Gwardinen

I love the fact that that's possible, but the people who can do it scare the crap out of me. Still haven't got any items! In fairness I only started playing again yesterday, but every time I see people get items and I don't it breaks my heart again. Do you definitely just randomly "find" them at the end of matches or is it only when you level up with battle points?

That is technically how it works in the UK too. You're always addressing the Speaker and referring to the person you're actually talking to in the third person. It just doesn't seem to make any difference here.

The books to read feature actually sounds interesting to me because I don't necessarily immediately buy the books I'm interested in. For one, they're often not out yet - I'm waiting for the latest Terry Pratchett book to be released right now and hoping I don't forget in the meantime. Beyond that I end up just scanning Amazon occasionally for authors I've heard of or read before to try to figure out which books have recently been released or are soon to be released that I might enjoy. I'm sure I've forgotten or just missed a dozen books over the last few years that I was at one point excited for.

I'm on the last level of Stacking, I think, and have been for at least a year now. I was playing it with a friend and then stopped seeing her very much, but I should either make a point of getting her to come over or just do it myself. At this point I'm concerned my PS3 will break before I finish it, like my 360 did before I finished Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes. In terms of games I did finish recently, I played through all of Prototype 2 at a pretty brisk pace. It's not the greatest game ever made, and certainly doesn't have a huge amount of artistic merit, but it is very easy and enjoyable to simply consume (no pun intended). The side missions were just varied and systemic enough yet with the right little sprinkling of script and voicework to keep me going, and the primary powers and traversal mechanics remain fun for the length of the game. I thought it was timed pretty well, just when I was starting to not want to pick it up again it was coming to a close. By contrast I've made it 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through Max Payne 3 and feel like I just want it to be over. It's not a bad game by any means (and is probably objectively better than Prototype 2), but I'm tiring of it quite quickly. I want to see the narrative, and perhaps more importantly the settings/situations, play out, but I hope it starts to roll into an endgame pretty soon. I'm having a lot of trouble motivating myself to start it up rather than just do another game of a neverending multiplayer game like Sins of a Solar Empire/League of Legends/Dota 2 with some friends. This issue will only become more pronounced next week when the Civilization V expansion comes out.

Haha, brilliant. Awkward indie stories are the best.

Happy birthday Sean!

Yeah that was kind of the vibe I got when the whole Japanese incident went down at GDC too. Phil Fish seems to have somewhat of a fragile ego and will both engage and lash out very easily. Doesn't make him a bad person but it does make him somewhat unsuited to be the sole face of a product.

Yeah I watched a few videos on her site and they were rather hit and miss for me. Some of them definitely made good points but some of them did seem like an overreach. The Christmas song video you've mentioned was one that had elements of both - I actually do consider Baby, It's Cold Outside super creepy, but the other example of All I Want for Christmas was totally bizarre to me. I didn't really see anything sexist in that song at all, and its lyrics fit with how I have felt about women in the past. People of both genders canwant to disregard other thoughts and needs for the sake of romance sometimes, that is much more of a fact of humanity than anything to do with a patriarchal society in my opinion. By contrast, her video about the Oscars and the Bechdel Test was very interesting in terms of her comments about how a female-centric story isn't necessarily a story with good female characters. Still, a little more awareness of how feminism interacts with the games industry is unlikely to be a bad thing.

Yep, and in fact Batman Begins is used as a reference!

That's pretty simple, it's been stated that this is a reboot, not a prequel. She does not go from this character to the Lara of the original Tomb Raider. If she becomes more like that in the end it will (hopefully) be through character progression, this is not meant to be a "how Lara became Lara" story. That said bad things happen to people and it doesn't necessarily make them super serious for the rest of their lives. There's nothing about the original Lara that suggests to me that she had to have an idyllic life all the way up until the time of the games - actually her aggressive cheer and inability to react appropriately to danger could easily be argued to imply that she is overcompensating for having felt scared and unhappy in the past!

Damn my lack of a time machine.

Seemed like a vaguely appropriate place for this. It's somewhat funny if you play LoL, but the real joy is the Idle Thumbs Wizard song cameo near the beginning: [media=] [/media]

Yeah there are some weird tricks to using iOS devices that I had to find out about online before I was able to use my phone more efficiently. It's kind of bizarre, and I'm still suspicious that there are things I don't know about.

