racingfreak92

Or the "wake up with a gorilla mask after a party with your bros"

There are special weapons you unlock after getting a certain number of relics, lost letters, and ratyat challenges. However I believe after 20 relics you dont get anything new.

Also, Far Cry 3 is home to the shittiest video game beard ever.

I never got mine either and I was most excited for that over the other rewards and whatever thumbsian things would be written on it.

Thats exactly what I did. A tiny part of me was hoping... please, please let the game actually have some semblance of player choice! then...

Spoilers up to the first act, not that it matters because this game is shit. I know that we didnt expect the same awesome narrative as Far Cry 2... but holy shit. I dont think I have ever hated playing a game more. Shooting dudes in the face is fun, dont get me wrong, but Jason Brody is the biggest douche bag character ever. Like if the Bionic Commando douche bred with himself in Tokyo Jungle to make some super species of douche. Vaas seemed so interesting. He could have been like The Joker in Dark Knight, just this uncontrollable dude who pops up unexpectedly. Instead he is like a stupid monster head that pops out on an on-rails ride at Disneyland. The weird hallucinations you have where you are walking down a path and you change places with Vaas, Vaas changes places with Citra, etc, could have led to you actually making choices in the game, but no. In the climax of the first act you are prompted to JUST SHOOT VAAS IN THE HEAD. Why even make you question the character motivations if the game is just going to play out like a 4th graders fiction assignment. The game was successful in making me feel for the characters, but the characters I feel for are everyone who Jason interacts with. Every single time you return to the cave I just cringe waiting for whatever verbal shit Jason is about to take all over his friends for no reason. This game is fucking terrible.

When I moved to college my parents made me get rid of the majority of my game magazine collection, among the magazines I trashed was a 99% complete collection of Nintendo Power magazines from the first issue to around the Gamecube release. I did go through each issue however and remove all the pull out posters, so this has got to be just about all of them from 88-2000.

Best thing to do is just check a site like deals.woot.com regularly. Every couple of months Amazon, Buy.com, and Ebay sellers will drop the price down to around $35 for a year. But I havent really noticed a pattern.

Is there still no way to get this directly through Steam?

Tanukitsune I would be interested in knowing what the letter you got says. Also possible spoiler question for other people who have finished the game...

The $100 fee isnt that bad. I know that making a game yourself or with a small team can be more of a passion then a job (ie. not really getting paid) but $100 is seriously almost nothing. What makes me angry is that the money is given to Child's Play, which is one of the stupidest charities ever.

So are you saying that Valve no longer takes submissions for indie games and Greenlight is the only option?

UGH SAME! Its such a sloppy handling game. I have tried it 4 or 5 times and every time its worse then before. I wish I could permanently delete it from Steam.

I stop playing games all the time - I never got the determination to play till the end. I quit the Modern Warfare 3 campaign after about an hour when I realized it was the most staged and shallow experience possible. Im sorry but just shooting dudes in a game is not exciting enough to warrant playing. You need to have either a very interesting mechanic, like great bullet dynamics or AI, or a story or some sort of deeper interaction. Metro 2033 is a game that I kinda wanted to quit, but I was glad I stuck with it. I found the mutant sections intolerable, they were just so awful. Even sneaking up on them and blasting two shots into them with a shotgun wouldnt kill them. It COMPLETELY went against the idea of being sneaky and accurate and I felt like every aspect of the game was designed poorly for those brute force interactions with the mutants. But I found the combat against the human AI so compelling that I couldnt stop playing. I would take take to scout the area, watch their paths and estimate their forces, then I would try to trip them up with their own traps and take advantage of dark spots and shooting out lights to ambush them and keep out of sight. I dont remember experiencing this bobbing head thing. I found that the game did very well at enforcing a combat style that had you taking out enemies undetected from far away, or being forced to get closer and use SMGs/shotguns to kill them once you were detected. I cant wait for the next game, it just disappoints me that the mutant combat seems largely unchanged.

