BFrank

The experience you have with Other M is directly tied to how much you care about the story stuff. I'm not really committed to Samus as a character and didn't really care that they took a different direction with her. The 'game' part of the game is quite good, and a direction I'd like to see the series go in. The Prime games were good, but they turned character movement into this slow, ponderous thing. Other M struck an interesting balance between 2D and 3D exploration.

The games press has gotten into this completely crazy group think about Nintendo, like there's all this pent up disdain over the Wii and they're waiting to be proven right. It's a lot of weird, wishful thinking.

The new version of the Wiimote that has M+ in it is probably my all time favorite controller. I hope it keeps getting use on the new hardware.

This applies equally to Skyrim and FC3, even Dishonored and Red Dead. In my eyes it's an essential weakness of the open world formula and you can only hide it, not wipe it away entirely. And though I'm not part of this camp myself, I know a lot of people who just don't think these things need to be a harmonious whole. They want a buffet, and they mostly consume the parts they're interested in. That's the strength of the genre.

These tropes make up what I'd call the techie/nerd pole stars of fiction. It's 'amazingly detailed' plus 'no spoilers' and it represents a kind of underdeveloped understanding of narrative. You can't 'write better' if you're just sticking to that stuff.

Gerstman had a full on hissy fit with a bunch of misinformation on last week's cast. The rest of the crew seemed a little.. awkwardly quiet in response? It was weird.

I had a TRS-80 and played some games on it in '83-'84, but the NES came along and I didn't look at PC games again until after college.

(responding to general stuff from a few pages back) AC games would be inherently less interesting without all the goofy, sci-fi stuff. The 'memories you're reliving' thing is an absurdly good way to frame a video game story, because it gives a context for all the gamey things that need to happen in an open-world game. It's a nod to the artificiality of the environment you're in, and it allows the story to jump forward months or years even if you've gone from one mission to the next in 5 minutes of player time. I've never liked the passage of time in games like Red Dead or GTA, it just feels weird and disjointed. AC takes that feeling and runs with it rather than trying to hide it. Plus, you get fail states that actually make sense in the narrative rather than derailing it completely. I don't have a lot to say about the actual plotting of the story other than 'it's fun', but the conceit is unmatched in a big, mass market game.

Action games throw an interesting wrinkle in, but I think it still works. Bullet hell games do have patterns, but they're hard enough that they force the player to improvise eventually. The point of those games isn't to memorize the pattern but to react smartly/quickly enough to having difficulty heaped on you. I think the spectrum goes 'puzzle' <--------------------> 'improvise', and applies to action and turn-based (plus everything in between) equally. But that's just me! I'll have to play SpaceChem to see what you mean about that one.

To me, puzzle implies a curated, smaller experience where a few, pre-determined solutions exist and you the player have to figure them out. A standard game of Civ is open-ended, but the scenarios (like 'fight off the Roman invasion for 30 turns') are more puzzle-y due to their being constructed with a specific mechanic and player response in mind. Great cast.

Flip the analogy and you get the perfect argument for why multiplayer games work best with a 'socialistic' business model: if you don't have anyone with which to play the games you've purchased, the value of the game you bought 2 months ago drops to zero, making it much less likely for you to go out and buy another one. You end up getting this death spiral where people don't end up picking up multiplayer games they'd like to pay for because they're not sure if anyone's playing them. The 1%ers need the freeloaders to get the full value of the game.

So I've played this a bit more now and I wanted to say how many great design decisions the game itself has. While I'm not a fan of the front end, pretty much every in-game element is more thoughtfully implemented than W2/W:A, which is a surprise after Reloaded was such a half-step in so many areas. It feels like they worked hard to address the balance between people who want to be really mobile and people who have an artillery focused play style, and it all works really well. So, to the extent that anyone reading this might want to play some Worms but felt that ball was dropped in the last few iterations, I'd say: this is the one to get. It's got some new ideas, it looks nice, I like the music, the way you connect to games isn't completely asinine anymore, etc. etc. etc. Feel free to add me on Steam if you ever want to play some games http://steamcommunit.../id/barneyfrank

I really like it so far. Great game.

I'm not a fan of multiple difficulty levels. My sense of it is that they're a crutch developers use when they've bitten off more than they can chew and are unsure how real people will respond to this big, wild mess they've made. I guess I'm arguing that there's always a 'real', intended difficulty and I want the game to kindly point me towards it. Mario Kart may have 50/100/150cc cups, but the 'intended' difficulty is 'with real opponents'. Halo has a bunch of options, but only one of them seems intended for people who know how to navigate in first person and pull the trigger sometimes but haven't yet memorized the map layout and enemy spawns of the campaign. I know that kinda runs counter to the PC-centric 'just give me options' mentality. I'm fine with options, I just hate checking my own temperature throughout an experience: "is this too easy? too hard? Hmmm!"