shammack

Endless Ocean is a pretty good scuba diving game for Wii. You can't punch the animals, but you can take pictures of them and listen to a nice relaxing soundtrack. There's also a PC game called Reef Shot that came out recently that is along the same lines.

I think it's safe to say without hyperbole that this is literally the worst thing in the world. Plus I always feel really self-conscious about how few toppings I want. There's a whole salad bar of crap you can put on your sandwich but all I ever want is like, meat and cheese and maybe tomatoes, and I can tell they're always looking down their noses at me when that's all I order. Well then just standardize your damn sandwiches and let me take it or leave it if you don't like the way I order it!

I actually really like the weirdly inconsistent tone of GTAIV. Some of the actual jokes are a bit too broad for my liking, but the contrast between the cutscenes' attempt at telling a poignant story and the ridiculous things that happen when you're actually playing the game is just amusing to me. I guess if I were heavily invested in the story in the first place, that might take me out of it a bit, but as it is, it just gives the game a unique and memorable feeling. When I play something like Saints Row where the whole thing is intentionally over the top, it all just starts to feel a bit "samey" and I don't get into it as much. I know there are lots of games that take their story way too seriously for what you actually end up doing in the game, but for me, GTAIV got the balance just right. I think I feel about it the way Chris felt about Red Faction Guerilla way back when, where the incongruity actually increases my enjoyment. (P.S. How can I get on whatever office mailing list is being used to organize these games? )

What? Seriously?

I heard that those are a great way to have fun.

This is maybe not the best example; Candy Land is entirely based on chance and involves literally no choices or strategies of any kind, so I'm not sure how Machiavellian diplomacy could arise from that.

Also, smile with your eyes.

I also love the way he makes little squeaky-toy noises as he runs around in Luigi's Mansion.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=138290904 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_QP5X6fcukM I'm pretty excited about this game. You play as an immigration inspector on the border of a fictional eastern European country. People queue up to get into the country and you have to examine their paperwork and determine whether or not to let them in. You do this by looking for discrepancies in their documents and/or what they tell you verbally, checking for forgeries, and sometimes searching them for contraband and detaining them if necessary. It's stylistically similar to something like Cart Life, but lighter on the pathos and with a more streamlined set of mechanics. You're compensated based on how many people are processed in a day, so if you want, you can try to cut corners and move people through faster, but there's a risk/reward associated with doing so. If you make a mistake, you get a citation; the first few are just warnings, but then your pay starts getting docked. Plus, if you let somebody through that you shouldn't have, there's a chance they'll detonate a bomb, resulting in your booth being closed for the rest of the day. Your wages go toward rent, food, heat, and medicine for your family, who can get sick if you don't provide well enough for them. Most of the immigrants are procedurally generated, but there are a few scripted events sprinkled in that are pretty well written. I don't want to give anything away though. It's on Steam Greenlight, but there's a playable beta/demo sort of thing that you can download for free right now. I recommend it!

Yep. The author talks a bit about how it works in the game's TIGSource thread.

Same here. I'm slightly tempted to upgrade to a 3DS XL now that there's going to be an Animal Crossing bundle, but I don't actually like the design of the Animal Crossing one that much. The Japan-only Luigi one is pretty cool, but in both cases I wish the designs were on something other than a boring plain white background. The purple 3DS is gorgeous. Has anyone upgraded from a 3DS to an XL and transferred their downloaded games over? How painful is it? Is it even possible?

Captain Olimar

Wow, that's pretty cynical. Obviously developers hope their games sell well, but I have to believe that you don't spend years of your life working on anything without developing some sort of personal attachment to it, and some specific vision of what you think it should be. I don't have a lot of playtest experience, but I used to do video editing and get notes from clients and such, so I have plenty of experience with the feeling of having made certain choices for carefully thought-out reasons, ending up with something that you're happy with, and then having someone on the outside come in and tell you what's wrong with it, not knowing the limitations you're working against or all the things you've already tried and why they didn't work. It's easy to get frustrated in that situation. Ultimately your job is to listen to their complaints, use that information to figure out where the real problem is, and decide how/whether it can be addressed in a way that makes sense for what you want the end result to be. But if the feedback is just "I wouldn't buy this unless it were a completely different game," there's nothing useful that can be extracted from that. Even if you are making something whose only purpose is to make money, you're still making creative decisions and judgment calls, and it sucks to have someone shit all over them. Maybe they were being overly sensitive, or maybe they just decided that if that's really how you felt, they weren't going to get anything useful out of you and they'd be better off getting opinions from someone who had some amount of interest in the game in the first place.

