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I know quite a few people who own one simply because it was the cheapest blu-ray player at the time.

ok ok the americaS, jeeze.

Ben if you put those games on your steam wishlist you should get an email once they go on sale. I also use IFTTT to send me emails on daily deals. Oh, and I tend to check steam obsessively which helps.

A weekend day would allow the americans to join in, (i don't know if there are any besides me)

You guys should stream it so i can enjoy it vicariously at work!

I've also gotten pretty heavy into Guild Wars 2. I'm nearly at level cap so that's a draw. Plus all the new content they keep pushing out is of quality and keeps the game feeling pretty fresh and interesting.

Which mods are good for this game? I won't make today unfortunately thanks to nefarious time zones and me having to work. Next time.

I'm excited, I never got to try Ballad of Gay Tony. Also for thumbstown multiplayer mayhem.

In my girlfriend's game her character got married and had children right before getting imprisoned in the spire. Since that part of the game takes place over several decades, once she got out her wife had abandoned her and her children didn't recognize her. I though that was a pretty cool intersection between side missions and the main storyline.

re: hidden sales - r/GameDeals is on top of it: http://www.reddit.com/r/GameDeals/comments/1i5agp/steam_summer_sale_2013_deepest_discounts/ GTA IV is on community sale right now! Retro GTA multiplayer thread, rejoice!

Well I never had a threesome in Fable 2 so clearly I missed something! *dusts off Fable 2 disc*

brave new world and dragonborn purchased in flash sales. sale of the sought after DLCs thus far.

The guild/quest missions in the Elder Scrolls games were usually quite linear and dull. There was also 0 discoverability. That discoverability is what makes the stuff Frenetic Pony is talking about all the more fun. It's something you can talk about at work or with your friends later. No one cares that you did this or that story mission. But stories about finding necromancers sacrificing chickens in the woods or a quest NPC wandering randomly halfway across the continent from his town or a bandit with a weird diary are interesting (and precisely because it's about exploring and uncovering aspects of the world that aren't immediately visible). I mean not all players are going to embrace this stuff. Most won't, most likely. But the games that are most memorable to me are those that reward looking deeper.

Everyone vote for GTAIV as community choice so I can buy it for 5 bucks for PC and join youze.

Burnout had those amazing destruction game modes where the goal was to damage as many other cars as possible while mid-physics defying crash (fail state of a normal racing game). Saints Row 3 also had at least one minigame of the same ilk.

I still would like to play some Dead Space 3 coop if only to experience that aspect of the game (different players experiencing different things on screen and asking each other if they saw it or not). I do agree that all the ancillary aspects of GTA IV added up to more of a sense of a living world, but I found them more interesting to think about than to interact with. Living world elements that I would love to see more of: vehicles have constant states - that heli i landed on my penthouse roof should still be there when I wake up, dammit! Characters should have constant states. It's kind of what you were talking about toblix. I loved that in Fallout 3 an NPC could walk around the world (totally independently of whether you were sharing the same loaded chunk as them) and could even die! It's something more open world games should embrace, despite (and because of) the added complexity.

Every character in Heavy Rain can die. There is no respawning, it simply alters the way the game resolves. I know the game gets a lot of (occasionally justified) hate, but it was super interesting that a character you've been playing as for a dozen hours can bite it thanks to decisions you made and the game continues on. It's that roguelike element that makes situations that much more intense when you know that a mistake will result in permanent death.

HAHA that is genius!

I actually found the side stuff kind of overwhelming in GTA IV. I would be sat there watching TV... on my TV. Or checking my character's email in an internet cafe. And this is that to a ridiculous extent. The more mundane the activities get in a game the more I feel guilty that I'm performing them virtually. For example, I would feel pretty guilty doing the road bike minigame instead of going out and riding my road bike.

