prettyunsmart

That's what I'm kind of conflicted about too. I mean its great to not have only stick figure women in games, but it seems like the reason for it is less providing a greater amount of diversity and more mean-spirited humor (from my perspective at least.

Sorry. Is there a way to add the NSFW tag retroactively? This is my first topic. And yes, I could be projecting something negative on the game, and that's partially why I wanted to post this. Basically to see if I'm being troubled by the game because I'm troubled by everything or if there's some legitimately messed up things going on.

I really wouldn't care much if I got into the beta, but this is probably the one chance I'll get to see how it runs on my PC before release. Minimum requirements are pretty low, but I want to see how shiny I can make it look (as well as read reviews, make an informed decision, etc.) before I decide if I want to buy it. If only demos still happened more often.

Jazzpunk isn't really working for me, and I think it could be my fault. I started playing with the intention of finding as many jokes as possible and covering as much of the map as possible to do so. The problem is that this just kills the pacing. You end up clicking on each person you encounter over and over hoping a new thing will happen, or returning to areas with nothing in them in hopes of a neat secret. Since Airplane! has been a point of reference for understanding the game, I was thinking about how its the pacing that makes that movie work. Jokes are layered in over jokes without much of a break. When playing Jazzpunk obsessively, this isn't the case. I rarely feel like I'm playing a game wrong, but maybe I am this time.

Rumble at sunset, Sharks v. Jets style?

I had just about given up on Rust since I don't really have time right now to play consistently. I logged in last night to find that my house had disappeared, either because of the patch or decay. Then again, the prospect of setting up a police gang sounds too awesome to pass up. I'll have to check out that podcast

This was amazing, and I only wish I had seen this thread soon enough to contribute. Now we just need to swap out the portrait of Breckon with a subtly aging and more grotesque version a few times over the next few months.

As much as it pains me to admit, I think I need to quit Dark Souls. I had a good run. After walking away from the game a few month back after getting stuck at the gargoyles (I know...), I managed to make it to Anor Londo without too much trouble. I hit level 50 and was working on leveling my Black Knight Halberd to level 5. Then, while walking through the cathedral, I decided to check out that interesting painting on the wall. I got sucked into the Painted World, which everything I read leads me to believe I'm about 10 levels underleveled for without any items to cure the toxicity all the enemies around seem to inflict on me. Maybe it's time to throw in the towel. You win, Dark Souls. You win.

It could work as a story-based experience, I think. It reminds me a lot of The Conversation which is one of my favorite movies. I could see it working well with the tone of a 70s paranoid thriller, possibly (spoilers for The Conversation)

This game is weird. I have a short sequel to my other story. A few nights after my failed mountain-climbing expedition, I logged back into the same server to continue building my house and regain some of the loot I lost over the course of the journey. Things seemed to be running smoothly enough with the server chat remaining friendly for a while and players seemingly helping each other more than they were harming each other. Then, he showed up. In spite of the quasi-utopian community we had built on our server, a player joined who was fixed on the goal of fucking things up for everyone. He took to killing everyone on sight, offering to give gear, only to shoot people who came to collect it, and generally taunting everyone else over the server chat. Things only got worse when the airdrop came in. I saw the packages fall from my house in Rad Town valley and I started running in that direction. I managed to clean out the first one without any trouble (I ended up with 250 9mm bullets, shotgun shells, m4 bullets, some grenades, and some health kits) and I contemplating heading back. But, the appeal of two more packages was too much for me to pass up, and I hadn't seen anyone else in the area. I started climbing the hill where the second package dropped when I saw a player in a red shirt rise up from the ridge. He pulled out an M4 and started firing immediately. As I tried to run, a bullet caught me in the back and I saw the "bleeding" indicator kick in. My red-shirted assailant followed me around the other side of the hill and I pulled out my shotgun to meet him. As he rounded the corner, I fired. At this point, I realized my attacker was Caboose, who you might remember was my travelling companion from my last post. He thought I was the player who was killing on sight (or so he said). I managed to patch myself up and handed Caboose a bandage to do the same. As I did this, a zombie came up from behind me, finished me off and Caboose bled out before he could apply the bandage. When I respawned, my gear was gone and the airdrops had been fully looted. Yeah, this game is weird.

