Problem Machine

Just because the space of viable choices you can make is circumscribed by the chances the game affords you doesn't mean there isn't, 99% of the time, an obvious best choice. The choice of whether or not to grab a teleporter is based mostly on whether you have enough defense and crew to make it worthwhile. If you do, buy it, if not you can wait for the next store. Basically, at any given moment there's a few things you can grab which will make your ship viable, and once you know what they are it's mostly just a matter of which you encounter first. Cloaking device is nearly always worth it if you can spare the scrap, since for just one power you can flash it to avoid an entire volley. Learning new ships is fun, but the game is CLEARLY balanced around the Kestrel so the others are all kind of caveat emptor. I may try picking it up again and see if I still feel this way, though. My roommate has unlocked the slug ship and I haven't, and this simply cannot stand.

Well, if one takes it as given that there's always a statistically optimal choice, then the end result once one begins making statistically optimal choices is the game becomes a pure slot machine. Thus, when one is playing the game, it's an extremely fun and exciting experience for as long as the game provides experiences which the player has not learned to optimize. However, and this is where being a relatively simple game comes to shoot it in the foot, the space of available experiences to encounter is relatively small, and depending on how quickly one learns system optimization the map of optimal strategies can be built relatively quickly after encountering each of these. After encountering all of them and deciphering the optimal move, there's no work left for the mind to do, and it becomes a slot machine. Up until that point, the randomness is awesome, since it greatly increases the possibility space of novel encounters.

I could just as soon play roulette if that's all there is to it.

I don't think it needs an alert klaxon or anything, since that would be super annoying if you intentionally powered down your oxygen for a few points of evasion during a wave of attacks or something, but I'd like to see the icons actually darked out on the ship or something. That would be consistent with other design decisions, such as showing you which systems are damaged and destroyed-- which themselves create the expectation that one would be able to see something like a system being unpowered.

Lasers or bombs and beams. Lasers to drill through shields or bombs to bypass them, and then beams to press your advantage so they can't get lucky and recover.

You're making me feel bad for not being able to afford new games. Why do you hate me, Jake?

Hawken looks great, and when it was announced reasons screenshots immediately grabbed my attention. The low world-contrast has a hazy look which implies a kind of dystopia, It's kind of strange that with such an evocative world it seems like they're going multiplayer only, but I guess the same could be said of TF2. Bulletstorm does look nice. There's some degree of overcontrast in the textures, but the world has a graphic art design which supports that fairly well. It makes me think that maybe the bigger problem is overemphasized normal maps, because games I look at that use a light touch when it comes to normal/specular mapping are consistently less vomitous to my tastes. I really like the DXHR screenshots which aren't flooded with tons of random amber lights. I'm kind of getting tired of thematic amber and/or blue lighting these days. The more neutral ones are really nice though. They feel like real places. The last one is an excellent example of dramatic uses of lighting, which is super interesting but not exactly what I want to write about. I do want to play DXHR now, though. Maybe I'll fire that up later today.

They are certainly desaturated, but not low contrast. The high-exposure low-contrast look has been in with blockbuster movies for a while, often using blue filters to achieve the effect, and video games seem to be aping that rather shamelessly. That said, there's a lot of different places you can have contrast. You can have high contrast textures, a high contrast environment, and high contrast lighting. I used that particular screenshot as an example of how horribly exaggerated the normal mapping was. The problem is actually worse with normal mapping, since most people haven't learned to have a light touch with it yet. The actual textures aren't as bad in the particular example I used, but the overall effect is as I described. This literally makes me slightly nauseous to look at. It helps if I look at the shadows... the shadows are nice. ... though, now that I look at it, that room is awfully brightly lit if it's supposed to be lit by candlelight...

Oh was he referring specifically to protagonists? Well then, that was me not paying attention then. That certainly would lend credence to the hypothesis you mentioned on the first page. Then again, who knows about the mechanics of reincarnation? Do souls respect time the same way that we do? Do they stay in a body for an entire lifetime, or do our souls sometimes leave us partway through? It must seem so, sometimes. That's probably overthinking it though.

Didn't David Mitchell say 'all except one' anyway?

