Merus

I think it's a mistake to treat this as an apology because it's very clearly not, and it's not intended to be one. That said, it shows some awareness of the harm he's done, which is actually sort of important. The usual non-apology apology is acknowledging people are upset, but not that people are right to be upset. I don't think that people are obligated to be nice as a result, but neither do I think it's meaningless.

I have been paid for writing reviews before; a Bravely Default objective review would be for shits and giggles.

I think I speak for a few of us when I say I'd enjoy writing some objective game reviews. edit: I have access to Bravely Default which means I could probably write an objective review before the subjective ones come out. That would be a lot of fun.

I remember playing the beta/demo of this and liking the gameplay but being put off by the writing. Is the writing still mean-spirited 'banter' or did they improve that?

See, I think that's the problem: the adventure design philosophy put forward by Monkey Island forces the format of the game to allow you to do clearly idiotic actions with no consequences. There's a reason why LucasArts adventures are all broad comedies or have extremely constrained interaction like The Dig - because if there's no such thing as a wrong choice then there's no reason to try to avoid it. It's certainly more foolproof, but I think most of the problem with Sierra's output is poor playtesting. KQ7 revived you from death right back where you were, but it had a completely ridiculous pixel-hunt puzzle that to my mind is the second-worst puzzle in the series outside of the original Rumplestiltzkin puzzle. If you're going to make an adventure game in 2013/2014, you need to understand the problems with LucasArts' output just as much, if not more, than Sierra's output, and that's hard to do if only one style of game is the 'right' one.

I am still kind of annoyed that the word for 'person' , 'man', got corrupted into referring to male persons, and the word for female person, 'wife', got corrupted into referring to married female people. (The word for male person was 'were', as in 'werewolf', which does mean that female werewolves should be 'wifwolves'.) I'm annoyed that we had a solution and we broke it.

On the other hand, it comes out in two weeks and at this point in order to get a decent picture of what is being done you have to show parts of the actual game. Backers basically nominated to be spoiled at least a little bit, in return for seeing how the game was made. That's including just enough detail on characters, locations and story beats that they can't go into it blind. I acknowledge there were people who backed because they wanted to buy a Tim Schafer adventure game so much they were willing to buy it before it was even created but I suspect these people are probably saving the documentary for after the game comes out. Seeing the sausage get made was not the attraction. But damn, it's coming together nicely, it looks like. Sure hope it is!

In terms of Sierra games, one thing you have to keep in mind is that the Sierra designers believed the game was more interesting if players had a wider possibility space - they included deaths and items you could use 'incorrectly' to keep players constantly thinking about parts of the game they thought they'd solved. Most of Sierra's games had ways to put yourself into an unwinnable state, and they advised players to keep several saves to bounce around the game state. Save early, save often. The Quest for Glory series is well worth a look - it's an RPG implemented in an adventure game engine, and has multiple solutions for each puzzle depending on what character class you are. The third game is merely not bad, but 1, 2 and 4 are all great (and tonally quite different - 1 is slightly skewed fantasy, 2 is somewhat goofy Arabian Nights, 3 is a sedate safari, 4 is a tense horror-tinged dark fantasy). Of the King's Quests, 1 is notable for a really terrible puzzle (which the remake improved some). 4 and 6 are probably the best for a modern audience. 3 has an interesting structure in that the entire first third or so of the game is a battle of wits - you have to work out how you're going to defeat an opponent who's willing to kill you if you so much as try and show defiance. The fan KQ2 remake is a much better way of playing that game, 5 has aged somewhat poorly, and 7 is pretty mediocre. Space Quest: because Space Quest was always more interested in comedy than on having longetivity, it's aged fairly well. One of its hallmarks is that when the main character is in a dangerous area, plotwise, it means they're genuinely not safe; all of the games have action sequences, minigames and areas where you need to step lively. I think the remake of 1 and 4 (which you must use DosBox for, as the action sequences depend on clock speed and are therefore unplayable otherwise) are the best. 5 is an extended Star Trek parody, and is good but suffers a little because its range is smaller. 6 is a little unfocused (and some puzzles are flat-out broken) but much better than KQ7, in the same period, was. 3 hasn't aged well (the final third is an extended Microsoft parody, which I know screams comedy gold to you), and 2 has some dirty tricks like items from the first area that are important towards the end, and mazes you have to carefully walk through. Police Quest has always been a fussy series - that's part of its charm, in that the solutions to the puzzles are actual police procedures. These days, it feels a little dodgy because it was written during the heights of the War on Drugs and the small-town cop who's on the frontlines of the War on Drugs feels more like propaganda than it used to.

