vimes

I wish customizable map was a standard thing; because I would love to put annotation and todo all over those. You'd need to make staying a live worth it in its own way; but frankly, I wouldn't mind having players adopt a mindset in which they'd rather give their own life rather than taking an NPC's. That would be fairly unprecedented.

Err, I can't extract a clear point out of all the stylism he put in this piece ; but if I understand what he's saying, I don't agree with his description of the punishement loop and I don't think he's talking about the same aspect. I see your point, but I don't think the game support that very well, and I think it's because it doesn't count the characters I killed during my failed attempts. Let me explain: overall, I only killed about half a dozen guy - but that's only in the successfull branch. In the first 2 thirds of the game, there were times when I fucked up, tried to fight my way out and butchered a huge amount of people before ultimately failing. Since I mainly used autosave, when this kind of shit happened; I was set back quite a lot and thus, not being commited to the decision that led me there, I usually try to find a sneakier way. It often exists and is significantly easier than the approach I previously adopted; which explain why, in the end, my body count is very low. But taking those alternate timelines into account, I think I'd be around 50+, which makes me a bloody murder. In the end, it isn't difficult to have the game remember that I fit my own standard - but if it did remember the CorvoI I was before I succeeded, then it would make me consider my course of actions more carefully and the execution would be pretty complicated.

I've done my first play-through in hardest mode/low chaos and I liked it a lot: Dishonored has clearly a huge amount of elements that work well, feel fresh and are effortlessly pulled off. But I feel like talking about what's bothered me, because it's a bit of an intricate and unique matter and discussing it here should help me articulate it fully. So, the main element that seems off is that, even though the game rewards heavily players for imagining a solution within a mix of 5 different play-styles, it doesn't really care about evaluating the execution. If you scheme a plan, you will succeed in applying it or if you don't, then it means a better solution within that style exists: aside from the first mission, you will not have to setup plan B or care about the the scarcity or limitations or you weapons and powers (at least in blink/stealth mode). Rewarding only intent could be a conscious design choice on their part, but I'm wondering if it isn't more a side effect of the general creative direction. If their main point was to never deny a particular approach no matter where players put their point in; then the game can't hinge its difficulty on the use of resources that the player chose to built his progression on (ammo or powers). It is quite grand to be able to do stealth or combat even if it isn't your forte, but the way Dishonored does it robbed me of the sense that I had to work with what I had; that my earlier decisions mattered. That's probably why the game grows less and less challenging with time (I really zapped through the Lighthouse mission). I can't envision a solution to that - at least not one that wouldn't weaken the creative direction - which is why I can't really blame the game for not succeeding in that area. But it's an interesting failure nonetheless; and I wonder how Arkane tackled it. I also agree with Fripplebubby: too many of the non-lethal options are about doing trivial, unrelated tasks which have no downside whatsoever: they are easy to discover, not difficult to execute and they do not bear any long term consequences. They also do not require your final involvement to complete them, which is frustrating. I think it is probably easier to choose the non-lethal option and escape, than to starte a fight and go away safely (the final mission is a pinnacle of that). I'm probably going to restart the game because it's still quite great and I feel like I've missed a huge amount of info on the Outsider and the Universe by blinking through the levels. When I do, I'll add some constraints that would have made the initial experience better: disable the HUD objective display to explore more of the world and find things on my own, only allow myself level 1 of the powers and picking up no blue vials - to replicate how stressful and complicated the first mission was.

I've got exactly 58 games on my Steam list that I haven't played enough. I vouched not to buy any 'crazy-sale' game or bundles until I've gone through all (most?) of them.

