sclpls

I think being suspicious of Fantasy Flight is a healthy instinct, but they have a large catalog of games, and some of them are fantastic (like GoT), and quite a few of their games are unwieldy junk. Just like most other companies, it's not going to be exclusively hits or misses.

I'm excited about a lot of movies the Castro will be showing in August. Un Flic, This is Spinal Tap, M... good stuff.

Russians are not happy with their portrayal in the game. Can't say I blame 'em. http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/25/4553536/is-company-of-heroes-2-anti-russian

If we're going to reference Cameron Kunzelman, then I would follow up with Leigh Alexander's response to him - that creating an ecosystem with certain ideas, concepts, etc. is not necessarily an endorsement of those ideas. Put another way, most game design does not count as a normative statement. I think we all are aware of this, which is why it is so laughable when politicians, or the media refer to video games as "murder simulators" that are turning American children into future psychopaths. To be sure, Civilization's top-down model of history is absurd, and not at all how the world works. Nation's aren't ruled by immortal leaders, technological innovations aren't decided upon in advance, and the flow of time is not turn based. There has always been a lot of fudging, and tongue-in-cheek approaches to the Civilization series (recall the FMVs for advisers in Civilization 2). A game with historical flavor is no substitute for reading primary sources, and critical histories; nor was it ever meant to be. It's all well and good to criticize the game of having a Western bias, but lets at least display a little bit of self-reflexive criticism if we're going to pursue this. When we start demanding more rigor, serious consideration of the flow of power, a less top-down approach, consideration of other agencies than the state and its self-appointed leaders, the perspective of subaltern communities, the de-centering of a European perspective, are we not implicitly endorsing history as a scientific practice, in other words, historical practice through the lens of the West?

I certainly was not claiming that one can't critique the presentation of the game. That's completely fair, and I am not concerned about whether or not anyone else likes Civilization as a game, or it's presentation of historical-like events. However when people make a critique is that Civilization does a poor job of modeling history, or that it is making some definitive claim about "this is how civilizations work", then they have opened themselves to the criticism that they misunderstand what the game is. Put another way, I just think it is weird when I see criticisms that seem to ignore that the map is not the territory.

No, it actually isn't pretending to accurately model anything. The origins of the game can be traced back to an old board game. There is zero modeling going on. It is not like a Paradox game where you input parameters, and see what happens. What Civilization does is include various aspects history in a worker management game. It is no more a simulation of world history than Agricola is a simulation of medieval subsistence farming. Sid Meier has said that when fun and reality are in conflict, always let fun win. Whether or not you agree with that game design philosophy, it is very much the guiding principle for the Civilization series. Some people may take away, "this is how civilizations work", but I don't blame artists for their fans' poor reading of what a piece is about.

I keep seeing people refer to Civilization as a historical simulation. That is grossly inaccurate. The game is an abstraction of world history, not a simulation of it. A lot of critiques of the game seem to stem from this conflation.

Yeah, even if Civ 5 were to totally open up at this point I get the impression that the modding community feels a little burned by this version of Civ, and has moved on. A real shame.

This expansion has definitely made me come around to Civ 5. I didn't like it at all in its original release. After it got patched up I felt luke-warm about it, and then G&K didn't really do anything for me. With this one though I definitely feel like everything has fallen into place nicely. The AI still isn't great, but there is enough going on that I am getting some really interesting experiences. I tend to agree with Rob that the main drawback to going back to Civ 4 is graphical, and not stacks of doom. That being said, I think there is an obvious compromise between 1UPT (which really does necessitate what I consider to be a lot of unfortunate design choices) and stacks of doom. The next Civ iteration should pay attention to Jon Shafer's new game, At the Gates, and introduce supply. There should be real restraints on how large an army you can field which should create conditions for how much of the map you take up, and where you are occupying your cities/forces. Also, if you are serious about wanting some outro guitar soloing music, I'd be more than happy to provide my services.

Alpha Protocol Call of Cthulhu Company of Heroes (complete pack) Hotline Miami Just Cause 2 Magrunner: Dark Pulse Monaco Quantum Conundrum (and DLC) Rogue Legacy Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion KOTOR 2 Surgeon Simulator 2013 Thirty Flights of Loving Sword of the Stars: The Pit I'm pretty happy with all this.

