chummer

A few interesting things I've come upon while playing this: - Seeing the word 'Microsleep' in Australian signage warning that it can kill me. - I can't tell the difference between Western Australia and the American Southwest. There's a town called Mt. Magnet that has a few storefronts with an American West facade. I assume it's American West as I don't know much about the history of Australia. Maybe they had their own version of it. - After figuring out a place was in America due to signage and suburbs with ranch homes, I was also able to figure out it's location in the Wyoming, Kansas, Dakotas area due to some makeshift, pro-life billboards.

Bumping from the bottomless pit of the internet!!! So I'm actually in the midst of playing this and it's like RPG fast food: lots of calories but almost all empty ones. The only thing really worth talking about is the game's spell making system. Essentially, you combine cards from an elemental group, add another that directs the spell (i.e. missile, enchantment, radius effect), then you add modifiers (is it offensive, defensive, timed, homing). As the game doesn't list out all the spells for you in one place, you end up experimenting with different combinations. While using the spells in combat is quite dull, discovering them and figuring out how to break the game with them is really fun. Does any other game have a 'make your own spells' system? I want to say Oblivion did, but I never went deep into the magic skills in that game.

I also got the same coupon for 75% off Total War Shogun II, but I only got two PM me if you want one!

I saw JP LeBreton tweet about this and immediately took up an hour of my time. I really want the experience of discovering one's environment through contextual clues in a video game, which is why I'm pumped about Gone Home.

What a weird coincidence I just got done playing a few hours of The Longest Journey and reached the point where the character crosses into another world where a different language is spoken. The game doesn't handle it well (you essentially just have to choose a 'listen' action out of a dialogue tree until the foreign language turns into English) but it got me thinking about how a game would teach a player a new spoken, language, as often written languages in games are just 1 to 1 stand ins for the English alphabet. I can imagine that the dialogue between the player and the game would consist of player actions (for instance, following set of directions the game gives to you in the language), but that doesn't address the learning part. Maybe the game gives you a guide so that when you point and click on something, the guide will say the word that represents it in the language. The problem with that is that it wouldn't teach sentence structure and grammar rules. This is a fascinating design challenge that I need to think about some more.

For what it's worth, JP has started up a stream of playing Doom levels that he likes. Here it is. I had trouble with that as well. It seems like everybody who is playing Doom mods has been doing it so for so long that nobody ever mentions it. Here's what helped me: JP posted these instructions with his Arcadia demake. I just bought Doom II off Steam and went from there. Also, gdZoom (the one I use) supports drag and drop play. Essentially, just dragging the WAD onto the gdZoom exe will get it to run. You can drag multiple items at once, which you'll need to do with some TCs. I still run into problems, so if anyone has some more thorough notes or a good video, I'd appreciate it myself.

Since we're talking First Person Shooters: Doom. JP LeBreton (former guest and all around cool dude) is a big Doom fan and his enthusiasm has inspired me to pick it up Doom II myself as I missed out on it (and most all of PC gaming) when it came out. In short: Doom II is really great. Granted, I'm playing through zDoom, which has lots of customization options and mouse support, so I don't think I'm getting the most authentic experience, but I'm having lots of fun. Non-linear levels that I can beat really fast if I try. The sweet super-shotgun. And the mods. Oh the mods. Anyhow, Doom II. You should pick it up if you haven't tried it.

What a weird, hilarious, dude. Hope he keeps doing what he does.

I'm at the point where it seems I'll need to decode the language and numbers to catch all 64 cubes, but I'm wondering if it's worth the time. More than anything, this makes me wish there was a game where decoding a language was one of the first things I was asked to do, and then be asked to explore the world as an anthropologist. (Judging from comments in the thread, looks like Riven or Myst do this.)

Roger Sterling sits in front of his C64, the light of the Idle Thumbs BBS bouncing off his face. He looks at his forum post number. It reads '995.' He quietly picks up the tumbler from his desk and sips the whiskey he poured himself just moments ago. "I can do this," he thinks to himself. "It could be a cock."

Did any fellow Thumbeteers wait a year for the PC version like I did and are enjoying it now? Any thoughts? While it's a gorgeous looking game with a fantastic soundtrack (Dustforce's stil comes out on top for last year's best though), the platforming is really dull even with the spinning world mechanic. While I'm sure the Polytron folks don't think so, the first, lackluster half of the game feels unnecessary.

No unfamiliar ones. There's only a handful that I follow and it seems to have straight up disappeared.

Yeah, this is pretty good. At the risk of staying on the thread's topic, it seems like the A1 Reviews tumblr has been destroyed. All the links to it here are broken and it has disappeared from my feed.

Licensing or a similar type of deal where they give a young, hungry dev group an IP to work on. Also, according to Game Informer, Pardox was one of the last three contenders for Homeworld. A shame that it wasn't them that got it.

This seems to be the 'Zinester' postion. The essays juv3nal linked to by Robert Yang and Mattie Brice seem totally find with not defining 'game' and letting people explore it in new ways and from new ways. The problem seems to be that Formalists want to give hard definitions- like Tadhg Kelly here- and marginalize those fringe experiments even more. On that note: So, I think, starting May, I'm going to do as much as possible to never use the word 'game' ever again. There.- Mattie Brice

I haven't read Koster's Theory of Fun nor Aunte Pixelante's Rise of the Zinesters, so anyone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the latter's complaint would be that they're being ghettoized into a non-game category. (Apologies if I'm characterizing this argument incorrectly.)

Looking through my Tumblr feed, I saw this article where Bun Kuchera talks to Seth Killian about this very clip. Quite informative.

I agree with this. I find that listening to the Thumbs critique a game from personal experience is far more informative and interesting than reading a breakdown that tries to review everything about a game. This is why I find Giant Bomb's Quick Looks so useful- while they may not provide lots of critical thought, footage of the game is of much more use to me for forming opinion. I use Metacritic as a last resort when I can't find thoughts on a game through either of these venues or RPS. Isn't Metacritic something a site has to voluntary sign up for?

Would it be valuable to start a new thread on Koster's recent essay response to Leigh Alexander's tweets, or get it going here, as it falls within the realm of criticism and such?

Get Games is having a World Builder sale that includes Anno: 1404 Gold Edition on the cheap. Edit: Apparently, Ubisoft games aren't available in North America through Get Games. Sigh.

Yup. This is basically the only thing keeping me from going into 1999 mode on a second playthrough. I went through most all of the game on hard except the specific encounter you mentioned and one more.

In regard to your second question, those Handymen are advertised as ways for people to live forever in the fair. I imagine they're people on their deathbed who just didn't want to die. I think their combat shouts indicate that, though I'm not sure. Regarding your second question, it's a bit spoilery but fits into the fiction at least:

The ending is a bit of a head scratcher. Here's my understanding of the bigger points:

So, how about that diegetic music?

I'm about seven hours in and there's a lot of video gaming going on. Sigh. I wish this game was about me being a tourist instead of being an actor, as there's a lot of gorgeous things I want to look at but often the game is putting a gun in my hand. While I'm enjoying it, I think this is just getting me more pumped for Gone Home.