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Among games I consider to fit the "nostalgia" category, the Command and Conquers are the ones I fire up the most frequently - particularly C&C1, RA1 and RA2 because those were the ones I really liked. The community has done a decent job patching them to work better on newer PCs too (see pcgamingwiki.com - which is a great source of info on fan patches in general).

That said, these days I do most of my gaming when I meet with friends for LAN parties, and C&C was never a big LAN game for us (though I do remember playing both C&C1 and RA1 against friends via 14.4K modem back in the late 90s). Warcraft III was for a bit, which was a bit annoying because I was nowehere near as good at it as C&C.

I really like Civ IV and V as LAN games - I find the length of the games mean I get really invested in the outcome. Unforunately I have trouble convincing people to play it on LAN due to the game length, and I've never enjoyed it quite as much just in single player.

I have a similar group of hobbies (though I write mainly original stories now) so I know how difficult balancing them is. Time has been a bigger issue than money for me - my PC is quick enough to run all but the bleeding edge games despite its age, and Steam sales make the marginal cost quite low.

In terms of single player, the only games I've invested significant time into these past few years are Dragon Age: Origins and XCOM: Enemy Unknown, both of which I'd recommend to you given your tastes.

Right now, I own a XBox 360, and a few games for it. Prior to the XBox360, my last console system was the original Playstation. Most of my gaming has been on the PC.

My all-time favorite gaming franchises:

NHL games
Sid Meier's Civilization series
Command and Conquer
Age of Empires
Heroes of Might and Magic
Suikoden (I completed the first, fourth, and fifth ones; almost completed the 2nd)


There are a lot of other games I've tried (Mass Effect, Soul Calibur, WoW) in a lot of different genres, but I tend to prefer RTS games, and games where you're basically building a society.

There have also been a fair number of RPGs I've played and/or completed (some of the Final Fantasy games, a couple of the "Tales" series of games, the first Xenosaga game, etc...)

But what I find is that I just don't have enough time for work, anime, gaming, and fanfic writing. I like anime, gaming, and fanfic writing about equally, and gaming is the most expensive of the three, so I don't game all that much. But it's certainly possible I might get more into gaming again one day (it'll probably happen once I tire of fanfic writing). It's only recently that I tried Mass Effect.

Hey, I sometimes wish these threads would just die so I could let the matter go, so I can feel you there.

I'm curious though... you mention you don't game much anymore, but do you game at all? If so, what platform?

I'm pretty much exclusively PC myself and have been for years (though as I mentioned to Syn, there's a bit of PS3 stuff I'd love to own). My girlfriend, on the other hand, essentially plays VNs on PC and Pokemon on her DS.

Just so you know, I've probably gotten a bit too emotional in the XBox One thread. I'm going to try to take a break from it. I just find what Microsoft is doing very distasteful, and wanted to vent a bit about it. I want to thank you for being relatively unemotional about things, since it did steer discussion in interesting ways at times.

One other weird thing that I wanted to put in my last post but didn't consider entirely on topic: I've had female moe fans tell me that they started as either a Pokemon fan or general video game fan with mild anime interest, and then transitioned into moe fans after finding promo art for To Heart 2 online and wondering what it was all about. On two separate occasions. Which wouldn't be so surprising if it weren't for both dropping the same name in a rather small sample size.

On it's own it probably doesn't mean a lot, but combined with some other stories I've heard, I get the impression there's quite a few fans out their whose "origin stories" don't quite fit the norm.

Sure. But I tend to find reading stuff written by people who are venting tiring to read in general, even if it's an issue I care about.

I find that highly questionable. I come from PC geek, occasional fanfic author background, not a general geek one. The only reason I consider myself to be a good source of information on what makes people anime fans is because Vancouver has a pretty good anime fan scene and I meet quite a few people at events, including newbies.

Where do people outside the fandom get exposed to this kind of content, let alone come to believe it's typical of anime?

I'm just surprised because in my experience, comments I hear about too much ecchi, or moe, or whatever in anime tends to come from more experienced fans, not newbies.

I also have axes to grind with a lot of "think of the mainstream" types over their tendency to trash shows that I honestly think don't deserve it. Example: the anime that got me into anime, Moon Phase, occasionally gets called "lolicon trash" or some such. Never mind that the show is fairly tame and that I've had pretty good experiences screening it to less experienced fans.


P.S. since we're talking about darn good shows that have bits of questionable content in them, have you seen any of Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge? Don't listen to Reckoner, it's good.

I'd go so far as to say that some of the milder ecchi titles can be good gateway shows. I went through a bit of a "harem phase" in my first year of being an anime fan, with Love Hina and Shuffle, which have their share of service, and I know I'm not the only one. Then I discovered Kanon 2006 and decided I found moe harem more interesting than its ecchi counterpart and it all kind of snowballed from there.

Ok, thanks for clearing that up.

As for "rants against the usual whipping boys", well here's the thing:

1. The criticisms are largely valid. You have to admit a lot of this stuff is pretty dumb and highly repetitive. Even some fans of it admit that.

