TychoCelchuuu

A fawn with sunglasses and a little tuxedo! You've just contributed more to these forums than anyone ever has, I dare say. edit: oh my goodness the '80s http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=053UrxWgtF4

All video games are voice acted by two people (Nolan North and Jennifer Hale) and they can never be in the same room at the same time because if some disaster struck, no video games could ever have voice acting again. So since they have to record separately and because it's a tough editing job to get two separate recordings to interrupt each other (also it's hard to have someone interrupt themselves) it's easier just to make all dialog sequential. This is why Robert Altman never made a video game (he can't go 10 seconds without having someone talk over someone else) and it's also why Nolan North and Jennifer Hale are very polite in person: they've had hundreds of hours to practice talking without ever interrupting anyone else.

I had to Google "babycham" but only after some serious soul searching to decide if I was prepared for what it might potentially be. Thankfully it's innocuous and the Wikipedia page even has an adorable photo of a fawn so that's good.

Later in that post syntheticgerbil talked about working minimum wage jobs, which usually aren't that hard to get, so I think the idea behind "you never have to work someplace you don't want to" is that you can always just work at McDonalds or something. Whether that's really going to make you enough money to survive is debatable but whatever, the question "is it okay to do something wrong as long as you need the money really bad" is hardly going to be answered in a thread about silly video game review/preview quotes. Speaking of which, this one caught my eye on Forge's Steam page: Which on its own isn't a silly quote, but when you keep in mind that Forge isn't an MMO and that the relevant comparison class is class-based multiplayer combat games like TF2/Chivalry then it makes you start to wonder whether GameSpy's been sucking down too much of Forge's Kool-Aid - the game itself wants to draw comparisons to MMOs but that's only because MMOs usually have such awful combat. Beating an MMO in the combat category isn't the goalpost you should be measured by, Forge!

"I'm Marty McFly, and the person whose cock I'd most like to suck is probably Jesus!" "I'm Marty McFly, and even in the horrible dystopian future run by Biff, they realized that censoring talk of homosexuality for religious reasons is bigotry!" Those forums are a real trip though. I never thought I'd see so many subforums dedicated to so many parts of Back to the Future. A subforum for the movie trilogy, one for the ride, one for the animated series, one for the fourth film, one for the cast and crew, one for events the website participates in, one for the DeLorean, one for the DVDs/Blu-Rays, one for a documentary about the movies, one for collections, one for websites about BttF (how meta), one for games, one for music, one for trivia and polls, plus a catchall subforum for time travel... but no 'off topic' forum section for people to talk about whatever. It's like the dystopian future where Biff is in charge except instead of Biff it's BttF itself in charge, somehow. And the newest registered user is "MartyGotParkinsonsLOL" which I guess is a good reminder of what the Internet is like. Speaking of Michael J. Fox, has anyone ever seen the movie "The Hard Way?" I feel like that's a really underappreciated buddy cop film. Good actors, good sense of humor, nothing much to criticize.

Shadow of the Horned Rat and Dark Omen were pretty cool Mythlikes, although Shadow of the Horned Rat actually preceded Myth by a year or something.

There's a difference between saying "it's really hard to get a job, so I was ready to compromise and work on crappy licensed games!" and "it's really hard to get a job, so I was ready to work for a company that does immoral things!" The first is a matter of taste - you'd prefer not to work on crappy games. The second is a matter of morals - you don't want to work for a company doing something morally wrong.

I don't really understand the appeal of that thing. Like, my favorite part of randomly generated games isn't whether I'm collecting bananas or cherries or whether I'm playing a twin stick shooter or a platformer. It's when the random generation is tied into complex systems to provide a uniquely tailored experience every time in the context of a set of rules I can come to understand and master. This is why roguelikes and roguelike-likes are great - they combine really great mechanics with the constant new-ness of random generation which allows them to have a brutal difficulty without making the constant repetition annoying. Randomization itself isn't at all interesting to me, and unless GameTron 1000 is just really really good at making each individual random component fun, I don't know why I'd have any assurances that the random games that pop out of it will be even close to the quality of a hand crafted game.

