Twilo

Here's some advice: You'd better STAY away from MR.T's BINS if you DON'T want a CROWBAR to the FACE.

By all means, I'm sure a lot of people like GTA's story; my point was that GTA has a very strong open gameplay system, which makes it hard to present the story within the game itself (as opposed to in a cutscene, which GTA does pretty well). What I mean is that there are two parts to GTA, the story and the game. When the story is running, the game stops and when the game is running the story stops. I think the balance you talk about is how the gameplay relates to the story (the environment, for example), how plausible that is etc. which helps the gamer associate the plot sequences with the gameplay ones.

Long answer, maybe. When we're talking about the story of a game in this discussion, we mean the mechanism that are placed there deliberately by the developer such that the player experiences particular events (rather than say, a multiplayer FPS where a "story" might be how you fought through 6 guys to get the flag back to your base or something). The reason I think there is a contradiction between playing the game and telling the story is that a game provides an environment in which the player can perform (to a limited degree) free actions. The extreme of this is a sandbox game like Oblivion or Grand Theft Auto, where users are free to perform a very wide variety of actions within the game context (the "play" part of the game) that may have no positive effect on the narrative. This freedom runs against the deliberate nature of a plot (for example, were you to kill a plot-critical NPC in a fully free game, you would break the plot). It's no accident that the games we think of as having great gameplay tend to sacrifice something plotwise (and vice versa). Games like Metal Gear Solid or Half Life 2 demonstrate the opposite to the sandbox genre, these are heavily story-driven games that demonstrate very high linearity and make for a less "free" experience. You can't have your cake and eat it too, I guess. Games with great gameplay and weak story elements tend to have great replay value while those with weaker gameplay (where the gameplay is strictly tied to the story in some way) tend to be a more memorable experience. I'm a ludologist at heart, so I'm sure the narratologists here will rip into this a bit.

If my arm DOES get tired while playing on my Wii, you're the first person I'm coming after, Marek.

Well I can imagine getting tired with the controller pretty quick if a game was based around it like Red Steel. In general I think I'd prefer the way Zelda is going with it, in that it's used for little bits like fishing and archery, but you use the controller as a normal pad for the rest. It's still going to be a pain to set up the console and tv in the living room in such a way that I don't have to stand up or anything. I'm mostly in it for the Megadrive emulator anyways...

Well the tilty-sensing thing is a pretty old idea (One of the Microsoft Sidewinders had it) and Sony certainly aren't implementing it to the same scale as Nintendo are (I doubt any of the Wii games that make more than cursory use of it would be portable to the ps3, at least anything using the positional sensor won't. Nintendo is really going all out with this one). Honestly, I think they're hedging their bets (better to slap it in there now rather than try and roll it out in two years time, dual-shock style) and they need something in there to differentiate it from the rumblable 360 pad. As for how devs will make use of it, I suppose some 3d-movement mech games (ZoE style) would be pretty doable, as well as flight games etc. Maybe something like Virtual On but with jetpacks would be cool, that's the sort of thing that goes down well for sony.

Apparently his Live Gamertag is "HiroProtaganist" or some variant thereof. Get Xbox360 Live-messaging or something.

Well personally I'd take "alternative" to mean outside of the mainstream of Video game formats (eg unusual games like Katamari Damacy), and "indie" to mean independent of a major publisher (eg self-published stuff like Gish). There's no real hard and fast rule to say what's a major publisher or not, nor is there a way to say that a game is definitely outside the nor but there's a definite distinction between the two. "Alternative" depends on the game, and "indie" depends on the developer.

Way to chime in there with another pearl of sage advice.

UT2k4 is definitely a good recommendation, though you are expected to buy the game, it's pretty cheap nowadays (20 quid?). Good value too, the variety and number of game modes included by default do a good job of maintaining interest. What I've been playing a bit of recently is the Natural Selection mod for HL; it makes the most of the archaic engine and is great to play too. Halo 1 is around pretty cheap too; the singleplayer mode is nothing special, but the multiplayer is good fun.

The biggest issue I have with BG&E is that Ancel resorted to the tired and irritating "Kwizatz Haderach"/"The One Ring" plot mechanism. Seriously, I'm so sick of that plot mechanism!

Enough with the freaking polls!

Like pommes terre!

Skool Daze is where it's at, guys.

Photographing animals is a lot of fun though, and backtracking for luggage isn't. I think I prefer the fun photography with no rewards to the unfun collection with cool rewards.

I bet you got all the luggage in Psychonauts though.

It does have an unfortunate side-effect of cheapening the perceived value of pearls; filling out that roll of animal photos doesn't seem too urgent when the last mission just gave you 14 pearls. I also think it's fairly likely that one of those lotta-pearl quests (the one in which you fly to the top of the black isle and get the pearls from fighting a bunch of Vorax) was a rush job. The environment might well have been planned for use with something else, then filled up with vorax when the deadline was approaching.

ポテト

Bring back Papa Lazarou!

Well you said that and twenty other things and mixed them all up in a big sack and dumped them on the counter.

The large pearl batches allows the designer to force the player to buy parts only after completing parts of the game in a particular order. It has the useful side-effect of disguising a linear progression of events Simplified example: Part A costs 3 pearls and part B costs 5 pearls. Task X rewards with 2 pearls Task Y rewards with 2 pearls Task Z rewards with 6 pearls but can only be completed with Part A In this example, you can't get part B without doing X and Y first.

My favourite manufacturer is the Tsubakimoto Chain Co. based in the Kyoto prefecture! Their hard work and continuing innovation has produced the highest quality of: -power transmission products and motion control devices -variable speed drives (electrical and mechanical) -electro-mechanical linear actuators -speed reducers -overload protection devices -one way clutches -and more! I love you, Tsubakimoto Chain Co.!

Like a modern-day modern day man! Seriously, what's with that smile? Creepy.

Replying to everything ever! Try and guess which one is yours!: Or driving the hovercraft across a broken bridge to the slaughterhouse. Ancel knows how to do a setpiece. I may be the most vocal Psychonauts critic around here, but BG&E bashing; that's just blasphemous! Maybe one reason we believe it's great is because everything else isn't... also: "noun was verbed to the point of nonexistence" is a stupid phrase, it's stupid! Stop using it! Stupid! There's something about the concept of "Art" that requires serifs, it looks naked without them...

It had a couple of sequels actually, Seiken Densetsu 3 is my favourite, while Legend of Mana on the psx was an interesting experiment. By and large the SD games are sort of middle-of-the-road; better than the SaGa games but nowhere near the Chrono or FF games.