(cough, cough)

The new Zelda game looks pretty early in development. I'd be surprised if they've even decided on a story at this point (and even more surprised if it actually comes out this year). At any rate, I'll take that over another remake of a game I already own in several other formats any day.

I wonder if that stuff is going to be taken out? That would be a shame, but I guess it's better than the game not being available at all. I still have my SNES cartridge, but sooner or later the battery is going to give out.

I guess I don't disagree with that. I consider them "superficial" in this context because most games present them without actually dealing with them in any meaningful way. I think games as a medium have a lot of potential for putting the player in someone else's shoes and showing them what life is like from that perspective, and I wish there more that took advantage of that. All I was really trying to say is that I don't think "it's the exact same game, but now your character looks like a girl!" actually accomplishes much and it may be detrimental in some ways (but it's just Donkey Kong that somebody edited to amuse his daughter; I am probably overthinking this). Maybe that's the case. I thought I remembered seeing it reported as the daughter having asked him to change it or something along those lines. But yeah, it's clearly a bad example in any case and I shouldn't have brought it up.

Sure. I'm unequivocally not arguing against underrepresented groups having more representation in games. But I do think there's a distinction between "underrepresented groups should have more representation" and "I don't want to play this specific game because I can't play as [whomever]." It's the latter attitude that I find troubling, and it goes both ways -- that's also part of the reason why you always have to play as a straight white male, since the prevailing wisdom is that that's the most profitable demographic for games and they only want to play as characters who look like them. That's a good point and one that I'm probably not capable of fully understanding since I'm never going to be at a loss for straight white male protagonists, although I don't feel that they represent me in anything but the most superficial ways. Pretty sure I didn't say anything even close to that; my point was kind of the opposite.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Why should my race and gender have any impact whatsoever on my taste in video games? Unless it's a game that's actually about those topics in some way (which is pretty rare, because video games), I don't really see how it's relevant. I know a lot of AAA games tend to be described as straight white male power fantasies, but I think this is misleading; I'm a straightish white male, but I find that stuff as off-putting as anybody else. I'm not suggesting that that makes me a special snowflake, but that the specific tastes that those types of games and sites cater to are maybe not as closely linked to race or gender as they're usually made out to be. I certainly don't want developers or journalists trying to pander to me on the basis of those things; it's presumptuous, crass, and gross. Agreed! This is tangentially related, but a while back everybody got excited about that guy who modded Donkey Kong so his daughter could play as Pauline, and it spawned a little wave of discussion about doing similar swaps in other games. That's cool and all, but on some level it also kind of bothers me because the implication is that people don't want to play a game where the protagonist doesn't look like themselves. Are we really that lacking in empathy? Why are we perfectly willing to play as anthropomorphic rodents and shit, but put off by playing a human who isn't our exact race or gender (especially in a game like Donkey Kong where it has literally no effect on anything)? Admittedly, in the case of the Donkey Kong thing, the daughter was a little kid, but I do have to wonder if it's actually a good thing in the long run to cater to players' desire to play as someone as much like themselves as possible instead of challenging them to empathize with a character who isn't like them.

I'm pretty sure the 15-minute gameplay video that got taken down included a Uplay achievement or something popping up at one point.

Clementine Clementine with Santa hat 15 November 2012 - 2 April 2013

I really like this game. My favorite thing is that the entire D-pad is dedicated to making Luigi say "hellooo?" in different ways, serving no gameplay purpose at all. Also, the music is extremely catchy.

I have a message from subbes: she says she'll be wearing purple on top and black on the bottom if you need to find her. (To be honest, she'll probably be wearing that either way.)

It looks like I'll be there on Thursday only, so I don't know if I'll be available for an official meetup, but if you see me, feel free to say hi and I'll be all socially inept at you. I look like this, more or less, and may be wearing my Wizard's Tunic (the Idle Thumbs t-shirt, not an actual tunic).