Gwardinen

Only just watched this trailer. Profoundly confused. Was also vaguely surprised by how graphic they were willing to be with a man brutally killing women using his fists and wire (watched the European version of the trailer, though no idea if there are any real differences). Although the hypocrisy of basically making gunshot wounds invisible while zooming in fetishistically on the damage inflicted by punches and headbutts is still somewhat baffling. I guess I've been watching too much non-premium TV recently, in which no one hits women and fights between men are accompanied by sounds only vaguely more realistic than a 60s Batman "ka-pow". But yeah the trailer was dumb. I have no idea what it's meant to be telling me.

I'm thoroughly intrigued by the big mechanical switches at the top of the computer tower next to him.

What the...? Is that the Daily Planet globe? Do you live in Metropolis?

Yeah there is a strange feeling of Blizzard taking its worlds very seriously sometimes that doesn't jive with how the writing actually works. That said, there are a lot of people who connect strongly with certain characters and there's a flourishing book business surrounding all three of the major Blizzard franchises, so perhaps the writers' hands are tied to an extent.

I see what you did there.

I wonder that myself about almost every film. I can count on one hand those films that have had 3D that didn't make the experience worse, and even among those I'd have to think really hard about whether they made it any better. For something like this that is about drama rather than action (and more specifically special effects), I don't see the point at all.

Yeah I recommend having friends for boss fights, being able to be resurrected is invaluable. It's also pretty hilarious to have one or two people sprinting around trying to avoid AoEs or even the world itself attempting to kill you (see Butcher fight with the flaming floor) long enough to resurrect a party member.

I'm going to be honest, as I was reading the post back myself I started wondering if I wasn't tacitly agreeing with you by having to explain better ways to express the meaning that might be lurking behind the term "repetitive". So yeah, at this point I'm actually just going to fall back on the idea that the term itself isn't necessarily worthless, but it gets overused and improperly used so much in reviews these days that the onus probably needs to be on the writer to decently explain themselves rather than hoping the audience will infer a thoughtful and nuanced line of thinking. Back on topic I would really like to hear what people think of Dragon's Dogma because I've been really unsure whether to bother even so much as renting it, the coverage of it pre-release has made me swing back and forth between interested and not quite a few times.

Really? I've had more of a sense of progress in D3 than in any other game I've played recently apart from Dark Souls. The fact that I'm literally using completely different abilities and tactics now than I was three levels ago, let alone at the start of the game, is really interesting to me. Contrast that to WoW, for example, where if you pick a mage you get a fireball as your first spell and you will still be using that spell at level 85 when fighting the biggest bosses in the game. It's not even just that you have the option to still be using the same spell - you will have to. I've actually been told that Blizzard has potentially changed some of that stuff in recent months in WoW, but if that bothers you replace WoW, mage and fireball with almost any other MMO, class and spell and it will probably hold up. Meanwhile, yeah, in Diablo 2 you were pumping stats into vitality, so I guess your health bar had bigger numbers in it. That's progression, sure, but it's a much more abstract and (to me) less interesting version of it. You still get bigger numbers in D3, as well, you just have less control over them. Frankly I'm all right with that trade if I get to swap from using a little blow gun to throwing jars of spiders to spreading a plague of toads instead. That's even before we get to how I went back to using a blow gun because of a certain rune and then shifted back to spiders again due to another rune, before combining two secondary powers with different runes to facilitate a completely different play style that involves spreading DoTs between enemies and barely using my primary left click attack at all.

Yeah, PC release is exactly a week away in the US, the usual three days later for Europe as far as I know. The delays on PC versions of new games still bugs me, but two weeks is a damn sight better than the months Rockstar has often waited over the last few years. Not to mention Red Dead Redemption still has no PC release! What is that about? I've long since finished it on the 360 myself, but it still seems bizarre to me.

Oh, that reminds me. For anyone that hasn't noticed yet, the latest Bethesda Podcast episode is about Dishonored. Haven't listened to it yet but I'd be surprised if our own Congrats Nick wasn't involved in asking some dudes some questions about turning into rats or something.

I dunno, I feel like that makes that less true. In the most recent PC Gamer UK podcast, one of the writers was talking about how runes being changed from being special loot to just part of the levelling system made him less excited about loot but more excited about skills, and I completely agree. I was going to respond with that anyway to your earlier post about how it might have been preferable to have runes be loot still - I definitely agree that it would have made that crap that falls out of monsters more interesting, but I also agree with the PC Gamer guy that it would have made levelling up much less interesting. So I really don't know what I would have found preferable in the end. What it does mean, though, is that Diablo III is much more about your character than either of the previous games in the series, and much less about your equipment. It might still be a fair accusation to level at the game, but overall I think Blizzard has moved to combat that much more than anyone thought it would. I barely look at the stats of the gear I find, but every level or two I agonise over which skills I should take and with which runes. I think I've shifted my entire playstyle at least two or three times each on my Demon Hunter and Witch Doctor, and they're not even past level 20 yet. That said, since Blizzard has honed talent trees into a fine art on WoW I think the game may well have been improved by incorporating that alongside the current quicksilver skill system. I definitely have no interest in putting points into stats, and as has been mentioned that almost always just becomes a way for you to either follow the optimal build or be weaker anyway, but a branching tree of extra minor abilities/passives likely wouldn't have gone amiss for a bit more customisation.

