Chris

...an armless baby? Good God, I can't believe I just typed that.

Yeah, Black Isle was a pretty solid studio... The lukewarm/negative reception its ex-members are getting in this thread is somewhat confusing to me.

I have seen that video too. And you were right to edit that post.

I just watched that whole thing and I didn't see any cows nor guns.

Man, I was a big jazz fan back in the day. Also, Jazz Jackrabbit was super fun.

I know this is probably what you just told me not to say, but is it possible to download through Steam using your CD-key that you bought? I'm assuming the thing you meant not to mention is "Why didn't you buy through Steam?". If I'm wrong and I am in fact being unconstructive, I guess it doesn't matter since I'm pretty sure you can't ban me.

Yeah, that definitely looks like it's targetted towards a female audience...

Just from a quick glance, a lot of these posts look like they belong in the spoiler thread...

Argh, no, please no. I have a feeling I'm never going to want to post on this subject again once the responses start coming in... Ah ok, thanks. That does sound more familiar. Either way, too bad he didn't just get on that other train...

Another thing I'd like to point out is that character development and possible story hints aren't exactly bursting at the seams in this game. You spend a REALLY long amount of time in sequences like the hoverboat thing. I mean, that's a really good chunk of the gameplay, and there aren't any characters there or any sort of clues as to what's going on. Sequences like that are punctuated by moments in which you must solve a bunch of generally physics-based puzzles, which add even more time and are also definitely not filled with any kind of storytelling. AGAIN, I think Valve was successful, but I'm not going to suggest that there are in fact always little clues and hints you can pick up that all contribute to the overall tapestry of "what the hell am I doing here".

First off: he's not dumb. Secondly: while I said I don't fully agree with him, your response is ludicrous. You seem to essentially be saying that any game in which the story is presented outright is "ramming it down your throat". This applies to, hmm, well just about any great adventure game. Full Throttle, for example, is one of the great examples of storytelling in games, and yet your character's motivations and the story arc are quite clear and obvious the whole way through. The same is true in Grim Fandango; sure, there are things to speculate about, but you certainly never lack knowledge of what's going on. "Valve went to great lengths to make the gameplay intuitive while leaving the story implied and characters developed within the game's actions" does not in fact say anything at all. It's a very wishy-washy response that could be applied to any number of situations, including crappy games which simply don't know how to tell a story. Your response sounds like a typical PC gamer elitist who hates to consider for even a second that an idiot console gamer (UGH, consoles) might have a valid point about your precious savior of PC gaming. Please explain to me how someone who is not familiar with the first Half-Life should know just what is going on, up until at least halfway through the game. You get off a train after a completely uninformative sequence involving this old guy, you're in this City 17 place, you meet this guy who was dressed up as one of those mask guys but apparently you know him, you sort of escape, you meet some other people, they keep telling you to go places. The whole Ravensburg (sp?) area doesn't seem to have any significance other than that people generally don't go there, then you eventually end up in Nova Prospekt, where you could have gotten if you'd just stayed on the train at the beginning. Remember when Barney (at least I think it was Barney, maybe it was Eli) says "Wow, good thing you got off the train here, you could have ended up in Nova Prospekt!" I mean, clearly you had to take a detour due to various events occurring, but if you already haven't the faintest idea what's going on, it's completely understandable why this might be a bit frustrating. I'm completely fucking loving the game so far, but I have a slightly different perspective on it. I can certainly admit that HL2 doesn't do as good a job as HL1 as setting up the circumstances, since in HL1 you definitely need no prior knowledge about any other events. It's clear that you're a research scientist, you participate in an experiment which goes wrong, and from that point you're mainly trying to escape with your life. It's very different. HL2 makes you feel like you're supposed to be saving these people from the get go, but they clearly know way more about it than you do so it seems like they should be saving themselves if they actually know everywhere you're supposed to go. HL1 put you in your position as a matter of necessity, whereas HL2 puts you there because of some ill-defined expectation. Again: I love this game, I think it's great. However, I definitely thing the main innovation in this game is its environments and physics, and is not quite up to par with HL1's revolutionary storytelling. That said, I haven't beat the game yet and I've heard it does get a lot better in the later portions. Also bear in mind I am playing extreme devil's advocate here. I wouldn't have bothered typing all this shit if it weren't for manny's initial insult of my friend, followed by a typically idiotic brushing aside of console gaming, followed by a rote and non-specific defense of HL2. EDIT: Treesus' explanation is one I agree with and is in fact almost precisely how I responded to my friend the other day. However, I still can't expect him to have gleaned this rather esoteric explanation out of thin air, not knowing who the G-Man is, Gordon's association with him, or any of the events of HL1. It's worth noting that my friend is enjoying the game a lot more after I filled him on in the previous game.

