JonCole

I lol'd.

"What is GOTY?" is a meaningless question. Greg said that The Last of Us is his IGN pick, and the IGN awards are "Best of 2013". He said his Giant Bomb pick is Gone Home, which he said was his "favorite game of 2013". He's talking about two different things.

In my experience, you cannot move the home directory without doing some major registry business. When I got a relatively small SSD and wanted to use it as the system disk, I went through the process of installing the home directory on the secondary HDD which proved to be a nightmare even on a clean install. Basically, you create a dummy user account when installing the OS, go into the administrator hidden account and change some registry values, delete the dummy account, create a new account, and go from there. That front-loads all the fiddling, but it again requires a clean install. When I created my latest PC, I just setup analogous folders on the HDD to Documents, Pictures, whatever and used the Windows library system to make them the default directories for those purposes. That obviously doesn't cover the other half of what a user folder does, like hold userdata and hidden folders, but it does keep those personal files separate from the system disk.

I agree, but what I'm detecting is that GOTY is apparently so set in stone on a personal level that changing your pick based on style/voice results in some great compromise of personal integrity. I don't really buy that, because as you said IGN has a clear editorial voice when you see the same bombast in every positive review on the site regardless of editor.

It's indiscernibly HD, more like the HD remakes on consoles with no new textures but things rendered at HD quality. That said, it's a heck of a lot easier to run than the disc-based old version on my current PC and the additions they made are fairly conservative and good. There's also that expansion they recently released, with bigger map sizes and some new races and junk, which may warrant a repurchase. I just know I loved AOE2 back in the day and sucked up that nostalgia like it was the tastiest treat.

There are a handful of missions where you basically just defend an area or build a wonder or something, but much of the campaign is a general "kill everything" type deal or "take this small number of units and prevail in directed, scripted scenes" missions. The balance of mission types is pretty similar to something like Starcraft or something. That said, I did enjoy most of the campaigns for that game. The setup is that the original game (Age of Kings) and the expansion (Conquerors) each have four or five separate campaigns following the historical battles relating to a certain civilization or historical figure over time. I'd recommend the fourth campaign in the expansion over the rest, called "Battles of the Conquerors" because it contains a handful of one-off missions that let you try out a range of civs in a variety of mission types. If you wanted to try one story-based campaign, I'd recommend Saladin, Montezuma, or El Cid.

I beat this campaign yesterday, it was a blast to play over a few days in a handful of sessions. It barely avoids overstaying its welcome, which is quite nice. Playing on PC, it's easy to forget that this was released as a XBLA/PSN-type game on consoles which really speaks to its ambition for such a small game. I definitely got a "The Club" vibe from this game, only with much better gunplay and a story that helped keep up a reasonable pace while avoiding any major feelings of repetition. It helps that most of the weapons feel sufficiently different and you can really reach a feeling of mastery over the short runtime of this game, which helps round out an otherwise by-the-books arcade shooter. The best part of the story is that as Silas continues to tell his ridiculously long story featuring any number of notable western figures, the characters in the game get more incredulous and Silas gets more and more tired (reflecting his age). The only thing I didn't like was the very end, which once again:

I wish there was a way to tilt the camera to overhead view. Sometimes the isometric perspective makes it hard to build precisely. There were a couple times where I had misplaced a wall in a building process, demolished it, and tried to build a new one in the right place only to later find I missed again and that chamber never pressurized. Also, do miners have to go through an airlock to reach the refinery (or said another way, can a refinery be in an oxygen-free room that miners actually enter)? I built a separate airlock to hopefully decrease the traffic through my other, intended-general-use airlock but the miners are fairly dumb and just use both despite the inefficiency of one person going in depressurizing, while another decides to run to the other door, which is pressurized because someone is still taking off their suit, etc.

I can't convince you to feel different about what Greg is doing, but I would like you to consider for a moment that part of this favorite/personal versus best/critical thing may be due in part to the rubric with which IGN votes for Best of 2013 awards. They don't nail down the process in minute detail (this is one area where Giant Bomb gets it so right with their 12 hours of podcasts), but they do have this little bit on their How We Chose page: That's not precisely the definition of "best" or "favorite", more the most impactful or memorable. I can't personally say that that's the actual measure with which the editors nominated games, but I can also see where that measure may explain why Greg might say one thing on IGN and one thing on Giant Bomb without it being "pandering".

Do we need to care about those people? If they can't determine that their standards != objective, they aren't really worth your care or attention. I think that Greg's sidebar is advocating more for your/our point of view than the POV of that of people, because he didn't just let his TLOU GOTY nomination on IGN stand alone and instead make the point that Gone Home affected him on a personal, emotional level that isn't quantifiable "superior" or more "GOTY-ey" than TLOU. As far as I know, there is no editor-specific GOTY editorial planned for IGN so his post on Giant Bomb was the place for him to make that point.

I think you're using reviews "how they're supposed to be used", in that you should find a reviewer or outlet whose general opinions align with yours and use them as a barometer for your own potential interest. I think that this situation is not only the mirror perspective of IGN readers feeling IGN is "right" because their interests align with IGN, but also a self-perpetuating cycle in that IGN seems to purposefully tailor their content for the broadest possible audience, thus the largest number of people align with their somewhat bland "blow you away" reviews and reinforce the "pandering" review methodology. Also, IGN picks up a degree of (unearned?) authority due to their mass - Polygon has to choose what games to review, because their review team is something like 5 staff members and some number of freelancers. IGN on the other hand reviews nearly every game, so the have readers who have an adopted opinion of almost every game to argue about elsewhere.

