sclpls

Space Alert is fantastic, but probably not necessarily summer cottage material. You need to play an audio CD with it. My recommendations for light games: -Pandemic -The Speicherstadt -El Grande (not really light, but I recall it playing quickly) -Love Letter

When people complain about objectivity in reviews, what they are really saying is, "why can't other people see things the same way I see things?" That's such a boring desire.

It's definitely that kind of game. I can't imagine playing the game without friends.

I feel the same way about Darksiders 2! Good deal, but I still don't want to pay $10 for it.

I jumped into CoH2 without playing the original, I was definitely mystified by Tom's review when I read it. This detailed discussion helped clarify a bunch of things I didn't really understand at the time. I see that CoH with all its expansions is available on Steam now for really cheap, so I'm definitely going to grab that. By the way, I totally buy Rob's explanation of LoS rules from board games because I've been playing a lot of the Combat Commander board games lately, and what I've primarily been enjoying about CoH2 is how well it translates into a RTS version of that game, LoS, infantry tactics, and all. Tom seems dismissive of reviews from newcomers to a genre, and I totally disagree with him. I believe that the greater range of perspectives we see in reviews, the better. As long as a review comes from an honest and thoughtful place I have no problem with the person's level of expertise. A SC2 review coming from the perspective of someone that is deeply involved in the competitive e-sports review isn't going to be of much use to someone that's simply interested in playing a single player campaign, and vice versa, but neither of those is necessarily a more valuable form of review. This puts strategy games in an awkward spot. Obviously we want them to be deeply engaging, and full of intricacies such that you need to spend a lot of time with them to truly appreciate what the game is "really" about. Those nuances are likely at risk of getting overlooked by the neophyte reviewer. That's okay though because initial impressions have to matter, and if your game play can't attract new players that can be just as big of a problem as failing to meet the expectations of someone familiar with the last iteration of the game.

Oh man, thanks for doing the quick research. That is such a bummer.

I'm curious about this as well. I finally picked up Hotline Miami. Only like $2! There are a bunch of other things on my wishlist that are discounted (everything but STALKER), but I'm going to wait to see if they drop in price any further...

While discussing failure being a feature of gameplay the game that lept to my mind was Crusader Kings 2 where the monarch you are playing getting assassinated just means you start controlling the heir to the throne. The defining feature I guess is that failure doesn't interrupt the flow of the game, which is what typically happens in a game, you reload a save or whatever. This, incidentally, is why the shooting sections of the Walking Dead really didn't work for me, because that was the part of the game where mechanical imprecision meant having to repeat a section over and over again. The game was otherwise very successful in not getting in the way of the player experience. As far as why don't more games explore interesting aspects of existence like romantic encounters, I think it is kind of like why do so many games feature violent combat as the conflict of choice? Computers are really good at handling things like physics, which have specific formulae that can easily be calculated. That's why games are so good at presenting aspects of reality that aren't obvious in our everyday lives, but can be revealed through the application of well defined systems. We don't get to see how macroeconomic effects impact our everyday lives, but through an economic simulator this can become fairly transparent. We don't get this luxury with human psychology where there just aren't the same formulae on hand to apply. Our relationships with other people are developed from specificity rather than general iron laws of nature. That's why Mass Effect's relationships are so crass - just follow these procedures, and you'll wind up in bed with another character. That doesn't gel with our experiences at all. Narratives are better at handling specificity than systems, which is why I suspect this exchange in the Walking Dead was successful. The Walking Dead allows you to make decisions that work on a purely narrative basis. You don't get bonuses or penalties for making a particular choice, you just experience a particular, specific outcome (that's also why I think morality in the Walking Dead is interesting, whereas it is not in most RPGs). No flow interrupted; the specificity of the encounter illuminated.

That Magic Circle record is so good.

I'm curious about how playing the stocks works...

I'm hoping one of these days I will find the time to play all these classic CRPGs that I never played back in the day like Planescape Torment, Arcadia, etc. Also during the last GOG sale I picked up the Thief games... we'll see if I ever get around to playing those as well. I am replaying System Shock 2 though, and I am surprised at how well it is holding up for me personally (after I modified the controls to something more useful).