Really?? Man, those are the only ones I had. My parents refused to buy me custom sets. I had a bunch of these enormous tubs of blocks. It was super fun.

Arghgh, I hated the kids who built stuff out of all different colors. Geez, it was one of my biggest frustrations.

One thing my generally console-gaming friend pointed out is that while the game world is incredibly designed and construcuted, he felt that at many points the game sort of felt like a tech demo. Since for a large part of the game, the player doesn't actually learn anything, Gordon's journeys feel kind of pointless--the G-Man says go here, you go here, not knowing what to do, something goes wrong, you go somewhere else, you meet people who tell you to go here, so you do it, something goes wrong, you go somewhere else, someone says what to do, you do it, etc., but you have no idea WHY--and to him it was kind of like the designers were saying "Now go to THIS location, do these wacky things with physics, kill these monsters, why? I have no idea, ok now go HERE!" It's not an opinion I agree with necessarily, and we had a lot of interesting discussion about it, but I think it speaks about a small negative side effect of the "cabal" approach for which Valve was split up into small design teams to work on various areas of the game. It's understandable that Gordon doesn't REALLY know what's going on, but to my friend that reached a ludicrous extreme. He didn't play HL1 (and Newell stated you shouldn't have had to), and he quite literally did not have the slightest foggiest idea what was going on during his whole experience until I explained some things and offered some educated guesses of my own.

Playmobil was lame, a worthless pretender to the Lego throne.

I'm pretty sure those three did sing the songs, along with Jake's friend (who I sort of kind of know I guess) Jared, who used to work for Clint. Jake can confirm or deny these things.

My parents didn't really buy me toys or watch much TV, so I kind of missed out on all the GI Joe, Transformers, Masters of the Universe, etc., business. They did get me Lego, though. I fucking loved Lego.

It's a column, not a TV piece. http://money.cnn.com/commentary/game_over/ Like Marek says, it's probably the best industry column around, and it really does horribly shame pretty much all the "real" video game journalists.

What's your context? You don't watch TV.

There are DVD cases that can hold multiple discs. Often what they do is just have the spindle be taller, with a little ring that keeps the discs from touching. The Halo 2 collector's DVD case is like this. There would surely still be room for three if the manufacturer had some foresight.

City of Heroes wasn't developed by NCSoft, they just publish and host it (like they will be doing for Guild Wars I BELIEVE). But anyway, there are a gajillion Korean MMOs that are super popular there and more popular than you'd expect in the rest of the world. Marek can tell you all about it.

It can be, it isn't necessarily. Some graffiti clearly is clearly art, but some is nothing more than defacement. If you consider anything with some kind of emotional conveyance art (even if it's just boredom or half-ass malice), then I guess all graffiti is but I don't think that's a very useful distinction.

I actually originally wrote Dog, then someone in the discussion thread said it was Doc so I changed it. Then I guess you changed it back? Should I change it again? In the game it sounds to me like she's saying "Dog".

That horse can never die. It's an immortal horse.

Dead horses? Pff.