We probably need to move that discussion somewhere else but I'm really happy it's happening. I've only watched a few Bergmans (7th Seal, Wild Strawberries, Saraband and The Silence), so my knowledge is limited and thus my opinion probably partial. My take is that, aside from Love & Death, I never felt like Allen was aping Bergman: there is enough difference in the social strata that he chooses, the camero work, the music direction or the way his characters express themselves through dialog to make these movies their own beasts. Of course, Interiors & Co are very heavy on introspection, on personal tragedies and have a melancholic stillness that are akin to the Bergmans I watched; but I'd say they have similar sensibilities and vantage point rather than calling it aping. I feel it is too much of a derogatory term: Allen isn't just copying, there is a real emotionnal and intellectual honesty behind these movies. I agree with you though: I dont think that pessimism is the mark of a genius or a great craftman either. What I recognize is the ability of a creator to craft endings that both provide coherent closure and initiate reflection. It just happens that pessimistic idealism seem to land itself to that. Woody Allen's is crazily talented in that field: he'll draw a natural conclusion to the tale, but in such a way that I can't help but think about the morality of it, or it's inevitability. Even in a movie like 'You'll meet a tall Dark Stranger', you can see that he himself wrestles with the concept of fairness and that he can't make his mind about it. Very few filmmakers dare to put that doubt down, or do it with the insight in human behavior that he has. As for the 2 small masterpieces by decade, I thought "small masterpieces" was an idiom, but since I couldn't find it in webbster and co, I probably should clarify: those movies are, to me, the apex of a genre, an incarnation of perfection in the sense that they fully realize what you can do with a certain framework and I wouldn't add or remove anything from them. Of course, some are not groundbreaking in any way, which is why they are 'small'. Annie Hall and C&M are probably masterpieces fullstop. In any case, here's my tentative list of those, but keep in mind I haven't watched Shadow & Fog, Zelig, Husand & Wives, Bananas, etc... 70s: Annie Hall, Interiors 80s: September, Crimes and Misdemeanors, (it's a very dense decade though) 90s: Everyone Says I Love You, Mighty Aphrodite, Bullets over Broadway 00s: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (I know some people won't understand that), Match Point. I haven't watched "Play It Again, Sam" yet; it's probably next on my movie list with some Bergmans since you made me want to watch more of it.

So, I've got the Steam version but when I try to continue my game and load Episode 4 all I get is a black screen. No crash. No message. Just the abyss endlessly staring back at me... if I stare long enough I can hear the voices of the dead, judging me. I KNOW! I KNOW! I SHOULDN'T HAVE OR . But let me play, I can fix this! I know I can! * breaks down*

I really, really enjoy Woody Allen's work because he is such a pessimistic idealist. My 1st Allen was a rerun of The Purple Rose of Cairo I watched in theater with my school when I was 10. I remember it clearly as the discovery of the notion of bittersweet, of the fact that a creator could both champion a thing but let its antithesis win: . The whole movie seems to build toward that happy conclusion, and to me, Allen is great because he chooses the 'realistic' alternative to deepen the discourse.(Of course I didn't formulate it exactly like this back then ) In that regard, the fact that C&M doesn't run away from its bleak conclusion is why it is a great masterpiece and why this final scene is one of the best piece of writing I know. Allen is not only consistently great at comedy dialogs; at least twice a decade, he's got something unique to say, approach a different genre to express it and shows he's a master filmmaker and character writer as well. My opinion is that he provided masterpieces for every genre he ever tried his hands on - be it rom-com, drama, thrillers, or variations of comedy. Not all his attempts are successes, but like I said, twice a decade, he delivers a small masterpiece like Annie Hall, C&M or September. Anyway, I haven't watched MMM for a long time - I watched it obsessively after The Purple Rose of Cairo though -, but I have excellent memories of it: its structure is fantastic and I love the fact that, in the end, it's pretty much about a tired upper class couple going through mid-life crisis and trying to chase away boredom by playing detectives. By the way, Annie Hall really revealed him to me as a great filmmaker: some people say it's full of gimmicks, but to me it really looked like he was shouldering the medium perfectly.

Yeah, but I would rather pay a second copy as a gift for a friend rather than a second one for me. In any case, I don't have a Steam key; I think they were only given to preorders.

I've given up : after having spent 3 days trying to get Episode 4 through the Telltale version of the game (and getting a bajillions error of connection and buggy resume of the download), I spat out 25 bucks to get The Walking Dead on Steam. That way, I get a downloading/update service that has been properly designed and implemented. I paid twice since I really wanted to play the full series: what I've seen so far is very good, and depending on how it wraps up, I think Sean and Jake might have created not only a great game but an important one for the medium... but , that being said, it amazes me that a company focused on episodic content didn't get that part of the distribution right. Also paying twice made me feel like I've taken an irreversible step toward blind fanboyism. Anyway, I'll be playing it soon!

