Badfinger

Where was the post from the gentleman talking about the same team being on SC4, Spore, and the new Sim City? I thought I heard it was in last cast's thread but I didn't find it there. www.coveredintea.com/wizard I have to say, I don't dislike the very introspective and critical podcasts, but I sure did laugh a lot at this one and in retrospect that was a fun change from Far Cry 3.

Joe Montana from the 1980's would be really sad and shocked to find out John Candy is dead. :[

Gabe Newell is the founder and CEO of Valve, and also worked at Microsoft as a producer on Windows through Win95 (which is where he made the fat stacks of cash to go start Valve). He basically sees all these crazy opportunities and then goes "Hey we should create a digital platform so we can produce and distribute our own game" and empowers people to make it happen. "Hey what if there was a Steam Box?" Gabe says: There is a Steam Box, but it is actually an infinite number of boxes that happen to run Steam.

Idle Thumbs asks: Can you babywall Sim City 2013? We Answer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ0fBYZ-Ahs

It was very weird watching Pikmin and apparently being in my own private chat room for about an hour. I can say that watching streams (and subsequent discussion on a cast) of DayZ sold me a copy of ArmA 2, and the stream of FTL sold my a copy of FTL. The greatest viral marketing scheme in history.

My god, episodes 43 and 44 might be my favorite back-to-back casts. The Goldblast, firefighter simulator and Batman Begins, and then the crazy ODST remix with Steve Gaynor Fresh Prince lyrics. Steve tends to dip into the absurd, and that leads to some extremely weird and funny moments.

I did this. I was just as excited about Sim City the second time.

The consensus I've been seeing is that most people who are excited about the game or Sim City fans is that you should NOT get the deluxe edition. I don't like how harsh some people are being, but $20 is a HUGE ask for what feels like a couple of extra buildings and some palette swaps. I know I wont be getting that version, but that's just my own personal opinion because I'm not as excited about Big Ben. The beta was a closed beta last weekend, so even though tons of people were participating in it you weren't supposed to stream. The game comes out first week in March, and at that time I agree it would be a fun Saturday stream.

I can't tell you how excited I am for Sim City. So excited that I made two posts about it. Re: effects multiplayer will have - that is EXACTLY what they're planning with the always-on multiplayer region play. Things you do in your city have an impact on other cities in the region, so if you want to be a Casino Lord crime boss, the other cities will benefit from their citizens being able to go be a tourist and play the slots, but also have to deal with the increased crime in the region.

About halfway through this week's cast. Found it humorous that you have to actually know how to spell "phaedrus" in order to visit this week's sponsor. e: Asking here, is there no thread for Sim City: The City Simulator? I poked through the first 2-3 pages of games the other day when I wanted to have a nerd freakout with everyone and I couldn't find it.

That Infinite trailer is awesome. Absolutely awesome. They hit it exactly right.

There are also certainly people who DO want the harshness and loneliness of being stuck in an unfamiliar spot for real. "Unfixable failure" might be beyond the pale, but frustration certainly isn't. I don't know if you've ever seen Survivorman, but its premise is that this dude gets dropped in a location with basically only the supplies he can carry or the normal "tourist" might have in that location, and has to survive and make it to an extraction point in 7 days. The big deal of the show is that in addition to being the show's only actor, he also films the entire thing with no crew. So even though they prep and scout and all that, he's still alone with just a backpack for an entire week. Some days he goes to bed hungry because his snares and lures didn't catch anything or didn't work or broke. I wonder similar things about people who love truly scary/frightening things. I don't really care for/about haunted houses, or thrill rides (roller coasters are not meant to "scare" but it's similar emotionally). What is it in human psychology that causes people to actively seek out things our animal brains would want us to avoid desperately? I don't like being frightened of things, that's why they're scary. Final thoughts on CK2- I appreciate your thoughts on it and attempts to reconcile it within the framework of that procedural narrative email, but we have to be honest with ourselves (especially me, since I'm arguing AGAINST it but with a stacked deck in my favor) that CK2 is not even implicitly trying to be the thing the email was about. Crusader Kings is NOT about crafting a story with a plot. The digital actors aren't all participating in service of the story and definitely not all in the service of the player. In my crude imagination procedural narrative storytelling is more like choosing two things, and having that generate a page of text for a book, then when you finish reading that you pick 2-3 more things and it generates the next page. That would be, to quote various game journalists, "Hell of janky".

