TychoCelchuuu

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Posts posted by TychoCelchuuu


  1. Gravity Bone is almost exactly told in the Dear Esther style if you're talking about "gameplay" rather than aesthetics. Gravity Bone is does have some interactivity but it's all quite perfunctory - exploration is 90% of what you do, and it's 100% of what you do in Dear Esther.


  2. If the story isn't what makes it unique, then Thirty Flights is basically interchangeable with Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, and the first parts of Half-Life and Half-Life 2 then, right? Because they all have the same gameplay? And people made the connection that Thirty Flights was derivative of Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, Half-Life, and Half-Life 2 because it came out after them, right?

    No! Not at all. I'm just going to link to this article again because it says most of what I would want to say, but it's already written. "Gameplay" is one of those silly words we're using because we haven't figured out how to talk about games yet.


  3. And I've been following it for all ten years! Actually more - I was following the mod before it released. So all in all I've been with Natural Selection for more than a decade and I've loved every second of it.

    I don't really know how the Steam sales chart works but I know that Natural Selection has been #1 for a while even during the Halloween sale. That makes me so happy! People are buying the game! YAY


  4. I still disagree vehemently.

    For Thirty Flights of Loving, the closest comparisons story-wise are probably In the Mood for Love and other Wong Kar-Wai films, Last Year in Marienbad, Primer, Inland Empire + other Lynch films, and other movies that leave lots of things unsaid and force you to put the pieces together in real time as you deal with a narrative that is often nonlinear. The closest comparions game-wise are Dear Esther, a bit of Gravity Bone, the parts in Half-Life and Half-Life 2 where you don't have weapons/can't shoot and you're just exploring or listening to people talk, and The Stanley Parable (with the massive caveat that The Stanley Parable gives you freedom to choose the outcome).

    Now, if gameplay were the big thing here, then Thirty Flights of Loving should feel a lot like the later things I mentioned and nothing at all like the movies I mentioned. You don't play the movies at all, whereas running around, looking at things, jumping like a bozo, and hitting your "use" button sometimes is exactly what's required of you from the games I mentioned (except Gravity Bone, which asks a bit more from you). Except Thirty Flights of Loving to me feels FAR MORE like the movies I mentioned and in fact feels NOTHING like the games I mentioned, with the exception of Gravity Bone, which is the game that plays the least like Thirty Flights of all the ones I listed and which really only feels like Thirty Flights because of the obvious stuff (set in the same universe, same graphics, same musical style, etc, plus a bit of nonlinearity near the end).

    In fact, I get the Thirty Flights of Loving experience in an only mildly attenuated form by watching "Let's Plays" on YouTube of it, which is one of my hobbies (it's amazing to see how other people experience the game [and horrendously depressing to see how little anyone understand - many people miss even the basic interactions you can do with Borges and Anita, for instance]). That's ZERO gameplay and 100% watching something happen, and yet it feels much more like Thirty Flights of Loving than playing Dear Esther does, even though Dear Esther's gameplay is whatever Thirty Flights of Loving's gameplay is (wander around and let the game show you stuff).

    Now let's move on to the other examples in the blog post:

    Spec Ops: The Line was about as different a type of story from Battlefield 3 as you could get. One game concentrated on multiplayer, one on singleplayer. But Battlefield 3 had a bigger PR campaign, and better gameplay at its core, and so it sold far more copies. Because the gameplay was exactly the same thing, and people chose the better one.

    This isn't even clear about what gameplay is! Because BF3's gameplay was much WORSE than Spec Ops if we're talking about single player. That single player was a fucking travesty. If you made it more than 5 minutes into BF3's single player campaign then DICE should send you $5 as a thank you gift or something. BF3's multiplayer gameplay was much better, I guess, but that's because even the lead designer called it "cancerous" and said it's "bullshit" that "shouldn't exist" so to suggest that people bought BF3 over Spec Ops because they care about gameplay more than story is patently ridiculous: if you care about multiplayer gameplay you will buy BF3, because it is an amazing game, and if you care about single player "gameplay" (gameplay being here a horrific word that means nothing, as I've been sort of arguing) then you simultaneously care about the story and thus you'll buy Spec Ops not just because the shooty bits are better but because the story's also good.

    As weak sales of games like Spec Ops and Sleeping Dogs and Max Payne 3 and etc. have shown, it honestly doesn't matter how else you dress up your game. A cover based shooter is still a cover based shooter, a GTA clone is still a GTA clone. If you are not doing it bigger and better than the next GTA-type or cover based shooter, just don't bother. Go create something that ISN'T out there. You won't have any competition, instead of facing competition you've no intention of beating.

    Sleeping Dogs' weak sales show that doing gameplay worse than the competitor is a surefire route to failure even if you dress it up in nice clothes? From what I've been hearing people say, Sleeping Dogs is at least as much fun, or more fun, than any other GTA clone, including GTA IV, at least when it comes to whatever "gameplay" is. Spec Ops, as I've already noted, blows BF3 way the fuck out of the water when it comes to single player, so clearly it hasn't failed because its "gameplay" is worse. And Max Payne 3 is failing because it's a worse cover based shooter than... what? Gears of War? Is it really? Says who? If your thesis is "gameplay is the only thing that matters and people will not buy a game if it has inferior gameplay" you need to give me some reason to think that whatever "gameplay" is, Max Payne 3's is worse. Most of the criticism I've heard about Max Payne 3 falls into two categories: the multiplayer is dumb, and there's massive ludonarrative dissonance, something which I would guess you're unconcerned with "because gameplay is what you are doing in a game" and it's what "commands your attention" and thus any dissonance between it and the narrative is moot - nobody is paying attention to the narrative.


