lobotomy42

I am vaguely interested in this title, but that trailer is really gross. "Let's shoot some hot cyborg lady in the head" is not particularly enticing, and also reveals very little about either the universe or the game, other than that both will feature hot cyborgs and army guys who can shoot people. Neither of which is really surprising or interesting.

So, I have a Wii U. I agree with a lot of the complaints here: setting up the friends list and adding friend codes is not the most intuitive thing in the world, and if you view the console as a direct competitor to the PS3 and Xbox 360 it is in some ways lacking. The backwards compatibility with the Wii is awkward, to say the least. (Although the PS3 no longer features backwards compatibility AT ALL outside of re-releases and the Xbox 360 is no picnic in this deparment, and who knows if the next gen will even offer this.) Some features do fall flat. Fundamentally, though, it is more a sequel to the Wii than a competitor to the other consoles. Viewed through this lens, it is another adorable little system. The coolest things about it so far are: The "Wii migration" animation which features Pikmin manually carrying your save games onto a spaceship, flying through space, landing on the Wii U and then unpacking. The Miiverse. The Facebook-ripoff pages are not that useful, I've found, but it is neat to see other players show up in your single-player games. Seeing notes in New Super Mario Bros U from other players is a great touch. I get smug sense of superiority every time I beat a level that someone else has labeled "This is so hard!" (Yes, I realize that this means I am probably feeling superior to an eight-year-old, but let me have my fun) Also having other Miis wander into your games (or, in the case of Zombi U, other people's former-characters-now-zombies) is a great way to make a fundamentally single-player experience *feel* like a multi-player one. Nintendo seems to really want Demon's Soul-esque multiplayer in ALL THE GAMES. The Wii U functioning as a TV remote is imperfect, but useful, if for no other reason than I have one fewer electronic object on my coffee table. Asymmetric gameplay, when done right, is really fun. I like the one-against-many scenarios in NintendoLand, although there really ought to be more than three. TL;DR - I'm enamored of the console so far, obviously we'll have to wait to see what games come out.

Nail-biting suspense! The month-long delay between episodes is becoming increasingly noticeable.

Am I the only one that didn't love this game? I bought into the hype back before it came out, but when I actually played it this year it felt so....nothing? Insubstantial? The visuals were pretty, but I didn't really feel they were used to great effect. The storytelling was ...existent.... but I never felt like the story was worth the game. And the game, most of the time, was just walking forward. (Or jumping, flying, sliding, etc., forward.) Everyone raves about this, but I feel totally befuddled, like I'm missing some aspect of the experience that makes it worthwhile. Honestly, a few months later, I am struggling to remember the damn thing. I feel bad ragging on it, because this is exactly the sort of thing I (theoretically) wish there were more of: short, controlled interactive experiences with less emphasis on traditional gameplay. But there it is.

Yeah. Yeah. I think ME3 is a bit better than ME2. But both are much more "We are going to go kill a bunch of baddies!" than ME, which is why they suffer. That, and they suffer from the sequelitis of having to make constant callbacks to the first game, which only serves to highlight the disparity even more, as well as all the ways in which your choices have been overridden by the need to control costs and (WHY?) voice-act every goddamn line.

Just finished episode 5. Depressing as all hell.

Has anyone called out the visual design yet? Because I'm noticing the more I play it that the general look and atmosphere of the world are one of the key elements drawing me in to the universe and its mood of despair. The design does a good job of suggesting a comic book without literally mimicking it. It also avoids looking cartoony or childish in a silly way, while maintaining a very distinct visual identity. (Sort of the opposite of Star Wars: The Old Republic, to compare it to something completely unrelated.) The deaths and zombies look appropriately gruesome and disturbing, even without "dark-and-gritty realism" as implemented by seemingly every other zombie game. (I wish I had better words.)

