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I feel like we can narrow it down to one week, it really shouldn't take more than an hour for any colossus right? (Though I've only ever done 5 of them in this game so I don't know how long the later fights get)

I didn't find the first one underwhelming at all. On the subject of lizards. I tried going around and trying to find lizards and fruit for a bit but it felt tangential in that soul deadening way that video game collectible collecting tends to feel so I stopped. Think I'll forgo ghost world exploring and just stick to colossi murdering.

The purpose is to be able to use steam on your tv with a controller. Standard PC interfaces are nearly unusable on a screen that's sitting 5-10 feet away from you. Hence the big buttons. Anyway, I'm a fan of the interface, it just takes forever to launch. And since I'm always switching between playing on my PC and my TV I can't just set Steam to always start in Big Picture. Also some games have a launcher that doesn't accept controller commands, thus negating the usefulness of Big Picture. Unless Valve makes it mandatory for all controller enabled games to have controller enabled launchers, I can't see this problem going away soon. It's the down side of the relatively open nature of PC gaming I guess.

I haven't heard about the checkpoint bug, that sounds awful! And everything you said in the last paragraph I agree with 100%

Yep that nails it: it's hard to overcome the problem of figuring out gameplay that supports a narrative that doesn't have you being a pscyhopathic killer. Like someone mentioned in one of the Unlimited Hyperbole podcasts, you don't get any dissonance when playing as Kratos in God of War. They guy is a proud murderous asshole. But wise-cracking nice-guy Drake gives pause. I think a game that centered around platforming in places like the Nepalese mountains (and maybe added some I Am Alive wall climbing mechanics to make it more of a challenge) and then played up the stealth aspects of the game and put you up against far fewer enemies and then dipped everything in top-notch storytelling, would be one idea. And make it 2 hours long! Ah fantasies. I'm holding out hope that The Last of Us is going to be where Naught Dog finally tries to address the dissonance between their narratives and their gameplay. If anything, it makes more sense to kill-or-be-killed in a zombie survival scenario. And it seems like there are options to completely sneak around bandits, though I haven't seen much evidence of that in the trailers (not to say it doesn't exist). I wouldn't be totally surprised if there was a truck driving turret section though, so mington were I a betting man I'd leave those odds be.

Played through Uncharted 1 & 2 over the past few weeks (what can I say, it's winter). It took some serious patience to finish Uncharted the 1st, because that game is mostly not fun at all. It treats you to a light airy narrative that's fun and pulpy and then shoves you into arena after arena full of nameless enemies and tasks you to gun them down in the thousands. I'm not a fan of using the PS3 controller for shooters and there's basically no auto-aim in the first game so that went about as well as you'd expect. But it did help me invest a bit more in the characters which I do think are really, really well done. Naughty Dog absolutely lives up to the hype of being great storytellers. The banter between Drake, Scully, Elena, and Chloe is wonderful. And you get nice little patterns that show up between both games, like Drake's macho urge to drive whenever they grab a car, Elena's transformation from naive reporter to thick-skinned journalist. I eat it up like so much Tree of Life juice. Uncharted 2 is miles better than its predecessor in terms of pretty much everything, especially gameplay and presentation. Climbing is better, levels are better designed, more varied, and stunning to look at. Finally there's a bit of auto-aim, and actual stealth options. The stealth is actually quite good, and feels more fitting with the general Indiana Jones tone of the game. Sneaking into a base, taking out a few grunts then accidentally turning a corner onto a squad of baddies and backtracking rapidly and often comically. I could totally see Harrison Ford doing this. Of course, I'd have trouble seeing Harrison Ford pick up a gatling gun and mow down dozens of guys as Drake does later in the game, but... video games. I seem to remember an essay once criticizing Uncharted 2 for having the main boss tell you you're no different than he, how many have you killed, etc. Actually, it may have been in the Tom Bissel book, Extra Lives. It really is a silly moment. I'm like, well maybe you shouldn't employ a small nation as your personal army, dude. Also I don't seem to remember more than a few soldiers coming in with us to Shangri-la but whatever. It really is an agonizing bit of dissonance, the need to make this great story into a fucking video game. My favorite part of the game was waking up in the Tibetan village and wandering around with Tenzin. It was a purposeful reprieve on the designers part but it also felt like a game that could have been. Then the baddies invaded and I felt real anger, not only at what the game was targeting (bad guys fucking up a peaceful village and my friends) but at the game itself for intruding in on such a nice moment.

