I_smell

I killed a boss, and then the door to the boss room opened back up. So I backed out of the empty room, worked my way back up through the dungeon, fought all those enemies again (some had upgraded to new enemies) and got right back to the start before realising "Oh there's no entrance"... So I kinda got lost for about 20 minutes, and then made my way back to the boss room and realised that there was a much smaller door that I was supposed to go through.

Alright I've not gone back to Darksiders for like 2 weeks now, I'm just about ready to say I'm done with it. It's just too many bad puzzles, dungeons, sluggish progression and waves of the same old boring enemy. I got the hookshot, and then fought a boss who's solution was to use the hookshot. It wasn't interesting.

I didn't know I was wrong and I'm sorry.

No cos traffic lights will always turn green eventually. It's more just they have a list of a hundred games they need to play, and now they can sort by Highest Rated.

I think Valve still decides what gets on or not, and the voting just puts the games more under their nose. Like Project Zomboid and Black Mesa were probably already getting on Steam anyway.

Yeah I'm saying I don't like when people go in this direction with stealth games. I'm not saying it's badly made or anything. Metal Gear had vision cones on the radar, but they could see way further than that, so it was more just to show which way the dots were facing. And that's not the same as having them stuck on the guys' faces. The guards would look in lockers and pathfind around hallways following footprints and generally use their intuition and be unpredictable sometimes. Laying all the information on the screen with like throwing-arcs and last-known-position n all that stuff I think takes out the tension and suprise n makes it way less fun. I THINK the real strength of stealth games is to make everything feel like a game of natural, capable humans wandering around. The kinda stealth game where that's all binary and you just figure out the path to get to the end? No thanks! EDIT- Oh this week's podcast is about Mark of the Ninja! I keep hearing how it totally feels so great and badass, but it'll be good hearing actual designers talkin about it.

I hear people goin nuts over this game, but it totally seems like a hundred other games to me. I love the stealth in Metal Gear Solid, where everything feels really natural and human- so you can knock on walls and hide under desks and throw distrations n stuff. I think the best thing about the whole stealth genre is when it's a sandbox, and you have to roll around behind people and frantically dive around corners playing hide n seek. Putting vision cones on guys, and sound-circles, and making it all feel like puzzles makes it totally robotic and stale to me. WELP!- that's me on stealth games.

I laughed at 0.30 where it looked like a giant robot stomping down entire forests. EDIT-- Wait that's where this is going, isn't it? Also I dub this robot "Big Fat-Dog".

I didn't play Borderlands 1 cos I hate stat-based numbers-heavy games. It looks like they've gone all-in with the personality and character in this one though, and gave it some more variety, so that's won me over. A submachine gun that gets more accurate the longer you fire it? Sounds good to me. My friends don't play Video games at all, so I'm bummed about not playing co-op. Xbox Gamertag TOMBRIEN if anyone wants to add me.

Wow I never knew Amiga game designers were so sexy!

Yeah and it all gets filtered and arranged by people voting on it, that's the point. The top percentage makes it to the people at Steam who have to actually judge everything, and the bottom percentage gets deleted, Everything in the middle stays where it is, and gets deleted after a period of inactivity. This is supposed to have a tonne o shit, it's the filtering system on the way into Steam. They're not sellin em. Anyway this other system's a good idea aswel. If the barrier to entry is like 100-200 upvotes: It's not super hard to get that for free. Just post your trailer on Reddit and Twitter or Tigsource or whatever. It'll be KIND OF WEIRD if WayForward has to say "Hey guys, please upvote our thing so Valve can see it! Alright cool, thanks." but I'm really losing track of what's happening with Steam submissions now, so maybe that's not happening? Aaaaaah I'm kind of tired of this conversation tbh. EDIT- Also I just looked it up and this WayForward game is actually their DS game from years ago updated for the iPad, so it's not MEGA surprising that it's not on Steam.

Nah I bet there isn't. I'm not arguing it's not EFFECTIVE, cos it is pretty much as effective as you can get. And y'know-... Steam is actually providing a great service to SELL YOUR GAME, so I guess I'm gray on it.

