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Also, I really don't think it matters. People with the mouse in their right hand can still use WASD, cursor keys, numpad or whatever just fine. The main attraction of WASD is there's so many more keys over there.
Yeah, it's pretty much like that the whole way through.
red dwarf garbage pod
Saya no Uta (PC)
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After being told repeatedly to pick this up I went through all of it over the weekend. There are three decisions in the whole “game” and it’s about eight hours long. This is a horror visual novel with a very Lovecraftian vibe to it. Monsters from another dimension, an intelligence we can’t comprehend, and an appearance that immediately renders people insane. It’s completely dark and even the lighter moments are twisted as you know things the characters do not.
The main character is suffering from agnosia after an experimental brain surgery and sees the whole world warped, Silent Hill otherworld style, with rotting meat covering walls and people appearing as maggot-like monsters. The exception is Saya, an innocent looking girl he meets in hospital, who lives with him as he becomes more reclusive and hostile. All this stuff is great and I was interested through the whole thing.
However, within Japanese visual novels there seems to be a requirement to add erotic scenes. The stuff in Saya no Uta is defended as supposedly necessary for the plot and the increasing depravity represents the main characters decline. I don’t really buy that and the lack of subtlety in these scenes makes it hard to recommend this to norms. I think you can turn this off, but by doing so you also need to turn off ‘disturbing images’ which is pretty vague as that could be 90% of the game.
It was good, but it was still 99% knob jokes.
I’ve been playing Lollipop Chainsaw on the 360 and it’s pretty much everything I expected. You push buttons, zombies explode into rainbows, and every other room has some dialogue, cutscene or mini-game to try and keep this interesting. Like Shadows of the Damned the humour is exclusively crude and if you don’t sread the rules at the word vagina you might have to cringe through a lot of it.
Killing stuff is pretty fun. I like the A, A, X or whatever which makes you somersault forwards like a gigantic circular saw and teleporting around with the pom-poms. The bad news is environments are PSX era flat walls with brick textures, some of the mini-games are kind of frustrating, and I’ve had four crashes in about two hours play.
It’s a shame in the last efforts from Grasshopper the craziness has only been skin-deep. The aesthetics, story and characters are Suda51 going mental but the mechanics are just genre conventions and barebones. Killer7 locking you to a visible spline and having you spray blood everywhere to reveal clues made the whole thing feel surreal at its core.
First hardcore clear is pretty impressive just because it takes balls. Even though if these guys did use the log on glitch to keep their characters from getting killed while getting prepared, which is only a rumour, the kill was legit.
Although, the skill ceiling in this game is very low. I think the mechanics in place don't really support the gameplay Inferno is supposed to offer.
Quote from Marvin.StarBastion is absolutely an indie game, I don't think that because they received funding it excludes them from what indie development is. They created this game as a team of 4 if I remember correctly, one artist, one designer, one programmer, one sound designer. Bastion feels completely like a product that was created because they wanted to make it, not because they wanted or necessarily needed to make money. It really comes down to your definition of indie; and I think it comes down to making what you want to make, and not making income your primary purpose/ outcome.
You don't get your own definition. It means independent, it means not relying on a publisher for "funding" and having nobody external calling shots. This lack of restraints mean you could potentially make something truly original that a publisher wouldn't want to touch and this is what makes indie games so exciting. However, this does not mean if you work somewhere "mainstream" you will never work on something original, you have sold your soul, you have no creative power, and you cannot be passionate. I'm having a hard time putting into words how staggeringly off-base this whole depiction is.
Dear Esther is described by many commentators as not being a game at all and I would be inclined to agree with them. The Marriage is an interesting idea and I concede there is no way this could have a mainstream equivalent. Limbo’s shallow gameplay of being spat out of a checkpoint to memorise a Simon Say’s sequence should not reasonably sustain anyone after 2 minutes.
While I cannot comment on Bastion because I haven’t played it, I do know Derek Yu vetoed it as being an indie game after it was picked up by Warner Brothers. Going back to previous post you also mentioned Journey, which was backed and funded by Sony. thatgamecompany have only just (in the last week) become independent.
Everything about Psychonauts was fantastic except the actual game part, and I think there’s your answer.
But when the selling point on the majority of mainstream games is the number of weapons or the improved dismemberment technology, rather than the quality of characters, stories, and emotions, I think it's good that there are also indie games that can afford the risk to try something different.
