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Ok ran into the shooting at me but not aiming at me glitch, took a screenshot: bloody screen: so real! Annoying glitch but thankfully doesn't happen much. Man do I have mixed feelings about this game. It's got great atmosphere and intense, tactical firefights. But what happens after the firefight? There doesn't seem to be any reason to keep playing besides to continue to kill people in interesting ways. But that doesn't seem to be a good model for a single player shooter. Wouldn't a multiplayer game be a better fit here? Battlefield or Planetside-style, everyone trying to hold down their checkpoints and then go out and raid those of others? As good as the AI is it isn't dynamic enough to make the firefights truly unpredictable. And the story doesn't interest me in the slightest. It's tough, because when I'm in a battle I have fun but traversing around feels ultimately pointless as the few goals there are are simply variations of the gameplay loop of clearing checkpoints over and over again.

Hey guys, there totally was an Alien game, and it sounds amazing: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-02-10-alien-retrospective

This is a nice resource for parts pickin' http://www.logicalincrements.com/

Oh, I'm not making a judgement call on the game off of his review, I just find his perspective interesting. It's very easy to become used to how the people around you see things and that's why I enjoy the Conan reviews because he sometimes calls to light aspects of a game that I didn't think much about because I'm already used to it. Even when it's something trite like his inability to spatially navigate in first person shooters. Also I think his faux-pervert act was really smart humor and was a witty bite on the male gaze of the third person camera and just from trailers alone that seems to be a valid criticism. I didn't mean it to come across as snobbish, I really just found it insightful especially when many reviews just talk about mechanics and graphics and take weird camera angles and neck stabbings for granted (with the exceptions you've noted)

Not to say it doesn't make us wince, it just doesn't incite the kind of reaction you see from Conan and his audience. I mean, he has to actually put the controller down. When was the last time something horrified you in a game to the extent that you had to put the controller down? My other issue is how jarring it is to see your character die awfully, then come back to life, then die horribly (admittedly this is because neither of them were playing and the game kept loading Lära upstream from the stabby branch, oh lawdy) in a game that in many other ways is a very linear cinematic experience. It was a problem with uncharted and doesn't seem to have been addressed here. (of course how can it be in a game that strives to be cinematic short of going full heavy rain and removing death)

It's also great at calling to attention things like ultra-gruesome deaths that barely register to many gamers and seem to be de rigueur even in games that are attempting to be taken seriously as pieces of drama.

Conan's review (one of his best yet):

It's still a hog! It actually chokes more on my CPU than my card, hilariously enough. 20 is unplayable though. Try turning off shadows (should give you another 10fps): http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/can-you-turn-off-all-shadows.52405/

Splinter Cell: Conviction That was a fun episode of 24! Speaking of Spec Ops, it - and discourse here - has really shaped my approach to video games to the point that I rarely choose to "spare" characters when the game is generous enough to afford me that option. It's just silly. I've killed every last remaining one of their comrades, why would I suddenly decide to spare them? I refuse to buy into the game's moral contrivances. You'd think it'd be dumb to craft a somber, realistic scenario with the moral depth of an 8 bit arcade game and yet that's where we are for the most part. Still, the gameplay is quite fun, excepting the occasional weird cover-related pathfinding bugs I ran into. Figuring out fun ways to stealthily wreck shop is where the game shines. Unfortunately it wasn't until the third act of the game that I felt properly fluent with the controls. Could be the awkwardness of mapping a controller based system onto mouse and keyboard.

Ian Bogost's write-up of the PS4 event speaks to that: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/playstation-4-a-Video game-console/273404/ True innovation is pretty damn hard to do, and as technology improves faster and faster thanks to Moore's law, our ability to be surprised by new tech will be diminished. Thankfully, that's not always the case. The Occulus VR goggles have me genuinely excited. I could see them facilitating entirely new kinds of gameplay experiences (something I don't expect from any new console by Sony or Microsoft).

I've got an Antec p190 Antecs are quite good at being restrained and tasteful. That Refine R4 is something else though. Really nice looking, might go that way next time I build a PC.

That's a pretty selective view of events.

It also depends on what kinds of games you want to play. Many of the games discussed here are of the indie variety and tend to be lighter on the graphics requirements. So you can get away with a fairly affordable low-end PC that can run many a low fidelity game. But of course, if you want to run Crysis 3, Witcher 2 or Planetside with max settings you're going to have to plonk down serious money for a high end graphics card and a pretty robust CPU.

I don't know what that means. (could be part of the problem lol)

Hope we have a good group tomorrow! I'm ready to ghost-cap some bases!

Well it's an image supplied by nVidia so that's not a stretch.

IMO Proteus has a really unique impressionistic style that's much more aesthetically interesting than what I've seen of Witness so far. Witness seems stuck between abstraction and realism, and judging from trailers, succeeds at neither.

Would Ken do that? Just go on the internet and stretch the truth for marketing purposes?

I'm not that excited by the art style. Dear Esther set my standard for remote islands realllly high. The stuff shown in the demo looks really plain. The puzzles... I can't tell at all what they're about, which is probably the point, but is also making it difficult to form an opinion.

Yeah it was classic. I was like: "got a guy on my tail, tibbles. Tibbles? Tibblesssss!" And then I crashed in a fiery ball shortly thereafter.

Nice flying with you last night, Tibbles. What was that platoon we were in? It sounded like it was being led by an old sherriff and, judging from the pitch of voice of the galaxy pilot, his plucky young sidekick.

I think it's the lack of an explicit narrative that's keeping it on my unfinished list. I know, how facile. But no matter how ingenious the puzzles, I just can't get that into a puzzle (or any) game that's purely mechanistic. (and is longer than an hour (pats Proteus on the head reassuringly))

Hm? That's what I'm trying to say: it's just common sense to wait for reviews before buying anything, regardless of the hype.

I've been done with pre-orders since the disappointment of HItman: Absolution. Little mini-games and extra guns or being able to play the arbitrary minute a game is released just doesn't seem worth risking that much cash on a game that could suck. And yeah, I too am super enamored with the promise of Bioshock: Infinite. There just isn't any reason to not buy it the week it's released once everyone's gotten a chance to play and review it.