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Awesome, yeah, that's a really cool story! The game definitely harkens back to an era when level design was a little more... challenging to navigate around.

In Dark Souls the frustration comes with trying to master timing your attacks with precision, etc. whereas in FC2 the frustration comes from your gun jamming, malaria kicking in, etc. at inopportune times. The difference is that the FC2 frustrations are relatively outside of the player's control. I think that's mitigated by the fact that FC2 isn't a particularly demanding game, but some people just hate those sorts of systems. Their loss.

I think if there weren't so many games I wanted to play at the moment I might pick this up, but as it currently stands I don't really have time for a Tropico of modest incremental changes.

I enjoy reading Kindle Singles type e-books (stuff that's longer than a long essay, but not as long as what most people would consider to be a proper book), but I have a hard time sticking with novels on Kindle type devices. I don't have any really informed opinions about the different types of devices though.

Yes! I've been waiting for this episode before deciding whether or not to pick up Tropico 5! I know what I'm listening to while watching the Colombia- Cote d'Ivoire match tomorrow...

Okay, finally had a chance to listen to this episode! Seems like the panel was saying something similar to my comment that as time goes on there needs to be a serious economic cost to continued military engagement. I think Soren has the right idea in his game where all the black market stuff gets progressively more expensive, especially if it's a system where it's the players that are driving up the cost. I'm not much of a fan of Power Grid, but I do like how that game's supply/demand system works where the different types of commodities will become more expensive/difficult to acquire as more players try to acquire particular types. I also liked the question Rob posed about the tension between players feeling like they are taking good actions vs. what are actually good actions. That's an astute observation about human psychology, and it must be difficult for strategy game designers to balance providing all that positive feedback to players so they enjoy playing the game vs. trying to encourage rational decision making. Soren's point about seeing how players approach victory conditions being a sort of moment of reckoning where the game designer sees what sort of game has actually been designed sheds a different type of light on Jon Shafer's dislike of victory points. I remember listening to the episode of the Game Design Round Table where they complained about victory points, and being baffled by the hatred for VP. Out of all the people I've played board games with, I don't ever recall anyone complaining about victory points. I chalked it up to idiosyncrasy. But perhaps this hatred of VP is more widespread among game designers than I thought... VP is the system that causes the game to be something totally different from whatever the designer intended!

It's a weird anachronistic way to talk about things. The idea of a canon is a much more modern idea, and it's certainly a weird way to frame religious art in the pre-Reformation era when the Church didn't place a primacy on Biblical text relative to the public expression of faith (the meaning of the word Catholic is derived from Greek meaning "according to the whole"). Fan art supposes a divide between the author and audience that just doesn't reflect the world view of early Renaissance European religious life. Religious art as proto-fan art is an interesting idea of course... it's just a very jarring way to think about it after spending a bunch of time walking around and being immersed in that environment. P.S. The apartment we stayed in in Venice was right next to Campo Santo street. P.P.S. We ate at a pizza place in Rome called de Remo. It was good. P.P.P.S. I see that Campo Santo has been working on sweet hand and arm animations. While checking out some ancient Roman ruins my wife pet a bunny who then flopped on its side. It was adorable. Please include this as a feature in Firewatch.

I will say with books I'm much less likely to do the thing I do with video games where I get to the 90% mark, and then inexplicably stop. If I get that far in a book I'll probably finish it.

So I got back from my honeymoon in Italy last week, and this post just caused my brain to leak out of my ears. :-\

So is this video game thing worth $15, or is it just not worth playing?

Seems like it's available in the U.S. as of yesterday, but I'll have to confirm that. Microsoft is involved, so I wouldn't put it pass them to have some lame staggered regional release.

I haven't listened to the episode yet, but this topic immediately brings to mind an issue that's been kicking around in my head for a long time: hyperinflation. Strategy games typically ignore inflation, or else have really simplistic models that fail to capture inflationary dynamics as they exist (I'm looking at you EUIV, where curbing inflation is trivially simple). It's not hard to understand why games don't typically do this: you're talking about adding an extra layer of complexity for the sake of a feature that's just going to be irritating to the player. The only problem though is that hyperinflation is what happens to countries that get involved in wars they can't afford, and without that sort of serious economic risk getting involved in a military conflict is most likely going to be more desirable course of action in a grand strategy game than it perhaps ought to be.

Chris going all "bah" to the animal puns is just his way of concealing his sheepish grin.

That's a good way of putting it clyde.

Sean's advice, regardless of whether or not it is applicable to this reader's situation, is in my opinion totally solid life advice, and something I wish I had internalized more when I was in my twenties. Trying to salvage friendships is a worthy goal, but only if the person on the other end of things is making a genuine effort to work on self-improvement. Sometimes you have to deal with former friends that are alcoholics, or drug addicts, or self-pitying assholes that lash out at everyone else, people that are physically and/or emotionally abusive, etc. If those people aren't willing to try and fix their problems (and a lot of the time they aren't) it is not your job to try and fix their shit for them, and trying to do so can make things worse. The examples I gave are maybe extreme, but hopefully it helps put into perspective why there are situations when it can be okay to leave behind old friends.

I'm flying to Europe this weekend, and now I'm afraid that the Super Noah's Ark 3D music is going to be stuck in my head for the duration of the flight.

Oh, I actually originally played it on the Xbox with a controller (I later checked it out on the iPad when I felt like trying to give the game another shot). That's me using idiosyncratic jargon to distinguish action RPGs that play similarly to Diablo/Torchlight, etc. from games like Dark Souls that have more expressive movement. I should probably try and think up a better phrase for that sort of thing since the actual control input isn't necessarily what I think of as a defining characteristic of the genre.

Since it was asked, I am someone who didn't like Bastion, and I am not a liar! I didn't like actively hate it or anything, but the game left me cold, and to this day I've never really understood what is good about the game. The art style was nice, and the music was nice, but I didn't get into the story or the narration, I'm not engaged by point and click style action RPGs, and nothing in the game really came together in a way that I found compelling. But whatever, different people have different experiences!

I haven't read anything by him yet (but plan to), but Iain Banks is the name I keep hearing from lots of different people for more recent science fiction.

The RPS review reported performance issues, bugs, crashing, etc.

I came away much more optimistic after reading that because it sounds like they are taking mod support more seriously than I thought!

This is the first time in podcast history that I haven't checked out when the topic was about a MMO. Great interview! It's still so difficult for me to understand the motivations of EVE players, but it was super interesting to get their perspective.

Just want to echo what everyone else here has already said!

Generally, they stress me out. However, I would really like to see them in more like traditional RTS single player games. I guess Wargame: Red Dragon has that which is probably the more appealing sounding feature of that game for me.

I thought it was a joke at first too, but then again this is Ubisoft and when I first saw that Watch Dogs DLC chart I thought that was a joke so....