Merus

Wow, I'm surprised by how gorgeous it looks. I mean, it's basically Myst except instead of trying to puzzle together lots of different systems and understanding how to express your intentions, it's just one complicated one. And also it looks great. Yep, sold.

It's important to remember that Call of Duty sells like twenty million copies. What The Games Industry Looks Like is going to be distorted by that, in the same way that if you look at the movies advertised you'd think the vast majority of them were dumbass. (The movie industry is lucky that it doesn't really need wide-band product launches - its highest profile event is the Oscars, which are explicitly prestige-focused.) Gaming is mainstream these days. That's the price we pay for a wider market, for there to be a market for different experiences.

I really should have made a Happy Bioshock Australia Day thread

Would built in pause and resume, recording and streaming pique your interest again?

Looking forward to last-minute Australia references (even if they screwed up the Australia Day code in Bioshock and made it 01/26 instead of 26/01 like an Australian date). Speaking of, I'm kind of hoping the American exceptionalism parts of the game aren't particularly overt and it mostly focuses on racism and Elizabeth's treatment, because I generally end up having issues with American treatments of American exceptionalism. This may be a vain hope given that there's an American flag right on the cover, and maybe Infinite will tackle it and succeed where so many others have failed (but I doubt it).

Honestly I think Microsoft are in for a surprise if Sony keep up their current strategy - most of the reason they're not selling is network effects, and Xbox Live is nowhere near as compelling as it was in 2006 when it was the only game in town. Also yeah non-final hardware isn't final, this shit is basically a bunch of components chucked in a box. Literally no-one gives a shit about the PS4 controller at this point, and yes I can see people upthread giving a shit about the PS4 controller but that's a statistical aberration I'm sure will be corrected once they realise that all that bulkiness could easily just be developer status or controller assignment LEDs that won't survive people starting to give a shit about the controller.

One day I hope that this becomes as common an aphorism amongst gamers as "hit it in the giant eye".

I probably wouldn't enjoy Sublime if I actually paid for it. I have difficulty justifying $70 for any program, let alone a text editor. (A big reason I haven't bought Skyrim, thanks to the Australian pricing differential.)

I've heard of people skipping devices, though I'm not sure how you manage to get all the way down to 7 minutes. Most puzzles are technically optional, but valuable because they allow you to experiment with the mechanics of the game that the blocking puzzles assume you know.

Finished it; all but one puzzle to go. I enjoyed it quite a bit, although I think I was disappointed how the game didn't have anything too perception-shattering after the stuff in the preview version. Still, I liked that it was a Metroidvania puzzle game, don't get a lot of those, and that the promise of that demo was mostly realised. I guess all that's left is to find the purple cubes and work out what else there is to do in The End.

This was a Day One Perch ever since I played the Hazard: Journey of Life demo. Really looking forward to it.

It's legitimate to point out what culture someone in a free speech discussion comes from. I've had the same problem. You just can't talk to Americans about free speech and limitations thereof (ironically). I've learnt, via bitter experience, not to do it.

See, I wasn't trying to express any of those things, although 'privilege' gets close. It's more that everything in the scene - the interview, the tennis/tennis academy, the social anxiety of the viewpoint character - bears the mark of huge obsession over the most inconsequential shit. I associate that, more than anything, with that kind of semi-enlightened privileged person who is dimly aware they have such advantages but are still more or less willing to milk it, for instance by not having a lot of perspective. Which is way more effort to describe than just saying 'so white you guys' given that I hadn't really read very much. Although now this discussion is going to inform my reading of it a bit. I think I'm disappointed more than anything that there's drug abuse in the book, as I'm kind of not a fan of that subject matter. Edit: yeah, let's not say that.

