Pepyri

For me, the exploration and wandering of DA:I wasn't about it feeling epic- I mean, once you're the only one around while the big baddie and his dragon stare you down, you've basically hit pinnacle epic, so I suppose that was all well and sealed. For me, it made it feel like the world went on without me. I felt like I was taking hikes, doing R&D for the Inquisition and taking people I felt I could trust along with me. It would sometimes turn into its own adventure, but that always felt like it "just happened" in a way that the story never did, and it was rare enough among the hours of "I hate how swamps make my boots wet." attitude of exploration. I do resonate with the 'stakes' idea though, Sean. The risk of your skill never increasing is totally valid, but I wonder if a more intelligently accomplished difficulty system for single player RPGs would let you have that same feeling. But I suppose I also enjoy the rote practice of certain tasks- I mean, I spent $60 on Elite:Dangerous and then another $60 to get a brand new controller for it 'cause the old PS3 controller just wasn't cutting it anymore. And I doubt you could place that game as anything but a slow grind. A pleasurable one, but still.

The DA:I discussion really hit on a nerve with me I've been wondering for a long time- the idea that reviews-based media actually ends up ruining a lot of experiences permanently for those who partake in it, and in the process that opinion gets propagated down the line without a whole lot of argument to the contrary. "It doesn't respect my time" was said at least 3 times this episode. The idea of the game being shorter, punchier, was a suggestion. Similar threads had been said about other games in the past(see: most MMOs, LOMAs, etc), and it strikes me as surprisingly weird coming from the same people who said they're not like "The average Call of Duty player who asks the game to 'Impress me!'". The idea that a game taking a slower pace, asking for more time, a lower average in heart rate, is inherently a bad trait just seems so disconnected from what I feel like many people are beginning to find in new experiences. Sean seems like someone who particularly enjoys this type of game. Games of DotA or DayZ are, after all, 90% "Go through the motions of making sure you're not dying this immediate moment, while trying to grow in power", and 10% "Okay now I'm actively engaging in something". I'm not suggesting that neither Chris or Danielle can see the appeal in this, but I think the language used by them both, as well as a large number of reviewers(I wrote "most" twice, before taking it back, since I can't be accurate, but it certainly feels it) is derisive of a game going after a different aim, or being for a different audience(one with more time). I will note that Chris alluded to this idea several times, but the language used to explain it I think could use discussion, as I think there's a far difference from "grind for grind's sake" and "trying to provide a lower-energy in-between". Hope this wasn't a whole lot of me shoving words in other people's mouths, just a thought that's been bugging me for the past year or two(not specifically with the Thumbs, mostly from review sites) and it finally all came together.

I'd never heard of this game! It's on iOS, so I think I'll pick it up.

I know it's cheating, but I've hit a point where "Game of the Year" ends up missing so much that it just isn't worth it anymore, because of how often great post-release support makes a game so much better. So for me, I define it all by "Best Gaming Experiences of 2014". To keep myself from posting a top 10 list, I'm just gonna point out the games that made a theme for a time of this year for me- 80 Days - What a damn experience. I've never played such a well-realized combination of mechanics and VN-style story, and having never read the book it's based off of, it was all fresh and lovely to me on top of it. First "gripping" experience I've ever had on my phone, easily. The Wolf Among Us - This started last year, but I was desperate for every last episode until it ended. The music, the visuals, the world- I loved it all so much. I really need to read the graphic novels. Endless Legend - Easily the biggest surprise of the year. Getting this, it's hard to not look at Civilization: Beyond Earth with downright scorn in comparison. Beautiful, unique, well-realized art style. Incredibly diverse, truly game-changing races. Smart innovations in everything from luxury resources to combat. Stupid amounts of variety. Great lore. And only $40, for the best strategy game of the year. SURE OKAY. Crypt of the Necrodancer - Just buy it. You'll think it won't be that unique looking at it. Play it and find out how wrong you were. Dragon Age: Inquisiton - The normal RPG fare, until you get to actually managing the inquisition. I loved sitting in that throne, ruling and judging situations. Why can't there be a game about ruling, instead of warring armies or 4x-style stuff? League of Legends - Things just keep getting better. After the best esports year any game has ever had, the 2015 pre-season changes combine with the 2014 changes to just put League in a pure, wonderful place. The game has never felt better, and I've been playing since alpha. Good gracious it's lovely.

The Arena Commander module is buggy as all hell. I've not once been able to do anything- literally. I launch it, and I'm met with an atrociously low-rez screen saying I cannot log in(so I guess it can't duplicate my login? why are developers so averse to error messages ugh), and an OK button I can't interact with because I have neither mouse or controller control. So I've gotta hard-kill the program. I understand this is early software, but that's why you don't call things 1.0 for a reason. Don't treat your versioning system like a damn marketing opportunity. Edit: Specifically, don't treat a versioning system implying "release ready" as a marketing opportunity. I could care less about alpha/beta, because no one has a reasonable expectation there(software is developed at all sorts of paces). But everyone agrees on what 1.0 is.

