Patrick R

Every single level name from Zombies Ate My Neighbors makes for a great pub quiz team name.

Was dating in IV essentially the same as San Andreas, where you just escort someone to a bar or restaurant?

I ended up with... Amnesia: The Dark Descent The Basement Collection Bastion Ben There, Dan That! Cart Life The Cave Organ Trail: Director's Cut Rogue Legacy Time Gentlemen, Please! I was sorely tempted to pick up Fallout 3 or New Vegas, but other than that I am pretty happy that I got what I got without spending too much. Now the question is how many of these games I will actually play.

Only God Forgives, the latest from Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn, is not a good movie. It is maybe the slowest and most languid crime film I have ever seen, and one of the most predictable. The whole movie feels like it's moving through molasses. It's often beautiful to look at, but man is it dull.

I'm saying that the debate is thus: If video games are art, is chess art? Is baseball art? Is Go art? Are non-video games art? Because in hundreds of years of art history, they have never been considered art. And if those aren't art, what about video games makes them separate? What makes something a game and what makes something art? What is the dividing line between "game" and "interactive art installation"? Are Choose Your Own Adventure books games, art, or both? I don't have an answer to these questions and, to be frank, I really don't care about the answer to these questions. I'm not an art historian, and whether or not games match a historical definition of art doesn't change how I interact with them or interpret them. My point is, the debate is about semantics, not about whether or not meaningful experiences can occur within the context of a video game. Viscera Clean-Up Crew doesn't significantly address any of those semantic concerns.

Trying to make art about personal things that happened to you but also happened to someone else is really tricky. It's hard to know how much detail you can ethically share, and how they will react to your interpretation of events. In this case, I am talking about my break-up and the TWINE game I'm writing about it. I thought it'd be a useful exercise (and a more interesting story) to make the game from her perspective rather than mine, where you look back at the significant events of a relationship and try to figure out where it went wrong, but now I'm wondering how real I can really make it without just revealing too much for her to be comfortable with. And the fact that we are not talking makes it hard to really know how she'd feel about it.

I think subversions of interactive fiction like Ultra Business Tycoon III are important and a good thing to exist, but there is nothing about it that I found appealing at all. In general, I think I just have a very different sense of humor than Porpentine, though I have often found the games they make to be enlightening and worthwhile experiences. But UBT3 is just too much for me.

Also, the debate on whether games can be art is not about whether or not they can be pointed and meaningful (a ton of games have been exactly that for years), but about how one defines the words "game" and "art". I don't think Viscera Clean-Up Crew really changes that debate at all.

Divekick was definitely the game my mind went to when Thumbs were talking about weird EVO games.

Now the original spoilery episode 115 is a collector's item! This .mp3 is gonna be so valuable in a decade. I'm gonna put my kids through college with this.

Government sponsored imprisonment of gay people is way different than what is going on in the USA and UK, I think.

A little history on this sort of thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKzz0zF9k54 That's Kenneth Anger's seminal art film Scorpio Rising (NSFW). It's soundtrack is made entirely of modern pop music (which was unheard of at the time) and is mostly used for tonal dissonance to heighten the chaos and anxiety of the film (the subject matter of gay S&M bikers already being plenty daring in 1963*), which would later be a direct influence on filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. How those two filtered the influence of Anger (think the or ) would later define how Tarantino used music, which in turn would influence a whole lot of other people to take this ironic sort of approach. Eventually it would even reach . Some of my favorites include... The ending of Beau Travail (don't worry, spoiler free!) with Corona's "Rhythm of the Night". Works better in context, but still Denis Lavant's dancing is insanely great. The end of Fallen Angels (still, not really any spoilers), with The Flying Picket's cover of Yazoo's "Only You" The opening of Heavenly Bodies with Sparks' "Breaking Out of Prison" *Eventually it took the Supreme Court to say that his film was art for Vice Squads to stop busting theaters this movie played at.

I had Steam syncing issues, but all it really meant was that I didn't get achievements when I played through certain episodes, which I didn't care about. Is it possible it's a newer problem? I played through Season 1 about five months ago, and it always imported my save data from episode to episode. But when I started the 400 Days DLC, it wasn't able to import my save data at all. Which again in that case didn't bother me so much because the changes to the DLC from it were minimal.

