Salacious Snake

You've seen the image currently on the front page of idlethumbs.net, haven't you?

Did anyone here play Far Cry Instincts? It was the console port, but it made a significant addition in giving the protagonist trigen-related superscientifical powers. I wonder how that panned out. It's a huge cliche at this point, but so is everything in video games, and it looked fun.

Now that's a game I want to see. Far Cry 3, starring Pauly Shore… You could have an achievement for "Weasing" all the juice on the island. "Bro" in the sense that people are using it is a term for mainstream college guys who are into sports and polo shirts. It's a way for nerds to lash out at the cool people who picked on them. Anyway, I think the protagonist as portrayed early on seems like a reasonable fit for the "ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances" archetype, but I hope they explain how he suddenly becomes a total badass. I'd be satisfied with a training montage.

I finished Alpha Protocol. I don't think that game got the credit it deserves. It's great! It may have helped that I played on easy, because I already knew that I wasn't interested in the mechanical side of the game. I didn't want to be challenged by the combat; I wanted to concentrate on making choices and being a beardy, schizophrenic jerk. It's cool. It seems that things can really play out differently depending on what you do, moreso than in a lot of games that give you the illusion of choice.

So excited and happy about this. It'll be interesting to see if the old masters of the craft have still got it. Good reference, but wrong Gilbert.

I'd have thought people around here would know not to play Freedom: First Resistance, since I can only assume that was the cause of all these dead monitors.

I recently got around to playing through the campaigns of Warcraft III. I suddenly understand why people give a shit about the backstory of the setting. World of Warcraft never communicated it in a way that made me care, but now I get it! Moving on to Frozen Throne now.

If you like Space Hulk, there's a little Swedish game based on it which you can find here, if you haven't played it already: http://www.teardown.se/ There was an earlier version which was specifically Space Marines and genestealers, but Games Workshop threatened them with legal action, so they changed things around to avoid litigation. It's good stuff, or at least it was when I last checked on it. I agree though, a new, high fidelity Space Hulk computer/video game would be great. The previous two official versions were very good.

That's how I wake up every morning.

The almost seamless transitioning between story and gameplay is fucking great. It's a huge stride forward in making fighting games interesting to play alone. The story itself is the kind of drivel you'd expect, but I'm getting sucked in in spite of myself. The actual fighting is fine; it's about as good as you could hope for a Mortal Kombat to be.

Bennett Foddy's new game, GIRP, has hit the scene: http://www.foddy.net/2011/03/girp/ Climb a rock! Beat my personal best of 15.2 meters! Watch I made about QWOP the other day!GIRP is not as infuriating as QWOP, but there are similar principles at work.

Stealth is affected by the noise of your footsteps, which could be contributing to the sense of unpredictability. You can eventually unlock an ability that makes you quieter.

That perfectly captures the absurd discourse on the game.

This game is bananas. It's definitely a lot more of a directed experience than the first game (at least so far), but it's solidly paced and is a fucking spectacle. I'm digging the sound and music in particular. I keep hoping I'll find out what became of Nomad and Psycho. Also, the sound effect when you activate stealth is a bit like the Predator's clicky purr sound which makes me very happy.

You're talking crazy talk. Ghost Recon games sell lots of copies, so it's a good name to use. Original IPs are scary and hard to sell. Look at it this way: people who care about turn-based tactical combat games will be interested in this one regardless of the license, and at the same time, a bunch of interest will be created among people who normally wouldn't be into that sort of game thanks to the name. At least I imagine that's what Ubi is thinking. At least the name sounds a bit like Shadow Watch, the other action point-having tactical strategy Tom Clancy game. Did anyone here play Shadow Watch? I always thought it looked neat.

I stopped by the Steve Jackson Games booth at PAX East and asked Phil Chapman how the new OGRE is coming along, and he got very excited and pulled out some prototype parts to show me. I snapped a pic: http://yfrog.com/h04h3vuj It looks really nice. It looks like the same scale as OGRE Miniatures, but with heavy cardboard. The chits are nice and legible, and the OGREs snap together. The maps are double-sided, and you end up with everything from OGRE, GEV and Shockwave all in one box. One huge box, which is apparently going to be $99. It's a hefty price tag, but it looks worth it to me. I thought people in this thread might get a kick out of it.

Thanks to his dumb antics, I was rooting for the aliens. Fuck you, plane full of people! This does seem like a weird sequel to make. I liked the screwy gameplay stuff in the first one, but I don't think it kept me interested enough to play through the whole thing. That's not really much of a strike against it, since I almost never finish games anyway.

Yeah, special thanks to Marven. It was fun. Hanging around and shooting the shit with people is the best part of these types of events. Congrats Nick. (Actually, I feel sorry for Nick because that event was reportedly a huge clusterfuck, so he probably had to deal with a lot of impatient people.)

Nice. Thanks for taking the initiative!

I love hearing you guys talk about B.U.T.T.O.N., because I love that game. I don't know if you got to see it in action at the Kill Screen party, but the twist there was that the buttons were installed on cardboard robot suits, which were worn by people (Kunal from babycastles tried to recruit me for robot duty and I wussed out). So, instead of an Xbox controller or a DDR pad, the players had to contend with armored moving targets. You can likely imagine the resulting mayhem. To further paint the picture for those who weren't there, the game's visuals were projected onto a wall, the room was dark and free alcohol was in abundance. And I guess to further further paint the picture, I should include an actual picture. http://yfrog.com/h27dnsij I think I shot some video of it, which I'll post in here when I upload it.

Just a minor correction: it's Dave, not Ron Gilbert. Easy mistake to make considering that we're talking about adventure games.

I love the game so far. I'm intrigued by all the goings-on with Delta Six. I'm super excited about the game's success. Dave is a cool dude and I'm friends with one of the voice over artists. Congrats, Josh, and good work!

That would be Pete Hines. And yes, it's a pretty down-to-earth and candid interview. At least, it feels about as candid as it can be, considering that he can't really speak with any specificity about Skyrim yet. I've been thinking a lot lately about how annoying it is that game development is so secretive. I understand that there are risks (like spoilers, overpromising, showing your hand to the competition, the psychotic need of PR to drip-feed information to websites). It's refreshing and super interesting to watch the vids on Giant Bomb following along with the development of Bastion. As a fan of games, I've always been curious about how they come into existence, but it's still a pretty nebulous concept to me. I took a computer science class once where I learned FORTRAN 77 and wrote some little math programs. It's like that, right? I wish we'd at least get more honest information after the fact. Postmortems, like those that pop up on Gamasutra once in a while, are a treasure. As a member of the press, I've had the pleasure of hearing some good war stories, but they're always off the record.

I'll be there, and I'll be on the lookout for a meetup as always. I'm also going to be at GDC, so anyone going there is likely to run into me at a party!

Oops, missed your reply. I guess my eyes were starting to glaze over at that point.