Someone got paid to write this: "BioShock Infinite goes beyond our sky high expectations" - Destructoid "On PC, Infinite becomes a portal into another world that speaks to the soul without even a whisper" - Destructoid "It’s hard not to dip my feet into hyperbole when discussing BioShock’s impact. It changed the way I played games. Literally" - Destructoid "If Irrational made the next Yakuza, I feel like us nerds would have the cheapest ticket to Japan ever sold" - Destructoid "We've been living in the fake HD era. Columbia is something great. It's a place you can believe in" - Destructoid "[bioShock Infinite is] a world so detailed that it makes one wonder what's the point of high defitinion if not all of our games feature a similar quality of original art assets as this one" - Destructoid "Let's address the minor nagging issues I have with the game's combat. Here's the deal: It's too good" - Destructoid "Even as the demo came to an end, I couldn't believe my eyes" - Destructoid (and: "On my first playthrough, I blasted through [bioshock] while listening to music on my iPod" - Destructoid "The original BioShock was a rather slow-paced dungeon crawler with a few combat encounters that got a little hectic" - Destructoid fuck you games journalism)

Or just don't post the keys in the open and ask people to PM or something. I mean, you might still be attacked by people like Hoodie Person over here, but at least you'll be able to tell the wheat from the chaff from the people who actually post here. Is that actually a Windows 98 key?

It's probably just the same person getting hired to work on every movie poster and video game box.

Yeah, I'm in the "this is a joke" camp. The OUYA actually seems like it might be delivering, though, which is both surprising and also a little unfortunate for people who want to make fun of it (like me).

Ooh I have one. It happened just now so it's fresh! I got The Walking Dead a little while ago and started playing through it. Last night I played and finished Episode 2. I loaded it up just now to play Episode 3 and my save is at the end of Episode 1. No evidence that I ever played Episode 2, even though last night I made it all the way to the end, sat through the stupid spoiler "next time on The Walking Dead" video, saw the stats at the end, etc. Laaaaame. Episode 2 was a lot worse than Episode 1, too, which kind of kills my enthusiasm for slogging through that all over again. Judging from the Telltale forums and from other posts online this is fairly common as things go - I tried the fix which makes my save show up again, complete with a stat screen with my choices, but when I go to start Episode 3 it thinks I haven't finished 2 and asks if I want the game to generate choices for me. So, that's still "lost progress" just as much as if my save was gone, because The Walking Dead is pretty much nothing but the choices you make. If this were 10 years ago I would just download a save game editor or trainer for the game, start Episode 3, and edit my saved game to have all the proper story flags and so on, but today's video games are all about making sure you can't do a goddamn thing because they're locked down tighter than Fort Knox on an Easter Sunday where all the guards are angry that they have to be there on Easter and they're just ready to shoot anyone who tries to steal the gold from the fort. So now I just have to let The Walking Dead languish in my games list until I decide to play through Episode 2 all over again or something, although I've seen posts from people on the Telltale forums saying that even after replaying things they just run into the exact same bug, so if I'm perpetually stuck in no-progress limbo I'm not sure I'd find that very enjoyable.

They're too late! It already exists! But I'm sure CA's game will be pretty cool.

They can now lie to us.

I used to have my hard drive partitioned so that the C: partition was very small and just my OS while the rest was a data/programs partition (D:) and stuff that extracted itself to a temp folder on C: was the worst. I guess with the advent of solid state drives that problem has come back in full force. HILARIOUS. I have enough games to play so I won't take your AC3 code but, Ben, if you want to post me your hard drive (that's the British word for 'mail' right? Post?) I'll happily clean the useless gigs off. Then keep the hard drive. An SSD would be sweet! I'll send you like a biscuit in return or something. (That's the British word for 'cookie,' right?)

Um excuse me I don't want a replica, which another word for "constant crushing reminder that hoverboards aren't real," I want a proper hoverboard. If I won this I'd have to put some magnets on it then a bunch of other magnets on the floor of my apartment so that I could hover around properly and that just sounds like a lot of work.

That kind of sounds like effort though.

