mikemariano

mikemariano I basically just tweet @nickbreckon, though.

Is this from PC Gamer circa 2000? (Apparently yes.). I think I have this issue somewhere. Does this mean we can blame friend of Telltale Games Gary Whitta for this picture?

Lost played fair with its audience. Dead characters stayed dead! Closed-loop time travel stayed closed! And—up until the final season—the fun of asking "what are all the mysteries...?" was intentionally more fun than any answers. But apparently I wasn't supposed to have fun with their questions. I wasn't supposed to pay attention to their island at all. I was just supposed to feel sorry for Jack because he loved his daddy. The show itself told me: "You're watching it wrong." Merely asking "How does the island work?" means you are an evil person—it is the Man in Black's first (and only?) sin. It's also the sin of any audience member who wonders, "why" or "how". I thought Lost was television at its best. And I hated it. I haven't watched a new television show since.

Not to derail, but I think that is a good decision. In the final season the producers do worse than not answer any questions (which would have been fair); they reveal that the answer to every mystery is "because I said so." They robbed their island of its mystery and replaced it with a dismissive response from a condescending parent. Mass Effect has far less mystery*, but it has a vast galaxy that (as mundane as some missions can get) has elements that are beyond human understanding. Boiling their galaxy down to an A, B, or C decision is worse than anything the Reapers could do to it. *For Mass Effect, the only real mystery is how the Reapers ate the Galaxy the last time around and how Shepard can know she truly is stopping them this time. I'm guessing this doesn't get a satisfactory answer.

At this point should I just read all the starred Google Reader items I have that spoil the Mass Effect 3 ending? Right now my position is: "I'll play the game in a few months—maybe." Will knowing the ending cause me to budge from that position? I am the type of guy who was so disappointed by Battlestar Galactica that I wish I never watched the show at all. I was so disappointed by Lost that I wish I never watched television at all.

Man, I would sail from island to island in Tales of Monkey Island Episode 2 just to see the map swoosh in. So good.

Watch out for rolling grenades!

I hope that they allow smaller projects to live as smaller projects. It's all too possible that all of those projects will have to sell a billion copies or be quickly cancelled. Who will buy a major studio first (like EA)? Rovio or Zynga?

My hands hurt just reading Ben Kuchera's description of this game:

Hey, the ESRB wrote back to me! Hmmm, so Steam and other sites don't have to use a broken cookie system for everyone; they can use their (possible also broken) login cookies! I'm also surprised that "age-gate" is the real term for this concept.

My actions may be stupid, but they let me retain my pride! Nintendo's website used to have a gating screen that said, "This game is rated M; do you wish to continue? Y/N" I don't think that's terrible; it reinforces the rating and is a simple yes or no question. But I see now Nintendo uses age dropdowns like everyone else. Dropdowns that say "please enter your birth date, but we won't explain why or even what the rating of the game you're interested in, and we'll never save this data because we don't really care what your actual age is." This isn't informative, it isn't effective, and it shows dripping contempt for humanity. I don't mind being stupid about that.

I just listened to the lastest Bethesda podcast about Skyrim mods and the Steam Workshop. At the very end of the episode, a dubstep remix of the Oblivion theme comes on. Shame on you, Nick Breckon!

Even Telltale Games is using IGN.com language!

A voluntary self-regulating group is always better than government censorship, of course. But that doesn't mean that the regulating group isn't harmful; This Film Is Not Yet Rated goes into detail about how the MPAA heavily and unequally penalizes films with homosexual content. And while I think this particular effort is terrible, a 7-2 Supreme Court majority thinks the ESRB does a good job, so I guess that's something.

Oh man, I suck at inventory management. This mod will crush me. And this Metacritic nonsense is absolutely insane. Clauses like that don't belong anywhere near a contract. I can't wait to see what Obsidian puts on Kickstarter!

Me either; way back in the day, PC Gamer US reviewed the first Thief and said, "The sneaking is great, but the zombie levels really take away from the stealth gameplay." Because of that, I put off playing the game until after Thief II. Then when playing Thief, I got to a zombie level and said, "this isn't as fun." I momentarily stopped playing. Now it's like a decade later.

I spent the whole article waiting for the RT trigger to show up so I could Krogan head-butt somebody. Mass Effect does a decent job of integrating your decisions into the story, regardless of the points you get. If there's any bonus to being completely Paragon or completely Renegade I'm unaware of it. My Jane Shepard split her responses almost down the middle and still unlocked all dialogue options. I suppose that anything with points is something that can be gamed, but I didn't let that get in the way of my role-playing.

Don't be sad. Achievements aren't for bragging to others, they're for personal milestones. My Xbox achievements are the only record I have of when I played a game. I can look back and see the date I finished Bioshock and never went back (even after downloading DLC for it later). I can see the New Year's Eve I spent bagging the Insanity achievement for Mass Effect 2. I know when I launched Half-Life 2: Episode Two's garden gnome into space! I need a memory aid like this or I will forget it all.

Wow, all four of your interview subjects did a good job, and they seemed to like the opportunity to not talk about their own games. Is this the first time we've heard a female voice on the cast? Apart from Subject Zero/Jack?

As a Nobel Prize game, The Blood Typing Game is not the Citizen Kane of games, but it is the Gabriel García Márquez of games.

Not at all! The Limbo designers did a great checkpointing job. I was never bothered by the cheap shots they took at me (and there were many cheap deaths) because it smoothly took me back just a few steps each time. Then again, I'm the guy who quit playing Super Meat Boy after dying once, so what do I know about "good" dying in games? ...Or should I say I had a decent run of Super Meat Boy on Hardcore Mode?

It's yet another episode in which I get to feel old! Remo talks about playing Thief in high school, a game that missed my high school years by months/a year/years?

Wait wait wait, what? Why? Do you have to rebuild your Shepard completely? Do they just approximate your old Shepard and say, "yeah yeah, she was blonde or something, right?" This seems insanely cavalier.

Losing Nick Breckon from Idle Thumbs also means we lost one of the best spokesmen about Turret Sequence Awareness. Please, think of dear, departed F. Nick and remove turret sequences from your games!

That's OK; nice threadsave! I am a lowly console gamer. I have Steam installed on my laptop and my phone, but basically I just use it to buy games on sale that I subsequently can't play. So I'm watching this with some interest; finally I'll be able to play Half-Life 1 again!