SuperBiasedMan

I'm similarly unkeen on other realistic FPS games to be honest, in general they serve to reinforce a presumed social narrative that's based on inaccurate ideas. As said before, the game implies that the police and criminals are on equal footing in capability. People soak this subconscious messaging up and then when Fergusson happens they don't think it's unreasonable for the police to have the equipment they do. It doesn't make Battlefield the only culprit but it's not pushing back against harmful presumptions. I feel the exact same way about other military shooters, but Hardline was just the game being discussed here.

Holy mid range expletive I have finally found a new apartment to stay in. It genuinely took me months but I finally got a place. I look forward to not doing this any more... for a year at least.

This is exactly the kind of branching I want more of in games. Basically your choices affect things but in a highly inscrutable way, rather than tangible cause and effect I want things that are shaped by both the player and things the player cannot control. I agree that expecting the world of the narrative to revolve and branch around the player's choices is a foolish endeavour because it's both unfeasibly, and also ultimately unsatisfying. But I don't think there's anything wrong trying to have the player nudge themselves a different way along the path, especially if the player isn't even noticing or certain that they're doing it in the moment.

I did try to play it, and will try again but even apart from being slow paced, it's really not the kind of gameplay that will engage me and draw me on.

When are they going to get round to building a single unique death star ship and having an auction for it?

Just finished Jazzpunk. It was a pretty entertaining, amusing game. I like absurdity and silliness, though at times it seemed like it was trying too hard. The experience definitely varied and it ended before it lost too much steam. I was a bit disappointed in the mechanics though, and maybe I was foolish to expect this, it involved a lot of walking around and clicking. More than a few times I veered off track because I must a queue or else there was no good queue for where to go next. For something that was vaguely absurdist and lampooning games, I'd have preferred to not have several sections where I collect a bunch of things and then return back with them. In my opinion, the game would've been better if it was just an open narrative where I could wander off and find some fun gags and things, then turn back to resume the plot without it gating me or asking me to do tasks that really added nothing for me.

I think it's good for a mainstream game to introduce the idea that the game doesn't have to serve the player. Plenty of books films and TV shows have done good things by not being direct and allowing the audience to easily consume them. This was made in a world where most players will just investigate the result online and find out what they missed. Very few people need to know how this ended, and really it serves the purpose of hooking people in better to make them have to investigate and discuss it online. That said, it makes for bad marketing when people think this is representative of how the full game will play. I'm assuming that's not true though.

It pains me that Cart Life was described as "Awesome but not for everyone." I actually didn't get round to trying it yet but I'm downloading it now. It was really amazing, I was genuinely so thrown by how to deal with the experience, it felt like it kept changing the rules on me in different ways each time.

Oh wow! I had no idea of that, it's a fascinating lens to view the experience through. Your paraphrasing makes perfect sense to me though, I grew up watching enough TV that sometimes people hearing me talk think I'm from America. I definitely had the feeling of being served American culture second hand. Still today, TV and films will refer to American geography I don't full understand but the media treats it as assumed knowledge. I'm generally more savvy know, though not always, but as a child this stuff would just wash over me and there'd be broken links where there's some concepts that I just never got fully fleshed out from the media. It's also kind of funny to hear this because it is then possible that I've met thecatamites before, I've been to a few game jams and stuff. I can't find a twitter handle though on the page, and I'm not sure if it'd be better to wait to get in contact when the full set has been played. Yeah I'm from the Republic, and we don't have this idea of older times being freer really. But there is nostalgia for the good old simpler times, less technology, more outdoorsy and stuff like that. It's not the same kind of thing that cowboys ellicit. Irish people settled into cosy farms and created communities (yup, it is that exact stereotype), we didn't really roam through untamed lands. Our media frequently does portray cities and big towns of the past as having health problems and fraught with issues but the general feel of older countryside or village settings is that it was much nicer even if it was harder. The rose tinted glasses are on for there because I suppose the vast majority of people are now city dwellers and they still see some of the issues of what living in a city entails (though not as much as before, obviously) and they forget how much living in the country really means. I also think a bit of the negative nostalgia is focused on the English occupation, which wasn't really felt in remote countryside farms.