So apparently Jimmy Wales said something pretty great, and uh, here it is: You can view what begat that response here: https://twitter.com/Spacekatgal/status/545801519782977536/photo/1

I'm trying to change the color whenever I get a new ship. Make it like different models have different dashboards!

Those games are the exact kinds of things I was thinking of(though none of those specifically), but not one of those was mentioned. And I disagree with your assessment- that's pretty much all that they talked about. Super Mario Tetris Grand Theft Auto Guitar Hero Far Cry 2 etc etc. The vast majority of games they mentioned were not brand new experiences, nor were they lauded for their storytelling achievements. They even went out of their way to say something along the lines of 'not Grim Fandango'. Which is fine- I think every game on that list deserves a mention- but it's the omission of greats like Shadow of the Colossus, or any primarily multiplayer games(aside from Minecraft). But more what I mean by video-gamey is that quality some games have of being abstract, ridiculous, and based around some sort of very tight system. I love my systemic games(they're what I've spent most of my life on) but I wouldn't use that to disclude the type of games they did.

Sure, but you could say all of that, and much more, about Dwarf Fortress. Or EvE Online. But DF didn't blow up the way that Minecraft did. After a time, the only distinguishable thing that Minecraft let you do is build structures- at which point you're not doing something unique to games at all, you're literally just playing lego with free pieces. That's all well and good(and lord knows I lost a genuine 40 hours out of a 48 hour weekend once and vowed to not return as a result), but that doesn't strike me as something remarkable. The landscapes it draws are inevitable of any cube game with generated biomes. The systems it has are simple and capable of a lot, but countless games have that same level of systems and never blew up, so we'll never see the recreation of processors inside of them. Except we did see that, again, in Dwarf Fortress(a game I really never enjoyed playing). I like Minecraft, I'm glad it exists and I think it's had a huge contribution to gaming, but I'm also sort of the opinion that it's minimalist to a degree that makes me wonder if it's creation was not an inevitability, instead of a creative vision. I agree you need criteria, I just think the criteria they chose is reductionist in a way that does a disservice to games.

I don't know. I feel like Minecraft is a non-answer- yeah, sure, Minecraft is something only possible in games, but Minecraft itself doesn't have a soul. If Minecraft didn't sell an insane number of copies, no one would regard it as some high achievement or another. I kinda feel like the entire idea of a 'best game' ends up being incredibly reductionist. It's gotta be something only possible in games, but in the process that more or less kills any potential storytelling opportunity. It's gotta be video-gamey, which kills the strength some games have as educational simulations. It's a fancy way of saying, "What's the best not-serious thing for a 10 year old to do", which makes me wonder then if we're associating this too much to nostalgia. I dunno. Maybe it's because in my top 10 games of all time, only one is something that even sort of could be considered for this(Natural Selection 1). From there, it's storytold game this, Lords Management that, RPG this, etc etc. It's almost as if the framing of the question goes out of its way to de-legitimize my favorite kinds of experiences that I've only ever gotten from games.

Woah, controller has made a HUGE difference. I'm really loving it, this is nice. About the only issue arises when docking, because there's no lateral movement. But that isn't a dealbreaker. I also finally got my Eagle(4 jumps and a 10 minute supercruise away), and when I grabbed it I changed my hud colors: Along the way I also ended up finding this neat web app to help you preview what the ingame color scheme will look like. It's invaluable.

I'm using M+KB but I'm seriously contemplating trying controller out just to see if it helps significantly. For many things mouse is fine, but in combat there's too much confusion to make it really work.

Well, two primary issues: Mouse controls for this game are atrocious when in combat. Like, really really bad. My default lasers take 20+ direct, close range hits to destroy someone In the process, anything where I'm fighting more than one enemy is a 20+ minute long affair. And it's stressful the whole way.

So, I grabbed this the other day and finally downloaded it and have been playing it off and on throughout the day. Probably about 4ish hours so far. I've- Learned that combat is insanely difficult Learned some pirates are actually "Clean" Space Trucker ain't such a bad profession The first time you manage to dock is more exciting than it should be Stopping at the right time is hard Space is quiet, have some music going There's a lot for me to learn

Apparently the game was put on Greenlight today, from which Valve ripped it back off. Eurogamer called and spoke to Doug Lombardi, who said: Pretty quick too.

I'd definitely be up for games. My Origin name is "Pepyri". Every time I log on I seem to do pretty okay in terms of ranked chits, but I've barely done like 5 or 6 matches like that. It was a lot of fun though. I really adore this game.

I finally got around to playing this last year when I first bought a PS3, and adored it. I was surprised at how few people talked about it, let alone played it, and I'm glad the re-release on PC has everyone suddenly really pleased. It's a game that deserves to be learned from, and dammit I'm sick of people overlooking quality games because "Oh God animu eyes". If I can put up with the train wreck that was Limbo's art design, you oughta be able to put up with some damn eyeballs. I understand one comes within the context of a community that definitely has its shittier elements, but between Valkyria Chronicles and Fire Emblem, I'd wish gamers would see there's some real hard substance here.

I'm only at 15 or so hours but hot diggity I adore it. It's like I get a double dipping of what I love about FF14 when I play it.

