catfishmaw

Dang I want to play this game.

Didn't realise there'd been an xkcd about it! Time to print this off and tape it to my tutor's office door. I was sort of thinking that the game would involve trying to decipher the mad text, but living in the alien world it describes sounds way better!

I don't really know how to phrase this without it sounding like an ethical confrontation, but why won't it keep you from buying a game?

Woop. Sorry, guys. Gonna try and work on my reading comprehension skills.

I don't read reviews, but if I'm to give shoutouts to the criminally underappreciated, I think I'd like to draw attention to Dan Bruno. I read a lot of bullshit video game blogs, and a lot of them are pretty smart or whatever. Dan's is mostly about music theory in video games. I recommend the stuff on Mother 3 if you want to really bake your noodle.

Is anyone else experiencing this bug in Calculords? Occasionally, at the end of my opponent's turn, my calculator will fail to produce a new set of numbers. The animations and music continue to run, but I can't play unless I forfeit the match. It's very irritating. And do any of you have any advice re: deck building? I made a hyper-offensive deck as an experiment, and creamed Sergeant Blok with it, but that didn't give me much of a feeling of proficiency, because he's the most predictable enemy anyway. I find I can beat him in a couple of turns just by mainlining a single lane. I know everyone's in the mood to talk it up, and planning your turn is good fun, but it's really not that complicated. Cards operate according to simple rules, and I rarely find myself employing any kind of strategy. Do the Penny Arcade guys have any redeemable features? I watch the whole of the Strip Search reality TV show they did. Some of those artists were wonderful, and exceptionally hard workers. It sucked to see them struggle for a job working with those two.

Right. I guess I misspoke; I thought the gamepad could be used to physically control the position of the camera, and buttons could be used to change the orientation of the cab you're in (I guess that was called the Dash Engine).

I hadn't thought of that. I guess you could use the gamepad as a gestalt camera! I've never actually seen or used a Wii U, but maybe the shoulder buttons could be used to take a picture. Is the controller light enough to hold it up to the screen? Maybe the game could have a non-adjustable on-rails view on the main screen, and a zoomed-in picture on the gamepad screen. I seem to remember that, in the original, you could turn slowly in 360°, or you could swivel about 90° with a C-button, Resident Evil-style. Maybe that could be how you'd move around. I want to throw an apple at a Cherrim or a Hoppip and watch in judgment of their cannibalism

I'm certain this has been said before, but why was there no Wii Pokémon Snap? It's a match made in heaven. Also there clearly needs to be a Voynich Manuscript game

I guess I'm just going to act as though the stated rules of the FIGCE thread are still being observed. I just played Kindness Coins. I really enjoyed it! I think my favourite touch is the sound effect which plays for the protagonist when you rebuff/affirm his question about practicing music over the summer break. I think dating sims feed into an adolescent male narrative of entitlement, and I'm always glad to see it taken down a peg. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the protagonist would have so graciously apologised. I kind of imagine him throwing a big, misogynistic tantrum. But maybe it's good that the writer has a little more faith in humanity than I do.

I think I disagree, but it might be because I have an ambivalent relationship to the Frankfurt School. I'm going to have to apologise, too: I'm really much more familiar with Adorno. After Adorno and gang returned to Germany (minus Benjamin, who died in 1940), they were surprised to find that they were seen as reactionaries by modern German students. That probably has a lot to do with their complicity with the filth, but I like to believe that a set of critical tools resembling some form of proto-Cultural Studies had taken hold among the postwar left, i.e., that even the basest form of mass-produced entertainment had cultural value of some kind. Perhaps that value derives from the way its rhetoric is deployed, rather from the elegance of its construction, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter in our society. Triple-As would have repulsed the troop much more than the products of Hollywood, I think. I like to imagine their horror at contemplating the WoW-addicted hoards. Ultimately, given their distaste for facsimiles of art objects, I don't think they would have survived contact with the Internet, where facsimiles of every cultural artefact are the order of the day. But certainly Adorno's more liberal modern advocates must derive comfort from the indie "space" (I wanted to say "scene", but I think that's actually worse). More of us are having more personal relationships with more contrived works. By all accounts, a good video game requires phenomenal skill to construct, and solicits a deep emotional impact on those who play it. If that isn't legitimate because their form was generated "by" capitalism, then I'm flummoxed. Wasn't every modern art form? Are we supposed to make art with only the tools created by extra- or pre-capitalist societies? (Probably got a load of shit wrong because I've never read Benjamin. Sorry.)

I thought I'd join this forum, since I generally have a lot to say about the games recommended on each Idle Thumbs episode. I have no ability to predict whether I'll post three or three thousand times, and I feel a little uncomfortable posting in this thread. Anyway, video games.

I know this isn't exactly the subject of Pedercini's talk, but do you think this argument necessitates the premise that, as we become more comfortable with, and more naturalised toward, rationalising mechanics in video games, we as individuals become more inured to the rationalisation capitalism subjects us to? The obverse seems to be his goal in game design: that by making rationalisation mechanics in his games less elegant, or suboptimal, he hopes to alert players to the subordinating reality of rationalisation in daily life, or at least to the potential consequences of uncritical gameification. (I can't help but be amused by the irony Pedercini himself notices: that because a game is a mechanical system, even a game designed explicitly to provoke inelegant solutions, or to unbalance the player's obsession with optimisation, will inevitably still motivate some version of optimisation in some players.) Anecdotally, my experience with emotionally engaging games is very different from my experience with games which stimulate my rationalisation drive. I love The Walking Dead, but I've given over much more time to Rymdkapsel.