Xeneth

I could easily be dead wrong about the usual telltale roster, I was under the impression from some light exposure to Sam & Max that they were fairly heavy on collecting inventory items and arbitrary solutions. Not necessarily combining items per-se, but wacky trial-and-error prone solutions. Maybe I'd like them more than I'd expect. I don't know what "Adventure +" even is! Adventure games make up a very small percentage of the genres I play, it's true. Most of my experience is with hybrids- Other genres that have adventure elements or puzzles integrated into action or platforming stuff. As I originally stated, there's nothing wrong with the wacky inventory style in and of itself, I just don't personally find it as entertaining... The puzzle-solving mood often coincides with a more serious or somber "me vs. a video game" challenge-centric mood for me. I'm not entirely sure why. As a result, mysterious environmental puzzles that sorta take themselves seriously like the ones in Myst and Riven appeal to how I feel when I'm in the mood to tackle a puzzle. Unfortunately, as evidenced in later Myst games and the endless Dreamcatcher Interactive knockoffs, the problem with designing your atmosphere like this is that when your barriers and solutions aren't REALLY well integrated into the world, the spell is shattered immediately. Comedy is a much easier tone to maintain. The breakthroughs into more lighthearted adventures for me have been: Ben There, Dan That & Time Gentlemen, Please - They poke so much fun at that specific contingent of the genre that I couldn't help but get sucked in... You probably hate me, but I was laughing AT these games instead of WITH them, and they seemed to want me to, so I enjoyed them. Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village/Diabolical Box - There's a sort of clean break between the puzzles and the exploration environment that allows me to get all scowly and serious when tackling a brain bender, then lighthearted while poking around the whimsical environment. (It helps that there's some mild creepy in with the whimsy too) Puzzle Agent - Gotta add it to the list, as so far I'm enjoying it quite a bit. More impressions forthcoming probably, but I suspect reasoning is similar to Layton in that the puzzles are disconnected and there's some creepy in with the whimsy. My childhood was defined by console games and platformers, so it should come as no surprise that I'm an adventure game heretic. I'm ALMOST too young (and didn't own a computer until 1998) to relate to I'd expect.

That one... Just wondering if anyone remembers what it led to. Not a huge deal.

The girl gamer issue seems to be the one I'm most empathizing with- That's a VERY heavy misogynistic and love-starved community in general as it is. For most guys with fairly non-unique names, just posting in a reasonable manner negates most of the concerns... For anyone with an obviously female first name, that's a crapload of random PMs from trolls and people who are desperate to snag an SO that shares their hobby. I'm afraid THAT community really doesn't need anything more than "it's a girl" info-wise to become intolerable. I'd really like to see this sort of experiment on a news forum/community or something that makes more sense than online gaming, where anonymity is arguably a reason for its success.

They sound like they're doing well. A new producer, and less simultaneous casters in their recent offerings. Funny that Chris being a guest on GWJ would get me to go and listen to them a bit again, considering that's how I originally found Idle Thumbs- "GWJ had a great guest on this week that sounded like he really knew what he was talking about. I hear he normally does this OTHER podcast, I should check this ou- OH HOLY CRAP THIS IS WHERE I BELONG INSTEAD." My attempt to hook up with the GWJ League of Legends contingent was the first time I'd stuck my head in their forums for over a year- Holy hell things are scary and hard to follow! I can only imagine the horror of trying to read something the size of neoGaf or SomethingAwful...

Hm... I have yet to see Up myself, but bump fer truth and justice!

So I was posting that picture Jake took of that adventure games cross-stitch I made to my flickr because I'm sifting through my files posting pics of sculptures and crap I made ages ago for some reason. Anyway, this led me to randomly do a Google search for "honey on the cat hair" and I suddenly realized that it actually made the rounds on some blogs and hobbyist sites at the time and I just didn't think to pay attention to the internet. Neat! Anyway, it occurred to me that this was probably some sort of neoGaf meme that made it's way onto the cast at one point, but I always thought of "Honey on the cat hair makes a mustache" as an Idle Thumbs thing... Which episode was that?! Had to have been fairly late in the original run, because I recall saying "I gotta get this thing in the mail before their last episode!" at one point. Also, is it true that the meme was sort of reinterpreted from one of the King's Quest sequel's puzzles? I read somewhere that you actually had to do this in a game, but it was syrup instead of honey... But maybe the internet doesn't know what it's talking about.

