SpiderMonkey

I just think you would end up with something of a GTA3 order of magnitude, rather than some GTA4 order of magnitude (hypothetical, I know, but you only need to spend 10 minutes with GTA3/VC/SA to see what more power could provide). It's not impossible, it just wouldn't represent much progress over and above what we have already.

There's more to a console's power than just pushing pretty graphics around, and I find that both sides tend to forget this. I think people's concerns are that if Wii ends up in a dominant 1st place, as seems certainly possible, its lack of power is going to seriously retard progress in some important areas of game design. (Those areas, I would expect, are the feels-real/narrative-related areas that go beyond just poly counts - facial/character quality, physics, and GTA-esque full-world games.) At least, I think that is what 10% of people think. The other 90% are the people who grew up browsing PC hardware sites, but now that they are moving into console gaming, they apply their PC gaming perspectives to consoles. Which is a dumb thing to do.

I'm not sure what's up with the trigger happy use of the flamethrower, but anyway ... What you say is all fine and dandy and I wasn't arguing against that, because I didn't really feel that was what he was actually saying. The quote annoyed me for two reasons: 1) He's using his game review article as a platform to attack movie reviews. Or at least, he seems to think game reviews suffer as badly as that Sixth Sense ramble. I've never seen a game review as opaque as that quote. (Though perhaps Ben's links suggest I should read more game reviews.) 2) His last sentence quoted says to me "the way you should be improving your game reviews is by making them more like buyer's guides." Which runs counter to most opinions I've read on "Video game journalism is shit", and counter to my own opinion. Hence my conclusion that he was saying "game reviews are too complex the way they are now, they need to be more simple and more like buyer's guides". AKA "game reviews need to be dumbed down".

None of those sound desperately appealing, but thanks for the write-up.

I wish it would stop raining, so I could go and get some exercise in on my bike. Thumb alerted.

The movie does smell a lot like it is intended as an appropriate piece of punctuation with which to end the now incredibly rambling sentence.

New Zealand Story returns to the DS? http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=66227 Nostalgia-gasm!

This seems like a much more pleasant way of irritating people online than calling them a "fag" every 2 minutes.

It certainly feels that way, in that there's a nice mapping between in-game training and real world preparation for their use "in the field". But what's been shown so far is a puzzle game, and HL is an action game series and to try and glue the two types of gameplay together seems like it would be a mess. Still, there's no point discussing this based on a 2min preview video, so I'll just go and put my "wait and see" cap on and sit in the corner patiently. IIRC (though this is vague and probably wrong on some details), OpFor had a gun that would fire the same kind of portals as the Nihilanth fired at you at the end of HL1. The primary fire shot a teleport bubble at an enemy and was a kind of instakill, the secondary fire would teleport you to somewhere else in the level. The "ammo clip" was about 3 shots big, I think.

The thing is, "incorporation into a universe" can go in two directions can't it. Core HL2 concepts can get referenced in Portal, or stuff from Portal can get referenced in core HL2 games (or both). The former seems easy and likely; the latter seems a little tricky and unlikely (and as far as I can tell, what miffy objects to).

That seems to suggest it's contagious, so if I caught it, I'm blaming you.

I'm sorry to go offtopic, but hearing stuff like this pisses me off and so I feel compelled to call you on your bullshit. Minerva is a great piece of work but it is absolutely not "the same thing but free". One has voice acting and proper character acting, the other has Shodan sending you some text every so often. One has 14 levels packed with content, the other has 2. One pushes FPS gameplay into interesting new areas, one offers up a solid set of straight forward fights. Adam Foster is very talented and Minerva is excellent for what it is, but let's be honest here: it's obvious that Minvera is the work of 1 person and it's obvious that Ep1 is the work of ~30. They are not the same and, I'm doing my best not to be rude, but I can't help but feel you are being willfully asinine in trying to suggest otherwise.

Your post sounds kinda like you are expecting a multiplayer game, so I'm just replying to point out that this is a singleplayer puzzle game. For those interested in The Ship, I've been playing enough of it to feel I can give some first impressions: - It's really fun when you manage to pull off something clever. - The atmosphere, especially the music, is great and the style of it all works well. - There's a lot of downtime where you aren't actively participating in the game, sometimes only a minute or two, sometimes more like 5. If the idea of stalking the people who are still playing and pretending to be their hunter, in order to fuck with their heads is appealing, you'll probably cope. If it doesn't, you'll probably spend half of your playing time quite bored. - It's all nicely balanced and the needs system works well. I've noticed one bug so far, which was a time wasting related problem, but other than that it seems glitch free. Overall, currently, I would say that if you want something to play every now and then, and if $20 is what you consider a cheap price for a game, it's a definite purchase. If you want something you can play the hell out of like CS or BF2 or DoD, or if $20 is enough money for you to constantly be saying "I'm not sure I've got my money's worth" (which lots of people seem apt to do with HL2:Ep1 & SiN:Ep1), then you shouldn't buy this. Edit: I forgot one vital detail about the game. The poo and pee noises are UTTERLY DISGUSTING. Least welcome sound effect in a game, ever.

