CaptainFish

I wouldn't really call Indiana Jones a Wise-Cracking Adventurer. I'd just like to put myself into the camp of thinking that Crystal Skull is a decent action film while Raiders is one of the greatest films of all time. The reliance on CG hurts CS, but I think my biggest issue are the scenes between the action set pieces. They don't have the artistry or subtlety of Raiders, the characters/actors can't really hold a candle to the original ones.

The older CRPGs like Baldur's Gate used to have some of those high stakes by virtue of being based off of AD&D. I was recently listening to a podcast where someone just played BG1 and it reminded me how harsh those games start off. At level 1 most of your party has single digit hit points, and you only go up to level 8 over the course of the entire game. It's very easy to lose and have a party wipe even if your tactics are on point, since there's probability built into everything you try to do. Origins still felt like that in spots, especially against the tough wraith enemies you'd find in each area. Maybe Inquisition would've benefitted from moving towards less combat scenarios overall, but having each one be highly tactical and difficult, rather than filling the game with lots of what seems like the least interesting combat a Dragon Age game has ever had*. Not that I think this would change Chris' time opinion that much, he said pretty similar stuff about Dark Souls 2 and that game is fairly challenging every step of the way. *My general impression from what I've heard about the game, maybe I'm totally off base. Combat has never been presented as a selling point in a lot of the material I've read for Inquisition, especially in comparison to how people lauded the return of classic CRPG gameplay when Origins released.

Considering Capcom's new version releases of Street Fighter II, with a bunch of new moves in Hyper Fighting/Turbo, reversals and combos in Super, and throw techs in Super Turbo and the changes in the multiple releases of Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter 3, changing meta in a somewhat recognizable game is an old trend. If even feels more like what we think of as an update now when you consider that a lot of these games were still played in arcade where switching to a new game just meant showing up and putting your change into a new machine. Sean and Chris' argument was pretty interesting, especially in light of a thread I was reading over at neogaf recently about the racial diversity of the Smash cast. What was presented* as a simple observation of a lack of minorities and suggestion that Doc Louis would make a good addition to smash as a somewhat prominent black Nintendo character was met with a lot of gross responses.That thread showed me a mindset that frivolity and cartoonishness and default whiteness go together through some logic that I can't really follow, and that suggestions otherwise are perceived as attacks on that core playfulness. So I agree with Chris' notion that having a somewhat mindless, fantastical, cartoonish or silly game does not mean that a white protagonist is a better fit than any other. I also see where Sean is coming from on his point, but I think that he would generally prefer a more thoughtful game in which all the design choices are deliberate and reasoned. Regarding Far Cry 4, I'm glad Danielle brought up the animals constantly attacking aspect. I saw the Giant Bomb quick look and the way roving bands of foxes attack you to their death and birds swoop in and trigger extreme in-your-face attack mini-cutscenes just made the whole thing seem like one of the latter-day Cabela's games where every single animal in the world is constantly trying to kill you. It actually put me off from the game quite a bit to be honest, the combination of high-fidelity animals from an animation and model standpoint with suicidally aggressive behaviour bums me out. I don't really see why it couldn't take a page out of MGS3 or even Shadow of the Colossus where the creatures act in a believable manner and doing what you have to do to win/survive means being the aggressor. *It wasn't presented very well, to be fair, but I still think the responses were unreasonable.

Didn't know that Top 100 list fact, I was genuinely surprised that she's the first female act, and who the other acts who followed themselves up are. It was really cool to see Puff Daddy's memorial song for Biggie was followed up by Mo Money Mo Problems. (Also woo! Boyz II Men )

I took Sean's comment from the angle of creating an asian antagonist who might read as a white person at a glance. Creating him so that misreading happens comes across as a planned idea to make your game cover seem like it has a white person on the cover so that it fits marketing data (ie looks like most other games on a shelf). That's way different than casting a well-known person for a movie and using makeup and costume to convey the same image. It would read as more of a deliberate choice and less of just a focus group conclusion. So when Danielle was talking about being called out for thinking Pagan Min was white, it just seemed like Sean was saying that that mistake happens by design (or redesign). The App Store discussion was interesting for someone who doesn't really engage with it at all, let alone looks at reviews. Seems like the same kind of outrage you see with other game stuff. I have been glad to receive free updates for Hitman GO, though.

I dunno that the Knuckles lore from the Adventure games matters anymore. Since Unleashed, which was the first turn back from the overdramatic writing to more cartoony stuff, the world has kind of just changed to accomodate whatever was going on.

SA 1 also retconned him to prefer flexing his muscles over chuckling. Knuckles fucking loved to chuckle! Just look at him!

Hmm, weirdly I have a way more negative reaction to Knuckles being dumb than him looking weird even though it fits into his character just as much as being more physically imposing than Sonic.