REALLY looking forward to this... Ico's hold over me was amazing. I'm sad that I don't have my own copy, but when I popped in a roommate's copy around 8pm back in the day, I proceeded to deny sleep and finished the entire game in a single sitting the next morning. What was the "topical" link way up there? It no longer leads anywhere...

Glad Bioshock had that effect on you! In my opinion, being mentally and/or emotionally scared without placing yourself in any real physical danger is very near the pinnacle of things we should enjoy and take advantage of as "evolved" animals!

Well, I think the fake updates were brilliant, despite their fakeness! Anyone else amused that the engineer update doesn't appear to have ANY material changes to his buildable structures? Of course, they talked about why on their blog... Engineers have the most impact on how a map actually plays, so it's not really surprising. Hey, they're not done revealing yet, so maybe they'll surprise me after all!

I'm for the general concept, as I have... issues with forums. (As a format for human communication) As I've said before, the relatively small size and high quality of these really is the only thing keeping me posting here. I find that threading and making conversations persistent exaggerates a lot of the inherent problems with text-based communication between people, to the point where even minor disagreements are amplified. For example, when arguing/bantering with people face-to-face, (or even in IM/Chat to a limited degree) all parties hold a sort of "conversation state" in their heads. Unsurprisingly, these states are based on impressions and are usually slightly warped by perspective. By shifting the conversation state tracking into a perfect digital record that never really mentally "scrolls off the top of the mind", you disable some of our inbuilt tools for dulling the fire. Fundamentally, when you argue, you're trying to make each other see the issue from each others perspectives. As they progress, we often back off on certain points or mollify each other by updating our mental model of the argument "landscape" to try to work around various defenses. The perfect static record that keeps getting quoted to the top of "the stack" means it often feels like no one's shifting their stances, even if they really are. There's a reason Quoting and other non-linear functions are necessary to aid tracking when the conversation takes place over long periods of time between so many people, but if you've ever had a heated text-based conversation in a medium where the entire log wasn't constantly visible, try going back and reading through it again and note how the real-time-ness and ephemera force it to flow differently. Sorry, weird tangent. As I was saying, I'm interested in any experiment that can be done to the forum format to encourage changes... I just wish it weren't being conducted in THAT community... Female Blizzard gamers I know might as well be banned from posting under those circumstances, they get digitally stalked badly enough as it is.

Urrrgh I hadn't realized this was out! ...Really, really tempted to pull the trigger on it as it's not very expensive. Some of the comments here are a little negative, but it seems to be a somewhat decent experience regardless of some shortcomings? Advice? The core of my interest lies in the fact that I like adventure games and puzzles, but I usually skip over the Telltale ones because most of them follow in the "arbitrary-inventory-combinotron" tradition as opposed to my preferred Mystian "solve-the-environment" style. (Not that there's anything wrong with the former from a design perspective, I just prefer the latter.) I just finished Time Gentlemen, Please so I'm not immune to the style when there's enough comedy to fit the ridiculousness of the model. The Layton games surprised me by somewhat divorcing the puzzles themselves from the environment, and that proved to be another way to kick my brain into not balking at immersion issues while satisfying it's desire to be challenged. Would you guys say that despite some graphical interpretation of Grickle style and puzzle clarity issues, this is worth the ten bucks or whatever?

...holy cow. I don't even know what to say. That's really sad and creepy. There was a GPS hidden in my tail lights in Brutal Legend?! ...I never noticed. Weren't there giant pillars of stage lights in the sky to orient by anyway?

I wasn't a PC gamer back then, due to lack of PC... I like the backgrounds, flavor, and details presented in those Alpha vids, but does anyone else find the character animation sort of floopy and unappealling? It's not nearly so bad, but I'm sort of reminded of the Zelda CD-i stuff.

It's definitely something that tends to just wax and wane for me over time- At the moment I'm sort of frustrated with the game and how terrible I am at it, but at the same time I know I'll be back. Only 100 golden wrenches in existence? The artificial scarcity of digital goodies sort of makes the completionist inside me spaz out and foam, I have to admit...

