toblix

I also pay every month for a service I haven't used in forever. At this point Microsoft is probably just being perfectly silent about it, hoping nobody will shine a light on how ridiculous it is that they're charging for it at all, and calculating exactly how much longer they'll be able to get away with it. Then they'll announce some restructuring of the whole service where multiplayer becomes free, and the "premium" service gets some dumb exclusive ice hockey stuff.

Shut up! SHUT UP OR I'LL KILL YOU

It's well hidden, but it's accessible from your profile page. Just search for badge. Also, if you vote on the deal o' the day, you get a direct link right underneath.

how I do sucka riginal crook 4 LYFE

What, I was just wondering.

What are you buying? ... and what's your Steam user name?

Yeah, I haven't seen it since, and I just assumed there were more than nine things on sale. I guess I requested the page in the middle of an unsafe transaction or something.

Yeah, that looks pretty fun. It disturbs me a little how they're laughing and joking about killing all these innocent people, but I guess video games.

Chris twote this: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8157257/line-explores-reasons-why-play-shooter-games, which is about shooters in general and this game in particular. I'm probably going to buy this game.

Hah, my exact experience as well! To this day I wonder what made me finish it. Must've been a gripping story.

That globe looks pretty sweet.

There are like three or four Kickstarter-related threads; you want a sub-forum for those?

SATIRE Yeah, there should be a single thread for all the Kickstarter stuff, just like the Recently Completed Games one – that's a great thread! Also, why do we have separate threads for different games that are in the same genre? And why does each podcast episode have its own thread? </funny closing tag><>/

I think he meant hardcore.

Hardcodre indeed. I wasn't really interested at first, but then a colleague pledged, and then I had to as well. I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with it, but it's so cheap it feels like a good deal even if it flops like a five-pound turkey in a ten-gallon pot of hot sauce. I bet a great many of the other backers feel the exact same thing.

So this. Just click and don't stop until you've gotten the demo secret ending, and then you wait for the release and buy it.

Oh shiiiiiit.

Okay, a preliminary suggestion to incite discussion: We play every Saturday at 20:00GMT.

This game is terrible. There is a lot of great stuff, like maybe the most original setting in a MMORPG, and the combat system could maybe work, but everything is rendered shit because there is no tutorial or introductory phase. Instead of saying "okay, we expect the player to spend a lot of time with the game; let's take our time and introduce each concept and mechanism gradually" it just throws everything at you during the first half-hour. Weapons and skills and abilities and levels and QC0 and assault rifle resources and ten thousand other words I don't understand. There's so much GUI and game jargon, and no guidance, and the quest system is a mess. Jesus.

The more I think about it, the larger the array of possible obstacles becomes: Find key card to unlock electronically locked door (colour coded?) Find code/password to unlock electronically locked door Find two or more artefacts that slot into ancient mechanism (magical?) Door is hidden behind bookshelf. Which book activates the mechanism? The secret is up to you! Look, those wall boards seem loose. Maybe there is a hidden passageway behind them? Did you find the crowbar/stick? Omg what's the clickety-clack sound when I step on these LOOSE tiles in the old bathroom? Can a secret hide under them? Nice candlestick! (Or lever!?) Fancy door that leads to different places depending on which side you open like in the Labyrinth with David Bowie Oh no, a retina scanner. If only you remembered to find the eye of who lived here. Hey these books are not in alphabetical order! Will alphabetising them unlock the/a door? Only alphabetising them will tell! Ooh yeah cool, Towers of Hanoi! Should I solve it? Maybe means of overcoming a physical obstacle will reveal itself? etc

Yeah, I know, but I was referring more to what it looked like than what it technically is. I'm fully expecting my energy bar distribution and lack of radio-fixing to come back and bite me in the final season climax.

Part two of the RPS interview. He mentions finding a key being a part of a preview build he sent to some people. I didn't want to mention keys and locked doors before, since it seems like the most obvious of physical obstacles. Anyway, it seems like the game progress will map to physical progress (in part, anyway), which makes sense, and there won't be just a bunch of abstract 7th Guest puzzles. I sort of took offence at the dismissal of Myst as "playing the piano to launch the rocketship," though I guess most of the puzzles are rather like that.

It definitely can, but it has to be super-interesting if the only motivation to play is that you'll find more stuff. I'm guessing, though, that once you add an explicit obtainable objective, you'll probably increase the number of players who will want to explore by thousands of per cents. If your goal is to have the most people experience your game, you should probably add a goal, and it doesn't even have to be the primary focus. This is of course based on my own experiences with games like Dear Esther and the Myst games. Riven, for example, is a game almost purely about exploration and discovery. If it didn't have the story and progression that it did, I probably wouldn't have completed it, but the biggest reward was still the exploration parts. IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

I'm guessing they felt they had to tailor it somewhat to the X% did This, (100-X)% did That! thing, which seems to be an important element of the (marketing of the) game. I felt the numerical summary retroactively detracted somewhat from the experience, as, instead of letting the game be a contiguous series of events and decisions, big and small, it x-rays it to reveal the internal structure of the plot, depicting it as series of discrete A or B decisions, ostensibly revealing what data points are carried over between episodes. It's not a huge deal, since one decision is not necessarily better than the other, but it takes me out of the story, and I wish it'd at least be hidden behind a "statistics" button in the menu or something.

Yeah, I heard Patrick Klepek recommend it as well. Apparently it's a mediocre FPS with some great story stuff? I find it almost hard to believe – is it worth playing for the story, even if you've become tired of run-of-the-mill FPS game-play?