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One of the games I enjoy most for its writing is Knights of the Old Republic II. It's a bit inconsistent, I mean it's a massive RPG with lots of aliens so some of the dialogue can get pretty bad, but on the whole I adore it. I do think it's quite subtle and you have to contemplate the story a bit to get something out of it. The game leaves a lot of stuff unanswered, unexplained and unresolved. I don't know how intentional some of that is, because the development of the game was suddenly wrapped up about 6 months too early. It's part of what I like about it and it's also what frustrates some people. It's a game about Star Wars though, so it can't be as profound as a story about something more human, but as a Star Wars thing it's the best written by far. I don't want to get into specifics too much, but I don't think you'd complain about the plot being too overt.

"I just like stuff that's super hard and doesn't care about me" - Sean Boy has Dark Souls got you covered! edit: oh it was brought up So, did you guys ever play it more after that livestream?

Great video from Monday's fight:

That's a fun way to play. Try the Large Club (drops from the barbarians in the blighttown tunnel entrance), or the Great Club if you don't get lucky with the drops. The Large Club isn't that hard to get though, a run or three with some humanity in your counter. It's got the same knockdown as the zwei but it's faster and does more damage.

Yeah, I get that. Maybe I was trying too hard to come up with more episodes . All of them have something about them that I like though. For example, I don't enjoy the actual character of Tuvix but the resolution to the episode stuck with me. Star Trek usually doesn't go there. Anyway, enough about that. I've started rewatching TNG (it's been ages since I saw that too), and I noticed how "The Haunting of Deck 12" was basically just a remake of "Lonely Among Us", heh.

Dark Souls honorable mention but no mentions on the podcast Anyway, most of the games I enjoyed in 2013 didn't come out in 2013 so I'm not going to do a proper list. If I had to pick a 2013 GOTY it'd probably be The Swapper, what a tremendously well made game. Fantastic atmosphere, elegant mechanics, good puzzles and even a good ending. Personally, I would've liked a few more challenging puzzles, because at times I felt like I was plowing through the game. I would give a mention to Guacamelee as well, I think it has some problems, but I came away feeling better about it than I thought I would. I could see myself replaying it. As for Gunpoint, it did nothing for me. The writing was witty but story got way too complicated for me to follow. It almost seemed like it wanted to be that convoluted for comedic effect, but it lost me. Fortunately, it was easy to skip. On paper I like the crosslink mechanic, but I never felt like I got to do very interesting things with it. Each level had a linear progression of colours, so it was always fairly obvious what to do. It's a puzzle game that never made me feel clever. I think The Swapper is much better, in every way.

With this robot obsession continuing to go on, I think the thumbs crew should play Binary Domain. It's an unintentionally hilarious Japanese game about the horrible robot future (the robot related plot twist is nuts). It's also a fun game.

Haha, well it's a season 1 episode so I'm not gonna call it great, but I liked it. Even though the plot device used is perhaps a bit contrived, I think it's at least used in the service of a good idea, namely letting them explore the two split sides of B'Elanna's personality. Her Klingon side is angry for not being acknowledged that she's needed, meanwhile her human side is angry at her inner Klingon for existing at all. Then by the end, through having to work together, they of course realize they need eachother. It's not the most subtle thing in the world, but I think the idea behind it is stronger than those in a lot of Voyager episodes that are just about the alien/anomaly of the day. I also like Roxann Dawson's performance as both characters. If you want to get into it though there's some weird stuff, like why don't they rescue anyone else from that place? It also does the Voyager sin of hitting the reset button at the end. Which other ones don't you like? I'm curious!

I'm going to take the liberty of adding a few episodes I think you missed! Faces - S01E14 The Thaw - S02E23 (I imagine this one is very divisive) Tuvix - S02E24 Remember - S03E06 Future's End - S03E08/9 (two part time travel!) Warlord - S03E10 (It's the one episode where Kes isn't boring) One - S04E25 Drone - S05E02 Someone to Watch Over Me - S05E22 One Small Step - S06E08 Good Shepherd - S06E20 Muse - S06E22 Workforce - S07E16/17 I apologize for this, but OCD. Fourier series are a way of expressing periodic functions they aren't random, they repeat. Therefore, technobabble!

I think the reason experiences I have in games like DayZ and EVE resonate with me more than almost all authored narratives in games is precisely because the mechanics are in sync with the "story". A game like GTA has to work so hard to create a situation where you feel like the stakes are high, hours and hours of expository cutscenes, and even then it rarely succeeds. In DayZ the stakes are there mechanically. One time I had foolishly parked a jeep (they were very rare back then) outside of a factory while me and my friends were looking for spare car parts. All of a sudden someone honked the horn, it drove off, we all opened fire on it and gave chase. The jeep ended up crashing into a tree and we had a long chase / firefight through a forest. I struggle to think of how a game with dissonant mechanics could ever come close to replicating that. I think the only time I've felt real tension in a game story was the final mission of Mass Effect 2, which actually had mechanical stakes even if it wasn't handled very elegantly. As for having purposefully dissonant mechanics, I don't see the point other than as a parody. Yeah, it's hard to tell a love story using tennis. That's kind of the problem games have.

If it looked dramatically better they wouldn't need the guy there telling you how much better it looks.

