quantum_leopold

I was very excited about this pretty much as soon as I read a description of the game that began something like "Neo-Paris. 2084. Memory has become a commodity."--all that sounded like the kind of scifi story that I particularly enjoy, but that few video games address. Add to that a video I watched showing the memory remixing ability, and I was all in. Reviews have been mixed, but generally complimentary of the world and the overall story, while critical of controls, combat, and dialogue. I was more excited about the former aspects of the game than the latter, so I picked the game up on day one and played the 90 minutes or so last night (completing Acts 0 & 1). I'd suggested to my wife that she might be interested in watching me play this game (something she has done in the past, but it's been a few years), as I thought she'd like the scifi story, and further encouraged by the promise of a well-rounded female protagonist. The game didn't make the best first impression on her, no thanks in part due to a long sequence in which Nillin is in a confined space and the camera basically just rotates between crotch shot and chest shot over and over, but also due to some viewer-unfriendly tutorializing--watching me bounce around in menus trying to figure out the Pressen system's customizable combos is apparently not especially exciting. After defeating an early miniboss, maybe 30-45 minutes in, I looked over to see my wife sound asleep on the couch. Oh well. As far as the combat goes, the customizable combo system is a cool idea, but I haven't had enough time with it to figure out if it really adds anything. The combat is rhythmic in a way that calls to mind the Assassin's Creed or Batman fighting systems, although connecting with an enemy is somewhat unsatisfying. I think the problem is that the basic enemies I'm fighting take too many hits. When it takes a minimum of three three-hit combos in order to punch out the weakest baddies, it gives the impression that my individual hits aren't having much effect. Perhaps as I go deeper into the combat system, my attacks will start to feel more substantial. The most glaring omission from the combat system at the moment is a counter move--an essential component of the AC/Batman style fighting--but it's clear that there are more combat abilities that I have yet to unlock, so I hope that this will be rectified soon. The first "memory remixing" sequence was very effective. Nillin makes contact with an enemy whose memory she needs to change, and you watch how that memory happened. You're then given a prompt explaining how the memory must be changed. You can rewind the memory (by rotating the left stick counterclockwise, which I could see getting tiresome), stopping on highlighted "glitches," and choosing whether to tamper with them (move the position of an object, undo a safety protocol, etc.) until you settle on the right combination of tweaks to the memory to get your desired result. Very reminiscent of Ghost Trick. I'm curious to see how often these sequences will occur. Although it's fun, the system doesn't make a ton of sense in the fiction of the game. You're told that Nillin can do this by virtue of a special ability no one else has (finally, a Video game where you're "the one"!), but there's no real reason why you shouldn't be able to do this all the time, or why you would pick the particular memory you choose to manipulate, or how you figured out what needed to happen to the memory to get your desired result, etc. Maybe that will be justified at some point, but the explanation will likely be "Video games." The story and the world are living up to my expectations so far, particularly the glimpse I've gotten of Neo-Paris in the first moments of Act 2, having emerged from the city's slums. The voice acting, however, is not good, and the dialogue feels like it's out of a JRPG (which I do not mean as a compliment). I also noticed that the lip-syncing between the models and the audiotrack doesn't fit right. Just before I quit last night, I set the voice language to French and turned subtitles on, in hopes that the acting and lip-syncing will come across better in the developer's native language. Maybe that will help? I'm looking forward to spending more time with this game over the weekend.

I finished Dishonored last night. I'd gotten about half way through it around the time of its initial release last October, but stalled out on it due to an excessive amount of fiddling with stealth (playing the same sequences over way too many times in a row). I started up again over the weekend, and finished last night. It was fine. Great level design, wonderful and unusual art style, some aspects of both the combat and the stealth that are pretty fun (particularly once I unlocked the second level time slowing ability, which was great). Mediocre-to-poor story that seems to rely too heavily on the star power of its VO cast, and it featured a narrative disconnect that I found frustrating, where you, the player, know better than to believe something someone is telling you, but you, the character, have no way of doing anything other than going along with the plot's demands so that you can fall victim to the surprise twist. And the story dragged on too long after what seemed to be the climax--I spent each of the last three nights this week thinking "okay, I can't have more than an hour left of this, right?" only to discover that there were entire missions still left to complete. I was surprised that I managed to get the Low Chaos ending, despite having killed dozens, maybe even hundreds, of guards, and a handful of civilians. This is likely because when it came to my assassination targets, I was generally more interested in taking them down the non-violent way rather than killing them, but that seems like an arbitrary result. I wish the game found a less binary way to make your choices affect the outcome of the story; it appears to be a very strict "kill most of your targets, get the bad guy ending, spare most of your targets, get the good guy ending" path. Especially given that the non-violent outcomes for many of your targets seem to be nearly as bad as death, perhaps even worse in some cases, I don't see that the endings should follow in this way. I'm glad I eventually got around to finishing this, but I'm not sure I'd be very interested in a Dishonored 2.

