Ninety-Three

Turns out the reason you sometimes take damage with Gamma Guts is a weird technical thing that boils down to "Gamma guts does 6 damage, but it hits enemies twice before they damage you. If they're only in contact with you for one frame, then they only take one tick of damage and can hurt you because they don't die." So the trick is to run into them headlong, only a glancing blow (such as from a fast-moving snowbot that hits you edge-on) can penetrate gamma guts + scary face.

I think the point Badfinger is making is "Some people use casual as a pejorative, which taints even the non-pejorative use that speedrunners make of the word". I disagree, but I understand the argument.

Yeah, speedrunners tend to use "casual" to simply mean "non-speedrun play" in a way that's clearly not pejorative. I've heard them talk about "When I played this game casually" or even say things like "I still haven't beaten this game on my casual playthrough. I'm like a hundred hours in, I'm level 50 at such and such..."

The real Half-Life 3 ARG is that the game won't come out until fans band together to code and release it themselves.

Not to open up another pedantic debate, but preservation is a matter of degree. A Lovecraft Twine that has most of the same text as the original is much a more preservation than say, a first person shooter would be.

Is this guy in any way harmed by being lumped into the category of gams? Nope. But we are doing harm by excluding gam-like things from the category of gams, leaving them Nameless. Therefore I propose that he is Gam. Everything is gams.

I disagree. Given that the "What is Game?" thread grew to about eight pages and still barely managed to change anyone's mind, I think it would be unwise to start this argument, so I shall have to leave in disagreement.

You know how many videogаmes have a Stupid Evil option where your character burns down an orphanage, or otherwise acts like a psychotic asshole for no reason, not even personal gain? It's dumb and videogаmey because there's no reason your character would do it, it's only there for players making the arbitrary and out-of-game choice to play an Evil character. The fact that everything was trying to kill me made pacifism feel like a Stupid Good option. I challenge you to find me the human being who gets attacked by a literal monster, tries repeatedly to talk it down only for it to keep trying to kill them, then continues their commitment to diplomacy rather than fleeing or fighting.

For your curiosity, I can explain why I trashed the opening. In short: The combat was dull, the puzzles were dull and felt like padding, its love for early JRPGs didn't resonate with me (and came off as impeding the UI), Toriel (the only major character in the opening) was very overbearing in a bad way, and overall I got the impression that everything was trying to kill me, which rather put me off the whole "pacifism" thing the game was pushing. The last two points may be personal, but I've heard the others repeated by several other people.

In the same way that one might say a game cutscene is a movie interspersed between two bits of interactive experience, I classify a Twine game's four linked, no-choice paragraphs as a book, interspersed between two bits of interactive experience. And in the medium of books, yes there's room to play with the formatting (see: House of Leaves or any of the others moddy mentioned), but it's done rarely, and generally to set a tone. On Twine it's done all the time, and usually it feels like a form of punctuation that interrupts my flow of reading. I dislike it because we've already got more convenient options in commas, semicolons and periods.

Sunless Sea is an extension of the world of Fallen London, a writing-focused browser game by the same people (check it out if you decide you like Sunless Sea, although it has even simpler mechanics and a bit of a grindy energy-system thing going on, it's worth it to get to the writing). I've followed them long enough that I think I can answer the question. It's a huge help that it's a game made first and foremost by writers, instead of the usual "a bunch of game devs make a big ol' gamey gamey then call in a writer to paint over it with a layer of story", but there's also a particular technique they used that I think is very important. They wrote an extensive lore-bible first, and wrote the actual stories second, drawing from the content of the lore-bible. The presence of a lore-bible, and thus the feeling that this is a world that exists beyond the content you're being shown, comes across very strongly in FL, and I think it's a product of the way you'll encounter a mystery somewhere, then hours later, in an entirely different area, you'll get a hint about the mystery, which is the way it ought to work in a real, plausible world. Having done some similar stuff, it's what happens when you write a lore-bible, then just write a lot of content while keeping the lore in mind: eventually clues and details accumulate naturally, cluing the audience in. There's an overall design philosophy of "fill out a world, let the player roam around in it freely". That way, you the player exploring the game is similar to your character exploring Fallen London: There are mysteries out there, they have answers, but finding them is a matter of stumbling onto them organically rather than following a linear plot progression and "go this way" quest markers like most games.

I tend to crack open early chests in search of an explosive weapon to access the Pizza Sewers, because the drop tables don't do anything I find exciting until 3-2's auto crossbow or 3-3's hyper rifle (though 1-3 starts the shovel and sledgehammer if you're into those), so an early large chest doesn't offer up much.

That is exactly what frustrates me about it. It's like if a book put one paragraph per page, then a bunch of empty space, so that you had to turn four times as many pages in the course of reading it. It makes my reading pace feel so slow, I'm convinced that I'd read most Twine games faster if they were one-choice-per-page physical Choose Your Own Adventure books, even accounting for how much longer it takes to "Turn to page 37".

