spindrift

As a counterpoint to IrishJohn, I think that Subject zero isn't anywhere near as bad as the trailer made her out to be. I'm finding her tolerably annoying. Also, if you do her loyalty mission you can upgrade her so she gains the ability to .

As far as i can recall there was no actual high res version released (i hope i'm wrong, that would be awesome), but at the time you couldn't turn up the graphics all the way without crippling your system. Also, editing the ini files allowed you to turn things up even more. Maybe you just remember being able to turn everything up to max when you got a better computer a few years later. It was the Crysis of 1999.

They even bleeped when chris says 'asshole' and '-shit'. Weirdly, the host says shit later on and doesn't get bleeped.

My resolution is to try to get back into online gaming. I haven't played any online game since HLDM / TFC. People were dickish enough when it was just text chat, so I'm feeling a bit daunted by the prospect of voice chat. Also, I want to play more indie games.

Outcast is my Favourite game. This is the game that made me stop thinking of games as toys.

Just chiming in to say I pretty much completely agree with PiratePoo and chris. I'm finding some of the other arguments in this thread baffling and self-contradictory. I can't parse them at all, unfortunately. I'm not entirely sure if that's my own failing, or not. Also, fyi. The NYU Game Centre has the mp3s of an awesome series of lectures up on their site. Most of them deal, specifically or tangentially, with the exact issues in this thread, being the possible approaches of games as Systems to speak to us, and the problems involved in trying to implement that.

Erkki: I haven't encountered anything like that, and i've played for some truly mammoth sessions. although like murdoc, my DLC Golem is broken too. Sometimes when I talk to him the game kills itself. Also, later on his model changed into the standard golem one and exploded itself.

Going to miss this podcast more than I'm comfortable admitting :-( Looking forward to the 1st episode of the idle thumbs sporadicast. I'm assuming it won't happen for at least few weeks, but when it does, will it go out via the old rss?

fuck :-( also, congrats Nick

The only real problem i have with the combat system is the lock-on feature regularly choosing the wrong target when i'm fighting multiple enemies. Why is there even a lock-on in a pc game anyway?. Also the game does a pretty poor job of easing you into things. The tutorial messages for combat are particularly useless, you get messages telling you to counter parry and charge up attacks before you actually have the ability to do those things (i finally realised that you unlock them if you train the next few levels of Sword). The art is also weirdly schizophrenic. The technical fidelity of the assets, i mean, not the art direction. There's a tangle of both gorgeous technically accomplished assets, mixed in together with amateurish clunky stuff. Other than that i'm loving this game a whole lot. For anyone worried about coming in late on the series - I have never played a Gothic game before and i'm having no great trouble adjusting to most of the systems.

great cast. You guys are having a run of extremely good episodes lately. I'm trying to play Red faction Guerrilla on windows 7, where it has a bug that causes it to run about 1.5 times faster than usual, so imagine psychotic sledgehammer psychopath running around smashing things at Benny Hill montage speeds and the craziness is taken to whole new levels.

suddenly my interest in this game has picked up again

I only recently heard about it and it caught my interest. The way it was initially described to me makes it seem a bit like dwarf fortress in that you don't directly control anything, instead you build infrastructure and set goals to try and entice the adventurers to do what you want. That sort of gameplay seems potentially really interesting to me, but i've heard greatly varying accounts of it since then so I don't know if I should pick it up or not.

I thought they were joking

I just started listening to this too in the past week. The guy is good at starting out with simple ideas and then bringing in increasing complexity without losing you.

I guess so that it was allegorical for class in addition to race.

Nice to hear they are involving the actors at a much earlier stage in the writing process. also, that has to be the shortest and most on-topic games list i've ever seen from you. Great interviews, guys. The expansion PAX were great. Is there going to be a regular episode this week or are you taking the week off?

In the sequel it looks like they are fixing the lack of mission variety, and a bunch of other problems, which is great, but none of those things were really what made the game suck. The biggest problem for me with that game was its pretence of telling a story, and of forcing you to sit there and act out the bits that trigger the story, even when it is blatantly contradictory to how the entire rest of the game encourages you to play. For example, in one early mission I spent ages scouting the area around the assassination target, silently clearing the rooftops of guards, planning my escape route & picking the perfect spot for the kill. I would come out from behind a pillar, drop down directly infront of the target, stab him in the chest, wallrun straight back up and escape via my pre-cleared route. My hiding spot was close enough for the 'accessing assassination memory' prompt, but it wouldn't trigger the goddamn cutscene. I moved closer and closer, from good hiding spot to poor, to practically out in the open, but still no cutscene. I eventually realised it wanted me to go out into the damn crowd of gawkers and stand there in the open like an idiot while this guy says his lines, and then i just had to run up and kill him like a street thug. Assassins Creed had, i think, the best 3d platforming I've ever played, so i'm definitely going to play the sequel, i just wish i didn't have to swallow all the cutscene bullshit. Push the story into the background instead of forcing it down my throat and i might appreciate it more.

I have a gigantic book of all the collected holmes stories, reprinted from the original newsprint (with the illustrations). I read through the whole thing in a week when i was bored and sick. My memories of some of them are tinged with fevered hallucinations. It was weirdly appropriate, some of the logic used in those stories is bizarre.

The first games i remember playing were Air Raid (or River Raid), and SimCity on a friends dads Commodore 64. My friends dad was showing off his new computer to my dad, who was utterly uninterested and bewildered. I was looking over their shoulders totally fascinated. After they went off to do something else, my friend and i snuck on and played some but we eventually got shooed off because 'the computer is for grown-ups'.

