Corelli

I played about two and a half hours of Velvet Assassin, so I'd say roughly two and a half hours.

This was my favorite game of last year and I didn't even finish it. I stalled on that boss with all the animatronic bodies, I literally couldn't beat him no matter what I did. And yet - my favorite thing of last year. When you consider the competition, I think that's pretty telling. Edit: Thought spurred from a previous post in the thread: Reloading like twenty times to save Malik was probably the best thing I did in a Video game last year.

FEISTODON is so great. I4gas7avTLY?hd=1 Edit: Thanks! My embedding-fu is terrible.

Love the art style. Looking forward to see it in motion for real.

Just finished The Hunger Games. No! Bad mainstream culture! Bad!

Why did they have to put the creepy blue lights on that robot? That makes it like nine times worse.

That's an interesting take. Again, it's been a while since I read it, but I saw it more as a book about the effects of emotional trauma than a coming of age story. I mean, does the protagonist really come of age in that book in any meaningful way? I'm not sure that he does. It's really more about him dealing with losing his brother.

I suspect that a legion of English professors would vehemently disagree. Not that I necessarily do, it's been a long time since I read it.

To me it sounds like you haven't read much good genre fiction. Just from the standpoint of science fiction, if you've read Zelazny or Stephenson or Pynchon or whatever, you wouldn't be conflating genre fiction with bad fiction, which, even though you say you're not doing, is pretty much what you're saying when you say genre fiction is not "adult". To put it another way, you're not looking at the cemetery. Sure, Franzen is great. I'm not disputing that. But there is lots of awful literary fiction, just like there is lots of awful genre fiction. For every Franzen or Updike there are ten Gutersons. Just like for every Zelazny there are ten Star Wars Expanded Universes. Or something.

I couldn't agree more. I understand that this stuff has to be done for marketing purposes, and it's in no way a bad trailer, but it's disappointing to get this instead of gameplay. But hey, Bioshock did it too. It's probably a necessity for a "AAA" title these days (whatever that means).

Social politics. There are really no good games (that I'm aware of, anyways) that delve into the social psychology of a given place and time. I've thought of one way to do this that might work well: a Jane Austen family-marriage simulator type thing, trying to shepard your children/immediate family through a web of social intricacies and match them (and yourself?) in the most effective way possible. Even better, put an RPG layer on top of that with dialogue trees and stats, procedurally generate the NPCs, and there you go. I would play the shit out of that game. Alternatively, I'd like to see a Total War-esque game based off of the Exalted license.

Hi. The Mass Effect 3 ending is really bad.

Major props for the speed suit reference.