If "cause and effect" counts as narrative then everything is a story, and when I say "Halo should take the story out of the game" and you say "no, Halo needs a story!" what's really going on is that I'm saying "Halo should take what normal people think of as the story out of the game" and you're saying "Halo needs the forces of cause and effect to operate without breaking." So we don't really have a disagreement, we're just talking about different things.

I think humans can probably understand more than just stories. For example, I have a pretty good handle on what it takes to build a computer or catch a baseball or cook dinner. Narratives are important but they aren't the only reason for living or the only thing we can understand. Humans are complex creatures, not just slaves to stories. Why can't games hook into some of the non-narrative parts of human existence? For example, the joy of solving a puzzle, or optimizing something, or surmounting a challenge that doesn't have any narrative attached? All of these things can be enjoyable in real life (playing with a block puzzle, writing a complex computer program, climbing that hill over there) and they can be enjoyable in games (getting past the next stage in English Country Tune, allocating your forces correctly in Hearts of Iron III, clearing a stage of Tetris). You're right - I spoke too quickly to say they can't support stories. What I should have said is that they have value without any stories. When you play a pickup basketball game or a round of Warsow you don't have to attach a story to it. You're correct to say that you CAN do so and that humans often do so, but it's not necessary and it's certainly not crucial to the enjoyment of any of these activities that we attach any narrative to them. I'm not sure what the point about cutscenes is - are you saying that taking control away from people is bad because humans are good at making their own stories and we should let them piece together disparate elements instead of imposing our own narrative on the elements? That seems to go too far, I would say. We COULD do that, and maybe games are better at that than any other medium, but we put the scenes in a movie in a certain order or the chapters in a book in a certain order to achieve a certain effect, and I think a lot of games rely on narrative control being in the hands of the creators. Thirty Flights of Loving is a perfect example. You could dial down on the player control even MORE in that game and it wouldn't get much worse. To reiterate my point, I was too hasty to say certain games can't support stories. Humans can come up with stories for anything. I should have said that what is good in some games can be had without stories. There is no story when I play a round of Quake III instagib against players with names that I don't even have time to read - I don't impose a narrative because I'm operating entirely on reflex for the duration of the match. I could go back and impose a narrative, or if I were a better player I could multitask and impose a narrative in the moment, but none of this is crucial to getting what is good in Quake III out of Quake III. Chess is a great example because a lot of people like those little chess puzzles in the newspaper, and I don't think there's much of a narrative going on there, or if it is we're stretching the idea of "narrative" a little far, a point I'll get to in a moment. I don't think Tetris is only interesting when you start fucking up. When I start fucking up is about when I start to get frustrated with Tetris (I don't play Tetris much). It's before I start fucking up when I get to jam to the music and slot blocks into block-sized holes that I have fun. I don't know if I'd call it interesting, but there's a lot of things that I wouldn't call interesting but that still have value. I don't think playing catch with a baseball or fetch with a dog is interesting but they are a lot of fun. Fetch is actually another good example of something that's fun without any narrative imposed on it, and in a lot of cases if you start imposing a narrative on fetch it gets kind of depressing because the dog isn't really thinking in narrative terms and it doesn't seem to care that it's living in this Sisyphean world where every retrieval is just an excuse to start another quest for the ball or stick or whatever. I really shouldn't be ragging on the Halo storyline because I haven't even finished the first game let alone played any past that, but I've heard that some Halo fans liked the storyline up until Halo 4, when the writers apparently got a little confused about which characters would know which things in this big confusing set of lore they've got, and there isn't an excuse for the Covenant and the Prometheans to be allied, or something. In any case, even if we defer to your diagnosis of Halo's story failings lying in the unchanging gameplay of the series, which I think is a pretty big jump (surely the Halo story could be good and yet still support unending war - The Forever War was a pretty good sci-fi book, was it not?), this doesn't really tell us much except that good games make for bad stories and that we should really stop putting effort into those stories because they have to be bad. This is a really interesting idea but I'm still not convinced. Puzzle games are probably the best example - I actually like World of Goo less for