TychoCelchuuu

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Posts posted by TychoCelchuuu

  1. Posted

    Yes, that article is so, so good. The mind reels. Thanks for the link greg!

    Revelatory that Pac-Man was a "Girlfriend Mode" predecessor:

    There were no games that everyone could enjoy, and especially none for women. I wanted to come up with a “comical” game women could enjoy.” - Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator

    I don't want to suck this down into the mire but the "girlfriend mode" that came up recently (and which was rightfully hated on) was "easy mode," not "a game about something other than war and violence," which is what Pac-Man was meant to be according to the quote (the first part reads "All the computer games available at the time were of the violent type - war games and space invader types.") The way you put it, it might be seen as a vindication of "girlfriend mode," where really it's anything but! Pac-Man is not at all dumbed down or made "easy" for your girlfriend who can't play hard games because she's a woman, which is what "girlfriend mode" implies. Pac-Man is just about something other than bullshit macho power fantasy (in fact it's largely about evasion) which is not at all what Borderland 2's "girlfriend mode" is.

  3. Posted

    I am so completely burnt out on sexism and Video games. It's a huge, glaring, pink-elephant problem, but jeez-- I'll try n frame it:

    When Obama was up for presidency, it was virtually impossible to talk about him being black. There's people saying WHERE'S HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE! and HE WON'T WIN BECAUSE AMERICA IS RACIST! or HE WILL WIN BECAUSE OF THE BLACK VOTE, or IF YOU DON'T VOTE OBAMA, THEN YOU ARE A RACIST NAZI.

    My point is that it's all just ffffucking garbage. Everyone wanted to be the one who's got it all figured out, so everyone's yelling, and as usual the loudest people drown out the wisest people. So no matter what you wanted to hear insight on, you have to wade through a sea of idiot soap-box crap to get to it.

    I clicked a Kotaku article a while ago that was titled something about strong female characters, and when I read it it was about the lack of STRONG AS IN MUSCULAR STRONG? FEMALE CHARACTERS? Aauurrrrrgh!

    Same thing happens if you make a blog post about art games- or practically everything Jonathon Blow ever says: You get a hundred comments saying

    "I agree. I knew games were art as soon as I played Bomberman! 100 thumbs up"

    That's not--... that's just rubbish! That's nonsense! Sometimes posts like that are like 5 paragraphs!

    So yeah- long story short: It's hard to have one more discussion about Lara Croft, and what she's wearing, and what her boxart is, and who's raping her. It's not that I don't think there's valid discussion to be had there; it's just that I kind of already know what Dark_Dude_94's opinion is gonna be. It's gonna be that rape is bad, and people shouldn't rape.

    I KNOW! I sound like a huge dick, and this isn't much of a spark for discussion, but I just wanna flush this thinking out of my head and into the aether, just once, y'know?

    EDIT-- Aw fffuck why do I always end up at the top o the page... This is not a page-topper, I'm sorry.

    Would you say that the discussion in the podcast was useless because, like you say, you "kind of already know what Dark_Dude_94's opinion is gonna be" and you found the podcast discussion to be like that? Or would you say that even if someone says something that is new and adds to the conversation in meaningful ways, you still don't care because all the idiots are also saying idiot stuff? Or are you fine with the discussion in the podcast but not in the gaming industry in general?

  4. Posted

    The talk about the Day-Z vet and the callback to the Resident Evil 5 dude reminded me of an experience my friend and I had that was similar. We were playing SWAT 4 coop multiplayer on a server, and it was just the two of us plus some random guy. SWAT 4 is a very slow, deliberate game: you check each corner and each room before entering, you make little plans about how you're going to breach a room, you secure each suspect and handcuff them and tag evidence before leaving each room, etc. You have to be slow because if you go fast you might get caught off guard and killed in one shot.

    So the mission starts and immediately this third guy sprints off into the distance and enters the building where the suspects are. My friend and I figure he has no idea what he's doing. All we can hear is *BANG* *BANG* "GET DOWN ON THE GROUND!" *AGH* *BANG* "PUT YOUR HANDS UP!" We get into the building and the room is full of suspects stunned by pepper spray. The other player is nowhere to be found. We handcuff everyone, secure all the evidence, and move on, all the while hearing *BANG* "PUT YOUR HANDS UP!" "DROP YOUR WEAPON!" *BANG* in the distance. Every time we get into the room, it's just a bunch of dazed suspects, disarmed and ready for us to cuff them. It becomes apparent that this man, who we dub "SuperCop," is bursting into each room and disarming everyone, by himself, at amazing speed. He is a one man wrecking crew. My friend and I spend the rest of the level following in his wake, one room behind him, cleaning up after him by handcuffing the snuffling, disarmed suspects.

