TychoCelchuuu

Lucasfilm Games?

They fixed the Dr. Galvani house crash bug.

I definitely meant "look more like System Shock" in terms of low poly, not in terms of art direction. Obviously it's not cheaper to have System Shock's art direction that it is to have BioShock's art direction. It's just cheaper to make System Shock 2 spec art assets than it is to have BioShock spec art assets.

Or even just ugly games. I imagine a lot of the budget in AAA games is making them look more like BioShock than System Shock.

Have we seen a dropoff in the small Kickstarters? I would imagine what actually went on was that Double Fine Adventure earned a zillion dollars and larger players saw they could also do this sort of thing. I don't think the small games have dried up, whereas for most publishers, making a small game doesn't even seem to be on the radar. Look at the spread of recently funded Kickstarter games: lots of smaller budget games are packed in there among the $10k and $100k games. Heck, No Time to Explain got $26k which is hardly $3k, right? And that was a while ago. Incidentally people have talked about this before so we're not really cool for whining about it, and until the AAA game bubble pops I'm happy to play all the wonderful indie games. Not to mention those big budget Kickstarters you mention are actually the sort of small budget games that I wish publishers would be funding in the first place. So maybe we're seeing the transition RIGHT NOW with this first round of successful big Kickstarters. If games like Shadowrun Returns, the Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2, Project Eternity, Star Citizen, and so on succeed, then maybe publishers will decide that they can get in on the action too and start making games with budgets in the low millions of dollars.

Even if you do find a wireless receiver, it's extra money that you wouldn't need to spend if you just get a wired controller. Plus, you know, batteries. And weight, too.

Speaking of that, the choices at the end specifically, what did everyone choose?

Certainly. Indie games already do this sort of thing on a shoestring budget, and I feel like indie films are a good template for where games should start heading - those movies get made for like, a million bucks or something, so they don't need to sell 40,000 tickets in every theater just to break even. But for some reason game development has gotten to the point where lots of publishers seem to want every game to be a huge AAA production with a massive team and a massive budget, as if they can't make money on a game like Hotline Miami or Mark of the Ninja or The Walking Dead. So Overstrike has to turn into FUSE to recoup its costs. Of course, the IDEAL situation would be one where people bought NOLF instead of Generic Manshoot #7, but for whatever reason, that doesn't happen.

Right, I'm saying we need to weep for the world where this is the case. Just because the generic stuff sells more doesn't mean we have to like that fact. NOLF, Wind Waker, Psychonauts, and Brutal Legend didn't deserve obscurity for looking pretty.

I don't know if I'm a little loopy tonight or if that is just amazing but that made me laugh harder than any of their other stuff, which is pretty good because they're pretty hilarious.

To see the difference between FUSE and Overstrike you really need to watch the trailers: Then you need to weep for a world where an entertainment company decided that going from the second trailer to the first trailer was the way to sell more copies and make more money.

Critical Distance's "This Week in Video game Blogging" has a good summary of some articles about the #1reasonwhy tag down in the "#1REASONWHY" section (go figure).

Because I haven't bought a boxed game in... many years I literally do not care what goes on the box.

