TychoCelchuuu

Valve takes forever to do stuff because they do great stuff and it takes a long time to do great stuff. From their very first game to what they're making now, Valve isn't afraid to scrap 90% of what they have and rebuild it all from scratch if that means making a better game. Of course, this takes forever and it costs a lot of money, so not many studios can do what Valve does, but it's hard to argue with the results. If a hundred or so of the smartest people you could find were put in a room and given basically unlimited resources and no time pressure, they sure as fuck would take a long time to make anything! They'd be perfectionists. How do I know this? Well, look at Valve!

I think your character needs diamond stockpiles to be really fucking rich which is a motivation that I think we can safely attach to someone without the narrative explicitly saying that your character is greedy. Like, I don't need my character's voice going "sweet, some diamonds, now I will have more money" or some other character saying "gee, you seem to do some horrible things to other people for the sake of getting diamonds, you must be very greedy!" If you play Far Cry 2 as a diamond-grubbing kind of character, then that's the narrative: you're a greedy mercenary, in Africa to make a fortune. As for why no faction recognizes you out in the field, I guess maybe they all recognize you as the guy who has killed a bunch of their fellow faction members.

Surely it's not the explicit narrative, though - in the STALKER games the narrative is weird sci-fi bullshit that doesn't even make sense.

If you have the Fortune Hunter's GOTY Edition or whatever the fuck (which is, I think, the only thing for sale on Steam) you can find the Jackal tapes which tell you more about that guy's backstory. Aside from that, you're limited to just finding the tapes from the reporter if you want more backstory. I don't know if the explicit narrative stinks - there's just not a lot of it there, and certainly I don't think the game's "narratively set up" to be played in any specific way, let alone the way you don't seem to enjoy. I think the whole point of open world games like Far Cry 2 is that you can play them however you want and have fun however you want. Beating the main story is optional. I don't know many people who bother beating the GTA main story, for instance.

I'm not sure I'd fault a game for only being interesting for a limited period of time. Most games are like that - if Far Cry 2 tops out for you at ten hours, then so be it. Surely there are some times when you do want to feel shitty about yourself for a few hours in the context of an exciting, visceral FPS, though, right? And Far Cry 2 is for those times, because you can just load it up, grab an assassination mission, and bet it (this is how Chris Remo seems to play it, judging by some comments he made a while ago on an episode of the podcast). So just because Far Cry 2 doesn't make you feel like you constantly want to play it so that you can earn the next bit of loot or whatever doesn't mean it's lacking something. It just means it's the kind of game that isn't supposed to be constantly played forever.

1999 mode is still in BioShock Infinite.

I AM SO SORRY I STARTED ANOTHER DISCUSSION ABOUT WHAT A CERTAIN TERM (in this case "AAA game" or perhaps "blockbuster") MEANS. HOLY FUCK. I APOLOGIZE FOREVER. LET US NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN. I haven't recently completed anything but the last game I beat was, uh... I can't remember. But I did beat Star Wars: Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith not too long ago. It was an enjoyable expansion but I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the original game - the levels just didn't seem as compelling in terms of the architecture. I'm gratified they generally stuck with the whole "large levels" thing and it's nice to have a lightsaber from the beginning, I suppose, but it felt a bit more like walking down fairly nondescript corridors than the original game did.

If the game has a great atmosphere and intense, tactical firefights, why do you need some additional motivation to keep getting into those firefights? Isn't the fact that they are intense and tactical enough to make you want to get into them, and doesn't the atmosphere make the game a fun place to drive around in between the fights you get into? And you don't have to go around clearing checkpoints, you can just take missions from the factions or from the cell phone towers or from the underground.

Exactly. Having a business model that's AAA or bust seems so ridiculous to me. Even Hollywood has things like Fox Searchlight Pictures or Warner Independent Pictures which fund smaller movies that will hopefully do well in a niche big enough to support their budget but much too small to produce a blockbuster. But with EA, a pretty great horror game like Dead Space needs to turn into the next Halo because everything needs to turn into the next Halo. Then you get massive studio closures and cyclical firings when the game finishes and there's not another massive AAA ready to be made to support the whale of a studio that was built up to ridiculous proportions. The industry gets fewer interesting games because everything gets homogenized to appeal to the greatest number of people, but the safer, more boring games are paradoxically even more risky because they have to sell so much to break even. Basically, eww. I'm glad companies like Double Fine and Telltale and the entire indie game system exist to provide a counterbalance to this sort of thing.

Princess Mononoke is probably my favorite of the three but Ratatouille is the only really comforting movie in that trio.

Idiot is the perfect word to describe Yerli. He doesn't understand why Crysis 3, his studio's masterpiece, isn't making as big a splash as the first two games.

Huge update coming out tomorrow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=AB-gmyOvUig

You only need to be as accurate as you want the predicted ratings to be. If you can't decide between an 86 and an 87, just flip a coin, and that means in the future, it will basically come down to a coin flip whether Criticker thinks you'll score a certain unwatched movie with an 86 or an 87. The way it works is by finding people who score movies similar to you and using their scores on movies you haven't seen to predict your score, so if your vague, inaccurate ratings match up with the vague, inaccurate ratings (or the fairly accurate) ratings of other people, then your predictions will be about as good as your ratings are. I find it sort of fun to get super precise predictions, but obviously it's an art, not a science, and if you can't narrow things down much at all then there's no reason to sweat it. It's still a neat website for keeping track of movies you've seen, etc. If I want to find out my favorite 10 drama movies from 1950 to 1960 I can do it in a couple clicks - it makes giving recommendations to other people a lot easier, and so on.