    I think we finished the map with a perfect score: no criminals dead, and SuperCop, my friend, and I came through unscathed. We went to the next level and the same thing happened, only this time it was in a large office so instead of going from room to room, we got to observe SuperCop as he darted from cubicle to cubicle spraying enemies into submission. With grace and experience he had turned SWAT 4 from a slow, measured slog into a game of zipping around preparing criminals for the arrival of his two sidekicks who could do nothing but marvel at his skill.

    So, thanks for reminding me of that!

    I think if you're going to set out to deconstruct a piece of western media you can pick apart the white male patriarchy in 99% of what is currently available for consumption. However, Borderlands did not stand out as a misogynistic game to me when I played it. Of course, part of this stems from my being male and having a privilege blinded perspective. But (and I know I'm going to get raked over the coals for using anecdote here) I played with my girflriend and we both loved the experience and she never pointed out anything that seemed super sexist to her. Well apart from the Moxxi expansion which was really crass and awful in all the predictable ways. I won't stand up for the writing, they clearly rely on stereotypes for every character in that game. But you can play as a woman and even that, sad as this may be, puts it miles ahead of most current video games (including the Aliens example you cited). And she isn't constantly moaning and acting sexy. She's kicking ass and is by most accounts one of the best characters in the game, after all. Should it have had more playable female characters? Yes. But I have complaints along these lines for nearly everything I consume. We need more women, more people of color less white men in media. Is it shitty that the only black character in Diablo is a witch doctor? Yeah. But it's also good that the barbarian woman is not an idealized fantasy babe and has a natural body shape. Patriarchy and racism runs through everything but I think as long as we point out the negatives without flushing the baby with the bathwater we slowly improve as a society.

    So while I think the writing is lazy and not critically thinking in the slightest, I don't think Borderlands deserves the description of misogynist. In fact, having a female character who isn't just a set of boobs, sets it apart from most other gaming experiences. To pull from anecdote again, this is the main reason my girlfriend picked it up to begin with.

    I'm not defending girlfriend mode, I think that's been covered. But I'm interested to know why Sean thinks the original Borderlands can be described in such negative light.

    The female player character is basically a seductress. Her skills have names like "Diva" and "Hard to Get". Her class is named "Siren." Her butt gets top billing in the game's promotional screenshots and she manages to show off her breasts and blow kisses simultaneously. She is basically one of Kate Beaton's strong female characters.

  9. Posted

    I can't struggle through the single player in RTS games any more unless they're sufficiently different from the RTS formula (Homeworld, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, Dawn of War II, Men of War, etc). The last one I finished was Company of Heroes and even then I'm not sure why I bothered. To give some perspective, I play single player for basically EVERY game I buy even if it sucks (hello, Bad Company 2), so not playing the campaigns for RTS games speaks to how much I can't stand it. Starcraft 2 sits unfinished and I'm probably not going to bother with Company of Heroes 2. I'm glad they're putting effort into the only parts of C&C I care about, especially because Red Alert is the only one that has ever had amusing single player, largely because of the FMV cutscenes.

  10. Posted

    Bought it, installed it, played it, played it again in Puffin Mode. Everything I could've hoped for and more. Wonderful followup to Gravity Bone although it would be nice to have AA in the menu (maybe I missed the option). Yes, the only substantive comment I can come up with is to suggest AA :lol: What can I say, the jaggies were distracting. Truly, though, a game from Blendo Games is always a game from Blendo Games, by which I mean you can really feel the authorship, which is one of my favorite aspects. Moosh already mentioned this back on page 3 but I love how this game doesn't just riff on Gravity Bone. I think my favorite part was

    the art gallery at the end. Especially the image of people standing around looking at the slab that said "Thirty Flights of Loving" with the little card next to it, or how a lot of the other title plaques said "Thirty Flights of Loving" then on the next line "Thirty Flights of Loving." I think when I'm less sleepy I'll have to think much more about it.