That's a really great point, all the callbacks in ME2 and 3 work well. They have the added bonus of taking the place of completely unknown lore that would normally fill those spaces.

The only Mass Effect choice I remember being in that grey zone was regarding Legion's loyalty mission in 2. Although there were a fair amount of choices that, while binary, felt like they dealt with more grey subjects like when your trust of a companion butts up against your protectiveness of military secrets/protocol. I was really disappointed that there didn't seem to be any choices like what you mention in DA:O where good intentions lead to completely unintended or 'bad' outcomes. Regarding choices "meaning anything" Jake's suggestion for having a character simply mention the aftermath of one of your choices would definitely be enough for me. The thing that bugs me about choice in games isn't a lack of branching, but a lack of any acknowledgement of your choices.* Dropping in simple nods like Jake mentioned where the player's thoughts can be echoed by the characters would definitely solve that problem. I think some of the reason some people prefer the systems based or branching based reactions is because they work even if the narrative fails to connect. Most of the time those systems clash against the narrative's attempts to connect with the player though. Alpha Protocol's character relationship system is one of the only ones I can think of where explicitly gaming your connections with people matched perfectly with the James Bond concept of treating ever person as a tool to completing your goal. Dragon Age: Origin's system of collecting and bestowing gifts on your party to make them like you makes a lot less sense, especially in the context of being in an urgent world saving situation (although having your party react to your decisions is effective). *I actually had an e-mail read about this regarding Ashley in Mass Effect 2.

Oh yeah I almost forgot that sound. It was like onomatopoeia for "I think this is dubious." Between that and the glass clink, it was a good episode for sound effects.

For me at least, the appeal of BoI not being in flash and running at a steady frame rate is a big draw. I really liked the concepts in the original and played like 40 hours of it but I stopped because the lagging just felt bad (something Edmund said was an issue himself). I recently heard they lost Danny's music though which seems terrible. I really enjoyed the glass clink after mentioning Chris' "Video Games" shirt.

The way Evil Within was described it reminded me of that recent Alone in the Dark where you're driving around while everything is crumbling around you. Speaking of advergames a lot of them get played by this group, Men Drinkin' Coffee, in . I like their sense of humour, but even outside of that, I learned that there are way more of these weird games than I remember. Stand outs include the Izzy the Olympic mascot game and the Taco Bell fps where you kill things by squirting sauces of various heat levels. The Gummi Bear game Danielle was thinking of was the Sour Patch Kids game World Gone Sour ( ). Method Man did a song and as well. Why? I have no idea.

I haven't tried Crimes and Punishments yet, but it was cool to hear Sean talk about it, especially from an adventure game designer's perspective. All the Sherlock Holmes games have been plagued with bad design and puzzles around a few smart moments. Silver Earring I remember being a pretty decent take on a Sherlock Holmes story, but it was heavily flawed. The idea that the games are more about replicating Watson's experience than Sherlock's seems to be built in to the series, though,at least in part. You're often taking the role of Watson investigating certain areas and often when you're piecing together the facts it's as Watson with Sherlock waiting to tell you if you got it right or not. It works pretty well in some circumstances as replicating the dynamic from the stories where Sherlock has already crystallized 99% of the circumstances behind a case, but uses Watson as a sort of talking evidence record to use as a sounding board (or sometimes just as a way to pass the time until the next character appears). But yeah, when you are in Sherlock's shoes, the puzzle design can be so obtuse and pixel hunt focused that you usually feel like the opposite of the great detective, oscillating between 4 locations struggling to find the hotspot to proceed. And like Sean says, when you control him there's always a disconnect between the player's bumbling and the character's hyper-deliberate actions. They really fall down flat at making you feel like Sherlock, but I don't really know how you accomplish that, because that character is basically an opaque black box you put evidence into so that you can open it for the big reveal later. The games succeed the most during crime scene analysis when they get as far away from generic adventure game design and performing pointless fetch quests. Each game has its own systems for actually observing the crime scene, and then you have to piece together what the evidence you discovered actually means by answering questions or matching deductions to circumstances on a fairly complex board.

Cacodemon! I guess I need to re-read the trilogy, a lot of that stuff went right past my middle school aged brain. I always pictured the cast as more diverse in the book than as it appears in the films, but I'm sure some of that is misreading. Still, it let me think of the Mordor peoples as just being symbols of corruption without seeing how they might be stand-ins for other races. I did notice the racial stuff among the 'good races' with some aryan and jewish overtones for elves and dwarves, though.