That's the craziest speed run I've seen since that first Dark Souls run happened.

True that. On a completely unrelated note, that Peter Molyneux quote about how a player will press left to see the most incredible thing -- made me think of Peggle.

I agree that one of the nice things about Civ 5 is that positive view of the progress of history. It looks like this new expansion is only going to build on that presentation by placing a greater emphasis on cultural achievements, so I'm definitely looking forward to it. However I think you guys might be remembering Civ 4 incorrectly, or at least it isn't clear to me why you would describe Civ 4 as having a more cynical view in its presentation of history. I think Civ 4 shares the same tone, but Civ 5's presentation of that tone just knocks it out of the park, making Civ 4's attempt at doing the same thing look more workmanlike in comparison, if that makes any sense. However Civ 4 used a lot of great techniques that Civ 5 built on to highlight all these positive accomplishments of human history (Also, don't forget that Civ 4 had that excellent Leonard Nimoy narration!) Anyway, as I was saying, I agree it is great to have a game like Civ in contrast to a game like the Last of Us, or basically any other video game which seem to constantly be set in failed societies, and have such a bleak color palate. It is weird how that is a sort of default setting for so many games right now. Bioshock Infinite also exists in this weird space because of it where it has the color palate of a game like Civ, but has that cynical outlook that permeates most other games, and that is definitely a deliberate, but also sort of comically intense contrast. Anyway, it would definitely be nice if qualities like grimness, pessimism, and cynicism weren't these cheap (and false!) signifiers for games you should take seriously.

RIP Douglas Engelbart, who invented the device that is my preferred method of interacting with games. Good NY Times write up: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/technology/douglas-c-engelbart-inventor-of-the-computer-mouse-dies-at-88.html?hp

Thanks for sharing. Maybe excessively polemical for my tastes, but a useful corrective.

I also can't play it at the moment because the only working PC I have in the house right now is a laptop with the Intel HD 4000. What's crazy is it will run something graphically intense like Company of Heroes 2 just fine, but not this. Oh well. The bottom line is Intel's graphics cards, although much better than they used to be, are still kind of a joke.

I'm not super familiar with the developer as I've only played Mark of the Ninja, but they got so much right about doing a stealth game that I definitely believe they probably have some great ideas to bring to the table for this concept.

That makes sense to me. I haven't tried Land Air War, but European Escalation already felt too unwieldy for me to really handle. Sins is nice because it has that grand scale, but it also has such an appealing pace to play a game at that scale. A RTS that plays quickly I think works much better when it's a much more tightly focused scope like Starcraft or Company of Heroes.

RPS does have smart writing, and it is frequently tongue in cheek, and this was certainly an example of it. On the other hand, that whole paragraph didn't really need to be in there at all. It was ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous, and while it might be self-aware it can still be called out for being what it is.

This is true! So it's not as bad as it typically is, but it is still ridiculous.

It never ends... from Rock, Paper, Shotgun today: "Leisure Suit Larry is basically gaming’s Citizen Kane"

What Jake said is right on. It's not that a narrative can't feature repetition, but it should be there for a specific reason, and not just as a sort of default mode to fall back on.

Repetition in games is interesting (which I think is more the issue then how long or short a particular work is). Last time I checked Steam, I sunk over 80 hours into XCOM. And here I am playing it on the iPad some more. I think it is one of those features where the fact that games can be this awkward marriage of narrative and game play. The lighter the narrative, and the more systems driven the game is, the more repetition is acceptable, even desirable. No one gets annoyed by how all you do in Letter Press or Boggle is forming words because that's what the game is. That isn't how narratives typically work though. In a narrative things should be moving along, and typically the protagonist isn't going to be engaging in the same activities over and over again. In AAA games, because of their narrative ambitions -- but typically modest game design ambitions -- you often see these features at cross-purposes with each other.

Oh man, I just listened to the outro music. You guys are mentally synced up with my girlfriend. She was playing that same melody on a cat synthesizer app for her iPad a few days ago.