  11. Posted

    I haven't bought it yet because I tweeted at Brendon asking if he gets more money if I buy it directly from him and he hasn't replied yet. I suspect the answer is "yes I get more money" but given the convenience of having it on Steam I want to know before I drop my $5 (or my $4.50).

  12. Posted

    The difference between Conviction and Blacklist for me is literally the "waggle the thumbstick to torture" prompt. I don't have a problem with brutal violence, even interactive brutal violence, as long as it's not real people getting actually hurt. What made me turn off the video was the juxtaposition of the clinical, value-judgment-free language of the onscreen button prompt with the action it was prompting you to do: literally twist the knife, via analog stick. That the game was asking you to do this with the straightest possible face is what made me unhappy. Button prompts in games are, barring anything cute the game does, as close to the literal word of god as you can get. They tell you the truth, and nothing but the truth. This is what made Portal 2's "press spacebar to jump" joke so hilarious, and it's also why the no-nonsense "twist a fucking knife into this guy's shoulder" thing in the Blacklight video irritating to me. The voice of authority from on high has appeared and is giving you the pure, unadulterated truth, and what is is truth? TORTURE THIS MAN. I don't remember the prompts in Conviction being quite as blatant "hit X to torture" and they certainly weren't "twist your analog stick to twist the knife!" Instead it was just "press X near an object to watch Sam 'Unhinged' Fisher push this person into it!"

  13. Posted

    The only way I'm able to play through stuff like this is on a meta level - as commentary on the horrible shit that most video games are. As it stands I don't think I could make it through Blacklist and in fact I turned off the video at about the point you did. Imagine being the person whose job it is to make sure "wiggle LT to twist a knife into this guy's arm" turns up on the screen. I don't know how I'd do that without just stopping and saying "what am I doing? Is this what I am making?"

  14. Posted

    But surely beating the game with respawns modded out is preferable to abandoning it forever. And System Shock 2 might not be as scary without the spawns, but it's still scary to a certain degree. It's not like it kills the game entirely, it just cuts down on the tension. It also cuts down on the tedium: weapon degradation and limited ammunition makes it pretty annoying to deal with spawns unless you love being Señor Wrenchman, the Wrenchmaster of Space.

  16. Posted

    The talk about the worker grabbing his balls made me laugh out loud, although nobody looked at me weird, but then the story about EA's poor lawyers made me laugh harder and I'm pretty sure a few people thought I was crazy. So that's wonderful.

    The talk about Space Engine reminded me of one of the other great space exploration games, Noctis (warning: worst website ever). Noctis has more of a focus on being able to actually land on plants and on finding neat unique stuff. It's pretty atmospheric:

    As for asynchronous games, I really like games like Frozen Synapse where your turn is a good, meaty chunk of gameplay that gives you a lot to puzzle over. That way it feels less like passing letters back and forth and more like a fun turn based game with discrete chunks that are individually compelling.

  18. Posted

    Yeah, it definitely looks like "pay $1 to get a cosmetic drop, get regular drops otherwise." Great knee-jerking, there, dudes.

    I'm sorry that misinterpreting the line from the FAQ that reads "A Tour of Duty is a collection of Missions that may span multiple maps. Tours of Duty only exist in Mann Up Mode. Mann vs. Machine is shipping with one Tour of Duty. We’ll be releasing more Tours of Duty in the future." to mean that 'a Tour of Dutyis a special linked set of maps maps' rather than 'a Tour of Duty is literally just the same thing you play in the free mode on you get items at the end if you win' is knee-jerking, but it honestly wasn't super clear to me. My bad.

  19. Posted

    Uh, wow. Pay us a dollar to play the full campaign mode. Once. Then pay us another dollar to play again. That sounds... profitable.

    Although I'm a little unclear on what the Tour of Duty is above and beyond a string of maps that you can play for free, other than that you can earn items in that mode. So maybe you only need to pay them if you want to earn items?

  20. Posted

    I used to be (and perhaps still am) very bad with horror games: I made it to the first enemy in Doom 3, shot him before he turned into a zombie, and quit. So my experience with Alone in the Dark is limited to watching someone play and briefly struggling with the controls myself before deciding I wasn't having fun. I know the fight option isn't the most effective and it's very limited by ammo: I'm just saying that "packing heat" and knowing that I can turn a particular encounter into a combat one means that I play the game with a certain attitude that I wouldn't have if I had literally no option of fighting.