Not exactly. While Hotline Miami did come to mind while playing (especially since you can pick up certain items such as screwdrivers and murder people gruesomely with them) you are penalized for killing anyone besides the designated targets. So if you want to get that fabled Hitman high score the best way to play it is to not interact with anyone besides the target, though I found it much easier to get through by subduing people and hiding their bodies. So it's much more like Dishonored if you want to make 2012 game comparisons. Except it has some hilarious loopholes in that respect: if you silently kill an incidental NPC and hide the body your negative score is erased. And, best loophole by far: if you choke an NPC to unconsciousness you get less points docked than outright killing them. However you can then dispose of their body in any way you like including dropping them off the balcony of a hi-rise and still get the same "hide body" bonus point. So the game doesn't care if you kill them later, just not as a method of knocking them out.

Having just finished Absolution, I'd like to review it in light of Blood Money, which is the only other HItman game I've played. My assumption that Absolution would be a more stripped down and streamlined experience than Blood Money has mostly born out. Miniaturized levels, no choice of weapon loadouts, and the introduction of linear stealth-focused level design all evidence this. Excepting the last one, which I'll get to, I'd argue that these changes are actually an improvement on the Hitman formula. Why? Well, if the goal of HItman is to make you feel like a cold-calculating killer, Absolution is far more successful at this than its predecessors. A partial reason is 'next-gen' graphics and up-to-date production values which allow for much better immersion in the game's virtual spaces. You're not wrestling with controls or being distracted by badly modeled characters barking poorly recorded lines. The developers have clearly taken a lot of time to add life to the backdrops of the game. Guards are constantly engaging in conversations that are some of the most natural sounding of any game I've ever played. Most of the writing is silly at best and offensive at worst but despite this, it adds depth to the game to simply have NPCs talking about their personal lives and bitching at each other as you crawl around in the darkness trying to figure out ways to dispatch them. Think Dishonored's guard dialogue but far more varied and fleshed out. The main reason I find Absolution to be an improvement, though, is in the actual design of the mechanics. Blood Money had a very particular and grating play style: explore a huge area from top to bottom - dying and restarting constantly - in order to find the solution to the puzzle of the level (how best to assassinate the target). Each level was a bore to play up until that actual assassination itself. Absolution improves on this in a number of ways. For one, there's instinct vision. It basically allows you to see everyone around you in addition to objects of interest. I love instinct vision, it totally makes Hitman into a game where you play as a bad-ass genetically engineered super-killer and not a random dude wandering through the wrong door and getting gunned down in slow mo as my previous Hitman experiences had been. It replicates that element that makes Mark of the Ninja so great: taking the guesswork out of stealth, immediately illustrating the problem and allowing you to focus your time on fun solutions to it instead. And there are plenty of solutions in the assassination levels. All very classically Hitman-esque: poison food or drink, drop something heavy, blow them up, push them out a window, it's all there. Not having a loadout also encourages you to use your environment and find natural "accidental" ways to kill an enemy, which is the very best way to play Hitman. Now despite all this glowing praise, Absolution ends up being a fairly disappointing experience. If they had taken the general game structure of Blood Money to heart and had nothing but a series of assassination missions I wouldn't be saying this. The assassination missions are awesome in Absolution. The forced-stealth Metal Gear Solid style linear segments are not. And they, for some insane reason, make up the majority of the game. Since the story of Absolution basically has 47 on the run, you get to spend a lot of time... running. And hiding. And it's so very, very dull to play a Hitman game this way. Especially when you can break most of these missions by grabbing a guard, stealing his clothes and just walking straight to the exit (while keeping an eye on the instinct meter). Gone is the IO Interactive who merely wanted Hitman to be a violent playground. Whoever is leading this project fancies themselves a film director (the game even has directing credits fading up during its intro) and mediocre B-move quality story is shoved down your throat at every opportunity. And it's not a good story. The same tone from earlier Hitman games is there and feels even more out of place in 2012. Men are perverts and women are whores, it's a slurry of cribbed action movie tropes and straight to DVD acting. And the misogyny is slathered on every available surface. The nuns being only the most limelit example of this. They are only present in one mission, and exist for no other reason than to receive brutal deaths at your hands. It's pointless and infuriating, and I would have trouble believing that even one woman had a voice in this project. What makes it all the more disappointing is that this stuff settles like a heavy dirty blanket and obscures the parts of the game that are actually excellent and well executed. And now that IO won't be leading the next game in the franchise, they don't even chance to learn from their mistakes.

