Vainamoinen

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About Vainamoinen

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    Social Justice Bard

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  1. Great necro. Before Tale of Monkey Island released in 2009, we've had like 500 threads discussing the upcoming release on the Telltale forums. And although this Italian "This is not MI5, the real MI5 is my fan game" guy kept coming back, the whole anticipation and discussion on that forum really made the game a special experience for me. Damn, I wish those times would come back and some forum would discuss Return to Monkey Island with as much enthusiasm.
  2. Cyberpunk 2077

    The tweet was made by the very same guy who made the gamergate tweet back in July. Apparently back then, the GOG suits failed to tell new guy that his job isn't to make GOG look like reactionary shitheads, so, he did this. Disclaimer: I thought the guy did a fairly good job moderating the GOG forums, and he wasn't afraid to piss off the outraged reactionaries, which seem to amass in this particular forum like fruit flies on a two week old corpse. GOG has fired him in the meantime – which led to a hilarious 'support group' forming on their forums. Part of those supporters still pretend to think that the provocation was accidental, others fully acknowledge it was a planned provocation, but think of it as 'not a big deal'. I don't condone the firing, but then again, he was really crappy at this particular part of his job. It was strike two and I wouldn't have let him continue after strike one.
  3. Telltale Games is closing down, apparently

    Jake and Sean, today I finally understand why Valve's security seemed so attractive to you. To the Fietzek brothers, thank you for those videos, they brought me so much joy. If you ever make a Kickstarter... Andrej-Wolfie, your immeasurable talent should have ruled out Ubisoft game tester. Really hoping things look up for you. Alan, you had to take that comment down back then, it was too negative after all. You were awesome at your job. I'm sorry we missed meeting by a hairline. Michael, you were the best community manager, for giving mods way more insight than we probably should have had, but also for being an axe and not a scalpel at a time of crisis. Andy, I really hope health things got better. You did amazing, consistent (and FREE) tech support work for Telltale for years. They should have offered you the world for it. Mark, last man standing at Telltale, thanks for meeting up at gamescom all those years back. You're still one of the nicest people I've ever met. Sarah, the valiant Mrs. Text-to-Speech, I'd love to hear what you're up to these days. Jared, you're one of the most talented composers out there. I really hope you can continue your work with as diverse applications as at the beginning of the great Telltale journey. Video-Shaun, it’s incredible what you achieved with what little you had at your disposal. I’m still a big fan of you. I hope you get to use those indie talents again. And the kung fu. And good luck with the kid, Laura. I really hope you're happy.
  4. Mass Effect Andromeda - Thumb Drive Engaged!

    Indeed, that joy refuses to arrive. I'm through more than half of the game, and have seen some of what made heart and soul of the predecessors for me: The companion loyalty missions. Of course, here they're taking, proportionately, much less time as compared to the total playing time. Those that I played do put a fair bit of effort in, but still feel awkward especially in comparison to Mass Effect 2.
  5. Mass Effect Andromeda - Thumb Drive Engaged!

    Oooof I'm battling with this game. I really want to like it but it's just not happening. I mean, I liked Mass Effect 1 to 3, loved them even. But this thing is just... it feels like such a waste of time playing it. For like 30 hours, I've just trotted from checkpoint to checkpoint to checkpoint for the same stupid errands, and the massive loading times between areas, masked as repetitive cutscenes and doors that take eternity to open, are starting to annoy me greatly. None of the side missions seem to make any emotional impact on me at all. I forget about the story the second the side mission is completed, and sometimes much earlier. I will have forgotten absolutely all of it in a week's time. Story is communicated in cutscenes with conversation partners entirely devoid of facial expression and written text on computer screens set in often blocky sandbox areas that fail to be at all visually distinct. Which may be enough for some low budget 10 to 15 hour experience, but here it just serves to justify ridiculously large and absurdly empty environments back. I'm kind of done with open world. I want overworld maps back. ...and now the character side missions are "on hold". Great. Those almost kept me going.
  6. Cyberpunk 2077

