Lurker > adjl

One more bump before I close the poll and you forever lose your chance to influence the next few games I play.

EclairReturns posted...

This may be an inappropriate analogy, but English-speaking folk do not typically refer to that Japanese archipelago country by its Japanese name. Similarly, the Japanese do not normally refer to their country by the name English-speaking folk have assigned to it.

Germany's an even more pronounced example. You've got Germany in English, Deutschland in German, Allemagne in French, Tyskland in Scandavian languages, Niemcy in Polish... That largely boils down to the history of what various cultures called the region as their respective languages developed, and you can trace the etymology of some of them (like Italian is Germania, which is obviously related to what English settled on), but the bottom line is that there are a whole bunch of seemingly-unrelated names for the country depending on who you ask.

I do think it's a reasonably apt analogy, though. The aliens should expect that we would continue to call it Earth, but so should we expect that they continue to call it Scrimbiblior. Neither their name nor ours is necessarily incorrect, we just each keep using what's familiar (putting aside for a second the fact that it's not "Earth" in every Earth language, so it's not like we have consensus even now).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Are we talking SHIELD helicarrier or like a giant blimp? Or like a massive platform help up by multiple balloons?

Or are we going all-in on something like Columbia from Bioshock?

I'm thinking balloon platform. A giant blimp would be too small, and the helicarrier idea is too energy-intensive.

faramir77 posted...

The only impact it has had is that it started a larger dialogue about how ass Pokemon games have become, especially in the past 10 years.

Even then, that's not a new dialogue. People have been complaining about Pokemon being stale and uninspired for literally decades, and that makes its way back into popular discourse whenever any significant Pokemon-related thing happens (the release of a new gen, the release of an alternative like Temtem or Cassette Beasts that seems poised to be "Pokemon, but better," the release of a game that resembles Pokemon but is a different style of game, etc.).

Palworld fits into that last option: It obviously (and quite brazenly) resembles Pokemon, but the core game is radically different such that anyone looking to play a Pokemon-like game (turn-based RPG about exploring the world and capturing creatures to use in a combat system that boils down to Deluxe Rock-Paper-Scissors) isn't going to have that desire satisfied by Palworld. That's naturally sparked some sentiments of "I wish Pokemon were more like this" from people who prefer survival crafting games with action combat to turn-based RPGs, but really, that's not what Pokemon has ever tried to be. Sentiments like that aren't genuinely good ideas for improving Pokemon, they boil down to "I don't actually enjoy the genre that Pokemon occupies anymore, but I want to see these nostalgic designs and concepts in a different genre that I do enjoy," and that's just not a realistic expectation.

I know literally nothing about Broken Sword (like I had to go check the store page to see what kind of game it even is), so I'm kind of surprised to see it getting attention. Hooray for claiming every free game I get notified of, I guess.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Speaking of which, how about a massive supertanker with a city built on its deck that just chugs around the ocean randomly? Then every once in a while your global capital comes chugging into sight off your coast, and you'd better be on your best behavior!

I'll see your supertanker, and raise you an airship.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

Broken Sword is an amazing, but somewhat hidden gem.

What version do you have?

Director's Cut, on GOG. It's one I believe I got for free from one of their many giveaways, which describes a pretty sizable chunk of my backlog (including like 250+ games from Epic).

That's why god invented the She-wee.

Dikitain posted...

239 - 94 is still most.

I'd say you have to get below 100k for "a few thousand" to be a reasonable way to represent the figure, and of the 66 countries whose capitals are sub-100k, 50 have more than 10% of their total population in the capital city. Capitals aren't necessarily the largest urban centres in their respective countries, certainly (that Wikipedia article links to another one specifically dedicated to countries whose capitals aren't their largest cities), but a large majority of them do have a significant number of people (if not by raw numbers, in proportion to the total population of the country).

Why didn't you finish your post? This warning about Candlejack or Candlejim or whatever sounds really im

ParanoidObsessive posted...

One at each pole. Each one rules over the world for 6 months. It switches every equinox. The capital is eternally bathed in sun.

I'll give this idea style points, if nothing else.

speedpunk posted...

What if it were two capital cities for Earth instead of one? They could be antipodal so the time zones wouldn't be an issue.

The idea of having a capital city is to centralize government activities. Having more than one kind of defeats that purpose. You'd effectively have two separate governments that way, which is largely unnecessary for the highest level (and lower levels would already be regionally divided, not unlike the current arrangement of federal, state, and municipal governments).

Plus a vote still only has as much power as anyone can enforce the vote with. If somebody doesn't like the outcome of the vote, they can just not accept it and fight anyone who disagrees. Unless you had a massive enough consensus to overwhelm dissenters with the associated military power, you'd still end up with people fighting over it.

In practice, I don't know that there even needs to be a capital. In the modern age, government doesn't have to be physically in the same place to govern. There'd be some squabbling over which time zone would be used to schedule meetings, since officials far away from that time zone would need to work nights, but otherwise everyone could just work from home and there's no need to establish a single city to be the heart of the world government.

If the earth tried to become one nation, fighting over where the capital should be would fragment it again.