sclpls

The Doom/Wolfenstein style info at the bottom is seriously so good.

Yeah, that's the impression I get too. They can see the signs, but they want to believe (or not believe, whatever).

#TeamScoops

Gone Home is telling its story through the environment the player occupies. If you told the story as a short story or film, it wouldn't make any sense to have Katie as the protagonist. The story is unique because it is told via game, rather than some other medium. Frankly I have a hard time finding that the story would be as interesting in another medium. If it didn't suit you, that's fine, but I vastly preferred Gone Home's understated storytelling techniques to Brothers' melodrama.

He was the creative lead on Bioshock 2. Here's his twitter: https://twitter.com/nullspeak

Man, it is so amazing to finally be able to play this! Also, I would love to see the Idle Thumbs crew stream this sometime.

For books that came out last year that I read it has to be the Flamethrowers, which is a book I'm very much of two minds about, but in a good way. However my favorite thing that I read last year was Cesar Aira's the Literary Conference. Because everything he writes is amazing, but this one is particularly brilliant and mind-bending, even with the most absurd of plots. A mad scientist/translator through a clever trick discovers some hidden pirate treasure and becomes incredibly wealthy. He sets his mind to taking over the world by creating clones of Carlos Fuentes (R.I.P.). He attends a literary conference where they are both in attendance to extract his genetic material via some robotic insect that he has created, but along the way gets drunk, falls for a girl, and some things go horribly wrong. What's actually genius about the book though is the way this ridiculous story becomes a commentary for things like the financial crisis, translating literature, and some really weird philosophical ideas.

I take solace in the fact that my friends that speak Spanish seem to think the translations of Bolano are pretty good. But yeah, translations are awkward.

I'm not sure I agree with Short's idea that creating a layering of meaning to upset reader expectations is what transforms a fictional work into something literary. Having complex, nuanced, contradictory characters is certainly a way to create a literary type of work, but it is not the same thing. For example, I would characterize Plato's portrayal of the characters in the Socratic dialogues as one-dimensional, but I can't imagine most people would disagree with the characterization of the dialogues as literary. So I think while Short has a lot of interesting ideas that she's exploring in that blog post, Steve's totally correct to say that she's asking for something to be something else. She clearly has a lot of strong ideas about interactive fiction, but as a prescription for how narratives should work in games I find it unpersuasive.

That Bioshock 2 review might be my favorite yet! Did you send it to Jordan Thomas?

(My optimistic take is that there are people much smarter than me that are probably working on this problem!)

Sometimes I feel like all this effort at trying to realize characters in games is all for nought. After all, games are basically just a collection of interactive rules/systems. Using rules to express things like physics or strategy games is one thing, and maybe even simple animal behavior, but to try and express human freedom and emotions like love in a highly simulated world seems like it is at cross-purposes with what games are. That's my pessimistic take on the problem at any rate.

I recall GAF flipped out over Rock Paper Shotgun picking Kentucky Route Zero. Some people, I would like to believe ironically but sometimes you can't totally be sure, couldn't believe that "this game they never heard of" got picked over the Last of Us.

I'm really interested in the question of what's the best way to learn how to play a game. It's something that the strategy genre has been kind of bad at approaching for the most part. On the one hand, you have someone like Soren Johnson championing that more strategy games should be taking cues from board games where all the rules are transparent and digestable. Given how convoluted a lot of hardcore strategy games are, this is pretty sound advice. On the other hand, you have someone like Rob Daviau who, while at Hasbro, did studies of people and discovered that the most pleasure people got out of playing board games was opening the box, and then as soon as they started reading the rules there was a precipitous drop. So his innovation with the Legacy mechanics was to take a cue from what video games have been doing for awhile, which is introducing concepts incrementally. That's the part that a lot of strategy games have been bad at, that upfront demand in learning before you can even engage with the game. XCOM is great because it is the sort of thing you can learn as you go. And that's one thing that I think a game like Spelunky, and roguelikes in general, are really good at, is having the learning of the game's systems work through actually exploring the game, and testing things out, rather than having to go through some long tutorial. So while having transparency is great, it is also really rad when you learn things through surprising events because then your brain is much more engaged with what's going on.

Cat food for thought.

I like that the game unlocks new abilities after you've successfully completed a run, so future games have more variables.

Whatever man, we know Nick has been there the whole time. He doesn't need to talk, we can just feel the man's presence.

I also finished Brothers. I didn't like it as much as other people here, but I definitely dug it's concise structure, and the imaginative and gorgeous looking world design.

I remember when the kinect was first released there were all these videos that popped up on youtube of people doing cool things with hacked kinect devices. I think the best case scenario is that we see people doing stuff like that with the Steam Boxes, and then Valve doing everything they can to support all the cool experimentation that comes from that. Otherwise you are just buying an expensive Linux PC which would be weird.

In proper English fashion, you can get quite drunk in Sir, You Are Being Hunted by Robots. I like to imagine that character, after getting thoroughly drunk, running into another human being, and trying to explain, slurred words and all, that he/she was being hunted by robots.

I tend to think of Michael Brough designs as a class unto themselves. I wouldn't say 868-HACK adds anything to the genre so much as it takes a lot out. It's sort of the Unity of Command of roguelikes, it's such a tight design it becomes almost puzzle-like. The deterministic mechanics used to really bother me a lot, but I think that just means it is really important to internalize all the rules whereas in a traditional roguelike that would be nearly impossible to do. I don't think this is really anything like playing NetHack or ADOM even if they share a few game design ideas.

I'm hearing reports that in the next Bioshock game using plasmids gives you malaria.

STOP THE PRESSES! http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/01/06/far-cry-2-creative-director-clint-hocking-leaves-valve/

Anyway, I made my way to Hell, and am looking forward to doing a bunch of those challenges to unlock new costumes.

I think Seattle is only really considered definitive cyberpunk for people really into Shadowrun. I don't think people that read, say, William Gibson novels, would associate Seattle as a particularly cyberpunk locale.