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I've been curious about The Shivah. Can you tell us any more about what you thought of it?

I got it when it was momentarily available for free (special thingy for Yom-Kippur I think) so I'm not sure if it would warrant the $5 they're asking. Not to be harsh on it as it does succeed in making you feel like you're conducting an investigation (and features full voice acting), but is quite short if you don't get stuck in a silly manner like I did (by not reading the readme.txt manual). It took me longer than 3 hours, but I would imagine if you didn't get stuck like me, you would probably be done with it in well less than that. There is a demo: http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/mayoco/project/media/shivah.zip

Prototip: There's an autosave, but there is also at least one point where you can continue past a decision that locks you into a less-than-optimal ending so you probably want to keep multiple manual saves if you do get it.

I think Chris mentions it in a podcast, let me see...podcast 45?

There's a link (I think) to the relevant excerpt on the wadjet eye site:

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/shivahThumb.mp3

The story is IMO well executed as well. Nuanced, kind of noir-dark in a rabbinical-crisis-of-faith manner which was new to me and neat. My only real criticism is that it's short, really. Which if you come from the always-leave-em-wanting-more school of thought may be a good thing. *shrug*

There's some press coverage link on this page:

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/shivah.html?page=press

Edited by juv3nal
add quote/add some stuff about story + press page link

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Finally beat GTAIV -- completely. As in I got every reasonable Achievement (ie. not based around multiplayer). Finished it 100% and how have unlimited ammo with which to sow destruction onto the city.

I'm glad I did it, but I'm not sure if I really feel any major sense of achievement, though :-/

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I got it when it was momentarily available for free (special thingy for Yom-Kippur I think) so I'm not sure if it would warrant the $5 they're asking. Not to be harsh on it as it does succeed in making you feel like you're conducting an investigation (and features full voice acting), but is quite short if you don't get stuck in a silly manner like I did (by not reading the readme.txt manual). It took me longer than 3 hours, but I would imagine if you didn't get stuck like me, you would probably be done with it in well less than that. There is a demo: http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/mayoco/project/media/shivah.zip

Prototip: There's an autosave, but there is also at least one point where you can continue past a decision that locks you into a less-than-optimal ending so you probably want to keep multiple manual saves if you do get it.

I think Chris mentions it in a podcast, let me see...podcast 45?

There's a link (I think) to the relevant excerpt on the wadjet eye site:

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/shivahThumb.mp3

The story is IMO well executed as well. Nuanced, kind of noir-dark in a rabbinical-crisis-of-faith manner which was new to me and neat. My only real criticism is that it's short, really. Which if you come from the always-leave-em-wanting-more school of thought may be a good thing. *shrug*

There's some press coverage link on this page:

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/shivah.html?page=press

Can I ask; are you Jewish? And whichever answer you give, how did you respond to a Jewish/rabbi themed game?

(I'm Jewish myself, fyi)

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I've been curious about The Shivah. Can you tell us any more about what you thought of it?

It's an awesome little adventure game that is great value for money and a lot maturer (in a good way) than 99% of games out there.

You mentioned something about the Jewish aspects of the game. I'm not Jewish myself, but I would say that it appeared respectful of Judaism (the game's designer is Jewish, too). Also, here's what Jewish Week said about it.

I'm not sure what your reservations are, but I think it's a great little game that should definitely be played by fans of old school adventures.

Only $4.99!

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Oh, I didn't mean about respectfulness. Just on the level of whether it makes sense to someone who isn't Jewish. Also, I was wondering how you'd react to the issues and themes it raises, given that you'd probably have a very different game experience to what I would have.

I think I shall put this one on my very long games 'To Do' list.

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Oh, I didn't mean about respectfulness. Just on the level of whether it makes sense to someone who isn't Jewish. Also, I was wondering how you'd react to the issues and themes it raises, given that you'd probably have a very different game experience to what I would have.

Um, to be honest, I really don't think you'll have a "very different game experience" from me... the game isn't THAT Jewish. It's driven by a compelling storyline and by rounded characters... I think anyone could relate to it.

Also, as Chris pointed out in the podcast, it's a very short game in a very good way... You can get a lot of satisfaction out of it in a small amount of time.

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Can I ask; are you Jewish? And whichever answer you give, how did you respond to a Jewish/rabbi themed game?

I'm not Jewish, but I thought playing a Rabbi was interesting and it made sense to me. The "rabbinical answer" was a neat touch and, not to get too spoilery, you do get to see it both "succeed" and "fail" in your interactions with others. I would agree with ThunderPeel2001 that the appeal is largely universal.

It wasn't proselytizing at all (which I understand Jews don't generally do) which would have turned me right off.

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I recently did my first play through as the US in Hearts of Iron 3. Just an amazing game.