I read the first 8 or 9 volumes of Fables, and liked quite a bit of it, but the knowledge that that book just keeps going (I think it's on like the 19th trade now?) is an impediment to me going further with it. My backlog of comics and books is big enough that the idea of sticking with a series that has no end in sight is just too intimidating. I'm definitely excited to see Telltale's take on that world, but I'm not sure I'll go back to Fables anytime soon.

I just finished "You" by Austin Grossman, and although it had some wonderful observations about video games and did a good job warming my heart with nostalgia, it was ultimately a pretty disappointing book. I've seen it draw comparisons to Ready Player One (which I loved to an almost unreasonable degree), but You is too disjointed to reach anywhere near those heights, in my estimation. The world feels interesting and real, with smart discussion about how games work and why they matter, and the in-depth examination of the Video game oeuvre of the fictional game company definitely hit the same mark that RPO did in terms of making me feel what it would be like to play those games. Unfortunately, that's really the only thing the book gets right. The protagonist feels totally undefined, and the important people in his life are just the thinnest sketches of characters. The plot feels arbitrary, as events seem to just happen so that one (admittedly interesting and fun) exploration of a fake Video game of a certain era can be imagined after the next. I know many people loved Grossman's previous book, Soon I Will Be Invincible, but although I totally remember that I read it, and I remember being pleased to see someone do a thorough exploration of superhero tropes that I love, I can't really remember any details of it one way or another. I suspect You will have the same effect on me in the long run: "Oh yeah, that was kinda pleasant, and there was some cool talk about video games...but nothing about the characters or the plot stuck with me at all." One thing I will definitely remember, however: there are repeated references to installing old games off of 3.25" disks, and a comment about how these disks are called "crispies." I had to quiz my older brother, with whom I shared many a computer game in the 80s and 90s, to confirm I hadn't gone crazy: floppies were 5.25" or 3.5", and no one has ever called a 3.5" disk a "crispy" rather than a "floppy", even if "floppy" was something of a misnomer for the 3.5" format. The disk size issue in particular seemed like a pretty glaring error in the tech nostalgia. Was there some weird disk format I've never heard of that could've been referenced here? And has anyone heard the term "crispies" applied to disks? Please validate my incredulousness.

Riot is a game that is explicitly pitched as a "playable documentary." It doesn't look like it's out yet, so I don't know how helpful that is, but it's worth a look.

Although I bought it quite a while ago, I finally got around to playing and finishing Home. I'm fairly sure this game first came to my attention when Jeff Cannata talked about it on Weekend Confirmed many months ago as a game that tells a story that is heavily influenced by player choice, which is always something that interests me. I was delayed in playing it first because "Home" is a terrible name SEO-wise (it'd be hard to find a worse name for Googling if they tried, but eventually I found it), and then because, upon starting it, the game advises you to play the whole thing in one approximately 90-minute sitting. For whatever reason, the idea of setting aside 90 minutes to play it to completion struck me as daunting, but I finally got around to it this weekend. Sad to say, I found that it was not worth the wait. I love the idea of shaping a narrative in response to a player's choices, and was very curious to see what I could do to influence this world. From the start, the concept isn't super fresh: you wake up in a strange house, with no memory of how you got there, and wondering where your girlfriend (wife?) is. You explore the house and attempt to make your way back home. On the way, you discover that some bad things have happened during the period where your memory is missing. Initially, the choices were just boring. For the first two thirds or so of the game, every choice is something like a)do you search through this desk?, b)do you pick up this weapon?, and c)do you continue exploring or just leave? I think the worst kind of "choice" a game can present you is "do something" versus "do nothing," and all of Home's choices seemed to break down into that dichotomy. I ultimately decided to explore wherever possible (I want to learn what's going on) but to never pick up a weapon (I wanted to avoid the seemingly inevitable and somewhat boring conclusion that I was responsible for some of the bad stuff I was seeing, and also wanted to steer clear of anything resembling combat, if possible). Perhaps I made bad choices, but regardless, my experience just wasn't very interesting. You go to an area. You search around, seeing and hearing some creepy stuff. I found some items that hinted at what might be going on. I ignored a lot of weapons. That was pretty much it. Much as I didn't enjoy the choices the game presented me early on, however, later they got much worse: bizarrely, the choices presented to me turned from "do you do X, or do you not do X" to more like "you did X and then what happened?" Without getting into spoiler territory, the game poses questions to you that are not too far off from this: "You looked out the window and you saw (S)omething? Or (N)othing?" I suppose that, in a sense, the developer was speaking accurately in describing this as a "choose your own adventure" story, but that kind of choice is not exactly what I had in mind. "Do you attempt to kill the troll, or do you try to bargain with him" is a reasonable question in a choice-based narrative. "You attempt to kill the troll, do you succeed Y or N?" does not strike me as the sort of choice that should be put in my hands. The couple of choices that take this form towards the end of the game were choices I can't recall having been presented in a game before, but I think that's probably for good reason. I like Home's ambitions, and some of the broad strokes of the game are fine--the art style is nice, the sound design is excellent, and I was creeped out at least a few times. But I found the choice structure to be very ill-conceived, and the narrative that I played through really didn't do much for me at all. I can't recommend it.

