Smart Jason

So, I picked up the entire Humble E3 Bundle essentially just for this baby: Now that I've got mine, you can take your pick of whatever I'm not going to try to cash in for TF2 crate keys. Red is taken. 1. Age of Empires II HD Edition: The Forgotten Expansion - You know an expansion is great when it says right in its name that it was just forgotten about! Special feature: doesn't include base game! 2. Company of Heroes - This is a whole game about being heroic in a company and it astonishingly has nothing to do with the corporate heroes who dreamed up its summary's opening line: "Delivering a visceral WWII gaming experience." 3. Ghost Recon Phantoms E3 Avatar - I goddamn dare you to open up your Uplay account right the hell now and tell me that it couldn't use some sprucing up with a sweet limited edition avatar. 4. Ghost Recon Phantoms Starter Pack - "I don't want to get into some free to play game," you whine, babyishly. Well guess what, now you've got a starter pack, so it's like you already spent money on it like a real video game! 5. Magicka Wizard Wars Exclusive Staff and Blade - This board has over twenty thousand total members; one of you must still be playing Magicka! 6. SMITE Loki Pack - "Since launching in Europe and North America in March 2014, [sMITE] has quickly established itself as one of the top three games in the rapidly growing Lords Management genre with millions of players." One of the top three! Maybe it's the first! 7. SMITE Xbox One Closed Beta - Can you play Dota 2 on your Xbox One? I genuinely don't know, but I don't think so! That's why SMITE is theoretically a more popular Lords Management Simulation game than Dota 2! 8. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege Guaranteed Beta Access Code - Be the envy of your friends with their pathetic Rainbow Six Siege Beta Access Codes of Ambiguous Contract. 9. Twitch Turbo - This is a whole month of Twitch Turbo! Watch Twitch without ads! Get some more emotes, maybe? Deal with the toxic environment of every Twitch chat with an air of vague superiority, this time justified by an icon! 10. Warframe 7-day Credit and Affinity Booster Packs - It doesn't matter what I write here because every word that preceded this sentence was strategically determined to appeal to us gamers! I'm salivating like a Pavlovian dawg! 11. WildStar Standard Edition - Remember when people were excited about WildStar for like ten seconds? Relive those magic moments with this romantically titled Standard Edition. 12. World of Tanks Invite Code/World of Warships Bonus Content/World of Warships Closed Beta Key - I know you never thought you'd gain entrance to the exclusive worlds of tanks and warships and the bonus contents therein, but au contraire. PM me! Even if it's just to say hi and see how I'm doing every so often, you know?

So, same thing happened to me, up to the point where I botched it, and as soon as I saw that I'd botched it I paused my game looking for a way out. The reload last checkpoint option took me back to the beginning of the scene and I did it all over again, correctly, triumphantly declaring "Screw you, I can rewind time all I want!" This was a big thing for me because normally I'm very strongly in the camp of never reloading in similar games. Not only do I think that doing so would cheapen the experience of a Telltale or Quantic Dream game, I also think it's very much a barometer of the true quality of a choice-driven narrative game to live with your mistakes and hope that even an imperfect ending feels properly and personally cathartic to you because of them. However, I reloaded this time because the series of questions that led to included one or two correct answers that I considered too arbitrary. Specifically, the one relating to scripture (and interestingly, this one doesn't even necessarily appear, depending on previous answers) - I knew exactly what the meaning of the question was and what previous piece of (for lack of a better word) evidence it was invoking, but couldn't decipher the developer's thoughts and close the deal. This is why I ended up disliking LA Noire - as much as I absolutely love dialogue as a gameplay mechanic and want people to explore every crevice of it, forever, I seemingly find it endlessly frustrating when it's turned into a right or wrong answer puzzle game where you're not talking to the NPC, you're trying to out-think what the game writer. Anyway, I bet the only reason the majority of people avoided being angry tomatoes is by "cheating," like me.

Penny Arcade made a comic about Hatred. Here is the customary news post accompanying it, written by Jerry, with lines bolded by me for emphasis. Penny Arcade is a cool site for gamers.

Aw jeez, sounds like that game would involve a lot of grief counseling, strained interpersonal relationships, and no clear objectives for victory - right?

Total armchair developer here, but how much time does Bethesda actually need to take between games to create a new engine? It seems like people have been anticipating Fallout 4 for years now and I was optimistically assuming the wait was so that they could finally get off Gamebryo or whatever they have to do to make a game that actually has believable NPCs. I guess they were just silent for so long so that they could announce and release within the same year. I appreciate that, but still, I'm not someone who normally complains about the uncanny valley or anything, but no games make me feel as unintentionally lonely as Bethesda's because everyone in them feels so hollow, automated, and unable to properly respond to my character's development. It's a difficult problem, to be sure, but I feel that it's one they're obligated to address for the type of games they're making.

Apparently this game was announced in June and I'm a big blind idiot for never realizing it! I always just assumed the worst for Parisian development studio Dontnod after the disappointing release of Remember Me (which I actually found to be a pretty good game), but it seems they've switched publishers from Capcom to Square Enix and are working on a five part, episodic game titled Life is Strange, which seems to have the aesthetic identity of a modern indie movie, Quantic Dream gameplay, and Telltale-style persistent choice (possibly with higher aspirations, as the game's Steam page promises multiple endings depending on your actions through the game). Here is the "reveal trailer" which finally made me aware of Life is Strange today and announced the first episode for release in early 2015 (on Steam now). And here is a longer look at the actual game, demonstrated by some of the directors of the game, from Gamescom in August, which I found. I am super excited for this!

I posted this on Twitter a while back and now it looks like it was deleted? I don't know why*. *Actually, upon typing this, it occurs to me that I probably stupidly uploaded it to Imgur and linked it on Twitter instead of uploading it directly to Twitter. Thank you for helping me reach this epiphany, cat thread.

