Ninety-Three

Turns out that census data is pretty easy to dig up. Using 2011 numbers, 59% of the UK is Christian, while 64% of the white UK is Christian. Given that the UK has less than two million black people with a 69% rate of Christianity, they're not buoying the numbers much. The large categories are Christian (59%), No religion (25%), Religion not stated (7%) and Muslim (5%).

I am horribly, miserably sick, and I have so little energy that I spent ten minutes staring at the landing page of Minecraft not clicking "Start". I figure that means I'm going to be lying in bed watching a lot of movies until I get better. Does anyone have any recommendations for "quiet" movies that would be good to watch while in this low-energy state?

They've said if they were to do a sequel, it'd probably be a whole new cast. That said, I agree with you, given how they vaguely established time travel to work, it seems like they would have to come back to the same message in LiS2.

I tried to watch this live on Twitch, but their stream was plagued with technical issues (stream started very late midway through a game, repeated audio dropouts, I think the stream died at one point...). Does anyone know if DF has put up a glitch-free upload of all the stuff they tried to stream?

As I understand it (as someone who doesn't like them), they're popular more for their character banter than their action sequences, but "fun" seems like a generally accurate description.

Save The Date veers pretty strongly into visual novel territory (which is to say, it doesn't have a lot of gameplay to speak with), but it's definitely saying something, and the interactivity of it matters to the message, so I'll recommend you give it a look.

Just paste a link to youtube.com into your post and it automatically embeds the video, like this. Your link didn't embed because the auto-embed only works for literal youtube.com, not the url-shortened youtu.be.

I've been checking this thread for several weeks and I just realized this thread's title is a Ghostbusters joke. I don't have anything to say about FO4, I just wanted to share my realization in case anyone else missed it. Good job on the title, mikemariano.

I had my camera with me during a very pretty sunset. These are the best of the photos I got.

Bouncing on the torches refreshes your walljump (just like bouncing on enemies). Theoretically (assuming the jump distance works out) you should be able to chain walljumps off the torches and go off the top of the room, which will obviously do something because the whole room is set up to facilitate that.

No seriously, this room. It's like, one in ten treasure rooms. Surely someone who is good at walljumping has either reached the top and gotten some kind of bonus area, or confirmed that it's impossible to do so. Does anyone in this thread know? The curiosity is killing me.

Zero out of ten was more a comment on chapter 5 than the game as a whole, to be clear. The first three chapters felt like a story about nothing (slice of life, I think they call it), and then the fourth chapter was the payoff where all these characters and backstories we've been establishing do something interesting. In chapter 5, even the open areas like the gallery felt less... open. I wanted to push a button to eat the food, to kick the villain when they were down, have an actual conversation with someone rather than a "click to inspect" dialogue. Little pointless things that would have contributed to a feeling of agency. Given that chapter 5's deadline had already slipped pretty far, I wonder if the whole thing was a rush job, Dontnod feeling like they couldn't delay it another month. Given how often episodic games miss deadlines (or in the case of something like Dreamfall, ship buggy episodes just to get something out), I wonder if the model is actually harmful. It kills me that they ended up not giving any consequences to most of your decisions. The scene on the roof in ch 2 was a brilliant solution to the problem of "We want player choice to matter, but creating branching content takes a lot of work". They had multiple choices feed into the event and ultimately influence a binary outcome, solving the problem that n choices create 2^n content branches. Apparently they stumbled onto that brilliant solution by accident and without realizing it, because the idea is never touched again.

Do I have bad taste? I think Alien is overrated. Maybe I just watched it under bad conditions, but I had a big problem with the movie being way too dark. A lot of the time the characters might as well have been acting against a pitch-black background for all I could see. Most of the time, I found it dull, rather than tense. Overall I got the same impression as mentioned for Citizen Kane above: I'm sure it made a lot of important and impressive advancements in its time, but watching it in 2015, all of that gets taken for granted, and I feel it doesn't have much left after that.

Stop reading youtube comments. I'm not? Where are you seeing this negativity then? I haven't seen any. It hasn't been present in the last four pages of this thread, and the only negative message about the game in the linked article was "The more I see of the game, the more shallow it feels, like an endless, inch-deep ocean, and the less I’m interested in it." I've seen a lot of people saying "Don't get excited because nobody even knows what you do", but "Don't get excited" is a very different message than "This game is going to suck".

Obviously "think".

The thing is, watching video ads or dealing with obnoxious content-blocking banner ads does cost me something: a bit of my time. It's a small amount, of course, but what the content creator makes off the ad is even less. From this article: Even at the high end, that's a quarter of a cent per ad viewed. If someone makes a video every week for six years, and I watch them all, even at the top end of that estimate it adds up to less than a dollar worth of ad money. I can't help but find the business model insulting. To run ads is to state "I'm going to waste half a minute of your life so that I can have a fraction of a cent." I don't hate the idea of ads, just the terrible value proposition they've settled on.

