lobotomy42

Seconded. At first, I didn't understand what was going on with the film reels, but once I did, I loved it. It seems Telltale is going all out to change up the formula this season. I love it!

Romance was also presented as a commodity in Dragon Age (where you could literally bribe your companions into liking you.) Dragon Age handled it a lot better, obviously, in that gender and sexuality were under the player's control, whereas they clearly are not in AP. (Although I guess Thorton could be abstinent.) Also, as in most role-playing games, once you romance *one* person in Dragon Age, you can't romance anyone else. I'm not sure this is a much more realistic model of human behavior. I agree that the heternormative implications of Alpha Protocol are pretty bad, but I'm not sure it's fair to extrapolate that the game is putting forth a universe in which all women will sleep with MT just because, in the game, up to three women sleep with MT.

This is a question of priorities, I think. I don't mind the bugginess of their previous games - I thought both Kotor II and NWN 2 were huge improvements on their predecessors, even with slightly abbreviated endings.

This is coming out soon! I'm pretty excited. Is anyone else?

Bit.Trip RUNNER is out today. I'm surprisingly bad at it. But it's SO delicious. Every bit as good as I thought it'd be.

I just finished the Penal Zone. It was fantastic! By far, the best Telltale episode yet. The psychic toys change the experience up in a surprisingly substantial way. Plus, the future-vision allows the game to play with form and make some clever meta-jokes as well. I was really impressed with this one!

I doubt performance will *ever* approach what it is on the Windows side. Between the DirectX/driver optimizations and the fact that OS X eats a huge chunk of video memory, it just seems totally unlikely. (Haven't Linux gamers had this problem for awhile now?)

Found a work-around - mount an external drive with a case-insensitive filesystem (like, say, FAT32), create "Steam" and "Steam Content" folders there, copy Steam.app over there as well. Make symlinks from your home folder into the new folders, and everything seems to work fine. But, seriously, WTF EDIT: Scratch all of that. The error messages go away, but I just noticed that the symlink'd directories aren't getting filled. Instead of putting things in "/Volumes/EXTERNAL/Steam Content", it puts them in... "/volumes/external/steam content" which is not actually on the external device. How did no one think of this problem? Ok, I'll stop spamming the thread with my technical woes now.

WHAT So, instead of my multiple hard-drive fear, I instead encountered this inane hard-drive related error: EDIT: To clarify, this error is occurring because I had the audacity to format my Mac's internal drive as case-sensitive, rather than case-INsensitive, not the other way around. In other words, somewhere there is Steam code that looks for a file named "foo.bar" and elsewhere in the code it looks for "FOO.BAR"

It's all being done in the original Fallout 3 engine, with some modifications - I don't think the gameplay will be *that* different from Fallout 3. The one aspect I'm excited about is having Avellone & co (from Fallout 2) back at the writing/direction/design helm. I'm optimistic, but still cautious.

Despite the superficial similarities, Braid and Winterbottom are quite different. Winterbottom's puzzles essentially use the same mechanic over and over again in slightly different ways. Additionally, the cloning mechanic and the time constraints combine to put a lot of emphasis on traditional platformer twitchiness. In Braid, you can almost always find an elegant solution that you can complete easily in one go - it's just finding that solution that's difficult. Winterbottom is also almost completely linear, whereas Braid is almost completely not. (You can run through all the levels, and then go back and solve the puzzles - not so in Winterbottom!) I still enjoy Winterbottom a lot. The silent movie style works well for the premise, and I enjoy the rhymes. It's quite whimsical. But it does have a slightly manufactured feel to it, as if some executive at 2K saw Braid and said "Hey, indie team, you know what's popular these days? Puzzle platformers with time-based mechanics! Go make one of those!" Which isn't to denigrate what that team came up with; it just doesn't feel like a labor of mis-placed love and self-involvement like Braid does - for better and for worse.

Shit, it's the future now.

The more I play the two (and I've played them each at least three times all the way through,) the more strongly I feel that ME1 is a better title. Narratively, there's no question - ME1 is engaging in a way that ME2 is just fan service. This is partially just the nature of sequels; re-visiting a familiar universe is nostalgic, but never as cool as exploring a brand new one and getting that first grasp on how everything works. Various gameplay aspects were improved for ME2, but nothing that I couldn't live without. The new combat is faster and more intense, certainly, but it still never gets beyond the realm of "half-decent squad shooter." And for all that the Mako missions annoyed me, at least it felt like they mattered. You'd get to the end of the mission, and there'd be some colonist glad for the rescue, or some shady laboratory run by an operative that must be stopped. The side missions in ME2, on the other hand, all seem to boil down to "shoot some stuff, then watch nothing happen." The real heart of it, though, is that ME2 made the story squarely about your side companions, but ran into a whole bunch of problems in doing so. Frankly, there's too god-dam many of them. Having 11 (and now 12!) companions means that it becomes prohibitively expensive to record many character-to-character interactions, so instead, they all interact with Shepard, and basically only Shepard. They also start to overlap, both in gameplay style and personality. We've got two "Spocks" (Legion, Mordin), two "Nice Guys" (Jacob, Tali), three "Rambos" (Zaeed, Grunt, SuZe), etc. We don't end up seeing enough of any of them; they all start to blur together. Even the main draw of the game - their own, individual side-quests - all boil down to similar elements. "Shepard, there's unresolved thing from my past that's come back to haunt me!" "Uh, <companion>, the evidence here indicates things are different than how you explained." "No, it can't be true! Wait...OMG, Shepard, you're right! This thing is mysteriously different than I expected!" Nothing that happens in ME2 relates to anything else. It all just feels like a bunch of "stuff" in the ME universe. Some of which is quite cool - decent combat, engaging scenes, some nostalgic moments that link with ME1 - but there's never any one single thread to tie any of it together. For all the talk of how much was improved in ME2, comparing the experiences of the two games just makes me think that ME1 will age much better.

