Corelli

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    138

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Corelli

  3. Posted

    I just went back to this stuff and really remembered that Columbia is a great, original, weird, fun city and the first half of the game is actually amazing.

     

     

    It's a shame they didn't "blow you away" with where the game eventually goes, but all credit to em; where it starts off totally did, and is one of the best game settings around.

    That arrangement is so great.

  4. Posted

    Double postin' to cover other small, less coherent thoughts-

     

    Sean, I like DOTA talks. Talk about the dota hole you go down. I am in the equal and opposite LoL Hole.

    I am right there with you on that one.

    With regard to reviews, I had wondered if you were going to bring up Giant Bomb. That's mostly a website not about reviewing games. Somewhat opposite to Patrick stepping outside the normal GB bubble and getting backlash, I think it's refreshing, while sometimes frustrating, for them (mostly Jeff and Ryan) to be completely up front that they HAVE a bubble. There are games that Giant Bomb will never cover or play, and they will flat out tell you that they have biases towards coverage. But because they are direct, they have also established a clear voice about their styles and preferences. When they do review something or weigh in with an opinion, you have the knowledge of them personally to know how their preferences color their statements.

    I think GB's strongest attribute is their honesty. They let you know where they're coming from and they're transparent, so you have a good context for their opinions. And they're entertaining. Basically all I'm saying is that they do a really good thing.

  5. Posted

    What I don't understand how to reconcile, and this is an important but often dismissed area of games criticism, is the difference in difficulty level.

    Bioshock: Infinite on hard is a completely different game than on normal. It's night and day. I was playing the game through on hard and not only was it very frustrating, but it really highlighted a lot of design decisions that were sub-optimal. Eventually it became such a chore that I just wanted to finish the game and play on normal, but on normal literally not one iota of the combat design matters: it's so simplistic that the vigors, tears, and skyrails simply serve to complicate an already jumbled mess of combat options.

    Contrast this to the original Bioshock, where, with the exception of some of the crazier "there's fifty splicers running at you at once" areas and the last boss fight, the combat is extremely interesting, filled with reasonable options that are clear to the player and fun to put into practice. Trapping a big daddy with an immense web of electrified crossbow traps and herding him into an area with a turret you've hacked is way more fun and clear to the player than jumping on a quickly moving skyrail then getting inexplicably killed in two seconds because a handyman electried it offscreen.

  8. Posted

    Did Bioshcok really create some "ludic language?". That game was famous for coining the term ludonarrative dissonance. Bioshock's 1 mechanical narrative is totally divergent from it's explicit story narrative. There are other reasons why it's great, but I don't think establishing some kind of "gameplay narration language" was one of them.

    "Ludic language" is an umbrella term that applies to anything with mechanics, really. Bioshock didn't "coin" ludonarrativic dissonance; that term was around for a long time before that and can apply to any number of games.

    Any game creates its own ludic language (or ludology) in the sense that its ludology is derived from the combination of mechanics the game employs; it's not something that's specific to any one game.

    Edit: clarity

  12. Posted

    As someone who played Bioshock for the first time about a year ago, I think you're underestimating how much your Infinite criticisms also bite that earlier game. The elements you mentioned—being alone, the horror milieu—mitigate it a bit, but I still stalled out after a few hours just because the combat felt wonky and annoying. But then again, it might just be that I'm totally over combat as a pacing mechanic.

    I agree, but only because you just got a few hours in. By the time I got to the end of Bioshock I was hacking turrets mid-combat and setting up elaborate traps for Big Daddies and it was some of the best combat I've ever experienced in an FPS, if not the best. But yeah, it takes some time to get there.

  15. Posted

    I find this problem interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing how Edmund McMillen deals with it in Mew-Genics.

    I had no idea Team Meat was doing this. It sounds like a fairly novel way of addressing some of those gameplay challenges, I'll have to keep up with it.

    Ninja edit: I wonder what role thematics has in all this. Is there an inherent disconnect when a game is presenting you cats or protozoa as opposed to humanoids? Or does it work better because the game is being more honest about the limits of its simulation? Part of the reason I never got much into the sims was because the sims themselves were so brazenly inhuman, there was always an off-putting level of dissonance going on. Oddly enough, I empathize a lot with the humanoids in DF, but maybe that has as much to do with graphical fidelity (or lack there of) as anything else.

  16. Posted

    The discussion about the granularity of simulation in games like Sim City and Spacebase (DF, etc.) is super interesting to me. Especially that Relic example. How useful are these mechanics if they're not communicated well to the player? It's a tough question, because some of the fun for me in those games is discovering that a simulation is controlling something that you thought (for lack of a better term) was scripted or baked in, like the first time I realized my dwarves in DF were making art about things that was happening during my game.

    Edit: Holy shit I did the Aladdin carpet thing too! I couldn't wear my glasses while wearing the headset so I couldn't even see anything that was going on.

  18. Posted

    Yeah, one of the questions I'd love to see answered by reviews is whether the game would be better off with less/no combat.

    It's an interesting question, but it's important to remember that Bioshock would probably never have been very popular if they hadn't screamed "WE SWEAR ITS A SHOOTER" during the run up to release about a million times.

  24. Posted

    It's just Troy and Rob this week as they reflect on Cold War strategy games and the unique challenges and temptations of that setting.

     

    Listen

    One of my favorite time periods to read about.

    Here's my take: The most important story of the cold war is a personal one, not an all-encompassing one. It's not the story of empires jockeying for power as much as it is the individual being crushed by the state. It's not imposing your will on the system; it's the system imposing its will on individuals.

    How do you make a game out of that, let alone a strategy game? One approach might be an examination of bureaucracy and the internecine politicking that goes on inside it (MI-6 case officer management sim, anyone?) Either way, I think that "the player as one nation" approach is essentially unworkable because, as you say, the whole point of the cold war is that very little happens on a global strategic scale.