youmeyou

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Posts posted by youmeyou

  4. Posted

    My secret hope is that these lead to a resurgence of actual functioning arcades. There's some cool work being done in NYC by places like Babycastles and NYU's game center that I try to participate in as I am able but it's all still very niche. But yeah, without a groundswell of some sort I can't see these types of games reaching the broader audience of solitary players spread across the globe.

  6. Posted

    What I'm talking about is this phenomenon of cultural fetishization. Like it would seem "crazy" to concept a cyberpunk game set in mexico city, or in south-central LA, it's always gonna take place in some Seattle lookalike, but a day of the dead game comes out and we all expect this.

  7. Posted

    Though I think parallels can be drawn with games/movies/books about Ninjas leaning heavily on well worn stereotypes about Japanese culture. It might not necessarily be untrue that there were Ninjas/Luchadores/Day of the Dead skeletons in existence, but the fact that they are the most outward facing element of an entire nation's culture and history and no attempt is ever made to dive deeper or examine modern day non-fantastical cultural realities can seem somewhat insulting.

  8. Posted

    It's a good point to consider for sure. Honestly I can't say either way. On the one hand this is definitely a fetishizing of certain well known cultural tropes, on the other hand it's a protagonist who isn't white! As callous as that is, that's what runs through my head as I play the game. I'm so starved for variety in game protagonists that even one that appears to be lazily stereotypical is welcome.

  9. Posted

    I also love all the references to other games, both old and new, throughout the game's art. And yeah it's kept wonderfully consistent with the luchadore theme.

     

    This is also a great coop game, up until you get to the crazy platforming parts. It does help with boss fight difficulty curves as they continue as long as one player stays alive. I quite enjoy the fight mechanics in general. Throwing enemies into each other gives me pretty strong Battletoads vibes.

  10. Posted

    Yeah I had to spend a lot of time figuring out port forwarding. I wish they had updated that aspect of terraria's awkward multiplayer. What they say about it on the cast is totally true though, it's awesome how easily you can move from your single player experience to a multiplayer one.

  11. Posted

    Yeah I'm definitely digging this. I love how often you guys interrupt each other to discuss tangential but awesome anecdotes.

     

    Appreciated the Resident Evil stuff. I remember passing the controller around a group of friends and no one wanting to touch it, no one wanting to be the one to round the corner and face the dreaded zombie cinematic then proceed to awkwardly rotate tank-like Jill around in a futile attempt at escape that most often ended with a full speed dash into a zombie hug.

  14. Posted

    Has anyone else seen this Battle of the Sexes game?  I keep seeing ads for it and every time I do I get angry because this game looks horrible in so many ways.  It's basically a trivia/knowledge board game, except the teams are men vs women where each team has to answer questions about the opposite sex.  Men get asked stuff about clothing, makeup, cooking, shoes, poetry, etc.  Women get questions about cars, tools, sports, more sports, machinery, etc.  It is the worst thing.

     

    I have this actually. It was a misguided present from my well-meaning younger brother. It's as silly and terrible as you'd imagine. It's pretty fun to play for the laughs though!

  15. Posted

    I have a better feel for what it's about, yeah. But I'm still going to take a 'wait and see' approach.

     

    I find the quazi-multiplayer aspect a bit worrying. What if I get the game months after release and all the planets have been claimed and bird species wiped out? I hope they're going to be spreading new players out across the universe in an organic fashion.

     

    Mirror Moon solved this by having seasons where the servers would reset and regenerate the universe every few months.

  17. Posted

    Some helpful detail in this RPS writeup: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/12/09/first-look-no-mans-sky/

     

    As you make your way towards the centre of the galaxy, the planet’s you pass are stepping stones along the way. You’ll land your ship on them and go hunting for resources. Those resources then, in some unexplained way, aid you in upgrading your ship and yourself. These upgrades allow you to travel larger distances, or maybe make you faster, or probably improve your guns. It’s still ambiguous. 

    No Man’s Sky isn’t a multiplayer game, in as much as you’ll never see another player. But the galaxy is the same between everyone and actions of “significance” will be shared. If you kill a single bird, that won’t be shared. If you make an entire species of bird extinct, then those creatures will blink out of existence for everyone.

  19. Posted

    In theory that's cool, but particularly with procedural tech, I think a lot of designers would struggle to make something that didn't either telegraph it (Huge! Teeth!) or fill with annoying gotchas (Haha! Poisonous!).

    Maybe a play on the anomalies of stalker. Though that could easily produce a whole shedload of "gotcha" scenarios. Since all anomalies in Stalker are mysteries until you fall victim to them or see what they do to NPCs. I found it added great tension to the game.

