TychoCelchuuu

If you buy a downloadable Steam game from Amazon.com it will give you the code, generally, as will buying it from, for example, GreenManGaming.com (and probably other online sites as well).

(I_smell's game is No Time to Explain) I agree that Steam should probably not just be doing the whole "mob rule picks games" thing because then stuff like La Mulana is up a creek, and frankly I think the whole Greenlight thing in general could be handled much better, but there's certainly an argument to be made that this whole thing is very new and that if we give Valve some time to figure stuff out, then we will have a combination of Primordia-esque "Valve realizes what's up and lets the game onto Steam" and also the more mob-driven "this game is the sort of thing people would buy if they could so let's put it on Steam."

Video games have been combining narrative with decent combat since long before 2001! Marathon, Halo's predecessor, did this back in 1994, for instance

At least he doesn't have a buzz cut. edit:

Is there some reason that talk of the fruit must be censored? Is this some sort of Garden of Eden situation?

Wadjet Eye's latest game got Greenlit so fast because, in their words, "since we moved up the charts so far so fast, Steam has judged that Primordia can bypass the rest of the process and get Greenlit right away" so that clears that up. La-Mulana is presumably somewhere down the list of games with not enough votes to get greenlit. They're not making up the numbers, but they are giving a free pass to certain games when they feel like it. If they're making developers go through Greenlight just to have fewer crappy games on Steam, is this bad? And the way voting works is pretty simple. A vote is a vote. I_Smell did indeed get greenlit.

This seems like a very odd position. What if I said that if games can't cook food then they are completely fucking useless to us as humans, given that food is fundamental to our ability to exist in the world, often to the point (especially in the past) of killing people to take their food? Just because something is very important doesn't mean that games have to provide that important thing. There are all sorts of things that are crucial to what it is to be human that games can't do, and that's not a failing of games any more than it is a failing of books that they can't play music or of movies that they can't heal a broken bone. You mention games that can support stories, but what about the ones that can't? Quake III? Chess? Tetris? Go? Are those games completely fucking useless? Can we just throw them all in a giant fire pit and never make any more games like that in the history of the universe and nothing will be lost? Do you really think Halo would be a better game if it found more ways to force the awful fucking story into your face at every given second? Chris' point is that he wishes a game like Halo could realize that what's valuable in Halo isn't your relationship to an inexplicably sexy robo hologram woman inside this convoluted nonsensical sci-fi universe, but rather the amazing combat that the game has. Would Halo be a better game if it doubled down on the shitty sci-fi and started compromising its peerless fighting mechanics to jam its second rate narrative into the experience at every conceivable opportunity? Because that's what it would have to do in order to work the story into the game mechanics, right? Change the mechanics of the game. And Chris is suggesting that the mechanics are the greatest thing about Halo and also one of the only good things, especially compared to the stupid story.

It's better because there's a purpose behind it, and because if the objectification of women were not a recurring problem that is endemic of our culture's bias against them and thus a component in the ongoing oppression of women then it would be perfectly fine, whereas something like Cortana or Ash's boob job in Mass Effect 3 would be at best silly and at worse steering us in the wrong direction back towards sexism even if you waved a magic wand and made patriarchy disappear.

Spec Ops: The Line is $5 on Amazon.com if you want to check it out.

I'm not sure about crying or anything and I haven't played AC3 but I know they got a legitimately Native American voice actor for the character which is pretty stupendous and his name (Ratonhnhaké:ton) is also admirably authentic. When I said Desmond was a generic white protagonist I didn't mean to imply that he had pasty skin or didn't have any races other than Caucasian in his ancestry (because obviously he's related to Altaïr). What I meant was that culturally he's interchangeable with the protagonist of any other uninteresting Space Marine narrative - he's a trendy bartender from America who speaks with an American voice and has that buzz cut that every game hero has. Of course if you go back far enough his ancestors aren't blond haired blue eyed Aryans but that's hardly necessary for a protagonist to be "generic white dude" in your game. He's from South Dakota and his main distinguishing characteristic is that he has none.

Have you ever played Tales of Game's Studios' Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden? It's pretty much the only JRPG I've ever really enjoyed, mostly because playing as Charles Barkley and exploring the post-cyberpocalyptic ruins of Neo New York made for enough hilarity and the combat had enough button mashing/reflex timing that, together, these things could overcome my odd irrational dislike for wandering around dungeons with monster encounters while I keep an eye on my stats bars or whatever it is that you call those things in JRPGs. Whatever. Shup Up and Jam Gaiden was free, but Tales of Game's Studios is Kickstarting the sequel, The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 - Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie - Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa. I kind of don't want to spend $10 for it even though it looks fantastic and has swapped to the action genre, thus escaping my weird dislike of JRPGs, but I suspect I will cave before the end of the Kickstarter just because the pitch alone makes me laugh. I would also be lying if I said I didn't want a Cyberdwarf body pillow. There is also a nice article on the game up at The Verge. Also I just now discovered that The Verge and Polygon are different.