  5. Stuff like your blog post seems really mired in the we're not really talking about games right stage, which the first comment on it points out. What is this "gameplay" you are talking about? I mean, if you asked me, I would say Thirty Flights had almost no gameplay, and what little there was ended up being largely inconsequential - the same story told via different gameplay would have been substantially the same game, whereas if you had changed the story it might not even be a Citizen Abel game anymore, let alone Thirty Flights of Loving.


  6. Games You Ought to Maybe Buy:

    Limbo - A stupendously atmospheric puzzle platformer about loneliness and dying a lot but not in the VVVVVV/Super Meat Boy sense of dying in a platformer.

    $2.49

    Atom Zombie Smasher - A fast paced action strategy game where you must evacuate civilians from different parts of Nuevo Aires before they are eaten by zombies. Sometimes you need to kill a few civilians to save the rest, like when you need to literally destroy half the city to stop the zombies. The game has a wonderful sense of humor and style that only Blendo Games games have, and it has a lot of replayability thanks to an in-game mod install menu that lets you tweak your game with community contributions. And if the "Blendo Games" thing didn't tip you off, this is from Brendon Chung, friend of the cast and creator of Thirty Flights of Loving.

    $2.49

    Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition - Easily one of the best RPGs ever made. The world is fleshed out in incredible detail, with believable and interesting locations that are populated by exactly the kinds of people who would live in the world. Where does the food come from? Where do the soldiers stay? Where are the trading routes? This is all fully realized. The story is amazing, the DLC is hilarious, the quests are interesting and have multiple solutions, there are lots of speech checks, the announcer on Radio New Vegas is Wayne Newton, there's a robot called FISTO... this is miles ahead of Fallout 3 and, I think, better than Fallout 2.

    $14.99

    BioShock 2 - In my opinion, a worthy followup to the original. The story isn't bad and it doesn't rely on a twist, but where it really improves is the gameplay. You can now wield a plasmid and a weapon together at all times, and because you play as a Big Daddy, you get some really interesting weapons, including that fucking drill. You can really go to town on people. The DLC, Minerva's Den, is an amazing short story that surpasses most of what BioShock and BioShock 2 have to offer. Friend of Idle Thumbs JP LeBreton is responsible for much of the game, and the same goes for Hot Scoops.

    $4.99

    Space Pirates and Zombies - A fairly fun game where you fly your mothership around to various parts of space and then send out your fleet to accomplish missions. You can customize all the ships in your fleet to match your playstyle and it's a lot of fun to unlock new ships and weapons and slowly grow more powerful. The game plays like Star Control's space combat.

    $2.49

    Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines - Another one of the greatest RPGs made, this motherfucker NEVER goes on sale so buy it right now if you like Deus Ex or games like that.

    $4.99

    Home - Haven't played it but people seem to like it.

    $1.49

    Rock of Ages - What do you get when you cross Monty Python, Marble Madness, and an art history class? The funniest tower defense/boulder rolling game ever to come out of a Chilean developer. Recently patched to have even better multiplayer and for Halloween, it has a ghost boulder and a pumpkin boulder.

    $2.49

    Nancy Drew®: Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake - Fucking GHOST DOGS am I right

    $1.74


  7. Uh, yeah, I guess I am comparing the US to Egypt? Because you asked whether the US was special with respect to vocal ignorant religious chauvinists. Maybe it's more excusable in Egypt or something but I'm not trying to say that the US is the best country in the world or whatever. I was just trying to answer your question. I'm sorry if I offended you and I'd be using a frowny smily face here if these forums had one.


  8. If the change from XP to Vista is anything to go by, or if the change from 98 to ME is anything to go by, I think it's fair to expect things to be generally worse. And I don't really need more performance on my computer: an i3 murders anything Windows 7 needs to do.


  9. What are the optimisations and improvements? Windows 7 works pretty well. Feel free to tell me to fuck off and figure it out myself - I'm basically being super duper lazy and not even bothering to Google it. I used to work tech support and thus kept up on all this shit, but after that I've sort of stopped staying on top of tech news. Gaming news is more than enough to deal with on a daily basis when it comes to nerd stuff.


  10. I don't really see why I would upgrade to Windows 8. Granted I haven't paid much attention but my computer is a keyboard and a mouse and a monitor, not a repository for Cheeto dust.


  11. Oh man, Dishonored developer shows up in the thread to talk about the game. Awesome.

    When you guys were joking about Dishonored having a really weird silly contextual thing pop up when you play it on Halloween I thought about Arkane's first game, which actually did have something pretty wacky. In Arx Fatalis in one of the dungeons you could make your way to an out of the way room that had a chicken in it. If you cast a reveal spell on it you'd see the chicken identified as a man. So that's weird. Then if you explore more in another part of the game you'd find a book about Lord Inut who discovered a way to transform into a chicken. So then if you grab a leek, a carrot, a dragon egg, and a bottle of water, then go to a tavern you found near the beginning of the game and mix them together in a cauldron, you get a potion. Then when you give the potion to the chicken it turns him back into a man and gives you a ton of XP. Then if you talk to him again he'll give you a weapon and then explode.

    Between that, the Thief easter egg, and the shoutouts to Steve Gaynor, Tynan Wales, JP LeBreton, and other BioShock 2 designers in the first assassination mission, I wouldn't put the crazy Halloween stuff past Arkane :D