mikemariano

The reality: You will be home alone, watching the BAFTA livestream. You will see Jake and Sean approach, alongside the man pictured in your avatar. As he passes, he looks into the camera and stares into your soul.

More hilarious IGN quotes! "We are focusing on our two flagship brands, IGN and AskMen. Unfortunately, as a result, we have made the decision to close sites and restructure our teams accordingly." -- IGN.com

Interestingly one of the comments on the Gameological critique of the Sony non-event draws this comparison: Cage and Jake are the Goofus and Gallant of game design.

This was my reaction. I have not owned a PC for over a decade, but there really seems to be no alternative.

Let me drop the ol' fuck this game unfairly and prematurely on The Witness. I know I will not enjoy walking up to signs and playing Super Mario Bros. World 8-4 pattern memorization on top of a stop sign. That said, the YouTube comments are hilarious; people are convinced that this cannot be gameplay. Good for them!

I got the impression that the box was mostly flavor text, so you can play the game without looking at it. Notice that breaching and lockpicking doors does happen onscreen and not in the box. In Fallout even this text was in the box.

In regard to Jake's observation of the civilization name in Myst changing from "Dunny" to "D'ni", Neal Stephenson's novel Reamde is partially about an MMO called "T'Rain" and its overuse of apostrophes. There is a section (partially readable in Google Books) in which a linguist is horrified by their arbitrary punctuation.

I forget which stream featured as pre-show music, but I can't think of these streams without immediately going to YouTube to play the song again.

I don't think you actually missed anything; I've only played the original King's Bounty and Heroes of Might and Magic II and the features you paraphrased aren't part of the core gameplay of the series and were equally unfamiliar to me. They never actually talked about how the Heroes games play. But they did describe the game they were talking about (Clash of Heroes), which doesn't seem to be anything like the Heroes series. I'm trying to think of a good description of Heroes of Might and Magic. You pick a Hero, take turns with other computer controlled heroes, run around a map, get some ore, hire some sprites, and have all your guys die in battle?

I'll always love the Law & Order SVU Valentines...

In terms of characters knowing more than the player, I was thrown off by Robert Cath in The Last Express. About an hour into the game someone gets injured and he shouts out "I'm a doctor!" I honestly thought my character was lying because that revelation came out of nowhere. Cath was also skilled at hand-to-hand combat and was fluent in several languages. I don't recall ever getting a good explanation of why my character was so talented; I don't remember ever being satisfied with his character.

"Dripping with fan service." 9/10 -- IGN.com EGM.com (This is the infamous review of Aliens: Colonial Marines. See also the Video Games Review Watchdog.)

"It’s like mixing chocolate, peanut butter, and handjobs." -- IGN.com Penny Arcade Report (On the Jaguar version of Aliens vs. Predator, of all things.)

I'm going to ignore everything being said here about the films. Are Gearbox still rumored to be developing another Half-Life game? I'm pretty sure that was nothing but baseless speculation but that would be amusing if they were lined up for Episode Three or something.

The Rock Paper Shotgun consensus seems to be that this game will be horrible solely because it uses keywords (name/job/bye) instead of fully-written dialogue responses. I am playing the original Fallout right now, which does have full responses, but I actually find it a little cryptic; there are response options that will permanently kill off any future dialogue with characters, and it isn't always clear that that's what will happen. Even knowing what my character will say isn't helpful. Is this a big deal or is this just RPS being RPS? Do any of you have strong preferences? I'll take it however a game gives it to me.

In terms of people who just want to buy a game, sure; that's what waiting until a Steam sale is for! But it's a fair price to ask initial backers. They're paying for the game, engine, and bragging rights!

This is a good option for people like me who don't actually buy a PlayStation, but who watch other people's goofy videos on YouTube.

I kinda want to warn everyone not to read the Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview with Brendon Chung, dedicated to the references in the game. The article nearly dissolves 30 Flights of Loving from existence, replacing it with a bulleted list of films, games, and directors. Overall I didn't like 30 Flights of Loving nearly as much as I wanted to because there was no story, story frame, or setup for the game to work against. At times it was just a bunch of cool-looking stuff. An article that reduces the game to an index of its cool stuff actually makes me like it less.

One consequence of all the next generation news? The return of Sony Defense Force. SDF is an intentional joke about console partisans, though the joke wore thin years ago. I'm not sure this is a welcome resurgence.

I've never heard of this game, but six months ago I would have Kickstarted it.

There's a definite difference between a game slowly "unlocking" a language as you hear it as Shawn described vs. actually learning what those words mean. I'd be very interested in a game that actually gave us some sort of fluency in a foreign language. Did anyone pick up any Italian from Assassins Creed II? Then again, Chris managed to read the Fez glyphs. I've been playing Ultima games for decades and still can't read city names in runes. Or you could be like my friend who didn't think to use the gravity gun during Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 and get angry! He resented the fact that there was a "particular obscure tactic" and was less inclined to play the game because of it. Also, Shawn talked about doin' it and I am uncomfortable with that.

Shawn Elliott of shawnelliott.com real estate fame?

Walker and the other RPS folks are fair, but I notice that things that bother Walker don't affect me at all. To quote Jake from two years ago: Prickly PC game reviewers! God bless 'em!

Extra, extra! John Walker doesn't like something!