Badfinger

The problem is kind of what I was (badly) driving at when I got all ranty, right? The people that made a bad decision were Obsidian by negotiating an all or nothing contract tied to an aggregation website, but as referenced in Tom Chick's post Adam Sessler is upset and blames Metacritic for literally taking food off of developers' tables. So people are mad at Metacritic coming AND going, and mostly all for bad or wrong reasons. Consumer information is not at fault. No one cost themselves any money but Obsidian. I hate harping back to Game Rankings, but if they were aggregator du jour they would have also denied a bonus because they're even lower than an 84.

Because people can accurately assess that restaurants who don't get Michelin stars didn't meet expectations, not that the rating system they agreed to in their contract was bad. ... Except people DO have problems with Michelin Stars, and claim bias towards French restaurants. It's similar to discussions on Idle Thumbs about how presentationally beautiful games like Anno don't ever get mentioned in discussions for end of year graphics awards. Can you imagine the production team on Anno agreeing to performance incentives depending on winning graphics category awards? The other direction, imagine incentives based on E3 awards. Holy crap, I could not imagine the shit show from that. Get rich from demos.

I beat it. I'm fairly sure I missed things, and all this time off has turned me from Ghost into the Mr. Magoo of assassins. Trying to choke someone out and then haphazardly bludgeoning them to death with my sword. I like it a lot. It's more of the good parts of Dishonored, and you get supercharged into having a bunch of skills quickly ala Minerva's Den. If you like Dishonored Dishonored, you should grab it and play it. Also more on the way, because this is just part 1.

But that's not Metacritic's fault. Metacritic does precisely what GameRankings does except it looks like it was built by someone who wasn't doing a college project, and also has movies, music, etc. No one gets mad at Game Rankings because it wasn't the cool, trendy thing everyone was looking at. And I apologize if I come off as bashing you specifically, but you saying that is a large part of the issue. What if workers at the Chrysler factory got laid off because they didn't get enough JD Power & Associates awards? What if you got a performance review every year/half year, but then your bonus was actually tied to the number of twitter followers you had? Also you're not a salesperson or in PR, you're a web developer. Whenever I think about it, it makes my blood boil. It's one of the worst things that's not literal racism or discrimination about the games industry.

I agree with Tom's point re: Adam Sessler and keeping food off of tables based on aggregate scores, too. That's one of the most egregious things I've ever heard of. Obsidian was denied bonus incentives not based on sales, not based on hitting concrete goals, but because they got an 84 aggregate score instead of an 85. And people got all up on Metacritic for that. Why? Why not get mad at 1) whoever at Obsidian agreed to base bonuses on something subjective and 2) everyone in the industry, but ESPECIALLY the publishers who think that doing something like that is an acceptable practice. I have literally NEVER heard this line of thought in a podcast/video/discussion from the professional video games media. I can't be the only one who thinks this. It honestly makes me mad. Much more mad that a horrible goal was agreed to in the first place than that they missed it by a whisker. Metacritic certainly has a place in the industry, but not as a performance metric. Imagine movies or music having metacritic performance riders. Everyone involved would, very rightfully so, pitch a fucking fit. So mad.

Happy Dishonored DLC! Thread resurrection! The Knife of Dunwall is out today. It's the first Dishonored DLC that adds more story to the Dishonored world. Instead of more Corvo you get to play as Daud, the assassin who killed the Empress. It overlaps the timeline of the main game at least in part. It's more Dishonored with more stabbing, powers, and whales. I'm pretty pumped up. Bought it last night, tooled around for a few minutes. Just long enough to remember how many of the mechanics I've forgotten. http://store.steampowered.com/app/208575/ Get stoked about Dishonored again.

The innocuous comment "When Nick comes back..." from Sean is a lot more knowing in April than it was in January.

I feel fairly confident that I would never WANT to be that good at tetris. I think Tetris and bowling share a commonality, which is the point of them isn't to be good. The point is that it's fun and everyone can relate and no matter how good you are eventually you're going to mess up and shrug and laugh and everyone can laugh with you.

What's funny about Infinite is that to me it's extremely obvious that And even though it's completely obvious, I'm probably wrong!

Double postin' to cover other small, less coherent thoughts- Sean, I like DOTA talks. Talk about the dota hole you go down. I am in the equal and opposite LoL Hole. Re: Infinite, responding to a post in the thread one of the things I genuinely admired was that it gave you all the information you needed to know about what Booker really was, had Booker heavily imply what he was, but never went out of its way to tell you what Wounded Knee, the Pinkertons, and the Boxer rebellion for Comstock were. I LOVED that. There are no heroes at Wounded Knee. Slate and Comstock are both disillusioned. With regard to reviews, I had wondered if you were going to bring up Giant Bomb. That's mostly a website not about reviewing games. Somewhat opposite to Patrick stepping outside the normal GB bubble and getting backlash, I think it's refreshing, while sometimes frustrating, for them (mostly Jeff and Ryan) to be completely up front that they HAVE a bubble. There are games that Giant Bomb will never cover or play, and they will flat out tell you that they have biases towards coverage. But because they are direct, they have also established a clear voice about their styles and preferences. When they do review something or weigh in with an opinion, you have the knowledge of them personally to know how their preferences color their statements.

