toblix

I really recommend watching the episodes as they come out. They're intentionally avoiding story details, spoiling literally nothing – certainly less than your average game marketing. The main focus is the people (some great portrait episodes not about the game at all) and the process. WATCH IT !!!

A quick question: Is the number of traits or whatever fixed? Is it true that the "gay" trait has no effect?

No thread for The Swapper? I finished this pretty quickly – most of the puzzles are really simple, though the last four required me sleeping on them, and then almost immediately solving them the next day. I sort of expected additional mechanics to be introduced as I progressed, but as it turns out, the game doesn't really change at all after the basic mechanics have been presented. Even the environments stay the same all the way to the end. A purely puzzle-focused game, in other words. I kept playing just to see where the story was heading – in the end I didn't really get it, partly because I'm not that bright, partly because I hadn't turned on subtitles and everyone was talking really quietly. Bonus: After finishing it, I discovered there were achievements, none of which I'd gotten. Turns out there are ten secret locations I never found.

If you go back and watch the videos, every time someone talks about adding something, you can see Chris's head appear in the door or from behind a plant. He never says anything, but you can see it in his eyes. I'm fine with all of this, especially since, in the end, we'll probably get the game with as much content as possible. As a bonus we get some real, tense documentary action! Even though they promised transparency from the start, I guess I wasn't really prepared for it. After having been exposed to the process of making games almost exclusively through marketing channels, it has been incredibly fascinating to see people discussing the project and then not having all the answers or necessarily agreeing on everything. It's no surprise, of course – game developers are humans, and I have lots of personal experience with disagreeing with people on software projects – but it's damn interesting. And the winnder of Best part of this episode goes to when Tim turns to the camera and points out the car/game analogy.

I guess it's not often you see a game with that kind of æsthetic that's purely a puzzler. I may be ignoring some obvious examples, but when I hear «puzzle game» I think colorful, happy, shiny (basically Peggle,) not dark, cold and brooding. I like how the textures are based on real-world items without it being pointed out at all. Also, I apparently have a thing for English sci-fi.

It sure does.

I had completely forgotten about the gravity-switching. I guess they did mix things up later in the game after all. The feeling you get when you come up with a solution after struggling for a while is incredible. It's like your brain physically expanded a little.

Whoops! I did a search first – guess I mistyped it.

COME GET YOUR SACRED OBJECTS

Sweet!

I know it's too late, but I'd like to apologize in advance.

Go Miffy! Finally, you get to be the cool teacher you always wanted!

Good times! Maybe the best times were all the times I won. Also, that time we played sniper-spotter pairs. That last-minute chopper chase was the best – hopefully we can play some variations of that next time. Maybe with more players? Eh? EH?

Oh no, Routine appears to be another sweet game that'll be too scary for me to play it. It's a non-combat space completely non-linear survival horror with permadeath. Sounds like part of the game is that you'll never be able to fully explore the spaceship (or whatever) in one go, and every player will discover weird and unique clues to the riddle of why everyone is frozen in mid-massacre. Also, there appears to be slender robots chasing you.

Looks like the shitty thing about the two first games (timer and limited saving) is being relegated to a «Nightmare mode» in the third one. I know a lot of people loved the hardcoreness about all that stuff, but the stress and constant replaying annoyed me so much I never completed any of them. Hopefully this time they've mainstreamed it enough for even me to like!

In video game terms it wasn't extreme at all, but that is one of the weird things that's starting to become ridiculously, annoyingly apparent to me. In some ways (all the cut-scenes) the game is going right for the serious movie thing, and still, just like in every video game ever, the player is tasked with just fucking murdering hundreds of people. If you compare it to any other medium, it would be the story of a crazed killer, but in video games it's the normal thing people do. Obviously this is not some great revelation, and others have said the same thing better both in this thread and everywhere else – I just found the disjointedness of it all to be extremely jarring, probably because of my expectations and how I felt about the cut-scenes. The Uncharted game have all the same problems, as the Idle Thumbs people have hilariously pointed out too, but when the story is an action adventure to start with, the violent doesn't stand out nearly as much. This is of course a matter of interpretation. I got the sense that the story of these people was not really meant to include the combat sequences, and that they detracted from what the story was trying to tell.

Just finished this game, and II'll just put down my little review before I go through this thread and read all these spoilers. MY REVIEW OF «THE LAST OF US» By toblix This is a really technically, artistically and game-developmentally impressive game that shows how far things have come, both in terms of video games in general, but also as a mind-blowing thing that exists on the PS3. It also shows how the current state of video game technology makes doing big-scale story-telling a weird impossible task, and impose some ridiculous restrictions and constraints. Instead of trying to write a thing I'll just make a dumb list like this: Amazing graphics, music, animation, and a crazy good last PS3 game from Naughty Dog. So much attention to detail throughout, like hand placement, incidental animation/dialogue and just ridiculously good-looking stuff all over the place. I've never experienced a bigger disconnect between when I'm playing the game and watching the cut-scenes. The cut-scenes are so good and well-produced and so emotional, and have characters that I relate to and empathize with, and the game itself is a very well made action video game that feels like it's not much different from other games. When I walk around the game and see Ellie sitting down on some furniture or picking at a thing or leaning over a thing or she comments on a poster, I'm super-excited about this ostensibly non-important, secondary thing, but why? Because I know that I'm now not just interacting with the systems, but watching a sequence that took lots of planning, motion-capturing, recording and rigging. This is weird, and a result of things that would be trivial in a movie being super-non-trivial in a game. This kind of AAA video game feels to me like it's struggling to go in the wrong direction. Look at how much time and effort has been spent on getting more detailed environments, and better graphics and more life-like animation. A lot of it just finding ways of easily letting hundreds of people crank out assets for your game. Yet we're still at the point where even the most highly praised games are basically 95% interaction with some variant of a classic system (traversal and combat) and 5% trying to be like a movie. Everyone gave this game perfect scores, which makes me feel like I'm not "getting it" or trying too hard to be critical. My impression is that the standard is such that a lot of people are "too happy" with what is basically the equivalent of a Hollywood action movie. The story is supposed to be about this man and this girl, and the role of the father figure and loss and hope or whatever, and still you get a flamethrower. Developing the sneaking/combat/fighting/weapon/AI system is so expensive, it's automatically given a huge role in the game, regardless – it seems to me – of whether that system "fits" with the story. You kill hundreds of people by shooting them in the face and blowing them up, which nobody can do without turning or already being insane, and the "story parts" just ignore this. There's a story and a game running in parallel, and they only touch ever so gently at a few points along the way. This is unfortunate, but all games with serious stories still do it, and the reasons for that are ridiculous, and it seems like the AAA industry is using all their might to get rid of or cover up this divide between the two game components, but it's like trying to bring down the Great Wall of China with an eraser. If you cover all the game parts, it's a serious, brutal story. If you cover the story parts, it's a farcical, over-the-top action romp with mindless killing and exploding buses. God damn it. I spent an hour and that's the best I could come up with.

Oh, penurize!

Cawed in a lance light!

So, «Hannibal» has just finished its first season and has been renewed for a second. Anyone watch this? What did you think? Anthony Hopkins was great, but I think Mads Mikkelsen does a much more interesting character, especially for one we're exposed so much more to than in the movies.

Why I won't post my face on the internet:

Have you tried renaming your account to Smork? edit: In addition to my good joke, I'm also saddened by this thread. Obviously you have some reason for this, but I hope you come up with a solution, like not leaving or at least coming back.