thestalkinghead

"Video games" should be caled "computer games" because a virtual reality beamed straight into your brain wouldn't have any video in it but computer games will always need a computer no matter what

empathy is about understanding (not just making you feel bad), and if you can understand that someone may say anything to stop pain or that someone may never talk or lie because of their beliefs and what has happened to them in their life you can understand why torture doesn't always work, sure you can just listen to someone say "torture doesn't work" and just take that as truth without thinking about it at all, but actually understanding why would be better. "I think it's also pretty clear that Chris didn't say that violence in general needs to make you feel bad for a game to get it right - the Thumbs love tons of games, like Dishonored, where violence doesn't make you feel bad at all." i didn't say he did, so I'm not sure if you are directing that part at me, but clearly the game would have been far more effective if you did feel bad about killing someone

well i was talking about the broader subject of violence as well just torture, but you need to be able to empathise with the victim of torture to be able to understand why it wouldn't just work every time

i have heard mixed reviews of that game, some have said it sort of tricks you into doing things then later goes "ha, look you did bad things" i felt like that with dishonored, i killed lots of random NPC's (most of whom were doing bad things) but saved most of the people that had a story, there was one but in the end i felt like i got a bad ending and it was blaming me for being evil but it was the game that made me do it, i know you can do a non-lethal playthrough but that just seemed really unnecessary and most of the NPC's were bad guys anyway

yeah i guess it is always better if the intention is to make the reader empathise with the victims of the violence/unethical behaviour than that to only be revealed with critical afterthought

isn't batman and the batman games very much like the splinter cell conviction's "torture always works" thing? in fact threatening/touring people for information that is always correct is very common in games, maybe it is the brutal over the topness of conviction that makes this problem more clear, and even though it is unintentional, it does point out how wrong that is. i need to think about it more so i can properly explain what i mean, but maybe over the top brutality and immorality is needed in fiction so we can look at it and say "that it is wrong". i think if every piece of fiction was always ethical and moral it would be bad because it would be ignoring the fact that unethical and immoral things can/do happen, and i think that exploring and thinking about immoral and unethical things can have a positive effect of not wanting to emulate or reproduce those things, basically i mean violence in video games and other fiction can influence you to be less violent (i don't know if that is coherent)

great episode

yeah, if just one person likes it, it was worth showing it to them

Geez, would you two stop fighting, this is getting way too serious

i agree about with the discussion about Civ, it does seem very odd to be able to "win" the world, the only kind of victory in civilisation that doesn't seem weird is a victory of total dominance where there aren't any other civilisations left but your own and that is only because really there wouldn't be anything else left to do except maybe make a few more cities, but Civ does seem to be the type of game that doesn't need a victory condition at all.

i dont no if you noticed but i was talking about using macros, maybe there is some miscommunication when i am talking about macros, but to me using a macro for a fighting game would be when there would be a programmed in set of commands that get activated by pressing one button, so for example instead of pressing up, down, left, right, a, b etc. to perform a fatality i would press "f" for fatality and the macro would perform the move for me, I'm not saying keyboards are better for fighting games because they obviously aren't, my point was that a keyboard has lots of keys that could be linked to specific moves using macros

I'm a PC gamer and i have a keyboard, and i am giving my opinion on why i don't like fighting games, my opinion doesn't change because of the limitations of the controller

the part in bold is basically my entire point, if you could press one button and pull off a shoryuken it you make the game about choice of moves and timing not about your ability to pull of a specific move, and yes it would change how you play the game and that is what i was saying would make me like fighting games more, I'm not saying pro fighting gamers or anybody else would like it more, but for me that is the reason i don't like fighting games that much because i spend most of the time trying to pull of a move while in the game i am just doing random stuff

well i'm not talking about just long combos as a macro i mean every move, also you can't deny that muscle memory of moves plays a massive role in most fighting games, if you could just pick up the game and instantly be able to pull off every move in the game, the game would be more about tactical choice of moves and combos and not about how much time you have spent mastering each move (muscle memory)

i would probably like fighting games more if they used macros, I'm not really a fan of muscle memory of super combos being the reason people win, i like it to be more about timing and tactics

i didn't notice as many things as listed here, but i assumed it was Mr White learning how to present himself as a criminal and emulating it for his Heisenberg persona

splinter cell conviction was definitely 24 the game, and i think the mark and execute mechanic undermined the stealth, because most levels/scenarios could be broken down to 'stealth kill the obvious stranglers, them mark and execute everybody on the big open impossible to be stealthy room' i like 24 but 24 and stealth game didn't seem to match up

yeah, simply put, "i like video games and if you do too, we have something in common so i like you" differences of opinions usually just make me want to work out why the opinion is different (even if sometimes it takes a while for that curiosity to kick in)

it is very hard to convey the tone of what you are saying on the internet, but very easy to misinterpret the tone, it's like everybody reads everything on the internet in an angry snide voice, no matter how thoughtful and calm it was supposed to be

i guess it's the difference between an organic word of mouth recommendation thing and a formal "reader recommendation of the week" section, that would be sort of an obligation rather than just playing games for fun

the most important thing a review has to tell me is how likely it is that the game will be the citizen kane of games and whether it will blow me away, also an objective numbered score from 5-10 (because 1-4 is just silly) is what will really tell me if i should buy it

knowing the tastes of the thumbs i wouldn't recommend saints row, the most i would say about it is to give it a chance if the opportunity presents itself

i kind of just think of it like Lee wasn't the kind of guy to point out other peoples hypocrisy (basically my conclusion after the fact kind of thing) and he would concentrate on the task at hand, like in life it isn't always the best choice to call people out on their lies and bullshit because it generally won't achieve anything

yeah Edit: lol routing

even with perfect motion capture technology the only things that could be perfectly motion captured would be things that actually exist, and only if the animation is of exactly what it motion captured, there is no way to motion capture a monster etc. without animators fixing the parts that can't be motion captured.