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As far as puzzles are concerned in strategy game missions, I don't have a problem with them in theory, but I often end up a little wary of them because there is always the risk of bad game design making the solution a little too precise where the slightest deviation results in failure. That's no fun, and has ruined a number of strategy game (not just the real-time variant) campaigns for me.

Authorial intent is nice and all, but ultimately a particular reading or interpretation is supported by the facts of the narrative or it isn't, or some interpretations are slightly more plausible than others. Authors aren't always the best judges of their own work, although I would tend to agree that some of the hyper-focused readings we sometimes see from super-fans end up sounding like more of a stretch than a more naturalist/less literal approach.

Most RTSs are going to be about building up a massive war machine. That makes for some compelling game play, but not necessarily compelling story telling.

The audiolog problem is definitely worse in Infinite because you have Elizabeth right there most of the game talking to you, but you're right that it is not as if this problem didn't exist in Bioshock. It is also such a weird technique for games to use. Like, it made perfect sense with the fiction of System Shock 2 where the entire crew of the spaceship is dead, but it makes less sense in worlds that are supposed to be populated by the living. They've sort of become the video game equivalent of how like in a TV show or movie any time a character turns on a TV it is always happens to be the news with a breaking story relevant to the plot. It is a bad crutch.

That's a good point. I really liked Bioshock a lot, but I didn't like it as much as System Shock 2 in part because the twist wasn't really a surprise to me because it was the same type of twist as System Shock 2. I also didn't find many of the characters to be especially interesting except for the woman who takes it upon herself to act as the guardian of the little sisters. Most of the characters just felt like philosophical positions personified. This is also sort of how I felt as well. Colombia never felt like an actual place to me, but more this sort of symbolic mytheo-poetic journey that evoked the idea of American Exceptionalism rather than a believable place that might have existed had we lived in a universe where there was enough helium for a cloud city to exist.

Also sorry to hear about Idle Thumbs getting scammed. As a warning that should you guys ever have anything trademarked to be wary about scams as the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office maintains a public database, and so there are a lot of scams out there preying on people that have trademark registrations.

Bummer you guys didn't enjoy Infinite, but understandable. I enjoyed my time with it more than the original Bioshock, but I think I'm in the minority opinion on that one so I'll leave it at that. I think your criticism about the audiologs is 100% spot on though. I remember when the game was first announced Ken Levine mentioned how he didn't want to be the guy known for the innovation of having guys talk to you from behind a glass wall. I assume that audio logs were included in that critique, but that doesn't appear to be the case. The use of audio logs is even more egregious when they are used to fill in major plot details as opposed to just providing more background detail to the world you are in. Also like so many games are using audio logs now... Borderlands, Dishonored, etc. It's time to give that a rest, and let people discover a world by other means. I wonder if people's disappointment with Infinite is going to spill over into the Dishonored DLC because I think both games suffer from a lot of similar problems, but it was maybe easier to not notice these things in Dishonored because it was new & shiny. I think the actual question about what journalism should do was maybe a false either/or sort of thing. Like, there should be a lot of different forms of journalism all doing different things, serving different purposes. I'd also point out that the playing a game to completion thing is sometimes more ambiguous than it sounds. Like, when are you done with a strategy game? There isn't any simple answer to that...

I agree with I Saw Dasein. The combat may have been an awkward fit for the narrative of the game, but as an activity I engaged in in a game I found it perfectly enjoyable, especially the areas with the skylines. Once I got the hang of setting up traps it became pretty tactically interesting as well. The original Bioshock's combat always felt more like a slog to me. I guess the only time things got tedious was with the Sirens, but that was probably my fault for going for a cheap solution where I would electro-hook each undead dude one at a time until there were no more corpses left to revive, and then she was basically quite harmless and easy to take out.

The talk about how Comstock isn't so in the player's face the same way Andrew Ryan was in the original Bioshock was a good point, but I also think once you finish the game you will find that there was a pretty solid reason for making Comstock a more distant character.

I rather enjoyed the twist in Bioshock Infinite, but that also had to do with the fact that a lot of my personal criticisms of the game that were developing as I was playing it were sort of negated by the ending, so that was kind of neat.

Cool dishonored French spam!

Thanks!

These games were great. I don't think I ever got very far with the Last Crusade though...