Yeah I don't mean to say that you can't have an interpretation outside of the writer's intent. That's perfectly valid. Also, you're right: the writer totally supports walking away. Which is pretty interesting. I kind of wish they had gone further with that strain of conversation, as one of the podcast guys admitted he never played past the radio tower section, and I'm just curious as to what this ultimately means in regards to the message Williams is trying to convey. Because if the game is a "slow boil" as he says in the next breath, but you quit halfway through that boil, because you find the actions of your character objectionable then you are technically in line with the game's message but you aren't experiencing the full thrust of said message. Just the very part first tap from that rope-a-dope. I guess that's valid, but it's weird to me that a piece of art can be successful by driving away its audience. But I'm sure there are countless examples in the art world and maybe it's just something I have to wrap my head around.

Dude. Rad!

I think I see what you're getting at. Ultimately, however, I think it's a difference between personal interpretation of a narrative and the explicit narrative the writers put in there. You can play Bioshock and quit the game before entering the bathosphere and invent a narrative that your character waited for rescue on the surface. I doubt that's what the writers wanted though, and I similarly doubt that's what the writer from Spec Ops wants either. If you quit the game before experiencing all of the story you're making an interesting statement and it's interesting for the sake of discussion but you're not actually experiencing the content of the game. While a movie in a theater goes on regardless of whether or not you are present a game still has written material that is experienced by playing. It doesn't stop existing simply because you don't engage with it. So in that way, it is very much like a book. A choose-your-own adventure is supposed to end when you reach the end of a story chain. Not when you put the book down. It can end but that's not the intention of the writer. So it's a question of personal intent versus intent of the writer. Which is in an interesting discussion to have. But what you're saying is the game is designed to have quitting be an option. And I just don't see that being the case.

That's like saying every time you turn the game off, your characters walk out of the Dubai. (and then walks back in when you start it again) That narrative doesn't happen in the game, so it's purely invention that it happens outside of the game. Now if it was something like Fable 2 where you made money based on real life time whether or not you were playing the game, or Metal Gear Solid where interacting with the hardware had effects on the game (psycho mantis controller swapping); where the game's designers actually implemented some way for your turning off the game to be a recognizable mechanic, there could be an argument for turning off the game being an option in Spec Op's choose-your-own-adventure narrative.

I think that message was referring to the first chapter. It's broken up into a few chapters. I think it takes closer to 4 hours to finish. I never played the iPhone version and I hear it's not a great medium for it. The game really benefits from an iPad size screen. In regards to the gameplay, it's not deep. But I found it well executed. There was a great tenseness to the fights, helped along by an excellent soundtrack which builds up nicely during these moments. And the puzzles take advantage of the touch controls, instead of ignoring them or using them as analogues to a mouse, which I appreciated.

Swords and Sworcery is still one of the only iPad games that I can unreservedly recommend. Really stunning aesthetics and lovely little details everywhere. Gameplay is simple and unobtrusive and probably disappointing to anyone looking for a true adventure game experience. It feels more like an interactive art piece to me. I've been playing nonstop Super Hexagon on the iPhone and I'm sure it's even better on iPad. One of my top 10 GOTYs of 2012. Ghost Trick, a DS port of a very clever adventure game with superb animation and long winded characters.

I'm holding out hope for Battleblock Theater actually coming out this year (was originally scheduled for 2010). Castle Crashers was such a wonderful experience, and I just want to see more from Behemoth.

Chile was actually one of the easier ones. Most of the targets spend their time alone and thus are easy to take out. Rodi, that's exactly my problem with Blood Money. And is why I compared to an adventure game (with guns!). You have to spend a lot of time exploring, observing the systems, figuring out the pieces of the puzzle before finally solving it. Does not offer very much instant satisfaction. Which is not a knock against it necessarily, just why had so much trouble with it. Though I did play almost 12 hours of it, so I definitely tried.