I just now played through the first four episodes. I don't have much to say that hasn't already been said. My first thought is: Bravo! This game has really gotten into my head. It has thoroughly driven into my head a certain sense of dread and futility about the post-apocalyptic world. By killing off characters on a more than regular basis - usually right after you start to get attached to them - the game seems to be training the player to start thinking of the other characters as disposable resources rather than the fleshed out humans they're written as. My second thought is: The way choices work in this game is a little frustrating. In the first episode, it seemed like I was making choices left and right that might eventually have major consequences down the road. The second episode seemed to carry this through as well, by remembering so many of my decisions from before. But the rapid progression of character death ends up undermining this somewhat. Why should I care if I've pissed off Lily or Kenny if they'll both be dead by the end of the game? I understand that a certain amount of rail-roading is necessary to keep the plot progressing, and the frequent character deaths are necessary to maintain a sense of dread. I'm not really sure what the solution is, but this does seem to stand out. Looking forward to / completely dreading Episode 5!

Link?

Has anyone here played any of the "Choice of" games? http://www.choiceofgames.com/ They're essentially Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books with a dash of RPG stats. I've usually been able to do complete playthroughs in an hour or so. I've been playing them lately and I have to confess - I'm addicted, even to the crap ones. "Choice of the Star Captain" is definitely the best written and most game-like of the bunch so far. (The author, Dorian Hart, apparently had a design credit on BioShock.) The others I've tried - Romance, Heroes Rise, Dragon - all seem to be structured like ego-stroking Bioware romances, where you customize a character and watch as everyone around you tells you how awesome you are.

A lot. I have no idea how many. Once a game has dropped below the $20 threshold (and they all do, eventually) I'll buy it if I have even the remotest interest in playing it. It's a bad habit.

I have been playing Vanilla Baldur's Gate 1 downloaded from GOG off-and-on for the past month or so. I had heard about the mods, but decided not to bother with them. Of course, now that you've shown me these screenshots, I feel a bit of a fool.

I echo everything already said in this thread. This documentary series in fantastic, and this episode was great. I don't work in games, but I do work in development, and I can completely relate to the cold-water project management mode.

Sure, blending elements can be great. But those elements have to gel or mesh in some way, right? If I mix softball and frisbee together in softfris, then it's up to me to balance those elements into a cohesive new whole. I didn't feel like Psychonauts did that. Then again, I haven't played it in five or six years, so I may be misremembering.

I didn't find the Meat Circus particularly hard - I just found the platforming controls throughout most of the game were sufficiently terrible as to making any sort of movement / jumping / aiming levels a pain. (I had a slow PC back then - maybe it was better on the Xbox?) I don't know, Psychonauts was really funny, but the design seemed all over the place. I could never tell if I was supposed to be exploring like an open platformer, collecting tokens like the worst Mario 64 levels, or trying to solve puzzles like an adventure / rpg. Combined with my experience of wonky controls, it seemed like a flawed effort at best. Certainly impressive for Double Fine's first outing, but still missing a certain something.

I attempted to make some text-based adventure games as a kid in QBASIC. They were awful, but I had the basic idea. In high school, I made a Tetris clone in Visual Basic 6 and in college I made a really sad Pac-Man clone. I also once implemented a really crappy text-only Gin Rummy in Python, which I was going to turn into a Facebook game at one point, but...didn't. There have been other attempts throughout the years, but those are the most successful ones. I don't know, maybe I'm not patient enough or just don't have the creative drive. I do have at least one idea for one, though.

This is how I feel! Almost every line could be a classic. A couple of the shorter ones I repeat in conversation more often than I'd care to. One Space Quest line has gotten stuck in my head: [describing his battle with a sea monster] "...which I won in the nick of time with my clever thinking and my... uh... cleverness." (Roger, SQ4) And, from having played the opening to the first Mass Effect quite a few times now: "Is that the kind of person we want saving the galaxy?" "That's the only kind of person who can protect the galaxy."

