Joewintergreen

Giants: Citizen Kabuto had a great soundtrack that did this

So today I found two bucks under my couch, so I thought I'd buy some Max Payne 3 DLC. Specifically the one that lets you use their terrible Max Payne 1 player model in multiplayer. What I wasn't expecting is they recorded new dialogue just for that DLC. It turns out, they took a bunch of lines from Max's inner monologue in the first two games and made him scream the same lines at his opponents. It is incredible and awful and surreal and amazing. Flying through the air, I kill three dudes. Max screams "AS SURELY AS THE BULLET RIPS THROUGH THE VICTIM'S FLESH, ORGAN AND BONE, IT SHATTERS THE IMAGE OF THE MAN WHO PRESSES THE TRIGGER!!!!" It felt like a Thumbs joke.

there should be a cvar to turn of head bobbin' in black mesa (or maybe they added it as a menu option)

I read it as brkl using that scene as an example of the show trying for titillation. If that read is accurate I don't see why it's offensive to ask if he thought that was successful. I meant it as asking if that scene really reads to him as something intended to titillate, I'm not accusing anyone of digging it. Sorry if offensive. Re the composition, I didn't think it was too much - it didn't linger, it wasn't a nude, there wasn't a huge amount of blood. I don't think there'd have been anything to gain by making it more vague. I feel like I'm forgetting some scenes though if sexualised violence is considered to be a huge deal in the show. What's there been other than Joffrey's exploits?

Does seeing a woman's bloody corpse with crossbow bolts sticking out of it seriously approach "titillation" for you, or does it not, and you just imagine that that's the intent? I can't even see what you mean by "compose the scene like that, light it like that".

Ubisoft are weird. Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed 3 both seem to me like really great games that somebody has draped a wafer-thin layer of poop on. It's a weird situation where there's a super fun time to be had if you just plunge in there and get some poop on you.

It was reasonable to assume you were going to be talking about the TV show, so yeah. I always feel like someone's going to jump out from behind a tree and go "Gotcha! You're secretly sexist" in these discussions, but: I don't see that it's problematic for terrible characters to do terrible things. It can be clumsy or inconsistent with the characters (like you might be saying Anakin's youngling murder was), but here it's not. It would also be problematic if it came off as meaningless, or deliberately edgy, like "oh dear, it's been two episodes without a rape, throw one in here" but it hasn't been so far. Is it problematic, or disrespectful, to depict sexual violence in a context where the entire rest of the production doesn't hinge on it?

Wow, I really could have used a heads up that that was a book spoiler. Fuck. Guess I should stay out of this thread.

What kind of justification for that are you after? We don't know how the story ends yet, but if, at the end of it, you can look back and say that his sadism could have been non-sexual without significantly altering the plot, is that a good reason why it should have been non-sexual? I don't really think it is.

GOOD NEWS EVERYONE quoth impromptugames.com plug'd

So, I started a company, and we made a video game. It's basically done, and we're going to need to start selling it, and now we need to somehow insert it into people's brains, a process that I'm told is called Marketing. It turns out this shit is hard, and it's hard to tell if you're going about it totally wrong or not, and (especially with a game that isn't out yet) it's hard to quantify the results. I was chattin' with TimeGentleman a few weeks ago and he suggested I make a thread on here on the subject. I know some of you have had to do this stuff, so maybe some insights can be had here. What I'm doing so far is basically sending the game, and news about the game, to every gaming news site I'm aware of, and a bunch I'd never heard of until recently, and popular Youtubers, and posting on forums and doing all the facebooky/twittery stuff, trying to get exposure and Greenlight votes. Inconveniently, I basically don't read any gaming news at all except twitter the occasional Rock Paper Shotgun, so I'm probably less in the know than most about what publications like to cover what. There's been some positive previews and articles written about the game, and some pretty sweet , but I think I've reached a point where I have not much idea what to do to spread the word about this thing much more than I have already, and Greenlight statistics exist as an indicator that I clearly haven't done enough. I don't really want to repeatedly shout "LOOK AT MY GAME" into people's internet faces, but maybe that's just what you do? Possibly I've reached the most people I can without actually having the game available to buy yet (here's why I don't)? Am I actually doing fuckin' great and just don't know it? What even is marketing you guys. also these are my steam stats from a few days ago. probably of interest to people!

