soggybagel

Holy crap! Scoops Klepek crossover! Also I normally listen to the whole cast, digest it, and then write a response to the episode but I wanted to do this before I went to bed and forgot about what I wanted to say. In regards to Chris's approach to games where he is not victory driven (though as noted he enjoyed winning) but rather merely existing in the simulation. I.E. his sense of disappointment when a really good game of Civilization ends because you hit the end state, where as you wish you could simply continue playing and basking in not only your own glory as a civilization, but essentially marveling at how awesome everything is. I am generally the same way. I like games that have end states but I know exactly what Chris means although not in regards to FTL because I have not yet played FTL. But I know the feeling he is expressing. And I to tie this to a previous discussion on the boards, I think a game or series of games that does this really well right now are sports games. Not the most popular type of game around these boards, but to me a perfect example is the NCAA Football line of games. You can (and this is something I've done) take a smaller non powerhouse football program and over seasons of recruiting (The recruiting mechanics in the modern NCAA games are pretty hilarious and very RPG like. Effectively you get points you can assign to recruiting tasks. Like a player visit, or calling a prospective recruit. From there you can sell them on your academic prestige of the school or the opportunity to be on national tv. And you get boosts in recruiting through specific recruit pipelines. So if you're a school like the University of Texas it will be easier to recruit Texas kids and kids from the surrounding states.) you can build your team up. And at a certain point if you've done your job its really easy to get the best team, win a national title (effectively the end game of the game) and continue to do so. But you don't have to stop. You can kind of bask in your powerhouse program that you built from nothing. You can always start over but it doesn't force a restart right away. Just had to kind of get that out there since it was on my mind and I'm going to bed. KEEP ON CASTIN

Very late to the game but I just bought Walking Dead Episode 1 since I was at home sick today. Just finished it a couple hours ago and holy fuck is this awesome. Well yeah. I'm so onboard with this game. I am playing it on the 360 and I really enjoyed it. The only problem is that I don't have any more Xbox Live points so I have to wait until tomorrow to pick up a card (I don't use my credit card due to a previous hacking issue). But man. Love it. Just wanted to express my happiness at how much fun and how well put together this is.

I just watched the first episode and I still really don't get the point. Which is to say I get that they're documenting the creation of the site but that was a whole lot of nothing being said there. And I still get a vibe and perhaps this is unfair, but of self importance just by the intro they have. THE STAKES HAVE NEVER BEEN HIGHER. Alright. I'm also not in the industry. So introducing me to these people in 30 second talking heads doesn't do anything for me. I don't really care that this person was in charge of x site. I don't know...I'm probably coming off as an asshole here but this was very boring and did nothing to make me more interested in the launch of this site.

I really hadn't been following the emergence of this site at all, but the trailer for their documentary made me laugh. Beyond self important and indulgent were my first reactions. Knowing basically nothing before seeing that trailer I was immediately turned off of the website entirely. Probably not fair, but what the fuck?!

