Chris

Hmm, okay. I'll give it a shot. No real reason not to, I suppose.

Definitely. There's no real reason to put it off until you play through the other ones, if you aren't actually ever going to finish the other ones.

I grabbed that on Steam but it didn't quite grab me. I played it for a few hours and had fun, but it never seemed like it had the longevity I'd want out of this kind of abstract level-based game.

Hey man, I remember you from the AG community. Welcome to the forums.

It's awesome, by far the best laptop I've ever owned. I don't think I could ever use a laptop as my primary gaming PC, though. The M11x is great as a secondary travel machine.

I picked up Bully, Assassin's Creed II, The Void, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. I think only The Force Unleashed was a daily deal; there wasn't anything else offered in the daily deals that I really wanted and didn't already have. They all had good standard discounts, though. In retrospect I don't really know why I bought The Force Unleashed. I haven't heard great things about the PC port, and the install size was bizarrely massive. Hopefully it's not total garbage.

Most of them don't really compel me to keep playing, to be honest. Sam & Max season 3 is the first one I've actually kept up with. I also got through the first four episodes of Tales of Monkey Island, but S&M3 is considerably better so far. Other than those two series, I'd never really gotten more than one or two episodes into a Telltale season.

Well, misunderstanding is just a result of ambiguity. There are some puzzles I messed up on in my first guess simply because I got it wrong. That's different to messing up because the rules weren't clear. But yeah, the punishment was infuriating at times, particularly for the puzzles where they show you getting it wrong (for example, when you trace a route), but then they still make you sit through the numbers scrolling up and then giving you a big REJECTED stamp. Yes, yes, I know I got it wrong, let me skip this fucking nonsense so I can try again, hurry up!

Yeah, I much preferred when WarCraft was a relatively serious world with a slight humorous tint to it, as opposed to now where it's just balls-out fourth-wall-breaking pun-packed nonsense. I tried out the WoW Cataclysm beta the other day and after spending many hours downloading dozens of gigabytes of data, I couldn't stand to spend more than 30 minutes or so in there. It's awful now. Admittedly, I chose a Goblin character, which I'm sure is far more drenched in that idiocy than the others, but it's unlikely I'll try again with a different race.

Man, what a disappointment that show turned out to be. They put the whole run up on Hulu and I watched through it, and even before the end of the first season it was going downhill. The characters started out really defined and believable, and everything just kept getting more and more self-parodying and idiotic. That goddamn show.

Red Dead Redemption's actual writing is MUCH weaker than IV and the episodes', in my opinion, but there's also much less dissonance between its theme and gameplay. I think it's probably a better game overall for that reason, but it's disappointing that the quality of the dialogue isn't stronger.

Well, in that instance, I was thinking you'd have to As far as I'm concerned, ambiguity of the ruleset when it comes to puzzles where you're penalized for wrong guesses is NOT an acceptable replacement for difficulty of the puzzle itself. That's not "challenge."

There were definitely others that absolutely don't give you all the necessary information, including the one of the last puzzles,

Valve also does detailed tracking of player activity in their games. Sometimes they compile and share that data publicly on the Steam website and it's already really interesting; you can see things like heat maps showing the frequency of deaths at specific locations on the various maps, and so on. The last time I remember them doing that I think it was for the Half-Life 2 episodes, but maybe they released some of it for Left 4 Dead as well. In general, that kind of tracking is becoming increasingly common. Bungie and Valve are probably a bit ahead of the game in terms of sophistication and ability to dynamically format that data for public consumption, and Rockstar seems to be in that ballpark as well, but I'm sure many developers do it more quietly. I don't know how many have the ability to load up replays instantly; given the massive number of people who play their games, these developers probably use this kind of data more in aggregated form, and rely on smaller-scale playtests to observe more detailed behavior. You could certainly use the large-scale data as a guideline for what scenarios to playtest.

Haha, I was equally distressed by the nonexistence of both games. Also, I think I still have every issue from PC Accelerator's relatively short run in a box somewhere.

I feel the writing in the episodes is a considerable step up over the writing in GTA4 proper. They all share the same writing team, Dan Houser and Rupert Humpries, so either they found something more to connect with in the episodes or they're simply improving their craft. Anyway, the characters and their relationships are just amazingly good. And of course it's set in the same city and there's new stuff to waste time with. So if you already enjoyed GTA4, I can't see the episodes doing anything but providing you with additional good memories.

Completed The Ballad of Gay Tony and Puzzle Agent the other day. I put a few thoughts about Puzzle Agent over in its thread. Gay Tony ended really well, and had some of the best interpersonal dialogue I've seen in any game, although there's also a lot of fairly standard Rockstar URBAN GRIT/EDGE going on as well. All in all it was a very satisfying experience, although I still find myself really dismayed how many missions boil down to "KILL A THOUSAND MILLION COPS" or "KILL A THOUSAND MILLION DRUG DEALERS." I just can't quite get over the insane level of disbelief-suspension required there when the actual characters and overarching plot points are so much more believable than most games.

Welcome to the forum! If you like, I'm pretty sure I can change your name to be something else.

For future reference, you can buy Steam games directly through the Steam website as well. You may mean you had no internet access at all, though.

My final appraisal of Puzzle Agent is basically identical to Kingz's.

I'm playing this a little bit at a time. I'm somewhat torn on it. In general I really like the way it looks and sounds, but the actual GAME in it is really inconsistent. A lot of the puzzles aren't fully explained properly in the kind of crystal-clear way they should be, and sometimes there are properties of the puzzle that aren't even explained in the description -- for example, I've had numerous other examples as well. It's also very frustrating that there's no way to take notes in the game. It's fine that they don't give you a really complete interface for this; I've just been keeping a pad of paper nearby. But to not even be able to just scrawl basic notes on the puzzle field with the cursor is painful--ie, to be able to mark off pieces I've already counted or assembled or used or whatever, because many of the puzzles have absolutely no interactive elements even though the premise of the puzzle relies on you "moving" those pieces around in your head. Then, there's the weird Telltale quirk of not being able to save your game for long periods of time for no apparent reason. I was stuck last night, not in the middle of a cutscene or anything, just hanging out with a bunch of NPCs, and there was a particular onerous puzzle that I knew I didn't want to deal with at that time of night, so I figured I've save and quit. Nothing doing. I had to complete every single puzzle in the room before I could get back to a place where I could save. I started just trying random answers out of frustration, and by the time I finished two of the puzzles I was so irritated that I still wasn't done that I just alt-F4ed. Anyway that's more griping than this game probably deserves, but just coming up against all these frustrations back to back made last night's attempt to play this game very combative. Plus, there was one very early puzzle I couldn't even physically solve because the shades of red and green they used aren't very discernible to red/green colorblind people.

It is definitely the most obscene galactic map I have ever seen

Welcome, dudes!

Each one is a separate executable with its own release date that you start and complete, so I would count each episode as an individual game. Each episode has a different project lead on the development side, too.

I just completed Sam and Max 302. It was good!