It's a little more complicated than that, as it only applies to media sold in Australia. The App Store, for instance, is not affected; you've also been able to buy The Walking Dead in Australia via Steam for ages, just not in retail stores. (Aside: it got rated MA15+ anyway so waiting for the R18+ was a waste of time). It's already been acknowledged that it's ridiculous to require ratings for everything in the age of the Internet, and probably the next reform after R18+ for games is allowing creator classification for anything M or lower. There is one advantage: based on the rules we have now, other than a couple of dumb provisions for games, the rating schemes across movies, TV and games are now consistent. One set of guidelines for everything, with context a big part of the classification. It's only problematic for games in that really they're a lot more violent than maybe they should be, but violent movies make it here all the time, so. So here's how it shook out: Back in the 70s, well before video games, the government introduced a rating scheme, and because Australia was a tiny market mostly getting its media from jolly old England, they made it mandatory like in England. To sell anything in Australia, you needed to have it rated. This is pretty typical around the world - see PEGI, etc. In general Australians are more trusting of their bureaucracies than Americans seem to be, so as long as it was relatively transparent it was just fine by most people. In the 90s games were added to the classification scheme. Same rule still applied, although for games they decided that if a game needed to be age restricted they'd just not rate it and let the states decide for themselves what to do with it. It was the 90s, it was a simpler time. The states are kind of an important thing here - before the 70s each state had its own rules, and much like in America each state used to be its own boss, so they don't like the idea of the federal government taking away their power. So the agreement was that every state and the federal government would need to agree to change the rules before any rules could get changed. And that's how come it took until 2013 to respond to the games industry not being for kids any more - you get one censorious Attorney-General who ruins things for the rest of us and the issue goes in the too-hard basket. Eventually it became a minor election issue once Australian gamers worked out that the classification board was lowballing ratings so they didn't have to ban borderline cases and decided to push the angle that 'adult' games were getting through for kids to buy. It also helped that the games industry started to be worth serious amounts of money, which made both state and federal governments suddenly very interested to see how they could get a piece of that action assist the local industry. It's an unlucky confluence of various rules that seemed okay at the time. Only one person really had it out for games in the government, but checks and balances breed tyranny just as easily as unfettered power. Locally, high prices were always the bigger issue for gamers, and the games affected were either crap or re-released with minor changes. The biggest problem with the uneven classification scheme, honestly, was that Australian gamers constantly got crap from Americans on message boards about it. That was before we knew about the debt ceiling.

It's a totally unfair opinion, and probably the intention of the scene, which is why it was important to clarify that it's an opinion based on just the first couple of pages.

It was very strange to see Australia's gun laws in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre come up as a response to the Sandy Hook massacre, because we banned a bunch of guns, sure, but we also didn't have a culture that deified them. We were basically just taking them away from crazy people, farmers and hunters, and the latter two groups were basically told there were plenty of alternatives and to stop their bitchin'. I don't think it would work the same in America; Australians are, on average, much more trusting of the institution of government, although we're on average a bit more socially conservative than Americans are. The problems we faced then and the problems America faced aren't really that similar; we had far fewer gun deaths but a bunch of massacres, whereas America has so much more gun death that it's only the sensational massacres stand out. We also don't have any gun manufacturers in Australia so it's a lot harder for them to get into the country in the first place. I think it's important, also, to remember that amongst the gun aficionado community there's a certain amount of contempt for feeling so secure that you're not watching for potential threats. The reasoning is that people not being ready to defend against crime at a moment's notice are letting it fester, which to me seems like surrendering to the idea that crime can't be prevented so you just have to defend against it. I am not sure how I'm managing to argue that gun nuts are soft on crime but I'll take it. (I do think it's ironic that so many appear to be concerned about the government taking their guns and then their liberty away in the country with the highest proportion of incarcerated people in the world.) Honestly I think it's a social and cultural problem that requires a massive shift in how America sees itself, which considering I say that a lot essentially means that I don't have any idea; in the same way that after the recent London riots a ton of social commentators had columns that boiled down to "these riots were because of this thing I've been writing about for years, everybody listen to me, I'm right". So I guess I don't have answers other than 'Australian-style gun control will not fix the problem of people loving guns too goddamn much'. Wait, wait: how about we get one of the Jackass guys to burst into an NRA meeting with a paintball gun? See how many people he can hit with it before someone tries to shoot him, and then we'll know for sure how much having a gun at your side and the requisite training to use it makes you safe. Okay, yeah, I don't have any ideas.

Based on the first three pages, this is the whitest book ever written.