So, apparently all the old Sierra folks simultaneously decided to launch new projects, since this is supposedly happening: http://kotaku.com/5902030/space-quest-creators-reunite-and-promise-a-new-spaceventure All I can say is.....what? I was a HUGE Space Quest fan back in the mid-90s, but this still strikes me as...bizarre. Bizarre that they would get back together, after their apparent falling out (and Scott Murphy's later less-than-kind words about Mark Crowe.) And bizarre that this is apparently their launch pitch. That video is difficult to watch and decidedly unfunny, unless I'm missing some enormous joke. I'm trying not to be cynical - especially about the Two Guys, because I do feel like I've been waiting for Space Quest 7 forever - but this is *really* starting to feel like bandwagon-jumping. When Tim Schafer proposes making a new adventure game, it seems reasonable, given that his company has produced such well-received (if not best-selling) games over the past few years. Jane Jensen's presence has been much smaller and more casual-focused, but she has also been consistently employed essentially as a game designer since her Sierra glory days. But what on earth has Al Lowe been doing? And Murphy and Crowe? Didn't most of the ex-Sierra crew pretty much retire from game development? (Or am I woefully ill-informed on this point?) Should be expect the Williamses and the Coles to pop their heads up with an announcement now, too?

This is key, I think. I get that Thumbs has a lot of PC enthusiasts, and I love GOG, but seriously I do not want to play the majority of games on my desk + laptop if I can play them on my couch + tv. Plus standardization means I'm getting the same version as everyone else, I'm not constantly tweaking settings to see if I can get a better framerate, or worried about driver installs, or or or. I agree that in practice this is going to start with a lot of mobile ports, but it also seems like company itself is distinctly targeting console gamers. Does anyone know how the specs of this thing compare with an Xbox 360, roughly speaking? (And remember - the Wii U is also releasing this year with specs probably no better than an Xbox 360.)

So, I finally finished my second character's playthrough and watched the gist of the extended DLC endings. Are people still talking about this? Looking back, it's hard not to notice how all over the map this series is in terms of narrative. The three games are thematically very different, and don't seem to mesh well in terms of even some of the very basic plotting. As just one example: Cereberus starts as an obscure evil group, then suddenly they have the resources to compete with galactic governments and are cool enough for you to work with, and then they're evil servants of the Reapers. There's also the someone muddled motivations of the Reapers, the way certain "major" decisions in previous games (e.g., saving the Council, saving the Collector Base) turn out to have almost no consequences, while decisions in certain sidequests (Maelon's data) can suddenly become make-or-break in ME3. ME2 and ME3 both seem to suffer from being fan-fiction-esque extensions of ME1: they depend on the prior game's existence for the crux of their emotional impact, but they also ignore or rewrite huge chunks where it suits them. It never feels like I'm in the same universe from one game to the next. That being said - I do like the "Extended Cut" endings. They drive home the differences between the choices in an effective way (which was completely missing from the original) and give them the bizarre, spiritual, sci-fi element that the conversation with "Starchild" seemed to be going for. The explanation of the reapers still comes out of left field, but at least the final choice comes down to something more than explosion color. And Starchild makes sense thematically, if not literally -- the synthetic/organic themes have existed to varying degrees since the beginning of ME, so the presented choices make as much sense as anything else. I still maintain that ME1 is far and away the best of the series, though. TL;DR - ME series has issues; I liked the extended cut

So, adventure games are cool again, is what I'm getting from this. Or at least everyone will keep thinking they are until all the kickstarter games come out next year and everyone feels disappointed for some indefinable reason?

Something set in the Ico / Shadow of the Colossus universe.

Actually, no, this game is amazing! I picked it up today almost on a whim, and tried it out for a few hours... Only to discover that it is awesome! I am totally loving it so far, though I've only played a few hours in. It's sort of like Zelda, if instead of Link fighting Ganon in Hyrule, you're a little robot cleaning up people's messes in a small dysfunctional household. And the toys come to life at night and talk to you. And there's a girl who thinks she's a frog. And some talking egg-army people. And....it's just great. Japanese games are so great!

I never played the DS game because everyone said it was awful. Were they wrong? Should I try to track down a copy? That second never-translated Chibi Robo sure looks great...