2. You're probably more well-versed in the general geek fandoms than I am, but in my limited experience with them, this sort of content really is what's holding anime back a bit amongst North American general geek fadoms. To comic book fans who debate over Power Girl's "Boob Hole" on her costume, a lot of this Ecchi material is just way too much. It does make them more reserved about giving anime in general a chance.


Now, speaking personally, I gave up on anime going mainstream in the west about a year or two ago. For that reason, I now find this stuff pretty easy to ignore (you'll probably notice I've had very little to say on To Love-Ru or Queen's Blade). My view is that "Anime isn't going to go mainstream in the west anyway, so we might as well let the ecchi fans enjoy their shows in peace". I mainly commented on that Ecchi thread because I wanted to head off the common misconception that if you dislike Ecchi it's because you're a prude. To be fair, I also realize that many smart and decent people can and do like ecchi. There was a time in my life when I myself was in the mood for it every now and then.

No. I actually changed the wording there though it's probably still possible to draw that inference.

That said, I've been part of most of the "nerd communities" I'm part of for so long that I find rants against the usual whipping boys get tiring after a while. It's like "guys, I've been hearing about this for 7-10 years now, make peace with it already".

(Tangent: speaking of being around geek communities a while... I'm not sure which is more disconcerning for me, realizing that I'm closer to 30 than 20 or that games like Half Life and C&C: Red Alert are now 15+ years old. Though at least I'm used to thinking of those as older games, unlike, say Far Cry (2004).

Do you really think that those who don't like ecchi are annoying elitists?

I'd be more inclined to say it was a nice trip if I weren't fairly sure both trips are work related. He's actually local has been around much this year.

Little Witch Academia and Wolf Children were the high points of the night for me. Wolf Children sort of distills a lot of what I liked about Hyouka - the "doing character development in a low key fashion" stuff - and then puts it into meatier (thematically) two hour movie about being different.

I adore the way LWA combined cute girls and "gainax spectacle" (Trigger is mainly ex-Gainax employees in case you didn't know)in one work. Enough said.

Okay, not quite. My friend noted that LWA seems to borrow a lot from Mahou Shoujo Tai Arusu - to the point of pretty much frame by frame homaging a scene. Personally I enjoyed LWA more than MSTA… though I do feel that LWA had an easier job to do here because they had do one OVA and hence didn't really have to hold anything back.

Death Billiards was also great. I generally have mixed luck with the "awesome death game" genre (things like Akagi, Kaiji, etc. - I have friends who love them), but limiting it to one OVA and putting some effort into character backstory really helped this out. Still not quite my thing though.

EVA 3.33… it's been a while since I saw 2.22, but this felt like it had a lot more character development and, uh… angst. My friend , who loves the original and has hated Rebuild so far (both movies, not just 2.22 like Reckoner does IIRC) thought it was a move in the right direction and from the perspective of being an "Eva" movie he's probably right - but as someone who hasn't been as big an EVA fan, I found it far less fun than 2.22. Also, the film has a lot of WTF moments - not in terms of the mindscrew stuff since I'm familiar with the TV series and kind of get that now, but in terms of having a ton of stuff changed since 2.22 that's only gradually explained. I'm curious as to whether this was done to throw the audience out of "comfortable, familiar territory" and hence put them into a position closer to Shinji's - and I'm also curious whether they just did it to troll the audience.

Also: remember Touji talking about his sister? She grows up to be cute.

(Side note: we watched on my dad's 50 inch plasma TV. However, unlike Rebuild 1 and 2, 3 is 2.35:1 widescreen rather than the usual 1.85:1 of regular anime movies and 1.78:1 of TV anime… I think watching it in between regular TV anime made the experience less epic just because of the smaller picture.

I think Muromi-san benefits from only having 12 minute episodes - normally I'm not much of a gag anime fan but I can enjoy them in short bursts. Crazy OP too.

This was actually my second attempt at Aku no Hana - it's not really the best "break from exams" show. I'm actually curious to see where it goes. I don't have a strong opinion on the intentionally "uncanny valley" (IMO) art other than I think it actually benefits somewhat from the big screen experience.

I don't think RDG is a great show, but I happen to like it a lot anyway. Not sure if this or Crime Edge will end up being my favourite "supernatural show with a cute girl" of the season - Crime Edge had a really strong third episode and a really cute female lead, but RDG feels like a slightly warmer show despite having a much colder male lead. Odd.

Hataraku-Maou Sama had a pretty hilarious start but I feel like it's sliding too much towards conventional harem territory. Will see if it manages to live up to its start.

Gargantia is pretty great, and I think I like it more than Valvrave's "This is your Code Geass on Bombast" approach though that's actually kind of fun too. The world and Ledo's interaction with it is the main draw - the action scenes haven't felt dangerous enough to be gripping though I'm not sure they could have really done it any differently given how powerful Ledo's unit is.