TychoCelchuuu

That's adorable but I will never own a Vita unfortunately.

Woo. I think the idea about the stats-based stuff is from this line from the main announcement:

I'm not sure it's really up to you (or up to anyone except each individual person) to decide what level of [thing that they enjoy] justifies what level of "craven lust" (whatever that means) that they choose to have for a video game. I mean, you apparently like video games with atmosphere, but not enough to make you like Half-Life 2 as much as most people. Does that mean they're really unjustified in enjoying the games as much as they do? Or does it just mean they place a greater emphasis on, and thus derive more enjoyment from, things that you don't find as impressive?

I felt the same way, Avaren, but then I realized that renting stuff is so ridiculously cheap (in one round you earn enough to rent something for that day) that I decided to get over that gross feeling and just rent what I want.

Looks pretty neat! I'm a huge wimp but I might be able to steel myself for terror if it's what I have to do to enjoy a game with a neat retro aesthetic ON THE MOON IN SPACE.

Well in QWOP you'd have a man flipping over and landing on his head despite moving at .0001 MPH on a flat surface with zero obstacles. So maybe you're being a little harsh on CLOP.

Yeah, I posted those tips on the first page (post #13).

Well, that would help you about as much as looking up videos of people running on YouTube is going to help in QWOP. Which is to say, if you can manage to recreate the stride, then you're golden, but the challenge isn't knowing what to do: it's being able to do it. subbes was saying that she knew what to do but that it didn't help, which is the case in CLOP as much as it was in QWOP. What might actually be going on, though, is that it would help immensely if she could also do the harder part of putting that knowledge into practice. Perhaps without her knowledge or your YouTube studying, a player would have no chance.

Does a game need to be one thing for it to be a good game? Like, assuming you're correct about Psychonaut's design being all over the place, is that necessarily a criticism of it? I can't really think of any reason to dislike a game that gives you exploration platforming, puzzle solving, token collection, and so on unless you dislike any of those things individually, in which case you would probably be upset that Psychonauts is the game it is rather than a different game that you would prefer. Just by virtue of having a lot of different gameplay elements, though, I don't think Psychonauts or any other game is worse.

From the Double Fine FAQ:

I found that to be a little bullshit, actually. One of his lines is something like "you have destroyed so much, Dr. Freeman, but tell me, what have you created?" It's like, look, I have a degree in theoretical physics from MIT so presumably I created enough stuff to get hired at Black Mesa, and then from that point out I was busy either fighting for my life or being in magic G-Man stasis. For all I know, I created a lot of stuff before the series started, and from that point on I haven't had a chance to create. So I wanted to yell at Breen "I would create a bunch of stuff if you'd stop trying to kill me!" or something, but nope, Gordon can't talk. I agree with Urthman that the first Half-Life was the one that really did this right. The part in Questionable Ethics when you find the houndeye cages is a stupendous example of storytelling in an FPS. Half-Life 2 (and especially the episodes) have plenty of this too, but they also have a bunch of really stupid "Alyx talks at you for 10 minutes" stuff that didn't work at all.

The "games discussed" list for this episode should probably have DEFCON, considering all the great commentary about it in here. Also, it was fun to hear Jake say he's watching Veronica Mars. The first two seasons especially are pretty great neo-noir.

The Cthulhu Saves the World port Kickstarter game got released. Saturday Morning RPG came out. Zombies, Run! was released as were Air Guitar Move and No Time to Explain!. And so on. And those are just from the batch of games before the whole video game Kickstarter craze started. In a couple of years we'll probably be inundated with games from Kickstarter.

Speaking as someone who has just gotten into roguelikes, Dungeons of Dredmor was a great introduction, and moving on from there, Brogue was an excellent second game. It's pretty, mouse-driven, and moderately simple (no character creation, for instance). It eased me into ASCII very well.

Or not enough thought! The question maybe isn't "what would taste better" but "what is it okay to eat?" Only in this case replace the drunk guy with a drunk pig, perhaps.

I know you were sort of joking with your edit about the coherency of your own posts, but it is a good point: there are plenty of people who don't know their arse from their elbow, namely infants and people with mental disabilities, so clearly there's got to be something more than "knowing your arse from your elbow" that makes it the case that it's not okay for people to eat you (or it's okay to eat babies, which I suppose is also possible).

For what it's worth, Blow never said that screen calibration is mandatory. I don't play any console games, so I don't know about the message at the beginning of the game, but from your article it seems like it is a requirement unless you negotiate some sort of special deal with Microsoft, perhaps through your publisher, which isn't exactly something your average indie game developer is going to be able to do, right?

Just beat RAGE. There were three great things in this game. The first is the character design/acting: it was really fun to just look at the characters while they talked, especially the scientist with the adorable little robot on his shoulder that would soundlessly act out a huge range of emotions with just the ability to nod and blink its little LED eyes. In general a lot of the characters were really well designed, except for a lot of the female characters who were inexplicably wearing basically underwear. Video games The second great thing is the graphics: the characters I've already mentioned, and the environment, as long as you never get closer than 10 feet, is absolutely beautiful. My Steam screenshot accumulation has acquired some wonderful shots from RAGE. The environments are not just pretty but also unique. All the crazy balloons floating around and stuff are really intriguing. Unfortunately if you get closer than 10 feet everything looks like pea soup. I guess that was to make sure it ran on consoles! The third great thing is the shooting and the attendant systems. I think RAGE has my favorite shotgun in a Video game and my favorite assault rifle in a Video game. The movement feels as solid as it always does in an id game. Little touches like how the camera acts when you move or shoot or how the guns recoil all add up to making the basic "use gun on man" interaction incredibly strong. Everything else about RAGE ranges from mediocre to bad. The driving is passable: I sort of enjoyed racing for a while, but it got tedious after a while. The open-ish world is pretty worthless: just drive from point A to point B to begin another linear mission. The plot is so stupid as to be offensive to my admittedly meager intelligence. The enemies had basically zero variety: aside from shield dude or little robot dude, every single enemy either ran towards you or shot a gun at you. Compared to something like Half-Life, which has many enemies that you fight in many different ways, RAGE's opponents really don't engender much excitement. The inventory stuff is just tacked on and useless. I collected god knows how many oil cans from god knows how many shelves for some purpose I still could not relay, despite having finished the game. The card minigame is boring. The gambling minigame is about as stupid as actual gambling. And so on. Basically anything else they put into RAGE is not impressive. I had fun, but it's disappointing that Carmack's company, of all places, tried to get fancy rather than focusing on the basics. DooM had better enemy variety than this game!

Just started exercising for real, so I decided to start listening to a podcast, and I had heard good stuff about Idle Thumbs. I'm up to #14 or something and having lots of fun.