Bjorn

I loved that game, it's up there as one of the best movie related games ever made.

What about collaborative/cooperative story telling games? Like Sleep is Death? This is a genre that has barely been explored, except for SiD, kind of Neverwinter Nights (I never played it with others)...and nothing else I can think of. I'm not going to say its simple, but if you wanted to explore replayable narrative, giving players an interesting toolkit to work with and allowing players to influence the stories being told to one another would be a fascinating avenue. I suppose you could make an argument that the D Souls games are exploring this in a very minor way. Player actions affected World Tendency in the first game, which ended up being a rather broken system since it tended towards neutrality, but there has to be an interesting way that the global community of players could affect narrative. And in both games, the ghosts and messages create a kind of odd secondary mini-narrative to an area. So yeah, I suspect that the solution to a narratively replayable game is not to look at the traditional single player narrative game, but to branch out and consider what current technology would empower that hasn't been explored narratively. On traditionally narrative games, the only ones I can think of that I like replaying are either classics that I go back to replay years later, or games with such tremendously strong mechanics that I want to spend more time with it, in which case a branching narrative is a bonus. Two series I can think of that match that are Dead Rising and the D Souls games. There are people who bounce off the mechanics of both those games, and that's fine. But for me, I wanted to spend more time in those worlds screwing around with the mechanics, and the fact that I could experience different story content along the way was a terrific extra goodie.

I drive through Ellis a couple of times a year going back to my hometown. A couple of spoilery thoughts about the game:

Finished this up tonight, pretty great pulpy Western game. Everything I had heard recommended about it clicked really well with me. It's actually pretty neat to play a game that is partially set in Kansas, and references multiple parts of our history accurately enough (at least accurately enough in the lore cards, the game itself it clearly drawing on the legends of the West). Flyover country tends to get the short shift in fiction, so there's an odd pride and happiness seeing it show up in some piece of media. Some of the civil war era history referenced in the game still matters around here as well . The burning of Lawrence, Kan., is mentioned several times, as several iconic Western legends were associated with it. It was, in part, retaliation for the burning of Osceola, Mo. Which is something that some people in Osceola are still pissed off about to this day. And that era still fuels the KU-MU rivalry (sadly defunct since Missouri left the Big 12). That rivalry produced my favorite t-shirt ever made, which I'm sharing just because it's awesome.

Nice, congrats!

They've been hired to do the tie-in game for the upcoming live action Captain Planet movie. That's the emblem of one of the Planeteers. I would be kind of excited if this were actually true.

If everyone who has volunteered dies before being able to help, I'm going to suggest that no one else volunteer.

Ah, okay, didn't know how to take your previous post. Agreed, to both.

I would argue that it's fact, because you can place BI in a historical context of similarly racist material, and show the lineage from which it is descended. If people choose to ignore or be ignorant of that lineage, that's their problem and choice. But it doesn't wipe out history, or what parts of it BI draws on in negative ways.

I almost commented on the racism thing earlier, but didn't want to derail this. BI has bad problems with how it handles minorities. I'm stating that as a fact, because it's a fact. The way the Vox Pop and Daisy are handled, in the context of how narratives involving whites and blacks often play out, it's problematic at best and racist at worst. For a lot of people who pay attention to gaming news, talking about BI being racist isn't a "gotcha" style claim that needs explaining in the context of this thread. This has been pretty thoroughly discussed around the Internet. It doesn't need to be rehashed here. You can go check out the BI thread here, there were discussions about it there. Or check out some links on the previous page. I don't think this thread should derail into a discussion about racism in BI. We have other places for that.

It's part of the Gone Home universe, it's going to be a forest burning simulator that takes place simultaneously as the events of GH.

HEY GUYS! HEY GUYS! HEY GUYS! I beat Yama for the first time today. On the Daily Challenge. The first time I had ever been to the City of Gold. The first time I had ever been to Hell. FUCK YEAH! 761 total attempts to finally pull it off.

The plasma cannon can be a random drop? Mind blown.

