Ninety-Three

So surely this thread exists, but I can't find it for the life of me: Can someone link me to the Walking Dead Season 1 thread? I promise I searched, none of the 112 hits for "walking dead" in the video gaming forum seemed to be the thread dedicated to the game itself.

I'll nominate Portal (the first one) because it's the only game I think is perfect. There are games that don't have anything wrong with them, but Portal is the only game I look at and say "I can't imagine how this would be any better". Despite that highest of praise, I'm not sure I'd call not playing Portal "missing out". It's not like Spec Ops where the game has something to say, and we're all richer for having listened. It's just a really, really good game. Is that what you mean about "unmissable", that there should be a reason to play it beyond "It's good", and having played the game should somehow enrich you as a person?

I get the impression that there is something meaningful there, even if it only comprehensible to Jonathan Blow. I'm not sure if he was trying to make us understand, and did a terrible job of it, or if it was a self-indulgence thing where he made it for himself. Either way, there's probably a really complicated explanation for it that we'll never be given.

No, once we reach the apex of the year of the PS3, our self-aware consoles will ascend to a higher plane of existence where they can finally comprehend the true meaning of Braid: It was in them the whole time.

I know most of the are tradeoffs, but there are some of them where I find the upside isn't worth the downside, and knowing what they do, I'd rather not pick them up. It's like shotgun versus assault rifle in an FPS. I know neither's just better than the other, but I like the rifle, and I'm not going to trade it for the shotgun if the game offers me that. A lot of these tradeoff items are "Surprise! Now you're stuck with the shotgun you hate!" If the items were always random and unknowable, I wouldn't enjoy getting stuck with the shotgun any more (and since it would happen more often, I'd probably enjoy it even less), but it would bother me less, because then it feels like the game is designed to force you to improvise, rather than just punishing you for not recognizing all the shotguns. It was a Tarot card, and now I know that I should heal before using it, my problem is with the first-time experience. There was nothing I could have done to avoid getting screwed by the card when I didn't know what it did. Sure I could have picked up hearts before using it, but I had no reason to expect I would need to. Maybe I should get down to low life because this unknown card is a full heal. Maybe I should save this card for a level where I haven't found the secret room, because if it finds secret rooms then I'd be wasting it on this level. You can't reasonably prepare for the effect of a mystery item.

Jeeez. Beyond just being terrible, that makes the 8chan ad downright baffling. "Join 8chan, we have Nazis!" What is going on in their minds that they think that is going to be a good marketing strategy?

I don't mind the idea of challenge items, what I mind is the game forcing a negative effect on me for daring to pick up an item. To make a comparison, troll bombs are fine, but imagine if they were impossible to dodge, they were just the game telling you "I've decided you should have less health". That would some unfair nonsense, and I feel the same way about items with unknown downsides: the game is just telling me "I've decided to make you worse. Guess you won't pick that item up again, idiot." I think it's the fact that it is avoidable once you know that makes it bother me so much. That way, it's not like it's part of the game, where it will always be the case that sometimes you pick up an item that you don't want and you're forced to improvise. Every downside item will sucker punch you once, and then you can avoid it. It feels like a "Fuck you" directed at players who have yet to learn all the items. I got teleported to the boss while at half health, when there were some hearts I could have picked up if I'd been expecting a big bossfight. I died, and I was not happy.

Wait, this Politically Incorrect thing is actually about Nazis? I saw the name and assumed they were just saying "We're politically incorrect! Look at us, using the swastika like you're not supposed to, aren't we edgy?" If they're actually associating with Nazis, then... wow.

Jeez, the game would have done well to explain that at all. Instead I boot it and it looks like a bunch of progress has been save-corrupted away. Now I see that there's something in the patch notes, but who reads the patch notes every time they boot a game?

Welp, I take back what I said about it being pretty well finished. I turned the game on today and had lost a chapter of progress. Puzzles and blocks re-locked, solutions and scores deleted. I hate everything, don't buy Early Access.

Sure is. Haven't encountered any bugs, and my only UI issues came from trying to do something weird (fly under the platforms to build a subterranean sensor array to act as a signal generator). Also, I need to brag about this somewhere. It feels real good.

The Thumbs board seems remarkably lacking in megatrogs and other problems of internet debate, perhaps here is the place we can that interesting discussion. I assume that's something that should spin off into its own thread, does anyone know if that thread already exists?

