shammack

I don't think I really have a consistent rule. At any point in a game, I'm willing to put up with some stuff that I don't like if there's at least one aspect of it that I'm really enjoying. But if I get to a point where there's nothing in particular that's holding my interest and then the game gets turned off for whatever reason, I probably won't end up coming back. I guess on average I'd say that I'd give a game around two sittings' worth of "playing but not really enjoying" time before giving up on it.

I'm torn between looking forward to seeing what they do and being insanely jealous of them. But yeah, "non-combat game about exploration" == day one perch for me as well. Based on Hot Scoops's blog and his comments on the podcast, I'm expecting these dudes to come up with some interesting stuff within that format.

So you want vim, basically. :trollface:

I've never read the comics and actively dislike the show and I thoroughly enjoyed this.

I don't really know! I just hit a wall of not being able to find anything else to do (apart from the ciphers and whatnot, which I want to avoid if at all possible). I think I have like 20 cubes and I've collected all the cube bits from the areas that were marked on the map as containing cube bits, and now I don't know what else I can do. I must be missing a big chunk of levels, but I can't tell where I need to go to find them since the map is useless, and it's not really any fun to wander around aimlessly in the areas I've already cleared.

The more of this I play, the less I like it. I think I've just crossed the threshold into active dislike. The platforming and perspective-switching parts are great (mostly), but I seem to have reached a point where I can't go any further with that stuff unless I start deciphering all this obtuse crap. Squinting at my TV writing down pictographs is not what I wanted out of this game at all.

I had a Commodore 64 with a big box of pirated games that my dad had obtained somehow. For years, that was my only source of games, so I was always the kid who went to a friend's house pretty much just to play their NES. I didn't get a console of my own until the SNES. I still have the C64 (and the SNES, for that matter). I tried hooking it back up a few months ago and it still mostly worked, except that some of the sound was missing and it was incredibly difficult to get a clear picture.

I've been occasionally seeing clips and screenshots of this game for a while, but it wasn't until I played the demo that I realized that the player character is wearing a surgical mask. All this time, I thought he just had a big grin on his face, which seemed weird for a horror game.

Wait, what?

That is annoying and it would be nice if you could turn those notifications off. But I probably wouldn't, just because in an RPG I like to know when my character's stats are changing. It's worth noting, though, that although that game obviously does use a numerical stat for karma, it's never presented that way to the player. It's only described in vague terms like "very good," and even though those karma gain/loss notifications pop up all the time, they never give any indication of how much. I don't really agree with this. Like I said, I roleplayed it that way. Maybe I missed some extreme options that would only have been available if I were very good or very evil; I don't know, but the options that I was given seemed adequate and appropriate for my character. Whether I was doing a "good playthrough" or an "evil playthrough" just wasn't something I thought about at all (until I started a new character to try to game the system and get to the stuff I'd missed the first time through), and I didn't feel like I was being "punished" for it. If a game includes any meaningful choices, that pretty much means it's not going to be possible to see everything in one playthrough.

I'm not clear on exactly what constitutes a "moral choice" in a game if it's not part of a points system or some other specific "morality" mechanic. Since NPCs are basically just robots going through a fairly simple set of instructions, morality doesn't apply to them in any real sense. By necessity, it has to be an illusion supported by having them react to the player's choices in different ways. And if you're doing that, there's always going to be some kind of numerical system underneath it (unless you're just dealing with every decision individually, completely free of context, which seems less than ideal). I don't think the points themselves are the problem; it's just that they're too transparent. The problem I have with most of these systems is that I feel like it's actually kind of antithetical to the way morality actually works, which is that you make decisions to the best of your ability based on what you think is right, without knowing what the outcome will be. The most satisfying version of this that I can think of in a game is Fallout 3. You have a "karma" score, but there's no real reward for going to either extreme, and it can actually be beneficial to maintain neutral karma. In dialogue options, you're never told what's the "good" or "bad" option (or whether that's even applicable) and sometimes your actions have unintended consequences and something that you thought was a good idea might go wrong and get you the opposite karma from what you were expecting. Characters get killed, quests become inaccessible, etc., but the game is malleable enough to give you lots of alternatives and there's never really one option that's clearly the best one. In that game (and even moreso in New Vegas), I always felt comfortable making decisions based on what I actually thought that I (or my character) would do or say in that situation, rather than because I was thinking about my karma or what reward I'd get. (In fact, I actually tried to start an evil character to see some of the quests I'd missed by being too good, but I couldn't do it because I felt too bad about being mean to everybody.) I haven't played Starcraft II, but having the player turn out to have made the right call no matter what does strike me as a cop-out, narratively speaking. I'd like the game to be flexible enough that I can't just accidentally screw myself over and make it unwinnable/un-fun by making the wrong choice, but I do want there to be some sort of consequences to my choices, otherwise why have me make them?

7PdsS01iUZs Sorry.

For more information, listen to Idle Thumbs 38: "Up On This Boss", from 3:58 to 13:52.

You might be right. I do remember a story (not sure if it was a Chris story or a reader mail) about a super mutant enclosed in a pen and a misplaced grenade destroying the generator for the electric fence.

I'm pretty sure it predates that because during that story, Famous says something like, "the grenade literally rolled down the fuckin' hill," referring to its already being a meme at that point.

I'd been assuming that that meme wasn't a reference to any specific incident, but had just developed as a sort of shorthand for "amazing emergent Far Cry 2 story," kind of like in the prologue of TITP #6 when they just bullshit some stuff about jumping a thing off a thing and seeing an animal and there being so much grandeur. However, what David said does sound vaguely familiar. But my knowledge of Idle Thumbs lore is not encyclopedic enough to know for sure. I would hazard a guess that if there was a specific story, it was probably somewhere in the first five or six episodes that talked about Far Cry 2, before it became a joke that they talked about it so much. On the other hand, as I recall, most of the uses of the actual phrase "grenade rolled down a hill" were much more recent, in the post-Breckon era. So in conclusion, I dunno.

Hmm. I'm not sure there's any circumstance in which publicly stating "i just won the grand prize at IGF tonight. suck my dick" doesn't make you an asshole, especially if that's your response to people calling you out on something you deserved to be called out on. I'm not calling for him to be drawn and quartered or anything, but it certainly doesn't endear him to me personally or make me eager to support his endeavors.

Everything is terrible!

On a slightly different note: xjS-cMn8GQQ

There's clearly a camera on the front of the vehicle and the image is being displayed on the inside of his helmet visor thing. Or a wizard did it.

Thanks. I'm pretty sure this is at least the third time I've screwed that up.

They're getting faster. d2D71CveQwo (I can't tell if my embed is actually working, so if not, )

Suck Box? Crap Box? Sex Box? Ice Box? STEAM BOX?!

Don't take my word for it, but it's my understanding that the "S" consoles are not compatible with pre-S hard drives (because they sit in the console in a different position or something). I never owned a pre-S model, but I bought the diskless S and quickly discovered that there are a lot of things you can't do without a hard drive even if you have the space available in onboard storage, so I had to buy one, and at that point I researched it and learned about this.

Thanks