Chris

I'm sorry, I only skimmed over your post for now (I'll read it in more detail later), so I just wanted to quickly disagree with this point. I kind of miss cutscenes too, but I think it's unlikely that the no cutscenes method is just a phase and will fade away. Especially when the next generation of consoles/PCs crops up and in-game graphics get even more impressive, it's just going to be less and less worthwhile to construct pre-rendered cutscenes when the game engine can produce something detailed and cutsceney on its own. I don't think it's as much some big stylistic thing like you say it is, nor do I think it's being heralded as "the right and only way to tell a true game story" (at least in all cases), it's more just developers realizing their in-game engines are getting more advanced and with some good scripting they can make exposition scenes that don't require a whole team of animators doing stuff pre-rendered. There are still games with cutscenes (Final Fantasy, Painkiller which does a shitty shitty job with them, others I'm sure but I haven't played enough new games at the moment to give you good examples), it's just becoming slightly less necessary than it used to be.

The concept of the world was quite unique in games, and borrowing music from classical composers doesn't make the soundtrack bad, it in fact makes it good if you like those composers. Er... I don't see it. I haven't a clue if you'd enjoy it.

I love Loom. It had some of the best atmosphere I've seen in an adventure game.

SHUT UP YOUR AN IDIOT

A friend and I rented it last night and despite taking an MST3K attitude towards the dialogue we actually enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than we felt we should have. The combat system is really good. In one of the earlier fights I played, I was unarmed and my opponent had a shotgun. I managed to point the guy's gun at his head (while he was still holding it) and pull the trigger, giving him a severe case of head explosion. Craziness!

Fuck everything, he's doing five blades.

In-N-Out is only good if you want a hamburger and/or fries, so no matter how awesome it is, it's only awesome in certain situations. Jack in the Box, on the other hand, has an enormously diverse/awesome menu of goodness. No contest.

I'm pretty sure stores just decide what games they want to put in the bin, it's not really an official classification. I've seen BGE still on store shelves.

ALL fast food sucks compared to Jack in the Box.

How in God's name could someone find out about Half Life 2D before finding out about Half Life 2? Furthermore, as Jake said, the game was made by fans who were bored. Even if Valve does have some ludicrous aim to increase HL2 sales by "publishing" this fan effort, that has nothing to do with the original intent or development of the game and thus cannot in any way be blamed for any gameplay deficiencies.

They are both illegal, but doing one is worse than doing the other. I highly doubt that if publishers were going to start prosecuting pirates individually (which doesn't seem likely at least right now) they wouldn't worry as much about people who cracked versions they actually paid for. It just seems unlikely they'd worry about that as much.

Right. Not to mention, you're cheating the developer, who is almost never responsible for stupid copy protection flaws.

Or you could just acknowledge that it's semantics, and that cracking a game you paid for isn't actually immoral even if it's technically illegal. Ragnar might be correct in terms of specific laws, but the reason I pay for games is more than anything because I feel it's right to do, not because I can't find legal loopholes.

I haven't found an electric razor that gives me a good enough shave when I'm not keeping a beard, but I do use one for trimming now. Real razors can't trim beards of course, so it's that or scissors.

Ahh, Diablo 2. The game that keeps on giving...

Precisely! Sometimes, I suppose, but it's worth only having to worry about it once a week (when I keep it trim so I don't look Amish or something).

Heh, sorry. I only ask because when I was in hurry I used to shave with just water and it hurt like hell for a while afterwards. I shouldn't assume other people would do such things.

This is probably a stupid question, but did you use shaving cream? I've only had that stinging when I didn't use it.

Well, of course when that's the case there's no room in there for ANYTHING else, let alone ladders.

Er... no. My reluctance is due almost entirely to laziness, and certainly isn't because shaving is painful (it's not, unless you cut yourself, but shaving cuts tend not to hurt).

And the inventory system is terrible. I can't even fit a SMALL ladder into my pocket.

Actually, wrong again.

I am vaguely aware.

Most of the time I live in Berkeley, and am a convenient metro ride away from the offices of Double Fine Productions.

1. Fire Emblem 2. Fire Emblem 3. Good God, Fire Emblem I brought my GBA to Italy with me and only brought one game (guess which one). It turned out to be more than enough. I've had this game for almost 6 months now and it's still completely playable. At GDC I was kind of skeptical when the Fire Emblem team received a nomination for Best Writing (alongside the likes of Broken Sword 3 and KOTOR), even after owning the game for a while. Now, however, I completely agree with the nomination (which was unfortunately only given to the original Japanese writers--I suspect the English translators as well deserve some commendation for their excellent work). The game has a MASSIVE amount of writing, far more than any strategy game I've played on any system, assuming you count Fire Emblem as a strategy game. The dialogue occasionally borders on the cheesy, but in general that tends to be because the writers obviously went to great length to create distinct and memorable characters, and that sort of thing is unfortunately quite uncommon in games outside of genres like adventure and RPG (and they often don't succeed in this regard). Remarkably, you could play through the game and miss a great deal of dialogue. There are plenty of hidden scenarios as well as in-game conversations between characters that are only revealed by particular circumstances. For example, in a mission I played on the plane a few hours ago, by complete chance I happened to position one of my healer characters next to a recently-acquired mercenary. The mercenary (again by pure chance) happened to be missing exactly one hit point--and the healer initiated a conversation, saying something like "Oh, you've got a scar on your cheek, let me fix that up for you"; a rather awkward exchange ensued, he being somewhat reluctant to accept her help on account of his rogueish ego. The game actually healed his 1hp automatically. It was unexpected and circumstantial, and the game is packed full of little bits like that. This is all of course completely in addition to the game's very solid gameplay, which is what kept me hooked for the first few months. I really didn't start to fully appreciate the writing until recently, but it's renewed my interest. woot woot What do you think? Also, you might already be aware of this, but Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, who authored that game, has a bunch of other AGS games, many of which are considered classics.