And the majority of indie games are just retro-sylised Cave Story clones with chiptunes and too many save states, right? If you're going to reduce the whole mainstream down to Call of Duty 18 and ignore titles like Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Heavy Rain, Rez, Katamari, Noby Noby Boy, Killer 7, Persona, etc. then this is just a huge straw man.
I was aiming to be as generic as possible. I don't know why you thought I was specifically talking about Super Meat Boy. The indie scene is not devoid of me-tooism, just as mainstream games are not devoid of innovation.
Quote from MclogenogI agree that Super Meat Boy and Fez aren't the indie games pushing the industry ahead. By design, they're "retro." But as a whole, indie games are capable of taking risks that would be too great to justify in the mainstream.
I would like to see this point made with examples.
I hope it's a platformer where you cannot lose.
Do Phil Fish and Team Meat have a punch up to determine who is the greatest person in the universe?
Quote from Sentura
what took you so long?
I still think the skill system could work if the itemisation and end-game supported it. And even if the skill system was void that doesn't mean permanent choices and rerolling characters wins by default.
Edit: I notice you sent me a PM wanting to discuss this with your battletag, but you also addressed me as “a fucking asshole.” Are you bipolar? I hope you don’t actually expect a sensible argument after that? It's likely to be along the lines of me suggesting going back to Diablo 2's system, but using the tools, techniques and methods hypothesised by The Internet’s Sentura to balance everything objectively perfect.
My little group of Monk (hello!), Demon Hunter and Barbarian (used to be another DH, rerolled) has now got to Act 3 and we’ve hit another wall where we can kill normal enemies fine but elites are impossible.
We now need to all gear up again but there is no productive way to do this. I’m struggling to stay awake at my keyboard as I run through the easier bosses I’m totally over-geared for, knowing I won’t get an upgrade but hoping I get something I can sell (and actually getting sub-60 junk items seemingly competing with each other to be the least effective items in the game). It struck me that this is the only end-game Diablo 3, with its bad itemisation and vested interest in promoting the auction house, can actually support.
I'm even having second thoughts about the skill system. Because, while I support the idea of changing your base skills around and promoting experimentation, the fact is Inferno kind of squishes everyone into the same build anyway, and the itemisation does very little to differentiate builds outside of random +5% Damage On Random Skill stats. This is the complete opposite of Diablo 2 where each build within each class focused on specific groups of items to make it viable in addition to just picking the skills. There are a lot of ways the new system can be intertwined with items, and I think the game would be better for it, but it is not happening at all right now.
Gearing up in Diablo 3 gives me flashbacks to when I worked in an accounts office; there’s some extremely intricate and completely soulless spreadsheet powering all this and not much else. The main concern seems to be keeping everything scaling forever as evidenced by my clear goals as Monk: I need all resist, poison resist (one with everything), dexterity, vitality and LoH. The more of this I get the better I objectively become at everything and none of them have hard caps.
Sets and uniques became obsolete on day 1 because they just adhere to their ilvl * mod with appropriate stats and there are much higher ilvl’s available deep into Inferno. Increasing the power differentiation for an equivalent ilvl item in 1.03 will make these better but they’re not going to actually become interesting. The easiest example Is Tal Rasha as this is in both games.
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The hell are those set bonuses? Remember the Trang-Oul Necromancer set in Diablo 2 that changed your appearance and gave you 3 abilities not even native to your class? Was hardly the best gear in the game but it was pretty damn cool.
I’m worried this is because of the RMAH. They don’t want to make interesting uniques and sets because when they stamp out another tier of ilvl they don’t want people holding onto old items that scale well or do interesting things. This clearly was the case with the WoW expansions where they wanted everyone moving into the next tier of gear; so they added “ratings” rather than percentages and items like the Luffa started getting fail rates over a certain level.
I'm now aware of my unwarranted sense of self importance
Thirk: http://penny-arcade.com/report/editoria ... a-croft-to
Nah, Kotaku could spin that as supporting rape.
At the risk of making an ass of myself and jeopardizing my future career I will say I think the reaction to Tomb Raider was disappointingly predictable and sensationalist. Putting a female avatar through the exact same harm as Drake in Uncharted is not reported as a step towards equality but just pandering to a niche male fetish about getting off on women being hurt. This is a catch-22 situation. The attempted sexual assault lacks any context but we can probably agree is something that should not be there, but the subsequent branding is utterly uncalled for.
Death Blossom. Great skill name or greatest skill name?
Tools look much better, loving the new Kismet.
I hope it's not another generation of games running at below half an acceptable frame rate, though.