Eh, I dunno, that might be overly harsh. I see what you're saying about games being about repetitive actions, but there are games that manage to make their core gameplay loop compelling and there are games that don't, and beyond that a game is more than the four buttons you use most often. Context and the implications of what the basic actions you're performing mean are equally, if not more, important. We are regularly asked as gamers to suffer a little bit of what we don't like in the course of a longer experience that appeals to us, but if the game repeatedly and consistently forces the same uninteresting actions and contexts on us, don't you think it's worth calling out? The example that comes to mind immediately is the first Assassin's Creed. It was slammed for being repetitive, but not because of the things you actually do most often - those being run, jump and hit dudes. It was because of the overall goals that were being given, and the activities that were used to give context to those basic gameplay loops, being the same or incredibly similar over and over again. As much as I enjoyed the freerunning and the combat (and still do in current Assassin's Creed games), the game did feel repetitive. I was constantly tailing some guy to get information, or having the same kind of fistfight in an alley. At some point the names and reasons began to blur together. It was like being in a weird Third Crusade version of Groundhog Day. Some games don't need contextual variation very much, because they're about their systems, but Assassin's Creed and Dragon's Dogma are both kind of about an adventure, right? They're selling a fantasy? I don't think anyone has a fantasy of doing the same things for the same people for the same reasons constantly in the hopes it will earn them a chance to do something they find interesting in the future. Generally speaking we call that "having a job". Basically I understand and even agree with what you're saying about games in general - though I don't necessarily consider it a good thing, but that's a discussion for another time and place - but I don't think it's fair to call the use of this term lazy. Inaccurate or vague might be a worthwhile assessment of it, though, because understanding what a reviewer probably actually means by "repetitive" actually requires a level of understanding of the meta-vocabulary of games critique in general that might not really be conducive to good communication in a public article. Also, as much as this feels like a hipster reason, the term is overused, which not only diminishes its impact as a criticism, but opens the door for exactly this kind of set of differing viewpoints on what a simple word might mean. In the end I'm inferring and speculating just as much as you are, and that's because hundreds of reviews over the past decades have used the term "repetitive" - and trying to figure out who is using it in a thoughtful way and who is just picking their "games review word of the day" calendar off their desk is becoming more and more difficult. Alternatively this reviewer might just have found the game boring, but thought that "boring" doesn't sound as official and respectable as "repetitive". In which case I wish he'd just said boring rather than using another word that doesn't necessarily mean the same thing.

I've seen that kind of thing done before. Those experiments are meant to prove that certain primates have a sense of "fairness" - ie. if you somehow cheat them, they will respond negatively. It's pretty interesting to me that what we consider quite a complex and high-level concept, and struggle with on many levels in our socio-economic decision making, is already evolved in the group dynamics of "lesser" primates. Not that I think capuchin monkeys are going to solve our equality issues, but it's neat to see how these kinds of instincts exist in order to facilitate cooperation in species like ours.

Yeah, it's also worth noting that until recently runes were intended to be very special loot. It was extremely late in development that they became level unlocks for everyone. So even that pretty basic pillar of how the skill and progression systems work came about not so long ago.

Neat. Maybe I'll hang out there when I'm on Diablo, if anyone wants to dance in and out.

The only things that're special about my keyboard that I actually notice and use on a regular basis are media controls. I don't use the actual play/pause and skip buttons very much, but I use the volume control and mute button constantly as it's easier than getting up and going over to my speakers.

For my part I won't even play the game unless there's someone on my friends list playing at a level I want to play at. So you're always more than welcome to join a game I'm in. Sometimes you can hop in where it's clear everyone else is already on a voice chat system, which can be slightly awkward, but I doubt most people actually mind. Also regarding trading shit; I think it's good etiquette to keep an eye out for things that people you're playing with might want, and perhaps link them in chat, but since everyone has individual loot drops now it's not a big deal. Dibs showed up and gave me some sweet voodoo gear yesterday which was neat. It'd be great to have an Idle Thumbs Mumble server to drop in and out of for games like this, or just as a hub for whenever we're doing multiplayer games of any stripe, but I hesitate to make too big a deal of it because I don't have the money to follow this sentence with "and I've just rented one! Woo!".

Well since you mentioned Guilty Gear anyway, I have whiled away many an hour with a friend playing on some hacked community-run lobby server with Guilty Gear XX #Reload for the PC. It was never exactly hugely supported by the developers and at this point is basically abandonware, but hell I have had some fun times with that game. You do pretty much require a gamepad, though. Trying to play what is basically an arcade port with a keyboard is nonsense.

Yeah there definitely is a way to go back to the mobile theme, as I've used it on another site with this type of forum. I think it's near the bottom of the main page.

Boy, that'd annoy me. I use my home key all the time.

That's just... awful in so many ways. I can't even begin to enumerate them. I did laugh out loud several times, though.

I'm playing Game of Thrones for review right now. I wish I wasn't. The writing is abysmal, bland stereotypical fantasy at best. The voice acting is lifeless, dull at those times when it isn't actively at cross purposes with the storytelling, such as it is. If I find any amusing sections I'll see if they're up on YouTube, but honestly so far it's just kind of boringly and embarrassingly bad rather than entertainingly bad.