I'm also going to point out here that the subject matter she trades in gets the hackles up of a certain type of male, who are generally willing to cut less slickly produced material a lot more slack. That said, I haven't watched any of her videos so I'd be going off hearsay, but she has the money to spare doing something really good and insightful and is apparently updating her backers so that is all I ask. But I am automatically suspicious of any outside criticism because there's a surprising amount of disingenuous blowback on this kind of topic. For instance, there was a lot of talk about how her project was a 'scam' taking money away from much more deserving projects and then no-one bats an eyelid at Godus, which is very easily summarised as a project by a known overpromiser that took money away from other, more deserving projects. Apparently one's only a problem if it's a feminist doing it. (More specifically: the very contention that it's a "scam" is problematic. Underlying that attitude is the idea that the issues being presented aren't real or are being blown out of proportion, which is indefensible - particularly because of what happened to the Kickstarter. It's also a very common, reflexive response, so much so that's it's got its own name, "mansplaining". Some of the examples that come up when you Google that are stunning, and, again, they're not isolated incidents.) It's pointless to have an open, two-way conversation with someone who believes you don't have the right to an opinion.

Late update: that's what they're claiming. They were trying to be The Worst NYE Show because the market has enough slickly produced, soulless NYE shows.

The think the idea that Far Cry 3 is intentionally trying to make the open-world stuff ridiculous to heighten the conflict between exploration and achievement in an open world - if you can go wherever you want, you can't also have a pressing reason to go to a particular location, like someone to rescue or a camp to destroy or something* - but I think the way they handled it is the wrong way. Mocking players for participating in a system is counter-productive because by building the game you're implicitly inviting players to participate in the system. Not doing so is not playing the game. Honestly it feels a little churlish to take that gift the medium has - by definition the player is participating in whatever action you put in front of them - and searching for ways to spurn that. If you don't want player participation, don't make a game. (By 'participation' I don't mean 'choice'; choice is overrated, and the classic JRPG false choice is a perfect example of participation without choice. Players tend to get annoyed by false choices, if they notice, but it can be used to great effect; for instance, some of the choices in The Walking Dead aren't particularly important but providing them allows players to feel invested without needing to give up much control. Being able to pick Mass Effect's Commander Shepard's first name, gender, backstory and appearance does a lot to endear the character to the player, but in terms of consequences there's some minor dialogue changes and some romance branches are closed off.) * The traditional argument is 'well if you don't do something the bad consequences should happen: the hostage gets killed and the mercenaries start their war' but what you're asking for is everyone blaming you for tooling around instead of doing the mission thing which doesn't solve the fundamental problem of there being an unresolvable conflict between the joy of exploration and the desire to provide goals and a story and suchlike.

I'm all horrified and stuff until I thought of a scenario that I think might work: You use a Lost-style flashback structure. In the 'present' Wander is killing colossi all on his lonesome, which serve as the action sequences. In the 'past' you see the backstory, with Wander at his village, and eventually it becomes clear that he's killing these colossi because his girlfriend's dying and it's apparently the only way to save her. That kind of structure would allow you to have the quiet moments of Wander just on his own in an empty world, and would allow you to invent a plot that doesn't need to intrude on the 'present'. You can't make something that feels like the game, obviously, but you can make something that shares some of its spirit. Honestly I think the director and writer would be capable of this - Chronicle and Hanna were both really interesting films. That said, I still think the biggest problem they have is the people they're trying to attract with the license will refuse to see the movie on principle. It'd be much wiser for them to work out how to make a Shadow of the Colossus movie, then carefully remove all traces of the license and present it as entirely new. Like they did for the Monkey Island movie.

I am ashamed to say I tore up at the end because it's so manipulative, but damn it if it didn't tug at the heartstrings. Can A Video game Make You Cry: Yes, If You're A Wuss (other things at which I have cried (not a complete list): A Goofy Movie)

I more or less followed it - the characters were super super obnoxious with the sole redeeming feature being War's surly "badass" response to every situation becoming a plot point.

I think I'd be more inclined to follow people quickly if games weren't so fond of hiding collectible items you can only find by ignoring the impetus of the scenario and wandering into some obscure corner somewhere.

I do enjoy how Polygon was going to be A New Type of Video game Journalism and a couple of months later Unwinnable comes up with A New Type of Video game Journalism and Polygon basically isn't anything new. Although I will say that I think I'm over How My Personal Problems Remind Me Of Video Games.