Ninety-Three

The Longest Journey! TLJ only has one teen (protagonist), but the sequel Dreamfall has several. I suppose it's not at all branching, but then again, Life is Strange is barely branching (the only significant branch so far being that one in Episode 2) so I'm counting it.

I could swear we had a thread discussing Youtube ad revenue and the like, but now I can't find it for the life of me. Maybe I'm just thinking of the business side of videogаmes thread. Anyone with a better memory than me know for sure?

The trick with the Deus Ex pre-order is that (as far as I can tell), they're not publicly posting the pre-order numbers, just announcing when the unstated number of sales hits 25% of their unstated goal to unlock the next tier. If the whole thing falls flat and not a single person pre-orders, they can just lie, claim pre-orders are rolling in and push a button to unlock the next tier. Of course they will do that, because allowing the campaign to fall flat would look bad. Unless the public gets really, really unhappy about this, I imagine other companies are going to see it as a can't-lose scheme and copy it, at least for a game or two until they have their own sales figures that tell them it doesn't work very well (and we're just fucked if it turns out it actually works).

Referring to the giant head episode and the microverse episode? Funny you should say that, I preferred the giant heads. There was little in the way of narrative arc, and it didn't do the interesting scifi concept thing that a lot of episodes did, but the writing (especially in the opening minutes) did a fantastic job of delivering its jokes, and that's what I'm there for.

As a min-maxer, I think I find it harder to roleplay when the game puts numbers and stats into the mix. I remember in Mass Effect 2 when I had to make a choice about the Geth and in a flash of insight I figured out the War Assets system that would be present in ME3. With that in mind, I couldn't evaluate the narrative choice any more because all I could see was "Choose A to get more War Assets". Any food system in a game like Fallout is going to be a whole bunch of stats that I naturally want to optimize, and "How can I bend this system of numbers to my will?" is the polar opposite of a roleplaying mood. Oh, that'd do it. I never put any points into Survival because as far as I could tell all it did was boost food healing and let me craft more food I didn't need. Survival seemed like a holdover from the oldschool PC RPG days when some of the skills were super important and some barely did anything but cost the same amount of skill points to advance as anything else.

The stories are completely made up, but the players have their characters interact with those stories according to rules that define what they can do. Some game systems have more rules than others, wherever the territory defined by the rules ends, people tend to go to making stuff up. Additionally, across the board people will often let the rules slip and end up playing more of a game of pretend. At its best, that turns things into a beautiful exercise in collaborative storytelling, and at worst it turns things into a bunch of self-indulgent players and gamemasters all grabbing at the reins.

I feel conflicted about this because I definitely have more fun winning, but I have won games of Starcraft or Magic where I know I played terribly, and I enjoyed them much less for it. I think the best way to express it is to say I enjoy winning and I enjoy exercising skill (which is why easy games of Starcraft are unsatisfying, you don't have to exercise much skill).

I know that, I said total healing. I remember that purified water healed 2 for 5 seconds, for a total of 10, and it felt like water was a better healing item than most of the food I found (not that I ever drank it for healing, worth too many caps).

Really? My memory is hazy at this point, but I feel like all the food I found healed somewhere between three and seven hitpoints total (other than wonderful, life-giving sasparilla anyway). Edit: I suppose food was technically useful because each healing source gave you a separate heal over time effect, meaning that a healing stim and five types of food healed you twice as fast as two healing stims, but that seems like some unintended silliness.

Food in NV wasn't really worthwhile though. I played hardcore and instead of any kind of desperate fight for survival, it just meant I dedicated a couple units of inventory space to water, and a few more to food. I never even had to go out of my way to stay fed, looted food and water kept me going. You could triple the starvation rate and all it would mean is that I'd dedicate 12 units of inventory to food instead of 4, and occasionally I'd stop at a food shop while I was in town. Other than making it obnoxiously difficult to buy food, I'm not sure how the Fallout model can make food relevant, rather than just a tax on your inventory space. I think it's for the best that they moved away from food.

That's not even a reason. Even if they're committed to doing Steam, if they're going to do a disc they can still load the disc with the game files to avoid a 60 GB download.

Because then you have to print some instructions on how to activate the Steam code, and more importantly you have to deal with it when the bottom percentile of your users can't follow those instructions and fail to install the game. Much harder to mess up a CD that autoruns a Steam installer.

I thought you were going to say that Microsoft Anna evolved into Microsoft Cortana. Surely that's replaced their old speech synth offering. It still surprises me and weirds me out that the thing is actually called Cortana. How on Earth did the necessary procession of stodgy suited execs approve naming their Siri clone after a Halo character? Was it an "I hear this is what The Kids like these days" deal?

I hate the way companies keep pushing Christmas decorations earlier each year. Call me old-fashioned, but I think Christmas cheer should start in October.