This is an entirely different discussion and I think you are massively oversimplifying the whole situation. Out of all the platforms, the PC seems like the best option for moving towards digital distributions since you are almost guaranteed to have internet access and large storage capabilities. Im not sure how the nearly 400 games I have purchased for PC in the last 6 years in killing it, but I guess I must be since I'm only buying from Steam - the largest and most diverse platform for getting games delivered straight to your computer. Making an account isnt too bad its when you are required to run the platform's program in order to play the game. If I could just download the game and then run it from my Program Files folder (or better yet, drop it into Steam as an EXE and get the overlay to work) then I would be more likely to expand.

This will probably make you sad, but this is exactly how I feel regarding PC games. 95% of all Pc games I have purchased in the last like 7 years have been through Steam and if they are not on Steam its almost guaranteed that I wont get them. If its a series/game I really want there is maybe a 50% chance ill buy it if there is a boxed copy available, but if its digital download only its probably 10% or less. I did not buy Minecraft but I did buy Receiver for the $5 it costs or whatever, and it was lame so that really turned me off. I also did not buy Battlefield 3 simply because it was not on Steam and I probably wont buy the next one either if its only or Origin. I was interested in Home but would literally never have bought it if it didnt come out on Steam. I am much more likely to download a game as freeware and then donate afterwards, then buy if digitally if its not on Steam (though I realize thats not really a sustainable business model). I guess its bad that Steam has a monopoly, but Steam is also the best service by miles. Origin may be much better then EADM was but its still the same company and they burned me much too bad with their old service for me to give them a second chance without a significant reason to do so. Desura dosent have the selection. Amazon's games marketplace seems decent but Ive only bought from them when it was a Steam redeemable game, same goes for GreenManGaming (they do have amazing prices though). One of my biggest hesitations to trying another digital distribution platform is that I dont want to have to manage a second program, either running it all the time when I dont need it or having to wait to launch and log in when I could continue to consolidate to Steam.

I am saddened that Video games spelled their name wrong. Its two words.

I have yet to play this. But it comes out on Steam today. I will be buying it immediately.

I really hope the guy that posted Need For Speed: Most Wanted gets it on there. I know I upvoted that one. I then downvoted everything else so they wont be able to compete. I then downvoted Reciever again because its a douchy game and I dont like it.

Its not that difficult to understand that they are preparing everything for launch. They need to develop a web interface, graphics, style guide, mission statements, details for advertisers, connections with said advertisers, get the ball rolling with develop and publisher PR companies, work out their writing style and direction, plan regular features and everything else associated with a directed launch. Not to mention relocate staff, get them acquainted, and develop some sort of chemistry for a podcast which they will probably be doing. Obviously its easy to do something basic. I could have a new Video game blog up within the hour. They are doing a planned launch and want to have everything ready when they do go live. They want the pace and efficiency that a regular blog would develop after a year or two, but at day one. Sure they could do it quicker, but what does it really matter.

I would say that while all of your points are completely reasonable, you are just in too small of a minority for it to matter to game developers. UI scaling SHOULD be easy enough to implement and I imagine would do a lot to help, but asking for anything past that will just run into a cost/benefit problem. The only reason you see color blind modes in games is because it represents a significant portion of the population (isnt it like 10%?). On the subject of motion gaming I would say you are not losing out. I guess if you are into Zelda/Mario or other Nintendo games then there might be a couple Wii games but besides that what Ive played has been pretty uncompelling (IGN.com) or isnt motion-control exclusive.

Even when gaming settles down there will still be plenty of eyes to sustain multiple sites. Especially when bland bread and butter articles arent looking for anything past easy clicks, and there are plenty of people from the internet at large and gaming audiences that go around trolling for articles to read about whatever they like. If the people running The Verge can be happy with a decent traffic steam and dont think they have to be the next Gamespot/IGN then whats the problem? There are plenty of despicable idiots that read Kotaku everyday. I will never be one of them, but that dosent mean they cant continue to make money and draw lots of hits. There is plenty of room for lots of sites. Just like in normal news there is CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. Tru.

