Gormongous

So we can all agree that this DLC seems a bit wrongheaded, at least? I mean, I find myself unintentionally avoiding the storyline in XCOM, which has made my games probably a bit harder than otherwise.

I'm not bagging on XCOM the shooter. I'm bagging on the exec who saw the old X-Com and said to himself, "This would make a great linear storyline." It's something of a leap, more so now that we have a modern XCOM that's at its best when allowing the systems to take the fore.

So the first proper DLC has been announced... and it's a set of three scripted missions, with a fully voiced character as a reward? Really? Seems to me like the same genius at the 2K office responsible for XCOM the shooter is sticking his fingers in this pie. Scripted story missions for a strategy game, seriously...

I don't think it's that subtle. I think it's just meant to score you for using a variety of weapons, but it's been bugged since fairly early in the first alpha.

No, it is frightfully buggy, to be honest. Botched controller support, botched redist packages, a couple hard locks, errors recording what masks and tiles are unlocked, the list goes on. The dev's working hard at it, but it's certainly not there yet. I even had a couple instances in the level called "Hot & Heavy" (the eleventh one, I think) where I walked into an area that turned out to be an empty black box from which I couldn't escape, which drove me nuts because that level has a ball-crushingly painful opening (running past a gunman to take on two guys with knives). I was not happy to have to play that again once I thought it was behind me.

I've never had a game make me feel more like the insane murderer parents are always worried their children might become if they spend too much time in front of the TV. The ultra-violence really bothered me at first, but now I'm on level ten and don't even notice it anymore. Instead, whenever I stop playing, my words and actions are so dialed up by the stress and adrenaline that it's like I've become the violence or something corny like that. Still, I mentioned something about the easy flow of a good action game in the Far Cry 2 thread, but Hotline Miami takes the cake. After you've tried a level a couple times and gotten the layout down, the results of your inputs put the best fight choreography you've ever seen to shame. Kick the door open in some guy's face, pick up his lead pipe, chuck it at his buddy on the couch, beat both their faces in, scoop up a knife, throw it into a passing dog, etc. Even unloading a shotgun is epic when you lob the empty firearm at the last man standing. I think I might stop for now, though. Sit down, watch some Star Trek, try to remember that peace is the only answer...

Yeah, weirdly the best way to manage chaos is to push forward in the game's plot, which gives you large panic reductions for every completed stage. It doesn't feel like a sustainable, systemic, and self-sufficient world if the player can't approach it on their own terms and expect some kind of success.

There isn't. I got the "all tech" achievement in my Normal playthrough and I never captured a Chrysalid. They, along with the three types of robots, can never be captured.

Not really. "Random" means something different in popular parlance than in technical actuality. If you put your iTunes on "shuffle", you expect to hear a different song from a different artist every time. That's "random". Except it's definitely not random, in actuality. True randomness would have multiple songs from the same album coming up, maybe in sequential order, or even the same song playing four or five times in a row, on rare occasion. This would prove itself to be random if you listened to infinite songs, but you don't listen to infinite songs. You listen to a dozen or so and then turn it off, so that dozen damn well better be completely different, right?

I know it's just the luck of the screen grab, but his so-very-dead expression, seemingly superglued in place to looked intrigued/intriguing, is what really sells this for me.

Well, America had a much later and stronger prescriptivist movement with the formidable likes of Noah Webster at its head. It wasn't enough just to enforce consistency, like in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The language also had to be brought into line with Latin, the most perfect tongue, and with math, the bedrock of reality. It's how we get all our blindingly stupid rules against double negatives, split infinitives, and terminal prepositions.

That would be a less unsettling outcome than her being like, "You video game baby, color your hair with boost, like Old Man Clancy's HAW."

I agree, Nappi. Cyberpunk and singularity culture is much better experienced as a historical artifact than an ideology.

Thanks for trying to bring up Crusader Kings II, Chris. I know I personally would love to hear your thoughts, and there's plenty of us around here that would be glad to help you over that first hump (and the second, and the third).

I totally agree, though i think there's some intentional incongruity in the sterile presentation to discomfit and disturb the player, but deliberate ludonarrative dissonance is another topic entirely.

