Architecture

Man, archiving your own games is actually really fun. This was a close match where we were outnumbered by the end:

Holy shit, what? Uncharted 4 Director Leaves Naughty Dog Damn.

The stuff during the evac with Miller is running in-engine? On PS3? I would believe you if you said it ran in real time on PS4 or XBO, but 360 & PS3?

I think there are a couple of well-hidden loads between some segments; regardless, it's definitely pre-rendered in a few spots (there's no way the framerate would be stable in the last-gen versions during the final sequence).

Still prefer Doge2048.

Orange blips are grunts, red blips are spectres, red circles are pilots and red arrows are titans.

I'm not arguing that misogyny is your intent, but it certainly is a byproduct of your continued use of such insults. I'm a foul-mouthed person and salty language doesn't generally raise my hackles, but I've got a lot of female friends who've brought up the use of gender-specific pejoratives as unnecessary, even when you're upset and ready to let hurtful phrases fly. I certainly understand your trepidation when it comes to censoring speech, and how slippery the slope becomes once you start ruling out specific insults due to a perceived heightened crassness. The reason I pointed this out in the first place is because when it happens in Ground Zeroes, the player is given next to no context for Master Miller's outburst. You could have replaced the word bitch with a number of other expletives and the scene would have lost none of its meaning.

I don't have time for a full takedown of what you've written, but suffice it to say that I disagree with everything you're asserting and find your line of thought to be poisonous. Your usage of bitch is misogynist in both examples you've posted--there's no difference between emasculating men through its use and slinging it as a gendered insult towards women. You're far removed from reality if you think that your use of these pejoratives is gender-neutral.

Playing around with Nvidia's Shadowplay. No idea who the dudes chatting are, but it ends pretty quickly. I came in mid-match and it's not the best game of all time, but I have some fun kills. I will probably start archiving some of my gameplay just for fun. For some reason the timestamp isn't working, but gameplay starts at 43s.

It's funny because I almost mentioned how much it reminded me of Arkham City. Wonderful game, but Catwoman being called a bitch incessantly made me sick to my stomach. It's just unnecessary, regardless of how "authentic" its use might appear.

That's probably my least favorite part of the game--you're literally running in circles.

Traversal is definitely much better with keyboard and mouse. Being able to turn while in the middle of a boost changes everything.

You mean the one slightly off the beaten path before you reach Comstock House? Smh, gents. Smgdh.

Real estate is mostly useless in this game, save for Trevor's airfield. Preferring GTA IV's driving model, however, leads me to question your sanity.

The difficulty spikes are such that while I enjoyed routine combat on hard, any time a boss or scripted sequence occurred it was like getting kicked in the balls repeatedly. I even had the end meat-grinder scenario break on me to the point where I'd killed everything but the finale wouldn't trigger, so I had to play it all over again.

The ending cutscene is at least twice that length, and Master Miller's rampant misogyny is frankly repugnant.

I suppose it's time for me to hang up this avatar. Any suggestions for its replacement?

I always got the abstract impression that Ubisoft made things their own, even when licensing middleware. I was actually operating on the assumption that the Assassin's Creed series was running some modified version of Unreal--I had no idea it was running on Ubi's proprietary Anvil.

I suppose I'll take a look at Unity. Does the free version have enough of the toolset available to make it worthwhile? I can't imagine shelling out for their licensing in light of how cheap the alternatives are. The local community college offers game design degrees, so I started looking into the curriculum. I'm thinking it wouldn't hurt to take some classes just to get brought up to speed on proper nomenclature and accepted design philosophy.

I'm criticizing everything aside from the opening hour, really. I really loved walking around in a video game for an hour without being required to just fucking murder everything in sight. Bioshock's violence is particularly gruesome, too--unnecessarily so, I'd argue. I think the disappointment for some of us is that it literally took hundreds of people millions of dollars and six years to realize one man's vanity project. Bioshock Infinite is Ken Levine's double album; he's fucking done.

If you would like to see a reviewer features as a subjective reviewer of the month

You should just stop now as you've seen everything worth seeing. You can Youtube the ending if you absolutely must know how it finishes. Edit: I realize how harsh and dismissive that sounds, but I feel like everything that Ken Levine promised failed to materialize. It's funny how similar this and The Last of Us ended up being (down to the same goddamned lead voice actor!), and yet how easy Naughty Dog made it all look while Irrational drowned in its pomposity. I find it incredibly difficult not to become venomous when discussing this game--it's more of a denouncement, really--and I'm not entirely sure why, to be honest. I think it might have to do with how insulted I felt intellectually. Mr. Levine hammered his utterly simplistic, derivative view of the world over my head with such force that I had no choice but to recognize its klutziness. Technical wizardry can't mask nonsensical storytelling.

Splinter Cell is still 2.5, correct?

Weren't all of the previous stage demos shown on PC?