Corelli

I am an idiot and I understand and can use Unity. Game development is cracking wide open and my guess is that we're just starting to see the effects.

This looks AWESOME.

That arrangement is so great.

I am right there with you on that one. I think GB's strongest attribute is their honesty. They let you know where they're coming from and they're transparent, so you have a good context for their opinions. And they're entertaining. Basically all I'm saying is that they do a really good thing.

What I don't understand how to reconcile, and this is an important but often dismissed area of games criticism, is the difference in difficulty level. Bioshock: Infinite on hard is a completely different game than on normal. It's night and day. I was playing the game through on hard and not only was it very frustrating, but it really highlighted a lot of design decisions that were sub-optimal. Eventually it became such a chore that I just wanted to finish the game and play on normal, but on normal literally not one iota of the combat design matters: it's so simplistic that the vigors, tears, and skyrails simply serve to complicate an already jumbled mess of combat options. Contrast this to the original Bioshock, where, with the exception of some of the crazier "there's fifty splicers running at you at once" areas and the last boss fight, the combat is extremely interesting, filled with reasonable options that are clear to the player and fun to put into practice. Trapping a big daddy with an immense web of electrified crossbow traps and herding him into an area with a turret you've hacked is way more fun and clear to the player than jumping on a quickly moving skyrail then getting inexplicably killed in two seconds because a handyman electried it offscreen.

I'm not done with Infinite, so I can't comment on the story, but I think the combat is a huge step back from Bioshock 1 and 2. And that's what I care about more than anything. That's what I'm actually doing.

League of Legends has brackets!

"Ludic language" is an umbrella term that applies to anything with mechanics, really. Bioshock didn't "coin" ludonarrativic dissonance; that term was around for a long time before that and can apply to any number of games. Any game creates its own ludic language (or ludology) in the sense that its ludology is derived from the combination of mechanics the game employs; it's not something that's specific to any one game. Edit: clarity

I'm happy this was not a joke, and I'm interested to see if DLC this different from the main game can keep some of the main games defining attributes like non-linearity, etc.

I think that's a pretty cogent observation.

Maybe I was wrong? This youtube let's play clearly shows that you don't pick heads or tails, you just push a button to flip the coin: Oops, my bad. Interesting how "push button for quick time event" became "choose x or y" in my head.

I agree, but only because you just got a few hours in. By the time I got to the end of Bioshock I was hacking turrets mid-combat and setting up elaborate traps for Big Daddies and it was some of the best combat I've ever experienced in an FPS, if not the best. But yeah, it takes some time to get there.

On the "heads/tails" moment - I'm pretty sure the game let me pick. I wonder if this is a difference between PC and console? I'm playing on the 360.

Obviously Kassadin is the best carry.

I had no idea Team Meat was doing this. It sounds like a fairly novel way of addressing some of those gameplay challenges, I'll have to keep up with it. Ninja edit: I wonder what role thematics has in all this. Is there an inherent disconnect when a game is presenting you cats or protozoa as opposed to humanoids? Or does it work better because the game is being more honest about the limits of its simulation? Part of the reason I never got much into the sims was because the sims themselves were so brazenly inhuman, there was always an off-putting level of dissonance going on. Oddly enough, I empathize a lot with the humanoids in DF, but maybe that has as much to do with graphical fidelity (or lack there of) as anything else.

The discussion about the granularity of simulation in games like Sim City and Spacebase (DF, etc.) is super interesting to me. Especially that Relic example. How useful are these mechanics if they're not communicated well to the player? It's a tough question, because some of the fun for me in those games is discovering that a simulation is controlling something that you thought (for lack of a better term) was scripted or baked in, like the first time I realized my dwarves in DF were making art about things that was happening during my game. Edit: Holy shit I did the Aladdin carpet thing too! I couldn't wear my glasses while wearing the headset so I couldn't even see anything that was going on.

Far Cry 3 is a weird game.

It's an interesting question, but it's important to remember that Bioshock would probably never have been very popular if they hadn't screamed "WE SWEAR ITS A SHOOTER" during the run up to release about a million times.

Retract your semandibles, guys.

Yep!

"Bradread". Nice portmanteau, Remo! (Not a pun, btw)

https://twitter.com/sarahw/status/306036683562971136

This is like a really nice kickstarter video. Good job having competent concept artists, I guess? This thing doesn't interest me in the least.

One of my favorite time periods to read about. Here's my take: The most important story of the cold war is a personal one, not an all-encompassing one. It's not the story of empires jockeying for power as much as it is the individual being crushed by the state. It's not imposing your will on the system; it's the system imposing its will on individuals. How do you make a game out of that, let alone a strategy game? One approach might be an examination of bureaucracy and the internecine politicking that goes on inside it (MI-6 case officer management sim, anyone?) Either way, I think that "the player as one nation" approach is essentially unworkable because, as you say, the whole point of the cold war is that very little happens on a global strategic scale.

I really enjoyed this, and I feel like the bookcast is really coming into its own. Great work guys.