So you don't get complete control over your troops, but it's probably still not nearly as frustrating as that WW I game where you just get to look at maps and reports and you have to yell orders through a WW I style radio.

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I liked Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, I found it very impressive in certain ways, but at the same time it was one of the bigger examples of some of Miyazaki's weaknesses. Like, Miyazaki has a tendency to let the story sort of trail off because he's set up a conflict and he either doesn't know how to resolve it or he gets to liking the bad guys and so he just doesn't want to resolve it. A lot of the time I actually find it kind of charming. But in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind it bothered me . . . the issues and mysteries set up were so big and ominous, and then it just kind of didn't deal with them. Just sort of goes shrug, never mind.

Spirited Away is perhaps less ambitious, but it's much more of a complete movie. It's still weird, it still raises some issues (not all that subtly, but I've never really been into subtle anyway), it still has distinctive Miyazaki approaches to characters and things go in some odd directions, and it has perhaps the most gorgeous, rich and strange visuals of any movie I have ever seen--perhaps the fullest flowering of that Miyazaki "look". But all the stuff works together, the strands get pulled together and the movie has a resolution. Every so often I re-watch Spirited Away, just because I want to. I might re-watch Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind someday, but if so it will be less because I really want to and more because I think I should.

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Yeah, Miyazaki. Not the game itself, just that trailer, has a feel that goes beyond general "anime" style and more into the specific animation style of the studio Ghibli films of Hayao Miyazaki, like "Kiki's Flying Delivery Service" or "Spirited Away" (which are awesome; if you haven't seen Spirited Away, just bloody go and see it). I don't think that's a problem.

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Here's an idea--access to the law as a public service. Someone wants to sue, they go to the government and get a lawyer assigned to them--and that includes megacorps. Defender gets a lawyer assigned to them as well, everyone's even. If the government assessor deems that it's a really complicated case, they both get the same size of team assigned to them. If there's a fee, it's proportional to the entity's income. Voila, big companies cannot come after you with teams of lawyers and bankrupt you with fees.

Secondary benefit: The government now has a motivation to make the law simpler, because the more complicated it is, the more lawyers they have to pay.

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So does that feel like a good game or am I just really a sucker for interesting art and atmosphere? Either way, wishlisted.

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@Kimyrielle: The law isn't so much weird as bought and paid for. It's the kind of thing that happens when your lawmaking process is dominated by the lobbyists of small elites. The DMCA happened at a time when you were seeing the rise of things like ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a corporate-backed lobbying outfit that literally just writes legislation and gets US governments, typically starting at the state level, to pass their bills as is.

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Like a few other posters, I too remember when all the major payment platforms at once decided that giving your money to Wikileaks was verboten.

Ultimately, Paypal probably shouldn't exist. There should be a secure international payment system run by an international body like the UN or some consortium of governments, that lets you use your money on the internet straight from your bank account. People have become dependent on the internet as a way to buy things they need--my dad gets his groceries that way because he's old and mostly blind so it's very hard to go to the grocery store. It's not a frill, it's important, and I see no reason why some private gatekeeper should be skimming fees off every transaction.

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I can see some games being always online. Shooters of the sort where the point is you have a bunch of different people, like, shooting at each other, I can see being always online. But a skating game? How does that require other people? Even if there's leaderboards and stuff, that doesn't require being always online, and anyway if someone isn't interested in leaderboards why shouldn't they be able to just play the blasted game? Is this, like, a combat skating game where you ram your opponents and clobber them with your skateboard? What's the rationale here?

Doesn't matter to me, not interested in skating games except possibly someday that one with the birds.

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@tfk Not exactly, no. Sharks normally need to keep swimming because if they don't they gradually sink. Normal fish have this "swim bladder" thing that gives them neutral buoyancy, and sharks don't. But sharks around places like coral reefs and other shallow areas will apparently find caves and take a nap. So a shark could lie there getting dentisted and be fine.

On the other hand, the tooth thing . . . yeah, obviously the game is silly fun so it doesn't matter. But as people have said, no way would sharks need a dentist, they just lose teeth and get new ones. Heck, they're not even real teeth, they're made of fingernail stuff, and either they're modified scales or their scales are modified teeth, I'm not sure which way it goes.

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OK, it's the "Roguelite" part I'm wondering about. How many times are we expecting to die in the process of setting up a farm?

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