Frenetic Pony

I know right? And why does the guy keep doing the same thing over and over. Just bizarre

Sadly, judging by the physics acumen this is a scripted even I wanted this to be next gen so we could just do this whenever damn it! I'm imagining some properly crazy game where you can smash trains together, re-recreate the Uncharted 3 ship sinking at will, and be a world renowned terrorist by burning down skyscrapers using only a fire simulation. Ohwell, until then GTA V definitely looks good; even if the bastards are waiting forever for a PC port again!

Skyrim is Skyrim with Skyrim! - Skyrim

Trine 2 isn't much better for "story" but is legitimately, eyewateringly gorgeous. And a breeze to beat on co-op since you can both be wizards and just levitate each other past obstacles

Talent counts for a heck of a lot. Look at Just Cause 2, it's still wonderful looking 2 years later and it's not like Avalanche was a huge triple A studio or anything when it was made. Huge studios get you a lot of art, not necessarily a great engine. IE look at Skyrim. That thing sucks, it looks like a game from 2009 technically, the editor is getting vastly out of date, you can't even go into cities without a long loading time into a separate gamespace; and yet Bethesda has over a hundred people at their studio. I'm sure it'll look rocking, I just wonder what they're concentrating on. Return on investment in shiny graphics tech has gone down since Half Life 2. It's been a while since any game actually "blew gamers minds!" So I'm more interested in what it's going to do in terms of allowing for game design. Not that I don't care about shiny graphics tech Yep yep, no more BSP. And if they're really doing a space MMO then all streaming all the time. I just wonder how this went with their new games. As in, I wonder what it was like transitioning Half Life 3 from Episode 3 on the Source engine to next gen stuff and Source 2.0 or squared... or cubed! No! Source Sqrt -1 then they could be all "it stands for Source: iMagination"

Actually, I loved Red Dead Redemption partially for its size. I was severely disappointed by Oblivion and Skyrim for feeling tiny and insignificant. With RDR I had a fun time just wandering around, I don't think I fast travelled once. Same with Just Cause 2. Then again I really like exploration. I expect if you want some more goal oriented gameplay then just wandering through aimless areas is going to get tiring. But then, I'm also happy they're spending their huge budgets in some other way. 4 was a hundred million dollar game spent mostly on simulating pool in a smokey bar. If I wanted that, I'd go out to play pool in a smokey bar. It's not like I can't do that, or get smashed, or go bowling or something in real life. They can't really do or simulate anything more or better because of hardware constraints. AI and physics programmers have to fight to scratch anything off the available hardware this generation as it is. The only thing they really even CAN do is make it bigger until hardware becomes more powerful.

All Skrillex. The classic music station? Skrillex re-mixing Bach. Jazz? Now called Jazzstep. Rock? Rockstep. You'll never escape. Even the DJ is Skrillex. He'll start talking like a DJ, and then drop the bass and just go into wubwubwubwuuuuuwuubwubwub. Heck, even the commercials will be "Have you been feeling irritable, discomforted, tired, or a host of other gene-EEEEEE WUbwuwubwwwwuuuuubbbwubwub

Just remember to always research your electronics purchases beforehand. The good news is that you can root a Kindle Fire and unlock it, which I highly suggest. I've been playing Super Brothers: Sword and Sorcery from the Humble Bundle, and it is an absolutely brilliant little game. I tried it for the PC and the control scheme just doesn't work. You NEED a touch device for this thing. And now that I'm using one it's fantastic arty style and one of the best games I've ever played in terms of sound design make it very cool indeed.

I'm pretty sure they're going for more of a Red Dead Redemption feel, which is just fine if you've played that game! Ok, it got repetitive after a while, but it was still fun to have some little thing to accomplish every once in a while thrown at you. Frankly the game sounds great, even if the story is questionable. Then again it's Rockstar, when isn't their story questionable? I've never played GTA for the story anyway, I played it to run over people and wander around a ridiculously detailed world while listening to funny radio shows. And it sounds like that's going to be out in force this time! Which is much better than the smallish, grungy world of GTA 4 where the cars sucked and I was asked to see "some big, American titties!" every five minutes.

Yep, buying this. Between this, Curiosity, A Bards Tale, and the MLP Games I might have to buy my own Android device just for gaming rather than "borrowing" one like I do right now. Which I suppose means my skepticism of tablet gaming is now over O.o

There's a huge difference between Sir You Are Being Hunted and what they're vaguely promising in this game. Then again, maybe I'm reading too much into what they're promising. Their procedural generation stuff could help a lot, though that is quit complicated to get right. Maybe they'll just be doing something like Diablo, a just kind of straight up, procedural "here's stuff." Kind of game. If that's the case, which now that I think about it could be, they may well just accomplish it.

