Forbin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj1QnijwxtY#t=0m49s

That sounds like something the mod community would do if they opened up an SDK. Have you seen the fallout 3 mod Real-Time Settler?

I want to play 2K Marin's "Oops all sidequests".

Firewalker may be the pack you're thinking of. It gave you the hammerhead hover tank, and had a few missions. Honestly, it felt like crap. The movement lacked any kind of tension as you could just tripple jump around the environment and change direction on a dime. The enemies were either too easy, or randomly too good as they fired heat seeking missiles that were barely visible. It basically felt like a prototype with polished graphics.

It's like the world portrayed before the bombs went off in Fallout. I like the era, as world war 2 level weaponry is the best suited for first person shooters. But that video wasn't really impressive. It looks like it was lit by Vincent Van Gogh. The effects look pretty early on as well.

Honestly, the dinosaur game I really want to play is a Left 4 Dead total conversion.

Goon Squad are the kings of creating messed up situations in World of Warcraft. There used to be this debuff called "Mark of Shame" that characters would get if they failed a low level quest that would cause players to be unable to interact with their faction's NPCs. Blizzard used a hack causing the debuff to temporarily flag you as "at war" with the faction to accomplish that. So Goon Squad organized a raid to purposefully fail the quest and get the debuff, then went into the main city of the Horde and killed Thrall. Wired wrote an article about some of the stuff these guys get into. In general I think griefing is an area of emergent gameplay that's super interesting. More griefing:

pre-rendered backgrounds please

There's a quick look up on giant bomb. http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-frozen-synapse/17-2579/

I'll believe it when it's gone Gold. Gate gold jeffbloom

Right, but the point being is that I've heard like 3 people talk about that moment as if it were a unique experience for themselves that the sandbox generated. In situations like that, I'm more inclined to credit the developers for their presentation than label it emergent. If I were a map designer, working on a sandbox game. And I decided to put a diving board at the top of the highest point in the world, with a fountain at the plaza on the ground. And I didn't give any motivation for the player to jump off it beyond their own will, does it still qualify as emergent? I manipulated this player into a position, that they're very likely to play my game, but there's no meta-layer telling them to do it.

Just Cause 2?

I think these strings of state modifiers are prettymuch what makes up emergent gameplay, but the question of whether they're forseen or not is interesting. Though players may see through the obvious links, (oil = flammable, splicer = flamable...) the not-so-obvious links can still be predicted by the developers. I used to subscribe to a lot more gaming podcasts, and one thing that led to me trimming the fat that was they became repetitive. Not just in the news coverage, but in their insights into games they were reviewing. Without fail, at least 2 journalists would talk about some amazing experience they had that seemed amazing and emergent. Eg: Red Dead Redemption has a point where a prostitute is being attacked by a man with a knife. If you kill the guy after he's killed her, then YOU get chased by the law. There are more complex examples, but a lot of these interactions are common.

On a related note, I just realized the Wikipedia article on Emergent Gameplay is a terrible mess. But I think Molyneux is correct, the more of a simulation a game is, the more potential it has for emergent gameplay. Personally I find that World of Warcraft is the absolute king. MMOs have to built as a series of systems rather than procedural events. But it's emergence may be more akin to a mutliplayer shooter than a single player sim.

Somebody make a webcomic about astromech droids named after shitty game titles. Something along the lines of Castle Vidcons.

ZvZ defending against an early pool your only options are to also build an early pool, and pull your drones off the line to help defend. Get a queen out ASAP. Don't go for a 15 hatch if you're going ZvZ if you want to be safe. I'm not sure I'd call mass stalkers a cheese. They're a versatile unit, but you should have enough in your arsenal to deal with them unless your opponent has better macro. Make sure you're using your queens inject larva as often as possible to keep your unit count above the protoss players. Reapers are owned by queens, their speed can be a bit much for other units, but speedlings on creep I believe can catch them as well. Maybe spend a drone on a spine crawler if it's a real issue for you, but it's unlikely to last long after the opening. Any cheese your opponent invests in is a huge risk, if you're able to repel it off then you will have a huge economic advantage. Use the timing to push out if his cheese fails. If he's good enough to recover from the cheese, settle for camping out his natural expansion. Since these rushes are most common at the lower levels of play, you may want to be conservative in the early game. Also, scout. If you see something fishy you should be able to respond in time.

This game is free to play this weekend on Steam. Also 50% off (10 bucks) It's definitely rough around the edges, but I've been having some fun. I love hitting 'F' when I'm getting fired to confuse the crap out of people on my tail.

2 of them work for Joystiq, and Justin is on that show every week.MBMBaM is a lot of fun. Their father is a radio host so, they've all got natural comedy and public speaking skills.

I have no problem with 1 or 2, and the odd star from any of the others. But they become mandatory to progress. 3) the planets gained from this tend to be fairly challenging later in the game 4/6) kind of annoying because you can never be sure if the ? means it'll be coins, starites or just some hidden challenge. Usually it's not the hardest thing in the world, but it's annoying to back track, especially if you miss it. 5) these are usually worse than comets. The first one requires precision jumping with a variable camera. 7) rage inducing. It feels to me that the original design for the game might have been the same as the first. Get 60 stars before the boss. But then they were convinced to weight it 70/50 so that players would see more content. It just doesn't flow as well. Anyways, that's enough negativity. The first 1-3 worlds are brilliant.

As Tycho from game developers are "moving us dangerously close to astromech naming conventions". CoD6MW2 sounds straight outta Star Wars.

http://www.thief4.com/ Doesn't look like a working title anymore Thi4f 4-life

Apparently it was going to be TF2. It's also possible CSS is in the mix as well, because independently the beta of CSS was pushed out for Mac as well.

According to a Wired article (which praises Nintendo for forcing people to collect all the random shit), it takes 70 stars to beat the game. Then there are 50 more you can collect, many from new levels. And then after you collect 120 gold stars, you unlock 120 hidden green stars to collect within the existing maps. I don't begrudge Nintendo for including all those extras, or even spending so much time on them (the game clearly has enough content either way). I just think it's a pain in the ass to make it all so mandatory. I don't understand why they create this overworld map with branching paths implying freedom, and then force you not only to visit every world to advance, but to also get all their hidden stars.

This game is starting to piss me off. Like all Mario games since 64, you get star blocked at certain times. Forcing you to pick up a X number of stars before you can progress. In Mario 64 and Galaxy 1 that meant picking most of the mission stars, and maybe a few optional ones. In Galaxy 2, the numbers become so high that you're forced to become a completionist, and do all the normal stars plus all the hidden stars, and usually a few comet and starbit hungry luma maps. In Galaxy 1, I remember there being something like 120 stars, and to complete the game you only had to collect 60. I'm not sure what this will be like when it's finished, but I'm at about 50 and I'm having to scavenge every hidden star possible to get past the 55 star block.

Dude you need to use paragraphs instead of double spacing every sentence.