Chris

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the games are a lie

You're getting a broken chair instead. Yes, the chair that was broken during one of the episodes.

Edited by elmuerte
erm.. typos

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So about those video games I won... they're real, right? :hah:

All games press competitions are a lie. Amiga Power still owe me a stack of Amiga games for "Zeewolf In the Style of The Clangers" and "Micro Machines In The Style Of That Time Rich Pelley Drove His Mums Car On The Beach At Weston-Super-Mare And The Tide Took It Away".

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Okay, in the last couple of podcasts you talked about moral choices and also a the level of immersion in games.

Having just finished one of my final playthroughs in Dead Rising I'd be interested to hear your opinions on that game.

For me, the fact that saving a survivor garnered you as many points as dragging them in to a horde of zombies and taking a photograph of them in their 'death scene' brought up more moral quanderies than kicking a chicken.

That, early on, you are forced to choose between saving innocents or following the story speaks volumes to me rather than having a plot that twists and turns. In fact I'm inclined to say that DR follows the path of a simple story line that you argue that most of the best books have, in this case it is survival.

This is a game that also plays with your emotions as gamer. The save system is set up in a way that you can't approach it from a conventional quick save approach and as such makes you appreciate each subsequent playthrough as it unlocks more story and depth.

EDIT: My pizza was burning so I had to stop

I feel that the game, through not giving you devil horns or glowing halos, nor giving you an alignment score allows you to create much more personal stories. For example on my last escapade I tried to save this old lady from atop a kids playhouse but when I eventually convinced her to follow me (she called me her gentleman guide) I couldn't get her away from the zombies and after trying for 5 minutes I gave up and instead photographed her being ripped apart by zombies. I then went over to a shop and stopped a crazed, lesbian cop from murdering 4 women. These I escorted to safety, by chance, none of them condemned me for my previous brutal act and yet I still felt insanely guilty. This, to me, was far more effective.

So as to frame this as a question, agree, don't agree?

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Fucking Amiga Power...

Amiga Power was amazing!

You can still find Dave Green on the London games scene sometimes, and I'm not sure what happened to Jonathan Nash, but he did work on this fine and upstanding website for a while.

IS IT ACCEPTABLE?

A CORRESPONDENT WRITES: I have a child, which I believe is called Neville. Scarcely a moment passes in which it is not engaged in wasteful frivolity, or emitting a noise of the most unsettling description. The child is greatly in need of discipline, but its nanny is some kind of nannying socialist, preferring to pander to its whims for "companionship" and "food"; and my wife died while giving birth and is therefore of no help at all. Is it acceptable to spank an unruly child?

PROFESSOR PHAMBLEMELL REPLIES: No, sir! No, - it is not acceptable. Strike the child, sir; the child must be struck; - strike it with the fire-shovel to imbue in it both DISCIPLINE and a FEARFUL RESPECT of the power of coal, God's mystical flame-rock that is the THUNDERING HEART of Britain's industries. The nanny may be reported to the police, or flung into the cellar, as you see fit.

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All games press competitions are a lie. Amiga Power still owe me a stack of Amiga games for [...] "Micro Machines In The Style Of That Time Rich Pelley Drove His Mums Car On The Beach At Weston-super-Mare And The Tide Took It Away".

Woo, my home town! :woohoo::getmecoat

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Amiga Power was amazing!

I was just sharing your sentiments with you. I hardly know anything about the Amiga except it was supposedly kicking the normal IBM PC's ass everyday back then.

I don't think it ever caught on in the US, so to this day I don't think I've ever seen one, let alone played an Amiga game that wasn't ported to work in DOS.

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I always imagine the word "Amiga" to be sung to the tune of Leader of the Pack...

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I was just sharing your sentiments with you. I hardly know anything about the Amiga except it was supposedly kicking the normal IBM PC's ass everyday back then.

I don't think it ever caught on in the US, so to this day I don't think I've ever seen one, let alone played an Amiga game that wasn't ported to work in DOS.

RANDOM FACT: the CGI special effects for Babylon 5, a show with a small budget and big ambitions, were done in Video Toaster (an Amiga add-on) because it was relatively cheap.

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RANDOM FACT: the CGI special effects for Babylon 5, a show with a small budget and big ambitions, were done in Video Toaster (an Amiga add-on) because it was relatively cheap.

IMPROVED RANDOM FACT: Even though budgets for the final season were massive when compared to the original season, the effects teams still stuck with their faithful Amigas because they produced the best visual effects for B5. :tup:

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I always imagine the word "Amiga" to be sung to the tune of Leader of the Pack...

I always imagine it as "Amigaaaaa, you've gotta see her".

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Things from the last couple of episodes

Re: Championing the PC

The three things I remember being the pillars of the PC platform were the ability to patch games, free add-ons and expansions and the mod scene.

patching has obviously made it to the console. Sadly the last two, especially the mod scene, as really died off in recent years.

Re: compulsive saving

When I finished BioShock I had ~980Mb in saves.

Re: "Nu-nu-nucl-nuclear launch detected"

That brought back memories of playing C&C Red Alert at a LAN many years ago when we were still using Token-Ring networking. Because token-ring was rubbish the "Nuclear launch" sound used to ripple it's way out of each PCs speakers as packets went round the loop. What made it even better was as each player heard it they would launch their own missile which just made everything more crazy. Good times.

