TheYoungCato

I'm playing through Grim Fandango remastered, I like a lot of things about it, but boy do I not enjoy classic adventure game puzzles. Had I not referred to a walkthrough, I would have given up on the game, and missed out on all the wonderful music, dialog, and visuals. All the same, I can't help but feel that I am somehow ruining the experience by not bashing my head against the puzzles until I solve them by sheer luck and attrition, and earning the parts I enjoy, absurd as that probably sounds.

I like how this game allows you to have your cake and eat it too regarding companions. I'm not a big fan of the Icewind Dale approach of having to create a whole party, but it's really nice to be able to hire customized adventurers if you want to try out a gimmick build. For example, I'm planning on hiring an Island Aumaua rogue and filling all her weapon slots with arquebuses, so when combat begins, she can cycle through and fire them off in quick succession before needing to reload. Another nice thing is that having two characters with the same class is not necessarily redundant, in fact it can be very useful. I really like having two rogues in my party, because double sneak attack cuts through an enemy's health like butter.

I find mouse aim clumsy because I keep losing track of my character's facing, which gets me killed a lot. Found sticks clumsy as well at first, but after playing though the first game on the Vita, I don't want to go back. With offscreen enemies, I find that with an smg or a shotgun, it's fairly easy to hit them once I know where they are, doing it with a pistol is tricky, though.

I find free aim is more efficent than lock-on, though it takes practice to be able to land shots consistently on target. I think that Hotline Miami is a game where aiming with a stick is superior to the mouse, flicking the stick in the direction I want to fire is just faster and more intuitive than mouse aim. I just played though the first two acts of HM2, and I've found it to be quite managable, I did sharpen my skills with a playthough of the first beforehand, though. I have to say that the soundtrack somehow blows the first out of the water, been listening to New Wave Hookers on loop. Also the Swan Siblings are the best characters so far, The chainsaw is like a knife with more range, and if you use gun bro to grab as much attention as possible, the combos get ridiculous.

Speaking of Demon's Souls, I've been playing it, and I'm not loving it the same way I did Dark Souls. It seems designed to be incredibly irritating to the player. Like not even the Anor Londo archers are as annoying as Demon's is practically all the time. For example, in the Valley of Defilement, there's this huge pack of rats, they're tiny, nearly impossible to hit with most weapons, and if they bite you even once you catch the plague, which slowly kills you and can only be cured by an item that costs 2000 souls to obtain. And when you get past them, you have to fight this boss that's basically a giant mass of leeches, which has one attack where it flails its limbs around the whole arena that has very little windup and is impossible to dodge So after getting fed up with that, I go to the Shrine of Storms, get past the first level, no problems, get through some of the second, there's this shadow creature that can shoot a laser that sweeps the whole room and is impossible to evade, at that point I just laugh and turn off the game. I really don't mind a challenging game, but this isn't like Dark Souls, or God Hand, where the play is so engaging that I'm enjoying myself even when I'm dying alot, it's just tedious. Like, I feel the urge to keep playing it, but it's the same, self-flagellating urge that made me beat COD4 on veteran despite the utter hell of anti-fun it was.

You throw Pug into a random name generator, you're gonna get gold. In my Shadow of Mordor game, I had a captain named Pug the Pathetic. He tried to bully some orcs into serving him, they said "not in a million years" and beat him up until he ran away with his tail between his legs. He met his end when a geyser randomly exploded in his face and knocked him down, allowing me to catch up with him. Really, the only way this story could be more Far Cry 2 would be if the geyser exploded in my face instead. god I miss having a clicky keyboard

I've been playing for a little bit, and I must say, I really, really miss having a c-stick. Not being able to dash into an up-smash, or being able to forward-air while moving backwards, among other things, is really hurting my games. Control issues aside, it's gonna be nice to have this next time I go to a convention. Also, I'm happy that two of the characters I care about have been buffed from their terrible, heart-breaking, Brawl incarnations, namely, Captain Falcon and (real) Samus, though right now I've mostly been playing as Lucina, basically just because she looks cool and is voiced by Laura Bailey. This is real nepotism in the gaming industry right here. He could've brought brought back Mewtwo or added in another F-Zero character finally or I don't know, something, but nope, we get friggin' Dark Pit. Hell, I liked Dark Pit as a character in Uprising, but c'mon.

Can I have a step by step guide for connecting to the Idle Thumbs Mumble? This interface is completely baffling

I'll try to make it, just have to figure out Mumble and Hamachi when I'm home from work.