I believe I'm in the final temple of the game now and I have warmed up to it. You guys are right about the difficulty spikes though. They stand out even more because most of the encounters are almost trivial when you get a handle on the combat. I think part of the problem comes from how bloated the mechanics are. Five different colours of enemy shields in addition to dimension swapping? The encounters where they combine all that don't play well at all. It also bothers me how inelegant it is. I feel like I'm a little harsh on this game, but I can't help it because it invites such direct comparisons with Super Metroid, which is one of the most elegantly designed games I've played. It doesn't just reference Super Metroid, it wants to be Super Metroid, but pointing out every way in which it's worse doesn't seem very fair. I do think though that the design of this game is an expression of a misunderstanding of why SM is great. Taken entirely on their own the traversal mechanics do get interesting eventually, but the possibility space feels small given how many mechanics the need to span it. I guess it doesn't help that I played Mark of the Ninja right before this, which is a super slick game in every way that Guacamelee is not. However, even though I think it's more flawed I still enjoy Guacamelee more, and I guess that counts for something.

I got the wall-jump and went for the chest behind the Super Meat Boy-esque jumping puzzles. Conclusion: the platforming mechanics in this game are garbage. Or at the very least are they poorly suited to jumping puzzles like that. The combat is alright but I'm not a huge fan of the dimension swapping just to hit certain enemies. With the amount of enemies they throw at you it also gets hard to avoid taking damage and you don't have that much health.

Well, here's a game about being a heroin addict

I haven't made a website in something like 10 years, but I think you just need a "default.html" file

I came to this a bit late, only finished it a few days ago. I'm curious, does anyone here enjoy the first person cutscene spectacle this game likes to indulge in? Maybe I'm just weird because I didn't like it back in CoD4 either. The moments where Booker is screaming because he's strapped to a rocket or whatever, those are the ones in which I'm the most detached from the game and I'm just waiting for them to be over. In general even people who didn't seem to like the game still love the opening, but for me it did nothing. It's not that I don't appreciate how insanely good the world looks, it's that I can barely interact with any of it and the only interaction I have is a generic 'F' prompt. That too makes me feel detached from the game. The structure of the whole thing is weird to me too. It's completely segregated into arena combat and kind of pointless exploratory downtime, neither part complements the other. Compare it to System Shock 2 where the enemies exist to add tension to the exploration. Imagine that game if you walk into a room, the doors close until you've killed 30 hybrids and then you're free to explore the area. It would be garbage. Everything is weird. They have bigger story ambitions and at every point they move the design in a direction that impedes storytelling. It's a not-yet ruined city, why couldn't we have NPCs to talk to and some proper dialogue trees? Not that every game needs dialogue trees, but I quite like them. In Mass Effect 1 the first thing out of Shepard's mouth is something you pick. It doesn't have any bearing on the story, it doesn't make you feel like you're Shepard, but it does make you feel participatory. The way Infinite presents its story has the complete opposite effect on me. When the game prompts you for a choice it feels out of place! Even setting the actual storytelling methods aside, I didn't particularly care for the story they were trying to tell. The few characters you do encounter are only there to deliver painfully contrived justifications for why you're going to be fighting more "people". Seriously, the plot contrivances are bad even by video game standards. About the ending edit: I watched the Errant Signal video, I pretty much agree with everything he said in it.

If your HC character dies in PoE it becomes an SC character though, which bothers me.

That's kinda crazy, that he found you. At least he felt bad about it. Even though the game is really barebones and half-broken it still has such a great capacity to tell stories. There's just something about it that makes you want to share your experiences with others, as well as reciprocating that.

I think you get an example of the kind of people playing DayZ in the video. Reddit is always just reddit.

Too bad they had to be enormous dicks and kill them after that performance.

I rewatched all of Voyager a month or so ago (hadn't watched it since it aired here). I enjoyed it for the most part and I don't think it quite deserves all the crap it gets. It has its share of annoying and/or underdeveloped characters, but so does every other Star Trek show and for me the characters I did like made it worth watching. Or maybe it's just nostalgia. The two-part conclusion was unsatisfying though, they put the denoument at the start and then wipe it from the timeline. I tend to like the time travel episodes but that one was a bummer. Because I semi-marathoned it the episodes blend together a bit, but some that stand out for me are "Night" (I think they sold how depressing that blackness was), "Timeless" (Harry Kim gets to act! Has a great teaser too), "Dreadnought", (not a very original idea but I thought it had some great dialogue), "Counterpoint" and well, quite a few more. It had more great episodes than terrible ones, even though it had a fair amount of terrible ones. Also, I know that people hate on Janeway a bit because she can be a bit inconsistent from episode from episode, but I still like her simply because of Kate Mulgrew. Probably going to watch TNG next.

Haha, well you need a blood bag and iv-kit/syringe, then if you administer the blood to someone with a non-matching blood type they go into hemolytic shock. There are blood test kits though, so you can see which blood type you have.

If you decide to stream DayZ I hope you get Evan back. There's some neat stuff in standalone, you can restrain people, take blood from them, force feed them stuff etc. and they've done a ton of work updating the map.

This is a bit random, but after Snow makes a joke about aircraft carriers about 6:30 in Lego Iron Man(?) shoots something from his fist. Doesn't the sound effect for that sound Exactly like the BFG from Quake 3?

You're right that "random" and "procedurally generated" mean different things and I did read the interview so that was a bit sloppy of me, it's just so long to type each time :-P. I still stand by the point though. Dwarf Fortress has fantastic procedural world generation that not only covers geology and climate, but also people and history. Still, that's just a small supplement to the game. I'm wary of procedural generation being the pitch because I don't think it's enough to sustain a game. That's just me though, I'm sure some people who have more time to play love the idea.