    Night City shows definite signs of sandbox blandness. I sure hope they can bring much more iconicity into it and don't just try to show off how immeasurably BIG THE WORLD is and how many HUNDREDS OF HOURS it will keep you playing. As to the mission shown however, I like how story driven these moments are, and especially the effort that goes into visually communicating the story beats. This is, hopefully, maintained throughout the game. I've only just started Mass Effect Andromeda and I'm appalled how many missions are squeezed in that just let you wander from map point to map point, a cutscene that shows you some face devoid of emotion that voices some words, then it's on to the next map point. It's superfluous crap, and unfortunately most of it is. It just leaves no impression. I forgot all those missions already. The Cyberpunk mission at least left an impression. Yeah, there are some really cheap shock effects in there, and a good bit more violence than I'd usually accept. But if CDPR goes on to continuously show, not just tell the desperate situation of this society's struggling members, this could still make an impact that ME:A can only dream of. I've had an odd feeling that I can only describe with difficulty during some of the high risk conversations they've shown. I felt like they aptly recreate what I dealt with "back in the day" when playing Cyberpunk 2020. That is not necessarily a good thing, I tell you, because the GMs were just about as juvenile as I was. Maybe that haphazard feeling, that rapid oscillation between the possible outcomes will be a good thing eventually. But maybe the 2077 creators are still just 15 year old GMs in a bad disguise and will treat you with arbitrary decisions that are a whole lot of things, but not in your favor, and not fun to play. The awesome custom main character is, as expected, totally wasted on the First Person perspective. Sure, there are cutscenes to show off the player customized protagonist, which in principle breaks the "immersion" that they seem to be so damn proud of. They're trying a 'best of both worlds' approach here and as I see it, it doesn't get them something coherent. I've trouble playing in first person perspective for more than a few minutes, so Cyberpunk 2077 really doesn't look like the game for me, despite all those memories a quarter century ago. Ah well. Seems like this game is a good ways off anyway. Whether it will be that new PC, the PS5 or whether I'll choose not to play it at all, we'll see.
  7. Another Red Redemption, Dead

    Sure, exactly what I play video games for. Shoot someone’s cousin, intimidate a witness into silence, and make a whole bunch of choices oscillating between deeply compassionate and infinitely cruel so that the main "character" looks like a complete sociopath without a shred of personality. Looking forward to the "story trailer" so we can see how empty this shell really is. :|
  8. Jeff Goldblum

    https://io9.gizmodo.com/jeff-goldblum-and-author-chuck-tingle-adorably-bond-ove-1826566542
  9. Jeff Goldblum

    Guys, solve me this riddle.
  10. I'd be surprised if that didn't break the neck of any chance In the Valley of the Gods released on GOG. God, do I need some drugs to crank that hype down now. I've been working it up for months.
  11. Telltale Troubles

    "Serious" P&C adventure games have been made, some where even great, but the point is well taken. "Interactive joke generators" was what Jake – possibly frustrated by a community that just refused to follow that strain of thought – called them in a discussion on the Telltale forums back in 2011 or 2012, if I remember correctly. The game mechanics i.e. genre conventions are strictly speaking not more or less absurd than in other genres, it may just be that the stronger storytelling focus makes the ludonarrative dissonance all the more apparent. Increasingly, the stories were too good to be 'interrupted' by item/inventory based puzzles, and the designers that attempted to create puzzles that "fit" the scenario and story usually ended up making repetitive, crazy boring and totally unambitious games (like King Art's "The Raven"). I weep for the P&C of course, I love it dearly, and since Daedalic has announced that they've buried my one great hope for a modern, technically advanced, graphically stunning and shamelessly gameplay focused P&C adventure game: The Devil's Men. The "simulated search engine" has been done to death in the Blackwell series, and I never understood the appeal really. I'm googling in real life all the time, why do I need a google simulator in my games? That's not the way those games evolve for me, sadly. I also don't see much hope in interactive storylines. As soon as they get ambitious, neither the journey nor end of the story seem to matter any more. I love choices in games, but to me they only seem to work if they're a total sidenote, accompanying and complementing a strictly linear story with a generally rather different gameplay.
  12. LucasArts adventure games on GOG and Steam

    I played it in English for the first time last weekend... which means that it was the first time I actually got to listen to "A pirate I was meant to be" in the actual game. For some reason the song is cut from the German version (probably the other FIGS languages as well).
  13. LucasArts adventure games on GOG and Steam

    Believe me, I tried, so many times. And failed. No idea why.
  14. LucasArts adventure games on GOG and Steam

    Fate of Atlantis is my all time favorite P&C. It holds up to everything. And I was so happy to see CMI pop up on GOG eventually. I didn't get this game to run ever since I switched from 98 to XP and... that's been a while. A looong, looong while.