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Pasted in the messy script to Macarena of the Missing and got Raymond Chandler, an early 20th century pulp detective fiction writer. And an old game-dev rant yielded a result of Stephen King. I'm curious how they're analyzing the data. Word frequency? Sentence length. Random hash of the text intended to drive traffic to their business through viral marketing? Edit: The word fuck repeated 100+ times gives a result of . Penis 100x could have been written by .

There is a PC version of Condemned. Plays really well. Picked up Cryostasis in the Steam sale. Between the old 'cast discussion and these posts, need to move it up in my gaming queue.

Never played any Gabriel Knight games, but if I remember right, Old Man Murray made that puzzle infamous.

Just played through Silent Hill 2 for the first time. The combat was clunky, the puzzles were Capcomesque, and pretty much every character besides Mary could have used a better voice actor. Plus, the 360 emulation of the Xbox port had some wonderful glitches such as James emitting light from his rear end, textures randomly turning white, and keypads turning invisible. But the atmosphere and story? Wow. Just... wow. Took me to a lot of places I never expected to go in a mainstream game, and somehow managed to tell a very personal story about an ordinary, flawed man who's not a guy who saves the world by killing a bunch of dudes. Are any of the other games in the series worth picking up?

That's fair. I was totally overgeneralizing. There's plenty of abstract films where you can construct a clear, powerful human narrative. 76p64j3H1Ng My personal definition* is that a game requires interaction, but doesn't necessarily need the player to make any meaningful choices. For instance, I would call Freedom Bridge a game, but would classify something like Queue as a game-like film. Thinking about these kinds of things a year ago, I made this game as a thought experiment. *Incomplete, partial vague, etc. I still don't have a precise definition for what a game is to me. The game designer intended you to interact with the game. The film maker did not intend you to fast forward through the movie. Films aren't expected to account for scenes being randomly skipped or played at faster speeds. Games are driven by interaction, even if that interaction is simply holding down a button to make a character move. When you fast-forward, you're interacting with a layer above the film. When you press right, you're causing something to happen within the game. That question ties into what you expect to get out of games. Are games so special that they should be evaluated on fun and fun alone? If everyone watches movies to have fun, where would that leave stuff like Schindler's List? (Not that Freedom Bridge is anywhere as powerfully executed.)

Part of the effectiveness of games like this (and one which may diminish over time) is that games are usually designed to be won. There's a greater expectation of a solution or right path, which is why it drives home the unfairness of the situation in a way unique to the medium. In terms of aesthetics, if someone watched a movie of this game, it would be much harder to personify it. It's much, much easier to read the featureless, black square as a person, since nearly all video games ask you to put yourselves in the role of another character. A movie or short story would probably need to put in more work to develop the character to achieve the same reaction. That said, I have a much broader personal definition of games than most. Edit: Hell, if you want to get art-wanky, you can say that there is a choice between doing nothing and doing the only other option available, and so it's the player's choice to go on a death march across the barbed wire fences rather than staying in the safe zone. It may or may not be a failing of the design that there is really nothing motivating the player to leave besides boredom.

Haven't picked up Puzzle Bots yet, but did you play the free prequel Nanobots? I thought that game was really charming.

It seems like they got so hard at the prospect of monetizing virtual arcade decorations and pay-per-play arcade games that they forgot to make the player want to buy the games themselves. Nothing in here besides maybe unified high score boards that makes me want to buy the games here instead of picking up one of the old Atari/Intellivision compilation packs.

Isn't that just a sequel to the stripped-down Worms XBLA that was branded with the same name as the original awesome PC game?

I have to wonder if NBC Universal heard all the Jeff Goldblum jokes on the podcast. Or were those clever hints all along?

Looks like Microsoft doesn't like sex/nudity, according to a peer review checklist. Appears to be strict rules and not loose guidelines. Not sure how graphic the images are in the game, though.

Along the same lines, I really liked the Universal Hint System, which gives a FAQ-writer as many hint levels as they need to hint at the solution. Not a fan of the hint system in the current Telltale games. More often than not when I get stuck and want a hint I can only bump up the hint level and wander aimlessly until it randomly decides to help me.

It creeped the hell out of me when those kids sang "When you're dying I'll be still alive / When you're dead I will be still alive." What a song to have children sing. From the title, I was expecting Dylan, not a trippy constantly changing and evolving array of faces, animated characters, and sexual innuendo. I was sober going into it, but man, do I feel out of it now.

Nice detailed post, but there's already a topic here on the first page: http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/showthread.php?t=7190

That's it. Thanks!

Glad to see Telltale working on an original IP. What is Graham Annabel's status at Telltale, anyway? I know he's been publishing his webcomic and promoting his books and such on Telltale's site, but he doesn't seem to be part of the team. Related: Tt5lB-RoAi4

PlayPen: http://playpen.farbs.org/index.php?title=Main_Page It's a collaborative, visual, choose-your-own-adventure wiki thing. Anyone can add in new screens and links between screens. It's already fascinating to explore and see what people have already made.

For reference, that Q3 mod you mentioned as having similar player trails as Plain Sight was Purity. Sadly doesn't seem to have been developed since late 2008.

TIGSource had a hilarious game development competition based on the Video game Name Generator a few years back: http://www.tigsource.com/features/vgng/ I also enjoy this Euphemism Generator: http://www.walkingdead.net/perl/euphemism

The identities to these games have been eluding me for a while... 1.) Played a 2d adventure game demo sometime in the 90s. The demo scene had your character shrunk down in size, and placed in a habitrail with carnivorous hamsters. I seem to remember that the game delighted in killing the player. 2.) Some Myst-style game about robot dinosaurs living under the Earth's crust. Might have been a bargain-bin jewel case game.

I do some amateur game design in my spare time when I'm motivated. The only games I've made of any (questionable) worth are Macarena of the Missing (a point-and-click adventure game parodying Limbo of the Lost among others) and Edge Tycoon (a "business sim" satirizing the Edge Games scandal.)

Voiceovers with the old graphics? Sweet.

Your description of the game and the critical reaction is already reminding me of Killer 7.

From his crossed legs and hand in lap, I dare say he's happy with the way the night turned out.

"The only feature the developer forgot to list? Like 50 million boners." --IGN.com