Greg Brown's question to Idle Thumbs is a question that I find extremely interesting. This was within the past several months also talked at for a bit on the Giant Bombcast as well and also if I'm not mistaken also briefly debated on a progresscast as well. My memory is hazy though so I could be getting these all mixed up in my head. The weirdest part about gaming news sites and magazines is that the much more incestual relationship that the game media has versus other forms of entertainment. In fact I'm pretty sure I'm just paraphrasing someone else when I just said that but its true. There is a dependency that games journalists seem to have more so than say a film news site because access to the games, events, and everything else that goes along with it is so much more important because as you all said its about being there first and simply breaking things fastest. I always remembered reading gaming magazines like EGM or PC Gamer growing up and seeing the previews for games that were much more optimistic than they probably had any business being like. Things would read something like Superman 64 is blah blah, has some rough edges but developers have promised that things will be smoothed out by fall for its release. Where as I feel like (and sorry for the constant comparison to the movie industry but I do feel its most apt) the film industry having invited a group of people to a pre-screening of Catwoman with the intention for prominent movie journalists to view it would immediately get shit on for having previewed a garbage film. There wouldn't be a preview written in Entertainment Weekly with kid gloves. Not that I think Entertainment Weekly is some sort of paragon of hard hitting journalistic endeavors, but the relationship that the video game industry dictates is that access is indeed everything and that the big companies can and will shut someone out in a way that just isn't really possible elsewhere. Hence if someone doesn't get a review copy early and has to actually just buy the game, they lose out on those precious launch day review hits because they're still playing the game. We certainly know big publishers have in the past leaned on sites to review games nicely or they may get advertising dollars pulled away. Hell, look at how the entire Gerstmann thing went down at Gamespot. Of course some of this ties in to the idiotic way of tying things like bonuses to Metacritic scores but that's an entirely other issue. The problem is I feel as though there is silence based on fear. This begins to enter conspiracy theory territory but goddamn if I wasn't pissed as hell when my Xbox Live account got hijacked and MS took over 100 days to do anything about fixing my account. I was deeply disappointed with the level of coverage on this and I honestly believe some of it was simply because Microsoft is that big of a monolith that they can simply say "No it's not a big problem, it's hitting that magical one percent of users." The stories that existed were simply rehashing of MS press speak and official statements followed by "IT SURE FEELS WORSE THAN IT IS, BUT WE CAN'T EVER KNOW...SHUCKS." Except we already know Microsoft lied about failure rates on those original Xbox 360's. But there would be no Woodward and Bernstein to crack the case open because the news cycle moved on and that you can't really piss off an entire console manufacturer. I genuinely feel like (PUT ON THOSE TIN FOIL HATS) this story should have been bigger but one part not wanting to step on MS's back and one part you can't really do anything because the apparatus to investigate doesn't really even exist in the current game journalist construct kills the entire thing. Thus, ME SAD. I haven't even touched the issue of the feedback you get from thousands of people, many who have nothing to add to the conversation beyond vitriol but one hopes that some can rise above it all and believe in what they do and say. I don't have a smart or insightful thing to add except that I like when people strive to do their best. I think there is plenty of room to grow and mature given the relatively young age of video games in general, but there is a lot of cases of arrested development that hinder everything. I apologize for this rambling post but I just heard the question a few minutes ago and I got excited.

I didn't enjoy the Driver demo at all so i skipped the release of the game. I just didn't enjoy the concept of jumping in to other cars and didn't find the driving in the demo that fun. And yes Driv3r (ugh) was released in the post GTA3 world so of course they felt the need to add the ability to walk around. Except it was very limited from what I recall and the controls were atrocious and it didn't amount to anything near an open world. That said and on an entirely different note I'm very excited about Grand Theft Auto 5 because I'm looking forward to driving around in a facsimile of Los Angeles. GTA 4 did a great job of getting across what New York is like and since I actually live in Los Angeles I eagerly await the ability to cruise around the city. Which is probably why I enjoyed LA Noire more than a lot of people. I was in a similar situation where I had moved out of Los Angeles temporarily when LA Noire came out and I would just drive around for a minute or two in the game randomly and be like, "Oh MAN HOLLYWOOD AND VINE, I'VE BEEN THERE!" Doing some virtual tourism or something.

I have to say I reacted nearly identically with my experiences with Max Payne 3. Granted, I only got to play the first disc of Max Payne 3 on my 360 but I found myself not having much fun at all. The narrative dissonance was for me a bit too much and there were bizarre things going on like the games insistence on hyper violence that I didn't feel fit with the nature of Max Payne, the very intense self loathing by Max himself, and the presentation in general. I also felt that by adding a cover mechanic and making Max weaker to combat it created a lot of situations where I was just hiding behind cover and slow-mo/bullet timing which kind of defeats the point of Max Payne. Many times doing a shoot dive would result in a quick death. Also fuck that stadium section.

Yeah I was broke and in the process of moving during the kickstarter campaign but now I have money. I'll definitely be donating when they get all settled.

The UI has undergone numerous overhauls. I'd say its not that I'm easily frustrated. It's not confusing in the sense that I don't know what is going on. It is more that its clunky. And the fact is they started with the blade system ui which was at least snappy, but Xbox Live has grown in to a thing that they never could have foreseen it becoming. In fairness to MS they are limited in ways they can fix things (i think anyways) as they are bound by the limitations that were kind of imposed early on. But the frustration isn't these minor things that we exaggerate upon. I'd say the issue is these minor things aren't getting any better after years of tinkering. And in some cases usability is actually decreasing. You couple that with the fact that we're all paying money for this service and things aren't really getting better and it leads to compounding frustration.