That's a good point, multiplayer games seem to have the whole datamining thing down, but in Halo's case the single player campaign benefits from the same tools! Hilarious that some part of my brain doesn't think of Halo as a single player experience after all this time. I wonder if any of the level designers watch some of the campaign replays in the interest of honing their craft. Bungie seems like the kind of company where progressive/obsessive things like that might happen. Much as twitch-oriented and multiplayer games seem to make good use of the technology, I have yet to hear about something like a platformer or an adventure game doing the same. There are genres where things like the level design and player hinting are basically the whole experience, whereas a poorly designed FPS environment can still feel quite good due to the moment to moment mechanics being satisfying. I still see so many gaffes in really polished big titles that make me wonder about designer perspective and playtesting is all- Off the top of my head, . (Fittingly, I didn't have any problem with this section at all, but the overwhelmingly negative feedback goes to show that they needed to design to a broader audience there!) I imagine that watching people play it in addition to all the press about that part being confusing would be like the difference between being told that a dish you prepared "sucked" and having a fellow chef look at your recipe and make detailed suggestions.

It has? Single player games automatically send demo files back to the developers for analysis? I wouldn't even know where to begin to verify that, Google-wise. Any specific known examples I could look into? Keep in mind I'm not talking about the existence of demo files, I'm theorycrafting ways to reasonably organize and deliver them to interested parties. The framework and tools would be sticking points as it's too much information to take in 1:1. The closest I've seen are the kill/death heat maps and charts in FPSs like Halo and TF2, but as I said multiplayer games are far less of a developer mystery in terms of usage.

I give the man NO credit whatsoever for partially fessing up to not knowing what he's talking about... The only reason it happened was people kept chewing his damn ears off metaphorically on the subject. Apologizing to a bunch of people whinging at you for an apology isn't really very impressive. (or sincere!) I'm actually more disappointed in the gaming, press, and development community for putting so much EFFORT into countering his views. The arguments for games as art seem to scream insecurity from my perspective, like the industry/community isn't so sure itself about the artistic worth of it's products and covers it up by being really obnoxiously defensive about it. I wish that the collective/average response was closer to- "Art's a really difficult concept to define, guy. I don't think you've played enough games to know, really. How can something that a group of artists labor at for years not qualify?" [credit to Jerry Holkins for that last bit] Long-winded articles like the one I read recently in Game Informer, and trotting out a bunch of specific examples just implies that his argument's valid enough to need serious defense. (I don't think it is, but I will say that there are plenty of things that most games could/should do better... mark of a young medium with room to grow that I can even say that. No one says movies need to work on becoming more interactive, heh.) I hope the trade off for all the validation of the counter-argument is that present and future developers get further fired up into experimenting with what a game can be.

As touched on in the first page of the thread... It really can be a form of performance art, especially when the player changes the way they're playing the game in response to the observer's presence. To expand on an earlier example, when someone was watching me play GTA 3, I started changing up the camera controls in response to their reactions to the various explosions, to the point where I was making "Bruckheimer" shots by crouching and holding the "look behind" button to frame the main character against the backdrop of what he had wrought, something I probably wouldn't have even thought to do unless I had an audience. Feedback loops like that are huge reasons why people still do, (and always will!) go to concerts/sporting events/etc. in person, even when more comprehensive and detailed viewpoints of those same events can be experienced by proxy. People are like experiential amps picking each other up within proximity... I'm glad my earlier rage brought a few other Thumbs into this awesome thread after it's initial burn, at any rate... no impressions on my idea of more games silently capturing replay data and forwarding it along to developers automatically? Was curious to know if any gamers see that idea as being invasive or inappropriate. I know a lot of people can get a little nervous about "being watched" in a lot of different forms, which is why I suggested that there be a disclaimer, something like... [On detection that the system is indeed connected to the internet] "This game may capture some anonymous usage data and use your internet connection to send it back to developers for analysis in order to improve future play experiences. Is this okay? [YES/NO] [Regardless of selection] "If at any point you change your mind, anonymous usage datamining can be toggled on or off at any time in the options menu." I think detailed play statistics that drilled down to actual replay data could be an invaluable tool to developers. "Says here that a whole 10% of our participating users never progressed past THIS point... well, let's fire up a random selection of those playthroughs and see if most were having trouble, or if that's just where they lost interest!" It's also more than possible from a technical standpoint, as replay data files tend to basically be coded text containing just the stream of unit and interaction data for playback in the engine that created them. (As seen in most competitive RTSs and, say, Halo 3) The main technical problem with them is that changes to the engine can render old files corrupted or unplayable, but that applies more to MMOs and other patch-heavy games than single player experiences. (By far the suggested targets, as people more consistently record and show off genuine multiplayer experiences, and the nature of competitive games means developers can jump on the servers and SEE how players are interacting with their product firsthand)