An explicit narrative is what I guess I'd call the plot. Or something that ALWAYS happens. I'm not saying CK2 doesn't have a progression, or a cadence, or a logical series of events. I'm saying that Crusader Kings literally does not have a plot. You could potentially not do anything but maintain a single duchy for 400 years. You can make Crusader Kings into Hamlet, but you can't make Hamlet into Crusader Kings because Hamlet's father ALWAYS gets murdered by Claudius, and Ophelia ALWAYS drowns, etc. Hamlet is more like Call of Duty than CK2. You're just as likely to have positioned your spymaster in a good place, learn of the plot, ask Claudius to abandon it, forgive him, and arrange a marriage between your son and his daughter. Then it's not Hamlet anymore. I suppose my position is that a procedural narrative isn't a story or a plot until you make it one.

Crusader Kings doesn't have an explicit narrative, though. You create stories based on events that happen, rather than the other way around. It's a Historical Wackiness simulator. In theory if the constraints of the game allowed it, you don't even have to participate at all. If the person you'd chosen to dictate the choices of died without heirs, you could potentially continue to simulate the alternate reality to the end of the time frame. http://lparchive.org/Crusader-Kings-2/ I am not much of a Let's Play guy, but I think historical simulators can be fascinating for that sort of thing. In that guy's playthrough, he takes what is literally a bug in the game (you can hold a tournament, which lasts for X months. Due to a glitch, the tournament did not end until his current character died like 15 years later) and turned it into a narrative touchstone in the story of the history he was telling. In that way, I feel it's like the story of Miasmata the Thumbs were telling, in that noticing the detail of the non-shirted arms and the extremely detailed medicine bottles they created a character who was an 18th century naturalist nudist that I probably would not have created in my mind.

I totally yelled "Holy shit it's Nick Breckon" when I heard it was Nick Breckon. (I didn't yell it. I did say it though)

That room escape sounds so awesome. The East Coast has a lot of really awesome things, but in my brain, somehow Seattle and San Francisco have all the WEIRD awesome things. Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre pales in comparison. I do not actually own a copy of The Ship, but I am a proud owner of Bad Rats and can confirm the Bad Rats virus phenomenon. One of the things about that game is it's 4.99, but I'm pretty sure the copy I was gifted was on sale for 50 cents. The price slash they will do to move copies is insane. Video Games Patron: I will sometimes buy games I know I'll probably never get back around to playing but were something I know I WOULD have played had I been fully cognizant and able to buy them at the time. I own the Thief series and Deus Ex because I should have played them. The original Thief is all but unplayble for me now but I feel good to own it on Steam.

That trailer was slick and awesome and managed to get me jazzed for the game without actually saying anything at all, and also Witcher 3 so you can be double-stoked. Advertising works.

Yeah I had been in the DOTA 2 beta, and was excited to be in it, and the game's just so different from League of Legends (and in my mind, not for the better but man let's not do that here because I think I'm the only one on this forum that plays the OTHER LOMA) that they might as well not be in the same genre. Valve gave me SIX giftable copies of DOTA 2, and the first thing that popped into my head was "why would I want to inflict DOTA 2 on people I like? Do they expect them to thank me for it?"

Is Dishonored Nick Breckon high chaos or low chaos? Are there two versions of Dishonored Nick Breckon?

I watched this right before bed last night (note: don't do that), and this game seems nuts. It definitely feels like something you should be playing with someone else to double the insanity.

I have now played a good chunk of Mark of the Ninja (4-5 hours or so?). It's a good game! If you are ranking the stealth games of this year, Dishonored is still better so it doesn't shake up my personal list. On the other hand, it does some pretty cool things in a $15 package and that's neat. I have to say, sometimes my ninja man is distinctly NOT doing some of the things I want him to, and that's a bit of a let down. It's not the Super Meat Boy precision people have built it up to be, although I fault the hype more than the game here. Mass Effect 3 now gets an honorable mention for its multiplayer alone. I got sucked into that HARD in the last week or so. Best PC Horde mode! It reminds me so much of a UT 2k4 mutator that was an RPG mode where you fought 25 progressively harder waves on a map, but also leveled up your character and gained experience based on damage done. It. Was. Awesome. This scratches that same itch.