I hate Twine. Or more specifically, I hate the way seemingly everyone uses Twine. Don't put a paragraph on screen, then make me click "continue" (in whatever form the only-option "continue" button takes) to get another paragraph. Just put two paragraphs on screen, there's room there, I promise. Save me a click and let me read it so much faster. Why do people do that, is just a stylistic convention thing where everyone does it because "everyone else does it"?

Yeah, once the scene finishes, they go back to following the standard dialogue trees as though the confrontation never happened. But that's a problem that plagues the entire RPG industry (and the Telltale choice-chooser industry): You make a choice, the content isn't allowed to branch because creating content is expensive these days, and maybe at a later date you get one scene calling back to the choice you made. Even Witcher 1 suffers this problem with its choices (I quit W3 7 hours in, so I can't comment on it, though I've heard it's similar), they've just figured out that if you put twelve hours between choice and consequence, it helps to dispel the feeling that you're hopping back on the linear rails of the main dialogue tree after every side choice.

That is definitely the case. Not only does Witcher 1 allow you to bang everything that moves (you can hook up with Triss after banging half the country, then bang the other half and there's no consequences), it has its own threesome. Some Bioware games (DA1, ME1) have tried to handle this case. If it looks like you're trying to start a relationship with multiple characters, they'll confront you. However, they simply ask you to pick one of them, so it's not exactly a punishment, and it has also suffered from serious implementation problems that tend to cause it to trigger even when you were definitely not romancing both characters.

I just realized that this counts, and I suddenly have a clear answer. The Koopa shell from Mario 64. I love the music, the incredible speed, and the sense of momentum. The feel-bad parts of it, like running out of momentum or breaking the shell serve to make you appreciate it all the more.

My first run I got there in 71 days, and could've done less if I was making more use of the banks. I think the mechanics had an unhealthy tendency to push against the narrative content. On my long-distance train rides, I never disembarked to check out the local city because I was terrified that I would run into a random event that would end up costing me time on my journey (and sure I might also find a random event that gained me time, but I was already making good time, so I was far more afraid of a penalty than a bonus). I got a quest to deliver an item, but it required going way off-track, or I could just sell the item and drop the quest for a ton of cash in a city directly to the east. It's not that I'm purely a mechanical player, I love a Sunless Sea or a Longest Journey, but when there are mechanics and narrative in the same place in conflict, I automatically put mechanics first.

I played 80 Days and... I don't get it? That anyone is praising this game indicates there is clearly something about it I have missed on a fundamental level, in the same way that I overlooked the "Talk" button in Dark Souls and missed all the lore. As a mechanically driven affair, I found it neither difficult nor engaging: I bought everything I could possibly use, never felt pressured for time, health or storage, and only once had to make a small bank withdrawal (which didn't even cost me any time). It wasn't just easy, I never really felt like there were any opportunities to demonstrate skill, it was a very simple matter of "keep pushing east". It was like playing an extremely lucky game of Oregon Trail, the kind where nothing bad ever happens. As a side note, the whole time it seemed to be tracking my relationship with Fogg, as well as several character attributes, but it told me "your character is now dependable" multiple times, which quite confused me, and none of it, my relationship or my character traits, ever seemed to do anything. As a narrative affair, I liked some of the little story snippets, but they were severely hampered by being only snippets. I learned that the Mongolians built a secret spaceship, which would be cool, except the story promptly dropped that thread to never again touch it. The Russian secret police have truth-detecting monocles, which is cool, and then, that setting detail established, my trip promptly took me out of Russia. It's a game about travelling the world, meeting people, and then leaving for your next destination just as you start to get to know them, which isn't terribly satisfying. So, what have I missed? Or to put it another way, what about this game is so good?

If I may start a tangent, I am always surprised by just how much people care about the DRM-free part. We can all get behind hating SecuROM and UPlay, but most "DRM" AAA titles are things I buy on Steam, can play offline, and never have to so much as enter an activation key. What are those titles doing so wrong that "DRM-free" is a major talking point?

My point was this: If the opponent played a card that made me lose life whenever I attacked, I learned about it when they put the card into play. not when I attacked and said to myself "Hey, why am I losing life?"

Dota is a lot worse about you dying because of it. My point of comparison was TCGs, where I've gone through the exact same "eventually you'll learn all the cards" journey. There there was a lot less room to lose specifically because you didn't know a card existed (you'll often lose because the opponent had a card, but knowing it existed wouldn't have helped).

That sounds like it will be great, dozens of hours from now when I've learned everything. I don't want to spend the next dozen hours, hell I don't want to spend the next two matches, dying because the opponent had some weird power that punished me for not knowing it. I hate that, so I'm not going to play Dota.

So just memorize a bunch of the heroes (or keep dying due to ignorance). Sounds like Dota is not the game for me.

We're watching all the movies in chronological order, and I haven't heard any objection to starting this week, so yes, Toy Story. The list wasn't for anything important, just curiosity.