I really wish this weren't the case, because there is some interesting discussion to be had about what makes a game, but that discussion is to be had among people who don't think "not a game" is automatically a pejorative. Sadly, as you said, pretty much everyone just uses it to complain about things they didn't like. Books, movies and music aren't games, and we don't hold that against them, why should we look down on a piece of software for not being a game? To take a more positive example, I'm not sure Minecraft is a game (at least not the way I play with it), and I say that as someone who loves Minecraft. I see it as more of a toy, the way something like Lego is. I don't so much play Minecraft as I play with Minecraft: sure there are systems in place, but for the most part I don't interact with them and I spend my time building cool stuff as if it were cubic Lego.

I don't mind discovery-based gameplay, what bothers me about Isaac is that I feel it crosses the line between "rewarding knowledge" and "punishing ignorance". I had items unexpectedly teleport me to another room, damage me on use, or provide what were if not downgrades, at least sidegrades that made me wish I still had my old attack. I understand that that doesn't bother most people as much as it bothers me, but in this style of game, I hate the idea of the game doing something bad to me that I can't prevent. If I'm skillful enough, I can win any fight without being damaged, but the only way to avoid being screwed by an item with downsides is to have previously experienced being screwed by those downsides. It no longer feels like the game is playing fair.

As someone who hated Binding of Isaac, I'm going to have to jump in and defend this Giant Bomb guy. I assume that he's complaining about the items, which was one of my issues with the game. Not knowing what the items did was confusing at best, and at worst led to me picking up an "upgrade" whose effect I would rather not have, and wouldn't have picked up if I'd known. The game was punishing me for not knowing an item's negative effects. It doesn't matter if it's intentional, that's bad. That's a dickish and unfair thing for a game to do, and the fact that game is being dickish on purpose is hardly a defense. If you're supposed to play with a FAQ open, the game should just have tooltips to save you the trouble, and if you're not supposed to, then it's just being a dick.

Almost every sanity bar I can think of is Lovecraft-style (not that Lovecraft really did hallucinations), but that's sort of a limit of the medium. How else would you systematize the effects of a sanity bar running out? It's not like you can reach into the player's brain and change the way they think, so you're limited to either changing what the game shows them (hallucinations), or changing the way the player can interact with the world. The only example of the latter I can think of is Depression Quest, where the severity of your depression dictates which options you're allowed to pick in the choose-your-own-adventure gameplay. EDIT: I realized the above may sound critical of Depression Quest, I didn't mean to be. My point was that Depression Quest is a game wholly about depression, as in not about anything else, whereas all this sanity bar talk seems to be concerning games that have a core mechanic, and also the sanity bar. I think it runs into some of the fundamental limits of videogаmes. We are never going to have a conversation system that's anything like human conversation (well, not until the year 21XX when we start putting sentient AIs into games), and similarly we just can't model mental stress well, because it's a thing that doesn't lend itself to being a described by a small collection of rigid rules.

They're both reductive, but brains are more complicated than bodies, so a sanity meter is much more reductive. More than that though, sanity meters are reductive in a way that loses a lot of the detail of the systems they seek to model, whereas health bars do a decent job of conveying the core principle of "bullets make people die" (at least before the days of unarmoured protagonists with regenerating health). Sure they gloss over the idea of bleeding to death, and being injured doesn't impair you in any way... as I type that I realize that perhaps it's not about the model, but the outcome. Everyone understands what dying is, that it will happen to you if too many bullets go into you, and health bars are a system that makes you die after getting shot too much. Sanity bars, on the other hand, are usually a system that causes you to start seeing a very specific set of hallucinations after excessive exposure to another very specific set of sanity draining things. The point of every kind of bar in videogаmes is that something bad will happen to you when it runs out: You get shot, your health bar empties, you die. You run around, your stamina bar empties, you can't run any more. But with sanity bars, you look at a monster, your sanity bar empties, you start hallucinating. While the other bars simplify complex systems, their inputs and outputs still make sense. Sanity bars though, they're just silly.