The latter, except both scale and contrast-- that is, contrast is an issue, but I believe it's the texture's contrast specifically that's a problem rather than say an overall contrast filter applied. The former I was getting into as a tangent, because it tends to be the end result of the latter. Well, I find it hard to credit 'randomly messing with the scale of detail' as an intentional aesthetic choice since, disregarding 'realism', it completely works at cross purposes to building an internally consistent and aesthetically pleasing world. I am completely okay with people eschewing the rules of photo-realism, and in fact I think this is something that's generally necessary in game development, but the inconsistency or internal reality of the game is harmed when the textures don't make physical sense within its own universe. Honestly, I'm kind of sick of people using 'but it's not supposed to be realistic as a defense against all criticisms which use reality as a frame of reference. I don't want you to think I'm shitting on Natural Selection 2 specifically here, btw, because that game looks pretty good... for a video game. I just think that, aesthetically, games in general use these overcontrasted and overdetailed textures which make for nice detailed screenshots but in practice tend to be overwhelming and unappealing. Well the entire reason I wrote this post is because I couldn't remember any examples right offhand, though I wouldn't cast my net as narrowly as that anyway. As I mentioned, just because a game doesn't aspire to photo-realism doesn't mean it gets a free pass on this. It's a look I tend to associate in particular with Unreal 3 based games, though I don't know whether that's due to something in the rendering engine or just how developers think an Unreal 3 game should look.

That's interesting, I hadn't thought of it as a holdover from lower res days. I mostly tend to think of it as being more analogous to doing traditional artwork, and how when you pay attention to one part of your drawing and try to get the details right the scale starts to drift and that part ends up being bigger than it's supposed to be, and one part of your drawing looks good to the detriment of the piece as a whole. Perhaps both of these contribute to the problem. Actually, just speaking of it as a drawing or visual artwork problem is maybe even still too specific. I've run into this pitfall in literally every medium I've ever worked in. When writing music there's a constant temptation to try to make each segment pop, to pull each segment out, and of course when you do that you end up with a bunch of sound which is all at about the same amplitude and kind of undifferentiated. One must learn to be stingy with detail, because making everything detailed tends to simply result in a baroque monstrosity. Although, actually, video games can potentially present one of the few exceptions to that rule, since players can hypothetically explore that detail at their leisure. This isn't really true of the visual design, but speaking of game design itself, given a highly detailed space to explore the player might not feel overwhelmed if they can explore that space in a naturalistic way-- naturalistic meaning, if the game presents a giant list of menu options to the player they will feel overwhelmed, but if they present a room which the player can poke around in and explore the player will naturally gravitate towards points of interest without being overwhelmed. Now, whether the chief difference there is in terms of the implied demands the menu places on the player, the comparative lack of information given to the player by the menu, or by the intuitive naturalistic interface of the spacial exploration, I don't know. I am super digressing from my original thought anyway.

Well, you can infer anything you like from the text (as I discussed at the end of the pre-discussion thread), but the basis for that interpretation of the character seems, to me, a bit flimsy, and contrary to everything we're told about Sixsmith's. So, yeah, technically possible for it to be in character, but the only basis for the interpretation that I perceive is a wish to exaggerate the resonance between Frobisher's and Luisa's stories into symmetry. It's unnecessary, IMO, but if it makes the story more powerful for you then knock yourself out.

Well... that seems rather out of character. Again, I don't really think of it as a piece of the puzzle, as it were, so much as just taking the opportunity to make a couple of apparently disparate parts of the story resonate with each other.

The synchronicity of Frobisher's and Sixsmith's deaths didn't occur to me until last night. Both of a gunshot to the head in a hotel room, both apparent suicides-- the sort of thing that's not a huge plot point but is obviously intentional, one of those little things that differentiates a story from a mere series of events. I dig shit like that.

Well it also ended up being more like 3 weeks because last month's cast was late. I ended up burning through like 80% of the book over the course of a few days, and my brain was maybe not in super condition by the end of that. I posted my thoughts in the pre-discussion thread probably right around the same time the cast was being recorded (if Chris's twitter feed is anything to go by) and now that thread is locked. Gonna have to back Nappi on not being a fan of the discussion system as it stands now. That said, another great cast. This is a really nice way to punctuate the reading of a good book for me. Hopefully I'll manage to keep up with the next one without massively depriving myself of sleep as I did for Cloud Atlas. Man. Every time I read a good book it makes me want to write a damn novel.