In this case, what is the line between exploitation and art? What are some examples of works handle this subject matter maturely, and what distinguishes them, substantively, from the merely manipulative?

I don't know if Dark Souls 2 is harder, but it definitely pissed me off more with its crappy dodge roll and hit boxes. It's as if the hit boxes of the player character slightly lags behind the model, so often I'd get hit by an attack despite cleanly dodging it, which would never have happened in Dark Souls or Demon Souls. It's definitely one part of the game that screams "developed by B-team", and it's disapointing because a good dodge move is so important to 3d action games. On the decline of Japanese games: While it's true that the major Japanese publishers have been declining in relevence, I think part of the problem is that even when Japanese developers do great work, it often goes unrecognized by everyone except fans. Really, Platinum Game's entire body of work could be used as examples. Last year they released not one, but two incredible action games, Metal Gear Rising and The Wonderful 101. Looking at the GDC awards, The Wonderful 101 got an honorable mention for visual design and MGR got nothing (Surprised it didn't even get an honorable mention for audio, at least).

This episode really brought back some memories for me, I'm really fortunate that my dad just happened to borrow this absolute gem from a co-worker one day and brought it home, else, I would have never played it. I was never much good at it, but as a simulation of combat in a very specific time and place, I found it endlessly fascinating. It helped me realize that there were far more to battles in that era than two neatly organized lines of men shooting volley after volley into each other. I'm a bit astonished at how specific my memories of this game are, such as the way unit morale was displayed with blocks, and how those blocks filled up with red as the unit suffered more and more battle stress, the way that crack units of like 400 guys were often worth divisions three times their number, the way that your battle results were tallied with shouts of "YEEEEE-HAW". I even heard the "Five more minutes" soundbite echo inside my head when Rob quoted it. Troy's description of Antietam helped me realize why I don't like many strategy games over a certain scale. if I have to micro-manage things like you do in Gettysburg, and if I have to spend like 10 seconds scrolling across the battlefield just to get the whole picture, I become discouraged pretty quickly. It's a little weird, but the original Ground Control and Gettysburg occupy a similar space in my mind. Both were games based around commanding units, in the sense of a squad or division, as opposed to a rabble, like in traditional RTS games, both games put importance on positioning, facing, and terrain, both games went at a more relaxed pace than Starcraft without becoming ponderous, and both games helped me gain a basic understanding of battlefield tactics. It's really, really unfortunate that there's nothing like Gettysburg, today. I find RTS games to be too fast for me, and I can never quite emotionally invest myself in the goings on of a grand-strategy game, they're just too big, too abstract.

The catharsis of body slamming a pile of fine china after losing all your souls is more than enough justification for rooms full of empty vases-this is actually the first time I've seen anyone discuss about how weird they are at length, which is a bit surprising considering everything else about Dark Souls has been analyzed to death. I remember thinking "this is strange" when I entered a room full of empty barrels for the first time, but that thought quickly left my head when I learned how fun they are to smash.

This is like Tetris infused with the melancholia and strangeness associated with modern Eastern European PC games. And like those games, your immediate need to survive distracts you from all the weirdness. Why are there art-deco looking dudes hanging out in space? Ah who cares I gotta make lines to live!

Has the presence of Uplay been confirmed or denied? I don't see anything about in on the Steam page and I'm daring to dream that I won't have to create yet another arbitrary account just to play a video game.

I was thinking the same thing. That encounter was a crash course on why FPS games should never have boss battles. I think the combat, for the most part, is rather under-appreciated, actually. Once I understood how to use the skylines, tears, and the vigors, I had a sense of control over the battlefield stronger than in almost any other shooter I've played. I actually thought the part that Jake thought was the worst to be one of the best, because at that point, I had such a grasp of the combat systems that the enemies were like toys for me to break in whatever matter that entertained me. I still have to agree that Bioshock Infinite contains a really excessive amount of combat, to the point that I felt tired after a multiple hour session. Jake's mention of Blizzard Battle Chests amused me more than it should, "Battle Chest" is just a wonderful, hilarious phrase, I guess. I own the Diablo 2 Battle Chest, bought it last October in an actual retail store (it was really weird buying a physical PC game period, never mind one that's more than ten years old) because I had never played a Diablo game. My favorite part is that most of the box is taken up by a strategy guide. A totally useless strategy guide that's a million patches out of date. In fact, the games are pre-patched to a few versions behind the latest, so it's not even relevant to the game that comes on the discs. I don't disagree that the game could have done more to explore racism, but I think it's a little extreme to say that the game's even suggesting "racism is not a problem worth caring about", just because the science fiction elements are more central to the plot. I completely agree to your point about Comstock and the revolutionaries. Even while playing the game, it felt like a desperate attempt at creating a morally ambiguous conflict.