I do have a vague understanding of cowboys, but I think only from their brief appearances within other works, like a Simpsons episode that decided to have an old cowboy actor. Things where cowboys were not the focus or the main point. Likewise Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy, City Slickers and Dances with Wolves? I have no first hand experience of any of those, they're names I know and I've seen cultural references but not the things themselves. I may have been unclear before though that I don't think being irish inherently means I'm not familiar with these things, it's probably more just me personally not having the exposure to cowboys in fiction. But I think not being from the massive expanse that is America, there aren't the same lingering concepts that the cowboys embodied in our society that might make the cowboy stuff tied to something even if I hadn't seen cowboys in fiction.

I have now played Cowboy Living, Galah Galah, Remnants of a Beautiful Day and the Fabulous Screech in the last while. They all really showed what it is that I want weird games, it's because they do things that just don't get properly picked up in the games 'with capital' where the overall goal is to be sold to an audience. Even if it's not a very money making endeavour, the general idea of the games with capital is to appeal to people and relate to games they're already familiar with. All the games I just played include less appealing elements to them. Most obviously Galah Galah is jarring, difficult and unclear. But that's because the games are busy focusing on totally different things. It's almost like playing an experiment, and when I'm recurringly picking up a game and only playing it for a little while before I 'get' it, having something being so far removed from my understanding gives me a lot more than game that's "X meets Y". Note, it's not that games with capital are bad of course, I've played a LOT of Spelunky and TF2, but when games borrow so heavily from one another as they do, there's only a small amount that's 'new' in each iteration, and it feels less worthwhile to go after all of them compared to a series of weird games where the design philosophy wasn't about building on the gaming industry foundation, but just doing what the designer felt like for that game. (not that there's going to be no influence, but intentionally structuring a game around existing design philosophy is different to being subconsciously having it affect you)

Likewise, as an Irishman, my country is too small for a lot of what cowboys seem to represent and I haven't even watched western films really, let alone going to rodeos or having any physical experience of the cowboy phenomenon. I feel like the experience of the game was a bit lessened for me because of this. Reading what Clyde said about the simulacra stage the game exists in, I think I'm missing the links that the earlier stages are meant to have instilled in me. I did enjoy the limited mechanics and voyeuristic nature of this game, where it takes the idea of a tutorial process and instead makes the cowboy disinterested in having to show the ropes to yet another player of the game. It also fits with the idea of a cowboy lifestyle (as I am reading it to be in this thread at least) where it's laid back, free and relaxed even if it's slower

That's interesting, I only played the web version and I got the impression that the title was meant to be about the idea of a gods watching and judging how good (more likely, bad) of a person you were. Mainly to make you consider the moral implications of your choices because even if you make it out of a dangerous situation alive by desperate measures, you don't leave behind everything you did and you have to live with what you did to resolve the situation. Is there anything about the final game that you think specifically implies it's more what you took from it or was that just how you responded?

Apart from everything previously said, I take issue with the games assumption that the police are against criminals, when really the police serve all people, including criminals. That's why criminals still have enforceable rights and can be victims of crimes. Police are peace keepers, not adversaries of people who break a law/s.

Thus is insane to me. Irish police (Gardai) don't even have guns normally, the idea of a military style police force is unfathomable.

There's a lot I want to respond to here when I'm not on my phone, but to contribute something as someone who has played all the episodes: Sarahs death did seem oddly premature to me, as well as to a friend I discussed the episode with. We had both made the effort to snap Sarah out of it and take her with us, and I was expecting there to be some real development from there where you were trying to help her adapt, in contrast to how her dad was sheltering her. But instead she just croaks pretty abruptly. In light of these thoughts, I could believe that the decision to kill her off was affected by the fans response to her, though obviously that's still not proof. And I also would say that this is a problem, though it's different to how it's being frames because it just means the writers are investing more into what the players want than they are in considering the social issues and writing what they feel is best. My personal interpretation still makes me doubt that the writers were really trying to make her disabled or act ableist, rather they seemed to adhere to ableist wishes of some players.

Not the Hot Scoops one?

I am also amazed you never ran into revolt troubles. I made the Britannian Empire and the English refused to leave me alone as soon as the throne passes on, but I'm guessing the sum of 100 hours of micromanagement created a smooth transition with each succession? I have two ideas that might help? Note I've tried neither but based on your previous run and how it affected things, would you be interested in: A) Never pausing, keep the clock ticking indefinitely (unless you're literally getting up to walk off and do something else, obviously). Just to put on more pressure and prevent the perfection you reached here. You could try roleplaying specific personalities for each character. Rather than min-maxing, try to embody a behaviour even if it results in suboptimal plans, like 7 attempted assassinations in a row. If you remember the Thumbs discussing their game with Ragnar, it was what got me back into the game because of the crazy plots you lead yourself down. I'm not sure if this would hold the same appeal for you but it is a different way to go. Also you could try moving on to Europa Universalis IV and expanding your empire(s) more.