It's so nice... except it's not. America has turned politics into the most finely honed contest of its kind anywhere in the world. Even as the election results rolled in there's talk of how this will impact "strategy" two and four years from now. Also, out of curiosity I've been looking at Google maps. According to Wikipedia the largest city by morphological, as in contiguous square urban area, is Tokyo. However if you loosen the definition of urban area even a little, to say include America's typically ridiculous sprawl, then Tokyo is positively dwarfed. The Dallas/Fort Worth area is almost 3,000 square miles, or 7,770 square kilometers for you non US commie bastards. LA as a contiguous area is 5,000 square miles, or 13,000 square kilometers. LA literally envelopes large state park areas into it's massive labyrinth of forever. It is literally larger than the entirety of the Bahamas and 89 other recognized countries in the world. I'm convinced it is now a living thing with distributed sentients that will slowly consume the entire world.

The video looks great! But I can't help think this is yet another British Kickstarter made by naive guys that have no idea or experience with how much work a large video game can actually take. There's a reason projects like Planetary Annihilation and Project Eternity set their MINIMUM at a million dollars. This wants to be those projects and more, with less than a third the budget and no mention of any actual experience. A tech demo is far, far easier than an actual game.

This is a fascinating game I'm just not very good at. The long stages just kill me. I end up failing once about every other time I try to enter a room. But the problem is it's hard to bring myself to repeat each room the same, so I'll end up playing a stage upwards of 10 times in a row if it's got a lot of rooms, and then I just get sort of frustrated and realize it's a really weird bloody game that I don't have a terribly great motivation to end each stage for. So I'm playing it maybe ten minutes a day max. Edit- Hard in the way that it's kind of boring to repeat the same way after the fifth time through. It gets boring quickly, just repeating the same timings and actions for Nth time.

Either way it's how I picture most Halo 4 buyers.

Well... Fuck. I was wondering whether to buy this. The optimistic side of my brain is trying to gang up with my illogical little lizard brain and come to the conclusion that since you want Halo 4 and I don't that obviously we'll disagree on AC3 as well. But I'm not buying it, I know your tricks brain! I enjoyed Assassin's Creed 1 and 2 for what they were, and yet always wanted them to be the better game it always seemed they could be. So far it doesn't seem like AC3 fits the bill. Anyone else play this?

Gordon Freeman does not sleep. He does not eat, he has no bodily functions, no emotions, never sways from his objective for even a moment, and he travels through time. The only conclusion being that he is actually a prototype Terminator that's missing speech software.

"The Real Nick Breckon" [Frenetic Pony] May I have your attention please? May I have your attention please? Will the real Nick Breckon please stand up? I repeat, will the real Nick Breckon please stand up? We're gonna have a problem here.. Y'all act like you never seen a podcaster before Jaws all on the floor like Remo, like Breckon just burst in the door and started whoopin his Sax worse than before they first were divorce, throwin him over a job on east coast (Ahh!) It's the return of the... "Ah, wait, no way, you're kidding, he didn't just say what I think he did, did he?" And Video Games Rodkin said... nothing you idiots! Rodkin's dead, he's locked in my basement! (Ha-ha!) Feminist video gamers love Breckon [*vocal turntable: chigga chigga chigga*] "Nick Breckon, I'm sick of him Look at him, walkin around grabbin his you-know-what Flippin the you-know-who," "Yeah, but he's so cute though!" Yeah, I probably got a couple of casts up in my head loose But no worse, than what's goin on in your parents' gamerooms Sometimes, I wanna get on Internet and just let loose, but can't but it's cool for Chris Remo to hump a game "Like in Far Cry 2, Where a grenade rolls down a hill" And if I'm lucky, you might just give it a little play And that's the message that we deliver today And expect them not to know what a game's systemic emergence is Of course they gonna know what emergence is By the time they hit fourth grade They got the all the games they want off the internet don't they? "We ain't nothing but mammals.." Well, some of us gamers who cut other people open up and call them lamer [sLURP] But if we can hump dead players and call ourselves slayers then there's no reason that a man and another man can't cast to us nightly player [*EWWW!*] But if you feel like I feel, I got the antidote Players wave your gamecontrollers, sing the chorus and it goes [Chorus: Frenetic Pony (repeat 2X)] 'Cause I'm Nick Breckon, yes I'm the real Breckon All you other Nick Breckon's are just imitating So won't the real Nick Breckon please stand up, please stand up, please stand up? [Frenetic Pony] Will Wright don't gotta cuss people in his simulations to sell his games; well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too! You think I give a damn about a DICE Award? Half of you critics can't even stomach me, let alone stand me "But Nick, what if you win, wouldn't it be weird?" Why? So you guys could just lie to get me here? So you can, sit me here next to real game designers? Shit, Tim Schafer better switch me chairs so I can sit next to Scoops and the Giant Bomb Crew and hear 'em argue over who was Scoops first You little bitch, put me on the your Game of the Year Awards "Yeah, he's cute, but I think he's just a community manage, hee-hee!" I should download other casts on MP3 and show the whole world how you gave Nick Breckon his start in Video Games [AHHH!] I'm sick of you little girl and boy casts, all you do is annoy me so I have been sent here to destroy you [bzzzt] And there's a million of us just like me who cast like me; who just don't give a fuck like me who dress like me; walk, talk and act like me and just might be the next best thing but not quite me! [Chorus] [Frenetic Pony] I'm like a head trip to listen to, cause I'm only givin you things you joke about with your friends inside your living room The only difference is I got the balls to say it in front of y'all and I don't gotta be false or sugarcoated at all I just get on the mic and spit it and whether you like to admit it [*ERR*] I just shit it better than ninety percent of you casters out can Then you wonder how can kids eat up these episodes like valiums It's funny; cause at the rate I'm goin when I'm thirty I'll be the only person in the nursin home flirting Pinchin controller time when I'm off medication And I'm playin but this whole bag of social games isn't working And every single person is a Nick Breckon lurkin He could be workin at Zynga, spittin on your real game [*HACH*] Or in the parkin lot, circling Screaming "I don't give a fuck!" with his windows down and his xbox booted up So, will the real Breckon please stand up? And put one of those fingers on each mouse up? And be proud to be outta your mind and outta control and one more time, loud as you can, how does it go? [Chorus 4X] [Frenetic Pony] Ha ha Guess there's a Nick Breckon in all of us Fuck it, let's all stand up Edit - this is a joke, taken way too far, due to seeing this on twitter this: https://twitter.com/chrisremo https://twitter.com/ja2ke