I enjoyed Kieron Gillen's take on Infinite. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/06/about-a-girl-assorted-thoughts-on-bioshock-infinite/ I don't necessarily agree with every individual point, but looking at Colombia through the lens of not trying to be real, but rather trying to be HYPER-REAL helps me put a lot of things in perspective. Additionally, I don't think you should HAVE to view outside discussion to be able to get things out of a game, but I don't think in depth discussion is a detriment. Isn't that what a book club is for reading? Even if you like the writing, or enjoy the story, that doesn't mean that every book is good at surfacing what its meaning actually is. That doesn't really exist formally for games. Some of that sort of erupts naturally from podcasts, but that's not actually what this cast (or any I know of) is specifically for. I have trouble being critical about saying "I didn't get everything I think might be there from this story". I am coming to this from this perspective: I am a TERRIBLE critical reader. Listening to the book podcasts, I know that I do not have that level of critical commentary of a piece in my brain, but I could still hold the same level of appreciation (or disdain) for the work without it. That's not to say that you shouldn't be critical of how the story is told of course. Having 3 overlapping sources of plot exposition at once (tears, Liz, audiolog) is bad presentation. Obfuscating or layering less critical parts of the story isn't bad by necessity.

I agree. The reason Spec Ops WAS worth discussing was the plot and story. As a game, it was basically functional enough to propel you through the story parts.

I was generally just responding to your comment up the page, that I agree with you there could be motivations to establish Booker as his own character. I'm also not sure I agree with you about that. I never finished Bioshock 1, so I started it up a day or so after I finished Infinite. Just the difference of the player-character being addressed as "Booker/Mr. DeWitt" rather than just YOU is a noticeable change to me. I also think the plot helps reinforce that. You enter Infinite with Booker already embarking on his journey, and with his motivations clearly established. Bioshock The First begins with a plane crash, where the only internal character motivation is to not die.

I think I can safely say without spoiling anything that by the time you reach the end of the game, there will be a few moments that very likely reinforce your position that Booker is Booker and not you.

Holy crap, so much awesome discussion in this episode. Sean, it WAS a good one. The discussion on the gifts was unreal. Imagine receiving the gifts. At what point does that person's mindset turn from appreciation and apprehension to expectation? On day 19 where you wander by and apologize, do they go "WHAT THE FUCK, NO GIFT TODAY? God, the nerve." Do they feel relief? Would there be a pattern to the gifts? It goes so deep.

I think the No decision Is Bad can apply to Sim City, but I also think there are multiple ways it can apply. Deciding how you want to build your city, building a high tech high wealth techno-city is a valid choice but so is building all slums all YE time. Just because there's coal in your city plot doesn't mean you have to mine. At the same time, road or service placement could be objectively bad compared to other building decisions. It's a simulation, there's ALWAYS an optimal decision path The advertising is saying you can build however you want, but that comes with the implication that it is beholden to the rules of the sim. Your goals are completely wide open.

Whenever people talk about the Great Gatsby (aka only Idle Thumbs), I can't not think about Hark a Vagrant. http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=259

A couple of things I had to yell out immediately. Haven't finished the cast, or read the whole thread - ~THESE MAY BE SPOILERS THOUGH DO NOT SPOIL ANYTHING MORE THAN LISTENING TO THE CAST~ I also definitely chose heads/tails. e: after reading the thread, wow, I thought I had made a choice as well. The brain sure is unreliable. I wondered if the choice of Liz's brooch did anything. A friend said he thought it swapped back and forth while he was playing, but I didn't notice that. I did not throw the baseball at all. You have the option to let it time out. Re: Sean's "She'll be right back" rant, the difference between you and Chris having a wonderful date on the beach and Chris saying he's going off for a minute, comparing it to Elizabeth saying that is that Booker was specifically sent to the city to get Elizabeth and remove her from the city, and they had just been attacked and fell a billion yards onto a beach, and a contingent of people are being pretty antagonistic towards you. The second she says "WOO A BEACH I'LL BE RIGHT BACK!" my reaction through Booker was "holy shit do not let her out of your sight for one minute, she is the most valuable commodity in the entire city and doubly so for you." (I then prodded behind every shed for hot dogs in the sand because it's a Bioshock game, but my point stands)

I liked the game a lot. Maybe not 10/10? But I enjoyed it a great deal, as evidenced by the fact that I finished it the day it came out (or at all frankly for me these days). I wasn't put off by the ending. I enjoyed it. There was a bit in the credits that gave me goosebumps, frankly. I also feel like I mostly understand it, while at the same time if I mused on the plot twist early in the game I didn't guess it "a third of the way through" like I've seen people in other places claim. Full disclosure, I never beat either of the previous Bioshock games and apparently there is fiction in other genres similar to this that I've never read or seen. So I wasn't put off because of sameness either. I do wish some if the plot elements fit together better. I love the Luteces. If you think you might like this game you probably will. The God Only Knows cover is absolutely stellar, I want this soundtrack.

Bioshock Infinite is making a desperate bid to dethrone Bioshock as the aggregated highest scored game of all time*. That's exciting, I'm excited.

