chummer

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by chummer

  1. Posted

    All in all, amateurish or not the PS4 thing is still and improvement over that.

    I actually want that really weird, Lynchian stuff again. Wasn't there one with a lady in a bikini on a toilet? I'm crossing my fingers as I head into a Youtube hole.

     

    Edit: I don't know how to embed, but here's some of that weird stuff that doesn't even have the console in it. 

  2. Posted

    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.

  3. Posted

    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.

  5. Posted

    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. 

  6. Posted

    I'm interested in finding mechanics that act as entry points for beginning to decipher an unknown language. Moments in a game that could give you the first piece of the puzzle that you can then attach more pieces to.

    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.

  7. Posted

    If there was a podcast that was just him getting talking a ton about the stuff he's super into...

     

     For what it's worth, JP has started up a stream of playing Doom levels that he likes. Here it is.

     

     

     

    Can you maybe direct me somewhere that explains how to use mods in zDoom? I could never figure that stuff out.

     

    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.

  8. Posted

    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.

  10. Posted

    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.) 

  11. Posted

    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."

  12. Posted

    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.

  16. Posted

    To an extent, I think it's about that for some people. Many designers just don't give a fuck about that at all though.

    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

  17. Posted

    This is pretty much where I've ended up with it:

    http://twitter.com/infinite_ammo/status/324784218695680000

     

    Edit: Or at least, the other thoughts I've had on it are nothing to do with what games are and instead about what we do with them.

    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.)

  19. Posted

    I definitely agree that the best kind of game review is when you get to know an individual critic.  She can just write about whatever interests her about a game, and that can give you a better idea of whether it's worthwhile than most regular reviews.  Idle Thumbs plays that role for a lot of us, even though you guys probably don't consider yourselves game reviewers.

    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.

     

     

     

     But then Metacritic picks up his review, assigns a percentage score to it, 

    Isn't Metacritic something a site has to voluntary sign up for?

  22. Posted

    Some later game issues I have...

    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.

  23. Posted

    I don't get the plasmids in this bioshock, why do they even exist? Or the handy man for that matter, I saw one during the non combat intro, but he feels out of place. It's a worker that it not really needed anymore?

     

    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:

     

    It's revealed that the game exists in a multi-universe world. Tears in those places allow one of the Fink brothers to steal music from other times (which is why those anachronistic tunes exist) while the industrious Fink steals scientific information. This leads one to  believe that he stole plasmid technology from Rapture and marketed it as Vigors.

  24. Posted

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

     

    After realizing there are multiple universes, DeWitt learns that he is Comstock. Comstock is what DeWitt would've turned into if he had gone through the baptism. Comstock took advantage of DeWitt's hard luck and got the daughter he never had in his own universe, who turned out to be Anna. To destroy all the Comstocks in all the iterations of the universe, DeWitt has to die, which is why he let Anna kill him in the scene before the credits. The post-credits scene seems to imply that a universe is created where DeWitt didn't lose Anna, no Comstocks exist, and DeWitt will get the opportunity to raise her.

     

    I think my biggest criticism of the ending was that it dove hard into the multi-universe thing which it only used lightly throughout the game and then tries to explains the rules of it right at the end. It felt stuffed and I didn't enjoy it. I think its a symptom of the game, as it feels like its trying to cover lots of things and never exploring any one of them very deeply.

  25. Posted

    So, how about that diegetic music?

     

    I've caught six instances of contemporary music done up in early 20th century style.

    • God Only Knows at the fair
    • Girls Just Want to Have Fun at Battleship Bay
    • Tainted Love at the Shantytown bar
    • Fortunate Son done a cappella as you head out of Shantytown
    • Everybody Wants To Rule The World in the ruins of Albert Fink's house
    • Shiny Happy People as you pass the Luteces on the gondola

    If anyone spotted any others, point them out as I'd love to catch them.