I used spies in Canada to make it seem like they were more of a threat to the US public than they actually were. I also used propaganda at home to create national unity as well as have the people more likely to invade an actual country. By the time I could declare war (June 1940), Poland, France, Belgium, mainland Denmark, the Netherlands, and most of North Africa was under control of the Axis forcing Canada to join the Allies. I took a gamble and declared war on Canada despite not having any firm alliances.

The invasion only took about two weeks before every main city fell. The next 3 months was spent pushing Great Britain out of the Americas. For my next battle plan, I would require access to German-controlled territory as they had Iceland in their firm grip. Despite not being in the axis, Germany signed a non-aggression pact with me and gave me military access to their territories.. I created a forward base in Newfoundland to take over Greenland, then set up in Iceland for my grand assault.

On December 7th, 1941 (heh), I launched everything I had in a surprise attack against Scotland in order to have a firm hold on some land before the final assault into lower England. This ruse proved successful, and provided me a great amount of defense (since I was in the mountains) as the Brits attempted to push me off their island. I used combined air and naval raids to give myself complete superiority in those fields which helped give me the edge to finally capture London.

I spent the next four years aligning myself with Russia (as Germany never declared war on them), giving myself a giant Bear of an ally in Eastern Europe and Asia. I turned on Germany, eventually taking over all of Europe, as well as liberating Yugoslavia and Republican Spain from Fascist rule. Viva la revolucion socialismo!

The greater Socialist Anglo Empire was created. :)

Edited by Michalius

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Broken Sword: Director's cut, the DS version.

Don't know why I never completed the original on PC, I played 5-7 years ago about half of the game, got stuck and I guess I just forgot about it then.

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Since 2010 started I finished Dragon Age, Assassin's Creed, Torchlight and Resident Evil 5. Not a bad start and I hope I manage to finish Mass Effect 2 before I get back to work next week.

As for some quick thoughts on the finished games:

Dragon Age: I don't really care much about fantasy settings but while the world itself didn't engage me the little details more than made up for it. The combat was also ridiculously satisfying and managed to find that sweet spot of being challenging without ever being frustrating.

Assassin's Creed: I forced myself to finish it in preparation for the sequel. Pretty much agree with the general consensus that it's a good 2 hour game hidden under 10 hours of tedium.

Torchlight: Never liked Diablo but rather liked Torchlight. Go figure.

Resident Evil 5: I'm never playing a game designed for co-op alone ever again. But when Sheva wasn't dying I actually did enjoy the game a lot (Until it started throwing enemies with guns at me and forcing me to use one of the clunkiest cover systems I've ever seen).

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Hrmm... I think recently I finished Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, and Prince of Persia on Game Boy Color.

Uncharted was fun, if not boring a lot. The gunfights near the end were a lot more fun to duck and hide with a good variety of environments and layouts instead of the gunfights near the middle which were just running around Ruins #324 and using the same guns over and over. Jetski parts were complete crap. I didn't expect much from the story, so it was fun. Also, unlocking all of that gorgeous concept art was worth it for the trophies. I can't believe how much great art was produced for the game. Some of it makes me sad because as detailed as the game is, it doesn't look anywhere as good as the traditional art produced for the concept.

I need to win on Hard and Crushing to unlock the rest of the art.

Twin Snakes was my first foray into Metal Gear outside the NES versions, and I enjoyed it, if not overly wordy and having more cutscenes than actual game. I guess I'm not that upset coming from an adventure game background, since I'm used to tons of talking. The dialogue was no where as amateurishly written or full of meaningless verbal diarrhea as something like The Longest Journey. It also didn't contain the onslaught of nonstop words and dialogue like any Josh Mandel written adventure or Infocom made game, so it's refreshing in a way. Too bad I missed this game when it actually came out over a decade ago.

I liked the cheesy added slo-mo action stuff, but I know a lot of people were unhappy with it. I enjoy all the little easter eggs within the game and going through lists of "things to try" on the internet. I have to get the rest of the dog tags, so I'm not exactly done. I've gotten both endings, and was overly satisfied with the Meryl one. The Otacan was goofy, but maybe not worth having me rewatch all the cutscenes with little differences.

And Prince of Persia on Game Boy Color was apparently made by a team who didn't feel they had to complete the game themselves, as there is a show stopping bug right before you meet your reflection self for the first time. The screen glitches out and everything turns into garbage, with no way around it. Somehow I was able to get around this by doing a soft reset with A+B+select+start, with the game loading up again without color, and having to finish the level from the beginning that way. I can't imagine most people would do this, though.