I realized I was only four episodes from the end and decided to finish it. Huge disappointment. I wanted it to be the Primer-esque exploratory sci-fi the first half leaned towards, not the character-piece-oh-and-also-there's-time-travel-incidentally that it turned into. I'm mystified by the total change of direction it underwent. If it weren't for suggesting the writers planned the whole thing, I'd think they were making it up as they went along. Spoilered question about one of the plot's loose ends:

It depends if it makes a noise. What if you're deaf?

But I need to know how many trees make a forest!

That's an interesting idea to consider. Chess is a game, so it's possible for chess to be a videogаme, but is playing chess by email a videogаme? If not, how many interface elements do you have to add before it becomes one?

Well Go is a game, and you're playing it on and against a computer, so I don't see why it wouldn't be. Look at it this way, if Go had been invented last year by some puzzle-game developer and released for Steam and iOS, no one would say you weren't playing a videogаme. From there I don't see why the origins of Go change things.

Not knowing the songs in question, I decided to watch the videos without sound to see if this bears out (jeez that CL video is weird muted). They seemed objectifying in somewhat different ways, and maybe you could say one is more objectifying than the other, but I definitely don't feel that one is empowering and the other depreciating. As WickedCestus mentioned, I think the difference you're picking up on is that the Hyuna dancers all look happy to be there (also maybe the audio, I wouldn't know). My metric for this kind of thing is that there's always a Creepy Marketing Guy in the design meeting saying "Sex sells, add more sex appeal", and if he got his way, it can only be objectifying. I don't know how much of that Hyuna video was made by Creeping Marketing Guy, but the BDSM schoolgirl surrounded by facedown twerking dancers in lingerie, I'm pretty sure that was all him.

I've been watching Steins;Gate, and I liked it at first, but now 20 or so episodes in, it's lost its appeal. I'm at and it feels like what the show is about has changed. I liked it in the beginning when it was them exploring the capabilities of their time machine, doing interesting stuff with it, and having witty banter, but now it feels like it's mostly a character drama. I kind of want to quit, but before I do I thought I'd ask some people who've watched it all the way through: Where does it go from there? Does it change, or am I in for more of the same (heavy character drama and time travel that doesn't make sense any more)?

Easy solution: Make it optional, but optional in a way that advances the main mission, rather than optional in the sense of "Here's a side dungeon for you to loot if you brought a decker". To give a specific example, remember the mission in Dragonfall where you had to infiltrate a corp lab, and eventually your cover would be blown and you'd have to fight through all the remaining security checkpoints while on a timer? They could put in something where if you had a decker, you could hack your way around one of the checkpoints: if your cover wasn't blown yet, you'd avoid the risk at that checkpoint, and if it was, you save time by bypassing it. If I remember the mission correctly, there was a decker segment, but it didn't have the kind of optional "works with or without" feeling I'm describing. Now that I think about that mission, I think a lot of what disappointed me about Returns and Dragonfall was how most of the missions amounted to simple dungeon crawls without a lot going on. If every mission had been like that infiltration, or like the one where you have to defend the AI core against waves of enemies, I'd've enjoyed the game a lot more. So that gives me a better question than "Is Hong Kong more of the same": What are the missions like? More simple dungeon crawls, or do they all have a neat hook?

I wanted to talk about this elsewhere after looking into it some more, but honestly, it's increasingly insensible to talk to the few remaining gamergate supporters, so sorry for the thematic double post. This is a major case. In comparison, the 'corrupted journalists' according to deepfreeze do not nearly have this kind of audience, and not nearly as loyal an audience as well. We all know what power Let's Players wield as opposed to their typing counterparts; they are still allowed to be enthusiastic about games. This is gamergate's cardboard house of violently called for disclosure soaked in gasoline and lit on fire. The reasons why these offenders are safe are clear enough: These youtubers didn't cross the hatemob. Didn't write about harrassment. Didn't talk about gamergate unfavorably. Didn't write reviews that dared to comment on cultural context. That's why they're safe from gamergate activism. That's why the industry corruption is safe from gamergate. That's why the actually corrupted love gamergate. I just checked KotakuInAction because I had trouble believing they wouldn't care about this. A Polygon article on the topic is linked under the title "Polygon suddenly decides to start worrying about ethics...oh, the irony!". The thread has 16 comments, 15 of which are angrily snarking about how Polygon has some kind of unspecified history of being bad at journalistic ethics. Further down there's a 28 comment thread linking a similar article which mostly features calm "Yup, they did a bad thing I guess" reactions, exactly one commenter suggested anything should be done about it. In five pages of Reddit, that's all there was. Their reaction to the Polygon article was the most telling: even if Polygon are being hypocritical, you'd think a reasonable person would still care about the bad thing they're reporting on.

Why on Earth are they there? Do these games have a multiplayer component I didn't know about?