darthbator

That's interesting (and cool). I figured that the breadth of weapons was really there to individualize the experience but I was not really sure how well that worked for them (I am SUPER late to the party on this game. Where is everyone? ::crickets: . I do agree with your second point there. Bastion does an amazing job of making you feel like your weapon/tonic/play style choices are "orthodox". That's why I was so upset with the fact that the game basically forced me to change my weapon on every single level I was in, rarely allowing me to experience the play style I enjoyed... Yeah it's hard to comment on. I really think the addition of all those challenge levels is a pretty glaring balance mistake. I'm sure they where quick to make, and appear to have a high level of replay ability at first look, but they're really just not very much fun. Especially to warrant as many of them as there are! I would gladly have lost ALL of those challenge levels for 2-3 more actual game levels. There's plenty of opportunities to play with the weapons inside the games numerous combat arenas. Really if they had just gotten all of the weapons dispensed in the first 55-60% of the game and given me a touch more critical path to play my own style and more fully upgrade the weapons I like and I think I might have been totally in love with this game.

I believe Dyack's assertion was that UE3 was such a disaster they had to basically fork their own engine out of it and that what they where using was no longer UE3 but their own engine. However UE3 isn't BSD licensed FOSS or something. You can't just derive your stuff out of it and claim that it's now your creation cause you changed it significantly.... I feel like someone at SK just fundamentally misunderstood the legal side of how software licensing and ownership works (based on earlier articles they mis understood lots of other stuff too). This is actually something you could probably do with idTech3/4 BTW. I am not entirely sure what license they release the source for those engines under, however there are quite a few FOSS licenses that allow you to make iterative enhancements on top of Open Source projects without committing your code back into those projects, or offering the source yourself.

I have a friend that is basically this guy. For him these sort of long format continued stories (that I feel almost always degenerate into the worst sort of garbage) are the prime attractor. We get into these almost hilarious arguments about Assassins Creed. !POSSIBLE SPOILERS OF THE GENERAL PLOT OF ASSASSINS CREED REVEALED IN THE FIST 10 MINUTES OF THE FIRST GAME ARE PROBABLY COMING RIGHT AFTER THIS! I have always hated the animus and sci fi story of Assassins Creed. I felt almost betrayed that they needed to couch what could have been an incredible period piece series in this dumb existential sci fi story about aliens, conspiracy theories, and you basically continually saving the world...... He constantly argues that's the best part and the only thing that makes the series worth playing at all...... I've started authoring my likely highly criticized quitting the game post on FarCry2. That game is starting to absolutely enrage me...

I got kinda drunk yesterday and ended up picking up a Bastion save about 65-70% of the way through the game and just finishing it. I was really surprised by the amount of narrative choice in the tail end of that game. I didn't make a single choice of narrative consequence the entire game and then last section actually presents you with 2 choices (one of which doesn't seem to make any material difference in the end)! I think I like the game a lot. The art and music is just absolutely stunningly beautiful. As a work of art independent of being a video game Bastion is utterly stunning. I don't personally think the "video game" aspect is quite as strong. This is one of the few games that I will accuse of doing more then it should. To many weapons (some that feel almost worthless) to many challenge levels for the individual weapons. There's just to much to experience and really not enough game to do it in. The game play itself in Bastion is sort of an average take on "Secret of Manna" style game play. I don't really think there is a lot of super interesting stuff going on there. The games strength is tooling around their amazingly artistic world listening to Rucks go on and on. They're giving you new weapons to use all the way until the very last level of the game! I don't feel like I ever really fully familiarized myself with the weapons I liked the most. Every level was forcing a new weapon on me.... By the end of the game I felt like I was leaving the intro game play tutorial. However now that I had experienced all the art/music/story I don't really know why I would want to go back? The play isn't compelling enough to make me want to go back through and actually play with all those weapons. I think that's probably my main complaint about this game. Other then that I think it was pretty much aces (despite it taking me like 2 years to play through =P).

I don't think we're the industry that gets to crack this particular nut. Conversation is simply to "broad" in scope and parallel in nature to be technically feasible anytime soon IMO (from both a programming as well as execution PoV). Even simple games are often doing a lot more lifting then most other pieces of software. Also a game needs to drive at being entertaining. It would be a magic miracle for get something like this to actually work at all. Much less to get it functioning in service of some kind of actual enjoyable game mechanic. I guess it comes down to what you would really consider "dynamic". On it's surface we already have lots of games like this, however the breadth of choice is severly constrained. To get the effect we're talking about I think the breadth of possibility needs to be expanded significantly in order to give it the ability to continually surprise the player. Really I think people who are doing it best at the moment are doing a good job disguising their limited dynamic nature. I'm really engauged by dialog and choice in the walking dead. I think one of the things that has enhanced that is that I turned off all the tool tip hints. I feel like the game is now hiding from me the moments of actual choice (in most cases). This will fool the user into thinking MANY more of their choices are actually creating dynamic forks inside the story/application then they actually are. EDIT: I don't know why I forgot this but I think the coolest example of "dynamic dialog" is Bastion. The dialog is context dependent on character action. I think that hooking into things like this make it easier to build these sort of dialog systems then hooking them into a kind of "call<->response" format. The latter IMO actually so closely mirrors conversation that the limited dialog choices and responses (that are easy to hear repeated) immediately destroy the illusion. However the Bastion system does an amazing job of typing the dialog specifically to a relevant action and then does a good job of making sure you don't trigger it continually exposing the "script nature" of the dialog.

