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Excellent talk from Joss Whedon about why he writes "strong female characters." (starts about 2:00 in)

There's a lot more overlap than you might think.

Errant Signal delivers again (also supports my take on the weird marketing for the game) https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7_tdztHiyiE Granted, it's an argument that we've heard before, but I think it does a good job at looking broadly at all the back and forth critical/audience reactions that went down during the weeks surrounding release.

Hmmmm this seems awful exploitative. Things like the Spelunky daily challenge encourage you to play daily by making it into a fun competition among friends. Guild Wars 2 releases new free content every month to keep population high. This... they're just dangling a sweepstakes carrot in front of my face to get me to log on to the game? I mean, unless the challenges are some kind of leaderboard style competition. Even with that it seems kind of weird (since the explicit goal is to enter a sweepstakes). It's why I never enjoyed the Steam ARGs, as good natured as they are. I don't want to play a game for some unrelated external benefit. I want to play it because something within the game's systems is compelling me to do so.

The other thing the spelunky "death clock" reader mail reminded me of was the Final Destination movies. (This was also spurred by Sean's fatalistic direction of conversation) In Final Destination, the audience watches as a series of seemingly benign events cascade, like some hideous Rube Goldberg machine, into the grisly death of one of the film's many disposable characters. A glass of water will spill near an electric socket causing the fireplace to turn on and superheat the stoker which will fly into a guys neck for example. I've often felt during exceptionally quiet moments when I am alone that maybe I'm a character in Final Destination and the scary theme music is queuing up for some unseen audience as a deadly sequence of events begins leading to me dying in a stupid and embarrassing way. I wonder if the next time Chris plays the daily challenge, he too will get the sneaking suspicion that events have unfolded that would dull his ill-earned confidence if he could see his run as an onlooker in the not-so-distant future.

Hosting a Halloween themed game night at my place so I made a quick poster:

That was fantastic.

Yeah, its closeness to Dishonored is what extra-sells Eldritch for me. I love sprinting at a mage, sliding under his cast spell and whacking him repeatedly with my dagger. Dagger + gun is a great combo. However, I will pick up a dynamite stick whenever I come across one, useful for blasting shortcuts through the level.

I never have. Getting stuck in a room with those guys is terrifying! You'd think they couldn't get through doors. I even threw a stick of dynamite at one and it did nothing. Running works pretty well.

Really cool. Not to mention the apparent mechanic of dispossessed drivers searching for abandoned vehicles with which to give chase. Don't think that happened in previous GTAs.

So you can play the beta now if you preorder the full game. Some thoughts: Despite being originally kind of bummed at how similar this game's aesthetic was to Minecraft's it plays so differently that you quickly forget the visual similarities. The AI in Eldritch, while still simple, is noticeably more complex simply thanks to the inclusion of stealth mechanics. So you can evade pursuit and sneak around enemies, they don't merely head straight to your coordinates. It's also made clear via audio cues exactly how exposed you are. Enemies all have their own barks, patroling, alerted, etc. It takes playing a bit to figure them all out but listening is rewarded and becomes vital as the game gets more difficult. The procedural levels are just fantastic. One of the many similarities this game shares with Spelunky is the modular level design and how you start to recognize certain chunks even as they are swapped with others each time the levels regenerate (this happens whenever you die. You are returned to a central hub from which to chose 1/3 books which represent levels). There's a refreshing amount of variety in level layout and enemy mix, it doesn't feel confusingly random, but there's always potential for surprise around every corner. A really interesting mechanic is the looting system. When you loot a monster it gets respawned somewhere in the level. If you don't loot it, it stays a corpse. What a brilliant way to manage item greed vs. self-preservation. Most of the time I end up looting but there have been a few moments when I only had 1 heart left and just wanted to get through the level and so I left the bodies alone and limped toward the exit. I've done two books so far. The first one is a bit easy as it's primarily a tutorial, but it gets challenging very quickly in the second. I have little doubt the third one will kick my ass.

If I remember correctly in Fate of Atlantis, if you didn't pick up something in the library when you first went through it, you couldn't solve a puzzle when you returned to it. But it could also have been just 'cus I was a stupid kid.

It's also fairly easy to stumble into an unwinnable state in old games. Not picking up certain items early in Fate of Atlantis as one example. Running out of health pickups in Half-Life and trying in vain to get through an area with a few points of health remaining is another. Actually Half-Life is a good example of an old game I admire but will never finish because the gameplay is just too grindingly difficult. I've had a save from somewhere in the train tunnels for ages now. I'd had enough of all the enemies aiming with 100% accuracy from across the room. Clearly all modern games are baby games in comparison.

I found out the form factor, guys:

Whoah: http://www.scribd.com/doc/170524064/The-Making-of-Shadow-of-the-Colossus

Dota 2 peripheral?! A digital lord's gauntlet.

I think it will be a perpetual motion machine designed to end world hunger. Calling it.

I think the 'Dear Niko' stuff is only effective if you've read Extra Lives, so I can see how it'd feel baseless without that context. He makes several points throughout. Some in the first paragraphs. He likes using rare words, its a stylistic choice I can see might be off putting. I find it fun and enlightening. No offense but, your complaints seem a bit nitpicky. Not a criticism!

Fantastic write-up from Tom Bissell: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9719678/tom-bissell-writes-letter-niko-bellic-grand-theft-auto-v via SoccerStar Argodale

How well is NVidia's SHIELD selling? My guess is terribly to awfully.

I'd be pretty into that.

It wasn't ever enough of a sticking point to be brought up of its own accord. I merely mentioned it to explain why I found Leigh's audio "review" (which adopts the same super-smooth tone) to be so on point.

It's primarily the smooth robotic delivery paired with lines like 'beautiful, diverse, sprawling satirical world with tons to see and do.' It's a cacophony of ideas and mechanics filtered through a lexicon of marketing lingo that proposes it as something normal and to be expected. They mention greed, then follow it quickly with cars clothes stocks and houses. Even the fact that it's a woman's voice in a game dominated by male ones kind of rubs me the wrong way. It has, after all, long been an established sales tactic to use women to sell a product designed for men (car shows, axe body spray, booth models). I wouldn't use the word creepy, but I was definitely unnerved by the pitch and tone (matched with the content) of that video after watching it.

God, that would be delish.