Golden Calf

Someone should make a free-to-play shooter wherein your framerate is locked into one of 5 groups based on which (constantly updated) quintile you fall into for money spent on in-game items. Dogshit - 12 fps / Horseshit - 24 fps / Bullshit - 36 fps / The Shit - 48 fps / Hot Shit - 60 fps Sounds pretty compelling to me.

Why the fuck does it cost a human effigy to fight Darklurker

I dunno, all this seems incredibly overeager to me, going literally from box art (!). To me he looks Asian. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't, but I don't know how useful box art phrenology is going to be when we haven't seen any in-game models and don't have a story breakdown. It goes without saying that I don't think a massive Ubisoft project is likely to produce a particularly nuanced story, but it feels weird judging them with essentially no information. Ya, it's a kind of weird image, but if he's Asian, doesn't that mean that he's a character that defies a stereotypical representation, and is potentially interesting, whether or not the execution is any good? I have literally no idea, unless there's some sources of info that I haven't seen. Edit: also, who even is this guy? Is he the villain? If in fact he is some white guy, maybe you're a local trying to repel his attempted power grab. There's so many ways it could play out.

Rohbuht is a standard pronunciation. If you watch old movies you'll hear it decently often. It's probably a regional thing.

Sean, you should listen to this past week's This American Life episode. It really got me right in the old gazoo.

But they already have a much better way of encouraging switching between weapons - the encounter design. Narrow corridors vs wide-open areas vs. places with good opportunities for ranged battle already make me vary my tactics and switch between weapons and magic and ranged stuff. What I'm actually doing to combat the durability part is buy another of the same weapon I already use and begin upgrading it so I can have an identical copy. But why? What is the value of forcing the player to rest at the bonfire all the time (more often than the other systems already do)? If I'm going to do that already, then I don't need extra encouragement. But when I technically don't need to rest (still have plenty flasks and spell uses) and would like to keep going, it forces me to interrupt what I'm doing. I claim that this is a bad design choice. I can definitely see wanting to limit weapon special attacks to be in line with spell uses. That seems like a great idea. I would be perfectly happy if weapons degraded much more slowly and special attacks chewed through durability much faster.

I feel like I only ever post to shit on this game, but I actually like it I promise! I think the durability system is so stupid. I do not understand what it's supposed to be accomplishing. SO MANY TIMES I've been doing really well in an area, killing mobs without using many of my healing items/spells, so that I would like to keep going, when it turns out my weapon is about to break. I don't want to have a bunch of upgraded weapons when I like the one I already have. And how are metal weapons so goddamn fragile while still being functional? All it ever does it interrupt my flow. I don't want to go sit at a bonfire, because I don't want to re-clear all this goddamn trash! So I usually end up switching to a shitty unupgraded weapon and putting down a small soapstone sign to be a mediocre helper, because durability is restored upon a successful summon. Sometimes this goes quickly. Sometimes, the summoner is a fucking moron and I can't be that helpful, so I have to go put the sign down again. Cool.

Ya I think the jumping stuff is the single worst part about the series. The controls and camera are in no way suited to the accuracy that some sections demand. It infuriates me that they doubled down on that stuff in DS2. And this I think is the second worst part about the series. Completely uninteresting gameplay. Still like the games, but I find those two things to be completely indefensible.

Man I love almost all of these. Word bans are good when you're trying to say something substantive but can only come up with 'compelling'. I don't think the cast usually suffers from a lack of descriptive flavor.

Do Miasmata or Neptune's Pride respect their players' time? The more I think about this concept the less I'm convinced it's a useful criterion for judging the quality of a game. I think there's something to be said for it maybe when thinking about MMOs, where in many cases much of the content is there to just keep you paying a subscription rather than providing an interesting play experience, but I think there are also a lot of games that just aren't interested in providing a compact, easily digestible gameplay session. In the case of Miasmata, you could plausibly play for maybe 30 minutes and then throw your hands up and say "dude, I get it, physically running around and navigating an unfamiliar island is difficult in real life, why do I have to keep running back and forth doing fetch quests?". But I think this would miss the point of the game, or why it's interesting. In a sense, part of the appeal of Miasmata was its unwillingness to provide a tidy playthrough. Dark Souls, Fallout 3, and Far Cry 2 all seem similar in this regard. With Fract (a game which I haven't played), I could be completely wrong, but it sounds kind of like 'not respecting the player's time' is longhand for 'boring,' even if the aesthetic and music components were interesting.

Ah ok, sorry to rope you in then. I dunno, I fully comprehended the sequence of events and what was happening in the plot. What I'm saying is that the characters' motivations seemed really strange / unrealistic to me.

I very much doubt that annualizing a souls-style game would pay off. Punishing mechanics fell out of fashion for a reason. Even though I loved Dark Souls, I'm only sort of enjoying DS2 and don't feel all that enthusiastic about the prospect of another. I suspect that they wouldn't get anything near the year after year success of an Assassin's Creed game. A souls game is something you have to commit to. Assassin's Creed is junk food.

