lobotomy42

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/08/are-you-listening-bbc-telltale-wants-to-make-doctor-who-games/ OMG PLEASE???? I would buy this game 10 times.

One of the great things about Doctor Who is that the premise is completely flexible. You can tell stories long, short, fast, slow, scary, funny, sad, or adrenaline-fueled. So I really don't think it would be that difficult to write Doctor Who stories for the adventure game medium. Consider the episodes of the new series "Blink," or "The Empty Child." In Blink, we follow Sally Sparrow around a series of locations (several repeated) as she tries to unravel the "timey-wimey" mystery of what's going on with the creepy statues in the creepy house. She figures this out by talking to people, talking to people, reading letters, watching a DVD, and talking to some more people. In "The Empty Child," the Doctor and Rose get split up almost immediately - Rose has to charm the mysterious Captain Jack into telling her where the mysterious foreign object is buried, while the Doctor hangs out with a young girl and a band of orphans as they try to puzzle out why this creepy kid in a gas mask is following them. In both cases, most of the time is spent watching the characters talk to other characters trying to glean clues as to "what is going on here," moving on to new locations, making new conclusions based on what was previously learned and then trying to figure out the next bit - essentially, an adventure game. The latter story structure lends itself almost immediately to Gabriel Knight-esque game that jumps between the two primary characters. Sure, there's the occasional "Run!" bit, but that's what cut-scenes are for, right? Plus, Doctor Who is fairly episodic in nature - despite its best efforts, there are rarely huge over-arching plots with much significance - which also lends itself nicely to a series of TellTale episodes, ya? Honestly, if there were one genre that lent itself to Doctor Who it would *have* to be the adventure game genre. I know it's just a wish at this point, but still, a guy can dream, eh?

I am basically in complete agreement with this. On the other hand, that trailer does remind me of everything I love about Star Wars.

Has anyone here played this? Is it really as awful as the reviews on Adventuregamers and Eurogamer make it out to be?

There is some part of my brain that reads that description and thinks "How can it NOT be good?" But it sounds like I should resist that.

I bought the first two episodes for Wii. I keep meaning to buy the later ones, too, but lack of time / money is troublesome. They were pretty good! I finished them, which is more than I can say for most games.

I can't tell if you're making a joke or seriously answering the question, or both.

I haven't played other MMOs extensively, but it does seem like Bioware's approach is basically "It's a single-player RPG, but online!" Actually, it's for this reason that I can almost get behind the project. In my mind, I'm buying the game, disabling all chat & multiplayer functions, playing it for 2 months, then quitting. On the other hand, it's possible all this "4th Pillar" nonsense is just marketing hyperbole, and in fact it will resemble other MMOs much more than we think. Or that Bioware is not nearly as ignorant as we think, but is trying to sound that way to fulfill the needs of marketing hyperbole.

Or just set the combat to casual, like I did.

Anyone have this? I'm on the fence about this one after the reviews and a lukewarm demo experience.

Well, 90% was just an estimation. Last time I looked it seemed like the XBLA titles appeared to number in the hundreds, while the combination of movies, tv shows, and absurd "theme packs" for games numbered somewhere in the thousands. I agree - there are some diamonds in the rough, the marketplace itself is useful, and in the grand scheme of things this is a minor annoyance. I could still do without the NASCAR-ification of the console OS, though.

One more thing I like: Everything now has a "box cover," which is nice. And (some of) the game detail pages have backgrounds that reflect the game, which is cool. Always nice to have more context-sensitive visuals.

As a counterpoint...if you're one of those people, like me, who thinks that 90% of the "marketplace" is a scam, then this change just seems like a way to fit even more advertising onto the screen at once. ...Except that the games list only shows your XBLA games and whatever game happens to be in the drive. (This was also true in blades, and was an equally dumb decision then.) Oh! I found something to do with your avatar: On any screen where your avatar is visible, move the right stick around. Not only will your avatar turn his head to match, but you can also get your avatar to make at least three different funny faces, and dance a merry jig. Nice touch!

I've managed to get through quite a bit more of the game now, and my feelings have shifted a bit. First, it should be noted that this game has completely consumed my life for the past two weeks. Seriously, all I can think about when I'm not playing this game is how much I wish I was playing this game. I've been missing work, avoiding friends, and letting my apartment turn into a mess as I continue to try to overturn every last rock in the Capital Wasteland. Someone actually mentioned going to the Jefferson Memorial to me today, and my first (unspoken) thought was "Overrun with Super Mutants." Not that I've actually finished the game, because I haven't. I actually reached a fairly awkward point a few days ago when I was wondering why I couldn't initiate any of the remaining sidequests (the existence of which I had inferred from all my missing Achievements.) After briefly checking a FAQ, it turned out that most of my remaining quests *were* the main plot. I had sort of assumed that I was almost at the end of it, but it turns out I had plenty to go. (The game has become a little more boring after that, as there's now usually only one or two places I'm supposed to be heading to at any given time.) Despite my apparent obsession with this game, there are a few things that have struck me as weird. There are a lot of characters who you can talk to but who really only have a sentence or two to say. These are a bit annoying - it makes me wonder why they're even in the game. They don't add to my suspension of disbelief, because they're so clearly "more people we added to make this town appear to be a city." The voice acting is a little rough. It hurts that so many characters are voiced by relatively few actors. Primarily, this hurts because it becomes difficult to tell characters apart, but I think this also took a toll on the performances. A lot of the lines sound like they're not being read in context of the conversation that is supposedly taking place, and I wonder if the actors even know which lines are being read for which characters. Even Liam Neeson's lines sometimes sound like he doesn't know what's going on. I also wonder about the dialogue writing itself. I don't know if this is nostalgia talking, but my fondest memory of playing Fallout is the awesome and often hilarious dialogue. I get the impression with this iteration that the quality (specifically the comedy) have fallen victim to the high quantity. But then again, I haven't compared it directly to the previous Fallouts, so I could be imagining things. There have, however, been some truly hilarious moments: In other words, still loving this game, very much.