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As I've been recounting in this thread, I just finished Neverwinter Nights 2. It was really good, if you can get past the still-rather-severe-buggy-ness-despite-years-of-patches. One thing I've noticed as I've started Dragon Age is that they essentially copied the influence system straight out of Neverwinter Nights 2, with the one addition of "gifts." I haven't seen this relationship mentioned anywhere else, but I guess it's nice that Bioware is paying attention to increasingly-distant cousin Obsidian's work!

Other than that, it's been a long time since I've *finished* a game. Been really good at starting them, though.

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I just finished my replay of Mass Effect in anticipation of ME2. Took me about 14 hours, according to the timer thing in-game. Goddamn that's a fantastic game. I'd forgotten how much I loved it. Now to start downloading my pre-order of ME2 off Steam.

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Finished infamous a couple of days ago. Sidequests were a bit filler-y and I wish there was more puzzly find-the-next-handhold-platforming like the climb up Arden's tower, but decent overall. I do wish bioware (I'm looking at you, both DA:O & ME2) would pick up on the aggressive checkpointing style that I saw in infamous and uncharted 2. I know people complain about the regen thingies in bioshock and all, but as someone with not so much free time to play games, only having to redo the last 5 minutes when I die instead of the last 25 is a real boon.

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Just finished Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. I liked it. But the whole aiming and shooting is terrible, a mouse it much better. I wish the game had more adventuring it. It's now pretty much moving onwards to the next prepared battle field. It's just like GoW and Mass Effect 2, you can see that you are about to be attacked because there are all these half height walls in an area. It's a shame so many bonus things are locked behind getting achievements. I love watching making-of and concept art stuff. And it would be great if that stuff is unlocked after completing a relevant segment of the game, rather than buy collecting hidden treasures and getting achievements for killing X people with weapon Y.

The jeep chase has a nice change of gameplay.

Traveling up the river with a jetski was a bit annoying.

. Anyway, the whole atmosphere of the game is great, can't wait to play the next one. (But first Mass Effect 2, and Bioshock 2, and Brutal Legend, ..., crap...)

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I just finished System Shock 2, after first playing the thing years ago and never completing it. Lame ending, awesome experience otherwise. I played it in its original form, without any texture or gameplay mods, and I didn't feel like I was ever overly conscious of its age from a technical standpoint.

It's totally understandable why these kinds of intricate, unwieldy mechanics have fallen out of favor in modern game design, particularly in action games, and I don't know if they're necessarily better than the streamlined form they take in similar games like BioShock, but there is something really rewarding about having so much control over your character, mastering such an involved system over the course of a dozen or more hours.

Also goddamn what an amazing story structure.

The whole three-way power struggle between Xerxes, The Many, and Shodan was fantastic. None of those three forces can directly harm each other; they can influence other entities, but it's purely through the player that each of them at their core can be affected and harmed.

Xerxes is, essentially, the AI version of the consummate solder who's been co-opted: he just keeps on doing his job, regardless of what's going on around him, never passing judgment or thinking critically. The Many is many-bodied but single-minded, pursuing its own end with total brute force. And Shodan is brilliant and manipulative but physically powerless and somewhat unhinged in her passion to achieve her goals, knowing that she can achieve nothing without the help of a human she despises--and that works the other way, since as the player you have no way of defeating The Many or even Shodan herself without her assistance.

The whole thing is very Silence of the Lambs. The ostensible villain, The Many, is far less sinister and worrisome than the entity whose intelligence you need to defeat that villain.

There was also a wonderful moment in the game that proved a much-needed raising of spirits that I wish were echoed in games like Half-Life or BioShock, which both feature the player as effectively the sole survivor of a horribly devastated environment. Throughout the game you're following the progress of a number of crew members of the Von Braun, most of whom are eventually killed or transformed. But at one point you catch a glimpse of two survivors, Tommy and Rebecca, finally succeed in their plan of activating the last remaining escape pod and jettisoning to safety. I've rarely been so relieved by a moment in any video game than I was at that point, knowing that at least my efforts are achieving something in human terms.

Video games always ask us to be satisfied with the knowledge that we've just saved the world, or the human race, but that's a totally abstract accomplishment, and it usually comes only upon completion of the game, when as players we're no longer invested in the gameplay. Selfish though it may be, as humans we can always empathize more with people we know than with people represented only as statistics or pronouns, and I felt I had come to know the many crew members whose progress I had been erratically tracking, always one step behind. Seeing at least one pair of them make it off this derelict hellish vessel, possibly thanks to the scores of mutants I had been methodically exterminating, was a genuine relief.

(It's true that, in the game's final cutscene, Tommy and Rebecca's achievement is essentially nullfied. But that doesn't nullify the significance of their escape during the game itself; and since that whole cutscene was silly to begin with, as admitted by Ken Levine, who reveals it was constructed externally, that moment holds much less resonance for me.)

Anyway, awesome game.