Yeah, Newgrounds has a hundred games, movies, music and all sorts o crap submitted every day for the passed decade. So does FlashGameLicense, so does Deviantart, so does Youtube and so on and so on. Spam, or stolen or innapropriate content doesn't make it to the front page of those sites, and content gets flushed out and deleted automatically every day. I think after the first week (like now, for example) people submitting Minecraft over and over again would've dipped just because they'd lost interest. Once Greenlight isn't the latest article on every game blog, then the only people sticking around are the people who're genuinely interested- and if there's repeat offenders then just take away their submission rights. Or make people sign up as developers, just to hammer in that YOU MUST BE A DEVELOPER TO DO THIS before you get to the submission page. If they're afraid of people who don't get what it's for: That's how you fix that. If they're afraid of like-- 4chan or something: The community reports everything and it gets flushed out. If they don't like a hundred iOS games being submitted every day: People will get the idea that that doesn't work. Kickstarter had a huge flood of games, but now that's died down naturally like everything else. So y'know- I'm not saying it's despicable and it's the worst thing in the world or anything: I'll pay it when it comes to game time- but I still think "How do we tell if this is a real developer?" "Make it a hundred dollars" is a sad, knee-jerk response. I'm not raving about it, but I'm allowed to be kinda deflated by it.

Well as someone who doesn't play as many games like this, spelling it all out is good for me. And y'know, marketing! Youtube videos get around, they wanna squeeze some more use out o that Awesome.png. Single player would be very cool, making it generate semi-random campaigns is a fun, cheap solution, good job guys!

It really annoys me when people use money JUST as a gate system. It's used on the app store, and facebook's doing it with Promote This Post, so I've already talked about it a lot in other places. but OH WELL, I guess this is how things are now.

OH! I quit Final Fantasy 12. Really liked the combat, really liked the bounty hunter system and the character progression board-system, and a tonne of things about it. Completely was not following the story or characters. I quit after fighting the same enemies for what felt like about 4 hours.

Oh boy, that's concerning. How popular or widely liked a game is is COMPLETELY separate to how good it is. People can design games to be a magnet for attention, or people can manipulate Reddit and Twitter in gross faceless corporate ways, and that can completely ruin a democratic vote system like this. So if this is REPLACING Steam's submission process then that's fucked. Cos then we start getting a tonne o spotlight on things that just patronize and cater to what the voters wanna hear (See: OUYA). For now that's concerning; if people still can't submit games the old way in a couple weeks, then we're in trouble.

I also never finished Far Cry 2, but it's fine because I put a tonne of hours into it and really enjoyed it. The actual story of Far Cry 2, I couldn't give a shit about. I think the characters are forgettable robots, and I have no opinion about the plot cos I can't remember it. I got far enough to unlock the second area and stopped. BUT- My fun with Far Cry 2 was sneaking around camps, and sniping people from a mile away, and all the amazing open-world possibilities, so I wasn't even paying attention to completing it. Yeah everyone says DarkSiders is a Zelda game, and when I first got the boomerang I was like "oh ok, here's where this starts". But I am like a real fucking student of Devil May Cry, and this is beat-for-beat Devil May Cry 3. The whole aesthetic of Angels vs Demons, hell taking over the earth, the enemy types and behaviors, the big glowing eye-wall that blocks you til all the enemies are dead... aiming and pulling the analogue stick back+X launches an enemy up- holding it down launches you up aswel, pressing X (pause) X gives you a different combo more useful for groups of enemies, the giant fist weapon that you can charge up and has all the same moves, dash+X lunges you forward and launches enemies back... ...you unlock the ability to transform into demon form, he negotiates with a bunch of sly, gross ghouls, I stick around every room to smash all the objects for more money, there's annoying level-puzzles that cripple the pacing- just the whole game. But for as many things as I can list that make it SIMILAR to playing DMC, I can list the reasons it doesn't do those things AS WELL as the Capcom team. They're so close that when I hammer the shoot button to shoot faster, it's disappointing to remember that DarkSiders didn't figure that out. Or how they didn't figure out to make you run faster if you run in the same direction for 3 seconds, or all that stuff that makes those other games so smart. and I've never played a God of War, so I dunno. Finishing enemies with a giant B button over their head seems like a God of War thing, and I hate that. and I really did spend like 2 weeks doing the puzzles Majora's Mask was telling me to do, and hitting a brick wall every time cos I was doing stuff meant for later on. I appreciate a lot of stuff it does, but I absolutely HATE the rest of it.