Every few months, I'll pick up The Singularity Is Near and read a hundred more pages before putting it down because Kurzweil's wide-eyed idealism is freaking me out. I've read hundreds upon hundreds of academic and popular articles in the course of my life, but never found an author so unswervingly committed to his thesis. If he showed just a little doubt, I'd probably tear through the book in a couple days and love every moment.

God, I just popped into this game for a quick assassination mission and totally lost like three hours. There is nothing like Far Cry 2 for occasionally permitting me to slip into one of those lovely and only slightly problematic flow states where I kill two dozen men with a bolt-action rifle while under fire without taking a single hit or wasting a single bullet. It reminds me of two passages from Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons, as dorky as that is. When I'm in the zone: And when it fails me, like it always does: I even got a mission from that posh British mercenary in vaguely Waffen-SS gear tonight! He's my favorite guy, if that's even possible.

Everything I'm reading about it seems pretty interesting, but this statement stuck out to me. Sure, the printing press heralded the Enlightenment eventually, but only by way of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which sparked the bloodiest wars fought on the European peninsula until Napoleon, if not the First World War. Twenty-five to forty percent of the populace in Germany was exterminated by the Thirty Years' War, and the resulting Peace of Westphalia, while stabilizing and normalizing relations among the great powers, set the stage for some titanic confrontations between Spain, France, and England in the colonies as well as at home. In fact, the aftermath of the wars of religion are generally agreed to have precipitated the exportation of violence abroad by the European nation-states precisely because of their destructiveness. So really, you could just as easily say that it was the unprecedented bloodletting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that brought about the peaceful mindset of the Enlightenment, which rejected much of Christian dogma out of sheer disgust. In that respect, the invention of the printing press did ultimately lead to peace, but by the rockiest road imaginable. Literacy can be just as much a weapon as any other technology, in the right hands.

I played a few missions with my X360 controller after the Three Moves Ahead guys talked about how well the interface for that worked. Let me tell you, I was floored by how smooth and easily it played, especially after a couple weeks with the PC interface. Take this is an official notice, if you have a gamepad but have been using mouse because you prefer PC-native controls, that XCOM​ is one game where you have to lay aside that chauvinism. The cursor moves exactly where you want, the button response is crisp and precise, basically everything the default PC interface isn't. About my only complaint is that you can't switch freely between the two. The game boots up with a completely different UI if you're using a gamepad and your keyboard won't work with it until you switch back. Again, very impressive to see in action, although I think it speaks a little about the manpower devoted to PC controls.

Well, it looks like they're going to sit on it however long it takes to come back with something stronger than "Hey guys, we were talking about making a game the other day, give us some money while we figure out what it'll be!" Which, you know, fair enough. I imagine there's huge pressure to get on the Kickstarter bandwagon and get yours before some high-profile disaster ruins it for everyone, so it probably doesn't take much to go off half-cocked.

Guuuys, you're making me feel terrible about my own procrastination techniques. Where else can I hide from the burdens of grad school with such efficacy?

Hah, only if the body physics were good enough to allow you to flip them over. Otherwise, it'd be my definition of over-designed video game hell. "Thrash your mouse around impotently to make the dodgy Source-style ragdoll vibrate into a face-down position!"

Highlight his post, Twig.

Speaking of great investment returns, RockPaperShotgun just posted an article detailing Star Wars: the Old Republic's looming free-to-play model, which looks horrendous. True, all story content up to level fifty is totally free, but everything else -- instances, PvP, space battles, revives, rare items -- is heavily restricted and runs on an as-of-yet undefined token system. Even full access to chat channels and the ability to sprint require player expenditure. Reading through the official announcement page, it looks like EA really is determined to reinvent the F2P wheel. Either that, or they imagine themselves in a possession of a wildly popular MMO, the players of which just can't spend enough on it, instead of a middling title quietly dying from a starvation diet.

No, you have the ending right. I'm surprised everyone's talking about how hard that mission was, though. Like I said before, I shredded it. Of course, this was on Normal and my team was six colonels, four of them psychic. The biggest hardship was having an alien grenade knock my Heavy's unconscious body on top of a railing, from which he couldn't move once revived. At least it was near the end, but still.