I'm only at the second mission and I'm enjoying this A LOT - I just stopped because it crashed after what I thought was 30 minutes but it had been 2 hours+. To get the few bad things out of the way: I still think that the textures and lighting tech could be better - I support the style 200%, but I think higher-res version would have really carried it the extra mile. I'm also getting a lot of LOD popping. The facial animations are veeery poor and the body animation are a bit subpar during the dialog involving the player (e.g. briefing). The feedback for the range of the Blink ability is confusing and the raycast used is sometimes buggy (it 'collides' with something right in front of me Everything else is excellent though. I'm playing in the hardest mode and passed the escape mission, it turned out to be a great blend of everything I love about Hitman, Half-Life, NOLF, Deus Ex and Mirror's Edge. I LOVE it. I love the ideas of factions, the idea of being able to solve some elements by understanding the storytelling mechanisms and the power struggle. I love how the number of people you kill impact mission further down the road. I love that every single item you can pick up seems to be contextualized and be there for a reason. I love that I'm not super comfortable about the prospect of putting a young empress on the throne.

No, I know the meaning of era I was just mistaken on the chronology: I thought that all the movies I mentioned had been shot within a few years in the mid to late 80s. And I was wrong, since Husband & Wives is from 1992. But, anyway, I've watched everything from he made from Manhattan Murder Mystery onward; so, I don't know, I feel like I'm keeping best for last.

It really did, but I know that the pool of his movies which are in the same vein is very limited (4 or 5)?, so I don't want to feast on them so fast: I've watched September, but not Hanna and her Sisters, Husbands and Wives and Another Woman.

Toblix you're probably right; I might have read the "2nd rate customer" bit with more outrage than Gditz had in mind when he wrote. Still... That sentence is along the line of what I thought was tantrum-ish: you can't have it so nobody should?

I don't understand the ire about this. I'm giddy about the game - so giddy, it's the 1st one I ever pre-ordered or pre-launched in my life - and sure, I'm a bit jealous that some people can play it early; but come on, it's only a few hours: the game's still going to be as good in a few hours. This is going to be partial, judgmental and maybe unfair but if I can understand impatient tantrums from kids, adults acting as if such a delay was critical and somehow hurtful is really irritating me: IT'S A GAME, don't get your priority backwards.

Those blogs are wonderful and they don't seem to be using Photoshop to manually edit the pictures - just a bunch of automated post-processes. I'd be really interested to see the rendering time for those are because I wouldn't mind being able to play these games in a few years with that sort of quality. Also, I've played 30 minutes of Dishonored on PC with maximum settings and I feel something is off visually; as if the textures were lower res and the lightning less 'rich' that what the videos seemed to show. It's beautiful but it falls a bit short and sometimes looks like an older game. Strange.

I really love Thompson's works and read Hell's Angels, Campaign '72 and Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas over a few months last year. Since then - and I'm aware it's irrational - , I've been actively avoiding his books: even though he was a really prolific author, I still want to have things to read from him in 10 years. On a semi-related note, I do the same with the Interiors-era movie of Woody Allen ever since I watched Crimes & Misdemeanors.

Campaign Trail '72 and Hells Angels are fantastic pieces of journalis; but Campaign is a huge, dense book, so if you don't want to burn out on the style, I'll suggest Hell's Angels first.

Will it be about a retired high-wire artist agent who reminisces about his life during a one way trip to the Sacré Coeur, where he'll be attending the funeral of a former client, though he can't remember anything about?