This game looks like it could be a sci-fi/cyberpunk/Martian version of The Witcher--European (French?) developer, RPG system featuring an emphasis on choices, challenging combat system, a questionable understanding and use of the English language... At $20, I'm tempted, although RPS posted impressions today that did not seem particularly favorable. Has anyone given this a try? (My apologies if I've screwed up something in creating this thread--I couldn't find any existing threads referencing this game, but I'm new here and may have been stupid)

I'm not comparing it to the Witcher in terms of the contents of the story, just in the broad strokes description of the game I mentioned above (RPG with lots of choices, deep combat, and questionable grasp on the English language).

I played through this the other day and enjoyed it quite a bit. I hope the final release is a bit more robust and mixes things up a bit--I felt like, for the most part, the types of document discrepancies that happened came in fairly predictable orders, and certain types of errors almost never happened more than once or twice. I'd like it if the game made me think harder about what I was doing, although perhaps that pressure is supposed to come from the ticking clock--I had a hard time sensing how slowly/quickly I was moving through the queue relative to expectations. Finishing the experience left me wondering whether Arstotzka was supposed to be an evil totalitarian state, or if so, to what degree. There's all the iconography of an oppressive eastern bloc regime that caused me to instinctually assume that I was working for the bad guys, but in retrospect, I'm not sure what evidence existed to support that feeling. Certainly they have strict border rules, but given the attacks on their border, that's not entirely unreasonable. And despite that, they appear to permit plenty of travelers, visitors, and immigrants into their country. The two legitimately troubling aspects of the Arstotzkan society are 1)that your pay is so poor and presumably employment options are so limited that it's very hard to keep your family alive, and 2)detaining would-be entrants to your country comes across as a somewhat sinister (although I don't recall anything obviously evil occurring--no executions on the spot or anything like that). Am I missing any more glaring examples of Arstotzkan tyranny? Are we meant to have some sympathy for Arstotzka and its rules? We get much more vivid demonstrations of the consequences of poor border control (explosions actively animated on screen) than we're ever given of the harms to our family or to hapless immigrants (little tokens showing "VERY SICK" "HUNGRY" etc.). I'm curious whether the ambiguity I'm perceiving is intentional on the creator's part, or if I'm just being sympathetic to this evil state despite the creator's intentions. Regardless, I think it's a pretty cool experience and I look forward to playing the final version in the near future.

Wow. I will definitely keep my eye out for that--the Vita games I was getting from PS+ started making me think about picking one up, and cross-buy titles like Sound Shapes and Guacamelee are making it more tempting. $250 feels a bit pricey, so I was holding out hope that they might announce a price drop at E3. But if I can find one through Amazon for less than $200, I might pull the trigger.

I've recently been working at finishing the Ballad of Gay Tony on 360 after having set it aside a few years ago, and have been struck by how dated it looks. It's still impressive in terms of the scope of the city and the art design, and the characters look pretty good, but otherwise it's showing its age. The new trailer for GTA V definitely looks good, but I'm skeptical that a September release for 360 or PS3 is going to be up to the standards of the other games I'll be a few weeks away from buying at that point. I'm very tempted to hold out for an eventual PC release, although I could see my resolve faltering as we get closer to September.