So uh this game is better than it should be. First day I had it, I was planning on putting in maybe a half hour. That became 6 hours and I stayed up till 4am, totally ruining my next day. Which was okay because I had nothing going on and just played more of it. What I'm saying is, this game is the bee's knees. It's really swell guys, and I think others should try it out.

People rarely back down or fully change when confronted with it. Like, seriously- it's incredibly rare. We all have that issue. And I've seen a lot of people start to back out, or at least concede there's a lot that's fishy, but they still care about that supposed 'core issue', and in the process never completely make the jump. The best way to convert people like that? Don't try. Get the rest of the public on your side. Keep focusing on who you can convert. It changes where the "national borders" are placed, which in the process makes even the diehards easier to convert, or at the least, make irrelevant. To steal from a comedian whose name I'm totally forgetting now: "Be so good they can't ignore you." Make your point obvious, simple, and foolproof.

While I admit this is true, there's a lot of GGers I've met who are part of it more because all their friends are GGers and they've personally never seen an example of the harassment, just GG's counter-claims. One of the biggest issues in media today is the fact that all of us sit within our own echo chamber. There's very little opportunity to learn the other side is human unless you actively engage with them, and like I said earlier in this thread, we've done a pretty horrible job putting our message and position out there, considering it took a month and a half before me, someone clearly anti-GG on Twitter and elsewhere, saw any centralized resource proving their claims were bullshit. I knew better because I've been involved longer, but if you expect everyone to have knowledge of the games media as well as most of us, you're really not understanding the point of media.

So, is anyone else keeping up with Fate/Stay Night(Edit: The Ufotable version)? It's off to a fantastic start, and so far has been appropriately dark and interesting. And the budget is completely out of control- short of the Eva Rebuilds or Makoto Shinkai's works(both of which shouldn't count considering they're movies, whereas this is a 26-episode series), I'm not sure I've actually seen anything higher. It's also nice for me to jump back into this world, if only because one of my most significant game ideas is based on their world, and I ended up really falling in love with the game idea at least as it stands in my head. An FFT/DotA/Neptune's Pride combination of sorts, in this world.

Legit started applauding, here home alone. Fantastic work.

I've gotta say, this is the first time I don't just feel like Firaxis made a less-than-stellar product, but frankly I feel downright ripped off. I've not finished a game yet. I'm about 100-150 turns in a Mercury game. But holy hell, is this a reskin of Civ 5 or something? The technologies are nearly identical. Buildings are nearly identical. Map, vision, and exploration are nearly identical. Resources and how you use them are identical. The graphics are bad- full stop. Models look about on par with Dawn of War 2. Textures are blurry until you zoom in completely(which, I love how they just pop in after a half second, on Ultra, at 60fps). Faction differences as far as I can tell visually are nonexistent, or at the very least are from a cursory glance. The user interface is a whole step backwards from Civ 5's best-in-the-entire-business user interface, by seemingly making outright decisions to have a worse UI- The technology scene is a nightmare of issues. It's too busy, it never highlights the truly important information. It has an obsession with showing these individual technology/building icons, that all look barely different from one another, in the process making their differences pointless. The Civlopedia has some really boneheaded decisions. Can't full-reset the search box. Searching for text that is in the description of something, but not the title of it, yields no results. If you get something with multiple results, it doesn't show them immediately, it instead pops up a button to the right of the search box, from which you can click and select from the results- which in many cases include extremely similar ideas(since you searched for something at least containing those), so you don't know which you want because they don't have any initial sentence summaries or anything- and if you select one, it then gets rid of the box, so if it's wrong you've gotta go back up, click the search box, hit enter again, hit the box again, and hit a new topic again. Yeah. And why you can be in there and not have an immediate button to re-trigger the tutorial on that one specific topic is beyond me. The orbital launch screen goes purple-grey for no reason at all. It doesn't do it to highlight anything- it then colors the deployable areas by coloring the ground pink. Why even make the world purple-grey then? And why is it that after I've deployed, you keep me in this view, with no button onscreen to get rid of it? Far as I can tell, I've gotta select an entire other unit/city/something(which either creates another window to get out of, or turns off that unit's current orders) to make my game look normal again. The options screen is lacking some real basics- no master volume, have 1/3rd of the window dedicated to advanced options, which you've gotta click a button to enable(why even have that part of the window there?). And while this isn't UI related, really, no borderless window mode? Furthermore, I'm really forced to wonder why this is sci-fi at all. They don't take advantage of seemingly any of the common conceits of being an advanced civilization- I still have to manually reveal the map, with there being no logical reason I can fathom I don't have one already- I mean, really, no one bothered to take pictures of the planet on the way down? And why am I exploring the world on land? Shouldn't I have some sort of plane or ship for that? I could understand if I needed to be on land to discover special resources, but one can tell whether they're over desert/grassland/marsh/water from the sky. Maybe I'm missing something. I know this post has come off really standoffish, but I'm looking for someone to tell me it gets better once you're further in, and why. But so far I've been completely disappointed.

Is it me, or is everything on there for iPad? I'm not seeing a lot of iPhone submissions.