I can't remember if i finished call of juarez 2. I played a lot of it but i can't remember the end, so i may have stopped playing. It gets extremely tedious by the end. Gattling turrets ahoy. There were also a couple of bizarre pseudo open world type missions randomly placed throughout the game, where you got to earn money and upgrade your weapons, but you could only do it with one character. I most recently finished Dawn of War 2, finally. I've stopped & started this game a few times near the beginning, but recently it just got its hooks into me and i poop-socked it to completion. Great game. I think what initially turned my off was that the game is essentially about micro managing units and in RTS games that's always been my weakness. It helped me to think if it as an extremely involved tactical diabloesque, rather than an RTS.

So you invoked richter as a good implementation of contrast to show how you don't need to use contrast? ...what? The filthy truism i mentioned is that 'contrast maintains visual interest'. This is a statement so obvious it hardly bears mentioning. A truism, in other words. Nobody said you need blatant bold contrast at all times in every piece of art. I'm truly baffled by your taking such exception to it. Okay, so i'll assume you are using a painting as a whole as an analogy for fallout 3 as a whole. The game used low contrast. These paintings use low contrast. A painting is a fleeting experience, you look at it and your eye travels around the painting, guided by the artists intent. Composition and contrast are used to do this. A hint of a face amid a dark blur at the focal point of the composition, then quickly to to the window panes popping out of the background, sharp amidst the fog, then the huge dark mass of curtain to the left contrasting the lighter area and balancing out the figure, then to the area where you expect to see legs, but don't, and then back up to the face. This is how you traverse a painting, not necessarily in that linear order, it is all intentional and considered, separate to the style as a whole. The gestalt of the painting is low contrast and drab, but within it are areas that are relatively high contrast to each other, they support each other and maintain the viewers interest as the eye travels across the landscape of the painting. I hope you see where i'm going with this. Fallout 3 is ultimately the same in it being on the whole appropriately low key, but it fails in the composition. As you travel its landscape you do not run into areas that contrast each other effectively. Each single moment of each area is well made and aesthetically pleasing, but it does not use contrast appropriately across a span of time. A painting takes a few moments to traverse, fallout 3 takes many hours. You can see the potential problem here? You're still conflating several different elements of artistic direction. There is a big difference between the conceptual decision and the implementation of that decision. One is sound, and the other is sometimes poor. All your arguments are based on the conceptual decision being intentional and appropriate. Yes, obviously that's true, I've said a number of times now that conceptually the idea is sound. Although it would still be entirely fair for someone to not like that concept. At no point did I say that was what you said. I was calling you out for saying it was unfair to criticise it. Which you go on to do again in this post.

Yes, i agree. And they sometimes used this tool poorly. I don't understand why you linked to richter. I felt his use of contrast wonderfully subtle and varied in a way that fallout wasn't, and supported my point? Maybe you think his work is irrelevant and you are ridiculing it? I don't know why you linked there. I feel you're conflating a few arguments here. I agree with pretty much everything you said except that if an overall aesthetic choice is good and appropriate, then it is now sacrosanct and that it's 'unfair' to criticise aspects of it that people think are poorly implemented. Like i said, overall the fallout world was great, and the overly desaturated style they went with was an interesting and appropriate choice. I just think they implemented of it poorly for reasons i already stated. 15-30 hours is a long time to go without any variations within an aesthetic. You brought up valve, but they are masters at changing up the visuals while maintaining an overall style. They don't just pick a theme and go with it. Each visual style has variations that are thrown in at appropriate intervals. I can see how you might disagree, but you said that to criticise f3 for being drab is unfair. Regardless of whether we think it is true or not, i still think it is still a fair point to make. this is entirely true.

@Kingzjester: I don't feel like fallout 3 was particularly subtle in its drabness at all. I think it was too brash and overbearing. Any art needs contrast to give it visual interest, if you are going for one extreme or another in your overall stylisation, then it is all the more important to give the viewer some contrast to maintain that interest. Fallout 3 did it one really notable time when you emerge from the cramped, relatively clean and well maintained vault into the wider world where everything is completely destroyed and dead. That first view of the world they made is spectacular, but after a few hours in the game it loses its novelty because after that moment it's all essentially the same. Brilliantly well made and realised, granted, but I still think it's a failure of the otherwise great art direction in that game that it disregards this basic artistic truism. It doesn't even have to be a lot of contrast, or something completely at odds with the aesthetic, just minor touches here and there would have helped. A broken, polluted world gives you myriad opportunities for adding moments of colour and contrast. Rust isn't always just one shade of red. Polluted water can be spectacularly colourful in a sickly way. Rocks and the soils have a range of colours. Types of plastic don't degrade in colour, and scraps can have fleuro yellow or orange bits of colour poking through. etc, etc. There are opportunities to give the world some contrast while still maintaining the overall stylisation they chose to go with. It would have emphasised the desolation, while giving some intermittent relief from it. Instead, this wonderful world they made just descends into drabness, like anything will if you are looking at the same thing without relief for 15+ hours.

GI is an umbrella term for a whole bunch of lighting algorithms, and Caustics is one of the more advanced ones, i would be pretty shocked if crysis were able to render it in realtime. I assumed that when crytek said realtime GI, they were just talking about some basic radiosity with a couple of bounces, i can't imagine it being too much more than that (still pretty impressive though). what does this mean?