I found Don't Starve's sanity meter to be a very poor representation/exploration of mental health (as a resource management system, thumbs up, but that's not the topic). Before my sanity dipped low enough to start seeing any effects, I had figured out that low light, pitch darkness, and spiders lowered my sanity, and everything else was fine. When the first tier of hallucinations showed up, I immediately ran over to poke them, and figured out that they were incorporeal, and purely aesthetic. When the shadow hands showed up and stole from my campfire, my reaction wasn't fear but "Hey! My fire's lower! You jerk, now I'll have to throw another of my 20 logs on it!" That was before I figured out they could be driven off too, I was thinking of them as simply a firewood tax. Once I learned how to 'kill' them, it was just "Oh, better go drive off the shadow hand." To talk a little more about killing people in games, what always bothers me is that the protagonists are fine not with just killing, but with killing hundreds of people. Your average videogаme character has personally killed more human beings than perhaps any real person that ever lived, and not only does this not affect them, they don't even notice. No videogаme character ever goes "Jesus Christ, you killed three hundred people. One at a time." When I realize how absurd a character's kill-count has gotten, it always makes me wonder how I'm supposed to see the game. Is the character meant to be a sociopath? Or is it like the way Civilization games get hazy with distance and time scales, and all the murder on screen hazily represents a substantially different amount of murder meant to be taking place?

I'm glad that they don't do that. Videogаmes, as systems of rules maintained by computers, can do some things really well, and some things poorly. The industry standard for modeling human conversation is dialogue trees, the same level of fidelity as a choose-your-own adventure book. As a way of interacting with characters, it works, but it sure isn't anything like actual humans. If a game attempted to model what goes on inside a person's head, I can't imagine it would be anything but a horrendous representation that did a disservice to its serious subject matter. Either that or it would be a blue bar to put under your red health bar. "Ended a human life, -10 sanity!" "Found Zoloft, +25 sanity!"

I think expecting the reviewer to be informed about gaming history depends on what you want out of the review. If the purpose of a review is to be a consumer guide that simply informs buying decisions, then gaming history doesn't matter. Anyone can pick up a game and say "Here are the parts I found fun, and here are the things I didn't like, overall I think you should buy it if that appeals to you". However if you want reviews to be "Games are art" thinkpieces, I agree with dartmonkey, just like in movie reviews it's important to understand the medium itself, not just the particular game you're reviewing. I think there's room for both kinds of reviews to exist, but the review in question seemed to be entirely a consumer recommendation, which excuses the writer's ignorance.

I hated the level design in this game. The environments were so annoying that it ruined the puzzles for me. I would love this game, if only it took place in Portal-style cleanrooms. My problem with the design is that it wants you to explore, which lead to all kinds of problems in a puzzle game. I hated when I was tearing out my hair attempting an impossible puzzle because there was a key or a jammer down a corridor that I'd missed. That then led to an unhealthy behaviour where whenever I couldn't immediately solve a puzzle, I'd assume I must be missing an element and waste a bunch of time exploring when all I needed to do was stare at the puzzle for a while and figure it out. I'm also fairly certain that I managed to break the story segments. At one point in a story segment I just pressed the "exit" option rather than taking one of dialogues that would presumably advance the story, so it dumped me back to typing "list" with no way to continue the story, and from then on I never got another story segment, every terminal had nothing but its list of three text files. I quit when I was running around through a labyrinth directing laser lights this way and that, and I realized that the only reason it was remotely difficult was that I was running around a messy environment in first person, instead of looking at clearly defined walls from an overhead view the way most flash laser puzzles do. Rather than just coming here to complain, I thought I'd ask if anyone else had those problems. Am I just uniquely bad at exploring the levels, or recognizing when I do/don't have all the pieces? Did this bother you but you put up with it?

