Thyroid

Bastion

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Alright, after my day at PAX I can say I didn't see this, however what I did see looked* awesome and in the similar style we were discussing here, it was both Wakfu and whatever other game Ankama Games had on display(Dofus?)

Similar style going, just one was executed so much nicer. Though I will say the Zelda/Diablo homage gameplay sounds more interesting.

*visually, the animation and game play was pretty meh

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Interesting concept, I wish it had been done on a game like Deathspank so the writers could focus more on making their jokes in a more traditional way, rather than trying to ram it into every possible flavour text.

That's funny because that's exactly what Deathspank did. Not one bit of dialogue in that game was near serious or having any kind of character or plot point. Every bit of dialogue was the set up for a joke and every action was the set up for a let down. It really got on my nerves after a while. Not sure how long you spent with the game. All this besides that the game thinks it's hilarious to kill turtles, eat poop, and collect poop.

You seem to be talking more about Monkey Island for that kind of humor. Deathspank is almost on par with a Leslie Nielsen movie with the kind of "non-stop laughs."

That said Bastion does not seem to be the bastion for high time comedy and great writing, but it may bring something to the table in terms of gameplay.

Edited by syntheticgerbil

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Just been watching the live demo of this on Giant Bomb. Looks unbelievably good! The narration is a nice gimmick that hopefully endures rather than becoming annoying, but the actual gameplay looks really solid. The graphics remind me of the beautiful high-end 2D games from the Saturn/Playstation era, but at a nice resolution and with modern scaling.

Really exciting!

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That's funny because that's exactly what Deathspank did. Not one bit of dialogue in that game was near serious or having any kind of character or plot point. Every bit of dialogue was the set up for a joke and every action was the set up for a let down. It really got on my nerves after a while. Not sure how long you spent with the game. All this besides that the game thinks it's hilarious to kill turtles, eat poop, and collect poop.

You seem to be talking more about Monkey Island for that kind of humor. Deathspank is almost on par with a Leslie Nielsen movie with the kind of "non-stop laughs."

That said Bastion does not seem to be the bastion for high time comedy and great writing, but it may bring something to the table in terms of gameplay.

I was saying a procedural narrative component would have provided an outlet for comedy that could have left character dialogue and itemization free from it's burden.

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Just been watching the live demo of this on Giant Bomb. Looks unbelievably good! The narration is a nice gimmick that hopefully endures rather than becoming annoying, but the actual gameplay looks really solid.

Yeah, I'm really not sure how interested I'm going to be in that narration after the first hour of gameplay.

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I watched about a minute of that Giant Bomb vid and the narration sounded really off putting to me. Not that I think it's a bad idea in itself, just the execution. I can't decide if it's the voice acting, the writing or the combination though.

Shame because I really like the idea and art style (despite the not so good character design).

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Did they just change the narrator or what? Wasn't it an ole-timey-yarn-spinner-sounding, tongue-in-cheek dude, rather than an extreme, I-done-seen-some-shit black dude?

TptJHeWngJs

I dunno how I feel about this. I hope this was not a product of someone trying to make it appeal more to the hard-core demographic.

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They didn't change the narrator, that's still recognisably the same voice, he's just clearly putting quite a different tone into this trailer than he does in the parts of the game we've seen so far. The narrator actually is (and always has been as far as I know) black, to my memory, but I understand what you mean in regards to the voice work in this trailer.

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Finding out that this is coming out on PC (eventually :hmph:) made me very happy.

That said, the trailer seemed fine to me.

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I find that Games journalists can't help themselves from giving this game special treatment. Maybe it's the access they're being given, or maybe it's their friendship with Greg (Kasavin). But everyone and their mother is all up on this game.

Which is fine, I think positivity in the media isn't a bad thing, but it's strange how people like Garnett Lee can be selectively reductive and shit talk games for being "just clicking things", and spend weeks hyping up "Bast-eon". And with Giant Bomb practically running a developer diary for the game, it's hard to find their impartiality.

I haven't read a game review in over a decade, and I'm not the type to care about the scores or the journalistic integrity of 20-somethings being payed minimum wage. But podcasts have typically been free of a lot of this type of "bias", as people used them as an opportunity to talk about a game instead of score it. Now I can't tell if this game is really compelling, or not because everyone seems to be saying "hey look, my friend made an indie game".

When games like Diablo get called "skeleton click game" by reductive podcasters, how can Bastion's coverage be so glowing?

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The Giant Bomb guys have at least acknowledged that they're much too close to the development of this game, and will not be trying to run a traditional review of it.

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I played the trial, enjoyed it enough to pick up the full version, and am so far enjoying that. Far too soon to give any kind of measured opinion about it to others, but the core concepts of the game so far are solid.

I must say the fact that Giant Bomb isn't running a review is just another feather in its cap to me. Every time I do some writing for some random gaming website and hate myself for how they force me to use social media or look at the next article on the page and see it's a Top 10 Sexiest Video Game Girls list or hear them talk about how there's no point spending too long on a particular review because its publisher "couldn't be bothered to send us a copy", I look back at Giant Bomb and it gives me something to hope for. It's probably not something I'll ever get the chance to participate in, and chances are I won't even ever get to do something like it, but at least for now it's a nice dream.