As a (primarily) Mac user, this is great news, but I still have one question: Will Steam let me install games to hard drives *other* than my primary hard drive? Because when I had Steam on PC, it definitely DID NOT, and this is why I stopped using it. I use external hard drives A LOT as my main hard drive is pretty full - if the Mac version still has this stupid requirement, I will not be a happy camper.

There are some games I don't particularly enjoy playing, but I do enjoy watching. Metroid Prime was like this for me, for awhile. I think who the player is and what they're doing can affect it a lot, though. If the player is bad, or boring, or doing things in a way that's different from how you would do them, it can get frustrating. But if they're good, and if the game can be watched as a continuous experience, it can be really fun. Actually, one of the reasons the Metroid games work well for me as a spectator is because there's so little extraneous stuff to distract the player - they can't stop and spend 20 minutes reorganizing their inventory, or agonize over where to put stat points, or skip through long cutscenes, for example. The entire thing is "the game," so you never feel like you're waiting for things to start back up again. The old resident evil games were good at this, too.

Don't get me wrong, I *loved* Braid. The concept, execution, eveything - it was fantastic. But the actual text within the game was horribly overwritten. I don't mind cryptic text or subtle themes or pieces you have to put together itself. But the prose itself within the game is just trying too hard. It beat the player over the head - like a David Lynch film - with what it thought was its own brand of subtley and meaning. "DON'T YOU GET IT, THIS GAME IS DEEP AND THOUGHTFUL, IN CASE YOU DIDN'T NOTICE" was how virtually all the text came across as.

That's like saying Jonathan Blow could do with his horrid pretension! *ducks*

I wasn't crazy about the general setting and premise, but I did quite enjoy talking to my companion characters back at the basecamp. This, for me, was the highlight of the game. There's tons of dialogue here, and I found almost all of it well-done and interesting. So much so, that I started rationing it, by refusing to talk for very long before questing again. (I was afraid that I would use up all the character dialogue before the game proper was finished, and then I'd be left with hours of grinding to get through without any backstory to make it more palatable.) Sten, in particular, was a great character to talk to, precisely because he does not want to talk to you. His answers were short, vague, and often ended with "Why are you asking me this? This is irrelevant, and we have work to do."

I hate the word "innovation." It reeks of marketing-speak, and usually means "we added a feature!" Does anyone ever talk Shakespeare of Michaelango being "innovative" artists? Would you use that word to describe books? Movies? Public graffiti murals? Innovative is a word used to describe consumer electronics products that are shinier than the last one. I hate it, hate it, hate it, and it should have no bearing on any kind of "art" question. That said, new gameplay paradigms or unique twists on old mechanisms can certainly affect the aesthetic value of a game. But it depends on context: what is the effect of the mechanic or (ugh) innovation on the player, and how she experiences the game, etc.

You mean WarioWare DIY? I think that's actually for the DSi.

Well, now you know how we 360 owners feel playing Dragon Age, which works great on PC, but is muddy and impossible to control on consoles.

The level cap in ME1 was 60. In ME2, the level cap is currently 30. I think that's telling.

How far are you into it? I do recall that the first 5-6 maps in a lot of these games are pretty basic.

I can't comment on the DS version of Fire Emblem - I've only played the GameCube iterations. But I'd say that based on my experience with those games, I disagree with most of your points. In Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones, characterization, and how much of it you want to explore, is actually tied directly into strategy. You can select a limited number of "conversations" that occur between various members of your party. Each character can only have a total of three conversations, so there's no way to see all the dialogue in one playthrough. Each conversation between two characters also gives the two units bonus stats when they're placed in proximity to each other on the battlefield. As a result, the characters you become the most attached to are also the strongest. There were also lots of between-mission dialogues where certain characters interact with the plot in various ways, assuming they're still alive in your party. (In at least one mission, a certain character can actually be convinced to leave your party and join the enemy depending on how the battle goes.) I agree that swords/lances/axes are not the most prominent element of the strategy, but what would you expect? It's a tactical RPG - if stats are all that matter, there's no strategy. If tactics are all that matter, it's just a strategy game. For me, Fire Emblem struck a good balance - my tactics affect not only the outcome of the battle, but also how much XP my units receive, as well as whether or not all my characters make it. In turn, the stats granted by my XP and which units survived affected my tactical options. I do agree that Fire Emblem encourages a very conservative sort of strategy. Since you're overly-cautious about character death, you end up doing a little tip-toe dance to avoid exposing any character to accidental death. But I don't think this detracts from the gameplay that much - every set of rules is going to favor certain strategies over others. Would you rather they *didn't* show you the lines demarcating ranges? That seems like it would only be more frustrating. There are also other strategic decisions to keep in mind. Do I send a unit to that far corner of the map to grab that cool item and risk getting him killed? Should I put my weak units up front so they can grab some XP, or should I keep my stronger units up front to keep everyone safe? Variety in map and mission structure also help with this. I never once felt like there were "right" or "wrong" squares to move my characters onto. Maybe the qualms you have are exacerbated in the DS version of the game. (If it is, as you say, a remake of the original game, then perhaps they didn't iron out these kinks until later on in the series?) But for me, I found Fire Emblem to be obsessively addicting and quite challenging.