CaptainFish

You could use this to describe the alien race of humans in pretty much every game ever.

I feel like thumbs posts here have discussed the sexist nature of his comments well enough, but after reading the original Eurogamer article, the whole premise of the design seems misguided. TF2, one of the greatest multiplayer shooters, excels a lot because it presents a wide variety of play styles between each class, with each one playing off the strengths of the player. Are you extremely good at fast twitch headshots? Play sniper. Can you easily determine intersecting trajectories of slow projectiles and opponents? Play soldier or demoman. Have a good sense of spatial awareness in setting up defense and traps? Play engineer. It set up these different play aspects without ever overtly presenting the idea of being good or bad at first person shooters. It's all about providing gameplay mechanics that appeal to certain skillsets. Once upon a time (before all the crazy items) I'm sure people cut their teeth on medic because it allowed you to focus on learning positioning without dealing with having to aim, all while not being insulted, neat! This Borderlands 2 article comes across as crass and dumb. Can't get a headshot? Well you must suck! This seems like a boring misguided way to look at shooter design. It's even more insulting when you consider that Borderlands 1 is a game in which enemies appear, run directly at you while you point your gun in one direction until they die. It's not a nuanced high skill ceiling shooter at all. On the other hand, trying to entice people into the medium and saying that they suck, rather than they are unfamiliar with the controls and baggage the medium has makes it sound like you don't actually care about enticing people into the medium. This stood out to me particularly, because in learning Dota 2 and teaching a few friends, I always teach them lich first. When they ask I always say it's because lich has very strong tools to help your team win, and to keep him alive while you're still learning other things about the game. Things like passively taking away xp from the enemy, a nuke that has good damage and a slow, and a ult that does great damage that gets better as you learn to read situations better and great movement speed. I don't tell them they're a baby and can't handle skillshots like us seasoned pros so why don't you take this cute* easy baby character. Because that would make me sound like a doucher. *Cute is more a reference to Borderlands 2 guy's statements than anything you could say about lich I feel like you've taken something away from us as an audience.

Okay. After failing to get on a server normally (not enough community ones up initially, with like 78 minute waiting times) I heard my friends got in. I actually got a smaller group together, bought tickets and traded them to two of them, failed to trade to the third because stuff was way too buggy, so he had to get his own. Then we hopped in Mann Up mode (every player needs a ticket for it), which has shorter queues but is also maybe a super hard version of the regular mode. So... the choice seems to be queue for like 20 minutes for a single game, or queue for 5 and not be able to beat it. Hopefully it'll become a bit more reliable once more servers go up and what not. The actual game was pretty fun, but the bots are actually way more competent than i would've expected. Engineer, demo and soldier seem really fun because they have automated attacks or splash damage. The game also tends to send really tough high hp targets while you're still dealing with scouts who push the bomb to the target really fast. Of course this was the hard (?) mode so it's not a fair assessment of the difficulty. On the plus side, the music from the trailer totally plays when the robots arrive, and even though it can be tough, it's satisfying to kill them. One thing I am bummed out about is that the bots are the blue team, and you play the red team, so the image of both sides coming together to fight a common foe doesn't really play out in-game (unless I'm missing something). Anyhoo, will play more to try and get a feel for it.

You need a ticket per 'mission' which is a map.

Yeah that part does seem kinda gross. I'd definitely want to see how the ToD missions differ from just playing the free maps. At the very least it seems that once you pay a dollar and play a mission in a Tour of Duty, you can play that mission as many times as you want in the Mann Up servers.

Day 3! http://www.teamfortress.com/mvm/ http://www.teamfortr...com/mvm/bounty/ http://www.teamfortress.com/mvm/faq/

Day 2 whoo! http://www.teamfortress.com/mvm/ http://www.teamfortress.com/mvm/mercs/

After watching the launch... film (I feel like callling it a trailer is inaccurate) several times, my favourite part by far is after the mercs meet up and are waiting for the bots to appear. The vocal music and short lower notes just feels so much like L4D in the best way (the lower notes even sound like special infected stingers). And then the vehicle arrives and it's obscured except for the lights.... It's the best.

I actually got most of my success alternating the left pair and right pair. I had a lot of trouble on stone sections where CLOP can't get any traction. Edit: I've only managed to get about halfway. I get good momentum on flat sections but have to do the same pattern really slowly to actually walk up the inclines without flipping over backwards.

I find it more lame because it's a kill response, most likely for killing a lady, playing off the suffer pun. But also, she's a queen so she wouldn't want suffrage for anyone, unless the Kingdom of Pain is a constitutional monarchy. Save that line for the Presidentrix of Pain.

Don't forget, she's royalty too. A royal pain am I right!? Actually, I wish they had chosen to play up the royal aspect over the succubus aspect, just put her in giant robes with a crown but oh well. The main reason I asked about if it was the voices, is because female visual character design isn't all that inspired or varied in Dota 2. Also, I guess she totally says this?

I'm actually super interested in the argument against Queen of Pain, and if it's all voice, is it okay if you turn the voice off? While I do generally like the super goofy lines and puns, my learning friend who plays lich definitely got tired of constant ice puns. It almost seems like a built in reason to make you want to play more heroes: you get to hear more voices.

That feeling that Chris described of learning the Fez language just by sheer amount of exposure reminds me of my experience playing the IF The Gostak. That's a bit different because it's not an explicitly translated language, it's all context based, but by the end I definitely had the implicit understanding of the language just from playing it so much.

How do you guys feel about the player knowing more than the protagonist in how it's handled in the LucasArts adventures? Pretty much all the classic ones would cut to the villain's actions, and you even mentioned that part of Full Throttle in a previous cast.