I thought it was pretty clear why the book cast wasn't as crazy as the video game cast, because books aren't a monstrous avalanche of mind-boggling nonsense. Nobody's developing a giant sensory-override hamster ball that you roll around in, and use bleeding edge rocket-guiding gyroscopics to simulate that you exist in a post-apocalyptic wasteland for books.

Majora's Mask is a game where you play the same 3 days over and over again, and it's the same every time- in the game's fiction. A side-effect of this design is that there are more than a dozen different people to talk to, and quests to START that you aren't equipped to finish yet in Clock Town. You can start conversations and quests, and try to solve problems and puzzles for people for hours on end without realising each one of these branches is sealed off until later, and ONLY ONE, with a specific chain of events triggered at specific times, will advance you forwards. By design, each quest opening has to seem as legitimate as the last, because at some point it will be. I was stuck in Clock Town for a long time, half-solving quests that lead to dead ends. Every time I felt like THIS IS IT! THIS IS MY TICKET OUT OF CLOCK TOWN AS SOON AS I GET THIS LETTER TO THE MAYOR!! -it turned out that that wasn't the right quest either. Even when I left the first area: this kept happening in other towns. Also there's so much sliding-on-ice rooms and pushing-blocks puzzles and walk-the-plank games and just corny, frustrating tests in all these dungeons that between that and the confusion with everything it was a nightmare to make the tiniest bit of progress in that game. If someone told me Dark Void or Saints Row turned out to be really good games, I'd try em again, but I couldn't beat Majora's Mask for a thousand dollars.

I quit Dark Void because it's boring and didn't make much sense. Also I bought Saints Row 3 on OnLive and halfway through my monitor fucked itself in a way that it always starts the game offset a few hundred pixels to the left, and to the up... which is weird. So I can't play it. But it was pretty boring anyway, so I'm not that sad about it. I'm playing DarkSiders right now and WHY DID THEY MAKE IT SO LONG!!!! The game is basically Devil May Cry, but with less focus on combat and more focus on puzzles, and I don't know what kind of evil person would set out to make that. There's so many... dungeons and back-tracking and levelling up your shit, and dragging huge crates around to line up with things- It is Devil May Cry with a load more fat added in between boss fights. That's exactly what it is. Oh and I didn't finish Majora's Mask. I hate Majora's Mask.

Wow this is pretty over my head as someone who came here for the Video games. I have basically zero knowledge about the world of books, and writing, people who write books and books with things written IN them. I listened to this episode relating everything to an equivalent that I do know about; "Oh that's how I feel about Breaking Bad" and "That's what I thought about podcasts." But maybe that's all the more reason I should listen to this cast, cos maybe I'm totally missing out. So I'll throw myself into it for episode 1 and see if I can follow along with what everyone's talking about.

You're right, I picked a part of XBLIG that was a tiny rare occurance and focused on it. Jumped the gun!

My only pledges have been Idle Thumbs and Double Fine. ...So I guess this campaign needs more Chris Remo.

Well- destroying PC gaming outside of ValveSoftware.com. PC games on Steam are doing great, and also browser games are doing fine. I guess there's a deep trench between those two that me and 600+ other games have apparantly failed to jump, and if the only victims of convinience are the developers who can't make games very well then you can't really point the finger at people for being bad or wrong. It's like being annoyed at people for not buying Xbox Live Indie Games. It's not the customer's job to go out of their way to support anyone or stop PC gaming from being destroyed. ...unless you're doing the marketing for a Kickstarter campaign. Speaking of which, I thought about XBLIG yesterday and I think the percentage of games that jump from Greenlight to Steam will be about the same as games that jumped from XBLIG to XBLA. It's kind of the same concept, right? EDIT- I'm kind of freely slapping the keyboard as I just woke up here, so don't take anything I say seriously.