Chris

I can't figure out what this post means.

The game has been patched a couple times, but I haven't gone back to it to see if those particular issues were addressed. As it turns out, I wasn't that into the actual game itself either, or I may have put more effort into dealing with the interface.

I have the same issue. I don't mind dated graphics much at all, but shitty interface issues like that are absolutely unbearable to me. If it's a main menu issue and there's a console-like start screen, I don't care. That bothers some people, but I don't mind. When it's part of the actual game though, Jesus Christ I can't stand it. I simply couldn't play Borderlands as a result. Those are the absolute worst in-game menus I can remember.

Fuck you, Baltimore!

Some of it is completely timeless though. I mean, this: That is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

I played it on PC and didn't really have any issues with the port (other than obviously more multiplayer freedom would be nice) but I didn't think the single-player campaign was that good. It was scattered to the point of bewilderment, really inconsistent, and reused a lot of tricks that were surprising and clever in COD4 but more ineffective now.

God, this is hard. Anyone playing this? I never played the first one, and the basic mechanic--essentially offering bounties to your hero units to complete tasks, rather than having direct control over them--is fascinating and cool, but it seems like I'm just constantly inundated by more enemies than I can handle.

Finally! "At the Mountains of Money" You lie on the ground, the last breaths leaving your body as you look up into the glowing, burlap sack-wrapped eyeholes of the man who ended your life. As voices recede and the world drifts away, you realize your dying thought will be "I wish I'd spent the 99 cents on that rocket launcher," and are disappointed. Games Discussed: Merchants of Brooklyn, Resident Evil 5, Team Fortress 2, Diablo III, Puffins: Island Adventure

I'm playing it because I genuinely enjoy the character interaction and situations. I think those things are very well crafted compared to the great majority of video games. Dragon Age doesn't feel like a grindy game at all to me. It takes me a relatively long time to level compared to many games, most equipment is fairly mundane, and I don't even really bother to look at my quest screen to grind through quests. I just go to different places and talk to people and do stuff, and I'll end up moving through quest lines as a result. I like how de-emphasized the whole grinding aspect of this game is compared to most RPGs I've played. I put it on "Easy," which might influence that. Grinding might be more necessary on harder difficulty levels. But the way I'm playing it, I feel pretty much free to just go wherever I want to and pursue whichever goal seems most interesting at the time.

It depends if you're counting 2000. If you count 2000, which I'm assuming you do since you mentioned it, then including 2010 would make eleven years.

I haven't watched the video, but on its own, that seems like a silly reason to not like the game. There are, what, dozens and dozens of hours of content in a single playthrough, and the game is bad because there aren't even more hours and hours of unique gameplay to allow for a different enough experience when you play as a different race? What about the actual game itself?

I don't see any reason a game can't provide you a valuable revelation. I learn amazing things all the time by way of life experiences, and that's me doing things directly. Why wouldn't a team of developers be able to create a world whose interactive possibilities are genuinely enlightening? Edit: Also, if the intellectual parallel to video games is driving or breathing, I think I'm justified in my frustration.

That's why I didn't call out any specific games. But rather than being a reason not to criticize Serious Sam or any other single specific game, that exact justification tends to be, either deliberately or inadvertently, used as a broad deflection of criticism on the part of the entire mainstream game industry. I probably won't stop doing that, but it only really happens when a game compels me to do so. This is surely correct. My issue is that I don't know if I actually do have anything to say. My entire attitude on this is fairly self-defeating in that respect. I love experiencing works made by people who have something to say, and I frequently find I have things to say about those things, but I don't know if I myself have any observations that stand up entirely on their own.

Well, I care. Vonnegut and Scorsese and Eco and the Coens are mainstream creators. Their works sell to millions upon millions upon millions of people. They resonate with a very wide audience. That, to me, is illustrative. Because there aren't many. There are games I think are extremely impressive and fascinating and worthy of discussion, but as I said in the piece, usually I find them interesting in those ways as pieces of game design, rather than as expression that is genuinely meaningful to my life. There have been no games that I can think of that have caused me genuine self-reflection along the lines of the works of Vonnegut, or Eco, or Welles. I could add some in, but I can't think of any that fit the criteria of what I'm describing. That's fair enough, but hopefully you realize that you telling me what you're looking to me to do isn't really much different than me stating aloud what I'm looking to the games industry to do. I haven't seen Brooker's thing and have no legal way to do so, so I can't really address it. Like I said in the piece, I recognize that this is easy for me to say. I spend a lot of my visible time on the internet discussing games I think are exciting and cool. But it's not my responsibility to do nothing but that. It would be ridiculous to say critics simply can't criticize.

Ah ok, I think I both misread your comparison and misunderstood your implication of "actor-driven."

I've not seen Monster, but I'm interested that you characterize This is England as actor-driven in the same sense as a Tyler Perry film. I didn't get that from it, really.

Well, they're evil because they kill miners in the mines, presumably. (Whether that's the humans' fault for going down there in the first place probably doesn't matter to the residents of the town.) I don't know how much more there is than that. Torchlight was a boom town that rose to quick prosperity on the back of its ember mining operation, but it turns out 1) ember has a corrupting effect that is now making itself apparent, and 2) there are entire levels of previously unknown civilizations under the mine that have now been breached. So now shit's all fucked up, and you have to go fix it.

rds_ljcVn-o

Admittedly I am not a fan of Joss Whedon so I'm a bit more dispassionate about it than I would be of someone whose work I appreciate, but perhaps he simply shouldn't be seeking those channels for his work. Network television is as far from any subculture as you can get.

How legion are those legions in real-world terms, from a network broadcaster's perspective?

Haha, I'm glad someone connected those dots.

Point taken. I only raised the issue because there are so many genuinely bad examples of writing both in video games and video game coverage.

I agree with your assessment of user opinion there. Very early on, Vista had some driver and compatibility issues, but it was a good operating system after that stuff was worked out. Windows 7 is not massively revolutionary, it's just cleaner and feels like the more "complete" version of Vista--which just means it's even better. There weren't tons of horrible awful things that needed fixing. Where did you get all your little add-ons, by the way? I've never really looked into that stuff. Are they mainly third-party or Microsoft-offered?

Technically "first-time" and "Polish" are both just individual modifiers of "developer," but yeah it's an awkward order. I wouldn't really call it out as "bad writing" though so much as a typo or minor syntax gaffe.