Is the first enclosure phase in Rampart automatic? Game looks really nice visually, I love the depth that appears in the cannon phase.

Did anyone else feel like the big intro reveal was completely unnecessary? I don't think it ever came up outside of an optional spot behind the monarch theatre and conversations with the related dude at the very end. It's like they put that in and just forgot.

Just downloaded and beat this game today, because of this post. Amazing game. Great music! I love MGS 1, 2 and 3, and the MSX Metal Gear games too. I still haven't played 4 (although I own a copy). I really enjoyed the stealth stuff in Metro 2033 for the small touches they put in. I was going through the first one trying to throwing knife everyone to death when a knife bounced off some metal (magazine or armor, don't remember) on an enemy's shirt. Something about the veracity of that blew me away. I'm tepid on Splinter Cell. I played through the first one this year, and the clunkiness of it turned me off. I also rented it at the time and didn't have a ton of fun. I've played through Double Agent and started Chaos Theory, but I just don't care for them for some reason. I really feel bad since Chaos Theory is lauded as amazing, but I stopped after a couple hours.

The warzone aspect kinda bummed me out. First off, I assume that is late gameplay, once the threat as escalated. Even so, I liked the sinister nature of being in a completely mundane place with hidden aliens lurking around every corner. Now there are sandbag walls, aliens that can summon waist high cover and you're having wild shootouts in the streets. It's really the only thing I've seen that has disappointed me so far. One thing I really liked about the first two games is the way a level would start out fine, but through the tactical choices made it was very different by the end. You could see where you decided to blow open a wall or take out a light, and where the ground had been scorched by attempted sniping. They probably won't have as much deformation as those games, but I hope that at least the alien structures have variation in where they appear. I really like the callback to the mind control stuff of the first two games. At least, it seemed like mc and not just alien tech reproduction. That was a fantastic mechanic, I hope it makes it in the new one.

I just beat Runaway: A Road Adventure. It was alright. One thing I think I enjoyed more than The Next Big Thing was the camera work. Since all the dialogue occurs on the game screen, rather than zooming in for closer shots, the closer camera of Runaway is much preferred to the often zoomed all the way out stuff in TNBT. I'm not sure how I feel about the mechanic where you can find multiple things in one place, but only after you know that you need them. That coupled with some kinda pixel-hunt-y things meant that I usually knew the solution for a puzzle but had no idea where to find the item. The game seemed a little bit cutscene heavy, but I'm not sure how I feel about that. There are usually points in adventure games where there is a big important dialogue, and you get the chance to choose every option and go through in your order. If you take that and turn it into a cutscene with more animation and production, that should be better, right? I think I end up feeling less engaged. One example that comes to mind is the big dialogue in the penultimate act of Curse of Monkey Island, just before you get turned into a child. It's one of my favorite parts, I love annoying LeChuck "my way." I'm not sure if I would like it as much if it had just been a scene that played, even if it had better music and more dynamic camera and animations. (Maybe I should've just used the pirate song as a better example) This complaint might be unfair, but I think Brian talks way too much. He basically performs descriptive audio for the vision impaired. I don't think there's a single animation that occurs that he doesn't narrate before and after. I understand that adventure protagonists talk a lot, but usually it feels like they're reacting to what's going on, not just explaining everything to the audience. Maybe it's because he's the straight man and all he's capable of saying are matter-of-fact statements, but by the end of the game I just wish he would stop yammering. Anyhoo, I'm definitely going to play the last two because I'm kinda interested in the plot arc (the cover of the 3rd game has me intrigued).

Braid guy has to jump over the green monsters.

The complaint that you can just walk over every square inch pressing x seems unfair to me. This isn't the 16-bit era anymore. Worlds have enough fidelity now that you can explore them like a sane person. If the argument is that you can find things without being prompted first, that's a matter of opinion. I can see how being able to find hidden things without some notion of it being there, could seem off. However, the argument that it's bad that you can find everything if you're thorough is kinda dumb. They probably thought about implementing time limits or Indigo Prophecy style penalty interactions, and decided that those constructs were too contrived. Should the crime scenes have been unrealistically big? Should there have been mini games for finding evidence? It seems they chose a system that is, on one hand, easy to break, but more engrossing on the other.

Brink has full Steamworks support, so you can alt-tab, right click on steam, click servers and do all your browsing, filtering and favoring there. The in-game browser was really bad at launch (it actually had an unusable frame rate) so I haven't gone back since.

That's a bummer. The Deep Roads section was one of my favorites, because they position it as this huge super deep dungeon, and my first thought was that it would be like every other place. Then you go in and each dungeon is bigger than the others and there are more of them. It was great when you fight that almost infinite horde of darkspawn at the bridge. It was one of the few game moments I can remember that had a mechanical design that matched the fiction. I know some people thought it was too long, but that could've been solved with some changes to loot mechanics.

An un-epic story sounds alright, if "you have to save the world" isn't the plot. Uninteresting is another story... The repeating dungeons thing sounds like a bummer. I know they did that in Mass Effect 1 (although it's a different genre), but there they also had all those unique planets. I recently played through Dragon Age, and I really enjoyed all the variety in the dungeon design. You had the huge Circle of Magi tower, the Veil section there (partially reused), all the different Orzammar dungeons, the Denerim alienage quest dungeons and the Redcliffe castle. That's only naming my favorites. Are the dungeons in DA2 as large as the ones in Origins, or are they more like the ME side encounters?

It's a bot so I guess that's a reference? There seem to be a ton of bot names. I didn't even notice the Castro Situation, good eyes Brannigan. I also like this screenshot, because <- Look at screenie first.