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A cyborg dreams he is a young teenage girl trapped inside a Florida retirement home with no sign of her grandparents. Does she even have grandparents? Are her memories her own? Slowly, a mysterious individual approaches her and whispers into her ear, "What is game?"

I believe there was a reveal that he was working on L4D3. That game seems suited to his strengths in terms of his ability to create memorable experiences via emergent gameplay systems. I look forward to having to manage anti-zombie meds before I turn into a smoker and turn on my teammates!

Congrats to Steve and everyone at Fullbright for winning those awards. That is rad and well deserved.

Borderlands: the Action RPG FPS: the Adventure Game: the Video Game

Well let me tell you the story of how the Idle Thumbs forum got weird with its fonts in threads. It dates back to the making of Episode 48: In Space when they brought Steve Gaynor on, who 500 years ago fought in an ancient battle as a cyborg with a sweet cyborg visor (only back then it was spelled syborg, so it was a sweet syborg visor)...

GotY: I need to spend more time with it, but I think the answer for me is Europa Universalis IV. I finally found a Paradox title that I don't seem to be bouncing off of despite my best intentions, and it is glorious. How good is it? I'm not sure I can go back to Civilization now! Best First Person Exploration of Mundane Environment with Excellent Voice Acting: We have a tie between Gone Home and The Stanley Parable! Best Expansion: Maybe I should check out the free Mountains of Madness expansion to Eldritch before I call this one, but the competition feels too stiff from Firaxis this year. I'm going with XCOM: Enemy Within. Best Strategy Game that Irritated an Entire Nation: No close contenders, this one goes to Company of Heroes 2 Best Innovation in a Roguelike: Thanks to the Daily Challenge Spelunky walks away with this one. Best Evidence that Video Game Developers are Watching Cool Movies: Kentucky Route Zero Game with Saddest Sad Spiral: Spacebase DF-9 Best Game About Robots/Best Game that has a STALKER roguelike vibe with a solid British sensibility: Sir, You Are Being Hunted Coolest Old Game I Replayed this Year: Thief: The Dark Project

Rereading that Bogost essay I came away with the impression that the real object of scorn here is the popularity of superhero movies.

Congrats to Jay, Jonathan Chen, and Lance Underwood! Also I agree that Sean should just talk about games he's playing, regardless of whether they've been covered in the podcast, or if they are old or whatever. I recently picked up and played Papa & Yo based on Sean's enthusiasm for the game, and I'm really glad I did! I avoided it because a lot of reviews seemed to regard the game as mediocre, but it turns out those reviews are focused on weird technical things like slightly imprecrise controls or the occasional framerate hiccup that I wasn't concerned about at all, and didn't detract from what was a really cool experience. As far as how developers regard lore, I feel like there has to be a difference between how people treat it when they've picked up a license vs. something they've created. Like, as generic as Blizzard's lore comes across to me, they seem to genuinely be in love with it. If another company worked on a game like Starcraft or Diablo though, I imagine they'd be like, "are you fucking serious?" In the case of AC though I think it probably is the case that they just came up with this weird conceit in the first game for whatever reason (my speculative theory: Ubisoft felt a need to create a layer of irony to avoid the game becoming controversial/in poor taste after 9/11 in a game where you were a Muslim character killing dudes), and then were basically stuck when the game turned out to be incredibly popular and they decided to make a bunch of sequels.

I would read the marital strife, childhood abuse, and professional anxiety in the game as non-expressive. They aren't issues that your character has to directly confront or engage with, instead you indirectly discover these issues through reading notes, etc. and you are right to point to the big empty house as becoming a metaphor for this isolation. The expressive qualities in the game come from picking up objects and examining them rather than character interaction, It's a confusing passage because he slips from talking about "engaging" with Objectivism in Bioshock (and I agree with that assessment for the reasons Clint Hocking elaborated in his criticism of the game's structure) to "expressive reasons" in Gone Home. I would state it as Gone Home engages with these issues, but it does not give any expression to them in its game mechanics. You can contrast this with a game like Papa & Yo where the theme of a child dealing with an alcoholic father are embedded directly into the game mechanics via the frogs that turn the monster into a raging, fiery beast. That creates a game environment where the theme is expressed via actual play. Gone Home is a more subtle pleasure.

Finally, a podcast on the Idle Thumbs network about Lords Management! I wonder how much of the success of the game can be attributed to the concurrent popularity of Game of Thrones?

