vimes

By the way, do you know how The Boat That Rocked was titled in France ?... Good Morning England

I love Hans Gruber variation on this one : "I'm going to count to three, there will not be a four."

Jesus Christ, is that Comic sans MS ?

Jesus, has anyone on these forums actually PLAYED or will play MW2 or is this thread going to be all about reporting what other people felt about the game ? Come on, I'm tired of all this "being offended through someone else".

So, has anybody played the game so we can finally talk about what's actually in there ?

Woops, I thought the caption was in there, those are histories of the relative normalized stock price relatively to November 14, 2007. More data Edit : changed image by a screengrab since the site I took it from only stores charts for a little while. Edit2 : let's be clear, it's a very depressing and daunting news; and I find it pretty extreme and unjustifiable, but I think it's better if we can actually discuss facts rather than pulling statements out of our asses.

Where have you been the last 24 months ? I don't know what these means for the overall market or if these amazing drops are due to something else than the crisis, but let's not say the game industry as remained untouched in thelast two years when evidence such as this one exists to prove the contrary.

All Chris Van Allsburg's books my parents had , namely The Wreck of the Zephyr & The Mysteries of Harris Burdick Cathedral In the Night Kitchen

I though we'd be talking about kids' book, with full fledged illustrations, a maximum of 30 words per page and a charming aesthetic. But it all went back to scary skulls and vampire from space. *sigh*

So do I and I found it utterly weird that the thematic was hammered in the opening and re-hammered at the end while being completely ignored in-between. I was expecting something along the line of having to discover the prophecy and making it actually happen for others. Was anybody surprised - as I was - that the game felt quite dull storytelling-wise ?

Pure was awesome and made me fall in love with racing game all over again; so if Split Second is anything like, it's going to be a major title. Also, don't expect Mario Kart like rubber banding...

I don't think misaligned texture and lack of shadows look better in motions, but I see your point. Maybe they gave out information too early; in any case, I wonder who let those screenshots get out of the door, because they are quite terrible.

Just a note, while I'm listening and still remembering my point : I love the idea of constructing a narrative experience from a bunch of snack sized experiences (even 1 hour long ones) which constructs a setting with horizontal depth rather than from a vertical one. It's like Shortcuts or Groundhog Day; and it's not been done yet in game ... I think ?

Happy Birthday, He who cho·reo·graphes and designs stuff, including this very intertube site -thanks for all that!

Wait ... what?! On the gameplay front, the puzzles were less naturally integrated than in the previous episode and more classical overall (except for the reality bending map which was awesome). With all the liquid substance we gather, the setting of a trial and the presence of crime scenes, I though a spoof of CSI was going to happen but it ended up being all about use-this-on-that. The effect of the monkey on the bearded Guybrush board in the inventory was very neat though. There was a record of frustrating puzzles due to lack of visual clues , similar alternative solution that didn't work , or just plainly absurd reasoning[spoilers]mixing all the ingredients creates a skull shape wound, even though there's enough skull lying around to use as cache? , or a bit punitive in failure . Also the finale required a certain order in interaction that didn't make any sense thus lacked the dynamism of the the best Telltale climaxes ... so it's not the most polished and surprising experience I've had from Telltale, to say the least. Also, while I was playing, most EU thumbeteers where having a great time in London; and I think it's in order that Telltale take the blame for that too. On a side note, was Marek the guy who provided the voices for the dolls? It sounded strangely like his thumbcast voice.

Really ? Is it using the motif I worked on with Dan months ago but never finished ?

Just finished the main storyline on Brutal ... the difficult part was the Dry Ice thingy because, contrary to all the other battles, there's always some a part of the level you can't see. That made me go into full RTS mode (flying around, ordering different units to different points), which proved unsuccessful and frustrating ... Anyway, once I got past that part, I rolled everything in one go; including the final fight which was ridicuslouly underwhelming. I loved the last two RTS sequences though, if only because there was a point in developing the full tech tree and get the Rock Crusher, which was so fun to use. Thus I guess my gripes should be more about the level design than about the game design, but still ... some infos are still badly (never?) delivered to the player and I still maintain that we should be left with less to do. In retrospect, I must say that the story - which I expected to be, in the worst scenario, the saving grace of the game - was disappointing both in terms of content and structure : in the end, it is yet another typical fantasy story. There is no twist to the genre's codes, and aside from the dialog, there's no clue it's been penned by the same writer who also delivered Psychonauts and Grim Fandango. I though the roadie vantage point would bring something to it, but it didn't;( The background was pretty good but it was unimaginatively conveyed (diaries ? again ?) and poorly integrated in the main storyline. It also didn't come up as a context for any of the the secondary missions and that was disappointing. I still enjoyed the game since the aesthetic was awesome and moving around was spot on , and I'm kind of confident about Doublefine's future : despite the letter, I picture Schafer as someone who could take feedback into account and be critical about the design decisions taken on BL .... and the GPP and technical guys at DoubleFine are obviously up there since they nailed the basicsbig titles usually suck at (camera and controls, feedbacks) and implemented the RTS design perfectly. As long as DF have them,that they make a faster rendering engine and the game designers do a proper postmrtem, the company is bound to make an awesome next title.

