Henroid

Alright, I gave the game another try. I'm starting to get the hang of it. The problem is memorizing all the information and having to discover things like where the hell you can eat. Right now my least favorite thing is the inability to fight sleep. I get to my cart at about 10am and by 3:30pm my guy is tired as hell. And if I break away from the cart to handle other things, like eating or smoking, he won't open the cart again because he's too tired. My days are wasting away in the worst way. As much as one can argue about how "that's like real life," I kind of refuse to agree. I've gone back to work from breaks even when exhausted because I have to. You can't do that in Cart Life. The rate at which fatigue sets in is probably way too hyper-exaggerated for me to feel like I'm actually trying to live out this guy's life. I'm trying to enjoy this game, and the idea seems like it should be. But I'm kinda having to fight to get my way to that so maybe I have the wrong impression. Edit - I may be resenting this game because I'm currently not in the best position in reality and playing it is only a constant reminder of things.

I just now tried out Cart Life, having somehow missed the fact that it's a free download. And my immediate reaction is that I feel extremely overwhelmed by it. The game is very unkind to you if you're trying to carefully read things so you make sure you're doing it right. And coupled with how complex (in its simplicity) things as simple as buying food to eat is, for a video game at least, it just feels... I basically feel like I have no time whatsoever to do anything. Before I know it it's night time and my guy is just hungry and pissy about sleep. Time passes way too quickly for me it seems.

There's a lot of tension regarding MS and Sony for their next gen consoles and I hope this year is it. The business drama and reactions from internet folk (for better or worse) will sustain me. It's not a hardware power thing, it's business model that interests me more.

I just beat the game and I feel so exhilarated from it. Everything just culminated into a perfect storm. I found two additional Burst Laser II's and a Heavy Laser as my final load out by the time I was half-way through the game (and even had a chance to buy a fourth BLII). The one thing that probably shaped the entire game, that wasn't that awesome random chance of weapon finding and instead a decision I made, was when I bought a scrap recovery arm toward the start. It added quite a bit of an edge to... well, everything. I also learned the value of having more weapon system power than you need, because the dummy space will lose power but your weapons will still be functional.

Happy Dishonored New Year everyone.

Are you serious? Motherfucker.

Wait, if USB controllers aren't supported, how the hell are you supposed to play this thing?

I just had another of those frustrating runs. I was using the Engi ship for the first time (and thus working with drones for the first time ever). I put the human to pilot the ship and set my crew to the shield and weapon systems. Ion weapons are amazing, the faster they fire the better. And drones aren't half bad either. Through quick luck, I suppose, my crew maxed out with all Engis (minus the human pilot), so I doubled up crew members in the weapon, shield, and engine rooms, and had the others waiting in the drone and scanning rooms to cover repair / security space. I arrived at the final stage of the game with level 2 shields, 35% evade, 2 ion weapons, and three attack drones (mk2 anti-ship, mk1 anti-ship, and a beam drone). Until the end of the game I was wrecking everything in my path pretty easily. But again, that final boss doesn't put up with no mess.

The Wikia page isn't terribly complex, if that's your worry. I accept surrenders too, generally if they offer a good amount of fuel, or if they're offering missiles and I have missile-necessary weapons. I think the trade-off to decline is more scrap than what is offered in a surrender but not the missiles or drone parts. So it's a good policy to accept surrenders. Cloaking devices I'm not decided on how priority they are for me to destroy. Weapon systems always, always, always come first for me. If they enemy can't attack me, it means I can focus on tending to my repair needs and such. Shield systems don't really matter much to disable if you have multi-volley weapons. Like the burst laser mark 2, the one you start with in the basic ship, fires three shots. That laser will remove the shield system, temporarily, of the enemy (unless the enemy has the 4 shield orbs) and your other laser weaponry can do damage. And that's another thing I've caught onto; timing your weapons to fire. I often let my burst shot take down a shield, and immediately hit the enemy with another laser I have while the opening is present.

