sclpls

hahahaha that is kind of the best!

All that being said, I certainly agree it is in poor taste when game developers get very in-your-face about DLC content available.

These DLC arguments are never going to end because people act as if the price of a particular good or service is something that is set in stone, which is a ludicrous economic belief. The value of a particular thing will be different depending on a person's circumstances. $100 goes a lot farther for someone with an annual salary of $20,000 vs. someone with an annual salary of $200,000. In the retail world the price of a new video game is typically fixed around $60. That's really inefficient, and it would make more sense to have a floating target, which is basically what Steam does. I think DLC was sort of the natural response to this inefficiency, so maybe they still don't have a ton of room to charge variable prices for a new game, but they can experiment with different price ranges based on having various DLC available which will appeal to some people, but not others. Ultimately that sort of flexibility will allow more people developing games to flourish I think... getting away from that fixed $60 point. I think its great that an indie developer can sell a game for $20 to hit a broad base of players, and a company like Matrix Games can sell their War in the East game for $80 knowing that that makes more sense for their niche audience.

Man, I hated how the controls were implemented for the PC port of Sword & Sworcery. On the other hand, I love playing Waking Mars with a Game Pad even if navigating the menu kind of sucks.

Don't feel too conflicted! It was stated in one of the podcasts Jon was on (maybe a few...) that the blacked out fog of war would be an optional gameplay feature. You can also play where the map is totally visible, and so you have a better lay of the land.

My favorite thing in the new XCOM is right after a soldier of yours dies, and hopelessly mousing over the corpse to make something happen. At this point, a lot of games might have some text box that says "deceased comrade" or something like that, but XCOM gives you nothing as a way of reminding you that your guy truly is no longer among you.

I am really excited about this game. This is the first time I've backed anything on Kickstarter beyond the basic pledge to get a copy of the game. Looking forward to checking out the alpha and seeing how it progresses from there. I'm still not totally clear on how supply works in this game. I know from these forums that Jon is a big fan of Unity of Command, but I assume it will be a different thing just because of different gameplay and because of the historical setting... speaking of which I am also so into the setting for this game, which is an underutilized setting. It makes me want to reread Tacitus who is pre-fall of the Roman Empire, but he writes in this awesome apocalyptic mode as if it was the fall of the Roman Empire kind of not unlike the rise of declinism literature that is currently pervasive in the U.S. and France right now.

Worth dropping by Polygon to see a piece they did on the development of XCOM. A lot of the information will be old news to people that have read a lot of interviews with Jake Solomon, but even then it is worth watching the videos to check out some of the earlier prototypes and design concepts. http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/1/31/3928710/making-of-xcoms-jake-solomon-firaxis-sid-meier

I'm getting slowly, mildly better at this game, although I still can't beat any scenarios 2 turns before last turn, which I guess is normal for a lot of people.

Eador: Genesis, it's available on GOG.

Funny you should mention Brian Reynolds, Kotaku just announced that he left Zynga. http://kotaku.com/5980075/

This threw me off too. I assumed the combination of RTS and ARPG just meant it was going to be a LOMA which didn't appeal to me. The game he described on this episode sounded a lot more appealing, and I've gone ahead and backed it.

Total Annihilation is probably my favorite RTS of all time (granted I haven't downloaded it off of GOG because I'm kind of afraid that something I look back on with such fondness won't hold up... maybe this episode will change my mind...). Very sad that it looks like GPG will be shutting its doors. I'm a little nervous about listening to this episode.

While I don't agree with SotS being a particularly interesting strategy game (it's been awhile, but I don't remember it working for me when I played it) I think all your other points are pretty right on. I actually like the cards in Endless Space (I also play a lot of board games, so I think those sorts of things don't bother me as much as a lot of PC gamers), but I don't think it was implemented particularly well either. One thing that just occurs to me is that pretty much every 4X space game ever always switches to a battlefield screen when combat occurs, and I wonder if that is doing anyone any favors. Maybe, contra Tom Chick in episode 202, space is where you really need hexes most of all.

Also as far as the discussion on the GDRT podcast I had the opposite experience of Dirk. I was always thrilled when there was a part of the game where it slowed down, and you would just sort of walk around and do typical adventure game stuff. I remember actually breathing a sigh of relief on several occasions just because of how heavy the game would get. What didn't work for me (mostly) was the whole tap a button a bunch of times, then press another button. That felt the most like a "I'm playing a video game" moment, and would take me out of the experience. That being said, I understand that the game needed to provide some resistance to the player at points, and it was nice hearing the discussion about it. Also, unless I'm just hearing what I want to hear, it sounds like Sean & Jake had reservations about how it was implemented as well.