    Personally I don't think I'd be much drawn to Proteus ad infinitum. Proteus worked because of its abridged length. I suspect the gameplay layer above the exploration parts is what will make or break the experience. You can't just throw in space battles and expect them to be interesting, for example. How long has that one guy been working on Enemy Starfighter? Which is just one tiny piece of what No Man's Sky is promising?

    I agree it's a stunning trailer.

  20. Posted

    Agreed. Im playing AC: Black Flag right now and the prospect of collecting every last chest and shiny glowing orb is enough to induce instant exhaustion. Yet I find myself climbing the odd tree or roof to grab a collectable more often than you'd think considering how pointless they are.

    There's got to be some interesting psychology behind the average person's desire to collect nonsense items in games. Something about tidying caves back in our neanderthal days.

    I do get a kick out of climbing and exploring and searching for treasure, I just wish there was a bit more meaningful content at the end of the rainbow. Though perhaps in life there never is; maybe games are just trying to tell us that it's all about the journey.

  22. Posted

    This is kind of interesting because I'm finally playing Stanley Parable so have gone back to listen to the cast that tiptoes around its plot. I got something out of the episode back when I didn't know what the game was and now I'm getting even more out of it having now played the sections they discuss. So even though it was awkward in parts, I prefer a process like this to having gaps in episodes corresponding to every game I haven't played.

  24. Posted

    Counter-point: It does work a lot of times. Hunting and exploring for strange bits of lore was fun for a lot of things in WOW (the AQ gate opening race for sure.) Also, reading all the random logs and bits of story in Deus Ex or System Shock 2. When you can get people to imagine how a set-piece came to be, or how the world we are living in transformed into one like Deus Ex, but can't actually develop the content, just having expository lore laying around works really well.

     

     

     

    I understand and mostly hate how the lore works in Skyrim/Oblivion, but for all the terrible/bad lore, there are still some good points. Finding the Daedric lord quests in Elder Scrolls games is usually a hoot, because they do have such determined personalities, and you wanna see how they manifest their evil differently in each game, how is Clavicus Vile gonna try to screw you over this time, etc.

     

    It's reductionist to say it doesn't work. It just rarely works, and works well in a narrow range of situations, and where things are well designed to be novel and make you think "how did this get here?" It's no coincidence the Daedric lord quests are the most unique/least Fedex dungeon quests in TES.

     

    I also enjoyed the Daedric quests best but mostly because they were the most interesting quests to play in Skyrim thanks to novel goals and lack of the somber, overwrought tones of most of the other content. The personalities of the Daedric lords are great, but I didn't read about them in a book, I observed them through play.

     

    I do agree its reductionist. I think my attitude toward lore is: it's often sufficient to have lore in the backdrop of a universe without having to actually read it. I love Mass Effect's universe but I didn't spend much time reading the galactipedia before getting bored. But knowing that depth does exist provides a better stage for the personal stories that make that series truly great.

     

    So it's more complicated than NO LORE EVER. There must be a line walked between lore and 'world-building'. It's like what Damon Lindelof said about character writing. Give your character a whole life story, only a fraction of which ever gets discussed. But the fact that you, the writer, know that story is there to draw from is enough to make the writing done for the character more well rounded and plausible (hopefully).

  25. Posted

    Bissell's review of Skyrim contains a fantastic breakdown on the weird adherence to lore in some games.

     

    http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7290527/one-night-skyrim-makes-strong-man-crumble

     

    Because no one cares. Not really, they don't. And they don't care because it's not important. Dense expositional lore has no place in video-game stories — especially stories that go without highly wrought cinematics — and it seems increasingly clear that video games are neither dramatically effective nor emotionally interesting when the player's role becomes that of a dialogue sponge. More simply put, the stories of Demon's and Dark Souls are told in a way that only video games can tell stories. They don't suffer in comparison because there's no comparison to make. The story of Skyrim functions like that of a fantasy novel with digital appendices — and these digital appendices are the only reason anyone's reading it in the first place. If you threw most of the fantasy novel away, it wouldn't matter, because it's not nearly as good as an actual fantasy novel — and as fantasy cinema it's a pathetic joke.

    Maybe some of you love Skyrim's expository lore. I suppose this is possible. But I'm willing to wager that the sort of person who loves Skyrim's expository lore loves expository lore of all kinds — loves expository lore in principle. Asking an expository-lore-loving gamer whether there should be expository lore in a game like Skyrim is like asking an alcoholic if he'd like a drink. (He would.)