I_smell

Yeah this is cool as heck, there was a while where I 100% felt like I was watching a documentary. I can feel it- coooomin' in the air tonight (this necromorph) Oh looord! (this is scary!)

Prototyping it now. Unity has a default skybox and water, so it looks alright already.

Yeah that's your one-time-use missile. The game is a dog-fight combat game, except you can ditch the jet and go hands-on in an idiotic twist. You and your friends can have fun swapping jets in the sky, and catching each other.

HAhaha yeah the Gears of War slow-walking was no fun at all, I don't think it belongs in a game like this. Collecting left hands sounds mega fun, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. Maybe it's just not in the demo. If this game had strategic dismemberment like Dead Space where enemies could adapt after cutting their leg off, then THUUUUUUMBS UP, but it's a shame it doesn't.

Hey . It's kinda semi-good but nothing amazing, I made it about 2 years ago and it just got greenlit.I'm excited and nervous about how much it makes, cos I'd LIKE it to sell a few thousand so I can spend the next year working on new games. (This footage is from an old version with old art)Anyway the MAIN REASON I'm making a post is that I just now had a huge burst of energy and planned out a new game idea. HERE IT IS!!!! Jet Nabbers!! (working title) Y'know those badass videos of people hopping out of jets in Battlefield? This is a whole game built around that. You fly a jet around, like an Ace Combat dog-fighting game, and at any time you can eject out. Up in the air, you can see people flying around below, and can freefall down and use a Just Cause grappling-hook to nab onto a foe and steal their jet. Up in the air, you are very easy to kill, because men are not made of metal, although you can turn in place and shoot in any direction, because men are not the size of jets. Instead of stealing someone's jet, maybe you just wanna shoot them and get back in yours. This is OK, because you can call your jet back to you like the hammer of Thor. If someone destroys or steals your jet while you're not in it though, you'll have to just float there in a parachute and (probably) get shot to death. In freefall, you can also catch missiles in mid-flight and steer them around. You might want to grapple someone else in freefall and wrestle their parachute away from them. In jet-form you might want to aim at a falling team-mate and catch them, or let them ride on you. You might want to launch your million-dollar aircraft at a foe and eject out just in time. If someone tries to hijack you, you'll have to shake them off, or fly straight downwards and eject at the last second. Recharging your resources wirelessly within an area around your base will encourage everyone to stay close together. That's the idea. I hope I can prototype it soon. In my head it's a skybox full of jets crashing into each other, and men ragdolling through the sky like maniacs.

I wish Platinum would've worked together with Kojima corp to make a new Zone of Enders. Anyway these were my immeadiate impressions of the demo. Long-story short Platinum is quite experienced making good combat, and talking to characters about Metal Gear things is fun. The sword-slicing was kind of a mis-step and the writing is generally stupid.

Nope! I haven't played Maniac Mansion either. I keep saying I'm gonna check out one o these old adventure games y'all love so much, but there's so many games out TODAY that how can I!

Yeah I always say I don't read huge articles, but even I had to read that. Just watched the Quick Look on this game- I dunno, man! A lot of standing around waiting for characters to get their jokes out. Lots of listening and reading- in a co-op game? Are you supposed to all be quiet and listen? If one person doesn't find it funny then that's gonna be a pretty uncomfortable experience. Between this and Deathspank, I don't like this guy's comedy. I don't wanna come down hard on Double-Fine, so hey, I'm still interested in those Amnesia Fortnight games.

That is awesome, that looks like a shitload of hard work. Is that dragon supposed to represent the Normandy? hahaha

Is Kotaku IGN.com meets blowing your mind? This list of Kotaku headlines will tear your brain in half, melt your ass, teleport your eyes into a bin this week.

Oh I forgot GDC happens! I'm looking forward to the same thing as every year: scrounging talks off GDCVault.com, which apparantly has a sweet new layout just in time!

I exile myself from the forum.

My home page used to be Astrology Photo of the Day but changed at some point. This reminded me to change it back, so thanks for that! Space nebulas are seriously stranger than fiction. This "Planetary nebula" is just a fucking collossal bubble sittin around in space. Just when you think you've seen it all.