I was looking to see if anyone had brought this up. Yes, we all just want some escapism sometimes, but it's so much easier to ignore a problematic element of a game when it doesn't directly affect you. That is one of the benefits of having a privilege, it's much easier to just ignore things that might make you uncomfortable. And that privilege is reinforced when someone suggests that it would be better for everyone involved if we just didn't bother to talk about it so much. One thing I've been trying to do more lately is to notice when a game handles gender or race in a positive way, to paint good examples of how to do it right. We spend a lot of time criticizing games that do it poorly, and we ought to spend some time raving about the games that try to do it better, to serve up as an example of how to improve. Two that might be easy to miss are: Thomas was Alone: Through most of the game, you have 7 characters, 4 male and 3 female. Not equal, but a better than typical balance. None of them feel like they lean too heavily on a stereotype, and 2 of the females go against typical gender norms. Later in the game, there are 5 additional characters introduced, of which 3 are male, 1 is female, and 1 is non-gendered(!). These things are just bloody blocks, and yet they do a better job with gender than virtually any AAA game. It also touches on both ableism and ageism. And yet it would be really easy to not notice any of this stuff, because the game is fun and well written. It's a great example that having diversity doesn't make a game less fun (something that I have seen people claim). The Banner Saga: Major bonus points for having a conversation about the role of gender in a society in the middle of a video game. They could have done better, but I think it's clear they approached gender in a thoughtful way, made interesting characters first, and at one point give the player an option to empower/disempower women in the camp to appease the men who would rather risk death than empower women. Which when you think about this conversation in terms of video games, is a holy-shit-meta kind of thing. Also, there are some major spoilers that actually show that gender plays an even bigger role in the game than is obvious if you haven't played the whole thing. I like that we are starting to get more games that we can point to and say, "Look, look at these games and how good they are and how well they deal with gender. There's no reason that a majority of games can't be like this."

Anyone on here a Space Rangers 2 fan? I started it up last night and played a bit. It seems like the kind of game that I should love, but after 3 hours I felt like all I had been doing was aimlessly flailing around, completely incapable of fighting anything, and the actions I could take to make money all felt like massive time sinks without very much gain. I can see how once you pass a threshold of having a certain amount of power/money/equipment, it would really open up, I just don't have a good judge for how long this intro period is going to last. Any tips on getting going?

The Internet has produced so much fucking terrific short horror/weird stuff. Those may or may not be true, but they feel so true that it doesn't matter, which is what makes them so deliciously unnerving. If true, that would give me nightmares for years. Edited to add: So I just burned like 30 minutes browsing through stories in Let's Not Meet. One of the top ones is Violin Hill, which looks to be a descendant of the Smiling Man story.

Go for it, you'll be a billionaire!

Technically it's probably possible, but logistically you would have some challenges. The ship would have to be registered out of a country where weed was legal. A US ship couldn't get away with it. You would have to get rid of all the weed prior to docking in a place where it was illegal. You'd have the cost of getting the weed from a country where it was legal to the vessel. This is one of the reasons that a lot of cruise ships also have casinos in them. The casinos have to be shut down when in port in most countries, but can open once they are far enough off-shore.

That's great. I had tried to think of something similar to say, but couldn't word it in a way I was happy with. Basically I'm no where near where my 19-year-old self would have expected me to be. But I doubt I would give him any advice if I had the chance to talk with him. The good, the bad, the ugly, the glorious all helped get me to a point that I'm really happy with. My general advice to people that age is to go to school and give it their best shot, but don't be ashamed if you leave or change your mind. And if you don't have a lot of international travel experience (the OP might with dual citizenship), do a semester of study abroad. That semester might end up being more important than all the rest combined.

I've hit a brick wall getting to the City of Gold. I'm mostly just doing the Daily Challenge, but I'm consistently robbing the market, getting the Hedjet, and then dying in usually ridiculous ways on the first or second level of the Temple. The worst was dying within sight of the Golden Door. I will get there. Oh yes I will.

Super charming interview over at RPS with Gaynor and Zimonja.

Your first time through, I don't think there's any shame in taking help (PC or NPC) into that battle. If you feel like you need to level up a bit, that's also a pretty fantastic place to do it. If you can handle the silver knights, there's a pretty efficient path to clearing them out that nets lots of souls in short order. Not the best place to grind, but a very convenient one.

Kalameet is still the only enemy that I wasn't able to cut the tail off of, despite trying with two different characters multiple times. I've seen and played with every weapon except whatever you get from him.

If you're not aware of it, Co-Optimus has an extensive searchable database of coop games. Makes it a lot easier to find games on whatever platforms you own that have local co-op. I'd suggest the Lego games. My wife and I have played most of them. They're great games for when we want something that's fun and goofy, but not particularly challenging.

I've been trying to work through some of the smaller/shorter games in my backlog over the last couple of weeks. Played straight through Thomas Was Alone this evening. :tup: :tup: It was just a joy from start to finish. I knew next to nothing about it, other than the art style, so the whole experience was a really pleasant surprise. It's the perfect length to play through in one evening (3ish hours). The puzzles and platforming were mostly easy, but that was actually nice. It had a zen quality to it of moving through each level without ever feeling stressed. It also does story telling and characterization better with a single narrator than a lot of AAA games do. Also, browsing through the Steam forums on it, saw this link that a theater group at UT in Austin is doing a stage adaptation of it this spring. So that's neat.