Last time, we discovered Neptune's Pride. This time, welcome to Neptune's Shame! P.S. Iron Helmet's Jupiter's Folly is a pretty sweet game too. It's more card driven.

So I've been meaning to play one of Vic Davis' games, and I'm just about ready to bite the bullet. Any recommendations for which one to start with? Six Gun Saga seems like it would be the easiest to learn, but also the lightest of the three.

This is apropos of nothing, but did anyone ever play this game? It was an early 90s PC game that was like some sort of post-apocalyptic strategy RPG type game. I think it was pre-Fallout, but post-Wasteland, although my memory could be horribly wrong about that. You had to sort of wander around the desert, find dudes to join your side, scavenge for food & water, and fight off other bands of mercenaries. I was never any good at it, but I still always had a blast trying to survive. The game had this sort of sweet overview map (which I think was randomly generated?), and combat was kind of frustrating because it was real time, and you would have to click on dudes with your mouse, but they were tiny sprites that moved kind of quickly so it was hard. I don't know why this game popped into my head, but it did. It had a totally sweet vibe.

I don't think switching perspectives in game is necessarily so important, though it is certainly a legitimate technique to convey that different people will have capacities in how they interact with the world. The Walking Dead did an excellent job of conveying subtle racial biases that you experience through the lens of Lee. Just stuff like that is valuable I think, and is completely missing in games where the protagonist just tends to be this blank slate.

So crazy that Rob Liefeld was mentioned, I was seriously revisiting this gem of a list the other day: http://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/4/21/2960508/worst-rob-liefeld-drawings Regarding the conversation about video games not doing a good enough job of portraying different life experiences than that of an able bodied white male, I think the argument is mostly correct about market forces and all of that. However, it doesn't explain it all entirely. Its true that the barrier to entry to publishing a novel or whatever is much lower compared to making a big budget game. Yet I would also argue that movies (and not just of the indie/arthouse cinema variety) tend to do a better job overall of portraying different life experiences than games do. I think the difference is that the movie industry has a much more diverse workforce than the typical video game company does. Although it is not the only way to solve the problem, I think a more diverse workforce would be the simplest, most direct way, and most likely way to successfully remedy the problem.

Very much enjoyed listening to Sean & Jake on the Game Design Roundtable podcast talk about making their game. I discovered that I live like 3 blocks away from the Idle Thumbs studio. Sweet!

Backed, one-of-a-kind, amazing podcast.

Nice discussion of Tropico 4. I like how it differs from the 3MA discussion where there was like this critique that the game is basically Che-Guevara-as-Santa-Claus, and it wasn't brutal enough in terms of having to put down political factions, and really capturing the difficult decisions a dictator has to make and distinguishing itself from a typical city builder. I kind of feel like that difference of opinion captures how both podcasts approach games.

Part of the problem with Endless Space (and this is part of the problem with the 4X space genre in general I think) is a problem of map design. In a Civ type game you have different terrain (mountains, water tiles, etc.) that will alter some of the strategic choices you make. In the space 4X you just move from nodal point A to nodal point B. The consequence of this is that even though you have different victory conditions in Endless Space, your strategy ends up being the same regardless, which doesn't help the game in terms of making it feel like it is just numbers.

I'm never totally clear on when these podcasts are recorded, so perhaps this was prior to the Second Wave release for XCOM, but my understanding is that that update addresses Dave's complaint that he never has to make difficult choices in terms of inventory. For example, you can have settings where equipment is lost when agents die, and there are settings that make nations stingier about providing money, etc. It doesn't address the more pressing problem of campaign variety, but hopefully we'll see some major expansion come out in 2013. I think I was defending Endless Space the last time it was mentioned on a 3MA episode, but now I need to offer a mea culpa, I've found myself pretty bored with the game at this point too, and the last couple of times I've played it I found myself bored, and more interested in playing Civ 4 or 5, or Alpha Centauri. Overall great list, and encompasses exactly what I've been playing a lot of this year, except for CK2, a game I love in theory, but in practice feels like too much of a passive experience for me to really get into.