I won't be seeing the show anytime soon (no TV), it sounds pretty cool.

Wait, let me guess: the Elders of Zion?

This remains a peeve of mine. Like, I've seen the direct translation Red Dwarf pilot. Ach, it was terrible, and terrible in completely unexpected ways. Housepet humor in the U.K. version comes off as total racism in the U.S. version.

The Office, I'd say, actually did it right, and I've even go so far as to call the U.S. version superior to the U.K. one. You can't - can't - do a direct copy. It doesn't work. The premise behind Life on Mars is and should mean different things in the respective versions, simply because both what the 70s mean, and what being a cop in the 70s mean, are different.

But everyone seems to think that these direct ports are the way to go.

You don't even need to come up with the special units. Nature's already done it for you.

Okay, I'm not. I'd rather see a fully realized KoTOR 3. I still feel burned over KoTOR 2, a game that crashes so hard in the end on so many levels that it's ruins all the fun up to that point.

But the Old Republic setting is a much better setting for a MMO in the Star Wars universe. There's much more room and much less grief.

Of course, this more sorts bad games out than pushes good games forward (good games tend to zero), but hey, that's unique in itself. Though, really, we see the problem. There's no unified system of rating like a star system represents, which really strikes the video game numbers as parody.

That's why, for me, the really important Kotaku invention is the "played to..." line. With games of ever-increasing complexity and, frequently, banality, not to mention games that are huge but lose in the long run, it's really useful to be able to assess just how the reviewers might have looked at the game.

So, thanks for that, Kotaku.

Likewise, when the point was made that death camps are never funny, I again, admittedly, thought to the Onion, and the B&N opening in Cambodia.

But the really insightful comment was made by @cowondinosaur about the Spanish Inquisition. I'm pretty sure that, at the time the Inquisition was a bundle of laughs, presuming you weren't Jewish. It's only later that we said "oh wait, that's not so swift" that we realized it wasn't something that you should joke about.

I worry about things you can't joke about. Why? Because I used to study comedy as an academic profession and the one thing I came out of with that is that comedy is how you keep someone in check. Comedy forces you to realize that you're not as high and mighty as you think you are, not only because someone's poking fun at you, but because you can all laugh at a shit joke.

In short, comedy is really what the leaders of the world today really, really need. And yet, we have this "too soon" mentality, because we are, as a culture, either prudes or chickenshits.

Now, a network throwing its weight behind something that was more like the news broadcast for the MMO universe, that might have some play. Feed rumors, deal with actual in-universe happenings, lay hints, and reward activity. Of course, it'd be dull as paint for nearly everyone not involved in the MMO, but there you have it.