TychoCelchuuu

I don't think Forge is an MMO and although the design is generic I hear the gameplay is pretty interesting, and I shouldn't be talking because I wouldn't have bought any of the three games no matter who won, but yeah I would've preferred Miasmata or Waking Mars over a game that's probably going to be dead in a few months when nobody is playing.

You don't have to feel bad about forcing it to carry hundreds of pounds for you and follow you around for hours each day, all in a dangerous combat zone? Also, it's not like you can just straight up invent the crazy superpowerful robots first. That's not how it works. Nobody got mad at the Wright Brothers for invented a slower, less reliable hot air balloon. You start small then work your way up to F-16 jet fighters.

Far Cry 3 chastising you for leaving the mission area is not the same as The Walking Dead not letting you open every door. It would be like if The Walking Dead gave you a "warning, go back" screen every time you went to any area other than the one you need to be in to move the story forward. Far Cry 3 already has its environment set up but they lock it down when you are on a mission for no good reason. The "parameters of the design" are explicitly about finding your own approach, free-roaming around, and so on, which is why everyone was so disappointed when they tried their own special tactic and the game shut them down. I don't think any of them complained about how the various systems didn't interlock or interact horizontally - their problem was that it's all a bunch of extraneous shit that doesn't need to get shoved into the player's face. That was the whole discussion about the distinction between systems and mechanics: it's fine to have a lot of interesting systems going in your game, but if you turn them all into explicit mechanics, the game just turns into a bloated mess that covers up the good stuff with menu after menu of leather wallet crafting shenanigans. You say that Idle Thumbs defaults to "critique" as the default analytical position - what you really mean is "negative criticism" or "negative critique" because critique is just talking about what works and what doesn't. But I think you're wrong that Idle Thumbs defaults to negative, because the first half of the podcast was nothing but gushing praise...

Zeno Clash is $0.99 and Natural Selection 2 is a flash sale for 10 bucks.

Listening in reverse order sounds like it would get kind of confusing when the in-jokes start flying, although maybe it makes up for it by providing revelatory moments where you suddenly realize what all the Samuel L. Jackson/Jeff Goldblum/Bird noise/Congrats Nick/etc. stuff is about.

The sound is easily the worst part. It's like the background noise of a sci-fi horror movie that's designed to keep you on edge constantly. It's unease in audio form.

That's a pretty sweet Humble Bundle.

Funny how? What's funny about it? Funny like a clown? Does his face amuse you?

Being caught in a time loop is pretty appropriate for a conversation about this game, right? Because it has those weird tears in time?

Strategy games aren't dull! Three Moves Ahead is an entire podcast devoted to them! King's Bounty and Men of War are particularly spectacular.

He probably spent like a year and a half working on Phantom Pain, his next magnum opus, and then some game executive came in and said "change the main character to Solid Snake and replace the villains with MGS villains, even the dead ones, we don't care" and he said NOOOOOO and now we have MGS V.

7 days after you finish the game, Elizabeth crawls out of your TV or computer monitor and kills you.

It dumps you into the middle of Peter Molyneux's cube.

It will transition seamlessly into an online store where you can preorder the sequel.

Indie Gala 11 ends in 15 hours. 10 games, most (perhaps even all) of which are pretty good.

Well I mean it wasn't just the car, it was anything Alyx said that suggested that you were doing anything other than being perfect. And to be fair I can imagine people getting mad at that no matter what the gender of the NPC that criticizes you, but Alyx was a bare midriff and a giant bust away from being everything wrong with female video game characters even before Episodes 1 and 2.

She's nerd bait to the max, and it's the worst in Episode 2, where Valve found during focus testing that if Alyx made fun of Gordon Freeman or did anything other than fawn over the player and constantly reinforce the bullshit macho power fantasy that 99% of FPS games are, players would get frustrated at her and label her naggy and annoying, because women with personalities other than "enamored of you" won't fly in video games. Unfortunately I can't find the interview that talked about this, but it totally happened. edit: I realize now why perhaps I've been googling to try to find this article for 10 minutes with no luck - the "we turned Alyx into literally nothing but an ass-kisser" thing I'm thinking of might be in the commentary from Episode 1, actually. Although I could've sworn at some other point Valve talked about Episode 2 where they took out any hint of Alyx making fun of the player's driving ability when they crashed the car or anything like that.

Since this was posted in the Idle Banter forum instead of the strategy game forum I was hoping Bruce was literally invading Russia. Oh well.

I don't see how they can get something like "we discuss our opinions of Far Cry 3's first impressions" wrong. A game only gets one first impression, and they talked about the one they got from Far Cry 3. If you prefer that they never discuss first impressions of a game that's a request I can understand in one sense (I know what it means) but not in another sense (why arbitrarily limit discussion like that?). I don't think discussion about first impressions is necessarily weirdly superficial - certainly the insights in this cast are much less superficial than most discussion that we get about video games in, for example, game reviews or game previews, which represent a significant subset of video game discussion. I'm not sure why you find discussions of first impressions to be frustrating to listen to - is it because they aren't followed up with discussions about the rest of the game? Because this exact same discussion could be imported into a separate podcast where they went on to talk about what they thought of Far Cry 3 after having played more of it and I don't think it would have to alter at all. "First impressions" as a category is separate from "what I think of something overall" and I don't see why it's wrong to divide the two and talk about just one at some point in time.

Given that they explicitly had this discussion and that the result (at least as I remember it) was that they wanted to be very clear that they were phrasing their criticisms as criticisms of the first impression rather than as criticisms of the entire game, I think you're going to have to give fairly strong reasons for thinking that they sounded like they were dismissing the entire game, reasons that would be strong enough to overcome their explicit statements to the contrary. They certainly said bad things about their first impressions of the game, but given that those were couched in terms of "here are the things we have to say about our first impression of a game we haven't played more of and that we thus cannot speak about fully" I don't see why you would think those criticisms bleed over into some sort of general rejection of the game.

Don't own a console but it's fun to read people talking about games, so god speed.

I almost wrote a post about how I don't see what anyone likes in The Matrix but there are so many issues with it that I got bored writing halfway through and decided to stop.

Autonomous Pretty awesome! The robot building UI is frustrating, as any slightly complex UI is wont to be without much time to polish, but running around in TRON is fun and watching robots fight is fun. I love how going up on one of the observation platform things changes the music. Spacebase DF9 I love the art and the music and it's fun to dick around. I won't really spend any more time with it because there's really no reason to play this instead of Dwarf Fortress or Startopia or Dungeon Keeper, but it shows massive promise and I'd totally be into it if it became an actual game. Hack 'n Slash Have not tried it yet. White Birch Couldn't figure out the bridge puzzle and I don't really enjoy platformers at all so that's it for me there. It's pretty to look at. Black Lake Wandering around playing my accordion is a lot of fun but after I got tired of the accordion I wasn't really sure why I'd want to bother finding the next clue (I lost the trail after the scent brought me to a river then disappeared). Mostly this makes me want to play a game where I get to play a busker with an accordion trying to earn money by playing the right songs for passersby or something.

And in Sorkin's case you take a look back at your entire career and hopefully come to a realization that it's maybe time to make some changes.

That was drawn by the incomparably amazing Kate Beaton, creator of one of the best webcomics and also occasionally poster of sketches to twitter.