I_smell

...oh, duh, now I feel like an idiot for not realising this. "We couldn't make a Nico Bellic that was turning his life around while also wrecking shit in a helicopter, so we split him into Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup."

If there's not some kind of country-redneck radio station then someone screwed up big-time.

No the classic character motive in GTA is that they're tryina get OUT of the gang violence. You'll be wrapped up in all the turf-war shit, but your character is the one guy who isn't into it. Anyway I bet this GTA story is 100% a GTA story. It'll be a bunch of gross, badass guys shouting n swearing about guns n drugs, and riding Faggio mopeds, and chat radio voices will deliver sick burns to a parody of Justin Bieber or whatever. I'm gonna play it n I'll have fun, it'll be a laugh, but I'm not expecting a big amazing leap forward.

I think the other trailers were a lot more fun than these ones. I mean the other trailers were really terrific, I could watch the last one right now!

Before Gravity Falls came out, I watched the intro on Youtube like a dozen times cos it's animated and sounds cool as fucking heck. I feel like the writing on that one is a short skip n a jump away from being really the best.

How horrifying is it that these robots are named "Big Dog and Pet MAN".

You revealed Nick's colour! NICK, READ THIS MESSAGE BEFORE THEY SILENCE ME!! ...MC'DONALDS! edit- aw I was excited to hear a sweet plug for Newgrounds, then dismayed to hear that it was about some weird ad thing. I'm sure the guys there are horrified and don't know it's happening, I'll send em a cast clip. It sucks cos I just got back from Flash Game Summit, and it's this giant gross downward-spiral of in-app-purchases and unskippable video ads before games, and Newgrounds is the only one site that refuses to be a part of it. They fuckin pay for it and are the absolute bottom of the pack now, cos they spent time on an Art Portal, open-source software and Developer Blogs instead of keeping up with this awesome monetization stuff.

Yeah if you ask me!

The part about Booker and Comstock being two different methods of paving over your own hideous mistakes is cool. But all this nonsense about INTENTIONALLY DISTRACTING EVERYONE from this one kind-of interesting interpretation is a fat load o wishful-thinking baloney. That's a hundred million dollars-worth of about 4 years game development- for what? Making sure nobody got it? 99% of the whole game was a red herring for one under-developed commentary on being sad? That's not the game ya played, buddy. You played the racism-multiverse thing. It was fun, and cool, and very pretty, but analyses it's own lore more than it does any facet of the human condition. Spade's a spade!

I had that thought when it came to Mass Effect 3. I thought all the "indoctrination theory" stuff was so cool and fun, even though the people at Bioware clearly never intended any of it. It's just a fan-made yarn, it might as well be a fanfic. But I just accepted it! It was fun to think about, and add on to the fiction. So that's part of it for me now. Similarly with Bioshock 1, how people analysed it as this thought excercise in player agency and interactive storytelling. I think it was pretty well covered in interviews that nobody at Irrational intended it, but they're happy people took it a step further and I was pretty interested in hearing that stuff at the time aswel. I can't accept it with Bioshock Infinite though, for some reason. This mutli-verse stuff feels like a straight-up denial that the game is about anything more interesting, and for some reason it's making me less enthusiastic about spinnin a yarn into what's already there.

"Underwhelming showreel" is a really good way to describe what that teaser looks like. Are these toy soldiers on ICE-SKATES? Come on, buddy! Anyway my nostalgia lies with "Mickey and Donald: WORLD of Illusion", so I'm not at all interested in this.

BRING US THE GIRL, AND WIPE AWAY THE FUNGUS.

Ken Levine said his favourite was Falling Art, and it's currently my desktop background!

Well if there's any one game you can inarguably say that about, it's Crysis. I've not played any of those games, but I heard they have HD graphics??? "Guitar Hero designer says games are 60% the controller!" like-- of course he'd say that, they made half a dozen games expressing that belief. In broader terms: some of my favourite games, out of thin-air, are Devil May Cry, Street Fighter, or Gears of War. A big fat half of what makes those games is what's happening onscreen. The animations, effects, and all the stuff outside of just hitboxes and variables are a huge deal, and those games could all feel much weaker, slower, and more boring if they didn't put that work in. You could easily make even something like QWOP or Hokra feel like cheap app-store garbage with the wrong layer of aesthetics. If we're talking about strictly pushing the most powerful computers as far as they can go, then hey- Doom was a technical achievement at some point, right? Could you have done Red Faction Guerilla 10 years ago, with all those buildings falling over? Would Just Cause 2 be anywhere near as good if you couldn't stream through that giant map? I think this is a dusty old, ancient topic to bring up.

