TychoCelchuuu

Option 3: people pay to remove cubes but the cube goes on until it hits a predetermined level of gross profits.

Tropico does a fairly good job of showing what happens when you do/don't provide social services for people and when you do/don't pay them wages high enough to let them live in something other than shacks.

This book owns.

I mean I'm sad the great franchise has been reduced to this bu ton the other hand this is fascinating and hilarious and strange and new at the same time. I mean look at that picture up there. It's a garden gnome with a pinwheel on an HDTV flanked by a 360 and a PS3. Sim City and The Sims Social aren't even console games! And The Sims Social is shutting down in 2 months!

Ugh these are so good.

I think Crysis is an amazing game for the way it lets people free-roam around its levels and approach things however they want with the various suit powers and weapons and stuff, and yes, it is gorgeous, but the two aren't linked at all. That Crytek things I play their games just to look at pretty stuff and not to also have fun seems sort of evident from the direction they went in the two sequels, neither of which I've played (except the Crysis 2 demo) but both of which seem to have cut down on the freedom in favor of graphical fidelity. I mean, I do actually like pretty games, and the Crysis games are very pretty, but I would love a game like Crysis with awful graphics or just less impressive graphics and I wouldn't as much enjoy a game that is as pretty as Crysis but not as fun (aka Cryses 2 and 3)

QWOP creator Bennett Foddy has been raving about it in such ridiculously effusive terms that his praise alone would be enough to get the game onto my "must play" list but other people have said nice things too so at some point before I die, assuming my death does not come swiftly and unexpectedly within the next few years, I intend to play this. I tend to be fairly bad at puzzle games that require out of the box thinking, though, and unless they're watered down to "you could beat this after two lobotomies" like Portal, I usually end up getting stuck. We shall see!

Is it amazing? Would I really spoil anything by watching it? edit: it's kind of amusing. One of the "heal yourself" animations is funny.

Make sure to shop around various stores to figure out which retailer-exclusive pre-order alternate couch fabric you want unlocked in your game!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=tFrjrgBV8K0

Gone Home Launch Trailer Script WIP EXT. HOUSE HOME The Gone Home sits on a hill, foreboding (potentially even fiveboding). Lightning flashes. Spooky music is playing. HOT SCOOPS (V.O.) There will be no dead bodies... INT. HOME The camera flies through a dark, empty corridor in the Gone Home. HOT SCOOPS (V.O.) ...except the ones you create. INT. HOME First person footage from the perspective of the player, armed with a rocket launcher, as the player blows apart enemies. Drowning Pool's Let the Bodies Hit the Floor plays at maximum volume. Cut to TITLE CARD: GONE HOME 2013 FULLBRIGHT COMPANY Drowning Pool cuts out abruptly and is replaced with the opening notes of a Riot grrrl song for 4 seconds before the trailer ends.

Excellent. Next stop, Kickstart it.

The art looks gorgeous, which does not align or fail to align with my expectations because I did not have any one way or another, and I'm not a backer! If John Lithgow is connected in reality and not just in a dream world then I suppose I ought to have backed it.

It might be standalone. It might also suck.

This is looking so real it's unreal.

French person. More details than that I cannot provide because I don't parlez francais or whatever.

X-COM: UFO Defense is neat, not because the economy is reactive in any way but because like everything else, it's tied into all the other systems in the game, so you get a lot of fun, interlocking behavior. The two main sources of income are funding from member nations and selling stuff. Member nations fund you based on your effectiveness at keeping them safe from aliens, which is a function of where your bases are physically located usually, so you tend to want to place bases near rich nations or near dense concentrations of nations. The money you get from selling stuff can come from selling alien artifacts and corpses to who the fuck knows, which is enjoyable because of the sort of narrative it implies, or from selling stuff you manufacture, which is funny because you can transition X-COM into a self-sufficient arms manufacturer that is defending the earth from aliens by making massive profits off of selling cutting edge weaponry to, presumably, oppressive warlords or world armies or something. It's just a very weird situation. But, of course, the real answer to this question is and always will be Team Fortress 2 and the larger Steam economy built around it.

One way to challenge yourself would be to not use Blink 2, or to not kill anyone, or stuff like that. Do challenges need to be hard coded into the game for them to be fun, or can they be self-imposed? You're fine with having them imposed by others (in L4D2 for instance), so why not impose some yourself?

I think you pretty clearly don't like being good at certain games - at the very least, Dishonored. You just have a weird irresistible compulsion to be good at it, and your inability to overcome the compulsion and have fun with the game leads you to not enjoy it. You could blame the game for this, or you could blame yourself. I tend to take the second route because it seems like taking the first damns dame designers to a hell where they must make one kind of game for one kind of person instead of letting players enjoy the kind of freedom that so many people love about Dishonored, but whatever.

Just because there's a way to play the game that makes it less fun doesn't mean you must play the game that way and fuck it up for yourself. Efficiency isn't really a virtue - it's just a way to get stuff done faster. If Dishonored is less fun when you play it the most efficient way, then just don't play it that way... Plus, if being able to murder everyone made a stealth game bad, surely the Splinter Cell games, especially Chaos Theory, would fail. Chaos Theory can basically turn into The Adventures of Sam Fisher, The Amazing Knife Stabber. Sam can just stab every motherfucker who discovers him.

Then really what you're saying is that Mark of the Ninja is a bad stealth* game, where "stealth*" means "Frenetic Pony's odd definition of what stealth means." So instead of going around saying it's a bad stealth game and then getting people confused, you should maybe say that you don't like Mark of the Ninja does its stealth. That doesn't make it bad - it just makes it different, and you happen to not like the ways in which it's different. But you don't dislike it because it does stealth badly/doesn't do stealth at all - you dislike it because it does stealth in a certain way. Given what you like about stealth though, I have no idea why you dislike Dishonored, because it has literally everything you ask for as near as I can tell.

Thanks for the link! I like to keep abreast of all the press about the game, although that article does have a really minor spoiler and it's made me reconsider whether I want to read any more about it as the game gets closer to completion and journalists start to reveal more and more about what can happen in it.

This is the second game in a few months (or faux-game), after Double Fine's Automata, to basically be Steve Gaynor's tumblr come to life and I really hope it's real. I really like the quote they have for the player character, Rex Colt, the fallen soldier who rose to be a hero: "Elite army dudes are elite."