    Amnesia gives you zero combat abilities. You cannot harm the monster. You have to hide or run.

  21. Posted

    Sounds like your mindset has already been polluted by the 13 in a dozen shooters. This reminds me of an other discussion I read somewhere, probably here, just because you can kill doesn't mean you have to.

    I don't mean that I feel like I have to kill ever monster, I mean that whenever I play a game, I'm presented with challenges, and I always have a little mental list of ways to respond to the challenge. In Fallout, for instance, "talk with people" is on the list, which means I approach situations differently knowing that there's often a way for me to resolve the situation with words. In Dark Forces 2, "lightsaber" is on the list, which means at any point I can decide to stop shooting lasers at people and turn the game into a melee combat game. In a game that gives you weapons of any kind, "fight" is on the list, because you can fight. A game where "fight" is not on the list has a different feel than a game with "fight" on the list, just like Fallout feels different when "talk with people" is on the list even if I just shoot everyone to finish each quest. In Fallout there's the sense that the violence was my choice, not something forced on me by the game.

    In a game where "fight" is on the list, I feel like each monster I encounter is scary, but ultimately something I can defeat. The developers gave me a gun, and if I so choose, I can shoot this monster. In a game like Amnesia or Routine, "fight" is not even on the list. There is never an enemy encounter that I could conceivably beat by killing it, and this is important not because I've been trained by 13 in a dozen FPS games to by hyperviolent and thus murder everything, but because having the option to kill a monster means knowing that the developers expect me to be able to deal with it like that. The threat is something I can remove. It's omnipresent and something that necessarily evokes a flight response or a hide response or anything other than fighting back.

  22. Posted

    For me, there's an entirely different feeling if the game has weapons, even if I can beat it without them. If the game has weapons, your mindset is always "if I needed to, I could try to fight." It's always at least an option. With something like Amnesia or Routine, you couldn't fight even if you wanted to, and I think that changes things fundamentally in a way that it wouldn't change just because a game could be completed without weapons.

  24. Posted

    Everything about this game looks pretty dumb, but it's too early to really start trashing it.

    It's never too early to make largely unfounded sweeping negative judgments! For instance, I really don't like how

    the guy shot himself once you fiddled with his memory. He thought he killed his wife, then that guy came on the screen and said "alright we're taking you to the courthouse" so the first guy said "you'll never take me alive!" and blew his brains out just before his wife showed up. I sat there wondering "what if that second guy had said 'your wife and I are on our way to take you to the courthouse?' or something?" The tiny story clip we've seen is just horrendously contrived.

    I also don't like the look of the camera they have. It does a lot of stuff that seems like it takes a sort of fixed perspective on your character when you're platforming, which I dislike.

  25. Posted

    I think that's mostly just because there's a mix of "very popular" and "no information available." It's a series that a ton of people like because it has wide appeal, so it makes sense that it gets a lot of attention when news about it comes out, but news about it NEVER comes out. We go YEARS without hearing ANYTHING about Half-Life. I think that's why people jump all over it. If better games than Half-Life handled news like Half-Life, people would jump all over every morsel of information about them too. That basically never happens because as soon as a game takes off enough to become a franchise, publishers pimp the sequel endlessly with constant barrages of screenshots/trailers/press releases at carefully timed intervals to keep the game constantly in the limelight. The Half-Life series doesn't do that, so people swarm over whatever tidbits they get.

    youmeyou's example of Infinite and Dishonored shows what I mean. People DID go nuts for Infinite when it was first announced, and there hasn't been a media release since that hasn't been widely covered. Imagine if instead of that, we had been waiting for 5 years since the last news of BioShock, and nobody was even sure if they were working on a new BioShock game, then someone accidentally put "BioShock 3" on some list somewhere. The Internet would explode! Dishonored, meanwhile, doesn't have a rabid fanbase because it hasn't even come out yet and only 4 people played and loved Arx Fatalis.

    Also, Half-Life ended on a MASSIVE cliffhanger and it also ended 2/3rds of the way through a planned trilogy. So in terms of having hype built up, I think it's pretty understandable why people would jump all over Half-Life news even if it's not the best game ever made in the history of forever.