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Totes agree Shammack. When I play it lethal it's like a very nice looking platformer. When I play it nonlethal it's a fascinating puzzle game.

It's a complex problem, which I don't think is solved simply by putting a timer on everything. Dead Rising for example, was a big theme park full of fun things to play with, and then you got a contrary message from the game telling you to hurry up and complete a bunch of objectives before an arbitrary deadline, which really grated. I don't think I would have been happy if I had to rush through Mass Effect either. Open-world games designed around exploration seem mechanically at-odds with that kind of linear timekeeping. I like tenseness based on danger and overcoming challenges. I dislike tenseness based on a countdown timer or a deadline. Feels like work, not game.

I think Sleeping Dogs did this pretty well, the plot elements were being driven by your involvement for the most part. The more you poked your nose in the hornet's nest the more the story kicked forward, sometime brutally. It was rare that you had a mission that was like 'come save me, now or at your earliest possible convenience!' The examples Thunderpeel mention drive me nuts too. Fallout 3 especially: it's just ridiculous that at the end you're basically the one dude everyone is waiting on to start a giant land war and you can take days or years to get there. Then again, there was no rush in Far Cry 2 and I never beat it. I tend to need some kind of overarching even vague sense of urgency to continue playing a role playing game. Once I finish the main story in most of these games I lose the will to go back and finish side quests. So it's a very fine and problematic line.

It's almost like charity for THQ... which probably does totally need it.

See Left 4 Dead on how to create an unobtrusive framing narrative that loosely justifies the actions required of you.

I wasn't really a fan of the bosses because it felt like you had way less options in how to approach them. So: similar to DE:HR in that regard. But at least they were violent encounters in a game built around violence unlike Deus Ex which ostensibly offered a non-violent playthrough.

Love the mic drop at the end. Great cast guys! I think Far Cry 3 was totally made for me; as it does kinda sound like a game made by people who didn't like Far Cry 2. I'm definitely looking forward to hearing more impressions about from you guys, once you've played some of it. It's funny that the lack of oppressiveness can end up being a bad thing but I've definitely experienced this. Most recently between playing Stalker: CoP right after Shadow of Chernobyl. While CoP was much more refined and more fun to play, it wasn't as emotionally impressive as Shadow was. Mainly because in Shadow I couldn't run 10 feet without hitting an anomaly or radiation cloud so the need to survive was far more pressing and worked nicely with the narrative of the world. I can see something similar happening with Far Cry 3.

My point is: just because Rockstar is saying "Hehe, hey guys, this hot lady is merely a cultural artifact. So, let's look at her boobs but in a smug self-aware way" does not mean the end result (pandering to the male gaze) is any different than what IO or 343 are doing by putting objectified depictions of women in their games. IO and 343 are merely being really uncreative and immaturely serious about it. But after 5 games all doing the same thing and to lesser and lesser effect, I kinda think Rockstar is getting to be pretty uncreative and immaturely serious themselves.

Tyler, you have blinders on if you think these depictions are any better than the other examples you mentioned. Hiding behind satire and making 0 new or interesting statements while doing so and repeatedly pandering to a mostly male audience is a lame move on Rockstar's part. While the Hausers are better than anyone else at making sandboxes feel real and well-crafted, I don't think they're any different than IO (and you're so incredibly wrong about Borderlands 2 - a game that has probably more positive female characters than men) in the way they approach women in their games.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to say an image that's essentially the setup to many an actual porn is kinda pornographic. The prostitutes have always been a shock value thing that mostly angers parents and fox news. It's fucked up, but it all comes down to the fact that it's a game written by guys for guys and that's just disappointing to see. (if not surprising).

#1reasonwhy has been trending the past two days. it's a hashtag for why women do not feel welcome in the games industry, neither as consumers or creators. https://twitter.com/...h?q=#1reasonwhy kotaku has featured a few here: http://kotaku.com/5963528/heres-a-devastating-account-of-the-crap-women-in-the-games-business-have-to-deal-with-in-2012

I read a bit of the GameInformer article this morning and there's a lot of head shake-worthy things being said by Hauser and co. First off, the idea that an older gangster who's getting pulled back in to a life of crime (necessitated by debt) is a "new, interesting idea" to paraphrase, is ridiculous. Hauser should really start watching some of the relavent media he's been purposely ignoring, like, I dunno... Heat? to get some perspective on how original a story he's writing. The main characters really don't interest me. They feel very much like cookie cutter models designed to narratively support the type of city exploring/destroying gameplay gta is known for. Nothing more. Which will be fine for most, but I don't think this story is going to add much that is new. And in terms of gender stuff: as disappointed as I am that there aren't female protagonists, this image bothers me a lot more: Seductress and Dominatrix stereotypes playing perfectly off each other into an image of pure pornographic fantasy for a male audience. Yay! Not!

