TychoCelchuuu

"Less murdery." "Tangibly less suggestive of psychopathy/sociopathy." "Not as violent." "More like NOLF and Thief." "You have less HP." "Physics puzzles." "Lots of crouching and staying behind things while moving." "Dishonored." It's a fucking insult to men, women, and humanity in general that "kill literally everyone in front of you to progress to the next level" is the default in video games and is also somehow "masculine" compared to a more nonviolent, stealthy/whatever approach, which is somehow "feminine." The horrific number of stupid, backwards, sexist assumptions built into that is depressing and I don't even want to start thinking about it in detail for fear of making myself even sadder. That level designer apparently has enough sense to hesitate before saying stupid bullshit but not enough sense to actually refrain from saying the stupid bullshit. At least she didn't call it girlfriend mode.

You're not really missing anything.

I too have basically been sitting this one out because life's too short to try to convince crazy people that they're crazy, but rest assured thestalkinghead that you're pretty much wrong about everything ever.

Home Page | Kickstarter | twitter | YouTube | Facebook http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=IANpN2iykPE Tangiers is a stealth game. I will let the words from its "About" page describe it: This devlog has the first gameplay footage. Tangiers will (hopefully) be released in mid 2014 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Links Rock Paper Shotgun Preview Another Rock Paper Shotgun Preview Indie Statik Preview Indie Statik Podcast with discussion about the game Eurogamer Preview Back the Kickstarter! I want to play this game.

Remember that? Well, also this:

Destruction's likely in the bag, Kickstarters tend to make a big chunk of their money in the last couple of days.

The proper response to the Live Journal thing is pretty much this comic: I haven't heard someone mention Albino Blacksheep in... forever. So that was a trip down nostalgia lane. But in terms of nostalgia it's nothing compared to the Rebellion discussion. Like CK2, I have a feeling the game's arcane UI held it back, which is a bit of a shame because unlike CK2 I don't think it's tremendously complicated, at least as 4X games go (although real time with pause certain puts some pressure on, as we've seen in the CK2 stream - I feel like Rebellion was near the head of the pack when it came to "sweeping 4X strategy games that are real time rather than turn based"). I looked up BoILR and holy shit, that is a thing. I agree with Chris (I think it was Chris) about how weird it is - it just seems so divorced from any other kind of competition I'm used to seeing or participating in. It's like a speed eating contest where the participants have to eat food chosen at random from a supermarket or something. Very bizarre. Fun to watch, though.

Creating an ecosystem in which ideas function isn't an endorsement of the ideas, yes, but it can be. The question is how the game treats that ecosystem. Does it reward you for buying into the ideas? Does the structure in which the ideas occur suggest that buying into the ideas is the way to get ahead and that resisting the assumptions built into the structure is to conflict with reality rather than to simply have a different opinion? Does it allow you ways to reshape the icky presumptions inherent in the ideas it presents so as to create a more legitimate experience? Does it constantly foster a sense of unease and ickiness to make it clear that something is off (Hotline Miami and Spec Ops do this very well). And so on and so forth. I don't think Civilization does any of these things. I think it's a red herring to point out the absurd parts of Civilization as if those exempt it from making any sort of argument through the way it systematizes stuff. It's a video game - it has to simplify things. Yes, in real life civilizations are not ruled by immortal avatars of their people. Does this mean Civilization has nothing to do with the real world? Obviously not. They didn't make the immortal avatars into snake people or sentient gas clouds. They chose historical people, to lead historical civilizations, in a world named after ours where things function as abstractions of what has actually happened in our world.

Oh man, can't wait to listen to this one - Star Wars: Rebellion is one of those games that I love but that most people are mediocre or unhappy about.

Yes, real time is what separates it from X-COM. That plus a smaller squad. There are separate management/fight parts, at least in the original (I haven't played Syndicate Wars).

The point isn't about whether Civ is or isn't modeling history accurately, the point is what kind of story Civilization is telling about the world by systematizing various real world events and processes in the context of the game simulation. Spec Ops is unrealistic, but the point of Spec Ops is to tell a story about violent video games where you shoot hundreds of people, which makes it absolutely integral to the argument Spec Ops is making that you shoot hundreds of people. Civilization is, ostensibly, telling a story about civilizations, how they interact and rise and fall, and so on. When the game models things in one way or another it says things about how it thinks the world operates because "how the world operates" is the subject of the Civ games, whereas "what it means to spend hours playing a game where you shoot people in the face" is the subject of Spec Ops. And in choosing to represent only certain parts of how the world operates, people are saying Civ is making some unfortunate arguments about reality. In some ways this thread is the same point that Cameron Kunzelman just made about Castle Doctrine - how a game chooses to model reality encodes certain arguments that we need to think about and, potentially, criticize.

There aren't a lot of games like Syndicate - Fallout Tactics in real time mode is the closest, I think, and even that isn't very close. Basically you control four agents and you go around a city doing missions which require you to shoot people and hack stuff and so on. The city is living and breathing - civilians walk around, cars drive around, and so on. You can harness these available resources in a variety of ways, by, for instance, brainwashing the civilians so they serve as meat shields in your firefights against the enemy. Your agents are cyborgs with various implants that change how effective they are, various items that let them do things like find enemies on the radar or brainwash civilians, and all kinds of guns.

