Reyturner

The time for Fedge is now!

On the subject of thinking about games and understanding one's tastes and general "good"-ness, you could do worse than reading these books: The Characteristics Games The Art of Game Design Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

http://www.bestofbridge.com/2009/10/08/tolerable-brussel-sprouts/

I'd say the things that GTA, Spelunky and Civ5 have in common is that you always feel like you are making important decisions: In Spelunky, any false step could mean the end of a play through. Its a game rendered down to its utmost essentials, without a trace of fat. In Civ5, every choice feels important; you can imagine possible consequences of building this harbour or attacking that barbarian camp. Again, a tightly designed experience. That takes us to GTA. If there's one thing GTA consistently does right is creating the rich, believable worlds, especially compared to Saints Row. Instead of cutting the fat, they marble it lovingly throughout the game world. The streets of Liberty City are just close enough to being real that it is easy to forget that every car and person you see is almost instantly deleted as soon as they leave you field of view (though not as suddenly as they are in SR). I know I always have a couple hours of totally suspended disbelief when I play a new GTA; I'll be walking at the pace of foot traffic, avoiding collisions in cars, answering the phone (or at least feeling vaguely guilty when I ignore it). It feels meaningful to bash into a random guy on the street or to flip a car over while running a red light. It's a while before I start intentionally going ape shit, driving on the sidewalk and shooting people for no reason. And then, when I do go crazy, my choice seems more real, more satisfying and natural. The fact that your so free to be totally shitty and amoral in this believable world while at the helm of this fairly real seeming guy is the reason the term "ludo-narrative dissonance" exists. SR just goes "fuck it, this is a video game" and even though it plays much better than any GTA, there is zero effort put into making Steel Port feel like a real place where there could be actual consequences to your decisions. The people are just foul-mouthed abuse sponges for you do perform wrestling moves on or to kill with dubstep. They then push you through scripted missions where every meaningful decision you make beyond how stupid you want your guns and outfits to be was put there in advance. What I'm getting at is that I don't think it is how fast the game responses to your button press as much as how much of an impact you feel that button press made. If this is correct, feel free to just ask me what games to buy and I'll let you know.

There are also a lot of highs and lows in any given game of Dota 2 and a very real sense of gradual progression. The different phases of the game all offer different flavours of drama. Laning has the micro-intensive parry and thrust of last hitting / denying / pushing and the occasional touche / reposte when someone gets out of position. Ganking gives you those feelings of building tension you get when you see a play developing in soccer; supports roaming in, the target blissfully unawares, suddenly they get a bad feeling and BOOM shit goes down. And of course there's the laser light show of big engagements and base racing in 5-man doto. And all that comes AFTER the cerebral mind games of drafting (which are admittedly pretty boring until you have a fairly deep knowledge of the game and the teams playing). The tension rises, releases, falls and rises again while the towers are destroyed one by one, making for a lot of little stories over 45 minutes. Contrast that with the typical build-build-poke-build-drop-build-harass-build-build-CLASH-gg you get from a lot of pro StarCraft 2 games; even though you can have a whole Bo5 series in the time it takes to have a single game of Dota 2, it feels like less happens and that less CAN happen. ALSO also, things like this:

<derail> There should be a crossover game w/ Gone Home (from the Fullbright Company) called "Grrl, You Are Being Haunted" </derail>

So has anyone actually played the game? There are a lot of clunky UI problems but it's actually pretty fun once it gets around to presenting the very specific loop it wants you to play. The combat is silky smooth and just deep enough not to be boring. It actually does a pretty good job of figuring out how to make trying hard matter in a beat'em up for the first time since you were shoving quarters into Shadows over Mystara at the bowling ally in 1996. Honestly, the only time you even notice what the characters look like with any detail, its in town (which makes up about 1% of the time you spend in the game).

Divekick is basically Yomi the Video Game.

Screw this flower growing Street Pass game that shady rabbit sold me.

In theory, I love that Riot is actually asking these questions; how do we design around counter-play, how do we avoid anti-patterns. But in practice, because the game has been built by professionals and not grown over years of amateurs and crazy people, it lacks the organic fluidity of Dota 2.

GB Quickly Looked at Gone Home from The Fullbright Company

In my experience, a majority of 50hr $60 video games actually secretly cost $15 (if you have patience and a Steam account).

It's likely that you haven't played enough games for your MMR to be accurate. Elo style systems require large numbers before they are really mean anything, especially when they base your MMR ranking on the results of your games and not your individual performance (which wouldn't be any better honestly). I know Dota 2 is capable of generating an individual rating based on individual performance (you can make this info public in options, play a bunch of games to generate some results and use DotaBuff.com to see this for yourself) but I don't know how they use it in relation to your MMR (i'm fairly certain total games played is a significant part of it as I rarely seem to encounter people who've play vastly more than I have). You'll probably have to play a few dozen games before it gets accurate, during which you'll likely play in a lot of stomps, one way or the other. After that, you'll be more or less where you should be (whether you agree with their assessment is another matter ). Edit: it should also be mentioned that the pool of players have been hugely impacted with the game being released officially (not to mention all the "new" players who've been playing WC3 dota for 7 years).

That depends, do you value the aliveness of your wife? If you're not married... that can be... arranged...

You can view art or culture through the lens of a specific ideology and ask "does this promote or contradict the values of this ideology". Does it promote feminist values? How about libertarian values? Non-violence? Abolition? Anti-racism? Anti-authoritarianism? Now, if you want to ask if the failure to promote of those values is itself an objective moral failure, that's a harder question to answer.

Out of curiosity, how do you guys feel about Brienne of Tarth's impending rape being the catalyst for Jamie Lannisters redemption (an ongoing process from what I remember from the books as haven't read them in about 10 years)? Considering the problematic use of rape as short hand for the most evil thing and Jamie's characterization up to that point (a remorseless, honor-less childer killer), does it work? Does Jamie's development come at the cost of undermining Brienne? Is there something else that could have been used to stir Jamie to action? Is it even believable that Brienne's rape would do the trick?

This all sort of reminds me of this and makes me feel like this.

The worst mistake I made was cheating myself out of figuring out the languages. After I looked it up, I realized how close I was... THIS IS A SERIOUS SPOILER. IT ISN'T A JOKE SPOILER. DON'T LOOK AT IT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED.

The trailers are cool but it's a F2P MMO from Perfect World, so expect too either hurry up paying or hurry up grinding.

Mexican cricket snacks taste like those Chinese herbal remedy stores smell... lime.

No game takes "upgrade to jump higher" further than Crackdown. You can make your car drive up walls! It totally counts.

Crackdown: you upgrade everything, even your car. Assassin's Creed. Borderlands 1/2

Eva reference / lifted concept? Also, notice helmets full of juice, reliance on memories, monsters in the ocean, etc.

The works of Joan Cornella are like what would happen if the Perry Bible Fellowship went off its meds.