I have been a 360 user for the past five years. I also for a year lived in a household with a PS3. Having experience both pretty heavily (the ps3 was the houses default system as it was in the living room and thus was used most as netflix system and the gaming system for a lot of intra-house gaming) I got used to both UI's. I will say that I think the current iteration of PS3's Premium service is fucking great. The fact that they give you access to so many games for "free" (Included in cost) is really fucking cool. I also think that for certain things like Netflix their UI is now better than the 360's ever since for no fucking reason other than to include Kinect support they absolutely ruined the 360 netflix ui. Unless their intention was to make it less usable and a lot slower, in which case they succeeded with aplomb. The biggest advantage the Live Gold has over the PS3 is cross gaming invitations and the general use of getting friends organized to play multiplayer. So if you're big in to online MP I do have to say I prefer the 360 over the PS3. Being able to invite a friend in to a match of Black OPS while I'm playing FIFA and just being able to quickly drop and pop over and having a consistent friends chat going on in the background is nice. I've posted about this issue in the past on other sites (Shacknews) but the thing that genuinely gets me pissed off is how Microsoft has consistently found ways to for all intents and purposes promise big, pretty much lie, and then end up doing fuck all. I'm talking about how one thing they at one point touted about Xbox Live Gold was that it would host and foster a better sense of community through events and cool stuff that in theory a percentage of that price we're paying as gold members would help subsidize. Recently they killed Inside Xbox which was a video production thing that they would display in one of the ad tiles. I never watched it. It was pretty boring...but it said to me they're killing this and certainly not replacing it with any original content. http://www.shacknews...own?id=28121074 Then they played up the community aspect. Beyond a few rare try to game with the producers of the game events this never happened. Their best opportunity and something I honestly really really loved was 1 vs 100. This was the one time where I thought they finally got it. Hey, lets have a trivia game. Let's have basic stat tracking. Let's have opportunities to actually win real prizes. I fucking loved 1 vs 100 on the XBox. It was one of the most fun times of gaming over the course of a month or two I've ever had. I played online with online friends, real life friends, and strangers. Then Microsoft killed it because they said it wasn't making money as they couldn't attract enough advertisers. I thought the killing was premature. I know, I know, this was a small slice of their overall program and I'm not approaching it from their stand point but honestly I don't give a shit. They're making lots of money and they could have still run this as a loss leader. I thought this was a great community game that for a split second hinted at some sort of community camaraderie/growth in to a gaming entertainment hub that they always talk about. So they kill it and then they promise new games. The only thing we've gotten is fucking Texas Hold'em Poker...which is fine. But it doesn't have the mass appeal of trivia, nor does it create an as fun environment. It was fun to see things like "15,000 people playing Live right now!" So they've killed insider video, any community games, and in its place they have more ads even though I'm paying and they bury arcade games in their sloppy UI. It sounds like I fucking hate the 360. I don't. I love it for the most part. I'm just disappointed where and how Live has been handled. The fact of the matter is right now at this instant the PS3 seems like a sunnier side of gaming just for the fact that you don't have to pay. And when you do pay the benefits are bigger. Oh and I didn't even mention the fact that their customer service side of Xbox Live is fucking horrid. My account got hijacked last fall, was transferred to Russia, and I was locked out of my own account after calling MS as they "investigated." This investigation ended up lasting over 100 days where they could tell me nothing, but then after I filed a BBB report I magically got a response the next day and got a call directly from some MS person and then two days later it was fixed after months of me asking through the standard protocol and then not getting anywhere.

Thanks guys. I laughed my ass off when you talked about Master Chief wearing vibrams.

To be clear I wasn't saying anyone around these parts was irrationally hating sports games. Just that as Codicier said, there exists these weird and stupid rivalries between supposed factions of gamers. Its all silly at the end of the day, but I'm the type of person who pretty much enjoys all games. But perhaps I'm a bit of a weirdo.