I really like the water temple tileset, but it actually would have been cool if they relegated it entirely to special areas. It would have made it seem even more wild and exotic. Something I really liked in Diablo was how each floor's random generation was a little different. The catacombs was by far the most granular, which meant that it had far more weird little corner piece configurations and dead ends than the other tilesets. But the catacombs was basically my favorite part of the game anyway, and the music for it still gives me chills sometimes. Everyone loves the town music, and rightly so, but the catacombs theme deserves just as much celebration.

Just finished the book (just in time?) and still don't know where I'm at. I liked it a lot, but I liked it best around the middle, where it all felt like it was building up to something, which it didn't really do. The birthmark thread seemed to imply some sort of causal relationship, and then nothing ever followed up on that- I would have liked to see him either embrace that idea and tie everything tightly together or abandon it. In the end, to me, that aspect felt half-realized. However, the series of stories with their variations on the theme of the book, and each one being so close to trite and then exceeding the archetype in some way... it all added up to something pretty powerful. Anyway. Regarding 'death of the author': We make stories because there are ideas that are too complex to simply tell. We must wrap them in narratives and encode them into the experiences of fake people and hope that some of what we wanted to communicate comes through. Trying to reduce a story to merely what the author can articulate about the story reduces it's scope and devalues it. The error is in treating this as some sort of dilemma, as though alternate interpretations devalue an author's intent. The glory of fiction is that nothing has to be just one thing, and it can all be one extended analogy, and whatever you get from it is excellent. "Valid interpretation?" What an utterly absurd thing to say. The interpretation has been interpreted, it is in the brain of the interpreter now. Whether you think it's valid or not is immaterial, and like it or not your own brain is processing the story in ways neither you nor the author ever intended. We can't control what stories are about, we can only string words and hope to communicate some part of what normally defies words. If we fail to communicate that then that's sad and frustrating, and I can see why many authors feel the need to clarify their intent on this basis, but alternate interpretations do not demean their intent, nor can their intent supersede the reader's imagination. If the author wants to go back and edit their work afterwards, they should feel free. I don't mind George Lucas mucking about with his classics, I just think it's a tiny tragedy that unedited versions are so difficult to acquire. The author can do whatever they want with their work, but we are free to prefer earlier editions.

The discussion of Torchlight as like a more fairy tale version of Diablo, combined with being in the process of reading Cloud Atlas and having read Sandman in the past, gave me the idea for a game where essentially what if that was LITERALLY the case? Like maybe Torchlight was the story told about the earlier, darker, legend of Diablo, which in turn was a retelling of an even stranger and darker a tale. So a game where you play through a light fairy tale, and then when you succeed in that you unlock the next difficulty which is the earlier legend, and so forth until perhaps you get to a real event. I doubt I'll ever try to make that one unless I get another idea that feeds into it, but it's a fun one to think about. Definitely some shades of Binding of Isaac there too.

The cutscenes are nice and all, but it was really wandering through the world and finding all of the weird little jokes hidden in random dialogue that made the game. The cutscenes are mostly just great because of how they build on the context set up by the rest of the game.

It would probably be a better game without the RPG combat, since it's kind of half-assed and without it the game becomes a pretty neat point and click adventure. Mostly it's all about the writing and world design anyway. It might not hold up, but my memory of the atmosphere is still one of the strongest impressions I've gotten from a game. It's really too bad Daikatana sunk Ion Storm.

Parody of Kickstarter y/n?

Was it supposed to be a Diablo pastiche or was the resemblance coincidence?

This is getting a few days ago now, but it had enough to completely shred my ship before I could charge my jump or my glaive. Possibly a beam heavy config, such as a beam drone and/or a pike beam. You really think that 125 for teleporter is a better investment than shields? You can't do much damage to an enemy ship until you disable their med bay if they have one, and in that entire time (minus cloak time) their weapons are free to wreak havoc on your shieldless ship. Simply, crew teleporters are super effective, but only when you can force a stalemate for long enough for them to go to work. edit: It's actually entirely possible that a lot of what bothers me is that missiles are fucking stupid. They take 6 scrap a shot and are easily neutralized by a single defense drone. They're an absolute joke compared to bombs.