Chris' point about how he wishes games like Halo could just be like a sport, without all the arcane lore shoehorned into them in the form of cutscenes all the time, struck a chord with me. I simultaneously would love it and hate it if games went in that direction. So, on the one hand, I would love it. Multiplayer only games are of course quite good at leaving narrative by the wayside, and things like Warsow or Quake III Arena are to me stupendous in part because they're pared down to the heart of the gameplay, with zero fat. The original Doom and Duke Nukem 3D were like this as well - a perfunctory story that had zero impact on the game. Meanwhile we have games like Thirty Flights of Loving or The Walking Dead which realize that they are about the narrative and don't force you to collect 12 items or shoot 18 people to advance the story or whatever. So I really like the idea of games that are about mechanics just narrowing down and focusing on the mechanics, while games that are about stories should feel free to just discard most of what we think of as "gameplay" as long as it's not integral to the story. Like, obviously Hotline Miami or BioShock couldn't get rid of the gameplay and tell the same story (BioShock could ditch a lot of it actually) but this doesn't mean that every interactive story needs a game and certainly every game doesn't need a story. But... on the other hand, I really like seeing the narratives that get tacked onto these things. Typically they are somewhere between "awful" and "bullshit" on the quality scale, often with a good dose of "offensive" and "morally bad" (like when Cortana gets turned into a voluptuous purple player-worshipping naked purple lady) but this is all just trashy grist for my interpretative mill. Like whatever stupid story they've stuck in the Transformers movie or in Avatar or even in The Avengers (despite Joss Whedon's best attempts to make that interesting), the stories people tell with these games intrigue me not because they're amazing but because in their own way they can also reveal little chunks of the human condition. Typically the narrative itself doesn't say much of anything, but the meta-narrative, the process of "look, we need a story for this Assassin's Creed game, what are we going to do" is often fun to think about. What does it mean that they didn't feel like they could just straight up make a game where you played an Assassin killing Templars? Is the sci-fi stuff an excuse to have walls around parts of the city to gate your progress? Do they think their audience can't relate to characters in history and will need Desmond, the Generic White Man, to play as if they're going to stay involved? By couching the narrative in science fiction are they hoping to avoid controversy? That's not quite accurate, though, because as interesting as I find those questions, I find it even more interesting to just straight up think about game narratives as I would think about any other narrative, even if the game isn't exactly Shakespeare. Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 are actually pretty good for this. The plot is straight up bullshit but there are nuances you can read into it, just because it's a story and in a story there is always interpretative leeway. Do the games deserve the effort I put in to thinking about what they say? Maybe not - maybe Halo isn't really stepping up to the plate and giving me enough to think about. But I often find that I can make a Delicious "Kirk Hamilton" Dish out of the ingredients I'm given, even if they're not the greatest ingredients. PS Waking Mars got Greenlit.

Yeah, THQ has published a ton of amazing games. I hope they can stay afloat.

Well yeah obviously aside from that time.

Poor THQ is doing anything to keep from going out of business.

Yes, I'm worried about whether this game is popular enough to never die.

May not happen for a while? Won't they be finished in a few weeks?

I think asking for money in exchange for video games is pretty much why Double Fine exists as a company. Seeing as that's what video game companies do. I suppose if you're sketchy about the idea of preorders in general then yeah this might look bad but Double Fine is hardly the first game to ask you to pay for a game before it's done. The latest XCOM unlocked 3 tiers of rewards based on how many people preordered it!

Why? Have you even played the first one? Steve Gaynor disagrees with you and I think anyone sensible would disagree with you. Colon cancer is unpleasant. Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden is hilarious and fun. edit: how you could say a single mean word about a Kickstarter where the $1,000 backer level is "you get to pretend to be us for an interview with a journalist" and the $10,000 level is "lunch with pictures of us (you pay for lunch)" is beyond me.

It was dated when GTA IV came out, wasn't it? The game is only four years old. The Internet, like almost everything that goes into the Grand Theft Auto games, is a wonderful piece of mood/environment building in action.

Why are any of the women posing in any of the GTA ads going back to 3? The cop isn't posing because she's busy arresting someone. And this is the third time in this thread that I've said being meta doesn't make it okay, it just makes it different, distinct, and better than most objectification of women in the media.

Like I said above, I don't think Grand Theft Auto gets a pass for anything it does, and perhaps there are ways to satirize America, marketing, and all the related stuff without using hot women to do it, but I don't think it's fair to say that a slightly more nuanced take on this stuff is exactly as bad as Cortana or Stripper Nun Assassins. Grand Theft Auto does for most of American culture (including violence) what Hotline Miami does for violence in gaming - it takes some first tentative steps towards criticizing it, but it does so almost entirely by taking the cheap way out and doubling down on the stuff it's ostensibly criticizing. This doesn't make it good or righteous or amazing but surely it's better to have some nuance in there than to just straight up say "yeah, some of the enemies in this game are stripper nuns because... fuck, we don't know" or "Cortana got a boob job because we could." If you think 5 games of this is too much and that Rockstar has outstayed its welcome I guess that's fine, but as far as I can tell the satire has only gotten better each time as it has grown to encompass more than criminality as its themes.

themthemthem, I don't think having "positive female characters" makes it okay to objectify women in the way that Borderlands 2 does (and the way that most video games do) and I don't understand why you think the distinction I drew between IO and Rockstar doesn't hold. It seems pretty obvious to me that the Rockstar promotional images are crafted in order explicitly to pander to the male gaze whereas IO, 343 Studios, and so on pretend to have reasons for having sexy stripper women popping up all over their games.

The reason the perp is posing for the camera is because she knows she's in an advertisement for Grand Theft Auto Fvive. It's the same reason all the other women are posing for the camera in these pictures, and it's why that one I posted of the woman on the beach is funny - she's not posing for us, she's posing for the camera, which is an ironic reversal of expectations because it's the first time it has ever made sense for a woman to pose in one of these things. Her eyes are finally not locked on us but on the camera.

Well, you know, it's a pretty common name.