Max Payne 3 has a two-player co-op horde mode thing you can pay extra for now. It is really good.

Hmmmm. What Lu says is hella correct. I initially read this as the other guy being an ass, but it turns out your original post was maybe a little (unintentionally) misleading in that regard. I think when someone gets you to playtest their game, they are almost certainly not looking for your advice - on game design, or on whether you think the game is going to be successful or how they can make it successful according to your personal barometer of success, or whatever. They just want to watch you play the game and see how you react to it (and how it reacts to you). The more thought you put into what you're saying the less useful it probably is to them. I would probably only ask for your "job" back if you think you'll be able to be a more useful tester, which unfortunately might mean shutting up and just consuming the game as it is and on its own terms, for the most part. Re making games, totally keep doing it.

I totally played the new co-op mode, Dead Men Walking, today. It's pretty fun. Interestingly, they recorded a bunch of new dialogue for Max. Some of it, like the "I was running low on ammo!" lines, sound more like the dialogue from the first two games than most of what's in 3 (in 3, he always kind of sounds like he's yelling, even in voiceovers), but the dialogue for when he's killing dudes and yelling at them afterwards (?) is absurd and awful. For instance, I shoot one of those young brazilian gang members in the face and Max screams "YOUR CHOICES BROUGHT YOU HERE!" or "IN ITS OWN WAY, THAT WAS JUSTICE!". Ultra weird considering the single player made the point that all these guys grew up in the slums and had basically no choice between being in a gang or starving. Or as I tweeted: "Max Payne dives through the air and shoots three young men in the face in one second. As he flies, he murmurs "it never gets any easier.""

Re 1) being a problem for me, not sure why it would have been at the time, but now, at least, I have been sending the entire game to press people all over the place. Some dudes were like "bro you don't want your game to leak just send them a demo" but I think I probably don't give many shits if my game leaks... worst case scenario somebody plays it, right? 2) is shit I need to work on. This thread is more helpful than I even expected. Thank you gentlemen

Thanks, this is mega helpful. Although number 2 will have to be something I learn from and do next time, I guess . I've also been reading your blog a bit, which has been awesome, thanks for doing it.

Thanks. Yeah, I try to do that. Have I sent The Gaming Vault a build? All names with "gaming" in them are now familiar.

oh shit. i guess i want a hydra now

Yeah, I guess that guy is playing using mouse emulation, which is interesting. And the FOV is wrong because I guess Mirror's Edge doesn't like you messin' with it. Given how simple implementing headtracking apparently is in Unreal, it is a shame we almost certainly won't see official Rift patches for older games like ME.

I cut those parts out, and now I don't have a transcript anymore! Jay kay, I never had one I have not, and totally will. Seems cool. Thanks. Yeah I saw that link. I had a similarly weird thing with my iOS game Vroom! at one point where ten thousand people in Russia suddenly downloaded it. No idea why. It wasn't even localised into anything other than English Hmm, I missed that part. The sales info was super interesting though. I don't currently have any dough to pay somebody to do my marketing for me, unfortunately (also i've heard some bad things lately from devs who have done that, though obv not a reflection on indieviddy). Hmm, sudden headache. End post.

Sweet. I will be interested to see how my vidjagames feel with this thing

Assuming your computer is amazing, you should totally open the map called FoliageMap in UDK, run around it in the rift and report back

Yeah, I got a lot out of E3 last year and Pax 2011 before that, and I expect Pax Aus in July to be super valuable, especially if I get into the Indie Showcase which I have obviously submitted to. What shows do you curate? I try to keep my press emails pretty succinct, sometimes even point form - Destructoid got an email from me that was just four dot points with a link to the greenlight and another to a playable build and went "SWEET WE'LL PLAY IT ON THE STREAM THIS WEEK" within ten minutes. I figure if I was a press dude I'd want to have to read as little as possible to figure out if I wanted to write about the thing.

Nah, that's suuuuuuuuuper old. The greenlight has two on it: Hmm. How do you embed videos here?

You got