Wall-jumping may be minor, but the combo system is so essential. Not just for the mechanical benefits, but because of how it makes you play. The game is a million times more fun when you're trying to go fast and stay airborne, rather than descending meticulously. I always buy charge (at least in world 1 and 2). If I'm full health, sometimes I even end my combos at 15 because I'd rather get +3 charge from three 15 combos than +2 charge +2 hp for two 25 combos. The way I see it, if I got +100 hp, that would mean +25 max hp, and I'd die in 29 hits, which is a lot. But if I got +100 charge, I'd be able to shoot for forever, so I'd never take damage in the first place. I'd rather build towards tons of charge than tons of HP.

Finished the final chapter. Zero out of ten, would not recommend. This chapter wanted to be a movie. It dropped all feelings of openness and interactivity to funnel you down a linear series of cutscene-filled corridors. And the movie it was trying to be was awful. Pacing is weird, plot threads (like the ghost deer) go unresolved, characters become certain of of things they could only know if they read the game's script, and unlike the great moment in Chapter 2, none of your choices have consequences beyond a "Hey, remember when you made that choice? You sure made it. Moving on." shoutout. But worst of all, most of the last part of the chapter is spent in a dream sequence where nothing makes sense and nothing matters because it's a dream, and it drags on for half an hour. Half an hour! Thirty entire minutes trapped in a constantly-shifting dream logic world (complete with obnoxious stealth section)! How did anyone at Dontnod think that was okay? How did enough people to get it approved think that was okay? Eighteen hundred FUCKING SECONDS!

I haven't enjoyed the general Telltale Narrative Game model much, but Tales from the Borderlands intrigues me because it seems like it might be trying to be less of a dramatic choice-chooser where your choices can't affect the outcomes, and more like a fun romp where your choices can be satisfying because you got to punch out a robot or something silly. Since everyone's talking about it, I figured I'd ask while I have the chance: Is TftB more of the same from Telltale, or is there a chance I might like it, as someone who has disliked everything else they've put out lately?

Emphasis added. You didn't read my post. You're saying things that are objectively not true. The most charitable assumption I can make is that you merely skimmed it, in which case I must ask you to actually look at the content you're talking about. My post looked at thirteen positive reviews. Only 21 of 46 negative reviews engaged (positively or negatively) with the idea that it was a game, 19 more merely referred to Dear Esther as a game in sentences such as "It's a pretty game", which is hardly engaging with the idea. One of the "not a game" reviews I linked makes any mention of challenge, and zero mention failure. When people explained why they thought it wasn't a game, they weren't wildly varying: some said "it feels more like an experience/journey/movie", and most simply said "lack of gameplay". Again, no mention is made of the idea that games should be fun or hard. I have no idea where you got those ideas, but it certainly wasn't from my post or any of the reviews it links. This is the point at which I am inclined to make the less charitable assumption that you are willfully misrepresenting facts in an attempt to win an argument, because how could anyone acting in good faith reach your point based on my post? And while we're talking about what words mean, the reviews being sampled by nonrandom means (in this case, first N negative reviews by Steam's default sorting of "highest-rated first") does not mean what I did was not empirical. That's not remotely how that word works. I performed a reproducible observation-based experiment (reading reviews), put the results into clear categories, and counted the members of those categories to produce data. There are many things it's not, such as "particularly rigorous", but to call it not empirical is just a misuse of language.

Oh wow, I just hit 20000 lifetime gems and unlocked Levitate Style, it's like easy mode! Falling slower is so good, I can finally maintain a combo in World 2. Are there rewards for combos > 25, or should I immediately cash in a 25-combo and start building the next one? Also, this room: So it's possible to walljump to the top, right? Has anyone done it? What's up there?

It's a damage boost. If you don't pick up any gems for a long enough time, it goes away and you have to get 100 gems to make it come back.

When people talk about the male gaze, they sometimes specify "straight male gaze". Is this a specific term with its own distinct meaning, or is it simply an attempt to be more inclusive? It seems like some rather half-assed inclusivity to go out of your way to acknowledge homosexuality, but only in one gender (shouldn't it be "straight male and lesbian female gaze"?), nevermind the failure to acknowledge bisexuality.

How is that different from every time a game gets its price lowered though? If I buy a game for $60 and the next week it drops to $40, I'm out $20 and we all accept that that's how the market works. A 100% price drop on the base game is obviously larger, but why can't the same "You weren't paying to have it, you were paying to have it now" logic apply?

So this is a sentiment that keeps coming up, and I disagree. I don't think there is such a thing is "the 'video games' conversation", it has always been "the 'entertainment software' conversation", so no matter what you label Dear Esther, it will not be excluded from conversation. That conversation has been dominated by games, but it has demonstrably had room for non-games since at least 1989's self-described software toy Sim City. There are people in the entertainment software discussion who think Dear Esther isn't a game, but I've never seen anyone say "This is not a game therefore it's off-topic, let's move on" (unless you're counting angry one-sentence Steam reviews). Spaces featuring what would have been labeled "the video games conversation", even ones where the prevailing attitude is "not a game", will spend far more time discussing Dear Esther than they will spend discussing any work outside the software medium, because really, they have always been "the entertainment software conversation". Now sometimes people will be uninterested in Dear Esther because they think it is not a game, but that is a matter of genre preference. Yes, labeling Dear Esther as "software poem" will cause those people to not buy Dear Esther, but that is labeling working as intended to inform the consumer, just like labeling something "hidden object game" will cause me not to buy it, because I know that's not something I want.