osmosisch

I thought your question arose from the question whether life is worth living, hardships and all.

What was that answer? All I saw was more questions and hypotheticals.

Just like in real life!

That's...not inspiring much hope. Oh well, maybe this will be the first I skip.

You use that as a pejorative (from context) but all you're saying is that there is a branching narrative. That's not necessarily a bad thing at all and entirely depends on the quality of the narrative itself and the position and quality of the choices. Put differently: If you want the player to affect the 'story' in any way, the player is making decisions by definition, and thus the narrative will be branching. The form of those decisions is secondary (ie. they can be dialogue choices, Dishonored's chaos meter based on number of kills, implicit decisions whether or not to kill an NPC, or to go 7-pool in Starcraft). Historically in games there's always been bad and good choices with clearly predictable consequences. Off the top of my head only SpecOps and the Witcher games really mess with this and I welcome it.

Nice to hear that you picked up A Few Acres of Snow! That's a great game especially in that it's one of the few new games that actually managed to incorporate Dominion's deckbuilding in a non-clone way, actually using it to simulate supply liens, which I thought was a great touch. It's a bit unbalanced but from what I heard in an interview (I think it may have been Three Moves Ahead!) the designer basically expects everyone to just house-rule the game a bit to fix those. I found the Hunters & Gatherers version of Carcassone to be a vast improvement over the original, as well as more charming in art and theme. You might want to check that out! One of my favourite two-player games is Thud! - a discworld boardgame. It's asymmetrical with very simple rules and still balanced, which I think is quite the accomplishment. I also love Avalam not so much because of its depth of strategy but because the beautiful wooden board and simple rules make it a great game to unwind by.

Is this one as difficult as Gravity's Rainbow? Because I bounced off that one so hard.

The fact alone that there is this much, and this level of, discourse about the game's plot is a sign how awesome it is. I feel like I robbed the developers by only picking this up during the Steam sale.

Colossi aren't around but there are lizards you can find that boost one of your meters if I'm not mistaken.

I am awesome therefore my children will be awesome therefore it is my moral duty to make as many as I can.

That's still kind of par for the course unfortunately.

Personally I loved Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum and was indifferent at best to any of his other books I tried. Most recently I read the Prague Cemetery and came away rather disappointed, feeling it was largely a retread of Foucault's Pendulum.

Thanks for picking that up so well JonCole, I couldn't figure out how to do so nicely. The hateboner people have for Polygon is really astonishing to me.

Good counterpoint to them having cool features: they also have stuff I don't like.

There have been multiple really cool articles on Polygon over the past weeks though? http://www.polygon.com/features Rob Zacny's piece on Homefront, the Sportsfriends kickstarter feature, the Doublefine one... I'm glad someone stepped into the hole that the Escapist left. I doubt it will ever amount to something profitable but it's nice to have longread reporting again.

Med means with, it was a joke.

If you have the time and inclination, it is very much worth it to run this on your PC with an emulator (particularly pcsx2). Similarly to the Dark Souls port, you get amazing fidelity that way. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ico-and-shadow-of-the-colossus-emulated-in-hd

Dammit, he gets results.

Meditate upon the amount of diarrhea and vomiting the next book shall contain?

PS has this been posted yet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw9Au9OoN88

Is it already known what the next book will be?

I was all set to make a Borderlands 2 joke but then I learned that this is actually a word for a car with a gun. Huh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle) I love this bit from the wiki page:

Curious;

Gosh I just love what you said here and how you said it. 100% agreed.

This whole kerfuffle reminds me of the Dragon Age marketing.