Those monitors aren't even all widescreen, and they're all resting on a table instead of a locking monitor arm angled appropriately to smash their photons directly into my eyes. How can I even hope to compete with a subpar setup like that?

I'ma double post to answer the sports thing (that other post is mad long): I love sports and also I love video games (and the competitive aspect of both). It's weird to me that people find it weird that you can like both things. They're certainly not mutually exclusive, just somehow stigmatized as being opposing ends of a social spectrum. Things I have had conversations about in the last 24 hours: Hanley Ramirez needing surgery and how the World Baseball Classic affects MLB, how boned the Flyers and 76ers are and how much I miss Andre Iguodala, the hilarious over-anticipation of the Blizzard card game, how medivacs are apparently overpowered (they're not, it's mutalisks no I'm not zerg why do you ask), and LoMas, LoMas, LoMas. To address the second part of your question also not addressed to me, I am fully in Sean/Chris's camp when it comes to recreational sports and acceptable behavior. Those are casual environments where the explicit goal is to have fun and play to the end of the game so you can go have beers, and a secondary outcome is winning. If you are getting shit-talked or berated by opponents (and ESPECIALLY by your own team) that is 100% unacceptable. I've had forum conversations about trash-talking in LoMas, and some people have attempted to compare that to psyching out/trash talking in professional sports. Somehow, that always attempts to justify people dropping racist and sexist epithets as "good natured ribbing" which boggles my mind. But long story short - professional athletes are being paid to play at the highest possible level, and to win at any cost within the rules. If that means attempting to gain a psychological advantage through trash talk, then that's what they do. Recreational game players are NOT being paid to play, and in fact have explicitly signed a social contract (ToS and Riot's Summoner's Code, for example) to be respectful and exhibit good sportsmanship. That's compounded with the fact that athletes are physically there with each other, and gamers are thrown together by algorithm and will statistically never randomly play with each other again. If you have reached a common ground with an opponent where you can share good natured trash talk (no swears or slurs are ever good natured) and helps you enjoy the game a little more, have at it. "LOL NOOB UNINSTALL" is not good natured. The way I think about it is that online matchmaking is Little League Baseball. You get grouped into random teams based on location with a very thin veneer of matching on skill, everyone is playing for a juice box and a ribbon, and anything unacceptable to yell on the field or in the stands at 13 year olds is also unacceptable here.

Point 1: PLAY CAESAR 3. Oh my lord I played so much of that game. It is awesome. It is not exactly a city builder ala Sim City, and more a scenario game. There's actually a campaign mode that's very reminiscent of traditional RTS campaigns, where you play with progressively more complex/difficult goals to attain to win the scenario. I don't know if you are a competitive person, but I am. When I do things with other competitive people, it can get kind of heated. I ENJOY competition. But, especially when I was younger, it was easy to let that run away from me and get very loudly frustrated at other people. I'm sure I had a few "take the ball and go home" moments across sports, games, and video games throughout my teens. Most of the time with sports with was with friends, and certainly you're playing card/board games with people you're friends with as well. One of the things I think makes frustration/raging more prevalent/noticeable in LoMas is the nature of how you see the game. When you're playing CS (I actually played MoH:AA and CoD competitively), you see a first person view, and the only things you have vision of are the things your gun is pointed towards. In DoTA/LoL, you have a 3rd person isometric view, and real-time vision of everything your team can see on the map. You can very literally see a person casually walking to their own death 10-15 seconds before it happens. That can be a very frustrating experience (both directions). The nature of a small team, an omnipresent view of the map, and a guaranteed time investment means frustration has the propensity to build and burst much more quickly. It's also directed frustration. If you're on a team with 15 other people in an FPS, and the top guy is going "UGH CAN'T WIN PLAYING WITH ALL THESE NOOBS" he's not raging at you. If you're on a team with 4 people and the guy with the most gold starts bitching "UGH CAN'T WIN PLAYING WITH NOOB SK. QUIT AND UNINSTALL" that's personal. It's personal because you're 20% of the team composition and they need you. But in CS you can quit mid-round and be playing another map or gametype in 30 seconds with no consequence. In LoMas, that's THE GAME you are playing. You can't just drop in ~15 minutes in to just do a little light CSing before dinner, and you can't quit and be replaced. If someone is being so abusive that you just straight close the client, YOU'RE the one who's in line for punishment for quitting. Also the team is now at a 25% manpower disadvantage (5/4) and even if you could have worked it out you're boned so you just let 3 potential non-jerks down. It's also Dunning-Kreuger.

That fucker is me. Westwood was probably the first developer where I truly understood what a developer was, and that they had made all the games in a series I liked. Even Maxis, Microprose, et al didn't occupy my consciousness like Westwood did. EARTH AND BEYOND, YOU JERKS.

Mania Planet is its own weird niche of insanity. It is much weirder than UPlay by far. I would recommend Giant Bomb Official and Unofficial Classic as servers to play on if you are Open Beta'ing right now. They're generally full or close to it, have some weird and fun tracks, and are stuffed to the gills with the worst possible dubstep you could imagine, which is wonderful.