Merus

I had to agree to disagree with my housemate over this, actually. I think he was more upset about Fullbright supposedly abdicating the responsibility to force PA to own up to the hurt they've caused than Gabe getting his feelings hurt, but considering we agreed to disagree I'm reasonably sure that's a misrepresentation of his position.

Super Metroid's interesting in that there are mechanical gates but sufficient understanding of the world and the game mechanics allows you to bypass them. For instance, the game treats the first expansion you get of a particular weapon as an unlock instead, so if you work out a way to get a particular expansion early, you can skip going to the canonical place to get that weapon. The morph ball, bomb jump, wall jump and shinespark are exploitable enough that skilled players can skip getting the supposedly required grappling beam and morph ball jump, and can usually get certain weapons out of sequence. Many of these abilities that allow players to bypass mechanical gates are things Samus has innately, or earns in the first fifteen minutes of the game. Many of the games that draw on Super Metroid, including its sequels, make their upgrade path much more strict. Very few of them are still played today.

The best bit is that I'm following some of the people on the panel in question: the chair was being a dick and the other panellists thought they were going to be part of a discussion on whether the games industry is too po-faced, which is a completely different discussion. So now they are obligating to address both things and I'm pretty sure it's going to be a trainwreck. (One of the panellists is Rae Johnston. She was briefly celebrated a few months ago when she responded to a jerk questioning her geek credentials because she was wearing a Bioshock Infinite shirt by telling him the ending.)

Thanks, or as you say in Norway, may your descendants ever bath in blood!

It is time to bump this thread because PAX Australia is REAL and ACTUALLY HAPPENING. although it may just be me and Lacabra hanging out and honestly I can probably do that at his booth

I find it ironic that Pratchett appeals most to nerds but the nerd way to read long-running series, by starting at the beginning and going on, is the sub-optimal way to get into Pratchett because the later books are so much better than the earlier ones. Even Monstrous Regiment, which I didn't much care for, is better than The Colour of Magic.

I realised I have actually quite a lot of stories about these two weeks. It is one of the most bizarre experiences I think I've had, and certainly the least painful of the bizarre experiences I've had. I was prepared to be worried basically all the time, to have to reassure others, to look on the bright side. I was not prepared for the rest of it. Basically everyone involved, from the hospital to the media to everyone I know, has been amazing and supportive and thoughtful throughout this.

Found alien ore, died, lost it and then my temper.

I think the Colour of Magic adaptation suffered from being based on some of the weaker material; The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are both fantasy parody rather than the satirical fantasy the Discworld became.

So my brother is out of the hospital (and into rehab). He recovered much, much faster than people with head injuries are supposed to, and it doesn't look like there'll be any permanent brain damage. The doctors say he was six minutes from death. If the ambulance drivers hadn't been getting McDonald's when he was punched outside the McDonald's, or if they'd closed down the emergency department at the hospital where he was taken, like the government has been threatening to, he would be dead. They didn't tell the neurosurgeon my brother had recovered so quickly, that he had opened his eyes, could have short conversations. He went into the ICU to see his patient and was told his patient wasn't there any more. Mum asked him how he managed to function, being woken up at 3 in the morning to come in and do brain surgery. Wouldn't he be sleepy, she asked. No, he said. You just have to be awake, because you can't afford to be tired. It's just part of the job. If I insert a paragraph here about a video game it will count as games journalism. There was a brief period where my brother was conscious and capable of talking, but was having trouble forming new memories. He couldn't really comprehend what was going on, but he did know the State of Origin was that night and kept asking people if they were going to watch it. None of us visiting him at the time really cared for rugby league, but he didn't seem to be disappointed. He asked the same question a couple of times, which made me think I'd be able to mess with him. The next day he remembered what hospital he was in. During the State of Origin game that night, the captain of the New South Wales team (which won for the first time in a long time) punched a Queensland player quite hard in the face, supposedly in retaliation for that player performing headbutts along with his tackles. No worries, the Blues won and there was a little bit of biff and everyone likes a bit of biff. A reporter called Mum about it, who also does not care for rugby league, and said if she had to pick she'd prefer AFL, which is less violent and more athletic (and bizarre). Dad had some opinions, though, being rather sensitive to people punching others for spurious reasons. All Dad's quotes were attributed to Mum. Celebrating supporters were sobered by the reporter's comparison between the man who'd put my brother into the hospital (which had been big news in the city's papers since the incident) and the captain of the Blues, and it gave those who thought the fighting was disgusting a way to express their opinion without being labelled a spoilsport. That was about sports so this doesn't count as games journalism. In the last few days of his hospital stay, my brother had been getting increasingly restless. He hated the food, he hated laying in bed all day, he hated the junkie in bed 24 who'd screamed the ward down at 3 in the morning, he hated that even after all this time, he'd have to go to rehab, and then stay with Mum and Dad, and he couldn't just go back to normality. I think he can probably bear a few inconveniences - he isn't recovered, even though the worst damage we know about is to his left eye, but there's potentially damage they don't have time to test for at the hospital. I think he'll be fine. He's a survivor.

False equivalency is the stage-y of video games.