Looks interesting... Bookmarked! (Insert into ridiculous sub-backlog of things to investigate in preparation to add to actual backlog jeezus)

Some good stuff to be hearing as someone who caved and picked it up in the sale... Unfortunately I have to finish one of my OTHER horror FPSs before I can fire it up- There's gotta be SOME kinda rules or my gaming life eclipses all other life (moreso than it already does, heh). Lately the rule is I can be playing a bunch of different games at any given time, but just one of each genre. The workarounds are pretty hilarious, like when I started an FPS because it's not the atmospheric horror style one! The splitting of genres super fine only gets me so far though- sometimes the titles are just too similar to avoid saying "but you've already got X installed and it's very close to Y and you STILL haven't finished it!"

So excited for this. Weirdly, I think I'm looking forward to the co-op campaign a little more than the story one, and might be trying to tackle that with someone first. Re: BritBall - The voice did sound a little less nuanced than some other strong Valve examples, but I don't think it was terrible. Thanks fer the heads up on the GWJ 'cast. Ironically, I learned that Idle Thumbs existed through the GWJ community, and I used to be sort of active over there... Apparently I only have the energy to keep up with one gaming podcast/community, because you guys have 100% stolen me away from there and it's been ages since I visited.

I bought the original Mario's Picross on the Game Boy when it was released in the states... I remember getting addicted to the combination of maths and intuition when Nintendo Power ran an article that included sample puzzles you could solve with a pen right in the magazine. I immediately whipped out graph paper and started making my own puzzles in anticipation of the release. As I recall trying to explain to others the logic required to work them out was pretty painful, heh. Ironically that Game Boy Cart. was THE ONE that would come to dictate my future policy about being never loaning anybody something unless I am prepared, right there and then, to lose it forever or get a replacement. It was stolen out of a friend's backpack at school by an unknown party, and I never was able to replace it. So when Picross DS came out and had custom user-creatable puzzle editing built in... Let's just say I don't want to think about how much of my life has been spent counting little squares. I'm holding off on Picross 3D because I know nothing will get done. Save for puzzles. I'll reward myself for doing something difficult at some point I imagine. Glad to hear I'm in good company in terms of understanding the appeal! I've always sort of thought of myself as the only one swayed by it, and it wouldn't occur to me to mention Picross as a game I play... like it's some sort of secret obsession. Weird.

Despite recent unemployment and lack of funds I caved on Cryostasis and Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena. (Coming with a remastered escape from butcher bay pushed me over the edge) I'm hoping maybe it will scratch some sort of Thief itch without me having to delve into the realm of "TH134F"

Curse you Steam... curse you. As for the whole Torchlight <--> Titan Quest thing... They both do different things quite well, and I'm sure everyone who's a fan of the genre can agree that they're BOTH worth playing. Titan Quest has much more going for it in the long haul in terms of story and and that "epic adventure" feel that swells as you dig into a game with a lot of content on it's bones. However, Torchlight has accessibility on it's side. What it might lack in terms of plot and player character development arcs, I feel like it more than makes up for in charm. It oozes a "just jump in" vibe that I find more inviting when shorter play sessions are the order of the day. I don't take my characters or my progression as seriously in Torchlight, and as such it opened the door to the "hardcore" game type (Dying means the character is permanently erased) for me in a way that Diablo and Titan Quest just never did. Now, full disclosure, I haven't finished either... so take my comments with a salt lick.

Oh man... I've been waiting for what feels like a year for another episode of this, thanks fer the heads up!