The disguises in Blood Money and Absolution work the same except for one exception: in Absolution, NPCs wearing the same outfit as you will recognize you for a fraud if you get near them unless you use your (finite) "Instinct" to hide your face. Otherwise they work the same: an outfit will allow you to walk freely around a specific area. Some outfits are limited: a party guest can only walk around the party, a security guard outfit can walk freely anywhere, as an example.

I think you can sneak by every guard in the first mission of Absolution as well. But it does encourage you to shoot them, and it certainly is an easier game when played that way. (and damn if the shooting mechanics aren't cool) The disguise system seems better thought out than in the OG hitman games. As opposed to having ultrapowered disguises where you could walk right up to a cop wearing his buddy's uniform, now you have to figure out who's in a given room before entering it. The chef thing does seem pretty stupid, and is where the system breaks. That mission in general felt pretty off. It was similar in setup to an OG hitman mission, but it amounted to interacting with a choice of one of several options and then immediately ending. There weren't any side bonus activities like most of the missions in Blood Money have.

I'm with you on the interface, Rodi, but if anything those were the least of my problems with Blood Money: http://www.idlethumb...160#entry215520 It might also be less of an issue on the PC. Since there are more buttons to go around. It's a learn by failing sort of system, not totally dissimilar to how Dark Souls does it (which is probably why I have trouble enjoying either game). I'm 2 hours into Absolution and while it's beautiful and tutorializes the player way better than previous titles it seems to have gone too far in the direction of guided, story-heavy stealth game and feels very conflicted. The train station escape scene (that we saw in the early demos) is really quite exhilarating though. So it has its brilliant nuggets inside what is probably an overall mediocre package.

I also am probably not ready for the Dark Souls experience. But I still need to give it a few more goes.

Wait, a game slowing down time to facilitate gameplay is a totally separate thing from frames dropping. A shmup with dropped frames is not a game I would ever want to play. (for fear of putting holes in nearby things I hold dearly).

Interesting read, I_smell. The close ups and the polygons are a great point, and having an art style be supported by its medium is totally vital. I played the Ni No Kuni demo and can totally see the video gameyness of it. It doesn't feel like you're playing a Studio Ghibli movie, it feels like you playing a jRPG wrapped in the colorful fabrics of a Ghibli film. Which on its own is still pretty great. The animation of the characters is still nicely executed, there's lots of character in the way your little buddies move around the battlefield, but it's a separate thing from the film world (which is once again, not necessarily terrible) On framerate I'm not really in agreement. Film and animation works well in the 24fps (or 12fps) world because it's a passive medium. I prefer video games to have the most frames possible. Because when I hit frame spikes/lags my suspension of disbelief that I am controlling an avatar in a digital world is lost. Not to mention, inability to perform fine actions. For example, if Ni No Kuni was running at 12fps I would constantly be struggling in the combat scenes as I'm trying to reposition my characters and queue up spells and being frustrated by lack of response from my actions. Can't really speak on SotC as I've only ever played the HD version.

hey, I couldn't get anyone to play planetside 2 and that's free!

As to using sexualization towards the purpose of satire, I think a great example of how to do it right is Aeon Flux. The exaggerated way in which she is depicted manages to both invite and disgust the male gaze. It's sexualization taken to a grotesque level. And it is 100% a comment on how women are depicted in comics and cartoons. And I think the comment is way more clear in this case, where her features are actually distorted, than in ads for GTA where you're just given an image of a well-proportioned women posing seductively and without context (besides being a comment on other pictures of women posing seductively without context i guess)

Like I said, you can argue that it's satire but I personally think its unsuccessful in that respect and comes off more as pandering. Is it really necessary to use pinup babes to make a statement about oversexualization in American media? Seems about as useful as the trend Chris pointed out with violent video games trying to make a statement about hyper-violence in American media. You get to make an easy, obvious statement, and then pretend you're not just pandering to your audience's base instincts. Win-win! As for all this stuff about clever writing and puns, that's great but besides the point. I agree the writers of Rockstar are far more clever than many of their industry counterparts. How does that make them any less male-centric and negative in their depictions of women? In the end of GTA 3 you shooting your annoying gabbing female partner as the credits roll. Ha ha, what a bitch amiright? Rockstar loves to make jokes at the expense of women in its games. Women in the games are either date power ups or hookers to use for health. And while the actual written narratives have gotten more nuanced, the playable actions within game world and the packaging of the product seems as immature as ever. So I see a dissonance there.