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I only have 150mb of bioshock games.

When I have to think about saving, the game is flawed.

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Maybe it's different on PC, but BioShock seems like the last game that would require compulsive quicksaving, seeing as there's a respawn spot every ten feet, and everything you killed stays dead even after you respawn.

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The vita chambers are still there on the pc, but I resorted to compulsive quicksaving anyway to specifically avoid using them because they felt too cheap. Ironically, I avoided an in-game difficulty modifier by using a meta one, breaking the game's flow to do so. Player psychology is a funny thing. :erm:

Actual question: Anything new from the City of Metronome team? You guys did an E3 preview on them ages back, and I vaguely remember hearing about some funding troubles, but not much since.

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Actual question: Anything new from the City of Metronome team? You guys did an E3 preview on them ages back, and I vaguely remember hearing about some funding troubles, but not much since.

Oh man, yeah, it looked pretty damn hot and the developers seemed cool and really with it. I remember (to touch upon that observation from one of the recent podcasts) the duders really had a fairly coherent if esoteric and elaborate explanation of their creative influences.

Anybody knows if the game is actually happening? This is not too reassuring. It says new trailer coming soon, but the copyright date on the picture is 2006. Well, they're not dead, but this still makes me emo.

:tmeh: :tmeh: :tmeh:

:tmeh: '';('' :tmeh:

:tmeh: :tmeh: :tmeh: ......:frown:

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From what I can tell those guys have had a pretty long and horrible journey trying to get any publisher support for Metronome. The originality and lack of track record probably made it very difficult to get any funding. They made have gotten close though. In 2007 I was pitching a project to a certain company, and the company rep randomly told us on his cig break that they were going to sign City of Metronome. It made me very excited.

It was also a bit weird because this company wasn't really a widely known name in game publishing, so it seemed like a cool coincide to hear they'd picked up Metronome. They were also very enthusiastic about investing in our project but then they never got back and it all fizzled out, so I'm assuming the same happened to them. :(

Anyway, I'm glad that a Rag Doll Kung Fu sequel has been outsourced to Tarsier. They seem like cool guys and I hope they'll succeed.

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I've heard F-Zero GX mentioned on the show many times and I was just wondering how many of you guys from the podcast have actually beaten it.

I haven't, yet.

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All games press competitions are a lie. Amiga Power still owe me a stack of Amiga games for "Zeewolf In the Style of The Clangers" and "Micro Machines In The Style Of That Time Rich Pelley Drove His Mums Car On The Beach At Weston-Super-Mare And The Tide Took It Away".

Wow! A fellow AP reader. Christ I used to look at those things every month. I even made a "Skidmarks in the Style Of Stunt Car Racer". Took me ages to make using Deluxe Paint. I was so pleased with it and couldn't wait to send it off. But then I went and irreversibly corrupted the file by placing a / in the filename with my Action Replay. (Why did it let me do it?!? Olaf Boehm, you deserve a good kicking for that.) *sniff*

Still, congrats on those efforts, shame they didn't send you anything. The basts.

Incidentally, I'm the John Walker mentioned on the letters page of issue 19. And my Mum really did write a letter in. Those were the days.

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I've heard F-Zero GX mentioned on the show many times and I was just wondering how many of you guys from the podcast have actually beaten it.

I haven't, yet.

Uh. I'm not on the show, but I've beaten it. On the hardest difficulty. The only thing I didn't manage to do was complete all the challenges on the hardest difficulty. Holy hell are those insanely hard. :frusty:

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76e9e65b6b13a818f4aab41fdecfc075.png Yeah, I don't either. (bird noise)

How awkward is it when you encounter folks from IGN at press events? How well do you folks and Matt Cassamawhatever and that dudelady named Hilary get along?

Love the show. Keep it up. (Checking out "You Look Nice Today," another podcast. Nothing to do with games, really really excellent.)

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e-mail is for people born in the 40ies.

I have a "re-question"

(Scroll down for tl;dr)

In ep.25 (1h 1m 40s) you adressed a question from ... Darkness(?), regarding Games as Drugs.

I got me thinking of another question than the one that was asked and answered.

I would like to hear some thoughts on making games as addictive as drugs.

(Not "Are games addictive? 'cause that would probably be pretty fruitless, seeing as there are still people who don't think cocain is addictive.)

When I heard ep.25 I was playing a game that I think is so poor/lacking that I don't want to mention its name, since I want people to either a) forget about it as soon as possible, or B) never ever learn of it...

Yet I could not stop playing that awful piece of *

When I heard "Games as a Drug" I started thinking about how slot-machines are designed.

The sounds and visuals are all created to draw attention to them, then give audio-visual stimulation.

So it has to draw you in, but not scare you away once you're there.

Then you have the "Near-Win"-factor, where the player is given the impression that they were close to winning.

Like Cherry, then banana, but the cherry is just above banana, and then cherry again. "Ah, almost won ... sooooo close ... " (When in fact you lost. Plain and simple. Nothing "almost" about it.)

Never "Total Failure!"

At first I discarded this idea on the basis of "Why would any dev/publisher want people to keep playing rather than buying new games?"

But as more games get revenue from in-game advertising, keeping people playing your games has more of an incentive. (There are other reasons of course.)

tl;dr Are more games now created to try and get people "hooked" rather than "playing"?

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