TychoCelchuuu

I installed, played, and beat the Syndicate FPS reboot yesterday (although I fully intend to go through the coop if I can find anyone to join me, so I'm not done with the game yet). I found it to be a stupendous mediocre first person shooter, by which I mean if you enjoy shooting people with guns and hiding behind walls and throwing grenades and hitting "use" to open doors, then it's hard to imagine not enjoying Syndicate. If you get easily bored when a game is about shooting people and you need more gimmicks or an interesting story or something like that, you might enjoy the beautiful graphics, but if not the game will likely leave you cold. Whether you enjoy the graphics will hinge on whether you can deal with massive amounts of bloom (used to good effect, mind you) or whether it just annoys you. Personally I think the game looks stupendous and plays very well so I had a lot of fun and I'm sort of sad that it didn't seem to do too well for Starbreeze, which continually churns out games that deserve more recognition than they get. The game's not without flaws, even for what it is - mashing "use" to open certain doors is a stupid mechanic (games are not more fun when you have to press a button a lot of times to do certain things...), the story is predictably stupid and uninteresting, and the casual misogyny that some of the characters threw around so that you could tell they were bad people was pointless and unhelpful, given that the characters are all serial murdering psychopaths that the player will dislike even if they don't go out of their way to comment on how attractive and bitchy the inexplicably beautiful female lead is. But, you know, this wouldn't be a true AAA video game if it didn't have casual misogyny slotted into it for absolutely zero reason. The game is also very short and a little more linear than is good for it - there are a few fun little puzzles with the hacking mechanics but it could've been much better had those been expanded and if the game had been more open like the shooters of yore, or Half-Life 2, or even sections of the Riddick games Starbreeze has made. Still, if shooters are the sort of thing that interest you, and if you like the idea of running around in a gorgeous cyberpunk world while you do your shooting, you can do much worse than Syndicate. If you want to coop it with me some time let me know. As for being a reboot of the beloved franchise: eh. They nailed the world, and nothing else. Although I hear coop brings back a bit of the original Syndicate flavor.

Like some parts of Detroit?

The developers of Routine and Enemy Starfighter have said they're all over this thing, and those two along with the general zeitgeist have helped a great deal in terms of moving me from "Christ almighty why would I ever spend money on something this ridiculous" to "maybe I will actually buy this." Hell, with the Unity support, maybe I can even Gone Home™ On The Rift™ or whatever.

There have been pictures: And a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=3IHjz0MAD9I

Excellent podcast, especially because it brought back memories of that weird VR Aladdin thing. Freaky. Speaking of bringing back memories, it has taken the triumphant return of Nick Breckon to remind me of one of the many reasons he's so awesome - with Nick Breckon on the podcast, we rarely have to go too long without hearing about a joystick or about X-Wing or Freespace or these other things I love deeply but which make me feel like a relic even at my tender young age. Truly this podcast now has a real dream team going. I would really be interested to hear what some/any/all of you think about Sim City 4 if you decide to play it for next week's episode.

Sim City 4 is pretty great.

I'm really enjoying these! Thanks for the link.

A blog post about that and some other L&D stuff for the curious. And a blog post about KRZ that some might find enjoyable.

3.5 million stretch goal? Avellone!

I'm 60% sure you're right and 40% sure that the third book is just going to be all about what you refer to as the "self-insert protagonist, who is shallow and petty and loved by all good people" fucking everything up in the most horrific way imaginable, turning him into a monster and then, eventually, a sad, worthless, broken man. In one sense Rothfuss hasn't set that up very well at all - Kvothe does come off as the most insufferably ridiculous Mary Sue to ever exist. But on the other hand, there are three things that make it seem like book 3 will turn it around. First, it's pretty explicit that something bad happened, so it's not like the series can continue to be Kvothe the Amazing Fighter of Evil and Lover of Women Except for One Woman Who He Really Just Creepily Longs for and Puts on a Pedestal Because He is a Fucking Creep - eventually Kvothe fucks up. Second, the entire story so far is Kvothe narrating everything, so it could just be one big "this guy is making himself sounds way better" (and, simultaneously, way worse, because the ego oh my god) than he actually is. This is his chance to set down his legend for the rest of history so he's just pulling out all the fucking stops and using the only real expertise he has (as a masterful storyteller) to make himself out to be the fucking Ubermensch when in reality he's just an asshole. Third (spoiler): So yes, I hold out hope. As for writing for this game, Rothfuss writes extremely evocative text, his dialog is not at all bad, and he has a great imagination and a feel for narrative. I have no problem with him contributing to the game and I imagine between editors and the limited nature of his involvement it will be all the better for it. The possibility of his joining the team has made me more likely to fund rather than less, regardless of whether his Epic Fantasy Trilogy turns out to be a horrific paean to how awesome Imaginary Patrick Rothf- er, sorry, Kvothe is.

25% off on Steam.