It wasn't totally clear to me what choices led to my characters joining the settlement or not. With Vince yeah sure, I did the choice where I left Eddie behind (did not even know that was a choice as I was just hitting on inputs to not die as I had already 3-4 times prior to truck-dude). But with Russel I chose to not aid truck-dude and he still didn't join. Same with Shel and her sister. I shot Stephanie but am not convinced that would preclude joining the settlement as the only other option was to ditch a settlement which would make them inclined to ditch settlements in the future I'd think? I agree with the sentiments that this DLC feels a lot more replayable than season 1 - as some of the choices appear to carry more of a right/wrong state (could be wrong here, but the fact that I'm tempted to even try to replay, unlike with S1, says it all)

I picked this up after Chris mentioned it a few podcasts back and it's quite good. It's a very small, limited experience but holy fuck is it intense. You're basically flying a probe around deep space via a Commodore 64 looking interface. You've got to make it from station to station without running out of oxygen or power. Much of the game's depth is in its sound design. Your breath becomes ragged as you run out of oxygen and your ship's engines start to rattle threateningly at higher speeds. Everything reinforces the desperation you might feel floating alone in space with limited air. It's basically that new Alfonso Cuaron movie in 8bit. http://milsci.info/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jSt4Ab7NcMQ

There are fascinating oddities all over, even in coastal cities! I've been following http://www.atlasobscura.com/ for a few years - they cover a lot of weird events and locations, thought it'd be relevant to the thread.

That's an interesting perspective. I can't say I share the impression of Joel as an impermeable character. I agree that he's far more powerful than your average guy (by video game necessity), but it never felt like I was eluding death in over the top, cartoonish ways. The franticness of the combat and the slim margins by which I escaped many of them allowed for my sustained suspension of disbelief that I was inhabiting a human character rather than piloting a cardboard avatar. At the same time, I did die and reload quite a few times. It's a tough game. I almost like to think of my deaths as Bioshock Infinite esque timelines. "And then Joel was hit on the back of the head with a brick and died. The end." It does ultimately make more sense than being able to survive so many encounters over and over again. In reality, you wouldn't. Still, good storytelling is able to account for its - sometimes necessary - implausibility and for the most part I think TLOU does this adequately. As for the last act spoilers:

I disagree with the general argument here that the story is undermined by the gameplay. I think both are done rather well and complement each other in impressive and interesting ways. The story would not nearly have had the impact that it had if you weren't playing as a violent psychopath. So much of the weight of the narrative is based on the depths to which Joel has sunk, the ends to which he has gone to survive. An effective way for the player to understand these extremes is to experience them, to act them out, to see the necessity of the actions taken. The question is never about whether or not to kill, it's about how to survive. Are there a few places where this falls flat and feels more contrived than sincere? Certainly, but by and large I felt that Naughty Dog succeeded at placing me in the characters' shoes and allowing me to see the world as they saw it and expressed it in the cutscenes. (I also think this is somewhat subverted by the end but even that is very cleverly done). ND has always been lauded for their narrative accomplishments more than their gameplay, and while I do think the narrative is what makes the game extra special, I also think they've come a long way in limiting the dissonance of the mechanics in relation to the narrative. Many of the mechanics actually remind me of what Spec Ops was going for. The brutal kills are brutal for a reason. Not for torture porn or to appeal to AAA dudebros, but to never allow dispatching enemies to become mundane. It's never easy. You are ripping the life away from the people you kill and the game is saying something about that. Whether its successful in that pursuit is of course up for discussion but I don't think it's a simple as saying the cutscenes are taking place in a totally different universe than the game. For one thing, the story is not simply a depiction of a hardened murderer growing a heart. The emotional connection between the characters is viewed through the prism of murder and violence, it never escapes this framing not least at the end.

Yeah I was kind of disagreeing with myself even as I wrote the 'more is more' sentiment because I agree in general it's a bad thing and waters down the narrative. It just doesn't seem to do that here. Part of the reason for that is felt in the scene changes. Some of the later game scene changes are... astounding. Like, as in "I just played an entire game already and now here's more game but it's tonally miles away from what I just played." Something not unlike the scene changes in Red Dead Redemption - though a common critique of that game is that certain areas go on for far too long, so maybe that's a bad example. Or a good example of why I'm wrong. Argh.