I'd love to give a decent answer, but I'm afraid I've had very little time with it so far and so, beyond expressing how ugly I find the HUD font, I couldn't offer any worthwhile opinion. This guy (Shacknews) gushed about it in a pretty entertaining way though. Agreed. I just hope that the 2 at the end of the title gives them enough licence to explore some evolution of the concepts at the core of the game, rather than pushing out another straight port, CS:S and DoD:S style.

I'm totally torn ... That art style just screams "masses of fun". The classes are all the same. This leaves the worrying possibility that the gameplay is also all the same. And that would make me very sad - I wouldn't be able to play it without feeling the wasted potential. Overall though, given the cheap-cheap-cheap cost of Steam games these days (CS:S: free, HL2DM: free, DoD:S: $10, The Ship: $15), I'm really getting into the idea of multiplayer gaming as a finger buffet instead of a 7-course meal. I don't need to play the same game 6 nights a week to feel satisfied with it, I can just fire it up a couple of times a month in between my other games.

I would be playing The Settlers II demo, but the damn thing keeps crashing as soon as I try and build a farm. Nothing like 100% reproducible bugs making it through QA to ruin your day.

I'm still munching through these, but thought I would chip in with another Looking Glass alumnus interview I came across at around the same time. Randy Smith (Part 1 Part 2) talks about Thief 1 through 3. Reader warning: Interviewer has annoying habit of trying to push his opinion onto interviewee. When is Idle Thumbs next doing another interview??

What do people think of the Prey demo? The guys over at Shacknews are totally orgasming over it, which makes me a little timid of posting my opinion there, since I'm just not feeling it. I like the wall walking and the portals, I'm so-so about the spirit stuff, but I got the feeling that the demo didn't really do much more than introduce the concepts: I'd like to see how they get developed further. I think the Doom3 engine (the non-ETQW variation) is one of the most restrictive engines in recent memory, and is responsible for most of what I dislike. - The lighting is dynamic, great, but it's ugly and frustrating how quickly everything fades to black. - All the objects in the game are built with really simplistic profiles to avoid casting complex shadows, making everything feel bloated and blocky. - There are never any more than 3 enemies on screen at once. - The environments are almost exclusively corridor based, with two directions to move in - forward and back. - Those two facts makes combat extremely simplistic - just a matter of pointing your gun at the enemy and backpedalling if appropriate. - The over-use of specularity means that environment styles are restricted to shiny metal and shiny wet flesh. - The facial animation is utterly inadequate, with a focus instead placed on fancy environmental animations. Inevitably this means over-complex machines doing vague and generic tasks and stupidly elaborate door-openings. I could probably go on for another couple of paragraphs, but my point is this: The only thing that feels different between Doom3, Quake4 and Prey is the cross-section shapes of the corridors, the shapes of the doors, and the shapes of the weapons. Beyond the portals (which are very cool), it feels like the same tired game as its engine-brothers. I can't decide whether the portals, wall-walking, etc redeem it or are just a brief distraction: a clever way of disguising the broken corridor-shooting-backpedalling dynamic by hiding the corridors.

Insert obligatory generic "buying used games screws over developers, so I find it hard to care that you had to deal with a less than perfect retail experience" reply. Actually that's probably a bit mean since you didn't mention any games currently in proper retail release, but still, I personally wouldn't expect a first-hand retail experience when buying a second-hand product, be it games or any other product.

I didn't really mean it like that. I meant more that if you grow up in the States, then presumably it is far more likely that you will be exposed to American Indian culture and history, both in your education and your entertainment. And obviously every piece of cultural work references and leans on those cultural imprints to a greater or lesser extent. This may or may not make those cultural imprints a necessary requirement to fully appreciating the work that is built on them. Etc.

I'm curious: do you (anyone) think it helps to be American rather than European, when it comes to "getting" the Native American/Red Indian/whatever storyline properly?

I think the "meta-observation" I would make, having read this thread, is that the problems people have with Steam are things you run into very infrequently, whereas the benefits are there on a daily and weekly basis. EULA issues (aside from 2nd-hand-sales) are mostly idealogical - I don't see any of those problems actually providing real obstacles to users the vast majority of the time, and things like losing account details and "big updates right when I want to play" are exceptions rather than rules to its use. By contrast, the great server browser, the never needing to worry about a patch, the never needing to worry where my CDs are, etc are all things that make PC gaming much more enjoyable to me. I can see why those things bother people (it's human nature to be more concerned by low probability, high cost events, see: terrorism), but as far as I'm concerned, the overall sum of good and bad comes out to a significant positive.

What exactly do you mean by "immature game design"? I can't tell if you mean "fun in an immature, kinda childish way", or "underdeveloped", or "retro", or what ...

It was my thread to start with and I'll do what I want with it! *stamps foot*

Eh? Steam's development massively predates the HL2 leak/hack job.