I was going to add something, but it's become increasingly clear over the course of the thread that you need to read the OP's mind in order to determine exactly the kind of response he's willing to accept, and he isn't taking comments in good faith.

If this is anything like Super Mario 3D Land, you don't need to gather any of that stuff to beat Bowser. If you're collecting most of the stars you'll be fine for most of the post-credits content, but if you want to see absolutely everything you'll want to go back for the collectibles eventually.

I talked with my friend Jen about Pax when the dickwolves redux broke. Jen enforced at Pax Australia and is a good deal more sensitive to these things than I am, with my boatload of privileges. Her feeling is that Pax has little to do with Penny Arcade - it's a gaming convention that happens to be run by Penny Arcade, and they MC the opening and closing, but they are not why you go to the show. (There is more Aus in Pax Aus than PA.) She also feels that Pax Aus is a good influence on the Australian convention scene - it treats its volunteers very well, the staff are experienced and organised, and they are, in her estimation, good judges of character, in that she noticed the organisers empowering volunteers who were helpful and friendly over ones who slacked off or were dismissive. She is enforcing next year, as well, both because she enjoys it and because she feels that there needs to be more queer people in positions of power and influence in conventions in Australia, and Pax Aus is the one that makes it the most pleasurable for her to be there. My friend Michael, who has mild cerebal palsy (enough that he was in his wheelchair at Pax Aus) was treated, in the main, quite well, although there were some people who were unaccomodating. They were dicks, but we did not take their unwillingness to accommodate the disabled as an official policy of the mothership. Some people are cocks. Some of these people have power. It has always been thus. One of the few panels I attended (Pax Aus was in its first year, and they severely underestimated the size of the rooms they needed, which led to massive queues) was the infamous panel that had this portion of the description excised when it was noticed: It turns out that this was chiefly excised because it had nothing to do with the panel at all, which was about the changing nature of games journalism in the face of the shift to online news and game distribution. One of the panellists was a female Greek/Aboriginal, who had responded to a jerk accusing her of wearing her boyfriend's Bioshock Infinite T-shirt by spoiling the ending for him. Another panellist recalled an investigative story Tracey Lien had done on an Australian developer as the best thing he'd ever been involved in, and that he was glad he'd been able to run it. The panellist who wrote that description was either playing to the supposed crowd, or winding people up. Rae Johnson's involvement was known from the beginning. Checking any of the panellist's Twitter feeds when it broke would have given you this information. To my knowledge, no-one who saw this as appalling did any kind of investigation into the people involved, and it was almost universally painted as Penny Arcade giving an hour to racist MRAs to complain about progressivism. This was instructive. Penny Arcade, to me, feel like a proxy fight. Jerry knows enough to know how little he knows, Mike has at this point learned to avoid the issue entirely because he keeps fucking it up, and Robert realises that they have an image problem and that circumstances have associated it with a much greater problem amongst the wider gaming community. Mike and Jerry strike me, chiefly because of their comic, as old men who don't really get it any more. Neither hold a candle to Dave Sim, for instance. And neither are anywhere near as bad as the people who are making New Years' resolutions to kill Anita Sarkeesian, who are attacking Zoe Quinn for trying to greenlight a game about depression, who are trying to dox Dina Kara for having the gall to get a job at Comcept while simultaneously disapproving of rape. We wring our hands at this greater evil, so in order to continue to feel virtuous, we turn our vitriol towards someone easier to blame. We tell ourselves that Pax attempting to duplicate (in all three shows they run, in the next show they run after it became clear they needed to address the problem) their successful indie promotion efforts for social issues is in fact ghettoising them, despite the descriptions saying that it's intended to highlight content already in the program. We tell ourselves that, despite repeated assurances that Pax is intended to be inclusive, that Penny Arcade are somehow lying about this intention because Mike is a fuckwit and somehow we didn't notice all the other times he acted like a fuckwit (like that time he invited people to cyberbully the Ocean Marketting guy because Mike hated bullies). And we think that this is taking a stand against evil instead of giving it room to work. I don't think they can commit to making the entire show a 'safe space', because what that term means is that no harassment or judgement will happen within. (For instance, comments on The Border House are not a safe space because of this, despite them taking a very dim view of sexism and harassment.) This is not something they can credibly claim while also having a policy to deal with harassment when it happens. This is not something they can credibly claim while gamers go there, and it is not something that any gaming convention that is not specifically about and for marginalised groups can claim.

Half-Life 2 has a crate right at the start of the game as a reference to Old Man Murray. And then they hired them, so.

