MysteriousLeg

I really love the entire franchise, but wasn't any more impressed by this game than the earlier ones in the franchise. You're right that the sense of scale is magnificent, they managed to wring impressively large environments out of the PS2 and it's even more impressive on the PS3. The commentary of Half-Life 2: Episode 1 talks about how they used scale models to create the Citadel in-world rendering, but it feels like the titans in God of War are rendered in full size, which makes really awe-inspiring moments in the game. I really did have a few complaints about God of War III, though. The puzzles were few and not particularly difficult, which doesn't matter in the grander scheme of the game, but they only acted as small asides, rather than centerpieces of gameplay. The boss battles, though fun, didn't seem as grand as the previous installments (excepting, perhaps, the final battle), and environments were reused repeatedly, which actually fits in with the story, but by the end of the game I no longer enjoyed any sense of discovery. My biggest complaint was the rhythm game that had physical X, triangle, square and circle buttons rendered in world as well as a physical Guitar Hero highway, God of War is not the most realistic franchise, but this section of the game just pulled me out completely. Ending spoiler ahead: So yeah, I still think it's a good game, but they didn't do anything new, besides a prettier presentation. If you didn't like the first two games, there's no reason to buy this.

I have a pretty unashamed love for the God of War series. They aren't the best games, and they certainly don't make an argument for art or intelligence in games, but they do two things well, environmental puzzles and combat. I feel like God of War III hasn't been as heavy with the puzzles as the previous two, but I may my misremembering, and there is one really well done puzzle that unabashedly cribs from Echochrome. While the game does cater to the most basic teenage kill-and-fuck-everything desires, it really is disgustingly satisfying to kill hordes of undead Greek hoplites and rip the eyes out of giant trolls. I don't know, I think Robert Ashley said it best: "Why is God of War so fucking good? That's a game that appreciates the fact that the ultimate thing in a game is for you to hit a button and for you to feel like you have all this incredible power. Like you're sitting there on your couch being, like, the laziest fucker on Earth, and you do the most minimal thing on Earth, you hit a button, and the button, it's not like you gotta press it really hard, you just gotta barely click it and all this crazy violence happens like you're an insane badass.... It's the most ridiculous feedback for the most minimal effort. You're not even trying. You're ripping people to shreds and the music comes and it's like '(operatic singing) KRATOS!' You're like 'YEAH! MOTHERFUCKER'. It's the most satisfying game. It's like the macaroni and cheese you get that has the breadcrumbs on top and the fancy cheese, it's not like the Kraft macaroni and cheese shit from the powder, it's like really good cheese. Ah man, it's just so good. It's comfort gaming."

"NewsCorp will lay you off an leave you desitute." -IGN.com Seriously, though, that is really sad. Poor guys.

I would agree that WoW more closely resembles a model of evolution than Spore, which essentially takes a Creationist path to species origins (starkly contrasting Wil Wright's own beliefs), but, as I said before, a pure evolution sim would be boring as hell. Ugh, I'm too much of an evolution nerd and, in general, spend too much time thinking about it. Unfortunately a window was opened for me to ramble about it, which is probably not the best for the forums.

Um, hi. I started listening to Idle Thumbs on episode 38, Up On This Boss, but have gone through an listened to each episode at least three times since. My fascination with the podcast has bled into my life in weird ways like, for instance, my fiancee and all her friends have started rambling the Jeff Goldblum combinations at random times, and she will sing "The Wizaaaard" whenever she sees the word Wizard. Anyway, I figured that if I liked the 'cast so much, I'll probably enjoy the forums, though I don't know if I have anything useful to contribute.

I was thinking something similar during the cast. Without having played WoW, I can imagine that there are pressures that exert themselves onto the player, making the player adapt to fill a need, be it raid members or enemies fought. Because decisions are willingly made, instead of arising through genetic mutation, this is closer to unnatural selection than natural selection, but a broader definition of evolution could be applied to it. The unfortunate problem with making games "about" evolution, is that to get a pure simulation of evolution (which is to say evolution by natural selection), the player wouldn't be allowed to participate in any way and would have to just be a spectator as generation after generation of increasingly complex AI developed. Also, this is probably what everyone else thought during the "Royal we" discussion.