Because it's not a game about war, really. I've written more about Spec Ops than any other game this past year, I think, and I often feel like I should probably just sit down and put my thoughts into essay form, but in lieu of that (or maybe at least until I do that) and to save me the effort of reiterating everything I've said elsewhere, I'll link this article, which is in some ways apotheosis of the kind of reading that you and others attribute to the game, and a response I wrote to the article on the SomethingAwful forums, which themselves have a great thread on the game in which I have made a lot of posts, and I'll also link to the Penny Arcade thread on the game where I've also posted a lot. In both threads the discussion picks up around December 2012. Much more focused, polished, and probably interesting pieces on the game are this Magical Wasteland piece on it vs. No Russian (be sure to read the comments or at least just the first one by some dude named Kevin, which I like) and Tom Bissell's review. Also, although I don't agree with it 100%, the Errant Signal video about the game says some stuff that I'm broadly in agreement with, so that's another good starting point in terms of thinking that the game isn't a piece of shit:

My point is that people who think Spec Ops is about how horrific war is tend to find it to be a shitty game, whereas people who think that Spec Ops is about how games about war are typically pretty stupid tend to find it to be an amazing game. I don't see why we need to saddle it with shit if there's another way of reading it that makes it much better and more interesting. You're right that if you read it your way, the game is obvious, blatant, and lazily manipulative. So why not read it some other way? If having a more nuanced reading is just an Inception joke in your eyes then I guess I'd rather spend my time making Inception jokes rather than assuming all art must be what I might unreflectively think it is on the surface before I think about it at all.

You've convinced yourself that the game is "about moral choices in war" and then when it doesn't give you a choice you've decided that the game has failed. But I think the fault is yours for reading the game as being about moral choices in war. I don't think it's a game about moral choices in war and in fact I think it's a game about other games, which are about moral choices in war, and specifically it's a game about how those kinds of games are bullshit. Spec Ops is one of the first games to call out the bullshit macho military power fantasy "you have to make the right choice" genre by showing that, narratively, that's a crock of shit, but because people seem so keen on reading the game as if it's another entry into the "YOU CAN MAKE THE CHOICE" game genre, they feel like the game shits on them when it turns out you don't have a choice. But that is the point. Games that give you the choice are the ones pulling the bullshit. Spec Ops is honest. "Either you're giving me a choice, which makes it impactful, or you're just ramming it down my throat, which could be interesting in it's own way, but wasn't done so here and just ruined the entire effect the game seemed to be going for. At least to me." I agree that they weren't doing the first option, but why don't you think they're doing the second option - ramming the choice down your throat in an interesting way? To me it seemed like the entire game, from the opening credits with the "Special Guest: [Your Steam name]" to the very end, was one entire "ram the lack of choice down your throat in an interesting way" experience.

You could rank every movie 100 or 1 and then the number it would spit out would probably be the % chance that you'd give it a thumbs up.

You did get the achievement (it's the one called "A Line, Held").

There are lots of reasons to watch movies - I watch a lot of movies because they make me think, or feel, something specific or interesting or complicated. FBDO isn't something I watch to get deep insight into the human condition. I watch it to feel good, basically, and also to laugh. It's like the comfort food of movies. And yes, I've ranked 691 movies on a 1-100 scale. It's pretty easy if you just rank movies after you finish watching them because that takes 3 seconds. It's very helpful because that site uses the rankings to predict what your rankings will be for movies you haven't seen, which means for any movie on earth I can get a number from 1 to 100, predicting how much I will like the film, and the number is rarely off by more than 5. It's been invaluable for discovering stuff I wouldn't have bothered watching.

Before we all crawl further up into the assholes of various definitions, maybe we should step back and realize why we're talking about this. You were surprised, upon rewatching the movie, to discover that Ferris isn't what you would call a protagonist, and in your words "[you] think, if Ferris Bueller was actually the protagonist, and the point of the movie was just to cheer him on for being a shit, [you] wouldn't like it at all." You didn't elaborate on what you meant by the first thing, but we can probably assume that you were just surprised that the title character didn't fit your preferred definition of a protagonist even though usually the opposite is the case. So, we don't have to argue about whether your definition of "protagonist" is right - we can just accept that you found it interesting that Ferris Bueller didn't have certain traits that you might've expected he would have because the movie is named after him. The second point can also be made without adverting to what a good definition of "protagonist" is (and in fact it seems to have more to do with your preferred definition of the "hero"). Your point is that if the movie were about legitimizing Ferris' actions and making him seem awesome for what he does, you would not have liked it, but you didn't see the movie as doing that. So that's another interesting observation but again we don't need to descend into tedious semantic discussions about what protagonists really are. Personally I think Ferris Bueller's Day Off hangs out in a small, exclusive group of "perfect movies" along with movies like "The Princess Bride" and (probably) "The Fifth Element." They're not the best movies in the sense that if I ranked every movie I had seen, they would be on top, but they're perfect in that they couldn't really do what they did any better, if you ask me. And I love them for it.

There's a fourth choice in the sniper section: And there's another choice in the crowd: Also in that section, "the latter" isn't the thing that gives you a cheevo - you get a cheevo either way.

Which is exactly why Spec Ops is a great game and why I think criticisms like the one Chris Remo has of it ("making the player feel ashamed about violence is just dumb because the whole game is violent") really miss the point. Spec Ops is not about making you feel bad for doing things it makes you do. Spec Ops is about narratives that make you choose violence.

It doesn't open up 2 additional endings, it opens up 3.

Or maybe the iPads have more mazes on them.

Would that Bungie had gone full Molynuex, or even 10% Molyneux. With their massive budget and ultimate freedom they've decided to just make Halo for 10 years.