TychoCelchuuu

The promised competitive match:

Looks pretty great to me! I like the cockeyed eye. As long as I'm posting here, the backlog of shit that has accumulated since I last plugged my shit largely consists of videos about Natural Selection 2. They are, in order, an alien commander tutorial, a marine commander tutorial, and a practice competitive-ish match (same rules as competition play) in which I take great pains to explain everything so that newer viewers won't be lost the way one would normally be lost watching competitive NS2 without much background (that video is coming in the next post since I can't slam 3 shits into one post it seems):

They are having a 48 hour grace period to pledge over on their site because it went down due to all the traffic for a while.

fuck that's the wrong video, I was going for his other one but I was watching both so I linked Shia. I meant to link Christian Bale which... you also beat me to now.

You could say that the taxidermy... is pretty fantastic.

I also voted for, among other things, The Flock, not because I think it would make a particularly interesting game but because I fucking love birds. edit: and toblix is sitting pretty in the #2 highest donor/purchaser slot with a payment of what I can only assume to be the randomly chosen value of $123.45

Letting the public inside the process is super cool! Having people vote on everything seems like it favor the same sorts of winners that Greenlight favors, although with much less art to go on people do have to vote largely based on the concept which I suppose cuts down on the whole "certain aesthetics get all the success." I'm rooting for JP's game - I've wanted another Startopia since... the first Startopia. Brad Muir's "KAIJU PILEDRIVER" sounds exciting too although I'm curious as to how extensive the roguelike elements would be. edit: Rock Paper Shotgun has an interview with the Schafmeister about the process.

Although this isn't quite in the spirit of the thread, it is technically a YouTube video and I've had it stuck in my head intermittently since what seems to be the day I was born, although certainly it can't have been that long:

It's actually not unrealistic - you DID miss most of the game, or more accurately you missed most of the ways the conversations and story could play out, and unless you play 3-4 times you'll miss much of what the game has to offer. Alpha Protocol is one of my favorite games of all time because of all the amazing stuff that's in there that isn't force fed to you - you discover it because of the choices you make, and this makes those choices matter.

Alternatively I'm arguing that if you don't want to buy games from cunts, then it's not just Elemental you need to boycott.

I would never put words in your mouth. But that's a shocking thing to admit to!

If Vladimir Bartol had written after a fatwā drove Salman Rushdie into hiding, maybe he would've stuck a disclaimer at the beginning. Anything to keep from getting attacked by a madman with an axe like Kurt Westergaard was, right? I mean they have the lives of the entire Assassin's Creed development team to worry about.

That's just UbiSoft Montreal, right? The other teams that worked on Revelations were Ubisoft Annecy, Ubisoft Massive, Ubisoft Quebec, Ubisoft Singapore, and Ubisoft Bucharest. Not to mention "multicultural" doesn't mean "also includes black people."

I don't see what's wrong with it. When the first game in your series is literally about a secretive group of Muslims who exist to kill people, and you set it during one of the most volatile times when it comes to Christian-Muslim relations and when it comes to the Middle East, and when the bad guys in your game are a group of Christians, I think maybe you'd want to take some proactive steps to ward off the calls for your blood by everyone you could conceivably piss off. And have you looked at the credits for the Assassin's Creed games? The development team actually IS stupendously multicultural. It's almost breathtaking to see how many people from all over the world go into crafting the experience.

That's an adorably optimistic thing to expect. I see no reason not to expect backsliding into sexy hit-nuns that 47 lovingly strangles to death in slow motion.

I bet they haven't even changed what the letters "G," "T," and "A" stand for in the title. Rockstar shitting out another no-effort game I see. I bet they just took their script for GTA IV, hit "Ctrl + F," replaced all instances of "Liberty City" with "Los Angeles," then they did it again and replaced "Los Angeles" with "Los Santos."

The guards DID get alerted when you acted strangely, right? If they see you on rooftops they'll say "get down" and 5 seconds later they try to kill you. That's a little harsh but at least they say something. Really, though, how SHOULD people in the 15th century react to someone being on the roof? I'm not even sure there's a uniform set of reactions for people TODAY; it seems a little tough to predict what people would've done back in Assassin's Creed times and then get mad at the game for not properly modeling that.

I've read Gatsby so many times that I'm kind of Gatsby-d out but I am definitely looking forward to the first Book Club episode that I'll be able to listen to, having read the book.

FESTIVITIES

Sounds about right. I never played much Doom 3 because it was scary, and I enjoyed RAGE a fair amount when the shooting was happening (but not when I was in a car) but it was definitely not as finely tuned as, say, the first Doom.

What did you like about Doom 3 that made it so much better than RAGE? Was it that its walls were visible rather than invisible, or that it didn't give you any neat toys in the first place to make you feel disappointed in having no reason to use them, or did you mostly like the atmosphere/horror elements which of course weren't present in RAGE, or something else?

Are you sure the train crash is scripted/in a cutscene because of the physics? Don't we see cars deform in the trailer at about 0:55? And since trains are clearly in the game, not just in cutscenes (heck, they're in the trailer multiple times) and since cars clearly deform and since trains clearly deform in some sense, why think that they can't do it in real time ingame?

Well, they don't have positive and deep male characters either, and some of the female characters are just fine (Elizabeta is maybe my favorite character from any GTA game). It would just be nice to, you know, play as them once in a while, because then they'd get front and center in the story instead of always being relegated to the sidelines as people you drive around or see in cutscenes. Believe it or not, I_smell, I actually play the GTA games for more than dicking around. I really enjoy the characters and the acting in the games. The radio station DJs, the ridiculous antics... I spend less time running around murdering people than I do playing the missions for real and advancing the story. That's why I want some women as playable characters. It's not an arbitrary distinction for me because I don't play the game as Free-Roaming Asshole Simulator 2000. I play it because I find Brucie hilarious.

Rockstar doesn't just make GTA games, and Tarantino does go back to the Reservoir Dogs well every once in a while. I'm disappointed that it's three men doing men things again but aside from that I suspect I'll enjoy the whole thing. The GTA games have always had wonderful cardboard cutout characters, by which I mean their characterization is pretty amazing even if what's really there isn't too deep. At least when they're being funny. The dramatic stuff always leaves me feeling flat. But Elizabeta Torres, Manny Escuela, Brucie Kibbutz... it's hard to stop laughing when they show up. The GTA games have always struck me as a sort of outsider's view of America, with all the ridiculous stuff turned up to 11 and with stereotypes and so on at full blast. I appreciate what Saint's Row tries to do by making everything ridiculous, but I find it much less interesting than Rockstar's slightly more focused parody of everything that anybody has ever thought America is.

And that article didn't really say anything other than "Curiosity doesn't work very well" which I think we could perhaps have discovered without having bothered to read the article. We could, for instance, have read this thread.