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Link?

Link is kinda effeminate maybe, but I'm pretty sure Link is a dude. :getmecoat

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Link is kinda effeminate maybe, but I'm pretty sure Link is a dude. :getmecoat

I think you've missed something, trot along to the comical pictures thread.

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The Giant Bomb guys have at least acknowledged that they're much too close to the development of this game, and will not be trying to run a traditional review of it.

Agreed, but honestly whether they run a review or not doesn't really affect me at all. I appreciate that they're up front with their association with the game, but they have pimped the hell out of it.

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Agreed, but honestly whether they run a review or not doesn't really affect me at all. I appreciate that they're up front with their association with the game, but they have pimped the hell out of it.

It's true, it's a weird situation. Their quick looks probably have more reach and influence than their reviews do, and they've done several for Bastion in addition to a full series of developer diary-style interviews. It's a strange place for Giant Bomb to be, because the developer diaries are still really interesting content to have about the process of making video games, but it's still a hell of a lot of promotion for a game all those guys have very close ties to. It's all a little incestuous. I respect that those guys are at least realizing that they can't feign impartiality and cannot critically evaluate the game, it helps put everything else in the right context, even if it doesn't make what they're doing necessarily right.

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. . .How is this a moral thing at all? They like a game, so they decided to get to know the makers, get them a lot of press and notice that they might (might) have not otherwise had.

How is that a "this might be a bad thing morally/legally" thing at all?

:eek:

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Greg Kasavin, the lead on Bastion, is a friend and former co-worker for a large portion of the Giant Bomb crew, they were all Gamespot dudes.

They didn't get to know the makers, they already knew the makers beforehand. So are they showing off the game because their friend made it, or are they showing off the game because its own merits warrant it? In reality, it is probably some combination of the two.

It's not exactly a huge scandal or anything nefarious, but it's worth thinking about with a critical eye, especially when concerning a website crew that generally prides itself on showing more integrity than most.

Edited by Sno

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Thing is, they're still showing more integrity than most. They've been up front about their relationship to Kasavin at every step of the way and after watching all their stuff about Bastion, they seem more relieved than anything else that it's turned out to be what looks like a good game. I dunno, I think that GB has fully done right by this one. There is so much depressing about games journalism, it seems strange to me that this is something people can get worked up over.

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A Look Back At Building The Bastion

...the recurring Building the Bastion series that we produced to chronicle what it's like to strike out on your own as an independent game developer...
As soon as we went ahead with Building the Bastion, I knew we'd end up seeing too much of that game and that running an actual, scored review would be right out of the question. Rather than hem and haw about that end of the coverage, I said up front that we wouldn't review the game. And I'll say again, right here, that I recommend you seek out various reviews on the topic before making a purchasing decision rather than just taking what I'm saying here on faith. Better safe than sorry, right?
When we started this site, I wanted to try doing things differently. I think we've generally succeeded in many of our goofball adventures, but I'm also proud that we're able to handle something like Building the Bastion. Not to get all "behind the curtain" on you, but conducting interesting (well, they're interesting to us, hopefully you agree) behind-the-scenes coverage of games that goes beyond the dumb "what platforms is it coming out for and when is it coming out???" interview and starts to say something more about both the games themselves and the people making them is pretty difficult to pull off, especially when you're running a reviews section. In my mind, though, you can't have one without the other. It keeps everyone honest. Pursuing something like this with Supergiant was kind of a risky move, and coming out a year ago and saying "here's a game we're not going to review" was kind of wild, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I hope you've enjoyed it, and I hope we can do something similar in the future.

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There is so much depressing about games journalism, it seems strange to me that this is something people can get worked up over.

I think it's because the Giant Bomb crew already hold themselves to higher standards that makes it a valuable and interesting point of focus for a dialogue like this. I certainly don't feel that Giant Bomb has done anything egregiously wrong in how they've covered Bastion, but it's still a conversation that is worth having. In a broader sense, games media will never improve if people don't think about these things.

Edited by Sno

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so... does the game get better than the demo, or is the demo indicative of the whole? All the reviews are so glowing but for some reason the trailers and demo haven't really sent me to gaming heaven.

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I want to clarify that I don't find that Giant Bomb is doing anything morally "wrong". It's just an odd situation, and even when they're spending hours talking about how they aren't impartial, they've still spent hours talking about the game. They spend hours talking about a lot of games, it's just what they do. But my question isn't whether they should be doing it or not, but whether this game is getting more hype than it deserves.

After listening to a bunch of different outlets cover this game, I have no idea how genuine any of this coverage really is. Either this is a downloadable title with literally no faults worth mentioning, or they're pulling their punches.

Anyways when it gets down to it, I'm really just disappointed that a lot of the people that seem to be hype machines whenever a games journalist or close friend is involved, will turn around take take the piss out of another game for something completely minor and random. If they're going to be optimistic during reviews of their friends projects, then I wish they'd look at the rest of the industry as their peers as well.

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