Yes, but you still need to put the disc in to play it. The only real benefits are shorter load times and less disc drive usage.

I really want to play this! I had better get myself a new PC right quick. There are so many adventure games I've been missing out on! Hopefully I can get one before Vampyre Story becomes old news. (Note to publishers: Please port all your adventure games to Wii. It will make my life that much easier!)

Yeah, I've had mine for a day or so now. Creating an avatar was fun, but once I finished, I quickly discovered that there's nothing you can do with them. What's the point? The Wii at least has "Mii Parade" and let's me pick them up and compare others. With NXE, you create an avatar and...that's it! I guess it's supposed to show up in all those casual games I'm not buying? Also, the avatars are even *more* blatant a rip-off of the Miis than I thought. Scrolling through the "eyes," I noticed several options that seemed *exactly* like eye options for the Miis. The interface in general is prettier, but also consists mostly of advertising for videos and crap. It's also not any easier to navigate than the blades. In fact, it seems like the exact same features of the previous interface were re-implemented in an almost identical manner. I still can't see any consistency with regard to where things are placed and why. You can rotate through the panels easily, but selecting a panel sometimes brings up an entirely new set of panels, and sometimes opens a giant window in the middle of the screen! Sometimes you press "A" to play the game in the drive, and sometimes you press "Y." It seems to replicate everything I didn't like about the blades, but makes the whole process prettier. As for new features...there aren't many, at least for poor Silver account holders like myself. The feature-set is largely identical to the previous one. I was hoping comparing achievements would be easier - it'd be nice to just compare achievements in *one* game with all my friends at once. I was able to install Fallout 3 to my hard drive, though. The installation process took about eight minutes, and now there's no whirring sound from my DVD drive when I play! Hooray! On the other hand, it takes up 6 GB. The price of silence... Interface is prettier but just as awkward, Hard drive installs are cool, and Avatars are currently under-utilized. Okay, I'm done talking about this.

That's all I wanted to say really.

As I understand it, the 'No on Prop 8' campaign didn't really get its act together in terms of targeting minority voters. Whereas, the Christian Right started airing multi-lingual ads and getting community churches lined up right away on their side. By the time the 'No' folks realized what was happening, they were battling against a whole series of misconceptions about the ban - that it was necessary to prevent churches from losing their tax-exempt status or be 'forced' to marry gay couples, that it would prevent schools from forcing some kind of scary gay agenda on children, etc. None of these were really true, but it managed to convince co-host Sherri Shepherd of The View, and apparently a great many other people. At least, this is the story we gay rights activists have been peddling amongst ourselves over the past few days. I was only in California part of the time, so I didn't really get to witness any of this.

This is indeed a bummer, but not totally unexpected. Florida and Arizona also passed measures in this election, and in '04 there were about nine states that did similarly. California was our one hope - because surely people on the Left Coast would support it? - but, alas, no.

True enough. But I figure I give him 24 hours before I start complaining about how centrist he is...

I agree with this wholeheartedly. Whenever I try and think of a "better" Fallout 3, all I can think of are slight tweaks or changes I would have liked to see on this take. This game feels like the legitimate extension from its predecessors, which is something that surprised me. To be honest, it's probably more faithful to the franchise than anything Interplay would have done at this point! Also, this game is totally addicting. I keep putting off real work to play it. Goodness, I could play this game for days and never get bored. And

Well, I was up playing the intro sequence until 3am last night. So at the very least, I can't complain about the game being engaging! Some things I liked: Liam Neeson The hacking mini-game Dialogue! And dialogue options! Stepping out of the vault and seeing Washington D.C. - My hometown! - was awesome. I wish more games were set here. Some things I didn't like: Combat, as a whole, sucks I find it really hard to figure out all the places I can go. Even in the Vault sequence, I got to the end and thought "Did I miss something?" 1st Person Controls on consoles are so difficult for me...yet 3rd person view is ugly So far, I'm liking it!

I pre-ordered this, but almost cancelled it about a week ago. Man, I hope I don't regret this choice. I really liked Fallout. (Although I don't think I ever got to the very end of either game...) As an aside: I've been reading the reviews from all the standard sources. It seems that, on average, the game gets compared to Oblivion about 8 or 9 times in any given review, and the original Fallout games about once at most. Does this bother anyone else? It's like we all collectively decided to review "Fallout 3 as sequel to Oblivion" instead of "Fallout 3 as sequel to Fallout 2" or "Fallout 3 as its own damn game."

Neither was my beef and chicken. It was the primary item on the menu at some restaurant with a huge sign out front that said "We serve beef and chicken! It's great! Really beefy AND chickeny!" So I said "Fine, I guess I'll order the beef and chicken." And then there wasn't any chicken.