Problem Machine

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Everything posted by Problem Machine

  1. GOTY

    I haven't been able to afford many games this year so I feel like I should recuse myself,.. but fuck it. Hotline Miami.
  2. Okay, finally got this written and it came out to like 3000 words jeez. Pretty pleased with how it turned out. Here are a couple of quotations relevant to the discourse in this episode of the pod: Re: Violence discussion Re: Disappointment with the ending (spoilers, obviously) You can read the whole thing here.
  3. Hotline Miami

    Soo I wrote like 3000 words on why this game totally blew my fucking mind right out the back of my skull (aijiyentdotcom). Some of those words are funny!
  4. Hotline Miami

    It gets in your brain. It gets in your brain. It gets in your brain.
  5. Idle Thumbs Ruinationcast

    I've never actually seen it, just the amazing trailer. Is the whole thing worth watching?
  6. Idle Thumbs Ruinationcast

    edit: aw he beat me to it
  7. The Idle Book Club 3: Telegraph Avenue

    edit: never mind then Since it doesn't seem to have been announced anywhere here or on twitter as far as I can tell, the Telegraph Avenue episode is up on the main page now
  8. Jon Blow had a really good lecture on that subject. A few of his lectures have really helped me to clarify my own thinking in regard to game design. Highly recommended if you have the time. And the reason why I, personally as a critic and designer, find Hotline Miami so exciting is because it goes a long way towards resolving these problems. I'm currently writing a... manifesto? Well, a critical analysis, maybe, which goes into more detail. Hopefully some of y'all will find it interesting.
  9. "...the blood-splatters and severed limbs, the realistically exploding skulls, the extruded viscera and errant eyeballs and wildly distributed pieces of ground meat confetti."
  10. Sorry, yes, hemotechnics is a word I made up and Chris admirably inferred the etymology.
  11. I kind of feel the opposite. I think the most games aren't about violence, they're about hemotechnics. When they're actually ABOUT violence, or at least address it head-on as with Hotline Miami, it's a breath of fresh air because a) it's more honest and it's more internally consistent. I wrote about this a while ago as well: Cardboard Cutout Massacre 2012
  12. The Idle Book Club 3: Telegraph Avenue

    Stop trying to make me angry.
  13. The bit about Hotline Miami had me really frustrated as I rarely am when reading the podcast, since I really thought that you guys weren't giving it enough credit. Fortunately I had like an hour and a half of other cast pods to chill off to afterwards, and can no longer remember most of the points I wanted to argue. I'll probably write one or two thousand words on Hotline Miami this weekend, and try to make a case for why I think this game is super important and more than just a novelty. I'll link it here, along with maybe a couple of choice quotations, when it's finished.
  14. I wrote a review of Frog Fractions!
  15. Hotline Miami

    Okay I may have been overreacting slightly last night. Four hours of Hotline Miami... does funny things to a man's head. Anyway, upon further reflection: This is seriously one of my favorite games ever, and it makes me absurdly jealous of the degree of game design skill that went into it. I don't know if I have ever played another game that kept such fine control over its tone or that told such an intense story so minimalistically.
  16. Hotline Miami

    Oh god I think this brain hurt my game. I... I'll probably be alright. Someday. Anyway. Just got the hidden ending.
  17. Idle Thumbs 81: Happy Halloween

    Man I am digging the fuck out of Hotline Miami. Unlike most of the people here, I'm not really sickened or made uncomfortable by the content... or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I feel sickened and made uncomfortable in exactly the way I wanted from the game. I came to it wanting a horror game, basically, and I have not been disappointed. People are talking a lot about different movies I haven't seen in terms of tonal comparisons, but for me the experience, the emotional game experience I get, is basically a direct cross between Super Meat Boy and Silent Hill-- maybe while listening to a Mr Bungle album or something in the background. And, I ask of you, could there be any higher recommendation? BTW, I can't remember exactly how you guys put it on the cast but I think you might have mentioned something about the game owing a lot of its look to the works of Messhof et al. I just wanted to point out that one of the creators of Hotline Miami, Jonaton 'Cactus' Soderstrom, has been exceptionally active and influential in the freeware game community for a long time. While it's probably fair to say that he's taken his share of inspiration from their work, I think it's more been a process of cross-pollination, and these kinds of high-res effects applied to simplistic graphics has been a hallmark of his visual style for some time. He actually gave a presentation at IGF a few years ago on the subject.
  18. The Idle Book Club 3: Telegraph Avenue

    Theme: Compromise. 'Getting away with' is such a weird punitive mindset. If you just mean you don't think Gwen and/or Titus should have forgiven him, well, that's more a critique of their characters than his. It seems like they're trying to make a family with whatever shitty second-hand components are available, though, so I don't know.
  19. The Idle Book Club 3: Telegraph Avenue

    Hm. I really liked it, and now I'm worried that the cast is going to be an hour of the thumbs shitting all over it. Oh well.
  20. Idle Thumbs 79: Most Memorable Maid

    Oh yeah, if you leave guys on their backs they will randomly choke to death on their own vomit sometimes.* *Not intended to be a factual statement** **I haven't even played Dishonored. ;_;
  21. Idle Thumbs 79: Most Memorable Maid

    Over time I've come to believe that the actual game space of any single player game is going to be by necessity some combination of puzzle and skill-game. One one end of this spectrum we have most turn-based strategy games, which always have a statistical optimal strategy, and on the other you'd have something like Super Meat Boy (though purer examples exist). The reason why this is necessarily so is because AIs, no matter how complex, are still essentially knowable, while other people are essentially unknowable. I think one of the things that competitive games offer is a special kind of intimacy that comes from trying to understand another person. Of course, whether that's a 'game' or not is a matter of semantics, so I don't think that's a super great way to frame that discussion.
  22. The Idle Book Club 2: Cloud Atlas

    Hm. I thought I only heard it once, since it kind of put me on alert. Nevertheless, the sort of thing that is easily excusable by ignorance. Chris doesn't especially strike me as someone who keeps current on the personal lives of celebrities.
  23. The Idle Book Club 2: Cloud Atlas

    I assumed that was a simple mistake, since they were "The Wachowskis" or "The Wachowski Siblings" for all except the first mention in the cast iirc.
  24. Putting Items in Characters' Butts: Why?

    agh stick figure jiggle physics