Look, this thread is for developer videos. If you're looking for the "Times Jason has just been straight up incorrect" thread, it's much longer and as old as the Internet itself.

And Steve playing Minerva's Den: One non-Thumbs alumbs commentary I know of (although still tangentially related) is this one of the original System Shock by Irrational developers:

That non-dungeon gameplay footage is blowing my head clean off. It's not often one watches a trailer for something that could genuinely end up being their favorite game of all time.

I planned on seeing Murdered: Soul Suspect through. It moved pretty briskly, even if it was frequently middling, and once in a while dared to show a bit of charm. However, right at the final or penultimate location, it hit me a game-breaking bug - possibly the first I can ever recall falling victim to myself. I can't progress, and it's even the fault of the worst aspect of the game - the stealth combat demons. Pretty frustrating, considering how close I was to the end. I would've liked to finish it just for completion's sake if nothing else.

Oh wow. This is actually really brilliant functionality - it's a shame they hid it. If you attempt to replay an episode you've finished, it will bring you to a chapter select (featuring a check list of the optional photos so you know where you've missed any), and, upon selection, offer to replay the chapter in collectible mode (as you said, just for achievement hunting while not overwriting your original choices), replay it normally, or even begin a new game in a different save slot from that chapter. I'm very impressed. One issue: it won't let you play in "collectible mode" in chapters without collectibles. It would be nice if the mode was simply a consequence-free replay option, independent of the photos, so that you could just replay any given chapter to see the immediate differences in choices. Although I guess you can just choose to start on a new save slot, then delete it.

I just finished the first episode and I'm really in love with it. Critics will complain that you don't actually do that much, but I think that's acceptable for a high school drama. I can't tell if the scope of the game is going to expand into a broader science fiction tale or not - which is good. They don't distract from the genuine emotion and characters by throwing in too many mystery hooks (i.e., the Lost problem). The dialogue is something everyone will have an opinion on. Some of it is the French-writing-English problem that comes through in Quantic Dream games, but mostly it's the writing teenagers problem. I have a really difficult time with slang-heavy teenage dialogue as a viewer - had to turn off Juno like fifteen minutes in, etc. - and my opinion of Life is Strange would probably be much lower if it were a movie just for this reason. It probably will be too much for some players, but I found it acceptable just on account of the medium. I cared more about the people speaking because it was a game, the dialogue had more weight because I frequently chose it; it's interesting to think about. Not in love with the design of the achievements, though, since I apparently missed taking a picture of a squirrel with a soda can and am thus ruined. Can't go back and play it again, because, like Telltale games, I want to let my choices stand unaltered, and I actually didn't see an option for multiple save slots in the main menu (which, even then, would be a pretty tedious excursion - to play through the entire episode again chasing one photo).

Really? I never got that impression, not more so than between Jeff and anyone else on the site. This seems like the sort of presumption he addresses in his farewell with people who think he was ever "going rogue." Anyway, my money's on him joining Polygon, but who knows?

Yeah, today is best for me. I'm a little busier the rest of this week. I hope this isn't a case where we're all just being too passive to actually be the one to start the game. Xtanstic, do I have you on my Steam friends?

The thing about comparing this to Remember Me is that this seems like an entirely different animal. Remember Me was meant to be a big AAA action adventure game with combat and platforming and I think people complained that its systems just weren't refined enough to compete at a high level with its contemporaries (although for what it's worth I personally thought its combo system was pretty compelling). One thing that critics all seemed to agree on, though, were its - uh, what were they called - memory segments, which were much more adventure game puzzle-like in design and creative, being standout creatively and wishing they were featured more. Life is Strange certainly seems, if not directly chasing what they did best with Remember Me, a change of scope that could only be for the better. I don't want to put myself in a position to eat crow if it turns out the game isn't so good or anything, of course; I'm just saying it's definitely not like they're just trying to make Remember Me again here.

As am I, as SAM knows. Let's get a couple more people and do this.

And, as is rapidly circulating right now, here's the discussion thread on its reinstated Greenlight page suggesting that "SJWs" appear as killable enemies victims in the game.

So, it is unrealistic to expect to win anything with these astronomical gem counts, right?

KotakuInAction is now throwing AbleGamers under the bus on a philosophical level, which is great, because it shows how paper-thin their belief in charity was in the first place. AbleGamers' website has also been DDOSed, although obviously there's no mention of that on KiA. Did anyone happen to catch Grace Lynn and Mike Cernovich having a Twitter encounter last night? It began with mud-slinging, included Mike calling Grace a "lady" in quotation marks, then insisting he isn't transphobic and that it was merely a comment that she wasn't ladylike. Grace insulted Mike's masculinity and his appeal to the opposite sex a few times, and was finally answered by him dropping the mic by publicly posting a nude photo of his fiancée. This prompted his followers to respond with exuberant, orgasmic glee: That last one is very special to me, because he truly believes that the cam model they got for their charity masturbation genuinely believes in GamerGate, to the point of fellating its adherents.

Hello friends. This is the first time since I joined the forum that two days have gone by without this thread seeing a new post. That won't do, so I'm afraid I'm going to ruin everyone's supper, tomorrow's breakfast, and basically every meal through Christmas dinner by telling you that GamerGate is masturbating for charity. Here are the poll results determining whether or not this is a good idea. They are unnecessary. Of course it is.

You beat me to this topic by seconds because I was looking up the exact quote so I could title my thread "Tacoma: The Lunar Base That is Maybe Haunted By Ghosts."

Heh, I hadn't seen that video. He uses a picture of my college on the "hipsters with degrees in cultural studies" line.