Super Smash Brothers Donnybrook Super Smash Brothers Fisticuffs Super Smash Brothers Skirmish Super Smash Brothers Disagreement

Yeah, Ride to Hell is pretty hilariously terrible. I'm not sure if I buy the 'too much on the plate' argument either. Yes there are a ton of bugs, issues and design flaws across systems that were due to scope, but it's also dumb and poor from a content perspective.

When Chris said "flashbang smoke screen" my mind just instantly went to "UHH EXCUSE ME FLASHBANGS DON'T CREATE SMOKE IN CS" in classic Chris overzealous nerd voice. I didn't even play that much Counter-Strike... Regarding Uwe Boll, I remember when Loading Ready Run, who are Victoria-based, did an interview with Uwe Boll who was living in either Vancouver or Victoria at the time. It was actually an inspiring take of him as an example of just getting the thing you want to make made despite industry roadblocks and critics. His stuff is all terrible, and the boxing thing was uh... weirdly vengeful, but it was an interesting angle on his career at least. As for boxing, I saw some critic boxing a young filmmaker recently. I guess the video is like 2 years old. The critic was clearly in much worse shape and much older and got beaten really soundly by the filmmaker. It's a super weird thing to just be a trend, but also an incredibly weird thing to agree to do. At least Lowtax was entertaining in his Uwe Boll match.

It seems like Early Access was removed from the Steam storefront with the new update (made optional I guess, but it's not on the front page by default). I wonder how people feel about that. It wasn't really servicing my needs so I'm fine with it, in general. A few too many games kinda fizzled out in an unsatisfying way.

It's different from formal play, excluding improv, but it's pretty similar to informal play like playing house or playing cops and robbers.

I really appreciate La-Mulana's design despite any issues with puzzles (of which I have many) because the sense of progression is so great. Both character and goal progress. You're given a set starting point, but once you get a little way into the temple it really opens up in a significant manner and you actually have a variety of challenges and puzzles, a lot of which you can take on in any order you choose. For a long while La-Mulana was just a thing that I booted up once a day until I solved a thing and it always felt like a fun enjoyable chunk. The character progression is also amazing. So many things you'd just think were core to how the player character plays are upgraded and enhanced over the course of the game that you really feel the value of every item you find and puzzle you solve. It does start to get messy when you start running out of puzzles and options as you come closer to finishing the game, and genuine frustration can set in. I'd definitely agree with Henroid's recommendation to write down and draw the hints you come across, or use screenshots. Pretty much every piece of text in the game is important. The remake seems pretty good from what I've played of it, but I really miss the MSX-inspired original art, music and references that were in that first game. I could tell that stuff was important to the creator and that importance stuck with me through the experience of playing the original version. It felt especially interesting because the MSX was a system that I hadn't engaged with at all (outside of Metal Gear 1 and 2) and that doesn't get a lot of direct homage when retro releases are made.

While I like the non-profit/museum/collect donations solution, Anita was right that it kind of implies that our current media is post-racial. There's a lot of exploitative stuff in a lot of media, and a lot of it isn't even that much more savvy than those cartoons. Bugs bunny fighting a racial stereotype villain is bad, but Bioshock Infinite being a decorative shawl of racial "insight" draped over a bloody woodchipper is also bad, and I wouldn't have minded seeing that for free after realizing that's all it was. So along with not taking money for the obviously bad old stuff, it would be good to contextualize it to show exactly what harmful things it's couched in, while also conveying that not taking money for those older things doesn't mean that the current entertainment that is making money isn't also exploitative.

Must be all the yellow feathers.

Man, I didn't consider Lovecraft when that discussion was going on. I've definitely watched a bunch of offensive portrayals in cartoons, and they don't really bother me at all. I dunno what it is about them, but they seem toothless in a way. Uh, this is excluding Song of the South, which I either haven't seen or don't remember. Lovecraft on the other hand, hit me really hard when I attempted to read it. I'm not really a stranger to reading older fiction and coming across racist thought processes and language (because that's most older fiction). However, I often come across those works from an academic standpoint, and they're framed with that stuff in mind. However, on the internet, the discussions of Lovecraft's work and derivative work that I was engaged in was completely separated from that aspect. All I heard about his work was a deep respect for his take on horror using these powerful creatures whose indifference towards man is so potent as to be malicious while the people discovering them struggle with their minds in trying to comprehend them. So, I was crushed when I attempted to read my first Lovecraft in a little anthology from the library, to find that it's also couched in this deeply racist and hateful viewpoint. I still haven't read any of his stuff. I was already thinking it's valuable to show works that are from a time when extremely offensive portrayals were more widely accepted, so that we have a good sense of history, but bringing up Lovecraft just intensifies that desire. I still enjoy Lovecraft-derivative works and love those his horror concepts, but I think being able to separate that from other sensibilities in his work to the point that you can enjoy and espouse it without ever engaging in it is extremely disingenuous.