This doesn't strike me as a very Idle Thumbs topic, but y'know- COSTS NOTHIN' TO MAKE A THREAD! That new DmC just came out and I've been keepin' an eye out for it. I've played like a hundred hours of , literally, the game's just amazing to me. On the surface, the animations and sound and art all look n' feel amazing. The moves you have are so interesting and fun to throw yourself around with, and the enemies have SO MANY TRICKS! They fuse together, they swim underground, they latch onto you and inflate and deflect attacks- I JUST got into a new mechanic in this game that's like an active reload I've just been ignoring this whole time.So when I heard that a new developer was making DmC, I thought "I dunno, can they do all this work and live up to it, or is it gonna be starting back from square 1?" I played the demo, and it feels like they totally did. It's not perfect but it ticks all the boxes, even holding onto the tradition of giving enemies new attacks, animations and AI behavoirs that only appear on higher difficulty levels- and that's going the extra mile if you ask me. Anyway I hate starting on long posts, so I'll stop there, but my other favourite combat systems in games are Gears of War, Dark Souls, Streets of Rage, and Vanquish eventually pulled me under. Y'know what else? I love Bioshock! I think it gets a bad rap for this stuff, but whatever, you can pull the hat off a guy's head and stick mines to it. Big fans of this kind of stuff I CANNOT RECCOMEND ENOUGH the Aztez Development Blog. It's close analysis of the design decisions that go into these games, and it's taking all these nebulous "combos are sweet" thoughts and putting them into actually well-articulated words. I'm avoiding fighting games, cos I feel like that's so much of a bigger conversation to get into.

I don't like Monster Hunter, but I DID really enjoy Dark Souls. I think they're similar in that everything's really slow and deliberate. I've not played much Monster Hunter but I think it's the effect that the art and animation has on how the game feels that turns me off. In Dark Souls everyone's dragging their bodies, carrying the weight of all this armour and exherting so much energy to desperately lunge their limbs forward- so whatever happens, it looks like the characters are using everything they have. In Monster Hunter though, that stupid pose he does when you drink a potion? This giant, colourful, regal fuckin jewel-encrusted club? I think even if the timing and all the inputs matched up exactly the same in both games, I'd feel way more annoyed with it in Monster Hunter. If I'm gonna die at the fault of a ten-second health-potion animation, I at least want the character to scramble it out of that crusty satchel and chug the potion for his goddamn life. Then when I die I can say "hey, we both tried our best". Has anyone played Dead Space? I don't play horror games, but when I watched a Quick Look I was pickin my jaw up off the floor. These dog enemies were pouncing all over the environment and everything was getting it's legs cut off.

He means if you take guns away, people will still be killing each other. Now here's an equally meak input by me! Forgive me for being close-minded, but I live in England and I can't even imagine a world where my friends and family are buying guns. I can imagine liking cars, or computers, or aeroplanes, but if it's guns then in my head that's just a maniac.

Yea another thing I always talk about being important in a combat system is having genuinely interesting enemies. I think Gears of War is where I first started appreciating this. The Flamer can use a flame-thrower to ruin you up-close,although his huge weakness is that if you shoot his back he actually explodes and damages everyone else around him, like a walking red barrel. The bloodmount moves fast and can cut you up, then also has a RIDER who shoots, and they're both independant entities that you can split up. The kantus has these ink grenades that poison a radius, he has this really annoying little SMG, he doesn't use cover but can dodge, and he also REVIVES dead soldiers, which is really cool and makes him a huge priority. Throwing all this kinda stuff into a big chaotic soup in Horde mode, along with all the FUN AS HECK weapons, is amazing. You have to put in so much effort to stack that many functions onto every new piece. Mass Effect 3 did a FAIRLY admirable job of emulating it, but maybe one of the worst co-op survival modes I've ever played was TF2's Mann Vs Machine. Note: I don't like stat-heavy games like MMOs or Borderlands or Diablo, and it fell flat for me on everything I've talked about being an important part of the experience here. I mean- as such a fan of the dynamic between the Heavy, the Medic, the Scout and all the rest, can you imagine my legitemate HORROR when I found myself in a boss fight against this?