Anyone here ever play Deadlight? I've never heard of it before but the trailer looks pretty great. Like Oddworld meets Last of Us. And it's only 3.74 for the next 15 hours.

I posted this in the old video game music thread, but I consistently (about twice a month) have nightmares that are set to the opening titles song of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

That's beautiful.

Congrats, Zeus. May your new baby give you dozens of new shit and piss related anecdotes.

I read it as a broader commentary on capitalism/consumerism. The destroyed environment is not a subtle reference to global warming, and the way that play cycles specifically turns the player (or, me at least) into a little impatient consumerist fiend who needs to burn more to buy more to burn more to buy more is pretty pointed. Certainly it is also a more specific commentary on Free-To-Play games, but the implications of the gameplay and theme overall felt broader to me.

Kane And Lynch 3: You Play The Cameraman confirmed!

Only just realized that, for some reason, the version of Dark Forces I downloaded from Steam has me on God Mode on default. So part of the reason it felt so primitive and boring was that I literally could not be damaged. Lasers even bounce off me, so if I run up to a Stormtrooper his blasts will only kill himself.

The big hurdle is that everyone's personal experience with relationships is different and if a developer tried to make your AI partner so broad as to appeal to most players, they could come across as inhuman. BUT one of the really interesting things about The Walking Dead is that it trains you to make decisions about the kind of person Lee is, and then role-play based on those decisions. While playing Walking Dead I felt like an actor as much as I did a gamer, I didn't always make choices that I would make in Lee's position, I made choices based on what I thought Lee, as I had interpreted him, would make in his position. It was the most honest portrayal of straight role-playing I had ever seen in a game. So I think a game could be very specific in depicting a relationship between two individuals as long as it did a good job at teaching you who they were, why they were attracted to each other, and what problems would come up in their relationship. The partner wouldn't have to appeal to me personally as long as it was sold to me why they appeal to my character. The Bonnie chapter of 400 Days did a great job of that, actually. The importance of Leland being there for Bonnie, a former addict, during her time of need (though I can't remember if it was implied that she was in recovery before the outbreak or if the outbreak made her have to defacto quit doing drugs) came across so strongly in such a short time that I was instantly drawn to wanting these characters to be together, even if Leland isn't the kind of person I want to specifically date. I think the hypothetical examples we've been listing have been assuming the first person, but given a strong character to role-play as, I think people could be motivated to act as them and care about their self-interest (maybe it's a story about a good relationship that slowly goes bad, and you have to choose when it's time for you to get out of it) without worrying about whether or not the other person appeals to them personally.

I want this to be an Oculus Rift game.

I really enjoyed reading this. Also, I think my question wasn't phrased particularly well. Jake and Sean obviously couldn't really reply to my last line about Telltale making an It Happened One Night game (which, in retrospect, is probably the kind of thing they hear all the time and probably gets real annoying, so sorry for that) but that actually pointed more towards the sort of thing I was wishing for. The same way that The Walking Dead isn't really a systems driven game but still tells a great story in the zombie genre, I'd love a game that was in the Telltale (or comparable adventure game) style, but was in the romantic comedy genre, or another theme that didn't have to include zombies. The love triangle between Bonnie, Leland and Dee is compelling on it's own. It doesn't need to happen in a game that has zombies. If you just played a recovering addict who fell in love with a married man, that'd be a super compelling game on it's own, sans zombies. And obviously the answer is that the financial realities of the games industry can support a bold narrative driven game if there are zombies, sweet headshots, and a popular brand attached. I guess I just wish there was a way around that.

Videodrome is the next closest thing to Naked Lunch. I think Naked Lunch was too specific and unique a vision to ever successfully duplicate. He started at the life and work of William S. Burroughs and it sort of spiraled out from there. I can't imagine another subject that would produce such a film.

I Googled it and learned that Minerva's Den is only available on Games For Windows, which is kind of lame because 1) it means the Steam sale doesn't apply to it, so you have to buy it for full price (4.99) and 2) I've never had a good experience on GFW. Always a pain in the ass, somehow. I will probably just buy Bioshock 1.