I beat the game without upgrading my armor once. It never seemed that valuable to me.

I didn't expect that I would want to post something on here before I started, but I finally got around to playing part 2 of the DLC. As with the rest of the Bioshock Infinite content, my biggest problems are with the story/characterization. I have to say I really disagree about the quality of the characters, and of Elizabeth's story especially. I don't think any of the game's attempts at emotional or affecting moments were earned because of how poorly fleshed out the majority of the characters were. In most cases, I had a really hard time understanding the motivations of any of them. The random enemies with their propaganda barks were pretty laughable, but even the main characters were often inscrutable. Why does Elizabeth care about this random little girl? The game seems to hate its characters; and even worse - they seem to hate themselves! Booker had his self-loathing, and Elizabeth bizarrely offers her own take on this self-hatred. She starts blaming herself for the abduction of a girl she has no real connection to, in a world where the abduction of little girls is apparently commonplace, when she herself has been abused quite badly by the city and its denizens. All the while, she is decoding ciphers and repairing a quantum mumbo-jumbo machine through her own ingenuity (It brings Hitman to mind). And as her last act, having apparently developed a death wish, she delivers herself to Atlas and asks him to "get it over with" which he, of course, does. Where is this coming from? Or am I just missing something? Why does the game want to drape its characters in such unremitting misery? What is it trying to say, with its world where caring about a political philosophy or trying to better a political situation necessarily results in mass slaughter, where even highly competent and earnest people can't help but be murdered? All this stands in stark contrast to what actually made me want to post - the 2 minute intro scene. Despite everything I've said so far, I absolutely think you should play this DLC, if only for the intro scene. I've walked around in it for at least 10 minutes. It's nothing short of blissful, and genuinely made me sad that Irrational shut down. It does Disneyland way better than Disneyland does, with beautiful visual touches and truly incredible music effects. You start out with La Vie en Rose being sung by Piaf, played on a gramophone. As you move through the level, different parts of the mix fade in and then out again: orchestral strings, a man whistling, a girl on clarinet, a man singing, violin, accordion, guitar, female choir. Most of the sounds are diegetic. At the end of the section, Piaf has completely faded and been replaced by an instrumental trio and a non-diegetic female choir. I really can't do it justice - I found it beautiful. At the same time, you're walking through the streets, passing painters and musicians and vendors, most of whom have things to say to you. There's some cheesy romantic lines in French that are a treat if you can understand them. At one point Elizabeth asks a man in a bookshop for Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and he replies that he's sorry but it hasn't been written yet. It's happy, and warm, and transporting. There's so many cool little touches that show off the creators' talents. Even the distortion effect on the bookshop's windows is a cool artistic choice. I wanted to be there, and was sad when the music changed to signal that the miseryfest was about to start. It's not that I don't like sad or depressing things - I loved PI and Melancholia - but there better be a good payoff to make it worth it, something the Bioshock writing just didn't have. Well, I started writing this a few hours ago but got distracted, and now I've sort of lost where I had planned to land this argument. I guess it just makes me sad because it seems unlikely that we're going to get a big-budget, first-person, optimistic, beautifully realized world without a bunch of violence or grit for grit's sake, like the one from the intro to the DLC any time soon. Maybe someone's working on something like this and I have a huge blind spot? Maybe they're porting the Mass Effect Citadel DLC to the streets of Paris? One hopes.

I considered posting this in the Quitter's Club thread, but I'm not sure I've actually reached that point yet.... I've just got the first of the four lord souls (I think that's what they call them in this game?), and I have to say I'm really disappointed. There are several things about the game that I absolutely love. The pvp/coop/humanity changes are really cool, the npc interactions as they gather in the hub town are surprisingly interesting, the boss fights are challenging and feel genuinely, intrinsically rewarding. And yet. DS1 felt like a really amazing, intricately interconnected, densely constructed lego set. This game feels like they got a bunch of different lego sets, mixed them together, and dumped them on the ground. Sure, there are some interesting pieces here and there, but the overall feeling is (to me) so much less cohesive / tonally consistent. And it's massive! Granted, I've been pretty thorough and done a lot of pvp/coop/covenant stuff, but just getting the first lord soul has taken me 41 hours. The sheer volume of content has forced me to acknowledge how much I hate some of their design decisions: The illusory walls are not interesting. You either spend a lot of time ramming your face into walls while mashing a, or mash a whenever you see a message on the floor (ineffectually 99% of the time), or look at a walkthrough, none of which feels at all satisfying to me. The jumping/falling puzzles are tremendously annoying (or at least way too frequent) - jumps over gaps where you're given a decent amount of maneuverability can be pretty cool, but so much of the time in this version you're given very little space to work with and have to make a pretty specific angle, when the controls and camera are decidedly not suited to platforming. There are several item pickups that involve stacking fire resistance, running out to the item, hopefully picking it up before you die, and moving on to the next one. Wow, so interesting. Crystal Lizards. Item repairing. I could go on. Do any of these things dominate over the experience? No, not really. It's not that I'm frustrated, it's worse: I'm bored. I almost always enjoy the moment-to-moment combat, but I just don't feel compelled to keep playing, which is fucking bizarre to me, given how insanely excited I was for the game to come out. Edit: This all actually must have been discussed in the earlier pages of this thread, which I intentionally ignored before I had the chance to play it on PC. I'll be going back to read them now.

