Bjorn

Eeep! Don't Starve expansion announced! Giants? Autumn? Full expansion, not just more content through patches? https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=v_hU6t488Us

I've played on and offline and can't say which I prefer more. I think I like my introduction to these games to be offline, and then once I'm familiar with a fair number of things, to switch over to online. I enjoy the crushing depressed isolation offline mode brings with it.

I noticed all those things, but ultimately the game moved fast enough and maintained my suspension of disbelief well enough for me to just overlook them. I can see how they would bother someone though.

Indie dev Jason Rohrer ran an editorial a few days ago about how Steam sales are ultimately bad for everyone and destroying everything we love. I feel like his entire argument is built on a set of flawed assumptions, depends too much on an outlier like MInecraft and ignores data points that would be inconvenient to his argument.

I logged in on the website this morning to claim the free games so far this month. It still shows Brothers as "coming soon" to PS+. Didn't see a date though.

The lack of editors historically makes them so much harder to add from a dev cultural perspective. In journalism (my background), editors are simply omnipresent from your earliest experience. Sometimes you hate them, sometimes you love them. But most of the time you recognize that they made your work better and are thankful for them. This was on my mind recently after reading this retrospective on a classic Rolling Stone piece about the mysterious death of Jerry Lee Lewis' fifth wife. The whole article is reprinted there, but there is a foreword about the writing and editing process that shows how stressful, but ultimately needed, the editor was. Of course, that was just cutting dozens of hours of work of one person, and all the work that was cut still informed the rest of the piece that eventually ran. But how resistant would people who had never worked with an editor be to the process? I wonder if some talented modders could make "Director's Cut" style versions of games like BI? But even that is antithetical to the modding community, since they are more likely to add or create new content rather than cut.

Dammit Japan.

Is there a thread talking about game pricing, and various philosophies behind it? Was curious about people's reaction to Jason Rohrer's argument against Steam Sales.

I finally finished this last night, after having started it months ago. Disjointed is one of the best words that can be used for it. There are good things here, some design and story decisions that reflect the absolute best that video games can be. But then there are elements that represent the worst aspects of games. I think all the things that bugged me have been talked to death (disjointed narrative, racism, ludonarrative dissonance, pacing, abandoned themes/opportunities, etc.). What video games need are editors, something that exist in every other medium. Great films, novels and journalistic works often reach their final state thanks to an editor. Someone who takes the raw material of the creators, and with a fresh and more removed perspective, puts it all together. A good editor would have cut about a third of the content in BI, making the whole experience tighter. They would have questioned elements like how Daisy was handled. They would have weaved earlier hints about the ending into the story to make it feel less like a separate story at the end. A great example of this would have been the battle with Slate in the museum. That whole piece could have, with minor changes, setup the ending in a much more elegant way while exploring racism in a more nuanced way. Unfortunately the nature of video games is such that including a traditional editor into the process may be impossible. The budgets are so big, the need to make these 20-30 hour experiences so pervasive, and release schedules so tight that I don't know how you successfully change the production structure to allow for that editor to come into play.

Kojima?! KOJIMA?!! KOJIMAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

I would probably amend my list to add Bioshock Infinite as an honorable mention, after finishing it this evening. I still feel like it has a lot of flaws, but it's rare for a game's ending to have a dramatic effect on my opinion of it. BI achieved that. I haven't played it, though I loved the first one. It was just the kind of game that struck me as worth waiting until I could get a deal on it. A kind of evergreen experience that it would be fine to get to a year later.

It didn't occur to me to do that until after I finished the game. Doh! I got through it this evening, a very enjoyable and paced experience. Though it was really just hitting its stride when the ending hit. I want part 2!

Tripping the Rift Games?

I actually had to quit watching the guy try to talk to women at a bar. That was just way to awkward for me to handle. There's a woman I know who works as a sex surrogate (I'd suggest reading the link if you're not familiar with the term). I know that one of the situations she often feels where she has done the most good is with adult virgins. Over a period of time, she's able to walk them through flirting, foreplay and eventually to sex. She said they usually have so much anxiety built up about sex, that a controlled environment like that does a lot of good for them.

As a consolation prize, you're probably the only player in the world to have ever died at Olmec twice in a row from falling damage.

Oh wow, 6 Central then. That's way earlier than I would have guessed. Thanks!

I'll have to watch this tomorrow. The idea is...hilariously broken in a way that only "reality" tv could break a good idea. It's a great idea to have a show discussing sex in an entertaining, frank and hopefully also educational way. But the gimmick here seems so limiting.

What time does the Daily Challenge reset? I thought I played earlier enough last night to be on Friday's, but when I went to play this afternoon, it showed it as being already done.

Catherine has been on my list of of games to play since it came out, but I never remember to actually buy it. I also haven't played through Heavy Rain. I just played through Anne Hathaway Erotic Mouthscape. An interesting piece of erotic fiction, but I still struggle to understand simple twine pieces. Does the act of clicking on a word to reveal the next "page" do something for some people? Larger twine pieces I get, in that they have more choices and interactivity. I did play with Ute a bit last night. If you enjoy this sort of thing, it's worth doing just to see all the animations. It's a very simple game, but does have interesting commentary on sex. Women's sexual history can affect who they date in the future. Women have more control over when sex happens than men. Women can get sex pretty much whenever they want, if they are willing to lower their standards.

1300 followers? Please, please let them be people who are following him just to laugh at him.

Woot! I beat Olmec for the first time, and on the Daily Challenge for Friday no less! Strange evening, I did some warm up runs that were terrible. Mostly died in the caves. Figured screw it, I'll just do the challenge and then play something else. And as soon as the challenge run started I was in a zone. Had a few close calls in the Temple, but otherwise it was probably the single best run I've ever made.

The cost and logistics of building that system are still prohibitive though. Wireless HDMI alone is still relatively expensive to incorporate into a device. And cooling would be a major factor. You can build something like a 360 into a portable form factor, but it's going to run really hot and eat batteries like they're Coco Puffs.

Saw that news about Nintendo, they seriously failed to anticipate the reaction to the Wii U. Revised anticipated sales down by something like 6 million. I don't know what role they are playing anymore, other than delivering platforms for their own games. They don't feel like a real competitor to Sony, MS or PC anymore, just this company off to the side that does their own thing. But it would really weird to live in a world where I could buy Zelda for a PS4. Not bad, but weird.

Does the diagonal that you throw with on Spelunky affect the angle of the throw?! I had assumed it only used the 4 cardinal directions. If so...mind blown.