Yeah that sentiment is super dumb, and has made it suddenly very difficult to defend this game to some people I know who are sensitive to issues of abuse to women. The comparison that they were making before with Die Hard is much better and more appealing. John McClane is shown as a human with limitations, and is then put through hell and becomes heroic in the process. That is a solid, interesting and unoffending arc. This has suddenly cast the game back into the potentially sexist and exploitative position it was in before. I really hope the game is actually good enough to justify my hope in it.

Have now watched both the most recent Mad Men episode and the last Game of Thrones episode. Mad Men: This penultimate episode in the season has possibly secured Mad Men as the best show currently on TV in my eyes. I thought the first two seasons were good, and that the third had a pretty serious lull. The fourth and fifth, though, have been better than anything they did before and better than pretty much anything else currently broadcasting. It's so very rare that a TV series has that trajectory and not the opposite, so I'm incredibly pleased. Not to mention all the changes the writers have wrought that have now ended up being so truly for the best! I am not nervous about this latest couple of big changes simply because those over the past two seasons have worked out so well for the show. Game of Thrones: Yeah, I seem to hold the common opinion at this point that it was fine and probably still leagues better than most of the stuff on TV, but it didn't quite grab me the way season one did and the final episode in particular was somewhat of a letdown. Final episode spoilers: Most of the Westeros stuff was just a little dull, though, and it felt very much like a setup episode for the next season rather than a grand conclusion for the season. That's fair enough from a writing perspective, but it's just not super interesting on its own.

Do you mean 1313? In interviews they've made a point of mentioning they have Industrial Light & Magic engineers working on a bunch of stuff, trying to get some of the rendering techniques they use for films to work real-time for the game. I agree with what you're saying about animation. For whatever reason it didn't occur to me during the demo, but yeah animation improvements are really what I've loved most this console generation so that bar at least has to be maintained going forwards.

The end of the second video there totally blew me away (IGN.com) - having it zip him directly into code and then him literally playing as it compiled and the jump height changing mid-stream was incredible. I actually said "holy shit" out loud. It's been a while since I did any serious programming but that totally excited me, and the scripter in me loves the editor in general. Whatever you think of their games, there are some talented fucking engineers at Epic.

Neat! That could be really fun. It's interesting that most of the films I get genuinely interested in these days are animated.

Technically, the girl from the Last of Us is not Ellen Page. She's voiced by a different actress and it has never been stated that she is physically modelled after Ellen Page, though there do seem to be some similarities.

Yeah I actually quite liked the Last of Us for that reason. If you compare it to the Uncharted games, it shows Naughty Dog reducing the number of enemies by a factor of ten and making the combat feel scary and impactful. A group of four is a genuine challenge, and the things your character has to do to get through them give even his companion, whose life he is protecting, pause. That kind of violence and the pure daft score racking up killing stuff that something like Bulletstorm or Saints Row might have are both ok with me, it's the stuff in the middle that is realistic and lacking in humour but unimportant and potentially even glorified that can be a bit dicey. Medal of Honor is probably the best example from what we've seen so far, and one of my friends said much the same as you, Scipio, it actually made him feel quite uncomfortable.

The Kaley Cuoco video was pretty great. Truth be told playing Diablo III on mute while listening to that song doesn't actually seem that nuts, though.

Man I didn't even think about that particularly dissonance. That actually is quite weird when I think about it, because yes the game is actually somewhat unforgiving on normal difficulty in spots. At the very least it heavily favours quite a patient and careful playstyle that is, as we've all mentioned, rather at odds with its tone. But the fact that its difficulty actually directly but inversely scales with the contextual difficulty of the protagonist's actions is bizarre!

Yeah the dissonance between the cover mechanics and the bullet time mechanics are referenced in basically every review or even casual mention of the game I've seen, and they've come up constantly for me while playing too. I also had exactly the same frustration that you can't just press the "take cover" button while on the floor, you have to get up and wait for the right frame of the animation before you're allowed that control again. As for the gun in cutscene thing, it's sort of irritating but at least they show whatever other weapon you have in your other hand, and your default weapon is also modelled correctly. It's not quite a Mass Effect arbitrarily giving you the default pistol/assault rifle in random cutscenes whenever it feels like it situation.

Are you guys still talking about "villagers"? If so this conversation is super creepy.

Over the last couple of years I was actually working for gaming news sites during E3 and that was pretty balls out crazy, so I know the feeling Orv... I'm actually quite looking forward to having nothing to write this week, and I'll probably just be chilling in the Idle Thumbs Steam chat today laughing about the conferences as a pure observer.