I didn't really know what neurodivergence actually meant when reading this earlier, so I looked it up on wikipedia to get a quick clarification and this part of the article stood out to me: This sentiment gels with me, as someone who thinks that at times people get overly worried about people (particularly children) who are higher than average on the autism spectrum but still high functioning. To me if you're different, giving your difference a label shouldn't make it a special problem to be solved by everyone around you, it should just be a way of characterising and understanding a person. Obviously there's a lot of grey area with what is high functioning and at what point is it worth taking real care with how someone is raised and interacted with, but I think on the whole I find people overly cautious as soon as a type of behaviour has a psychological label attached because of the stigma that generates. My main point though is that this very quote implies (to me) that it's not fair to say this is an ableist issue if she IS neurodivergent since the very point of this definition of neurodivergence is that Sarah would be no less able than anyone else, she'd merely respond differently to how other people around her do. Which also gels with my interpretation of her character. She responded totally reasonably. Frankly Clem's response, though it was obviously shaped highly by Lee's influence, seems more atypical to me as she's just grasped her role so well. She becomes too capable for someone her age, especially given how frequently the rest of her group will lean on her for important, dangerous tasks. ...of course if I'm wrong could someone explain what neurodivergent is supposed to mean in the context? It just reads as someone with a different kind of brain/thought process, and if that is the case I stand by this post.

The overused misuse of exclusive has led to such a watered down word that almost means the opposite of it's original intent. It literally makes me barf.

The idea of Sarah being disabled is odd to me, she seemed perfectly normal just not capable of adapting to the zombie world as well as Clementine. I imagine it's the direct comparison to Clem that made for this anti Sarah sentiment. The overall sentiment is pretty gross and I didn't read the scene when it happened aa

That was meant to say cock fighting slaves. I think my phone is trying to gaslight me with autocorrect and other minor technical grievances.

I think if people really thought about it, they'd see Pokémon as worse than regular animals because Pokémon are intelligent sentient creatures and people use them as tools, playthings and cook fighting slaves. Those all occur in real life but the first two are considered generally ok because animals don't think like humans do, however Pokémon totally do.

Having checked thoroughly, I found out that the mechanics do the exact opposite of what you said clyde. When the lines hit the eyes, they disappear and there is no progression. If the lines reach the bottom of the screen then they contribute to progressing the sequence of lines at the bottom, as gamesthat exist said. I guess I brought that feeling of mechanics doing nothing to it because the game was so disorienting and confusing I couldn't feel as if my actions were achieving anything. I also much prefer my playthroughs where it was a confused mess, since when I was testing to figure out how it worked I was far too effective at halting the progression and made the experience much more lacking. I found You Have to Do Everything good for comparison, but overall I didn't think it did nearly as good a job of it. The tone and visual style seem so much more relaxed in comparison. The music had the discord in it but so little moved on screen I didn't get a sense of panic. It was also not as overwhelming as I expected and it ended with me feeling pretty comfortable with it. I think because it was designed to be 'beatable' as a game it loses a lot of the real anxiety in Anxiety World. Also I think when we've gone through the whole set, we should link this thread to thecatamites. Just because I know if it were me I'd be very curious about this kind of deep analysis of things I made.

I did do a similar thing before. I didn't stick with it that long though. It started to feel stale as writing, but I might have just been in a too unmotivated mood/not trying hard enough to get each character have a real unique voice and retain my/a reader's interest that way. Also in my game I was naming all my soldiers after characters from other things based on what their actions in the mission suggested. That's why my first mission was a team made of Michael Scott, Princess Merida, Travis Touchdown and Scott Hansen (the cocky australian from Pacific Rim). I have yet to go back and play through Enemy Within, maybe when I have time I could try doing this again. I did like the idea of getting further on and have missions where the characters are all reacting differently to the mechanics of gene splicing and making soldiers into mechs. Plus there's the potential for using missions where you capture aliens, and how people would interact with newly discovered alien tech.