youmeyou

How is gender an arbitrary decision? There may be good reasons to have the protagonist be a male, but it's not a frivolous concern that these games rarely if ever have positive and deep female characters.

That also raised my eyebrow. It has its flaws, it's glitchier than I would have liked, but it's still a really nicely designed combat system at the end of the day. Especially during my second playthrough, when I experimented with bombs, knives and traps in addition to magic, it felt varied and complex and so much more meaty and visceral than your average rpg swordfighting simulator.

Ok that looks pretty dang rad. Feels like I'd be playing Beverly Hills Cop The Game, which I'm ok with.

It's kind of like the Empire rebuilding the death star or a boss in Final Fantasy turning into a bigger boss upon death. It's an easy way to prologue tension and challenge. Not necessarily a plausible or interesting way though.

It's kind of fun even if you're playing with a lunatic. Even when it first came out there were people who already knew where all the secret scarf fragments were and would helpfully chirp you along. Fez had some pretty amazing puzzles, but the pacing was really trying and it performed so sluggishly when it first launched that I didn't have the patience to finish it.

Wow, almost forgot about Mirror's Edge. The ladders were pretty decent in that game. Except when you missed them. ARGH.

hahahahha awesome, barichnikov.

When I think of 'bad' ladders it's always in the realm of FPS games. So maybe it's just the dynamic of your character magnetically sticking to a ladder shaped object and gliding up and down that irks me.

Are there any examples of good ladders in games? That aren't slanted boards or 'press W to ladder?' Also, playing Black Mesa reminded me how much I hate ladders in video games. Especially in that fucking Blast fucking pit.

I've been playing it on PC with a controller. In my experience, the controller works better than mouse and keyboard. Also you can only buy the entire package on steam, as opposed to individual episodes on consoles. I haven't seen anything regarding the iPad version, but if the controls work (and there's no virtual keypad nonsense) I'm sure it would be a pretty neat medium to play on.

Journey kind of falls under 'more of an experience than game' category. But it was such a wonderful, memorable experience. No to mention, stripping people's identities for multiplayer was a master stroke on the dev's part. Never enjoyed playing online with strangers more than in Journey.

You did this to us Mington. You have no one to blame but yourself here.

My own top list includes: Journey, Dishonored, Hotline Miami and Walking Dead. Not necessarily in that order. Will mull on it for the next few months and some spots may be shuffled (especially if I get my hands on XCOM before the year is out) I like your criteria Gwardinen. It's pretty much the same one I use. Additionally: emotional impact

Is that a real quote from Machinima? That is some prescient goofing from Idle Thumbs's early few podcasts. "Fallout: Oblivion with guns"

I think it's kind of fruitless to have an argument over definitions. If you don't enjoy the game feel and the gameplay then that's fine. I'm just disagreeing with the assertion that it's an FPS that they put a mech skin on. You cannot just run and gun around like you would in an fps. Every move must be considered due to fuel and overheating costs. And when you're not dashing, which is to say: most of the time, your movement is slow and you are very exposed. It takes a dramatic relearning of strategy and routine to actually be good at this game. And it's strategy and routine that I haven't ever come across before, which is why I find it exciting.

I think that's an unfair characterization Orv. You have limited fuel, you overheat, you can repair yourself... it has plenty that makes it a 'mech' game. Is it Mech Warrior? No. But it doesn't feel like I'm a human being running around with robot stuff skinned over the screen. Ha! I also just noticed PiratePoo comparing it to DOTA a few posts before I did. (and that was even before the mothership base mode)

Hawken has added a new mode that kind of reminds me of a lord's management game. Each team has bases and must collect enough energy to launch battleships against the other base. You then battle over control of an AA turret at the center of the map to try and keep your battleship alive long enough to do damage to the enemy's base. The thought first occurred to me as the matches take a loooong time to beat. Lots of back and forth of attacking and defending as your respective battleships bite the dust.

That Kotaku graph is kind of classically missing the point. I'd rather play a game that gave me memorable and well-crafted experiences than an enormous empty world. Which is why my preference of late has been for hub-world type games like Witcher 2, Dishonored and Deus Ex:HR. Playing Sleeping Dogs now and totally agree btw, the city could be even smaller and I wouldn't notice, since the game seems more focused around its central narrative than the GTA games have traditionally been.

