Horticulture Tycoon

There's no way to get recorded audio to branch at predetermined loop points? I would think you could record a series of parallel static audio tracks and create transition sections to segue () between them, like a set of railroad tracks and switches.

I get home from work about 22:00 GMT, I'll jump in if I can. Assuming there isn't another blizzard, or I don't simply forget.

Andy Warhol made a movie that was nothing but am 8-hour continuous shot of the Empire State Building. But then, that movie is intentionally unwatchable, so I don't think it could be said that he got away with it. Regarding iMuse, how hard could it be to do with live music? Sure, it would take meticulous planning and a great sound editor, but I don't see what technological limitations exist today that would prevent it, other than composers and sound people being reluctant to put in the effort.

This is going way back, but I remember blind-renting Bionic Commando on the NES knowing nothing at all about it (other than I thought the title was badass), putting it in the cartridge, and being so put-off by the fact that I couldn't jump that I almost went back and tried to exchange it for another game. But I'd spent my hard-earned allowance money on it, so I grudgingly tried to get my money's worth, until next thing I knew a whole weekend had been lost to the game, and upon finishing I declared it the best game I'd ever played. But then, the exploding head of Adolph Hitler has that sort of impression on a 10-year-old.

Yeah but it's still good vs. evil either way. All you're doing is choosing which side you're on. Syntheticgerbil is completely right that this is an argument about semantics and not about the game. It just seems like you're trying to create distinctions that aren't there, by saying that BioShock was a game (at least in part) about good and evil, but not about good vs. evil. It seems like hair-splitting to me. But if you see a distinction there where I don't, then really we just have to agree to disagree.

Is it supposed to resemble some kind of poorly-constructed structure that could collapse at any moment? Because that's what it makes me think of. (EDIT: Okay, that's definitely not what it makes me think of anymore, thanks Norfolk) Boy, if Chicago gets the 2016 games, the bar has been set awfully low for us in the logo department.

This is a nice surprise, I was expecting another week off from the U.S. cast like the last time we got a U.K. podcast. And coincidentally I'm stuck at home today with nothing to do while I wait out a blizzard, so now I at least have 90 fewer minutes to kill.

Black and white side-by-side does not make gray (I mean grey... Sorry, Europeans!). I mean look, the proof is in the endings: You either become the greatest, most noble human being ever to walk the Earth, or you are the biggest child's-arm-twisting bastard in history. The game has no in-betweens. There is absolutely zero nuance whatsoever. It's not only BioShock, it's a lot of games. It's just a pet peeve of mine, these games that treat morality as a simple binary system or good and bad, light side and dark side, positive karma and negative karma, whatever. It's just not interesting to me. Gdf brought up Shadow of the Colossus, which is a nice comparison: That game offers no player choice, you're totally on rails from beginning to end. And yet it still makes you question whether or not you're doing the right thing. After all, you always know what the right thing to do is, making decisions is mind-numbingly easy. It's not knowing the right thing to do that's far more dramatic.

Yeah, I actually think Ripburger sounds very recognizably like Mark Hamill. He also does the voice of that crazy trucker hauling the fertilizer, now that one sounds nothing like him. Also, when did Mark Hamill become one of the Lost Boys?

...said the man with 37 posts in three days.

Speaking as an occasional wannabe screenwriter myself, there's a lot to be said for concision. "Kill your darlings" is the phrase a lot of writers use: If it doesn't advance the plot, illustrate character, or establish tone, then it's gotta go, it doesn't matter how much you love it. I mean, what would be the point of including every line of dialogue? You have the game there if you want that experience. The purpose of the video is to boil the game down to its essence, and it does that very effectively in my opinion.

I love adventure games, and I'm ashamed to say I've never heard of Beneath a Steel Sky. What kind of release did this get in the US? Anyway I just downloaded it, looks interesting. Though it seems very pixel-huntey from the first few rooms I checked out, but I can live with that if the game is that good. More on topic, I'm getting no picture on the Full Throttle video, is there some kind of codec I'm missing? EDIT: Nevermind, I figured it out. Amazing how a simple thing like changing the aspect ratio makes it look ten times as cinematic... Why hasn't anyone ever tried to make a game in 2.35:1 before?

Here's the part where I distance myself from gdf because we're both new guys who are ambivalent about BioShock, and if I don't want any misunderstandings in the future. Consider this my official statement: I love Half-Life. That is all.

I think we're arguing about two different things. I'm not saying that's all BioShock was about, obviously there was a lot more going on in that game than that. And it's silly to try to reduce the game to those terms -- especially for the president of 2K. However, when the game does get into issues of morality, I don't think it's as sophisticated as people make it out to be. You can either do a good thing or a bad thing, but there's never any doubt as to which is which.

You could argue that the whole story of Star Wars from Episode I to Episode VI is about the internal conflict of Darth Vader, but I've been talking about Star Wars on the internet for so long I don't even want to get into it anymore. Regardless, just because it's an internal conflict doesn't mean it isn't good vs. evil. I didn't see a lot of moral ambiguity in BioShock, there's a right thing to do with regards to the Little Sisters, and a wrong thing to do. This is pretty much obvious right from the word go. And besides, the reveal that you were basically a puppet the entire time without any free will makes the character's whole moral dilemma kind of moot, anyway.

The picture on the right makes it look like you'd be too busy working on your suntan to bother saving the world. The green filter never bothered me, but then I could see how it could be more of an annoyance on PC since you're sitting closer to the screen.

This is the Video game industry we're talking about here. I can't believe anyone would be shocked about a hit game getting an endless stream of sequels. It's far more shocking when a hit game doesn't get one. Harvesting children = evil; not harvesting children = good. Seems pretty black and white to me.

No worries, I probably had one article about non-linear storytelling in me, after that I would've exhausted everything remotely interesting I had to say. Incidentally, Thumbs is banned at my work outright, so consider yourself lucky James. I assume anything with a games or video games meta tag is obliterated by the filter.

You guys almost went for the "Nick has Pac-Man fever" joke, but unfortunately (or fortunately?) for all of us you never quite got there. I had an experience similar to Remo's friend when it comes to never being able to adjust to mouse-look, to the point where I actually preferred playing PC shooters with my super deluxe flight-sim joystick, and continued to do so well into the 2000s. I'd use the main joystick for WASD movement, and the directional thumb-controller-thing for mouse-look. I got my ass kicked on a consistent basis, but I was stubborn to change. It was partially a kind of weird ideological thing with me (I insisted that a joystick is for games, and a mouse is for spreadsheets), partially to justify the cost of the joystick, and partially so I could play Jedi Knight with one hand while eating chips with the other. Anyway I still suck at mouse-look to this day.

Hey folks, hello and all that. I go way back as a Thumbs reader, back to the days when Thumbs actually required you to read. What a pain in the ass that was, listening is so much easier. In fact, I go back farther than that even. I remember about five or six years ago (maybe more, I dunno), Marek posted on Adventure Gamers that he was on the lookout for writers for the site, and being the drooling LucasArts acolytye that I was at the time, I emailed him in an attempt to volunteer, but he never got back to me. And I was sad. I got over it... In time... Who am I kidding, screw you Marek! Anyway, after the death of adventure games I lost interest in video games for a long time, but GTA 4 brought me back, and it's been six months of slow-building love-affair-rekindling ever since. I just hope video games don't jilt me again, that bitch.