It is interesting to me how sports games can depending on the crowd get a lot of disdain lumped on them, as if they are somehow less "pure." Although its the same stupid mentality that blindly will lump a game like Modern Warfare in to the "frat dude" gaming territory as if somehow its less of a game than any other shooter. That said, I love sports. I like watching lots of sports. I'm obsessed with some of them. Play in fantasy leagues. But its not my thing. But some of them have some amazingly deep systems built in to them and they in my view are pushing the boundaries of out of game interaction. It sounds like a lot of the new EA sports line this year will have ways to manage your team/league from a browser or your phone. Not sure if this post has a real point, just that I like sports games and I think that it would be interesting as mentioned in the pod, if people with no interest in a particular sport just decided to pick up a game like NHL 13 and learn the game, its system, but also about the sport itself.

The Last of Us is a third person survival action game being developed by Naughty Dog. It takes place in a post apocalyptic America where some unknown plague has wiped out a lot of humanity. Thankfully, it's not ZOMBIES! From the sounds of things this is a direct response from Naughty Dog to the world of Uncharted and the various action packed/adventuring adventures of Nathan Drake. In so much that in Uncharted you were mowing down hundreds of enemies, throwing grenades that blow up piles of dudes, and jumping out of planes with nary a scratch on you, The Last of Us looks to take a much more grounded and realistic approach to combat and the implications of what a showdown could be. The very fact that you may bring a gun in to a confrontation can be monumental versus fighting hand to hand. On top of that, it appears that ammo will be very limited and as far as everything I've heard, the idea is you minimize and will want to avoid confrontations as much as possible. Each confrontation is designed to be tense and truly a struggle for survival. As someone who doesn't own a PS3, I'm very very interested in this title. It goes to the heart of addressing an issue that has been raised on Idle Thumbs but also many other places regarding the bizarre and jarring dichotomy of wrapping a story in supposedly very real life and death stakes, but when the gameplay begins you end up mowing down millions of dudes and fighting your way through an army all the while brazenly jumping off cliffs, flipping cars, etc. It was somewhat disappointing though to be expected that at E3 the big video demo showed a very action packed sequence filled with gun combat, unarmed struggle, and ultimately culminated in a violent end. I've heard though that you could play that same scenario a lot different. I also read that the bigger behind closed doors demo they gave to a lot of press shows a much slower paced game that looks to ratchet up the tension in very grounded ways. E3 Demo: [media=] [/media]As far as gameplay goes not that much is known but I'd expect it to handle a lot like Uncharted. And although you'll be escorting a young girl around a lot of the game, everything I"ve heard or read is that you're not really hand holding here. She gets out of the way intelligently and hangs back when needed. I would expect that the people over at Naughty Dog are smart enough to avoid the very terrible aspects of gameplay that can arrive when you've got an AI friend following you. Knowing thumbs listeners/readers, I think that this game is something that should appeal to a lot of us. Now its hard to read through a lot of the press clippings, but I do think Naughty Dog could do something really special here. Far too often games put us in a mode that doesn't really force us to think about what we're really doing. By heightening the danger of the world, enforcing a more conservative pace, and hopefully avoiding an overly didactic approach to gameplay, this could really be amazing experience.

I tried searching "Last of us" in quotes and it didn't work. Oh well, I probably just fucked it up.

Yeah as I stated the gameplay video that was shown from everything I've heard is kind of the opposite of how the game usually is. Which is annoying why they show that, but it does at the very least show that it isn't a typical run and gun ala Uncharted. But as typical with a lot of big events like this, they want to show a big action packed event as opposed to a sullen 15 minute sneak fest. Also, I searched "Last of US" which as a search string had words they didn't like, and when I searched Last I must have not highlighted Topic Title only because I missed it. I mean, if someone wants to merge this, or kill this one, that is fine, but the former topic hadn't had a new post in it since December 2011. I'm not in charge here so I can't do much, but if people feel like this should be closed I don't care. That said, this is kind of the first real news we've had of the game in a long while with actual gameplay and what not so I don't think its too big of a deal redundancy aside.

I'll admit I haven't been following the Diablo 3 news as rabidly the past week or so, but is the commodity market going to be down until that big patch hits that changes how crafting works? I kind of wish I could just buy some gems right now. And I'm not bitter but it does kind of suck if they make everything a lot cheaper after I've already dropped way too much money in to jewel crafting. Oh well.

-Grand Theft Auto Killing Every Haitian....market. -Alien vs. Predator bursts Into Stores

I usually likes a large majority of what EA Tracks offers. In fact I've even managed to find some new artists that I'm now quite in to.