Sorry guys, but I won't be able to come to London this week end - had to cancel my day-off and everything - so no Idle Meet for me :/ Be sure to drink pints on my account, and to the Parisians ... make me proud and let us meet anyway in the upcoming weeks.

It doesn't have anything to do with anything but ... for people doing pro/amateur dev, it should be known that Torchlight uses the awesome open-source 3D engine Ogre, which just turned awesomer by shifting to the MIT license and thus becoming completely free and void of any restraint in terms of source modification!

Je sais pas encore; je serais peut-être en route pour Singapour d'ici là. Je te tiens au courant par PM ... ou dans ce thread.

This subject is kinda why Video game is a source of enthusiasm to me and why I'm working in the field; so this message might get long and off topic. Games can be written as movies, as books, or as plays - it's more than fine - but these will rarely be both very good as games and still win the comparison against their model. It's a limitation of the medium : interactivity comes in the way of maintaining the unique flow needed by these linear experiences. So, I don't believe in "The Magnificient Ambersons - The movie - The game", simply because the exact point of view it adopts can't provide activities that are as meaningful in terms of story as they are in terms of lasting interaction. However, what I do believe in is "The changing social power game of the 20th century's US - The game". The difference is that it's a game set in a defined universe that tackles the same problematic as the Amberson but uses tools which are interactivity friendly or, better yet, which are strengthen by interactivity. Thus, my bet is that the breakthrough will come from a title that manages to carry out a defined thematic and trigger the same intellectual or emotional process for all players, while providing gameplay and story experiences that fits their actions, i.e. being nearly unique for all of them. For this, and in the same way novelists appeared because writing novel was different from writing poems and plays, the Video game medium needs to spawn video games writers, if it's ever going to find its own way as a narrative tool. What I think we need are people that can understand why a kind of narrative structure creates such and such effects, why an event triggered at a point in the story carries a peculiar meaning across, why an activity and a point of view offered to the player change the player assumption of the world ... and build narrative system out of it. Structuralists in fact. For instance, say you create templates of scenes that carry the point of 'humiliation due to having to conform to you social status untold rule' and at one point of the game, you need to get this point across. First thing you do is choose a template via some criteria (can I cast all the characters of this template, have I already used it, is it carrying a point I've already conveyed or don't want to convey?) Depending on how you want this point to be carried across (is it toward the player, or another character) or with which strength, you'll put the player in a certain role, cast other characters/object as the remaining ones, set it in space and time that both makes sense and bolster the intentions and define a point of view (when/where is told from, when/where is it compared to the talking point of view, who's telling) ... lot's of different instantiation, one of them being the exact Eugene/Isabel flashback from the movie; but you only show this one if it makes sense in the player's experience. The closest profile we've got to the one which could do this are the Bioware guys (with, as best example, the Mass Effect smuggling mission Chris is always mentioning) : they offer an array of comprehension of a series of events depending on what the player does, in which role he cast himself ... but they're still crafting the story as a huge tree of story arcs anchored in time, space and featuring definite actors and props. The next step is to go further in abstraction and build story patterns whose instantiation in a certain context is controlled by preset authorial need. This structuralist approach to build storytelling model is not new, (it all goes back to Propp, Levy-Strauss and Barthes in the 40's) and academics have been playing with it successfully since the 70s : automated story generation reached a peek more than a decade ago with systems like UNIVERSE or MINSTREL... but the integration of a real time disruptor (the player) is still a huge headache. Most of it is due to the fact that other correlated issues are yet to be solved, starting with "Can we model the player intentions from its actions so that we can offer a proper response?" or "When do we know the narrative is going to break and to which extend should we try to avoid the breaking, to fix it, to maintain the current story structure or to drop it altogether and create a brand new?" Also, because this approach pretends to offer the player meaningful and diversified activities, it is gameplay centric. Kay?

It's 2007 all over again! (I'll save the eulogy, appreciation notes and moist goodbyes for the end of the month). Anyway ... I don't think that Uncharted 2 aims at being an interactive movie; sure, it builds on the same kind of feeling you get when you're really immersed in an action movie sequence, but it uses pace and tension in a way that only a game could : they way the games distributes ammo, awards special weapons or retain others, the different techniques you can use in most stealth part ... all of that is part of gameplay activities grammar and are deeply dependent on the players action. I don't think God of War or Bioshock, for instance, are very different; they just give the illusion of choices, but when it comes to dramatization (first encounter with Big Daddy, with splicers, dialogs with Cohen) and being sure a message/feeling is conveyed, they resort to even cruder tools than Uncharted's. Anyway, only in the train level, did I get the feeling that I was playing through a video. And I'll admit that was bad.

Wouldn't it be awesome if you hair caught on fire and your cat exploded after stating that ?

That's one of the huge caveat of the cover system, but I think forward + circle, then circle again might work.

Why, oh why, must there be a boss fight at the end of each hero's journey? It's not even a coda when you look at what Uncharted 2 put me through : I've been blowing helicopters up, derailing trains, facing minigun wielding colossus, fleeing from a raging truck, and I should consider shooting at explosive resin bulbs the crux of thrill? "What about you need to do that a gazillion times, wouldn't that be epic ?" Arrr, !