Denial

The whole of the Dear Esther soundtrack, by Jessica Curry, is pretty sad. Pretty and sad, rather. The soundtrack is downloadable from ModDB /v/pys-y0APGNY?fs=1&hl=en_US

It seems slightly absurd to be speculating while one of the game's creators is in-thread, but I would guess that Cigol and I are drawing conclusions from the same demo, in which it looks like she is going to be an AI character who is able to boost the player's plasmid-equivalents in semi-scripted (or environmentally dictated) ways. What else she is intended to do I think is unknown.

Really, this. Carl Sagan could have used rhetoric (in the sense of unnecessarily complicated language intended to confuse or deceive - using the Aristophanic idea of the rhetor) in his popular science works, but if he had he would have failed to communicate - his language would have been inappropriate for the context. However, if a layperson who had read Time-Life's Planets had instead looked at the science behind Sagan's conclusions on the climate of Venus, it would probably be incomprehensible - not because it was full of rhetoric and thus unnecessarily obscure, but because it was necessarily obscure. Sagan was a great populariser, but the technical conversations he had with the rocket scientists on the Mariner project would probably not have been easily understood by the average viewer of Cosmos. That said, games kind of are inevitably somewhat exclusionary - it's just that the elite they are limited to isn't cultural in the conventional sense. It's the group which has money to spend on gaming hardware and software and time to spend using them - after which you can factor in reliable access to the Internet, reliable access to electricity supply and so on. Since most of the people who talk about games speak from inside this group, it's generally an invisible boundary, but it's certainly there. I think that's why the responses to "inside outsider" voices like the Borderhouse Blog can be very interesting - when they hit the gaming mainstream (like the recent discussions over Hey Baby and then the marketing of Privates) they often criticise or question ideas which are instinctively understood to be structural - and, as a result, one of the immediate responses is often that the critical voices are overcomplicating things - that is, adding unnecessary complexity. OT: Really interested in Bioshock Infinite - especially the asymmetrically able AI partner.

I found the early going a little slow - but I wasn't hugely disappointed by that. It's a nice difficulty curve: unlocking the dash attack changes your gameplay style, and upgrading your strength (buying objects in shops boosts your stats, RPG-style) helps to put enemies down a lot quicker. My level 16 character can sail through the earlier levels on replay. I think the game is probably a lot more enjoyable if you already saw and enjoyed the graphic novels or the film - there are a lot of references and in-jokes shared between the three - but the core mechanic's pretty robust. Jonathan (pixeltao) Lavigne, the designer, also did TMNT for the GBA a few years back, so has some retro beat-em-up form. re: the film - if you like any two or three of Spaced, Edgar Wright films, Michael Cera, indie rock, alt ladies/chaps and video games, it's worth seeing, I think. It's certainly not the Mazes and Monsters of video games, which you might get from miffy's pre-review - in fact, the characters don't spend much time playing video games, but rather played a lot of Nintendo when they were younger and filter the world through that set of cultural references. Again, you might get more out of it if you read/liked the comic book, but pretty much by definition it has to appeal to more than the readers of the comic book.

I loved Torchlight - loved it a lot, actually, and blogged about it, and Idle Thumbs' response to it here. But one of the things I loved about it was that it was single-player Diablo, effectively. I liked that the whole game had been set up for one person - that you didn't feel like you were missing out by playing it alone. I'm excited about Torchlight 2, but I'm not as excited about multiplayer Torchlight 2.

Sorry I missed this one - got roped into organising a party. I've run through the Passage, but only single-player so far. Perversely, I'm more interested in the L4D DLC...

Ah - alternate weeks. Gotcha.

I return after a long exile (by which I mean partly work and partly Mass Effect 2), and there's nothing on the radar - no friends playing. Did the discussion on backchat channels etc also encompass a new time, or is it just that we've moved on to BFBC2 en masse while I was away?

I'm stinging from arriving too late for L4Thumbs on Sunday, although it probably did wonders for my productivity (hem hem) and was entirely my fault - it's starting to feel like we are a versus and a campaign on busy days...

I certainly find console aiming less intuitive - it felt genuinely odd that GTA helped you to aim on the PC, whereas on the XBox it is a literal life (bar) saver, despite its eccentricities. On the other hand, I can't aim for toffee with either format, so I may not be the ideal control group. Also, on the PC I used Razer's software to play around with mouse sensitivity on the fly, which helps, I think, to suit the movement to the action. Possibly the Razer Onza will produce the equivalent experience for the XBox...

Thanks, toeblix - I'm more used to HTML or Textile - UBBCode always takes me a while to adjust to. Hopefully this will distract people from noticing that I just compared a Troika game to the Venus de Milo. I agree with gdf that the PC platform allows for a whole bunch of genuinely demented material, and as wan extension of that it allows you to do stupid or unwise things - find and download Bulgarian RTSes, install things which are almost certainly adware, play Evony. That freedom to error is important, I think. The generally unfinished sense I definitely agree with; like a mid-air running bug breaks immersion and deflates emotional investment. That said, relatively few bugs are actually game-killing at this point, surely? The STALKER bug Lord Korax came in on clearly is, but at least it's right at the end, where most players probably won't see it. Which is another fascinating element about games as against films or books - a lot of people get a satisfying experience out of them without actually reaching the end. But that's a different discussion.