I always understood social justice warriors to be people who are willing to get into a fight over any perceived prejudice, especially from allies, and who have a somewhat simplistic view of social issues but a whole lot of anger. I've certainly seen some silly comments from Tumblr users. Then again, it's usually used by people who don't see any problems with prejudiced behaviour so it's probably a shitty word.

I am embarrassed to admit I shed a tear or two during the ending. I doubt you will because you're not a giant baby, but still, a genuine Video game Tear. Alert Stephen Spielburg.

I look forward to when people say things are 'not a game' because I really want to know what the deal is with their definition of 'game'. Like, is it that there isn't any lose condition? Because then adventure games aren't games and they basically were the game industry. Is it that there isn't any win condition? Then Tetris isn't a game. Is it that there isn't any pressure? No challenge? That the world doesn't appear to respond to their actions? Because I can think of 'games' that share those attributes. As for genres, I think they're mostly harmless because we're essentially trying to describe what kind of experience one will have and some of the interactions one might expect. People want that, and for anything that doesn't really fit into a tidy genre label, we just add a new label like how the written word has 'literature'. Anything that is 'literature' may be sci-fi, or a zombie story, or a mystery, but more importantly it expects you to work a bit to fully appreciate it. I believe the kind of people constrained by genre labels aren't the kind of people who'd engage in a more complex taxonomy.

The Room and Device 6 are just making me think I need to pull out Riven and Rhem again. I get a little surprised when people say they get baffled by some of the puzzles in them, which I recognise is my problem because I'm used to puzzle games that don't fuck around.

I tried Day of the Tentacle for the first time recently. It is hard as balls. It has a very specific, bizarre logic to it that I think is a little unfriendly to newer players.

I kind of love how the fedora has become internet shorthand for misogynist nerd when it was originally a ladies' hat.

Well, procedural doesn't mean random - a lot of good procedural generation bakes making decisions about pacing and environmental cohesion into the generation.

Beneath a Steel Sky is pretty good, but it's also a great deal harder than you probably expect. Give it a try (because it is free) and investigate Lucasarts' classic adventures if you want something else.

They're actually making Half-Life 3.

Wil Wheaton's actually got a bunch of voice acting credits, so it's not stunt casting. Anyway I guess this is where all that money went! Into an amazing cast.

I think, ever since Minecraft, that people have been re-evaluating their procedurally generated algorithms. The trick of having procedural generation take place on multiple layers - generate a high-level layout first, then drill down - helps give the worlds a soul they wouldn't otherwise have.

I'm still baffled. Guys, every single year I watch my twitter feed bemoan how no-one at the VGAs care about video games, the offensive and dismissive jokes, and how the entire thing is a joyless slog only mitigated by one or two cool announcements and a game that deserved an award getting an award, even if it was an award from Spike TV. This happens every single year. Why do you keep doing it to yourselves? They have the worthwhile announcements up on Kotaku and Polygon as soon as they happen. You are missing nothing. This is something you are doing to yourself.

Why did people expect the VGX to be not terrible? The problem with previous years was not the format, it was the horrible creative judgement. The same people are still in charge. Thank you for actually reading my rambling thoughts, clyde! Okay, so: games are pretty great! But there was always this belief that gaming needed ambassadors to explain to people who don't play games just how great they are. They're something you have to learn, so it was assumed that someone would have to actually try and explain what it was like to be good at a game and interact with it and have it respond in pleasing ways. And we had people like Tom Bissell and Charlie Brooker happy to make that case. But what actually did the trick, it seems to me, was not cultural criticism, but making truckloads of money - it's about the time that Call of Duty started making mad bank during a recession that serious publications like The Economist started paying attention. I distinctly remember one article that can be summarised as 'what are these video games, and why are people spending so much money on them -- guys do you realise that they're already doing digital distribution -- holy crap they throw out their own platforms every half-decade, by choice, look how quickly they adapted to the mobile world -- whaaaaaaaaaaaaat these people are amazing how did we not know about this'. Making eye-bogglingly large amounts of money is the most respected form of cultural relevance, because it is an argument for relevance that cannot be easily dismissed. The other big thing is Minecraft, I'd say - I don't think we realise how huge it is, and I strongly suspect it's Pacman/Space Invaders huge. I suspect there will be a generation that will see the creeper face and respond to it in the same way that everyone knows what the chomping yellow dot means. And what parents see is their kids tooling around in this blocky, smeary world, and then they get their mum and say, 'look what my friends and I built' and it's an entire goddamn castle and mum understands now. There are monsters because monsters make it exciting, but the important thing is the freedom. GTA3 had freedom, but it also needed people to explain and contextualise its faults. Minecraft doesn't have those faults - it, like many games this year, demonstrate their special qualities much more readily than games have for a while.