Yeah, that's probably true - you could probably get way more people to play Gone Home or Dear Esther with a crazy ad campaign than the current number of players. I'm not sure you could sell Bioshock Infinite numbers of $60 games to people who don't self-identify as people who game as a hobby, but at the existing price point, Dear Esther and (eventually) Gone Home could probably doing a thousand times better than they have.

I don't even own the game but even I can tell you that yes, XCOM is like AZS/FTL. That's how the original game was.

I think Facebook is already filled up with confused people.

Like, if I put Coca-Cola in my video game, but instead of representing actual Coca-Cola, it was a noxious poison that the villain used to kill newborn infants? Yeah I'm not seeing why Coca-Cola would have any issues with that so it's probably OK.

You chose Bejeweled 3 as your compensation from EA for all your SimCity troubles?

Every time Gone Home releases any media I get excited. This game is going to be great! Or at the very least it's going to be 90s! So very 90s!

Another article about the same thing, plus a comment that Garriott posted on the article: I disagree with most of the specifics (the stuff about education and experience and stuff) but I guess I agree with the general sentiment - if most designers were good then most games would be fun, right?

Big budgets are cool and everything but they're not what make games great and I doubt a "walk around and look at stuff" game is ever going to sell well enough to merit AAA money just like a more understated movie won't make as much as Transformers. Thirty Flights of Loving, Dear Esther, Gone Home, Myst (which did sell a ton but largely because of its puzzles, not its narrative, I'm guessing) and so on are more than enough to satisfy me though, assuming we get more like them. Who cares if the graphics aren't as nice as Infinite?

GOG.com.

A quick perusal of torrent trackers suggests it has been cracked, too, so presumably whatever the always on stuff is doing, it's not doing enough to make the game stop working if you bypass it.

Well seeing as these are subjective opinions I don't think it's possible to say that Saint's Row is the same as GTA - clearly it wasn't for me. I don't think we're going to get very far into explaining why I didn't like Saint's Row if you deny that I experienced what I did when I played it. The conversation is going to dead end pretty quickly.

They don't start you off on the same foot - GTA starts you off in Liberty City and Saint's Row 3 starts you off in Steelport or wherever the fuck. GTA starts you off with cars that are more fun to drive, guns that are more fun to shoot, sunsets that are more fun to watch, walls that are more fun to hop, and people that are more fun to punch. GTA nails atmosphere in a way almost no other game series does. San Andreas feels more like California than almost anything else I've ever watched, played, or read. Saint's Row 3 doesn't have any of that. It has janky feeling guns, boring cars, a city I could not give a shit about, movement mechanics that didn't grab me, and pedestrians that I felt no reason to mess with.

That's definitely a fair way to make a good game, but it's not a way to make a game I enjoy. I want games to be intrinsically rewarding because their base mechanics are something I enjoy, rather than extrinsically rewarding in the sense that they continually throw up goals for me to meet. The part of my brain that gets reptilian satisfaction from constant low-grade stimulation of the reward response center is basically dead after having grown up on games like Diablo. Every time Chris Remo talks about Torchlight II or Diablo III on the podcast, I agree with him: I'm sure it's a brilliant game, but that part of my life is gone. Rolling the "will this be a good item" slot machine every time I kill a boss and watching the "just this much more XP until the next level" bar fill up in small increments every minute while I'm playing is no longer something I can derive satisfaction from. At best it's boring - at worst it feels like a tangible drain on my life, like I can feel every productive minute of my existence swirling down the endless drain of mediocre-to-acceptable gameplay that keeps me enraptured only by exploiting my least favorite parts of human psychology. So when I hear you say something like "well, Saints Row makes your character feel 'off' but that's okay because you can play a bit more and it will get incrementally better" it just looks like a massive series of small slopes I have to climb to get to the fun part, whereas Grand Theft Auto games are so famously fun from the first moment that lots of people never touch the story except to open up parts of the city, and then when it's all open they never bother to finish the rest. I don't want to play a game where the goal is to upgrade myself to get to the fun part. I want to play a game that is the fun part. Even the set-pieces didn't draw me in to Saint's Row. Again, I appreciate the setup and everything, but it just didn't feel as fun to play, moment to moment, as GTA does. Skydiving from a plane and shooting people while cars fly by can only be as engaging as the shooting mechanics are.

The "hold up we missed a letter" thing made me laugh. I played Saint's Row 3 for 30 minutes when it was free over a weekend and I found the gameplay kind of tedious - it was like a GTA game but with the crazy dialed way up and the soul dialed way down. The wacky narrative conceit/immature humor/etc. of the series doesn't bother me at all and I think I kind of enjoy all the parody and the batshit insane stuff, but if the core gameplay fundamentals in an open world game like this aren't pitch perfect it just ends up feeling like tedium to me in no time at all. GTA has a wonderful sense of place and a feeling of being there and exploring that can keep me going for hours, but Saints Row just felt empty in terms of engaging me, to the point where when it was dirt cheap in the THQ Going Out of Business Bundle I didn't even bother buying it.