Erkki

Waking Mars got greenlit, so everything makes sense to me.

Finished it. The game had a good length, though I could have dealt with it being even shorter (for example missing big parts of the flooded district). Towards the end my enthusiasm for it died down a bit. I did ghost one mission but generally played stealthy-unless-caught and got the good ending. This doesn't top The Walking Dead or FTL for goaty, but good game, and I'm glad games like this are still made!

Sorry if this has come up in the thread already, but does anyone else find it odd that you can hear lighting strike before you can see it in this game. I understand the reasons for better gameplay experience, but it seems odd to show natural fenomenon turned upside down.

What's worse than a Steam sale? Another Steam sale that is just weeks away. I would like to play Miasmata now, but I don't want to buy it at the current price as it's very likely it'll be cheaper. About Far Cry 3, I'm not sure if it'll be cheaper, but I want to see if it will. These things would be so much easier if we lived in communism.

Isn't there already, basically? And wasn't it even the first you learned? Forget what it's name was.

Not at the moment but I was with the previous one. I'm annoyed at myself for installing Steam on the wrong drive.

I guess they are assuming that casual gamers will suddenly start playing this instead of Spider Solitaire.

I really don't see how it makes it better. Distinct, I can agree with.

His ideas may be a bit crazy (I haven't looked at the Q&A or anything besides the pitch & PDF), but keep in mind that he is not making it by himself, but has a whole studio (or a part of it) to support him. I'm sure the group as a whole can figure out how to keep the game a game and not just some programming and hacking exercise. I predict that the hacks will probably be more discrete than the pitch promises, and not quite the situation where you can actually change anything you can think of. Can you name some of them? I'm curious to try them. Cargo: The Quest for Gravity was building machines, but not automatons. I have vague memories of games that had you building robots, but those could as well been weak games for other reasons.

I have an obvious question: how does it compare to Mount & Blade?

This game is amazing! Even if I'm playing pretty casually, not like I usually play these games. I left everything on default settings, including the objective highlights or whatever those things pointing to your objective(s) are called, out of the various highlight options. I'm mostly trying to play sneaky dude, but when I fail and am seen, I try to quickly kill whoever noticed me. So far it's been pretty successful, and it's a bit too easy even because the noise doesn't seem to travel very far. If I had a dime for every time when I've missed a jump/blink, fallen and accidentally landed on top of a guard, then I'd have two or three dimes. I'm also not bothering trying to find absolutely everything, but I do try to get the runes and charms. The first mission end screen showed me that 11 bodies (could have said "unconcious" IIRC) were found -- does that mean they were found after I had left? Because I didn't see/hear about any of them being found during the mission.

But actually only 1 is going to get made into a full game? Is that how previous (closed) amnesia fortnights also worked? Did Stacking, Costume Quest etc. all come from different fortnights?

Damn, still would have bought it at 50%, but I saw 25%.

Do people still use separate save files? I rarely do these days. I just use quicksave.

I wanted to go for a non-lethal approach as well, but I got one death the same way you did -- except I put the body across from the trash can. Since you find out so much later, I decided that I don't care that much about the non-lethality because the swordplay seems kind of cool. Or is there a significant reward for going 100% non-lethal?

It was? Crap -- missed it then.

tsk tsk. Weren't you supposed to not buy anything that isn't at least 66% off? I'm waiting for the Christmas sale with Deadlight and I am Alive, hopefully they will be that cheap then.

Well, just the usual: pixel hunting, or having a bunch of items before you know what to do with them so you try combining them all etc. Also found from the walkthrough I had to look at some item in the inventory before it could be used for it's purpose (I forget which puzzle that was), and monkey wrench type things, including an item that only made sense if you noticed something about it's icon because it's text didn't give any hint.

For some reason November and December seem to be the months where I find more time to play games than usual. I finished Dead Island and Deponia. Deponia is a pretty good classic point & click adventure. It's quite well done (even has the '.' key for skipping dialogue!) and not too long or short -- I finished it in one 10 hour sitting. The puzzles are good, but occasionally fall into the same traps as many other adventure games that come before. I consulted a walkthrough about 3 times just because I wanted to get it finished in a single session. The story and dialogue is ok, but there's a bit more dumb jokes and fourth wall breaking than I like (recent adventures seem to love doing that for some reason). Overall, I would recommend it if you like point & click adventures. Now I'm thinking about what else should I finish... Batman: Arkham City, Skyrim, Trine 2, Black Mesa, Sword & Sworcery? Those are in various states of completion. I tried getting back into Skyrim but now it just seems a bit boring. I also installed Assassin's Creed: Revelations -- maybe AssCreed 3 will be cheap at Christmas and would be nice to get AssRev over with before that. Of course, I also want to play Dishonored and Far Cry 3 so I'm afraid I'll have the same situation as the end of last year that I'll have 3 or 4 unfinished open-world games in progress

I voted for 3 out of the top 4 so I'm happy (as long as Black Lake doesn't make a sudden push past Autonomous).

I just played through Deponia in one 10-hour sitting, and would recommend it as well. Quite good, although I'd prefer less text in the beginning and fewer dumb jokes.

I was just reading the RPS Far Cry 3 review; as it started getting into problems with the game, like a stalking mission and "escort missions which didn't impress", I thought to myself: Has any game ever gotten escort missions right? Or missions where you have to follow someone without them seeing you (lets call them "stalking missions", not sure what the right term is)? In all the games I've played recently, these missions have been an annoyance. In Dead Island you sometimes have to run back to the NPC being escorted to get them going again. Then it's a problem that they might run too far ahead. Generally, matching your movement speed to the NPC's seems to always be an issue. In L.A. Noire you often had to tail some car, or a suspect moving through streets on foot. The car tailing always seemed to boil down into two circles with different radii, cocentered around the suspect -- you have to keep your car between the two circles no matter how suspicious the resulting driving pattern will look; just as long as you don't get too close or lag behind too much, you're fine. With the on-foot stalking, there was an additional danger of having to restart because you couldn't hide fast enough when the stalkee decided to look around. And so on and so on. Even in the venerable Thief games these sort of missions were the worst ones since suddenly your ability to survey the situation ahead was removed (there might have only been one in Deadly Shadows, or were there any in the first two games?) and you may have been forced into quickload/quicksave types of solutions. So, if these kind of missions usually always suck (or do you disagree?), why do developers keep putting them into games? Is it a pathetic attempt at adding variety when still not having figured out how to create interesting gameplay beyond combat? Do you have any examples of well-done escort or stalking missions that you've enjoyed playing?

Bought Deponia on an impluse, a few minutes before the 66% off expired (it's still 50% off). I hope it's good. I love the junkyard setting from the trailer, but the main character seems to have a lot of stupid stuff to say.

Off topic: the countdown to tears actually ended for me last year with To The Moon. And The Walking Dead was the second ever game to make me cry. So if you want to spray some more tears on your keyboard, at the moment To The Moon is 50% off on Steam (4€).

It symbolises the fifth wheel. The mystery of the games plot is which of the three characters is it?