You can still go back and edit the spoiler tag into your post. I got this from the $5 Amazon sale and started it up last night. Next thing I knew it was 3:38 AM and I had just finished it. Wow! I enjoy shooters, including cover shooters, so the mechanics didn't bother me in the slightest, although I did find it too hard on the hardest difficulty so I had to knock it down to normal partway through the game if I wanted to not have to play every fight perfectly. The art direction in this game is peerless. It has the ridiculous detail and over the top big budget bombasticity of a Call of Duty game, but it combines it with stupendous use of color, light, and most importantly angle to do something that most games do only in a rudimentary sense if they do it at all: it tells a story with the level design through the way the levels look and feel. Plenty of games do environmental storytelling with incidental parts of the environment - graffiti, corpses, scorch marks, whatever. That's always neat in the same way that detailed sets on a movie are neat, and Spec Ops does that pretty well. In fact, it does it excellently when it comes to the simple stuff, like when you find lots of corpses. What Spec Ops does that very few games do at more than a very simple level, though, is that it also tells a story via the mood of the levels, particularly with the off kilter angles that so much of the game is tilted at. This felt like The Third Man in video game form when it came to all the slanting going on. It's not exactly masterclass level design to decide to make things tilted to convey a sense of strangeness and of something going wrong, but to do it right isn't trivial and in any case that is exactly the mood the game needed to convey and it's a great fit for the Dubai architecture. Back to Spec Ops, then: Overall I greatly enjoyed the experience, if "enjoyed" is the right word, and in the future I'm going to recommend it to anyone who will either enjoy or suffer through the gunplay. There's a lot more there than just commentary on video game violence and even if it said NOTHING interesting it would still be such a pretty game. Also, force Anti-Aliasing through your graphics card control panel. Makes the game look nicer.

Actual people?! Is Friendly Dad really KIA? Oh noooo, he was a loving family member

Just finished SiN Episode 1 - Emergence, the first and last and only and best and worst and shortest and longest SiN Episode which I got when it was the daily deal a little while back on Steam. Pretty great Source engine FPS, I'd say. Competently made, with fun weapons, enemies that aren't always as stupid as a sack of bricks, and interesting environments. The plot wasn't even bad enough to be good, it was just blandly inoffensively absent, which is annoying. I'd rather have something awful to chew on than a perfunctory excuse to shoot people. The game also takes its cues for "how much should we pander to the male gaze?" straight from the "The Duke Nukem 'Give 'Em Big Titties and 50 Other Tips for Spicing Up Your Female Characters' Guide to Game Development" so that's depressing. The game has a dynamic difficulty scaling thing and I don't know how much it actually works, but you can look at all the pretty numbers and charts in the menu and it certainly stayed challenging but not brutal the entire time. I often found myself at very low health and ammo after each fight in a level, which I suspect means that the difficulty scaling was really working. I don't like how one of the enemies it spawns in greater numbers when you're doing well (I think) is the minigun enemies that don't drop any ammo when they die and that can't be headshotted but on the other hand that certainly kept things difficult for me. So in the end I recommend it if you're a fan of HL2 single player mods, especially if you're snooty about them and want high production values, because this has pretty great production values. It's a good length, it has secrets to find (including Dopefish!) and you get to see what Ritual would be doing if they hadn't gone broke.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?f&v=rFZ1t727-uM

We can't give away Company of Hero codes individually since the THQ Humble Bundle comes with 2 codes - 1 for Saint's Row 3 and 1 for all the other games. If you just want that second code you can pay $1 in case nobody has any codes lying around to hook you up.

It may be that it contains a hidden code known only to the electronic monstrosity that controls gaming: Steam. But that is unhelpful to us mortal beings of flesh and blood and bone. We are left with only the ability to click the link and hope that Steam smiles upon us.

You get a link to redeem the game on Steam.

Someone behind Dragon's Lair sold their soul to Satan at some point in exchange for continuous sales on every platform forever, I suspect.

If each year, more shit gets shoveled out of it, soon it will be pristine and shit-free!

I didn't quote the rest of your post because it was indeed agreeing with me so I wasn't sure what to talk about. I just wanted to give all games made before 2001 some props and I'd use a frowny smily face right here if we had one that didn't look angry. I'm sorry if disagreeing with people makes me sound like an asshole - my position has always been that discussions are no good if everyone just sits around saying "yes" to each other. It's not what we agree on that's interesting, because we don't need to talk about what we agree on.

Nobody has a true gender! Gender's a social construct! I don't think the BioShock Infinite guy is Rob Lowe though because Rob Lowe wasn't alive in the 1920's when this game is set, right? So clearly they can't be the same person. See, I just used science!