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Died on Yama again on today's challenge, but it was a much better run. 510k gold, ghosted vaults on the ice caves and temple. I was struggling with low health again and I almost had the sucker but I think I destroyed one too many cover blocks up top and he just spit a fireman on top of me. I was so proud too after three goddamn vampires jumped at me from the ceiling and I managed to avoid the triple threat of dying the same way as yesterday. Also the funny thing is I think that Yama died after I did due to a spike ball. I guess I just need to get better at avoiding stupid damage in hell and handling Yama.

That was the best.

I got to the City of Gold for the first time today during a warmup then got to Hell and Yama for the first time in the daily challenge (Oct 6th). Unfortunately despite having around 20 health pre-Olmec, a shortage of bombs meant I had a hard fight against him and just kept hemorrhaging health. A vampire dropping down from the ceiling did me in.

I have to admit that I was finally planning to cave (mostly for Dark Souls 2) and pick up an Xbox One controller. But now this weird thing is an option. As someone who has never played a game with a gamepad for more than 5 minutes, I'm not sure if I should go for the more traditional controller or this one where at least the marketing material is somewhat targeted at me.

Unfortunately neither NA team managed to make it out of the group stage, Cloud9 is the last hope. Although to be fair OMG and SKT T1 both look extremely good, like potential champions good. Fnatic looks good too but it's hard to say considering how shaky the other teams in their group have been. I don't think the second team to make it out of group B (they're playing the tiebreaker now) will get past the quarter finals unless they get a lucky draw. Edit: Well, at least that tiebreaker game was good fun.

Hmm, Jake and Sean talk about pitching an idea for a certain sequel. Then they form a game studio whose website has orange as a dominant color. Valve puts up a countdown timer. Hmmmmm....

Yeah, the LoL World Championships has been really entertaining even in the group stages. EU teams are showing the rest of the world that they're still in it despite not getting an automatic seed in the tournament.

I think the problem is that Steelport was designed for SR3. When you're driving around you're forced to interact with the dynamic world more. In SR4 Steelport is mostly just a platforming level for collecting orbs and at any time you can just super leap and fly away from any given situation. But I'd still agree that in both games most of the focus is on the missions and activities and not the open world as much. I think the point of the open world in these games is more to just evoke a sense of player freedom than to have emergent interactions.

Yeah, I was in a black market level once where I watched the "slow-motion trainwreck" of a snail spitting an acid bubble into a shopkeeper.

They stop talking about game endings at about 30m20s. Last of Us specific spoilers probably end much earlier than that but it's hard to figure out exactly where.

Regarding card games, Blizzard's Hearthstone is actually a really interesting implementation of simulating card game interactions. They do things like showing your opponent's cursor so you can see what cards they're considering playing and on which part of the board. Also I think pro Magic players play MTG Online rather than Duels of the Planeswalker which I think has a much messier UI but is a more accurate representation of the entire card game.

Regarding Chris's false ending to Last of Us there's actually a kind of neat ending cutscene if you hit a fail state at the very end of the game that has a similar effect. Edit: Changed video to a link so it doesn't spoil the end of the game, sorry about that. LINK

Actually the store page is wrong, there is keyboard support in the PC version. It's a little tricky but workable. It was a nice little game, and yes very similar to Limbo in its naturalistic puzzle design and macabre themes but of course more colorful and in 3D. While I liked both these games they don't really resonate with me that much, maybe they're a little simplistic. Also the ending here didn't really work for me as well as it did for others.

Yeah, I agree. Actually the problem I have with the flashback explanation might also have to do with the fact that Katie is such a cipher and I don't care that much about her point of view being consistent.