Games are often bad at this but it's not like all games are bad. Receiver accurately represents its theme. So does Far Cry 2. I think Spec Ops: The Line does a good job. Thirty Flights of Loving does it extremely well. I think Sim City 4 is pretty good. STAVKA-OKH is a good one also. AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity gets it right. Hotline Miami does a wonderful job. Little Inferno pulls it off. I haven't played Dark Souls but I hear it's great for this sort of thing.

I've almost bought this game three times already since it showed up on IndieGameStand - each time the smart part of my brain kicks in and tells me I don't need another video game, especially not another endless multiplayer one that I can never finish. I might cave at some point in the future though. I see Dewar has already bought the game, which means there's no point in my vouching for Desura, which I find to be better than Steam in a number of ways, and at the very least it's a great program that's no hassle at all when it comes to redeeming codes for indie games.

I don't have a lower limit in terms of stuff I need to get out of a movie or a book or a game in order for me to enjoy it, so I enjoyed Valhalla Rising even if it's true that there's not much there, but it was certainly a slow movie and it didn't have a lot of stuff per minute, so I suppose I agree that there are lots of movies that deliver messages more efficiently in the time available to them, either by being shorter movies or by packing more messages in.

There was a fairly huge conversation about how simulation games choose to represent reality in this Sim City thread which might be a good place to start. Civilization is pretty much that write large in precisely the way you talk about, although I don't think anyone ever needs to be ashamed for enjoying a piece of entertainment as long as they understand the problematic elements of it. If we had to reject all entertainment with problematic elements we'd be out of movies, books, and games to enjoy.

I had a strong suspicion that the CVG thing was false - the grammar was fucked up in a lot of places and you'd expect such an august institution to have at least minimal standards.

This Crusader Kings II stream is just tremendous. Perhaps one of the best streams I've ever seen. So much fun. Long live King Sean I Vanaman of Munster!

Setting the difficulty to easy won't help you with the bees. Read the difficulty selection screen more closely. You're like 10 minutes away from beating it.

You really ought to finish it. What part are you stuck on? Have you tried changing the difficulty?

Dishonored DLC Kane & Lynch 2 That's all I've bought so far. Pretty much the only other thing on my wishlist discounted enough to make me think about buying it is Project: Snowblind, but that has been on my wishlist since 2010 so I'm pretty much never going to buy it - it's a badge of honor. Everyone else can get their silly badges from crafting trading cards. My badge is something that can't be crafted except via the use of a time machine.

It's actually just as easy as backing a game in dollars but people are xenophobic or some shit so there you go. I've seen a ton of people saying "I'd pledge if it were in dollars," either for this game or for a lot of other Kickstartes that are in lbs, and frankly it's mystifying to me. Personally I haven't backed it because it's expensive. I wish it the best of luck though.

What I find odd is that this game is like, ten billion times less intimidating than the simplest traditional video game. All you do is click on words - it's impossible to lose, impossible to get stuck except in the sense that you can't remember which words you haven't clicked on yet, and impossible to have your progress blocked by a lack of reaction time, insufficient strategic prowess, bad puzzle solving skills, or any of the dozens of other things that turn most normal people away from all but the simplest video games. Anyone who can read English and click on a hyperlink can beat this the game. My mom could play and enjoy this game. Compare that to something like, for instance, The Last of Us or Bioshock Infinite. Even on the easiest difficulty, the majority of my friends and family would probably get stuck multiple times in those games, and likely never beat them even if they wanted to, just because stuff like "navigate this 3d environment" or "shoot these people before they kill you" requires all sorts of button presses, timed reactions, hand-eye coordination feats, and so on. And yet, it's with Twine games that I see the most reports of gamers getting fed up and quitting as soon as they find the slightest excuse. This isn't to slight any of you who abandoned the game - I'd never shame any of my friends for quitting Bioshock Infinite 5 minutes in because they can't figure out what the "open door" button is or because they got lost in an alley, fell off the side of the world, and respawned somewhere that didn't look familiar. Stuff can be hard for people and there's nothing wrong with just abandoning ship at the first sight of something that's unfamiliar or not effortlessly and instantly surmountable. I just find it strange that gamers, who put up such intricate requirements on their abilities just to get through your basic video game because there's supposed to be a really cool Winter level later on or the ending is really sweet, give up so easily on a game that is just hyperlinks. Like, shammack skipped the guide and almost instantly gave up on death. Imagine skipping the tutorial in any other video game then giving up the first time you die. You'd never beat a game! You'd be fucked! You wouldn't know any of the controls or anything.

I cry at the drop of a hat, so you have to scale down all my tears by like 80% to hit what a normal person is like, but I definitely cried like a baby at the end of Porpentine's game - well worth playing.

There area fuckton of first person horror games on Greenlight. As far as I'm concerned Miasmata isn't really a horror game. Every once in a while it's scary, but mostly it's a game about exploring and about limitations. You can go hours without anything remotely scary happening.