I feel like iOS still really leads the charge in gaming. I am an android user (and something of a FOSS fanatic really) but I can't deny that iOS gets most apps first and a lot of stuff seems to have a pretty long exclusivity windows (even if that is just waiting on port work). I would like to see google strap a social angle onto their gaming. Openfeint is [thumbs_down] I think something built into the OS and tied to your google account would make a LOT more sense.

I remember the second game being better in just about every way. I liked them both at the time but it's not something I plan on revisiting. I remember the controls simply did not make a huge amount of sense (I remember hitting some shoulder button + triangle to "dash" upwards while locked on). I thought both games did a great job making you feel like you where in an anime. To this day I think ZoE is probably the best "JP Anime Robo "simulator"" I have ever played. I remember being impressed at ZoE's launch by how many assistive systems where in place. All your interactions with the game feel very abstracted. IMO sort of like working a really advanced computerized tank or etc might actually be. It's one of the rare cases where that sort of "detached" control feeling actually felt extremely satisfying to me.

So I just finished watching a roughly 90 minute interview about the randomization tools and methods used in level generation in "Path of the Exile", a game I haven't actually played. Lots of the level randomization stuff they are doing looks incredibly advanced and while I can't say I learned a huge amount I have new absurd respect for procedurally generated ARPG's. Towards the end of the interview he mentioned that they had been working with that element of their game for roughly 6 years at this stage. This caused a strange feeling inside me (/blush). I've actually always been attracted to games with high levels of randomness. Rouge (like) likes, stuff with loot tables and varying map layouts. In a lot of ways I feel like randomness is the "magic" in the novelty engine of some of my favorite games. At some point I start wondering why? What makes that random component so important? In this particular time we're totally saturated with games to play, media to watch. There is so much to consume and it comes at such a relentless pace you couldn't possibly see it all. This really makes second play through a rare thing IMO. I think the funny thing is that part of that randomness is still absolute magic. The magic RNG black box is really one of the reasons I am currently in LOVE with XCOM. However a lot if times I wonder how much time and resource is dedicated to creating a "unique" randomized experiences for the player just go totally un noticed and un appreciated. What are some examples of games that really leverage a system like that in a noticeable way? Are there any? I mean on some level it's depressing that lots of really talented software developers are putting lots of work into stuff like procedurally generating maps for ARPGs that people are going to play through once maybe twice, No one is going to talk about the amazing random level layout in that game. In all honestly I don't think most players will even notice how random the levels are at all.

I second a music thread. I've drummed a bit in my day. I've thought about taking up the guitar but I haven't because I'm lazy.

Yeah, I actually really liked a lot of their earlier games. That was sort of depressing...

Oh man....

I imagine natal language as the subtle gesture language you speak to your Xbox.

Your gamma settings remind me almost of FC1. I don't know if I like that or not. I don't know if I like Far Cry 2 or not. I'm glad these uncertainties are "problems" in my life. Speaks to how well things go for me =P

It looks really pretty. I don't really take the time to read any gaming sites "like that" anymore. I don't really have any interest in reading reviews. I don't really have any interest in reading previews. The only things I really actually "read" are RPS and Kill Screen Daily. Sometimes giant bomb. And on those I am only really reading their interviews and editorial content. I wonder if the idea here is just to replace mainline sites like IGN with something more sleek and modern. I mean there is clearly a demand for this particular kind of site but I was under the impression it was already being thoroughly filled. I believe VOX Media is the "tech" subsidiary of SBnation which does ABSURDLY well. I believe they're using a lot of the same publishing tools as the verge.

Anyone else a little worried about the pace that skyhook might force? Bioshock was a slower sort of smell the flower contemplative experience. The skyhook stuff looks to be rather fast and shoots the players actor all over the environment. I'm sure that'll end up with a much different kind of feeling. I don't know if a system like that is quite as familiar tot he environmental pickups Bioshock used to such great effect... I'm not to worried. I'm still more excited for this then anything else on the horizon!