That's Silent Hill 2 for me :/

Apparently, most user didn't perceive the satire http://kotaku.com/5846080/the-life+changing-20-rightward+facing-cow

Pretty cool cast: I was surprised to hear 2 writers defends the idea that you can't trust an author when he talks about his intent. That's pretty fascinating. As for Cloud Atlas, I never managed to read it from cover to cover; but in hindsight, I was probably unfair to the book. Basically, I fell love with the idea of partial, interrupted narrative that may, sometimes, pick up some of the previous segment's unfinished theme and either continue with a similar view or provide a counterpoint. So, when the second half revealed that the each story would have a closure, I was really disappointed. Already before that, I was being bothered by the existence of explicit physical links between each story - it felt unnecessary and blunt. The reincarnation angle never came to my mind, but the fact that each people is basically a reader of the previous protagonist story didn't appeal to me at all. I liked each story individually - mostly the composer's one -, but into the second half, I got the strong sense that the author's engrossment for the smart structure he came up was going to undermine any focus on the thematics. At that point, to be honest, I hadn't grasp any overarching theme, but I felt the content was going to serve the structure and not the other way around. And I thought the characters deserved better. In the year after I gave up, I went back every few month to finish one of the segment, separately. After having finished all of them, I can say I really enjoyed each of them immensely as separate corpus. But I never could build up the motivation to immerse myself in the 'complete' flow of the book again: the prospect of an accumulation of personal's character conclusion appeared daunting to me, as it would give a 'fable-like' quality to the message that I felt would lower the book rather than elevate it. That's where I was probably unfair to Mitchell: I probably jumped to a conclusion, stuck to it and filter the book unfairly because of that. At least, that's what I get from from what Sean and Chris said on the cast. And so, the cast allowed me to understand the book from a completely different vantage point; and I'm really happy about that On a side note, I'm always weary of adaptations, but when they happen, I only truly value the ones that present a strong interpretation of the original material: I really want to see a unique point of view on the oeuvre rather than a literal reading or a vision close to my own. In that sense, the reincarnation angle of the Cloud Atlas movie doesn't bother that much. What does, is that, if the Wachowskis really are using the same actors across characters, then they seem quite unimaginative about that proposition. They could have used craftier ways to support the reincarnation theme they chose: they could have either done something similar to what Gilliam did with Ledger's character on Parnassus (actors shadowing another actor basically), or better, make different actors establish the connections between their characters through 'ticks' or subtle recurring body language. It's not that they are literal to what Mitchell said, it's just that they seem very 'bland' about it.

Sometimes, I'm wondering if I'm mistaking what I think industry veteran aspirations should be for what they actually are. My initial vision of game veterans' Kickstarter was that they were going toward crowdfunding to undertake projects which, because they were conceived by people that have been 20+ years in the industry, were more personal, mature and thus less marketable than current industry output. But there's been a string of Kickstarter by people I otherwise respect which look like they are trying to make a game that their 15 year younger self could have designed. I'm not saying it's bad, but it makes me wonder if the game industry (or the community of game making people) somehow prevents growth and evolution.

I can't find any version of it online, but the 5 variations on the Mystery theme from Wallace & Gromit : The Last Resort have to be one of the most enjoyable and deep piece of Video game music I know. I keep discovering new nuances in the tracks even though I've been listening to them regularly for the past 2 years.

I'm really happy that they captured the moment when Schafer's clarifies that Bagel's style doesn't only mean is rendering but his imaginary universe too. That's a huge shift in my opinion, and it's very interesting that it took so long for that creative direction to be clearly articulated and communicated - at least if the doc makes a good depiction of what happened. In that context, Lee Petty is damn right to be so concerned: if Bagel's style is his main contribution, then he would mostly be involved toward the end of the art chain; but if his universe needs to fuel the game, then he needs to also be involved heavily at the beginning of all things, where he can influence puzzle design, story flow, etc... That's the kind of surprise change that would make artistic directors and producers flip tables; so kudos to Lee Petty's for staying cool headed and coming up on the spot with ways to allow some of that to happen. I want to believe that the point of having such a small, experienced team is to allow for such complete reversal; but given their release date and the amount of stuff they seem to be planning for, it'd be surprising if they went ahead with it. If they do, I hope the ways they are coping with that will be documented because it would be priceless.

I really, really like FTL, but I wish there was a room to train my guys for onboard fights, because 90%I lost, it was at the hands of boarders in the middle of a civilian system. That seemed unfair. I must admit that I felt awesome the few times I managed to fight them off, repair my ship engulfed in flame to finally smithe them to oblivion (after, of course, ignoring their bargain, the bastards); but otherwise, it really felt random. I haven't won a single time on Easy yet, but that's fine: a vast majority of the time, the failures are coherent narratives and experience on their own.