I finished Hitman Absolution this weekend. It was...okay. It's the first Hitman game I've ever beaten, despite having spent a lot of time with past Hitman games. What I liked about past Hitman games was well replicated here: big sandboxes with an interesting variety of ways to kill targets. The best levels gave me everything that I wanted, and the instinct system made the game less punishing, less frustrating, and more fun. Unlike past Hitman games, I rarely triggered alarms by wandering into an area I didn't know was restricted, or by getting spotted by a guard I didn't think could see me. And I'm not sure if I can credit this to the game or to my own personal growth, but I was able to finish this game as opposed to other Hitman games in large part because when I began to get frustrated by a level, I felt okay about abandoning stealth, pulling out my silverballers, and blasting my way out, shitty score be damned. Unfortunately, while the game does have a lot of great scenarios, there was a lot of other stuff in it too. The story is garbage, as it is not just predictable and stupid, but also entirely unnecessary. The "sexy nun brigade" is all over the place in cutscenes, but were involved in maybe three minutes of actual gameplay. The game also puts you through frustrating and boring sections of gameplay where you don't have a target, you're just sneaking from Point A to Point B, trying not to be seen. I can only assume those sections exist to serve the story, justifying how the Hitman got from Mission A to Mission B...but then there are other times you're going to a new place for no apparent reason with no explanation. And the cutscenes (which look terrible on 360) make some really strange choices about which moments you get to control and which you don't. On at least a few occasions, I shot a target point blank in the head or blew him up with C4, only to trigger a cutscene in which my victim then delivered an extended monologue about something. Shouldn't his brains be splattered across the wall? Why are we talking? Everything about the story feels like an afterthought. Despite my gripes, however, there were still significant portions of this game that I found to be really thrilling and inventive. It's worth your time if you're interested in a creative stealthy action game. I just hope the next Hitman game will ditch the pretense that it has a story worth telling.

Although my overall impression of BSI is more favorable than the Thumbs', I wholeheartedly agree that the fact that the game is a shooter hurts the interactivity with the world. When the game told me, early on, that I didn't need to shoot everyone, I was excited. If I play it cool in certain scenarios, will everyone leave me alone? Will certain behaviors tip off the cops that I'm the guy they're looking for? Are there things I can do to calm people down? But there was no such nuance in practice. In sections where people were cool with me, everyone pretty much just ignored me as long as I didn't start shooting (that I was walking around holding a shotgun while my left hand rippled with evil bird feathers apparently did not raise suspicions). In sections where the cops were after me, they just stood around corners waiting until I would step close enough to cause them to start spraying bullets at my face. The warning about interacting with the public, as with the 'choice' 'system' in the game, seemed like it was part of a game that they intended to build, but didn't belong in the game they actually shipped.

I'd love to get a code for The Ship, if anyone has some to share. Sadly I don't have any codes with which to reciprocate, but I give excellent thankyous! http://steamcommunity.com/id/mrlogical

Hello! Although I've been immersed in the world of Video game podcasts since about November 2006 (stumbled across them while trying to figure out if I needed to wait in line for a Wii at launch), for some reason, although I'd heard of IdleThumbs years ago, I just reflexively thought of it as "that podcast I don't listen to." It wasn't until I'd heard about the success of their Kickstarter funding that I had occasion to think through why it was I'd completely written off the podcast without ever giving it a listen. I think maybe I visited the website once several years back and didn't like the logo? Something totally arbitrary like that. Around August, I was travelling a lot for work, resulting in me burning through my whole podcast backlog and needing something new. I downloaded a few episodes of Idle Thumbs to fill the void, and have been listening ever since. I'm a thirty year old guy, a lawyer in the Washington DC area, and I have a daughter who had her first birthday today. As a new-ish parent, my gaming time has been massively limited these days, although my gaming purchases have been slow in catching up to that fact--I'm currently in the middle of around a dozen games, and just resigned myself to canceling my Dead Space 3 preorder, having realized how unnecessary it is to buy yet another game I don't have time to finish. And as a fan of books, television, and comic books, I've got pretty massive backlogs in each of those media as well. It's occurred to me recently that I'm living my life as if at some point I'm going to get a month long break from working, parenting, and spousing, in which I'll have time to get to work through all my backlogs, despite all evidence suggesting that that won't happen. Basically, I want to be Burgess Meredith in that Twilight Zone episode but with better glasses. Perhaps by interacting with the IdleThumbs community, I can get some vicarious enjoyment out of these games that I don't have time to play. Cheers

Regarding your discussion of the crane game/claw game, there was a really interesting Reddit AMA from an arcade owner a few weeks back, in which the owner went into a lot of detail about how the game works. According to the arcade owner, there actually are legal regulations for these claw games--he notes that California law requires that the claw actually exert enough force to grab something one out of every twelve attempts, and one in every fifteen for Nevada. Perhaps your friend who claims to be skilled at these is really just the claw machine equivalent of a card counter?