I liked Bogost's piece, but I also read it more as commentary on the state of critical games writing and how that community, if we can call it that, communicated Gone Home to its public, rather than about Gone Home per se. I agree with everyone that it doesn't make sense to talk about cliches from one medium to the next. Things written in blood on the wall is a cliche in video games, but it isn't the sort of thing that I would recognize as cliche if I saw it in a novel because that's not the sort of thing you see appear in that space. I've argued before that I see Gone Home as deliberately being an anti-genre game. All the tension people experience in that game (besides whatever natural tension you experience from being in a big empty house at night) is a deliberate result of genre expectations being defied by that game. If it were a short story there would be nothing remarkable about it, but of course it's a game not a short story, so it's different. That's also why I disagree with people that think it would be a great game to show to people that have no level of familiarity with games. I think the game requires a certain level of literacy with games to understand why it is interesting. The narrative is sweet & touching, but I'm not sure its sufficient to grab people that are new to games. (Admittedly, I also never really understood the desire to get non-gamers into games. I love coffee, but I'm not sweating how I can convince my friends that don't drink it that there's more to it than just being a bitter drink)

Yeah, I'd say you did a good job playing FC2 the way you did. I think what we all love about the game is the way it supports all these different approaches.

If Crusader Kings didn't exist you might have an argument for Lords Management as a reasonable replacement of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, but the existence of the game demonstrates the absurdity and inappropriateness of the title for that genre.

Haha Unity of Command walks the finest line between "is this a puzzle or strategy game"? Probabilistic outcome of battles puts it in the strategy camp, but the one wrong move and you fail the mission makes it more like a puzzle. Basically you have a strategy game here with missions that are so narrowly and tightly designed combined with an AI that understands the rules of the game so well that they become puzzles essentially.

Man, I remember I had a TI-83 for my math class and was jealous of all the kids that had TI-86s since they were playing cool games that I couldn't run. I have a bunch of stuff to say about XCOM so much so that I don't even know where to begin, so I guess I won't bother. I do find it funny though that some of my favorite gaming experiences of 2013 have been Spelunky and XCOM, which were also some of my favorite gaming experiences of 2012.

Yeah, that's true on both counts. Weapons breaking down in an advanced sci-fi economy with massive spaceships seems a lot more implausible compared to that happening in a war-torn country in Africa. It also isn't as punishing since you can always switch out weapons the next time you get to an arms dealer location, you don't have the scarcity problem that exists in SS2. Also I think another thing that causes it to work is something that Chris or Nick brought up when they were streaming a FC2 playthrough on twitch, which is that on normal difficulty no matter how chaotic and dicey a situation you find yourself in you can usually flail around enough, and end up okay most of the time so even though the game throws all these unexpected problems at you -- gun jamming, needing malaria pills, something next to you catching fire, etc. -- it's not as if that will kill you most of the time so the game isn't really punishing you.

I really liked Clint's explanation of the weapon jamming, and how that helps support all the sorts of emergent game play that happens in the simulation of the game. Personally the weapon jamming never bothered me nearly as much as the weapon degradation in System Shock 2, which was really annoying and game-y in a bad way. The weapon jamming in Far Cry 2 felt way more natural.

Tom Chick also criticized the Hotline Miami devs when they decided to edit the rape scene that was to appear in the sequel after Cara Ellison described her discomfort with that depiction on the odd grounds that the devs listening to feedback of their game contaminates it's artistic purity (I guess real artists don't consider how their work affects their audience, or something), and that rape scenes in video games make the medium more mature, sophisticated, and artistic (because if Bergman hadn't made the Virgin Spring his oeuvre would have been considered a mere crass, adolescent plaything... basically trash). I like Tom's no-nonsense reviews, but if you want to find some well considered opinions on issues that affect women in video games, I'd search elsewhere.

It occurred to me recently that most of Stefan Feld's designs would translate really well into iOS games, although unfortunately to my knowledge no one is working on any ports. His board games tend to be heavy-ish Euro games that involve taking a single, difficult decision. Trajan in particular strikes me as fitting Soren's ideal for a good asynchronous experience. Ironically the only game of his that I think wouldn't work well is one of his lighter games, Die Speicherstadt. That one involves a worker placement bidding mechanic where players go around placing workers one at a time bidding prices up until everyone has placed all their workers. That's the sort of thing that takes very little time when everyone is sitting around a table, but will kill any asynchronous game.

SMAC had this specificity to their sci-fi world that so many games in that genre lack. That's why emulating it is kind of an odd choice, it would be better to copy the spirit of the game and make some strategy game set in some crazy, unique sci-fi universe rather than try and capture the original's magic. Luckily the game's interface is not so dated that it feels unplayable these days, which cannot be said for a lot of strategy games from the 90s.

Yeah, the ending has that effect on people. I'm surprised everyone thought Burial at Sea feels the same as the B:I. I thought the light stealth mechanics added some nice nuance that was missing in the base game. Personally I enjoyed sneaking around, taking out splicers without all of them firing at me at once.

I seem to be having issues now where if people do any work outside the base, they won't come back in, and eventually die from oxygen deprivation. Naturally this generates a sadness spiral, and so before I can even get it off the ground my base is doomed...

To tberton's point, in trying to imagine what Fulbright Co. might do for their next game, assuming they are sticking to a first person no-combat game, I imagined a game where you are an archaeologist excavating some ancient ruins.

I am drunk, and want to blast aliens... but I also know I will undoubtedly wreck my campaign in the process of doing so. Not only is this game full of hard decisions, it even produces the occasional difficult meta-decision. Hmmmmmmmm........................