The new preview for this game is totally sweet!

Speaking of shopkeepers, this is why I wish the influence of roguelikes extended beyond permadeath, and random levels. The shopkeeper AI in a game like NetHack is a thing of beauty. That's part of why I love so much about Spleunky, the design really reflects a genuine love of roguelikes by capturing lots of amazing details, and not just the big, broad game design features of a roguelike.

I played 30 Flights of Loving. Man, those French New Wave style cuts were so good.

No, it was definitely a lot of both.

Haha he's writing the screen play for a remake of Logan's Run, so I guess there is a distinct possibility that we will not!

The Company of Heroes Complete Pack 75% off was the sort of deal I've been waiting for. So good.

Part of why I like the trade routes is it means there is more of the map you have to pay attention to. Firaxis made a lot of smart decisions about how to make the game more engaging, something that didn't really come through in the G&K expansion. Nick's complaint about the previous state of the end game was ironic to me. His complaint was about having to manage a ton of armies. For me, I felt like a military victory was the only interesting victory path to pursue in Civ 5 because a peaceful endgame just meant I was hitting "next turn" over and over again as I waited for more buckets to fill up. So I would end up getting a little blood thirsty just so I had something to do.

Idle Thumbs now exists in the SkyNet database.

A lot of sizing up bluffs.

XCOM is a tactics game. To play a strategy game well you need long-term planning, that's where "thinking three moves ahead" comes in. In a tactics game it is going to be about taking advantage of the situation in front of you. Some games are a mix of strategy and tactics, and then you have to make calculations about taking short-term gains vs. long-term objectives.

It's well taken (again, I did like the piece, and thought it made a lot of excellent points), but I also find a lot of the criticism of "gameisms" to be pretty dull and uninteresting. When Old Man Murray does it it can be insightful and well taken, but too often I see these sorts of criticisms falling afoul of Tom Francis's fifth rule for critical writing, "keep some perspective" (see http://www.pentadact.com/2013-07-01-five-things-i-learned-about-game-criticism-in-nine-years-at-pc-gamer/ ). I'm all for more critical writing, but the best thing to do is just write the criticism rather than wring your hands over whether a particular critical voice is having a negative impact on the medium. The wider the range of a conversation the better as far as I'm concerned.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I always enjoy reading from people that worked on games. It's been awhile since I played SupCom, but I remember the first time the battlefield opened up in the middle of a mission was a really cool, bewildering experience.

Expectations change depending on who the creator is. If your favorite band produces an album that turns out to be a dud, why shouldn't that be disappointing to you? I think there's room for criticism that limits its focus to the object itself, but I don't see why it's a bad thing for critics to consider context.

I was thinking about the height thing in a first person game, since it was something we discussed during the stream. My best guess is it became a convention because you spend so much time in these games picking stuff up off the ground, and this just makes it slightly easier to do so. This ties nicely into the Tom Bissell conversation, and the discussion you guys had about smashable pots in games. Tom Bissell's compares seemingly weird game decisions to night scenes in movies. If we were seeking out true fidelity to life we wouldn't see anything, but instead there is always lighting in night scenes in movies so the audience can see what is happening. That's an artificial construct that we've all internalized and accepted. His argument is that we should extend that same courtesy to games. We can agree or disagree with that value judgment, but I think it makes the accusation that he is simply being an apologist for bad game design ring hollow (although I also liked that Medium piece). Part of what I found so interesting about Bioshock Infinite is it tried to solve so many problems that previously existed in older Irrational games, and in the process of doing so created a bunch of new problems. I appreciate that sort of messy, ambitious project as much as I appreciate a very compact, tightly constructed experience like 30 Flights of Loving. Put another way, I don't pick sides between A Portrait of an Artist and Finnegan's Wake.

Also Ticket to Ride is good, but in my experience it usually takes 2 to 3 hours to play, not 1. Then again, my friends are pretty competitive about Ticket to Ride, so your mileage may vary.