I think that arguing objectivity's place in game reviews is the ultimate red herring; objectivity is a misnomer for generality. Most of the people who complain about a lack of objectivity are instead complaining about how a review doesn't align with the general attitude towards a game. In other words, reviews would be "objective" if they were all a single score with no variation. That's what makes The Last of Us a "safe" GOTY; pretty much everyone agrees that it's great, with little to no variation (the low end of the review scale on this one was like... 7/10 or something). I think the real problem here is that it's hard to talk about games with authority in this space. People perceive confidence about one's opinion as arrogance or holier-than-thou. For every person who praises a Rock Paper Shotgun as a herald of honest opinion and higher-level discussion, there's another that gives them crap for "being PC master race" or whatever. If you're a woman and state a dissenting opinion, you're struck down for not being experienced enough to review games or you have "too many feels" or some such shit. "Pandering" is practically required to get anyone to listen. I don't know what the root of this issue is or what seems to make the gaming culture so coarse, maybe it's a combination of the time investment and money investment that causes people to violently strip away authority from any game reviewer that doesn't agree with them.

I don't really know what you mean when you say there are only a few areas you can go from the start of the game. The only major limitations to movement around New Vegas are 1) New Vegas itself, which requires a toll or a small quest to enter and 2) Quarry Junction, which is essentially bound to destroy you until level 20 or so due to the ridiculously powerful Deathclaws and 3) the main quest, which tends (90% of the time, I'd guess?) to only lock off areas that are only relevant to the main quest. You can take multiple paths to subvert Quarry Junction, as a side note.

I like that system. It beats the hell out of systems that attempt more objectivity by pointing out more details, like rating the audio, replayability, etc.

I think "pandering" is a strong word for what's happening here. The "objectivity" thing is very real when it comes to IGN, where they draw no shortage of ire for every review that steps outside the general consensus. So having a personal GOTY versus a professional GOTY seems quite appropriate. Especially in the case of Gone Home, where I've seen such a wide gulf of opinions that seem largely based on personal, past experiences. And not to minimize this "issue" too much, but it is just a GOTY award. Giving it much care over the "cool, this game won" or "darn, this game didn't win" seems a little silly.

It really depends on what you dislike about Obsidian games. If you disliked KOTOR2 because it felt undone but enjoyed KOTOR2 for all the things that made KOTOR1 good, this is like that (relative to FO3) except that it feels way more complete. There is still some bugginess involved in some number of questlines (particularly intersecting ones), but it felt no more buggy or odd than Bethesda bugginess.

I have nothing to add to this thread, aside from saying I've been reading the slightly ridiculous amount of spoilers and they're really adding to my post-game retrospective experience. Thanks guys.

I don't think Valve is particularly interested in bringing down the hammer at all, hence the "Mass Effect Collection" that does little more than collect whatever is available on Steam and say "here is what we've got!". Mass Effect 3 requires the Origin client to run, so it's not on Steam. Valve still wants to sell games, because they still get a cut. Valve's only solution for bringing the hammer is delisting, and there's essentially no benefit to doing so as it's not going to get ME3 onto Steam. I personally just wish that EA would move a little closer to Ubisoft, which includes a version of their client with every game but still sells their stuff on Steam. It's clearly an imperfect solution, but one that lets me still manage all of my library through Steam.

Maybe if your first post wasn't an advertisement, people might be open to using your services. As it is I can't imagine anyone would be interested and at best this belong in the plug your shit thread.

I actually heard pretty good things about it and enjoyed watching the Giant Bomb quick look:

I seem to have completely missed this game, but in light of this thread getting resurrected and some GOTY stuff thrown its way, I'm going to give it a shot. If nothing else, I'm hoping it'll keep me away from buying Van Helsing on PC and Diablo III on PS3 for a little while longer.

If ME3's combat had the story of ME2 to match, the SP would have been bananas. Also, if MP didn't include that pay-to-win stuff that mangled the MP economy I think people would have given it a more fair shake. Also, I wish they didn't balance MP for a full party, I had a lot of fun in GoW3 rolling around with 2-3 players in Horde.

I do think I'm only ankle deep in the game as compared to you, Dewar, so I might reach the same conclusions eventually. So far, I've found a fair amount of satisfaction just staying in a system and trying out each planet for a little while. Thus far, no boredom has taken me and I haven't felt the need to go much farther. I should also say that the only really big things I built in Terraria were elevators and skybridges, so maybe my idea of building is different from you.

Thus far, backlog intimidation has kept me from buying too much but I have dipped my toes in where the deals seem good enough or the want to play a game seems immediate enough. So far, I've grabbed: Age of Empires 2: The Forgotten (DLC) Deponia La-Mulana Eldritch Shadowrun Returns Ys 1 and 2 Call of Juarez: Gunslinger I feel I'll play AoE2, Shadowrun, and CoJ in fairly short order, and all the rest was ludicrously cheap so I had at it. Between the Steam cards profits I've made and a sudden windfall of $12ish PayPal credit I've spent something like $10 on this sale so far. Really wild, dumb stuff. I also purchased God of War: Ascension for $10 on PlayStation Network for their winter sale. I feel pretty good about that, since the last time I played GoW was God of War 2 (for the first time) via the HD Collection about a year and a half ago. I feel primed for another game of that type, so seemed as good a deal as I'd get for a couple years.

I don't know if I agree with that. I would say that the systems in Starbound discourage the same amount of digging as Terraria, but you're certainly able to do just as much and explore a planet just as much as you did in Terraria. Similarly, you can build really cool buildings though you'd only want to on whatever planet you decide to designate as your "home planet" for easy return. Terraria-like gameplay is more encouraged in co-op gameplay, in my mind, where digging into the depths is much more rapid with multiple players and shared discoveries in the depths are a lot more exciting than the more spartan planet-to-planet surface resource stripping that Starbound encourages in single-player.