Here's my Rust story, which I felt compelled to write down after last night. It's a bit long, but I'm not sure how else to tell it. I had only played Rust twice before last night. Both times a man with a balaclava and a large gun promptly shot me in the face and stole my meager supplies within minutes of spawning. A few days ago, I noticed a post on the Giant Bomb forums about a new server a reader had started focused around collaboration and not killing each other on sight. When I logged in, I was glad to find out that this really was the case. Within a few minutes of signing on, an established player had offered to give me some supplies to get me started and pointed me in the direction of a larger settlement of players. Another led me around to spots where good items frequently spawned, and yet another helped me build a house. It is with this last player (who I’ll refer to by an abbreviated version of his in-game name, Caboose) that my real story begins. After helping me build my house, Caboose asked if I could help him get to the large Giant Bomb settlement. I agreed, figuring that I owed him for helping me to build my house, and that this sounded like an awesome piece of emergent gameplay/story. I followed Caboose across the road, into a large valley where we gathered supplies before heading out. Caboose lead me up the side of a mountain, I assumed in the direction of the settlement. The sunset over the mountain was gorgeous, and it really did feel like we were on a post-apocalyptic adventure, trying desperately to find the last human settlement. We crossed another valley and Caboose started climbing the mountain on the other side. At this point, I started to wonder if he knew where he was going. I later learned that while I thought he was sure where he was going, he was under the impression that I knew where we were going. It was on this second mountain that our journey took a tragic turn. I missed a jump across a crevasse and fell down inside. Caboose, in his attempt to help me get out fell in as well. When we told other players what had happened, I was surprised to see that a few of them immediately started searching for us. We fired off flares and gunshots to help them find us, but since we didn’t have a clear idea of where we were, they all ended up searching in the wrong part of the map. After a while, I just asked Caboose to shoot me. He reluctantly agreed, and a single shot from his shotgun brought up Rust’s signature “You Are Dead” screen. At this point, I just want to say that my character’s life, from carving out a meager existence with the help of a few friendly survivors to dying tragically after crossing two mountain ranges and failing to help his companion reach his destination felt like a complete story in itself. Of course, I respawned, because, video games. After gathering enough food to make the journey back across the mountains, I headed out. It was now night, which in Rust makes navigation nearly impossible. I found my way back to the valley below the mountain where Caboose was still trapped when my torch ran out of fuel. With no other way to navigate, I asked Caboose to fire off the few rounds he had left to help me locate him. Faintly, I heard a few small pops off to my left, and I started walking. It took some time, but I was able to climb back to where I had fallen, and I soon saw the glow of Caboose’s torch. We had tried to drop objects down to climb out, but the uneven ground at the bottom of the pit made it impossible. Our only choice was for Caboose to toss as much of his gear as I could carry to me, and for me to put him out of his misery with single bullet (actually, it took two now that I think about it). We met up back in town, and I gave Caboose his gear back. I’ll probably play Rust again soon, but I’m not sure any story that comes out of the game will soon match the tale of when Caboose and I tried and failed to cross the mountains to the Giant Bomb settlement. (PS - I attached a couple of pictures since I got an error when trying to send embed them. Also available in a more readable format on Medium)

Last night, I finished Octodad: Dadliest Catch, which was pretty neat. It was nice to see a comedy game come out where the humor comes both from the writing and the mechanics. Too often "funny games" just have wacky item descriptions or something like that on top of an otherwise rote experience. It falls apart at the end due to a difficult curve that ramps up a bit too steeply, but overall I thought it was a good experience. Video games aren't constrained by actors, sets, props, or anything like that, so they can be about literally anything (even if they often tend to just be about a small handful of things). Octodad is refreshingly different, even if it might prove a bit too strange for some.

"Dear Katie, I could tell that Lonnie was upset about our bottom tower going down, but she wasn't saying much. She just sat there watching approaching creep wave come our way."

For newer fiction that's both literary and accessible, you might try Gary Shteyngart. A Super Sad True Love Story is a fantastic, funny, melancholy near-future science fiction novel about man growing old in a youth-obsessed culture told through alternating diary entries and social media exchanges. Absurdistan is the story of a rich oafish Russian man who accidentally becomes an important figure in a civil war in a former Soviet republic. For non-fiction, I haven't actually read this, but I bought my wife a copy of The Poisoner's Handbook Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum for Christmas, and I've been anxiously waiting for her to finish it so I can steal it without feeling guilty.

That would be true for most periods of literary history. I was just reading yesterday about the standard narrative of early twentieth century fiction that suggest that realism dominated for 10-20 years, only to have modernism come along and replace it. Really, over the course of those decades there were melodramas, science fiction novels, pulp magazines, short stories, poems, children's books, as well as the canonized texts that everyone remembers being read just as widely. Anyway, more broadly, I was wondering what contemporary fiction you think of as subtle or not?

I picked up Octodad yesterday, and I think that might be the perfect palate cleanser. It's short, light in tone, pretty well written, and only frustrating in a comical way. Every time the controls get hard to handle, I always end up just laughing at the ridiculousness of the premise.

What discipline are you in if you don't mind me asking? I'm a grad student in English, so I'm always interested to measure faculty interest in gaming across fields.

I'll second Euro Truck Simulator. I picked it up on a Steam sale just for the hell of it, and it turned out to be one of my favorite relaxing games. Since you drive assigned routes, there are objectives and time limits, but nothing too unbearable. Plus, the game incorporates some sense of progression since you can work up to owning multiple trucks and managing a larger business with the money you earn from doing jobs. What I like about that is that there are goals, but nothing is pushing you to do them in any kind of timely fashion. It lets you go at your own pace, which is what I want out of a game like this. Good for listing to podcasts and audiobooks/10

DayZ does this in a way. Your hunger and thirst are always in play, so each moment you spend looking through a town consumes some of those resources. If you are too meticulous in your search, you can end up not having enough energy to make it to the next town. My last character starved to death because I searched to slowly and came up empty.

So how bad at video games can I be and still enjoy La Mulana? If the meets-meets-meets of the game is Spelunky/Dark Souls/Fez, that seems a little scary to me (who is a baby apparently).

I really enjoyed about 85% of the film, but the ending felt a bit hollow to me. Is that strange?

Some recent favorites: Ben Okri's Stars of the New Curfew: Quasi-magical realist short stories from a seriously under-appreciated Nigerian writer. Worth reading for both their originality and the devastating critique it offers of the international oil economy. Richard Wright's Native Son: I have no idea how I went this long without reading it. In any case, it's one of the most powerful books I've ever read. Visceral, effective, and impossible to forget. George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia: An only somewhat fictionalized account of the writer's time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. A fascinating study of both the fascination/horrors of war, and the complex political situation of early 20th century Spain.

Hi all, I've been listening to the podcast for a while now, and I decided to check out the forums. It's nice to see a place on the internet where people seem to be able to talk about video games without being outright horrible all the time (I'm looking at you reddit). Anyway, I'm a grad student in English and film, so I don't have as much time for games as I'd like. Still, I'm managing to spend a few hours here and there wandering Chernarus in DayZ, playing the Spelunky Daily Challenge, and trying to not be so terrible at Dark Souls.