TychoCelchuuu

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Posts posted by TychoCelchuuu

  2. Posted

    Finished it just now. Great game.

    The two janitors at the end are definitely the developers so that redeems the stupid secret ending a bit for me, and the hospital section was sheer brilliance, as are all the parts in between the missions (at the apartments and at the convenience stores and so on) but overall I share Chris Remo's "games that try to say something about violence by making you wonder why you are killing all these people are being lazy." I don't mind though because this game is mechanically so much fun that narratively I can deal with a well done narrative saddled with a stupid, empty lesson behind it because it has just enough ambiguity to keep it interesting despite that.

    And of course the soundtrack. And the aesthetics. You're right, Vegas: it takes courage to make a game that looks like this, a game that will certainly turn people off for looking like it does. But its vision is uncompromised and it's all the stronger for it. One of my favorite games this year.

    I found myself about halfway through the game switching from "try to plan stuff" mode into a "just be a fucking nutter" mode. I still ended up thinking tactically in some parts, especially when I could end up catching my breath, but just flipping the "go for it" switch in my brain added some real fluidity into how I approached situations. And then I was reading online and I saw someone say you can fling the pots of boiling water on stoves onto enemies to scald them. I wonder what else I'm missing.

  3. Posted

    Age of Chivalry was lots of fun but I don't usually buy multiplayer only games like this unless I can be assured of a dedicated community sticking around in all but the most dire of situations. So, Red Orchestra 2 and Natural Selection 2 got purchased because those will never die (well, they actually fucked RO2 up so badly that it might actually die) but something like Lead & Gold, War of the Roses, Chivalry, The Ship (unfortunately), Bloody Good Time (also unfortunately), Sanctum (which I guess also has single player) and so on sits in the "only if I'm rich" pile. And I'm not rich.

  12. Posted

    There are "sub-optimal" builds for your character's stats in Alpha Protocol (although why that would make you distrust the narrative is beyond me) but even the worst character build can make it through any part of the game, especially if you're playing on one of the lower difficulty levels. SMGs are probably the worst guns but I made it through the game my first time using them because I didn't know better.

  13. Posted

    They had planned to have stretch goals but they hadn't decided on them at the time of starting the Kickstarter - they earned much more money more quickly than they had anticipated so it was a matter of making up stretch goals on the fly based on what they had vaguely planned in advance.

  15. Posted

    Alpha Protocol does not have an optimal way to play, though. It's not about the "right" path and the "wrong" path. All of your choices are the right choices because they are your choices. If everything is on the critical path then you're telling a story where the player has no input into how the story plays out. Games can do so much more than that. Alpha Protocol can do so much more than that.

  17. Posted

    The RPS interview just really is fantastic. I mean, stuff like this:

    RPS: Back before Curiosity launched, you talked a lot about the technology underlying it and the fact that you were trying to make something that could bear the load of so many people simultaneously tapping away at it. Why didn’t that work?

    Molyneux: The main reason? It was my fault completely. The server guys here said, “How many people do you think you’re going to have coming online?” This is the reality of it. I’ve done three talks. I did a talk at Rezzed, I did a talk at Unite, and I did a talk at MIT. There was the Wired article, but that was back in mid-October. So I said, “Look, it’s going to be a slow ramp up. We’re not going to go out to the press, we’re not going to start talking about it until we’ve proved our tech in the marketplace. The only way to do that with this is to get people to start using it.”

    So those poor guys, instead of implementing 15 servers as there are now, they implemented a solution which was only one server, because they thought that they would have at least a couple of weeks before that one server was being pushed. The reality was [very different]. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I wasn’t even online when it launched. I was in Israeli security because I’d just given a talk in Israel and I was fighting my way back. I had done one tweet saying, “Oh my God, I don’t believe Curiosity is out.”

    But by the time I landed and got back to England, it had had 200,000 downloads. And all those people hitting our server, a single server, and trying to get on and trying to register and trying to go through Facebook and trying to tap at once… We were totally taken by surprise. Those poor guys, they turned around to me and looked at me with hatred as they said, “Look. As quick as we can, we have to implement our cluster-based solution, which we didn’t really want to implement.” They got this load-balancing solution out as quick as they could, and a mistake was made, which was a schoolboy mistake, but it was impossble to unravel. We lost the gold.

    RPS: That puts you, with the Kickstarter I think, in a bit of a precarious position. You being you, a lot of people look at your work and say, “OK, he’s a guy who promises a whole lot and then it doesn’t always work out that way.” And now they have a very fresh reminder of that in how Curiosity turned out. Do you think that will make people a little more hesitant to donate to Kickstarter, because they’re not sure if you can actually pull off GODUS as you promise it?

    Molyneux: Probably, yeah. What that means is that we would have to go down a more traditional publishing route. Whilst I’ve got lots of friends in publishing, it would be a shame. But you’re right. It just wasn’t good enough. We should have… I shouldn’t have been… Well, I don’t know how I could have predicted this. It’s just a cube in a corner of a white room. I don’t know what we did that made two million people download it, and download it in such a short time. I wish I had some time machine and could go back two weeks. You live by your mistakes, for sure.

    I just love how his main failing here was the opposite of what everyone dings him for - it's a complete lack of hubris that makes him think his stupid cube thing won't be popular, but instead everyone on Earth downloads it twice and melts the servers.

  18. Posted

    Awesome episode. I'd talk about the Cortana shit but I'm worn out from that after having spent a while on another forum in another thread arguing with people who think she's totally fine because she just chooses to look like that and it fits with her character and jesus christ kill me now.

    Anyways, random thoughts:

    Chris making the XBOX "shwoomp" sound was amazing. That was a really good recreation of that sound.

    Chris revealing that BioShock Infinite is just a Halo clone will give quite a bit of succor to the 14 year old Halo fans who are going to post denigrating stuff on BioShock Infinite YouTube videos.

    I'm so glad someone (Sean?) brought up The Phantom Menace as the start of all the Latin/Sanskrit chanting. I was saying in my head "I think it was probably Duel of the Fates" and then Sean said it! One of the many reasons I love Idle Thumbs is that between all of you, there's almost never anything I want to add to the conversation that isn't added by someone. I'm also glad Flotilla and Brendon Chung in general got some props for the amazing music choices he makes.

    On the subject of awesome game music and using one violin instead of 8 string sections, Arcanum's entire soundtrack is written for a string quartet and it's beautiful:

  20. Posted

    youmeyou is 100% accurate, the game lets you choose a location and a creepy load out, and then gives you a splash image saying in french there are tons of child soldiers in the world.

    Whoa, spoilers!

  25. Posted

    Looks pretty great to me! I like the cockeyed eye.

    As long as I'm posting here, the backlog of shit that has accumulated since I last plugged my shit largely consists of videos about Natural Selection 2. They are, in order, an alien commander tutorial, a marine commander tutorial, and a practice competitive-ish match (same rules as competition play) in which I take great pains to explain everything so that newer viewers won't be lost the way one would normally be lost watching competitive NS2 without much background (that video is coming in the next post since I can't slam 3 shits into one post it seems):