Merus

Games are at a stage in their history where no genre will ever really die, because it'll be revived as a retro experience ten years later.

Think of it this way, Ben: you had to get quite tipsy to be sanctimonious. Many people do that even without liquor.

I think the only reason people remember the burly brawl is the name. I'd be hard pressed to go the other way - I have a fairly good memory and I only vaguely remember details about the fight - but the words 'burly brawl' are evocative.

are you still wearing meat we all move at the speed of thought now I tried to visit you back on earth but you weren't capable of acknowledging my presence I suddenly realised my foolishness in recapturing an existence I no longer recognise or desire I left my nostalgia centre there and returned to my home in the Carina Nebula it may cause an increase in static electricity or unusual distortions in the light spectrum in your apartment, and for this I apologise I would invite you to visit but you are still wearing meat it's beautiful here

It warms the cockles of my heart that Gormongous actually did use 'begging the question' correctly and someone tried to pull him up for it

I'm sort of impressed that Metal Gear Solid managed to stop the marketing people from leaving off the screenshot with Meryl's frequency on it.

I see a banjo, but not a banjo player. I'm going with Phalanx.

I think you will get at least a pound of entertainment out of Hexcells. I think John Walker overrates it, but that just means it's a puzzle game well worth your time instead of the best puzzle game of the last ten years.

no, no, yes - sent from my ion cloud

got no time for no cut-rate Commander Keen

i want to see your art

I think that things like gamergate are an inevitable result of having subcultures that exclude outsiders - after all, metal's had an ongoing problem with Nazis forming bands and demanding to be heard - and I think it's putting the cart before the horse to assume that creative freedom only comes when the forces of capitalism and homogeneity are excluded. Take Mouth Sounds and Mouth Silence, which are unique and completely depend on combining things that were never designed to be combined for its appeal. Basically, remix culture.

I don't get it.

My housemate loves the Serious Sam games. In watching him play, I realised that Serious Sam is basically what people want from Duke Nukem: hyper-fast Doom-like gunplay, all the weapons being useful, and machismo without the sexism. If Gearbox gave Croteam the Duke Nukem license they would make an excellent Duke Nukem game, except we already have four Serious Sams which is at least two more good games than Duke Nukem ever had. (edit: my housemate informs me that Serious Sam 2 is not The Second Encounter, and is also not very good.)

'Problematic' is a word you use to avoid actually describing what the problem with something is. It is a weasel word, one of the few weasel words that naturally occurs outside of corporate communique. It often seems to get used to describe something written from a privileged view, because saying racist/sexist/homophobic/ist/ist/ist is unwieldy and reductive. 'Problematic' isn't a solution.

Hey, this is good advice! Thanks.

Is that Hannibal Buress? Because he's really good in Broad City, to the point where I expect he's just really good everywhere.

If you own Bioshock 2 when it had GFWL I'm pretty sure you own Minerva's Den.

The great thing is that everyone is slowly coming to the conclusion that resumes/CVs are not actually a particularly good method of hiring but no-one has any idea what they should do instead. I'm sorry, I think I said 'great' when I meant 'worst'. Just ol' me using the wrong words in Ben's threads agin

you're all blocked

This thread exists primarily so Ben can rag on my imprecise use of certain words.

then I guess Jim Crawford is kind of a douchebag which doesn't seem likely, so I'm willing to rule that out

I think we played different Minecrafts. Minecraft, at release, feels very Swedish to me - there's a beauty and a harshness to the landscape, which you protect yourself from with your own labour. It doesn't matter so much how you do it, but if it works, it works. It's very minimalist, in that there's not a lot of systems but what systems are there have a lot of complexities, but its systems express something about the real world, about what's important in the world. In terms of game design, there's a huge amount to talk about, from the triumphant use of procedural generation to create interesting environments, to the clever way the tools create a progression without gating, to the way mechanics reflect Western story structure, which makes pretty much everything that happens in Minecraft fodder for player stories. ("I wanted something, so I went into a nearby cave, and then...") Also remember the question is what's the best game, not the greatest game. That means, as the Thumbs point out, you need criteria for determining what is meant by 'best' and what to judge 'best' on.

Argobot's an academic, I think.

Luigi's Mansion 2! A really smart expansion on the original, preserving the fun adventure puzzle feel without wearing out its welcome by over-extending itself. Each mission felt like it had its own identity, and by the time I felt like the game had shown me all it had, it was just about to end. The optimisation around 3-star runs proves to be interesting, because of smart balancing where many of the environmental enemies are only worth 5c but there's lots of 100/200c secrets around. It's a bit of a shame that 3-star is as high as you can get - I reckon there's an interesting optimisation game in working out if the 60c secret is worth the 30 second detour that's mostly irrelevant so long as you hit the 3-star requirement.