I think, for instance, starting a revolution would be an interesting theme. You'd start off with a small group, and they're precious so you can't sacrifice them particularly willingly. You'd start off with small guerilla operations for resources and defence, and talking to people to get an understanding of how they see the current regime and try out some untested arguments. Some people will be convinced, but most will bat back with either a thought-terminating cliche or an actual argument that reflects what they're more concerned about. Some will try and report you, so you need to feel people out first. As you learn what clues to look for, and get more resources and support, you can start going after bigger targets to try and provoke specific responses from the regime, which in turn allows you to try and change minds that were previously sure the regime would never do what you just made them do, or secure better resources and defences. Eventually you'd be ready to take to the streets and your influencing and directing would let you push the riot on a larger scale to surround the palace. Shin Megami Tensei has you persuade (or threaten, or bribe) enemies to switch sides. On your own, you're not particularly effective, but if you recruit demons you can use them to contribute their power and combine them to get new demons. Each demon has its own personality, and how they're feeling is affected by a bunch of factors, including how you've fought in the fight.

I think this'd be a great basis for a game with non-combat oriented conflict. Or even a game with it, where you wanted to deemphasise combat as the only solution. It's usually pretty hackneyed because there's no depth to the persuasion mechanics. Even something like SMT has more complex persuasion.

Phil should call this guy and say, 'could you please be a beta tester'. God he looks familiar.

Re: number 4 (again, vague hint):

I've had someone get offended at me for holding a door open because they assumed I was holding it open due to chivalry. It was very odd. I basically decided to ignore them. Anyway: is it me, or have the majority of AAA exclusives on the Xbox 360 had serious issues with the way they portray women? I'm trying to think of whether it's been as bad on the PlayStation 3 (I can't speak for Resistance or Killzone) but I can't think of anything as blatant as it is in Halo or Gears of War.

What I remember was that the game was balanced around taking guns off people and clearing out enemies, and the way that everyone wanted to play it - non-combat unless someone was right in your way - was an optional challenge the game wasn't balanced around for first-time players. After about level 4 or so, once per level I'd get stuck in an area where I just kept failing over and over again, and it was pretty much always due to men with guns getting a bead on me in a section where I had no easy way to avoid them. And then in I think level 8 there's this jump where you have to wall-run onto a suspended crate and then wall-run again onto a building 20 metres away, and at that point they'd taken away the part of the game I was liking, so I just gave up.

Half-Life 3 being released by Square Enix for some reason

Firstly, what you're going through sounds like it might be compacted by depression or anxiety. Depression lies. There are simple self-administered tests to see if this might be affecting your outlook, and you should not listen to the voice saying there's no point doing it because depression lies. If the tests indicate you may have a problem, a mental health professional is your most important call. Again, depression lies, so if the tests indicate there is an issue, ignore the voice that says that you should be able to do this on your own. There are online resources that may be helpful as well if it's not serious enough to require specialist care (Google cognitive behavioural therapy), but if your thoughts are sick then you go to the thought doctor. Platitudes follow. I keep in mind that, over the course of my life I'm capable of having 5 or 6 careers at which I become an expert and then abandon for something fresh. I'm likely to actually do only two or three. I've wasted one so far, but my life is by no means over. I've got plenty of time to become awesome at something, decide I don't want to do that for the rest of my life, then abandon it, do something else that's great, feel I've had enough of that, and then do another thing! Also that most of the fears and anxieties - excluding aforementioned mental illnesses - you and I have felt are felt by basically everyone. I guarantee you the majority of parents feel at some point they have made a huge mistake and they have no business being responsible for the continued existence of another human being. A lot of people find meeting new people kind of awkward! The majority of our generation, at some point in their lives, takes a look at themselves and goes "what m I doing with my life". Honestly that last one's a good thing because it means you're capable of self-examination, which is a crucial skill to have if you want to have the success of being good enough at something that it's worth others ensuring your continued survival and ensuring your genetic material perpetuates, and that's counted as 'success' for most herd animals for millennia so there's no reason to change the definition now.

I hope it's not as tedious to play in the way that everyone wanted to play it as the first one was. Also fewer dumb jumps would be nice - I never actually finished Mirror's Edge because of a rather difficult jump late in the game, and my patience had already worn thin. But I had a lot of fun with it in theory.

Specifically they said that if they did give it scores, it would the epitome of a specific score they're thinking of.

I don't see that as child molestation so much as the pokémon version of English fairies, or really any kind of mythology where kids are kidnapped by creatures and never come back.

Cannot handle poison headcrab zombies in Half-Life. Poison headcrabs kind of freak me out but the poison headcrab zombies are a) disgusting and fling poison headcrabs at me. Therefore c) auuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh

And this is why you don't announce shit before it's done! I suspect Microsoft were expecting to coast to victory based on their previous strategy, to wit: make the platform as attractive as possible to develop on by getting rid of as few development bottlenecks as possible. The problem: Sony actually learned from their mistakes! So they made an x86-based platform with several iterations designed to get rid of as many bottlenecks as possible! Which means that all that carefully cultivated advantage Microsoft thought they had is gone, because now Sony has the same advantage and internal teams used to sharing techniques, tricks and tips! And all the disadvantages Sony brought upon themselves in the last console cycle are no longer a factor, and the audience is more open to Sony because the audience doesn't yet believe Sony intends to screw them over! It's a good bit of fun to watch.

The Rhem series is not anywhere near as pretty (the fourth game is still using the Myst-like movement system of basically static images) but in my opinion it's got much better puzzle design. Instead of the ages of the Myst games, it makes the entire environment an interconnected jumble and part of the fun is teasing out where you can and can't go and in what directions. It clears the bar that all good games of this format do, of making sure there's plenty of viewpoints that connect together in intuitive ways - there's nothing worse than clicking on something and not being able to work out which way you moved - and having the puzzles be clearly presented with an underlying logic. They're just... really hard. I think also Antichamber and possibly Portal might scratch that itch.