TychoCelchuuu

Yeah, one or the other (or both or whatever).

This is like selling an alternate cut of slow, intellectual movie that has the pacing sped up and a voiceover added to explain everything for dumb people.

ACT ONE OUT NOW. So that's pretty cool.

Criticker is a website that I really like. You rank movies you've seen and, based on the rankings of people similar to you, it predicts what you would rank films you haven't seen. You can choose your own ranking scales and all that jazz. I rate from 1 to 100 and the numbers it predicts for me are rarely more than 5 away from the actual rating I choose to give a film. Pretty awesome for finding new stuff to watch.

You can buy Minerva's Den on the GFWL store if you have Steam BioShock 2. That's the only way to get it aside from buying the BioShock Everything Bundle coming out soon.

My theory: to sustain the zillion dollar budget that it takes to make a game with production values like Uncharted you need to pad out the game's length enough so that people don't feel cheated when they pay $60 for it. That, or the developers don't mind the narrative dissonance and think that shooting people is so awesome in a video game that it more than outweighs the damage it does to the narrative. Thirty Flights of Loving costs $5 if you don't buy it on sale and lots of people are pretty annoyed that it's exactly as long as it needs to be to tell the story - imagine if Uncharted were only as long as it took to tell an Indiana Jones-esque story and Nathan Drake only killed an appropriate amount of people. Another option is that not only do they like the shooting so much that they let it hurt the narrative, but they like the shooting MORE than the narrative, and if you made them choose one or the other they'd say "we want to save the people who invade the village and discard that awesome feeling you got wandering around the village." With the way their next game is looking, though, and with the effort that it seems like they put into that sort of thing in Uncharted, I suspect Naughty Dog would be pretty happy making games that didn't need excuses for gunfights every 5 minutes if they could get away with making those games. I doubt the market would support them but that's just how life works I suppose.

"Bruce Willis" is usually the good guy though, isn't he? The two white guys here are both bad guys and I think the black guy is a bad guy too. Hell, the entire story is about robbing banks I think.

They're not anybody. Has GTA ever used real faces of anyone as bases for the characters?

So it definitely doesn't matter what the writer wanted or didn't want, but if I can't convince you of that (and I won't try because holy SHIT is that a harder conversation than my theories of literary interpretation are up to supporting), here is a podcast where the writer of the game explicitly says that walking away from the game is something he intended as an option for many players.

Putting the game down with the intention of coming back to it later and continuing the narrative is distinct from putting the game down with the intention of ending the narrative because you no longer wish to be the driving force behind Walker's actions. Arguing that putting the game down for any reason has the exact same meaning no matter what your intentions are strikes me as odd. That's like saying someone who leaves a movie theater to use the restroom is doing the same thing as someone who leaves a movie theater because they hate the film. They're obviously not doing the same thing! They have different reasons! They're reacting in very different ways to the narrative. When it comes to Spec Ops, your reaction is far more important because it's a game and you have agency in the narrative. Your choices influence it. Movies don't end when you stop watching for any reason, but certain games (like Spec Ops) can end when you stop playing for certain reasons. If you think the game's narrative doesn't support "walking away" then that's fine, but I think it totally does, from the very first 5 minutes of the game when Walker says your mission is to recon the area and then leave. The Errant Signal guy made a similar point in the video on page 2 I think.

Why is that weird? For most of the story they can basically just walk out of Dubai. That's what their orders are, even. It's not at all like that sketch in Friends for the reasons I mentioned in the post above yours.

Obviously you never have to do anything with a massive amount of detail. It's not like people have forgotten how to make games the way they used to be made. Pixel art, even with 16 bit palettes and all that jazz, is still quite popular with indie developers, as is 3d art with a lower level of detail (witness Blendo Games or Minecraft or AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity) or just 2d art in general (Braid, World of Goo, Binding of Isaac, FTL, etc). The issue isn't an inability to do it, it's that consumers demand more. As consoles grow more capable and engines like UE4 become able to harness that power, if your game is uglier than your competitor's game, you'll lose sales. So everyone has to pour millions into art to make high resolution models so that they don't lose market share whenever IGN.com posts a "Game X vs Game Y" comparison picture where Game X is slightly blurrier and everyone in the comments section says "well I'd better buy Game Y then."

Ah, I didn't know that about Nintendo, but then again 720p isn't exactly aiming for the skies if you know what I mean. And you know what I mean. Since you said you know what I mean.

Cart Life is not good at imitating real life by having a perfect 1:1 mapping between what you do in the game and what you would do in that situation. Cart Life is good at imitating real life by making you think and feel the way you think and feel in these kinds of situations. It makes you worried, frustrated, confused, overwhelmed. You have to figure things out and memorize things and make choices and learn and it's not helping you. Nobody is helping you.

Like, 3 games? Not a lot as far as I know. I'm not a game developer but I would be very surprised if it's common for artists to work at a higher fidelity than what consoles can handle on all the assets they currently make.

Slow doing what? Unless it's slow playing games, it's not the graphics card's fault because that's pretty much the only time it does any work.

So I'm trying to put this all together and I think Ben X is a child who suckles. Did I get that right?

Nappi provided an answer to that question, which is "uh, yes," and I think that sounds like a pretty good answer because the things people say and do overwhelmingly suggest that even when their life isn't super awesome they still prefer it over nonexistence.

I made a sourdough starter a little more than a year ago and now I just wing it. I put starter, flour, and salt together, knead, let rise, etc. So unfortunately the answer is no I don't have a recipe I've heard good stuff about no knead bread though. It's not sourdough but it's bread.

Putting down a choose your own adventure book is a valid choice, I would say. That ends the adventure at whatever point your character is, and if the game were a book, Walker would leave Dubai and radio in for backup. Putting down a normal book is sort of weird because there's no conceit that you have any influence on the narrative, so it's not clear why ceasing to read would be any more effective than anything else you do. It's not like there's a character in the novel that reacts to what you do and that stops what they're doing when you stop reading. You have no input into a novel the way you have input into a video game.

Exactly.

This is good.

Cool! I have sourdough rising right now. Making bread is awesome and it makes your kitchen/apartment/house smell so great.

This isn't the GOTY thread But in the GOTY thread I did say that Thirty Flights of Loving was one of the games that I couldn't possibly fail to name GOTY which is why I can't choose just one. So yes, this game rocks.

The best metaphor for Far Cry 2 is that they looked at other meals and decided to take as much out as possible, leaving only the bare bones. Then they infected the meal with malaria.