I was going to mention Torment as well. It comes close to Chris's idea for a game story where it is gradually revealed that your character isn't a good person, except in Torment, the player character only knows as much as the player because of his amnesia. I do think amnesia is handled in Torment better than usual, your past is revealed only in pieces through conversation and the occasional vestigal memory, and many of these can be missed, seeking out your past feels like part of the gameplay, instead of some plot that has no bearing on what you're actually doing. There's no big infodump cutscene where your memory is magically restored in full, so you never have a complete picture, and furthermore, there's no "twist" where you turn out to be some great legendary hero or villain of worldly importance, Torment focuses on having a personal story. TWD reminded me of Torment a little bit, in having to make choices for a character with a pre-defined past you don't fully know, except in Torment, the PC is more of a blank slate due to his memory loss, and thus, you have more freedom to shape his personality as the player.

GOG's prices start at "pretty dang cheap", any discounts are marginal as a result, and sales are pretty irregular. If you really want to purchase the game for like, 8$ instead of 10$, you may have to wait for a while.

I would like to also recommend this excellent Let's Play of The Void. Even the soft-spoken commentator fits right in with ethereal atmosphere, and he manages to explain the game's systems very well while providing his own speculation on the game's narrative and themes, he shows off all the little details put in by the developers, and he knows when to stay quiet, and let the game speak for itself. After watching it, The Void became my favorite game that I have never played. I'd like to hear the Thumb's take on it sometime.

I really like that there's no non-lethal ways to take out guards, as opposed to most stealth games. In most cases, rendering a guard "unconscious" is hardly different from actually killing him, because either way, once you hide the body, he's permanently eliminated as an obstacle. Mark of The Ninja restricts you to purely non-confrontational tactics, and I feel that's made me test the systems far more deeply than If I had simply been stabbing dudes. I find that in 2D, playing cat and mouse with guards actually can be more tense, it's much harder to avoid their gaze when they have less space to search. That path of silence costume is pretty sweet, being able to run everywhere is a really empowering feeling in a stealth game.

The discussion on the differences between Halo and immersive sims like Dishonored was interesting, because I find part of what draws me to Halo over Call of Duty and COD-likes are the similarities to an immersive sim. Halo isn't a stealth game, but I've always liked how the enemies are nonetheless limited by their "perception", and that you can surprise them, even in the middle of a firefight, by keeping out of their line of sight and getting around their flanks. Indeed. I just wish I enjoyed the game as much. I'm curious as to why the developers thought it was a good idea to make the guns so weak, because looking at it from either lens of theme or mechanics, it just makes no darn sense. For game soundtracks that uses a single singer as opposed to a chorus, Nier is an excellent example. It's not the most polished game, but I don't think I've heard of or played a game more experimental than Nier for the whole of its 15-20 hours this generation. Sometimes it's just a third-person hack-and-slash ARPG, others, its also a 2D platformer, or a top-down scrolling shooter, and sometimes, you get trapped in somebody else's dream and its a text adventure lite. It rarely commits the sin of lingering on any one gameplay type for too long. Also, it's notable, particularly amongst games from Japan, for featuring a weathered, roughly middle-aged father as the protagonist. Being able to sprint and use the flashlight at the same time would be too big a drain of energy, obviously.

I was going to mention Freespace 2, seeing your "escorts" are, more often than not, heavily armored warships with brimming with beam cannons and flak guns that shred most anything, so you're more concerned with your own survival, unless there's bombers, or other warships brimming with beam cannons and flak guns. Doesn't hurt that capital ship combat in Freespace 2 is one hell of a pretty light show.

I'm watching Giant Bomb's quicklook, and only now I'm realizing just how much license humanity gives the Master Chief to be kind of adick. I've always been super-careful avoiding fratricide, but in this video, the player's driving a tank, nonchalantly runs a friendly marine over on his way to his objective, and no one takes offense. I'm loving the idea of an alternate universe Master Chief, who has killed numerous marines with poor marksmanship and even worse driving, but is still somehow treated as the great savior of humanity

A few hours in, Corvo's indifference towards eating food from abandoned, rat-infested buildings began to weird me out.