And I never said that anything "breaks the narrative", so we're even. Just so we're clear, I really enjoyed the game. I wouldn't still be posting about it if I didn't. It just does a lot of interesting narrative things that it's worth talking about what works and what doesn't. My initial post was responding to the explanation that the audio logs were flashbacks from Katie's point of view where she is reading the diary and remembering the object that is related to that diary entry. I don't feel like this explanation adds anything to the game versus the simpler explanation that you see an object and narration plays. Personally I also didn't feel any dissonance from the way the audio diaries were presented either, but maybe that's because I was already invested in the story. Believability is different from realism because you can have unrealistic elements that are believable in fiction, like disembodied narration, ghosts, or larger-than-life characters. I only made that point to explain that what's believable for a player character in a game is different from other characters because they're loaded with the player's own expectations for themselves. Especially in a first-person game with a mostly silent player character designed for the player to inhabit rather than role-play as.

Hired help can also carry the eggplant while you carry the scepter.

First, I think you're reading too much into what I'm saying as hardline criticism. That is certainly not what I'm trying to say here. I'm just talking about the feeling of playing the game versus after the fact explanations of what happened. I'm not saying that video games can't use this narrative tool, just that it's a little harder to buy into it when you inhabit the narrative yourself. I don't think that Gone Home pushes the concept enough to make the distinction between flashback and just disembodied audio logs an important distinction to make. I'll admit that the first diary entry does address this by saying that all the entries are written for Katie and presumably at some point Katie is reading them. But other than that (and the ending as Argobot mentioned) the act of picking up a new object I haven't seen before and then having a piece of audio that explains the significance of that object doesn't really evoke the feeling of being in a flashback to me. Basically the audio logs can already be more strongly read as flashbacks in Sam's narrative and I don't think there's much point to having multiple layers of flashbacks. I think an example of a game that does more with this kind of framed narrative is Bastion. Also I have to disagree with the assumption that all forms of media have identical expressive power. If this were the case then what would be the point of making a video game instead of a movie? While the essential toolbox of fiction can be applied everywhere, as you said, it may not have the same impact unless specifically tuned for how the audience will receive that fiction. My issue was not with realism but with believably of the fiction. Generally if you're going to present some new information to the audience in a piece of fiction then it should impact the audience in some way while still maintaining the audience's investment in that fiction. The audience is willing to suspend disbelief to a certain point but that willingness has to be earned. The problem of introducing new information about a player character is similar to the problem of doing the same for non-player characters, however on top of dealing with expectations of what is "in-character" for the fictional entity there is also an expectation for what is in-character for the player. This is why amnesia is a common trope for player characters in video games since it reduces the player's expectation of knowledge about themselves. In other media, especially TV soap operas, the amnesia trope is used more for dramatic tension than character development.

http://www.polygon.com/2013/9/2/4684116/godus-peter-molyneux-demo "...unless someone comes into your area of influence, then by all means finger them to death." - Peter Molyneux

Yeah, I meant it was a lot of work for the graphics programmers. Some of the artwork and animation must be custom too since it's different from the rest of the game.

Wow, I didn't know this but apparently one of the earliest example of two movie sequels being made back to back is Back to the Future Parts II and III. They were even released six months apart like the Matrix sequels. It's weird because I always thought of them as very different movies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_back_film_production

The most impressive thing about that mission to me is that...

It's a video game, not a movie. I'm not an external observer to a character's narrative, I am inhabiting the role myself. I should know whether I am in the present time or remembering something in the past. If they really wanted to push the framing device further they could have, for example starting the game with where it ends (just like the movie Steve referenced in one of his interviews, Sunset Boulevard), but I think I would prefer the way it is now where there is some uncertainty to the ending.

That's the explanation that Steve has given in interviews, but it doesn't really jive with me.

Only problem with black knight sword is that some of its strong attacks are really slow to pull off, even though they look super cool.

Geez, guess I'm sorry my nerdy analysis of a potential plot hole lead to this nerdy naval gazing about what is or is not valid analysis of everything. I didn't mean to imply that some plot hole or inconsistency had lessened my enjoyment of the game, I liked the game very much. However I disagree that Gone Home is a purely emotional experience, and thus should be solely analyzed as such, because its core design conceit is collecting anthropological evidence and piecing together a consistent explanation for what's happened in the house. The characters in the game are believably realistic so it's not unusual to think about how they would act given the evidence that you discover. It's also a testament to how much work was put in the game that my potential issue regarding character behavior has a plausible explanation and that everything really works chronologically.