Weird Double post

Yayyyy! Not my best written blog in retrospect. Should definitively have included level design into game mechanics, as they can be rather intertwined. Was simply trying to say that Sleeping Dogs is just GTA no matter how you dress it up, Max Payne 3 is basically almost exactly like Uncharted, and Thirty Flights of Loving is very different from Dear Esther, even though they're both rather uninteractive "narrative" driven games. Didn't like Thirty Flights of Loving at all by the way, and yet did really enjoy Dear Esther. But I suppose you can just start to argue that the way a story is presented changes the story itself as well and you get into a whole mess of what things have to do with what and then no one is happy. Maybe it was a much simpler argument that branches out too easily into a futile exercise about the whole of game design.

Review Summations: It's good that they've ditched overly wrought stuff from Revelations, there's a lot more open world stuff to do, they've tried to ditch just using the same gameplay like climbing away from bad situations over and over again, trying to replace that with more horizontal running away, and they've once again changed all the meta/extra game stuff around. As in, having a boat and a town thing to build rather than more tower defense or etc. But apparently they've not made up for the change from vertical to horizontal gameplay in terms of mechanics, as you'll get stuck trying to climb up stuff or hide in stuff far too often when you just want to keep running away. They've also screwed over the social stealth stuff, which just doesn't work anymore. Oh, and of course there's even MORE silly assed twists and turns to the already ludicrous story, but we could easily guess that already. For example, halfway through the game Desmond Miles PUTS ON a mask to reveal that he is secretly Deadmau5, and the entire video game story about the end of the world is a prelude to his new music video which will be revealed on December 23rd, when Assassin's Creed 3 transforms from an open world action/adventure game into a Kinect only DJ/Dance co-op game, which is actually his new music video. So, good ambition gets caught by not having mechanics polished enough to support it. Still sounds worth a try at some point, but probably not right away and at $60. Also I don't have Kinect yet.

Actually, and against internet popular belief, Crystal Skull wasn't Lucas' fault. His story didn't call for Nuking the Fridge, or Indie having a kid, or just about anything that ruined it. The only thing it DID call for was the communists and aliens. Which frankly I thought worked alright for moving it into a 50's/older Indie era, though obviously and retrospectively not as well as something like Uncharted 2's story might have, for example. Still, point is Spielberg ruined it, not Lucas.

So, I've always wanted a blog, and somehow my blogs have become rather popular (Relatively speaking) over on Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JohnathonSwift/20121030/180516/Games_are_about_Gameplay.php Not sure how, though I suspect it's making bold claims. But I thought you guys might like this. It's basically about how games are defined by their gameplay first, foremost, and above all. Think of it this way: Thirty Flights of Loving could have radically changed gameplay, and the same story, and you'd call it a radically different game. But Thirty Flights of Loving could have a radically different story, and the same gameplay, and you'd have called it far more similar to the original. Thus, games are gameplay first and foremost, even if it's a game all about a story.

Forza Horizon: So I technically haven't "beat" it yet. But it's driving game, and I've played long enough to get the loop, which is all there ever is to these things. And it's a very pretty, open world driving game that really tries to embrace it's open worldness, and having extra challenges from people on your friends list, which it reminds you of in a direct but non obtrusive way. The driving itself is much more arcadey than Forza, but manages to maintain enough of the physics to make driving different courses and different cars feel very different from each other and still challenging. As opposed to say, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, which kind of felt like you were just driving the same rocket at various speeds. My only complaint is that for a game that says "Forza" it doesn't feel nearly as big as Forza 3, the last Forza I played. While still long and big, this doesn't have the seemingly infinite amount of cars and challenges that could last forever that the traditional Forza series does.

This is what I've been trying to say: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/6445-Dishonored By the way the ending is awful, really bad. The last mission lasts all of 10 minutes and you don't get to kill ANYONE if you get the good ending. They're all already dead, or asleep, or something. It just ends. And I finally wanted to kill someone damn it!