It is an automatic thing. If you stab a man and then immediately back away, you drag him. If you stab a man and let him fall, THEN you can turn and run.

That's very thoughtful of you, and I may very well take you up on it! Dark Souls was very much a 2012 game for me, I own it on PC. The reason I didn't play Fez and Journey was that I couldn't be bothered to turn on a console this year. Dark Souls was just in a weird spot where it definitely did not fit on any of my lists but for some reason I feel it needed to be mentioned. Maybe one day I'll get back around to it. Just like I've been meaning to get back around to playing more than 40 hours of Skyrim (not enough hours!). My "should I go down this rabbit hole?" game of the moment is definitely Crusader Kings. Oh shit I realize I've left off a game: Honorable Mention - Game that was not a very good game, but was a great overall considered experience: Spec Ops: The Line e: Ugh my posts are always too long. How can I make them more concise? I blame my Senior English teacher. Speaking of sales, if you think playing through it on easy for like $10 would be worth it to you, Spec: Ops is on sale on Steam for $10 right now.

For all the talk of it being a "down" year for AAA games or big budget releases or whatever you'd like to call them, of my top five games on the GOTY list, four are of that nature. In order of release they are Day Z, Borderlands 2, Dishonored, X-COM, and Far Cry 3. Just fucking phenomenal games that at the same time are all crucially flawed. Honorable Mention - Games I loved playing but have done a disservice of not playing enough: FTL, Planetside 2, Torchlight 2, Endless Space Honorable Mention - Games I'm sure I would have loved but haven't played for Reasons: Fez, Journey, The Walking Dead (I own it and want to play it through with someone else and we've not gotten the time to do it yet), Mass Effect 3 (I've only paid about $25 for all of 1, 2 and 3 so far, so I wait for sales. I'll probably get From Ashes and Leviathan and play that shit even though paying for DLC of that nature is loathsome) Honorable Mention - Games I would probably love but know I will eventually buy when they go on sale on Steam and then not play them because I'm terrible: Hotline Miami, Mark, The Ninja, Legends of Grimrock Honorable Mention - Game I'm incredibly intimidated by and want to play but am glad I got my dad to purchase to eat his retired hours: Crusader Kings II Honorable Mention - I can't stop playing this fucking game, it's why I haven't played more games, jesus the community is horrible and it came out in 2009 and I should really stop and where's my wallet?: League of Legends Game that I am as surprised as anyone and slightly saddened is not on any of these lists: Assassin's Creed 3 Dark Souls: This game came out in 2011 why is it on lists! vvv Yeah, I know. It's funny that it feels like it's getting more recognition the year after its release! A lot of people think it's the best game ever, and I put about 6 hours into it. The time when I killed the first gargoyle but it didn't die and so I thought you had to kill both to kill either but then someone told me that you didn't is the time when it put the "harsh but fair, perfect fidelity" to a lie and I got too frustrated and put it down and never picked it up again. It just keeps getting mentioned too often for me to ignore. I had the choice between this and Endless Space as a gift from a friend, and I chose this because I was ready for the experience. Turns out I was not ready for the experience.

Far Cry 1 was what people claim Halo to be - a way to set up a completely open approach to combat situations. Then there were mutants and I became disgusted with it. So, I hit a really low point with FC3. The mounted turret escape scene was awful, and made me really annoyed with it. Then I did a couple more missions that were not bad/good, and really dug in to disposing of camps and exploring the island and now I'm fully reinvested. I've secured almost all the camps on the (first) island, and done with most of the incidentals there. I booted up the game one day with a single goal - find boars, and kill enough to make a new ammo pouch. I'd played over 10 hours with the intro ammo pouch. And it took me three more hours to get to the boars. That is an amazingly good thing. By the by, it really helps to understand that the tooltips were written in-character by Willis. He's a guy that thinks he's pretty clever, but also still uses cassette tapes.