TychoCelchuuu

That's so scarily accurate. I can't believe I haven't heard of this channel before. That's actually so spot on it mostly made me angry that people actually agree with it unironically rather than [adjective that describes the feeling you get put when you are experiencing something funny].

Oh and BY THE WAY A Sam announcer pack for Dota 2 would be the best. I haven't spend any money on a free to play game in my entire life but I'd buy that and start playing Dota 2 (I don't play Dota 2).

"If I ignore all the torturing this guy does, he seems like a pretty sensible dude!"

I played SS1 a few months ago and it worked fine.

http://storify.com/TychoCelchuuu/j-chastain-on-the-definition-of-games http://www.visitproteus.com/what-are-game/ http://kotaku.com/5980714/they-patrol-our-streets-in-search-for-the-notorious-not+a+game-its-your-friendly-neighborhood-game-police

I actually think in a lot of ways System Shock 1 is a better game.

You need to play System Shock and System Shock 2, the two games that pretty much started the Gone Home genre (although Strife beat them to the punch I would say). System Shock is the reason the combination for the filing cabinet in the dad's office is what it is, for instance.

ok stop this is the best thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=QXvFNMtgrsw Literally the only bad thing about it is that I didn't think of it first.

Sci-fi is often a catchall for sci-fi/horror. So between the ghosts and the X-Files references I guess Gone Home is sci-fi.

How exactly does the manga style fit into the concept of the recovery of written logs from a deserted Korean colony ship? I didn't mind the manga at all but if I hadn't known of Christine Love prior to this I would've thought it was a dating sim or something. I'm looking forward to playing Hate Plus at some point but like you I'll want to replay Analogue at least once, maybe more since I think your ending carries over. Analogue is a great game for a lot of the same reasons Gone Home is great - investigative narratives where you piece together a story are fun because they give your brain a workout. They're like convoluted movie plots except they only move as fast as you play, which is nice for making sure you don't get lost (although I can't remember a time when a movie lost me) - that's a feature they share with books - and also they involve you directly in the investigation because you are doing the uncovering, which is a really gratifying sensation that you couldn't really recreate if Analogue were a book or something. My complete inability to remember names did cause me to have to start writing down the family trees on a piece of paper though. If Hate Plus has a better interface, that's good - I wanted access to all that stuff at my fingertips, easily, without being trapped in conversation menus or having to click 8 times.

yep

I think the "language of game reviewing" likes the game just fine. And can I just say that "Gone Home" being in the "Adventure > First Person > Sci-fi" category at GameRankings is pretty great.

Twice, assuming you're talking about the series of articles. Here it is a third time: http://critical-gaming.com/blog/2009/5/18/critical-gaming-pikmin-course-week-1.html

Korean Dota 2 Commentators and their Knowledge of the Game I haven't seen the streams of the brand new Korean Dota 2 players + commentators, so Sean is probably right that the commentators don't really know what's going on based on his assessment of how surprised/excited they sound by things, but I think it's worth mentioning that Korean commentating (according to my MINUSCULE KNOWLEDGE OF THE PRACTICE) can sometimes be quite different than American style - rather than just "play by play" and "strategic analysis" which are the two things you usually get in American/English commentating, I think at least in Starcraft some Korean commentators (like ones on TV) even do stuff like hide parts of the game from the viewer only to reveal them at a climactic moment to heighten the tension (so like, hide the fact that a player is doing a drop or building a nuke until it's right about to happen, then reveal it for the excitement value). That kind of specific production and management of the viewer's excitement levels in a stagecraft sense suggests to me that something very minimal, like acting excited when a Dota 2 hero pulls off an ability you "didn't expect," is well within the ambit of Korean commentary. Sean's probably right though, because if the players are new, for comedic value it makes sense to have new commentators too. ALSO apropos of Korean Dota 2 commentary this video is tremendous - it's some translated Korean commentary from that 93 minute game that put Nick to sleep twice: "Video Game" as a Term In Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden (and presumably its sequel, The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 - Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie - Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa), in the future, video games are referred to as "vidcons." This is thus the canon term in the movie Space Jam, too, although I do not believe it occurs in the film proper. I'm actually sympathetic to the point Nick was making, and I think the Gone Home era is a good time to make the point: right now, video games are casual games + things nerds play and not much else. In a future where a game like Gone Home is normal and a game like Gears of War is weird, I can see us as having gone through a phase where the general public had to pick something to call video games that wasn't "video game," just like the general public had to pick something to call MP3 players and tablets and more or less ended up with iPod and iPad (although that example isn't the best). Also

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men I enjoy mediocre third person shooters. This is an incredibly mediocre third person shooter. I enjoyed it.

Alpha Protocol treated you differently depending on what you wore sometimes, but it wasn't wealth based. Games like Fallout have "wealthy" sort of clothes add Charisma/Barter/etc. bonuses which make people treat you better.

Even in bomb defuse missions which had the same thing sort of?

I stared at it for like a minute originally and made zero progress. Gave up, came back just now, figured it out. Hint: Star Wars.

Gone Home music

WHAT TANGLED WEBS WE WEAVE

Does "XCOM" refer to the original X-COM? If it does, it should be X-COM, not XCOM. The way you can tell X-COM from XCOM is the dash.

Further details will be forthcoming in my Gone Home tweak guide that I plan to publish within the week - this game definitely demands max FPS and pin point accurate control. If you don't squeeze every last frame out of this thing you're going to be at a serious disadvantage.

You can turn it off in the menu though.

I'm not seeing why that would be necessary. You could, alternatively, just listen to the people who say torture does not work. I think it's also pretty clear that Chris didn't say that violence in general needs to make you feel bad for a game to get it right - the Thumbs love tons of games, like Dishonored, where violence doesn't make you feel bad at all. Twig: torture is of dubious effectiveness. See the sources linked here and here for instance. If you're confused as to why people would keep up a practice that doesn't produce the desired results, maybe you could ask people who pray, or who consult their horoscopes, or who do all sorts of things that don't work.