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System Shock 2 is one of those games I've heard about for years and years but never had a chance to play when it came out.

I'll have to hunt down a copy, though my Steam-spoiled baby ways cause me to be very, very sad I can't buy it somewhere online.

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System Shock 2 is one of those games I've heard about for years and years but never had a chance to play when it came out.

Same for me, along with a thousand other games that came out between 1998 and 2003 or 2004, since I had no resources with which to play anything.

I just beat Dragon Age as a female dwarf noble. Man, that was really super. I haven't been that into a game in quite a while. I kind of want to start a new character, but I have so many other games I haven't even touched since I've been playing it.

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Yep. I only played System Shock 2 about 2 years ago, just like Deus Ex.

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I just finished System Shock 2, after first playing the thing years ago and never completing it. Lame ending, awesome experience otherwise. I played it in its original form, without any texture or gameplay mods, and I didn't feel like I was ever overly conscious of its age from a technical standpoint.

It's totally understandable why these kinds of intricate, unwieldy mechanics have fallen out of favor in modern game design, particularly in action games, and I don't know if they're necessarily better than the streamlined form they take in similar games like BioShock, but there is something really rewarding about having so much control over your character, mastering such an involved system over the course of a dozen or more hours.

Also goddamn what an amazing story structure.

The whole three-way power struggle between Xerxes, The Many, and Shodan was fantastic. None of those three forces can directly harm each other; they can influence other entities, but it's purely through the player that each of them at their core can be affected and harmed.

Xerxes is, essentially, the AI version of the consummate solder who's been co-opted: he just keeps on doing his job, regardless of what's going on around him, never passing judgment or thinking critically. The Many is many-bodied but single-minded, pursuing its own end with total brute force. And Shodan is brilliant and manipulative but physically powerless and somewhat unhinged in her passion to achieve her goals, knowing that she can achieve nothing without the help of a human she despises--and that works the other way, since as the player you have no way of defeating The Many or even Shodan herself without her assistance.

The whole thing is very Silence of the Lambs. The ostensible villain, The Many, is far less sinister and worrisome than the entity whose intelligence you need to defeat that villain.

There was also a wonderful moment in the game that proved a much-needed raising of spirits that I wish were echoed in games like Half-Life or BioShock, which both feature the player as effectively the sole survivor of a horribly devastated environment. Throughout the game you're following the progress of a number of crew members of the Von Braun, most of whom are eventually killed or transformed. But at one point you catch a glimpse of two survivors, Tommy and Rebecca, finally succeed in their plan of activating the last remaining escape pod and jettisoning to safety. I've rarely been so relieved by a moment in any video game than I was at that point, knowing that at least my efforts are achieving something in human terms.

Video games always ask us to be satisfied with the knowledge that we've just saved the world, or the human race, but that's a totally abstract accomplishment, and it usually comes only upon completion of the game, when as players we're no longer invested in the gameplay. Selfish though it may be, as humans we can always empathize more with people we know than with people represented only as statistics or pronouns, and I felt I had come to know the many crew members whose progress I had been erratically tracking, always one step behind. Seeing at least one pair of them make it off this derelict hellish vessel, possibly thanks to the scores of mutants I had been methodically exterminating, was a genuine relief.

(It's true that, in the game's final cutscene, Tommy and Rebecca's achievement is essentially nullfied. But that doesn't nullify the significance of their escape during the game itself; and since that whole cutscene was silly to begin with, as admitted by Ken Levine, who reveals it was constructed externally, that moment holds much less resonance for me.)

Anyway, awesome game.

DAMMIT! This is why, Mr Remo, us thumbs would love you to start podcasting again. Your views and overall analysis of games is second to none, apart from maybe Nick's or Jake's.

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Just finished Dead Space finally this morning.

Had some hardware problems in the beginning when I started to play this back in December.

Play time was around 12 hours which I guess was quite normal. Played it on the medium difficulty and apparently it is even more survival horror on the harder difficulties. I had no problems getting ammo and medikits with medium difficulty, almost felt like they had put too much helpful items everywhere.

The story had suspense and I really liked the whole atmosphere in the game. I think this would've been even more disturbing to play during the night, which I didn't do...

As said in the Dead Space thread, I want to buy the Dead Space: Extraction game next. I actually watched yesterday Dead Space: Downfall so it's a real DS crazy momentum going on now.

Dead Space 2 doesn't sound that interesting, I get the feeling this game works as it's own already enough well.

I have the same feeling about Bioshock 2 as I have about Dead Space 2, even though Hot Scoops Gaynor is working on Bioshock...

Of course Isaac being insane now and having tormented visions of his girlfriend, that could lead to all kinds of interesting situations in the second game. Though the developers said recently that the second one will have less survival horror and more straightforward action so that's a letdown for me...

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