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It's definitely been the game to watch in these videos. So ambitious, and it's remarkable how much they accomplished. I can't wait to learn what the potatoes are.

The end of Mission 4 is honestly just stupid. The guards patrol at high speed, and after watching their circuits carefully I followed one behind only to have them randomly detect me and turn around. No glass or bumping of anything. I have put 3 hours into attempting this now. I want to talk to the tester who accomplished this on Master with the customizations on. Also, they one-hit you, unlike other guards.

Last video was great. Penn seems so sad and disappointed.

With two people, we've had our games run from 30 minutes to an hour in a half. I played a 5 person game on the weekend though, and that was definitely 3-4 hours. You really lose any sense of the narrative when you have that many players. We have one of those cubed Ikea shelves, three cubbies of which are now filled with board games. I'm starting to think we might need to get rid of a few...

Ugh. I'm on mission 4 now. It's way too long for the no-saves-but-autosaves system. I just timed it, and with a perfectly executed path, it takes 11 and a half minutes to get back to the point where I'm dying, 4+ minutes of which is unskippable cutscenes, elevator rides, or load times.Then, I die to enemies who one-hit kill, or, just now, for being at slightly the wrong angle for a sticky, context-sensitive jump. An hour and a half ago I was thinking about how much I like this game and how it's better than people are saying. Now I hate it. But I hate it for the "ugh why can't I defeat you" feeling, and not the "this game is dumb" feeling. I wouldn't be so mad if it weren't for the infuriating waits. It's fun running through a level quickly without being detected. It's not fun waiting.

I played both DLCs several times. I thought the plot was equally still bad. But I understand that I'm in the minority there, so that's fine.

I will never understand the love of Daud. I can just see him being interesting (is it his remorse?) but I don't find him well-written.

I just noticed that the total for AF2014 is hanging around $170K, with less than two hours to go. Last year they pulled in $240K. I wonder how this will affect AF going forward. I really expected them to bring in more money this time, given how successful the last one is. But I bought in at a pretty low level, so I guess I'm part of the problem.

My girlfriend and I have been playing Tales of the Arabian Nights for the last couple days. It's an interesting hybrid, partway between a strategic board game like Arkham Horror and a story-driven RPG like FATE. You construct a narrative by encountering spaces and making choices which lead to reading paragraphs from a Book of Tales. It's main weakness is that there is really no balance or fairness. It can be hard to have fun when one player is losing dramatically. You have to retain the perspective that it's about the journey, and winning is just a way to end the game. Last night, I ended up completing the game as Sultan of an undersea kingdom, though I nearly failed to make my triumphant return to Baghdad when I was ensorsceled and my girlfriend maliciously left me in a forest on the outskirts of the map. There, I was imprisoned by a Powerful Wizard, but used my powers of acting and disguise to escape.

I am happy. Here's hoping we get more missions like the Golden Cat and Brigmore Witches and less The Flooded District. Also change the name and get rid of that horrid mask.

Both Pokemon B/W and X/Y have received huge critical acclaim, but for some reason they weren't able to catch me, and I quit both of them early. I really expected to be able to fall in love with any Pokemon game after playing 100 hours of Soul Silver, but I'm starting to think that was more nostalgia than anything else. I also think the recent Pokemon games are paced much more slowly, and some of the cities get too big, so that exploring them is a chore rather than an adventure.

Garrett just looks absurd. I can't believe they went with the blue eye thing.

Ah, wacky. That probably explains the big difficulty jump. I guess by the time I finish it, I'll be better at the game.

I finished mission 1. Does anyone know what's up with this bank heist? It's on the map right away, and I'm working on it now, but I don't remember hearing about it at all. That said, my girlfriend was talking to me a bit during the Besso cutscene so it's possible I missed everything. It's soooo much harder than mission 1. I'm not sure how I'm going to get it all in one go with all my modifiers on.

It's definitely true, though. The game is called "stealth action" everywhere. Compare this to the Dishonored interviews which were very upfront about an immersive sim heritage. This is a re-imagining of thief in a different genre altogether. It's much more palatable if you approach it as a AAA action game (Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Gears of War) where the core mechanic is sneaking rather than shooting.