That is fantastic. Charles Barkley has the best head.

Just spent 2 hours taking a biodome and 2 hours defending it from its previous occupants. Both events were equally difficult and, in turn, rewarding. Even outside of a squad, it was easy to figure out the objective was 'attack/defend this base right here.' But this game basically has no tutorial section and is confusing as hell so it takes a bit to figure out what's going on. My main super major gripe at this point is the engine. By the end my fps was down to 15 and remained there no matter what quality setting I chose. Think it's just the strain of rendering hundreds of characters. (i have 2 SLI'd 660 ti's)

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Though, this PC gamer review does make a good point of the marketing deficiency: http://www.pcgamer.com/review/far-cry-3-review/ We’d been told it was an ‘open world’ game, but everything Ubisoft showed of it made it look like a monologue-heavy, tightly scripted adventure, its freedom limited to small mission areas. That is in there, it turns out: there’s an absurdly long series of missions about rescuing your friends from the pirates who’ve captured them. But it’s just one of the many different games you can play on this vast, freely explorable tropical island.

Well the plot of Far Cry 3 is largely about drugs, judging from the reviews. And in the E3 video from last year they show you attacking an enemy camp, something you will undoubtedly do ALL the time in Far Cry 3. Not sure what else they could have shown.

Hm maybe they were, I could be misremembering. I remember the GTAIV ones being much less varied and dynamic.

No, I think it's more like you guys all assumed it would be terrible without knowing much about it. The main villain is certainly already more interesting than the Jackal - and what more do you need to know about an open world game besides the fact that it's open world? How much did we know about Skyrim before it came out? Except that we had to save the world at the end of it?

So I played a few hours with the RPS guys last night. This game is pretty damn fun when you're rolling with a large squad! Incredibly buggy and shoddy performance unfortunately. But the sense of scale is intact, trying to capture a mammoth biodome in a several mile wide clearing while whale sized dropships careen by flocked by clouds of buzzing one-man fighters, epic is not an unfair description.

I'd be down to try and form an idle thumbs squad, if there's enough interest. My username is fancifulnotion. haven't set anything else up yet.

They're more fun than the GTAIV ones but definitely not more fun than the San Andreas ones. In San Andreas you dated around 4 women, and each woman had particular interests. Except, unlike in Sleeping Dogs, you weren't led directly to do what her interest was, you had to figure it out. Some women liked greasy spoons, some liked fancy restaurants. Some liked you if you were buff, some liked you if you were fat. It was a fun challenge, figuring out how to Groundhog Day yourself to make a girl like you, and one that should be present in all dating sims worth their salt.

I was looking for the same thing. I assume that means Minerva's Den is not effected by the Steam sale then.

Just finished it. Definitely has been my favorite sandbox game in a long while. The atmosphere, for the most part, is great. Driving through rain-slicked streets listening to 90s techno as vendors hawk their wares under the neon glow of a hundred store signs - I could almost smell the duck lard frying. And the story, while fairly generic, was well executed. It zipped along at a reasonable pace, and was met with little resistance from the side missions. To it's benefit, the emphasis of Sleeping Dogs is placed on the central narrative, so you never feel like you're aimlessly wandering around doing filler. Well, 'never' is too strong. Many of the side missions are very much filler. All the races are too easy, the dating is so ridiculously superficial, the random events are dull and repetitive. Thankfully you don't have to do most of them. They're very much optional, my face meter was full 3/4 into the game so I clearly didn't have to do as many face meter quests as I did. The fighting and gunplay are both miles better than anything in the genre. I hope every subsequent game takes notice. They've really managed to make the micro as believable as the macro. The city feels real when you're driving at 60 miles and hour through it, and the thugs feel real as you're driving your fist into their face. It still suffers from the floaty physics and sluggish responsiveness endemic to gta-alikes but I'd say its still a step in the right direction.