Game logic bugs are not driver issues, most bugs people encounter are game logic bugs. Oh, sure - that's a perfectly fair point. I do think that it's harder to build for PC, because you don't know what the system's going to throw at you, whereas, theoretically at least, if your game runs on one XBox 360 it should run on all XBoxen 360, region limitations and modchips permitting. Arguably that's just part of the deal, though, like multiple resolutions and having to insert some desultory new content into your console port. I mean, <i>could</i> you even run a certification programme for PC games, beyond "we're pretty sure that if you meet the specifications printed on the side of the box, this will work", which is roughly the extent of the assurance you get? Likewise, the ability to release patches and have people propagate them on your behalf is no doubt a powerful incentive to snatch the plate from its fall from pole to floor. But. But I think about Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, which would not have passed any QA test not created by maniacs, which needed a patch just to not work, effectively. If that had been an XBox game, would it have ever seen the light of day (or another, more vampire-friendly metaphor)? And yet, to deny the world VTM:B just because playing it was frustrating to the point of self-immolation would be like throwing the Venus de Milo away because the arms don't work. And, you know, what Chris said above. The reason I don't have an iPhone, despite the mockery of my peers, is that it's wholly dependent on a marketplace, or on invalidating the warranty and giving the maker license to try to kill your phone. On the PC it's not just good but right to have the freedom to install what I want.

I think he is referring to the certification console games are supposed to undertake (a lot of bugs slip through still). A lot of the polish in console games is similar in PC games, just not all developers seem to bother, with it being an open source the developers seem to leave this to modders, this may be because the resources they had for the development have run out, or the time which could be used for a patch is time the developers are making another game. Sure, but the the variation of PC hardware has to be taken into account. It's no excuse for genuine glitchadelica - Troika physically pelted me with my own gonads with Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, and I confess that I gave up on Stalker when after twenty hours of hiding and creeping I hit a missing door bug. I was feeling pretty weak at that point. That said, given the demented mixture of hardware configurations and software on the PC scene, there's aways the possibility that some driver or other might bring the whole edifice crashing down...

This is the first game I've played as a 360 owner, and I'm trying to get the hang of the gamepad before opening up to multiplayer. I'm rather liking the stylised graphics, possibly because at least in the early stages it would, if grittily realistic, have looked a lot like Fallout 3. I mean, a lot a lot. That said, I would like to state for the record that games designers should decide fairly early on if their game is going to have jumping puzzles, and if it does further decide not to make everything brown. It's usually not a huge problem, but some of the scavenging missions are really irksomely lengthened by this.

I think Realism versus would be too quickly fatal for the players - it's not backed up by hard evidence, but I suspect you'd have one or two players pocked off by hunter pounces not far from the team, and the others would be overwhelmed by weight of numbers in fairly short order...

Fatale By: Tale of Tales Available: For Mac and PC, for $7, downloaded from the Tale of Tales homepages Synopsis: Arguably not a game per se, this is sold as an "Interactive Vignette" - somewhere between a theatre piece, a meditation, the easiest collect-em-up you have ever played and an unusually demanding screensaver. Playing (possibly) as John the Baptist, experience your own execution and then explore the frozen moment before dawn in the company of Salome, Herodias and your executioner. Character designs are by Takayoshi Sato, quondam Team Silent member. (nb. Features some nudity, inasmuch as pixels can be naked. And some decapitation) More: Official Website Also, Tale of Tales' previous, controversial but often highly rated game, The Path is on a Halloween discount for a few more hours - details on the main Tale of Tales site.

I'd like to recommend something, but I don't want to mess up the formatting - could someone tell me what the "tag" thing at the left of the title of the game is, and how you put it in? I'm not very used to UBBScript...

Good point - I was thinking that maybe I could jump straight up in the air and be pulled at incredible velocity towards the belt buckle of the nearest survivor, but there might be complications with the rain of metal death. Anything to avoid a repeat of the heroic leap straight past all four survivors, over the rope bridge and into oblivion, though. Mind you, that did immobilise the survivors more effectively than a four-way boom, because they were all laughing uncontrollably.

Having snuck onto the Idle Thumbs Left 4 Dead Sundays through ninja means. Hi all - I'm Denial as in "in Denial about how it's not the mousemat, it's the ineptitude". I play mainly on PC, some mobile gaming, intend to... explore... the... console... space more fully once I've moved flat, which is taking up most of my spare headspace at present. I'm blowing off steam, and indeed Steam, with Left 4 Dead quite a bit at present, and looking forward to trying out L4D2 tomorrow - although unless they've magnetised hunters, I'm probably still on a hiding to nothing...