Keep in mind that numbers matter in a fight too. A one-on-one fight is going to go slow in lots of cases. But when there's a second attacker on someone, the second attacker gets to use guns because they're not grappling and such in melee combat (that's a nice little beat to add to the game I think).

Okay it is way too satisfying to board a ship and destroy its oxygen supply and leave its crew to die.

This game is difficult. And I'm playing on easy. I can't decide if I like the Rebel Fleet closing off areas behind you or not. Some of the achievements I'm confused on how they're possible. Like the first ship you start with, one of the achievements to unlock the 2nd layout is to fully upgrade it. And that seems ludicrous. How are you supposed to get that? No hiring of any crew, no buying of missiles, no need to repair your hull? That's all I can guess. It sounds crazy to make happen. I got the achievement for reaching the end of the game without using drones, which I have zero interest in using anyway, so I laughed.

Where there's smoke, there's fire propagation.

I still have 20 minutes to go in listening to this but I have to get this thought out about Far Cry 3. It sounds like, based on what you guys are saying, that the development direction of Far Cry 3 came from a place of, "People know how to play FPS games, but they haven't played any other kind of game before." So their angle was taking features from so many other game genres and putting them into a AAA presentation game, to be that first step for people who probably actually haven't played many other games outside of FPS. Edit - Phaedrus & Phaedrus, Attorneys at Law

The New York Times interviewed Bobby Kotick and has a four page article about it. It's worth a read, because as far as I'm concerned Kotick doubles-down on reasons why he should be disliked. Edit - Or no, not doubles down, but now we can dislike him as a person rather than dislike his business MO in the video game industry.

This deserves sharing from elsewhere on this forum. I love the "I love video games," it's perfectly placed. Edit - That didn't carry over like I thought it would be it's clickable, whatever.

Gamasutra has an article about AAA development being up against the ropes and possibly ready to go down. One thing it doesn't note as a problem is executive payout (overhead costs) at publishers being a problem. A lot of that money can be going back into the companies to cover costs / pay for employees. But that's more a problem across American business as a whole and very political.

Even if it's the Spike VGA's this is pretty damn cool. Congrats Jake, Sean, and the rest of Telltale.

One of my peers just brought this to our attention. They haven't even started Bioshock Vita. Edit - Oh by the way, Bioshock Infinite is delayed once again. This time from February to March.

TOR is going to have some of its paid for features relaxed. They're making the extra action bars something you get just by reaching "Preferred" status (buy something from their store once; as in a pack of points), and also reaching Preferred status will take you from 2 character slots to 6. They still have room to go but it's a start.

For me the only thing noteworthy about The Passage was the effect of things ahead of you being blurry and increasingly coming into focus, but in exchange things behind you go less out of focus. And for a minute or two's worth of experience that doesn't do anything for me. And to be clear, yes I know there's a maze below you. For me, it was a presentation concept work rather than a game (or a puzzle). If I try to examine any sort of statement from the game - as many others have claimed to have gotten from it (and I won't deny people their own experiences) - all I get is, "everything you're doing is futile." As a person with depression and childhood issues, I don't want to be told that yet again.

Same here. It's simultaneously so bare bones but has so much depth that it has earned itself a place of recognition. The one thing on the MoMA list that I disagree with is The Passage. I mean, I get why it was chosen, but I don't think it should be there.

Does the song consist of them singing "Literature" in the same way that "Video Games" is sung for the Idle Thumbs theme?

In a positive or negative way?

The MoMA discussion made me so pleased to hear. First of all, agree 100% about the list being fantastic. I would argue that things like Doom shouldn't be included because they don't have to include it. The reason is because that sort of game is what people "know" of video games at face value. "Oh, shooting things." The MoMA list feels a lot like a statement of what video games are beyond the public perception. People don't need to be taught that shooting games are video games.