Merus

Why do you think it is important that the player must be involved in the plot? And, more importantly, why do you think that a game plot is illegitimate if the player is not involved in the plot? (The player has no meaningful control over a JRPG plot, and plot is the chief appeal of that genre.) I ask these questions because your criticisms, to me, boil down to 'good games contain these elements I like and not these elements I don't like', which is a very common error by people just starting to analyse games.

Thoughtful perspective here, at my house when I look out a particular window onto the bay. I think IF people (and roguelike people) get annoyed at indie games in the same way that indie people get annoyed at mainstream games - they try and do something that they've already seen before, but they just. don't. go. quite. far. enough. Short's coming from a perspective of a genre where having a human connection and telling a meaningful story is a large part of the genre, and so from that vantage point Gone Home looks like a big budget blockbuster, with promotion and press, but lagging the state of the art.

I am fascinated that we've finally found the country that Epic Movie was made for.

From what I'm aware they've tried handing out large disbursements in both the US and Africa, with similar results. I recall one study that went to the dodgiest places they could find in the poorest country in Africa and handed out large slabs of cash to see what would happen, and they found that nearly everyone at least attempted to spend the money wisely. Essentially, the problem is that most of these systems have protections against abuse while the vast majority of the beneficiaries value the opportunity too much. What does appear to matter, however, is the stability of the country. The money's spent effectively in countries like the US and Kenya, where poverty exists but money can be spent wisely, but in poorer countries where no-one has enough, it's much more expensive to pull out of poverty. Most of the research I've heard of hands out single large disbursements, or annual disbursements. I don't recall seeing results of weekly or fortnightly payments.

Other suggestion: allow the author bios to have opinions, but not about games. Reassure people in the FAQ that people with opinions about a particular topic will not be trusted to write an objective review on games that touch that subject.

Really a middle school is a gangster's paradise. They're old enough to have money, but young enough to be no threat to you.

I am lucky to live in a gorgeous area where I can, with only minor adjustments, run a flat route along the beach, a hilly route around a bay, up a leafy, well-heeled suburb with lots of hills, a restaurant district and working-class suburbia, a university, or an enormous park. I find gyms incredibly boring, but having actual scenery is super-great. I also used a fitness game to train me up - the voice in my headphones would cut in and say that it was time to start running, or stop, or do knee lifts, and it developed a story as I went so each week, and each run, had different contours to it. Thankfully there's also a version for accomplished runners that adds way more stuff.

I couldn't feel anything in my left foot, I rubbed some skin away on my right foot, my muscles ache and I had trouble breathing, but goddamn it I ran 5 kilometres. I ran 5 kilometres in about half an hour, which is not a bad clip. I have to exercise to keep my head level, particularly now when anxiety and depression are staying over, but if I can keep that speed and push out my distance I'll be well placed for the gorgeous and hugely entertaining City 2 Surf in August. I did it last year, running and then walking, and got 128 minutes over 14 kilometres, and the par time is 90 minutes. If I can run all the way I'll be incredibly pleased, but if I run all the way I'll have run up Heartbreak Hill and that's an accomplishment in itself.

Kids are more tolerant of well-worn tropes than adults are, even smart kids. This is frequently confused for kids not being discerning, but they pick up on lazy plotting pretty well.

My housemate is obsessed with OLED technology, so I asked him to answer the question that Michael Bay couldn't. His response: basically the curved screen does two things; make the edges of the screen closer to your eye, and reduce the glare of specular light (when light is shining directly on the TV screen). I would add that the curved screen is chiefly a gimmick so that they don't have to bore people with the advantages in colour reproduction, response rate, blackness reproduction and power consumption that OLED technology has over LED and plasma. They sold flat screens mostly on form factor - yes it was clearer and sharper, but it was also flat and enormous for only a little more than a good CRT display. I think they're doing the same thing now. My housemate is eagerly awaiting the second generation of OLED TVs, when they stop selling only to early adopters. He lights up whenever the manufacturers announce they're dropping the price of the current models by a couple of thousand.

There was a PAL version? I got a boot disc just for Chibi-Robo.

Yeah, it really is nothing like WoW - the structure of the game is very different, and a great deal of your ability is constrained by how much you can afford to lose. It's entirely possible to join a big corp as soon as you finish the tutorial, have them send you some startup capital, get out into their territory and join the 'real' game. Player advancement is explicitly a function of time, and it runs even when offline. Like DayZ, though, the appropriate mindset to approach other players is 'other bastards out to ruin your day' so even though I understand where the fun is, it's ruined by all those bastards out to ruin my day.

I can write you that Minecraft review, and I am also getting a 404 error. It would be sort of great for two people to collaborate on a review, and then post them separately but with the sentences in a different order.

Which goes back to my point about why the hell anyone hoped for it to compete with the Xbox One on price and performance. Barring a miracle, it was never going to, because an Xbox One is a mass-produced machine that has pieces they can buy fifty million of, and the Steam Machines are not. (Hell, the big advantage of consoles, consistent hardware, doesn't even apply to the Steam Machines.) They were never going to be, so any expectations built on that - that they're a console - are similarly misguided. Which explains the tone Kuchera takes in the article, because he can't work out what it's for if it's not a console. Poor Kuchera. Always so slow on the uptake.