Recently I was bored and decided to pick up a certain game the Idle Thumbs are always talking about. I like shooters, and the game came well-recommended, so I was surprised to find myself hating nearly everything about it. I'm not too far in to the game, so given how well-liked the game is, I'm entirely willing to believe that I'm doing something wrong, rather than that the game is as bad as it seems to me. I can't bring myself to keep playing it like this, so I come for your advice, Idle Forums: How can I enjoy this game? There are a number of things I hated that seem like they just have to be tolerated, like the nearly minute long cutscene when a buddy rescues you, or vehicles touching level geometry in just the wrong way and becoming undrivable. Since my goal is to enjoy this game I still believe is good, I'll focus on explaining my problems with the core systems, in the hopes that someone can recommend a solution. 1: Driving is boooring. There's not much to say about this, it's just an extremely dull activity that I have to do every time I want to be somewhere where there's stuff to do. The long dirt roads are boring, and every now and then there's a checkpoint which is full of guys I don't want to fight, because apparently they respawn even if you clear the checkpoint, so doing anything other than blowing through is just a waste of time. Is there a way around this problem? Fast travel, or just a way to make sure the missions I take involve less driving? 2: Diamond finding is sloooow, and therefore boring. I cannot for the life of me judge how fast that damn green light is blinking (I can walk thirty feet in any direction and not be able to tell if the light has gotten faster), so whenever I notice nearby diamonds, I just stand in one place and turn in a circle at an agonizingly slow pace until I get the direction to walk in (too fast and the light only goes solid for a split second, which gets lost in the beeping). I would just ignore the diamond caches entirely, but given that they are my upgrade points, ignoring them seems like a bad idea. Am I particularly bad at reading the frequency of blinky lights? Is this the way the system is supposed to work? Can I safely ignore diamond caches? 3: I can't tell where anyone is in jungle combat. I'd say that maybe I'm blind, but I've never had this problem in a game before. When there are aggroed enemies in the jungle, they might as well be teleporting in behind me for how well I'm able to see them coming. The rather vague damage indicators compound this problem: I'll get shot by someone on my left, scan left, and the indicator will fade before I can find anyone, then I'll get shot by that same guy again. Is there some graphical setting I can change, maybe crank the gamma up to maximum? Or is this a system working as intended, and the game is telling me "Don't fight near foliage, it gives the enemies cover and is dangerous"? If so, how do I avoid it? It seems like most of the combat I've done so far has either taken place in jungles, or in outposts ten feet away from jungles that the enemies immediately run into when aggroed. 4: Malaria. Goddamn Malaria, who thought that was a good idea? It's not that I'm being crippled by the effects of the disease, exactly the opposite. My screen starts to turn funny, I take a pill and continue on my merry way. But eventually I run out of pills, and then I have to take time out of doing whatever I wanted to be doing to get more pills. It's a complete waste of time. Does anyone remember Spore at the interplanetary stage, the countless "Something has gone wrong in your empire, drop what you're doing and get over to planet X and fix it" missions? This has that same time-wasting, "stop interrupting me" feeling. Is there any reason I shouldn't just mod this annoyance out of the game? So those are the things that made me stop playing Far Cry 2. I want to like the game, and I trust that there's something good there, help me find it.

I just found out that the Veronica Mars movie is out (they really need better marketing, I found out via a hotel movie selection), and it is what I was hoping for, which is a two hour episode of the show. Maybe my memory isn't giving the show enough credit, but the movie's dialog felt especially witty. I watched it with someone who'd never seen the show before, and they also liked it. Minor spoilers to follow.

If I'm supposed to enjoy travel, then I think I'm going to have to give up Far Cry 2, because I can't imagine ever developing an affinity for the dirt roads. That pretty much concludes the topic I'd started, but I am curious about what's been said regarding immersion and the environment. To me, Far Cry 2 was one of the most video gamey games I've played in recent memory. Despite an entire city, I only saw two characters who weren't either soldiers or armed mercenaries (and one of them was only present for the opening cutscene), and every character is such a video game enemy that if you drive past them on the open road, they will stop, get out of their car, and start trying to kill you. It's like you have a floating neon sign broadcasting "I'm the player character, drop what you're doing and shoot me!" Both of those are fine things to do ("This video game is too video gamey" is an awfully silly criticism, after all), but they sure didn't help me feel immersed in a world. How do you folks get past those issues?

It's true that they either charge or hide, but when they charge it's extremely easy to pick them off as they close the distance, and when they hide, I've found that five or ten seconds of patience is almost always enough to make them decide to switch hiding spots, and then I nail them when they move. I am playing on Hardcore (I started on Infamous, but the enemies killed me so fast that I had to turn it down). I suppose I could turn it up, does it have any effects other than increasing enemy damage? I think the problem is that I'm not struggling to advance. Travel feels more like a tax on my time than gameplay. "Okay, you can attack a fortress, but first you have to spend two minutes appreciating these dirt roads". For me getting from point A to point B is just an uneventful series of roads punctuated by blockades to clear out. The blockades are gameplay, as is the stuff at point B, but why do I have to spend so much time between those places on dirt roads?