Yeah I'm still having a really hard time with this. I keep hitting strange fail states, I don't feel like the gunplay feels tightly tuned either. I'm getting ready to author my quitting the game post on this game. Something that constantly seems to happen to me is that a companion will send me on a "shortcut" from a main mission and during that shortcut I will fail in some unknown inexplicable way and it will course correct to the alternate path.... I don't mind the course correction but a lot of times I have no idea what the hell I did wrong. Then when I want to reload to figure out WTF happened I have to reload from the last SAVE POINT I got to. Oh great more dull slow driving....... I feel like this game is constantly punishing me with it's most boring mechanic Every time that happens I immediately turn the game off. I don't know if this is really "for me"

Anyone perhaps interested in getting a TL2 game going? I've been meaning to make it through this game next but I really like playing these kind of games in multiplayer....

Listening to him talk makes me want to open my wallet...

I course corrected my normal play through pretty quickly after losing china. I shifted my strategy to maximize sats before anything else. Once I had about 60-70% sat coverage the difficulty really goes south. Something to consider, completing the story line missions will reduce global panic. The council will also occasionally (maybe once a month) bring you a mission that will reduce global panic. I find benefit in "rushing" to the story missions (the ones that have their own menu option in the war room) and then turtling at that stage to amass tech/funds/soldiers. That way if at any point your global panic levels start getting out of hand you can just send a team into that story mission and kinda let some steam off of the entire globe.

Yes but not over USB. Wireless 360 controllers are not pinned to carry data over USB. They only use it to charge. You need a wired controller to get control over USB. Otherwise control is ALWAYS moving over wireless. So you need a receiver in order to make it work. MS used to make them but they don't anymore. However some chinese company makes a perfect fake. I think it might be the same exact ODM that made the original product for MS. http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-Wireless-Gaming-Receiver-Windows/dp/B000HZFCT2/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1350677038&sr=8-4&keywords=360+wireless I happen to have one of the official MS ones that where packed into a controller back in like 08-09. I do have a few friends who have the "fake" chinese one and it works flawlessly.

So I finished XCOM : Enemy Unknown last night on normal-normal. I loved just about every second of it. I love XCOM, I loved the original and I love this new one. I'm not going to go on and on about it since XCOM discussion is kinda the talk of the gaming-centric internet at the moment. I doubt I have many observations about the game that haven't been thoroughly hashed out elsewhere already. All I can say is that I greatly appreciate any game that can communicate an experience/feeling other then entertainment/joy/flow state. XCOM regularly will make your stomach sink or cause you to bite your nails and will occasionally get you screaming obscenities at it. But it's still rewarding and enjoyable enough to always keep you coming back for more. Just like the original I feel the modern version rides that same line. The only people I would tell to stay away are ardent strategy game haters. I think anyone else should absolutely play this game! I'd really like to make a run at TL2 next but I don't feel like going that alone. I was sorta hoping we could organize a thumbs group to play a few times a week and truck through that way. Those loot centric ARPGs are just always more fun with more players.

I feel like I need to go back and maybe re digest a few of those episodes so my appreciation for all their hyper progressive, immersive, game elements trumps the mundane nature of making it from here to there. I think one of the things that "bothers" me is that I can't really think of any ways to make travel more entertaining without killing the immersion of the world at least a little.... Maybe the other elements of the game demand that part be so mundane to set a consistent tone...

I never really dug deep into this game. I feel like I really tried when it was THE idle thumbs topic. I just felt like the really long travel times and frequent checkpoint gunfights really hampered my ability to get into the game. Maybe I should go back and try one more time. There are so many things I loved about the bit I played! I just felt that the amount of time spent driving around tracking my map (an admittedly incredibly immersive implementation of a map) trumped the amount of time I spent doing anything else. Actually it might have trumped the amount of time I spent doing EVERYTHING else... Maybe I'll start dumping a few hours a day back into this one to see if I can't maybe get that special experience with it that everyone seems to always rave about.

I am kinda right on track with everyone who feels it's abstracted in the way a board game is. This may sound strange but the absence of "real time" in ANY facet of the game is what makes it's suspension of disbelief function for me. To me it communicates that they're creating an emulation (not simulation) of something. To me everything fits into that view of things. From the 80's GI Joe action figure look of the characters, to the kinda hot wheels looking nature of the cars (really I think part of me loves this game because so much of it's art style reminds me of the toys I grew up with ). All the way through to the implementation of their systems. It all feels like a "1 to 2 step" abstraction of reality. To me everything kinda makes sense in the framework of their separation of time. Looking at it in that way the tactical combat, IMO, is not as absurd feeling. It's just a representation of how these units would move around and flank one another shown in extremely segmented time.

oh wow! That's an amazing game. I can't wait to start my next play through (although at a much more leisurely pace).