Got to play a little bit over the last two days. This is a fantastic remake of Renegade multiplayer. It reminded me what was great about the game that other large-scale combat games like Planetside 2 have failed to capture: because there is only a single map, it has focus. There is no downtime. I completely suck, but I've still been having fun. I do think that the 64 player cap is probably too much. I know they never had enough beta testing to see how it held up with 64, and it feels very hard to progress since the maps tend to have 3-4 choke points which are always flooded with people. Some of the added mechanics also need balancing. Air strikes in particular seem to benefit the winning team and be nearly useless for the losing team. I really do love it, people should check it out.

So I picked up the game with the GMG discount pre-order code. I'm playing on Master with basically all the custom modifiers on. In particular, I turned on a modifier which makes it so that the only autosaves are at mission start, and you cannot manually save, and the modifier which makes it so you cannot take out (only avoid) enemies. Needless to say, I'm still on the first chapter of the game. It's fun as hell. I would use the metaphor of playing a stealth Dark Souls. Since my focus is now on execution of a critical path in one go, my agency is expressed more in where I feel I can take risks and in my planning of a route that I can reliably take each time. Every moment is tense as hell and every time I get a little farther I have to figure out how much I can reasonably steal. If I mess up, it's all over. The game is now about mastery rather than expression. I think Thi4f will actually end up being really important to me in hindsight because of this experience. It's interesting to play a game not in the way the developers exposed, not in the way the fans wanted, but transforming it into something more appealing. I guarantee if these settings were the default and the game was being marketed with a different title and a "Prepare to Hide Edition" subtitle, it would be getting rave reception.

I've got a couple that I finished lately that I want to recommend. Zeno Clash 2: I really loved the sheer weirdness of Zeno Clash 1, and the sequel delivers on that in spades. It pushes itself artistically to an extent that is shocking for such a small team. The only things the game suffers for are a tendency towards excessive exposition (really a shame after the subtlety of the first game) and a game-y progression of "please visit the four corners of the map" (again a downer compared to a natural, Journey-style progression into the unknown in the first game). However, there are some genuinely ingenious ideas for combat, and the story was a page-turner that kept me up late to play a little bit more. I think this series is sadly ignored. In my mind, these are the games that pick up the ball of Half Life 2's first person narrative games and do something genuinely different with it. Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers: A fun adventure that is kind of stuck between the keep-turning-pages style of a dime store mystery and the hard stops of an old point and click. I ended up playing with a guide open on the other screen because I was more interested in the former experience. The writing is fantastic, with little bits of snark from Grace and the narrator in particular convincing me gaming dialog peaked in 1993. It's also always lovely to play a game that is about something games are not about: real people with real skill sets in a real, modern location, solving a mystery with just a little bit of a paranormal layer.

It sounds like the game just suffers from being too easy once "solved". It's really common with this genre of game I think. I've had similar experiences in Tropico 3/4 and Prison Architect.

I've only played the prologue so far, so take this with a grain of salt. I don't mind the random conversations, but the way the audio is mixed for them is really weird. It's like they really didn't want you to miss them. Two people talking in the street below you a block away sound like they are talking in your ear. It's very different than Dishonored or Arkham City, for example.

Thank goodness Mnemonic was nailed down a little. It doesn't matter if it's only four linear puzzles. Black Lake was close to that last year. Every AF should have one experiential art house interactive project.

I'm pretty excited for this. I played the old multiplayer beta a couple years ago, but it was still in pretty rough shape and sadly underpopulated. Renegade was my first online FPS experience though, and I'll always love the mechanic of finding paths to sneak a nod buggy past a guard tower and nuke a building. One of gaming's greatest memories. Maybe there will be a chance of getting some thumbs together to play?

Having read both the RPS and Stealth Bastard reviews, I'm so torn. I've actually never played the pantheon of PC stealth games (Thief 1-3, Blood Money, etc?), but I love Dishonored and hate Assassin's Creed. This Thief is a chimera of those alluring from one side but repugnant from the other. For $45 $35 it might be worth finding out. *edit* Welp, picked it up from GreenManGaming. I like the genre enough to make this worth a try, plus Square Enix is the only big publisher doing games on PC that aren't anti-consumer.

My heart is in my throat every time Derek comes up in the videos. I feel for the guy.

I've had this lately too. It started happening shortly after I'd read that Chrome was switching to an OpenGL based renderer for web content. I think they probably made the switch over in the main versions and it's still got some bugs and artifacts.