I spun out a game today, it's about a minute long. FADING It started off as a game where I wanted to have you sync up two metronomes, but that turned out to be completely impossible, and it gradually turned into a game where you silence two metronomes instead!

I think Girls Just Wanna Have Fun is actually turning out to be my favourite one, cos it best represents the idea of being COMPLETELY unaware of who wrote the song, or why, or what it's about, but also being quite pleased with how it sounds. You can still hear that the music has ups and downs, but through this context it just sounds blindly nice from start to finish. It perfectly feels like being on the beach in Columbia. This really grew on me, cos I didn't even notice it in the game.

I heard that this is something you can download as standalone without the game. That might be perfect for me, cos I didn't buy Far Cry 3. One that I can invest less time and money into, and that cuts straight to the point, might be really good! If it's a dumb joke thing then whatever, thumbs up! I got time for that. I feel like that comedy's missed the bullseye by a smidge, but hey that soundtrack is spot on.

lol that's amazing, whatever the hell that is. Y'know what tripped me up in this game? Hummingbirds. When you first get baptised, there are hummingbirds flying around you in the garden, and they're also in Comstock House at the end for some reason. There's a bunch of signs that point towards "The Atrium", and also there's a Kinetiscope called "Hummingbirds" that's just a video of them... I think they show up just enough for it to be significant. I read that hummingbirds can't actually fly that high, so they must be bred on the city somewhere... or something. It feels like a twist or some piece of exposition that got cut, but these assets are still around. EDIT-- Y'know what I just realised that they're really good at hovering in mid-air. I bet it was something to do with that.

Oh, duh, that's why I had it bookmarked then. For DLC I genuinely wanted the most unrealistic thing to happen: but of course that's a billion dollars-worth of work.

Errant Signal is a video show where some clever fella talks about video games. I reccomend it! Bioshock Infinite episode Basically a lot of the same conversation we just had over this thread.

Speaking of blogs, I'm finding a lot of posts from black people who're PRETTY ANNOYED that racial segregation, and a civil rights uprising, was used to draw people into a sci-fi plot. Also usually upset that everyone just likes it. I was pretty underwhelmed with the direction the game ended up taking in the end as well, but yea I imagine if I was seriously invested in this stuff I'd have been a lot more offended. EDIT-- Should probably say that I don't think attacking some individual at Kotaku is a very noble thing to do, but ya get where I'm comin from!

Actually that's a really good point about the voxophones. In Bishock 1 you were silent, alone, and digging through rubble in an upturned mess already. Listening to audio diaries isn't the same when there are people hanging out and talking to you, as demonstrated by me pausing them so much. It's like walking around listening to a podcast in real life!

Y'know what this game could've done with? Some regular old conversation. I was playing MGS3 right before this and there's hours of codec chat in there about old movies and what life's like for these guys outside of the mission, and everyone just gettin to know each other. For someone locked up in a tower for 20 years; she doesn't say much. I remember walking into Chen Li's shop and thinking "Wow I bet that giant furnace makes this whole house unbareably hot!" and I'm not even a tower princess. Come on Liz, d'you just not like small-talk or something? Also it could've done with less scrounging hotdogs from every cupboard, but like how much of that was my fault?

I just went back to this stuff and really remembered that Columbia is a great, original, weird, fun city and the first half of the game is actually amazing. It's a shame they didn't "blow you away" with where the game eventually goes, but all credit to em; where it starts off totally did, and is one of the best game settings around.

In typical idle-forum style: I was bummed to find out that this game had fungus zombies in it. I think this will be exactly an action game, and it'll be a good one, and there'll be a trilogy of it. And that's not me being cynical cos I did say it'll be a good one! Have they showed what the last ofus is yet? I heard you n this girl are tryina track down the last ofus, in my mind it's like a magic dog or something, there's only one left. Are the mushroom people the ofuses?