You know, there's a lot of hate for Heavy Rain but I believe they took the dialogue driven adventure format into some very interesting places. The whole silence as an option and being forced to make a decision before a certain period of time elapsed was used very effectively in that game. Not to mention, dealing with characters who were keeping things from you and having to conversationally 'battle' NPCs in order to move the story forward. TWD is taking this ball even further IMO. (and i'll have to check out those earlier Telltale games you mentioned, vimes) I think what makes these two games exemplary in terms of dialogue is that they do manage to illicit many of the same sensations in the player that a violent action game might. In Hotline, you've got to think super fast; you've got to combine strategy with gut instinct. I'd argue the same goes for HR and TWD. And those are the kinds of dialogue driven adventures that appeal the most to me. I enjoy games that manage to get the adrenaline pumping. So maybe that's where you and I differ on this particular question, plasticflesh. I think experiencing a dialogue as puzzle removes the urgency, the emotion, and the agency. Ultimately all games and most interesting interactive things are presenting a problem/puzzle to be solved but I prefer to become absorbed and immersed into the world the game's designer has constructed. In order for that to happen, the artificiality of the world must be masked. Opening the curtains and revealing the machinery is a valid path for a game to take, but I feel that makes immersion impossible. Now when I approach something like Fable, I'm substituting communication for puzzle solving. Fart returns happy unless character likes muscle flex then muscle flex returns gift. It's interesting that the game makes the logic so visible, but I'd rather play a game like Walking Dead where for example you're given the option to lie or be honest without knowing how the NPC you're interacting with will react and if they'll believe you or not. Both games have their hierarchies and branching trees, but if the branches are hidden, how much ultimately does it matter that they exist?

I don't doubt that it will improve, but I don't think there is an example yet of believable dynamic dialogue that also tells an interesting authored story. Everything I see at this point is more at the level of exercise or puzzle as opposed to being a narrative driven game. Guns are far easier to simulate than language. You can simplify down the mechanics of a gun and build convincing gameplay out of it. But when you simplify the mechanics of speech you get Fable 2's fart noises. Which are a great start, but not even close to the level of nuance needed to establish verisimilitude.

Dynamic conversation systems while super interesting still seem rather limited by technology. There's a really interesting article about human thought processes and computer processes being (currently) incompatible and the way that shapes the software we use and thusly our daily lives: http://nplusonemag.c...ty-of-computers which seems related. While there can be attempts to get around the current limitations of technology, computers cannot simulate intelligence to the extent that a human could suspend disbelief and feel like they weren't talking to a program. Or see the author behind said program in the case of video games. Another example of a game that attempts to simulate and make a challenge out of human conversation is Façade, a game in which you visit a couple for a dinner party and can interface with their AI by typing something in a text field. The AI then attempts to parse what you are saying and apply it to the context of the dinner party. It's pretty rudimentary, but when it works, it feels like a plausible exercise in pushing the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior. Monkey Island swordfighting isn't actually that dynamic. Each insult has a counter-insult and it's simply a matter of playing the mini-game enough times to have all possible combinations available to use. Argument Champion is also pretty interesting but it tends to feel like a puzzle game as opposed to a conversation. It breaks language down into interconnected synonyms to the point that the words lose meaning. Which is interesting in an of itself but wouldn't work in a game where you actually were having someone trying to author a story. Which is kind of why I linked the article. Dynamics and scripted storytelling are at this point, not really compatible. You can program algorithms that resemble organic occurrences, but they won't seem plausible as stories. Walking Dead is engaging because it hooks you into a (actually, several) well told story. It also manages really well to hide the way events unfold based on your decisions. So it feels less like a 'Choose your own adventure' book than Bioware games or Bethesda games do. The point isn't solely about interacting with AI in Walking dead. The writing, supported by a dialogue and events system, is engendering an emotional response in you as you play through the story. If that makes sense.

I support turning comments off completely in those cases. There are plenty of portal sites that occasionally turn off comments for news pieces that are likely to bring in the raging hordes. I'm not saying don't delete obviously racist, sexist awful comments, but 'rude' is a subjective description and I've outlined why I feel that way.

A website can obviously do whatever they want. It's not entitlement to have an opinion of free speech. And if I think a website that purports to support 'community', private as it may be, is likely to delete a comment because they don't agree with it, I will simply stop visiting that website. If idlethumbs started deleting comments that were say, critical of idlethumbs, the situation would be the same for me. I would simply stop participating, because sites that do that end up turning into boring echo chambers.

Better not to have comments at all if you're going to pick and chose which ones suit you better. Politeness is a matter of subjective opinion and sometimes when someone disagrees strongly you can find that as impolite as being personally insulted. It's a slippery slope, to point out the obvious.

"are you curious" "error accessing server" "retry" "are you curious" "error accessing server" "retry" "are you curious" "error accessing server" "retry"