Everyone likes making fun of Michael Bay because he made terrible movies out of those kid's toys, but real talk for a second: here's a man that got stagefright, which is an entirely human thing to do. He is not trained, nor accustomed, to getting up on stage and lying to a bunch of people like those other guys are, and when the safety net broke, he acted like a human being and went for the exits.

I don't know why people are expecting a) that the first-gen SteamOS/Steam machine stuff will be any good whatsoever and that Valve have to get it right first try. Also there was no way in hell they'll get close to an Xbox One for US$500 without the economies of scale the closed platforms enjoy, and there is no way in hell they'll get the vast majority of the Steam library running on SteamOS. Lucasarts aren't going back to port their classic adventure games to Linux. No, they're releasing now, at the start of the console cycle, because they want to be able to compete in the middle of the console cycle, when PCs start pulling ahead of the consoles again.

Will Objective Game Reviews ever cover reviews of game objectives?

I'd probably go breathing, because the metaphysics of not requiring food bug me far more than the occasional pangs of hunger, particularly in an abundant society like the one I'm blessed to have been born into. I'm far less creeped out by my blood cells finding oxygen whenever they head to my lungs. As for sleeping, I'm even more creeped out by magic tinkering with my memory, moving things from short to long term memory. I don't like the idea that I don't turn off, that I'm not required to declare the day done, that my whole life would become a continuous blur of events rather than quantised by my biorhythms. I think, of the three, it'd be the one that makes me most dependent on wish magic, and it's the most likely to go horribly wrong to my mind. Of course, if there was any wriggle room on wish content I'd either wish for an end to conflict in either Palestine or the Congo, or a perpetual motion machine, because I'd be a fool to waste a miracle on problems that don't need a miracle.

I feel like DQ, unlike Final Fantasy (which Bravely Default is in all but name), has a broader tactical range because it's a game where buffs and debuffs not only work most of the time, but are necessary for even regular enemies. FFXIII tried to fix this but the end-game of that game breaks down a little because it's balanced around a few great builds. I don't think I'm ever going to use Poison; the only enemies I want to poison are bosses, and you can't poison bosses unless you get really lucky. One minor point in its favour: I have access to several techniques that put turn-limited buffs and debuffs on, but they don't appear to fall off until the start of the next turn. The Chapter 1 bosses appear to have brave/default patterns, which does mean you have to default and brave at specific times but I was hoping for something a little more fluid.

I kind of see threads like Recently Completed Games as read-only threads: you post in them to be on the record, not because you're expecting a conversation to start. Why would there be a discussion in there? It's about games other people have completed.

Handhelds are really good for RPGs, because you can crack it open and play for a bit while you're waiting for something else to happen. There's an option in the menu to change the frequency of random battles (including turning them off), which will be useful if you want to get your bearings. There are multiple systems in the game that benefit time-poor players - if you leave the system closed, you'll build up time for a free turn, and your town will continue the restoration effort. The 'come back tomorrow' stuff is going to be far less daunting for you if you're not trying to barrel through it in a week. I don't know how to parse this question. It's a throwback JRPG, so it has a turn-based battle system. I don't know what bugs you about DQ9's battle system so I cannot really answer this question, but if you are saying that DQ9's is too simplistic (I would classify it as a... late bloomer) then this is probably not the game for you. You may enjoy The World Ends With You, on the original DS, which has a very active combat system (almost to a fault) and is also a game I will recommend without hesitation or indeed relevance.

The idea that weaknesses caused a knock-down, and that an enemy's elemental attacks could knock allies on their ass just as effectively. Naturally, the first boss loves to do it, but you got a sense early on that as you got access to more elements, and thus so did the enemies, you'd have to make sure you didn't get complacent and could protect against the weaknesses while making sure you actually had strengths. Here it feels like the optimal strategy is, for small enemies, attack 4 times with all your damage dealers, and for bosses, default until you fill up or an opportunity presents itself, and then attack 4 times. I don't see how this is going to get any more interesting unless they convince me attacking less than 4 times is regularly worth doing, or it turns out there's a way to guarantee your party will always act first so I can at least go after the no-damage chain.

So I am playing Bravely Default because apparently it's going to be a thing? It certainly sold out in the Boxing Day sales, and my Twitter feed seems very excited. It appears to be trying to sell itself chiefly on nostalgia - remember Final Fantasy 1? And Final Fantasy 5? Here's a game like that, but with voice acting! Although it probably needed a better voice director because like half the line readings are a little dodgy, and the plot is very Japanese in that all the main characters are gendered stereotypes. I don't know if people know yet about the microtransactions or the base-building element (it's not as bad as Farmville, although you are literally building a farming village) but I expect people to rationalise it away. I am only 3 hours in and I sure hope it gets more complex soon; by this point you could see the shape of Persona 4's combat system and what kind of challenges you could look forward to, and that game is a notoriously slow starter. So far in this I feel like I've got one strategy that works on pretty much everything. I know Square Enix are capable of better, and I'm not yet past the prologue; I'm hoping it's just a shaky start.

Pentaditcoins

I don't much care for Ben Kuchera's opinions and Polygon isn't really doing it for me any more. Can anyone suggest a good quality general gaming news site? I subscribe to RPS but it's niche.