gbrown I dont think you can have a site that dosent post something regularly. I think The Verge consistently puts out extended pieces of really high quality. Sure there is daily filler. But the amount of traffic that brings in is key to keeping afloat. Now you could say, then how is The Verge different from any other site? And I think they are different because they want to do this long form content, but also realize that short, daily blurb stuff gets them the traffic they need for better content. Whereas sites like, Kotaku (which is the most aggravating, source-stealing, douchebag-filled, pathetic, sexist and largest piece of garbage site out of all gaming sites) ONLY posts daily blurb shit that borrows Huffingtonpost-style headlines to mislead you into every click possible. Even Shawn Elliott, who I would say is(/was) one of the hardest critics of the gaming industry, did have to go to previews, write some crappy content, and whatnot. Part of the problem with things like previews, early-access demos, etc that the press gets is that the publisher wants you to pretend their game is the BEST game ever. In order to not completely mislead/lie to your audience, most games writers dial that back maybe 10%. Elliott would dial it back 50%, and acknowledge flaws but also features/aspects that seem rough now but show promise. You cant even be completely skeptical. You have to do a little bit of pimping, because to dial it all the way back and pretend that every game is crap is as irresponsible as believing all the crap the publishers tell you.

I write for a medium sized independent game site that does mostly news and reviews, and a little bit of editorial. Ive been doing it for a few years and I think people like Chris Remo, Shawn Elliott, Tom Chick, and some other prominent writers in the gaming industry influenced my style alot. Most of what you see on the web about games coverage (and Im talking about stuff done by "games journalists" not mainstream press) is pretty shit. If you handed me a randomly picked review from a website it would probably have no substance and be a bland retelling of "the graphics are good not great, the sound is good. I like the shiny effects. Oh wait did I mention anything about character motivation or the actual experience of playing the game? Or did I effectively do the same thing as reviewing a screenshot? 8/10" I havent really been following this Polygon thing since I am not yet sure what their content will be like, but I hope they are trying to do something which will one day mean you can take the quotes off of "games journalists". Now Im not sure if that is what they are going for based off the people they hired. I despite everything Justin McElroy writes, which is usually crap caught up in way too much hardcore gam3r metaness and childishness. I havent read much by Authur Gies but based off what he tweets Im gonna guess I dont like him either. This "documentary" is just a way to advertise their new site. They make it sound like they are taking a big risk with this site, but in reality its a heavily funded and planned ordeal that is aimed at being profitable. They are not indie and you should not treat them that way. Whatever marketing person did this video though was smart enough to know that its better to try an indie angle then admit that they are a big, funded, corporate thing. The ideal thing I want to see in a Video game site is something like what The Verge does. Introspective, well thought out, well researched, and original pieces. Not the same press release. Not blowing up two new screenshots into the biggest thing ever. Not being a mouthpiece for a publisher. I_smell I take great issue with you saying that you dont want to see a focus on written text in 2012. I go to lots of sites multiple times a day to read news and content - and Im not just talking gaming sites. The LAST thing I want to EVER do is watch a fucking video. Even if a site is using Youtube I will more then likely skip right over it. Heaven forbid if a site is using their own content player and ad network that will take forever to buffer and then play a 30 second ad beforehand, just so I can find out that the whole video has been uselessly fabricated just to serve the purpose of showing me an ad beforehand. Video content is my least favorite thing in the world. Times when you need video: showing off a live playing of a demo, doing an interview ON LOCATION, live coverage of a press conference or event, doing what the IdleThumbs do on their Twitch TV page. Times when you dont ever ever ever ever need video: EVERYTHING ELSE not listed above.

This guy just really cant admit that he was wrong. Also I forgot about the game Fate of the World, but multiple Gamasutra commenters pointed it out - and they are right that Balance of the Planet effectively is Fate of the World. Except Fate of the World has much more of a game to it, dosent look like a 5th graders powerpoint presentation, and from what was demonstrated of Crawfords game, Fate of the World also appears to have more depth. After reading this post-mortum I have no more interest in supporting Crawford. Your project failed. MISERABLY. Many many people said over and over - make your game look better, change your pitch, tinker with the simulation a bit. He refused and he continues to make up reasons why, and ignore the things people have been shouting at his face. If he relaunches a new campaign he will have to do without my donation.