A lot of chocolate is genuinely different in the US than basically everywhere else. Hershey's uses a process to keep milk from going bad that produces butyric acid in the milk. Saves them money, but the acid remains in the chocolate. People in the US and Canada are used to it, but I can imagine it would be pretty gross if you're not.

Ok I see what you mean now, and it turns out I agree. It reminds me of a book I read a while back, whose name/author I can't remember, which talked about a theoretical Tetris game "about" the Holocaust in which the blocks are contorted people that you're trying to pile into a gas chamber - if you pack them in close enough, they aren't able to escape and will die, but if they aren't packed in close enough they start to become harder to manage and can eventually reach the top and escape and you lose. The obvious point being that this game is in no real sense about the Holocaust. It's a mechanical re-skin. My only (minor) disagreement would be that your take doesn't allow for serendipitously finding a theme that fits your mechanics without planning them around it from the start. I think it probably has more to do with how thoughtfully it gets implemented than with when the decision is made to do so.

I don't think I understand what you mean by having a theme inform mechanics as opposed to the reverse. Anyway, I think that modifying mechanics for thematic reasons is a great way to use systems to make a point: for example, you could have a game that involved, say, dealing pot in New York. You could make the difficulty change solely based on the race of your character, so that non-white characters are stopped by police at a higher rate than white characters, all other things being equal. If the thing you want to make a point about is itself systemic (e.g. prejudice, differences in outcomes for children based on parents' wealth, etc.), shouldn't a systemic representation be the best possible way to get people to experience that system?

I definitely think that you've put your finger on some problems with DA:O, but it seems to me that these are just examples of poor execution, and not of an inherent flaw in systemizing thematic elements. For example, if you're an atheist (as I am), you might make a game in which you could pray to God/gods, and even have npcs encourage you to do so, but make prayer have no impact whatsoever except waste your time. This would be a systemic statement that's an honest reflection of a certain world view (even if this isn't an accurate reflection of the nature of the world as such). There are a bunch of great examples of using systems well to communicate a point. Look at Rod Humble's independent games. Look at Cart Life. Here's a great analysis of two games about Depression in which systems do a majority of the heavy lifting in the story/theme department: Yep. It seems to me that not using systems in games to communicate thematic points would be like using movie theaters to show books scrolling across the screen.

I could be wrong, but it sounds like you are pretty low level? The combat, even on higher difficulty, is pretty simplistic at low levels because you haven't been given the range of skills/runes necessary to develop more sophisticated tactics. So ya, it's really boring early on. I agree that the tone/story leaves a lot to be desired. I think they just figured that the bulk of players are more or less going to be doing repetitive loot runs at the end game, and so they didn't invest a ton in one-off story moments that people will not want to see more than once. This is not an interesting first-person story game, it's a flashy piñata. The mechanics are going to get more difficult as you level up, but if you can't see yourself doing loot runs over and over late game, it might not be the game for you. I played a bit with some friends, and enjoyed my time getting gear upgrades for a little while. But there isn't much there, especially if you don't have a group of friends to play with. If you find the combat at all fun as you get a bit higher level though, you might enjoy sinking some time in late game. Edit: realized I basically said the same stuff everyone else already did : (

Oh awesome! I loved the bit about the cheese wheels. The unnecessary stuff at the margins that allow for personal flourishes and self-directed exploration are so important to why I enjoy so many games.

His riff on why he liked the original XCOM was gold. About how important it is that the game acts like it doesn't care about you, but instead just treats you as a regular actor within its rule set, as opposed to some pre-ordained hero. How that makes the experience feel authentic. It made me think about Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Far Cry 3, all games that I really loved running around in, but couldn't care less about the main story line. With Far Cry 3, I cleared all the camps, tried maybe 3 story missions, then never turned it on again. With the other two, I ran around for 100+ hours, developing my character and building up a found story, and though I did end up completing the main missions, I absolutely didn't give a shit about those sections. There's something fundamentally unheroic about being a hero in those worlds: the games go out of their way to flatter you with particle effects and sweeping music, but the problem was solved before you even got there, by the people who decided on the necessary inputs. It feels like riding the Disneyland Indiana Jones ride with someone patting you on the back, saying "Good job!" at every turn. I think the subsequent discussion of how Gone Home fits that paradigm was really astute. Makes me wish I could have been at GDC for that talk : (

I'm a TA for an Algorithms class, currently grading homework. Fully half of the students clearly cheated. I want to punch something.

Called it. But seriously this seems awesome to me.

I'm sad to say I'm really enjoying this. Hopefully the fun evaporates before my free month runs out.