Yeah the controls was the big problem with me aswel. I mean you can't lock-on any more, like what's that about, right? It's strange that this is their attempt to make it inviting to new players. On the one hand I can SEE WHERE THEY'RE COMING FROM making it so fluid and easy to switch weapons mid-combo, but on the other hand making so many seperate pieces rely on that variable is so hard to keep track of. I'm not a fan of double-tapping to lunge forward either. I did really love DMC3, I think I played through it about 3 times but haven't touched it in years since. I was talking to someone yesterday who hates the new DmC, and they were so pissed off that he doesn't have all the Style stuff (swordmaster, gunslinger, royal guard) and doesn't have 4 different guns. I didn't notice that at all, cos I'm so much more a fan of Nero, but now I get why that would annoy people. Cos Dante does have a fucking quadrillion moves usually, but with me playing as Nero for years it's not too much of a change. Still never played Bayonetta. Or God of War. And yea I just went nuts in Bioshock. The way you can set people on fire and they run around screaming and jump in water, the way you can poison med-bays, or cover a chair in 12 proximity mines and throw it at someone... A game like Skyrim has first-person spells aswel, but the enemies feel so much more alive and capable in Bioshock.

As refferenced by that "making of the trailer" quote, and the video posted before, I think there's people on that team who really want the cyberpunk genre to be like holding up a mirror to society, accelerating what sucks about the human nature by a hundred years, a fertile environment to make commentary on man's inhumanity and so on and so on. BUT when your starting point is people cybernetically-enhancing themselves, it's really easy to slip into making a story about how cool robots are, and how badass the future is. I think Deus Ex, Too Human, Ghost In The Shell, The Matrix and a hundred other near-future stories start off from that psuedo-psychology angle, and then turn out to be slow-motion spinning around sexy gun woman. When I said "being indulgent" I meant the designers making things that they just think would look cool, like you said. Maybe I'm using the wrong word and should've said "being gratuitous" instead, or something.

I wasn't interested until I pieced together that the developers of Dust Force are making a "skill based FPS of mystery and mastery". That's gotta be something super cool, right? I don't know what the hell CPMA is, but "based on a movement physics mod" sounds perfectly right to me!

Halfway through, so far I've had to ask google to define "Trepidatious" and "Fastidious". I already knew what "Diegetic" meant from last episode, so that was a personal win. Probably a good job I don't listen to the book cast. This guy is the coolest.

I love Jengo the near-sighted assassin who uses a shotgun, and Tengo the assassin who always gets there first. I hope there's more dumb assassins, but honestly if it's just these two for the whole game then that's almost funnier.

I'd skip the wiki page.

Why do I miss all the threads for games I'm playing? I got this on the iPad, and yes it is very, very, shockingly slow. Especially compared to other iOS games, this takes roughly 300x as long to really get moving. Characters are funny!

OH it's a SEQUEL to the old tabletop game. I just thought they renamed it, but that video made it sound like it actually does take place 57 years later. That's cool. I think Hitman's sick badass baditude was misplaced and they weren't deliberately evoking it in the way Cyberpunk is. Similar to how like Deadly Premonition is weird, but No More Heroes is aiming for weird. Or how Army of Two's bro-out stuff looks idiotic, but Gears of War couched it in this whole world and fiction that's all about that. Cyberpunk is about overtly sexy sex-bots and gun-cop shoot-ups. BUT-- COUNTERING MY OWN POINT: In some ways they cross the line from being aware to being indulgent. Like Chris said on the podcast about Far Cry 3, it's not really a knowing commentary if everyone's enjoying it for the sick badass action; and like Sean said about Borderlands 2: it doesn't stand out as a stylistic choice when every game is like this. As individuals, I think we all fall on a different spot between those two paragraphs. So that's that conversation in a nutshell!