Also to be fair, it can take awhile to understand game design flaws for complex strategy games and/or simulations. Master of Orion 3 comes to mind as another game that is basically universally regarded as terrible now, but when it first came out it had a lot of positive reviews. It was another game that had so much going on that it was difficult to understand there were serious problems with the game. When games reach a certain complexity level it just becomes very difficult to gauge what's working and what isn't so it is easy for your initial impression to be very positive because whatever you don't understand you interpret as you just not having fully learned the game yet, rather than a fault of the game. I'm glad for the most part the genre has largely backed away from that level of complexity thanks to the influence of i)S and board games, although some games like those made by Paradox, and city-builders necessarily retain a certain amount of complexity. Another problem with evaluating strategy games is it is hard to tell how long you need to play the game for. Generally speaking, you probably don't have a very good handle on things after just one play through.

Also Rob, you didn't link to whatever it was that you said you would link to!

I'm definitely looking forward to the HotS episode. I think how it turns out will be dependent on who appears on the show, so that should make it interesting. I just listened to a Qt3 podcast where Tom Chick was ragging on it...

I think what was missing from the talk about DOTA 2, LoL, etc. with regards to it being a competitive game just like sports is that with sports there is at least the concept of sportsman-like behavior, and whether or not athletes actually live up to that ideal it is at least this idea out there in the world that is somewhat enforced. It is not clear to me that this is something that Riot or Valve actually care about though, and I think that is unfortunate. I enjoy playing games competitively, and don't mind tense or aggressive communication, but when that spills over to verbal harrassment it generally stops being fun, and that was my brief experience playing LoL. Part of what I like about SC2 is that even though that is a super competitve, tense game I don't typically experience any obnoxious behavior from my opponents. Now there is probably a strong argument that much of that is because that there are so many actions that need to be performed at any given moment in SC2 that taking the time to insult your opponent risks putting you at a disadvantage, but I do wish there were more opportunities to play competitive multiplayer games without having to deal with so much off putting social behavior.

I was thinking about this recently, and I think it is the music that draws me back to Civ 5 more than any other aspect of the game. It is just so pleasant and relaxing to listen to. Civ 4 also featured a pretty excellent soundtrack (I absolutely love the minimalism of the modern era), but Civ V's score really taps into that theme of the greatness of human achievements. I like how the new expansion is planning on playing up this aspect of the game where when your civilization creates cultural artifacts that get housed in museums, there will be a menu where you get to examine/listen to pieces of your civilization's greatness. Very nice touch!

When I try to post things in Chrome it doesn't recognize any of the text... I'm currently posting this in Internet Explorer (bleg...)

That definitely seems like one of the great unexplored potentials of strategy gaming. One can imagine a game where you make decisions like in Mass Effect or the Walking Dead, but these decisions result in strategic consequences as well as narrative ones. It's a good question why there haven't been any major titles to do this...

I enjoyed hearing about how Sean thinks he could beat Obama at golf. This reminds me of a time when some friends of mine got together to play Conquest of the Empire. That's a board game with rules that are sort of like a mix of Diplomacy, and Axis & Allies, but the setting is the Roman Empire. So it is a pretty contentious game, and of course a huge half hour long argument broke out at one point when one player captured another player's general, and was holding him for randsom. The delicate balance of power being what it was, of course everyone was involved in the argument, not just the two people directly affected by this action. After much heated discussion no settlement was reached, the general was executed, and a bloody war broke out. At some point we took a break to eat a late lunch, but during this time somehow the topic of Tiger Woods came up, and the player whose general was captured remarked that he thought he could beat Tiger Woods in a fight. The rest of us were incredulous... bear in mind that although this guy is in reasonably good shape, he's also in his mid-40s at this point and not someone you would look at and think he is some super tough dude. His entire line of reasoning was also that golf isn't a real sport, and therefore Tiger Woods can't be that fit. This prompted the player who captured that dude's general to get into an argument with him about that, and soon we found ourselves in another bizarre proxy argument of the previous argument. Fun times.

There's no way you're going to make Space Rumsfeld any less of a shadowy character! ;-) I love all the 3MA episodes with small developers, and I think they are especially insightful because they have the capacity to be more open than some of the developers from big studios. Like when Paul started citing like how many copies of a game he might sell in a day... I don't think you would hear that sort of candor from a bigger company. I'm not trying to knock big studios either, I'm sure they have valid reasons to keep their cards to their chest, but as a listener its definitely nice to get a chance to peak behind the curtains.

Clearing the cache appears to have worked, thanks everybody!

One of my favorite parts of this episode was when Bruce just started naming all the different games that Paul had done. It seemed like if Paul hadn't interjected Bruce would have kept on going until he had described the entire catalog!

So I was listening to this episode yesterday because I picked up Starcraft 2 recently while it was on sale, so I went back and downloaded all the episodes that discussed SC2. I would like to point out that during the discussion of Red Dead Redemption there was a brief debate of whether or not blaxploitation films were similar to westerns. Thanks to Tarantino's efforts, we can now safely answer that question in the affirmative!