the story in there, compared to back when it was Tower of Goo or whatever (just the tower building game with no puzzle). I find the little signs from the Signpainter or whoever to be irritating for a few reasons. I have to try to keep this narrative in my head, even though I find it most natural to play puzzle games in small spurts spread out over long periods of time. So, I feel like I'm missing out on something in World of Goo unless I either have a perfect memory for the story or I sit down and trudge through it. Second, arranging the puzzles in a narrative structure makes it feel like I'm trudging through a set of obstacles in order to get to the end rather than encountering anew a series of interesting puzzles. Contrast World of Goo with something like AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. There is no narrative in that game - you can play any stage you want as long as you unlock the stage "next to it" on the giant unlock grid thing. More importantly, what narrative content there is is entirely divorced from the game, and you encounter it in any order, completely divorced from each stage. So I can play a round of AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! without feeling obligated to keep the entire narrative in my mind and without feeling like I now have to play the next level or risk losing the thread of the story. My first time through Hotline Miami I felt like I had to beat each level in whatever way I could to keep progressing to the end to find out what was going to happen. Now that I've beat it, I can replay the levels at my leisure, divorced from any narrative, and try out interesting strategies or go for a high score. Hotline Miami isn't BETTER this way but it's not worse either - it's just a different style of game, and games that are focused around getting a high score or solving a puzzle or something like this are games that don't need narratives and are likely better without them. Maybe you're right that a game as complex as Halo couldn't communicate everything it needs to communicate without a narrative. Maybe Halo needs its story to contextualize its game mechanics. But... I don't think so. Halo could just dump you in an arena and tell you to fight. The Witcher 2 literally does this before the game starts - it teaches you the controls, dumps you in an arena to kill a bunch of people without really explaining what the fuck is up, and then uses your success/failure to set a difficulty level. Did we need a story to contextualize the arena? The Witcher 2 tried to add one but it was a failure if you ask me, because I was slaughtering dozens of people with no repercussions. It would have been better if this arena had been an extra-narrative one that was designed purely to test my combat skills. Assassin's Creed II or Brotherhood or Revelations or all 3? has something like this too, the Animus challenges. They have zero narrative attached - they're just "kill X people" or "traverse this area in X seconds" or whatever. Could someone load the game up and just play these? Or would they need a narrative to contextualize things? I don't think they'd need a narrative at all. This sort of virtual reality no-story world is what some people wish Mirror's Edge was, and that's the route they went with their DLC, and it is also the route inMomentum went. I haven't seen anyone get confused about inMomentum's mechanics because it lacks a contextualizing narrative. Some of my favorite mods, like Suicide Survival, Perfect Stride Continuum, and Half-Life Bumper Cars, to name three of more than a dozen examples that I could have given, do just fine without any narrative contextualization of their mechanics. But you might be right. Maybe for Halo to tell you to get to the turret, there needs to be a man yelling "get to the turret." I think we can all agree that the right way to do this isn't to have Cortana saying a bunch of condescending lines at Master Chief, and maybe the right way to do this isn't to have any sci-fi bullshit in there at all. Maybe just make it like a sport. This is what Shootmania does, right (I haven't played it)? It's what paintball and airsoft do. If paintball had turrets, and we made a paintball video game, do you know how we'd tell you to get onto the turret? A paintball dude would say "get on the turret!" Then instead of a massive bullshit sci-fi universe bolted on to our "shoot people" game, it would just be a "shoot people" game with the minimum amount of "narrative" needed to get off the ground. To wrap it up, I said that I'd return to the idea of "narrative" being stretched too thin. I think that's what you're doing when you say we need narrative to contextualize actions. I think I can contextualize lots of actions in certain kinds of games just by having the guy next to you tell you that you have to the action. If that's enough narrative for games, then sure, most if not all games need narrative. What they don't need is what Halo has.

Specifically the joke started and continued through many episodes of Idle Thumbs.

I think they're bad adaptations too, for a certain definition of "adaptation" at least, so I guess we can be friends.

Whoa I had no idea that someone had set up an item trading site sort of thing. Maybe I can get rid of this crap in my inventory finally. I wonder if anyone will give me Far Cry 3, XCOM, and Mark of the Ninja for my frying pan.