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the Dao of "games journalism"

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Posts

  • StiltsStilts Registered User regular
    the Shalebridge Cradle level in Thief: Deadly Shadows is really damn scary.

    Also gives me a good excuse to post this Keiron Gillen piece again.

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  • VivixenneVivixenne Remember your training, and we'll get through this just fine. Registered User regular
    edited April 2012
    I wrote up four drafty thingies over the Easter long weekend

    I've already submitted one, but I only have time to polish/edit one of the other things right now

    and I guess my question is which of the below topics you guys are most interested in hearing about:
    1. Compartmentalised labeling and RPGs - basically, a link between the appeal of RPGs and the way we think about roles and labels
    2. Breaking down the microtransaction model - critical reflection of the advent of microtransactions in video games
    3. What keeps a game alive long after the height of its popularity? - is it diehard fans? strong online communities? additions/changes made by devs? references TF2, Guild Wars, WoW, and others

    I am leaning towards the first but the other two were fun to write, too

    Vivixenne on
    XBOX: NOVADELPHINI | DISCORD: NOVADELPHINI #7387 | TWITTER
  • OrikaeshigitaeOrikaeshigitae Registered User, ClubPA regular
    the first is a priority, but i'd love any of those

  • OrikaeshigitaeOrikaeshigitae Registered User, ClubPA regular
    starting a bit early

  • NeoTomaNeoToma Registered User regular
    I really like the first as well.

  • Blake TBlake T Do you have enemies then? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered User regular
    edited April 2012
    Game facts.
    After they (finally) shut off the halo 2 multiplayer. It continued to be played for a month or two as people discovered that if you didn't turn off your xbox and stayed in multiplayer you could continue to play.

    So people just left them on.

    Blake T on
  • OrikaeshigitaeOrikaeshigitae Registered User, ClubPA regular
    i guess my house is an exclusion zone for procaster not continually crashing, fucking up, broadcasting more than i tell it to or just generally being a dick

  • Day of the BearDay of the Bear The Qun demandsRegistered User regular
    I wish my internet wasn't so shitty.

    I'd love to watch some streamin' some time but it ain't in the cards.

    m6eoUgQ.jpg
  • chiasaur11chiasaur11 Never doubt a raccoon. Do you think it's trademarked?Registered User regular
    Blake T wrote: »
    Game facts.
    After they (finally) shut off the halo 2 multiplayer. It continued to be played for a month or two as people discovered that if you didn't turn off your xbox and stayed in multiplayer you could continue to play.

    So people just left them on.

    It was interesting to read about as it happened. The slow fading away of the last systems playing it. Just lights blinking off, numbers ticking down.

    End of the world, in a small way. Love that kind of thing.

  • HunteraHuntera Rude Boy Registered User regular
    Blake T wrote: »
    Game facts.
    After they (finally) shut off the halo 2 multiplayer. It continued to be played for a month or two as people discovered that if you didn't turn off your xbox and stayed in multiplayer you could continue to play.

    So people just left them on.

    Bungie and Microsoft eventually had to contact them and tell them to turn off their xboxes because they couldn't close the service totally until they did.

  • MugginsMuggins Registered User regular
    They also gave them free copies of...Reach? or ODST?

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    hey satan...: thinkgeek amazon My post |
  • HunteraHuntera Rude Boy Registered User regular
    Veretas wrote: »
    They also gave them free copies of...Reach? or ODST?

    Reach, I believe.

  • GoatmonGoatmon Companion of Kess Registered User regular
    the Shalebridge Cradle level in Thief: Deadly Shadows is really damn scary.

    Yeah, it was straight-up terrifying.

    But the creepiest music from the game (That isn't just spooky ambient noises) is from Overlook Manor.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IfttUuCac0

    Switch Friend Code: SW-6680-6709-4204


  • T4CTT4CT BAFTA-NOMINATED NAFTA-APPROVEDRegistered User regular
    better game facts: about four people on this forum were in the last 10 people on Xbox Live Original

    one of them was the last four iirc

  • FishmanFishman Put your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain. Registered User regular
    That sounds.... pretty boring, actually. I mean, I kinda get it, but I'm also like "So?".

    X-Com LP Thread I, II, III, IV, V
    That's unbelievably cool. Your new name is cool guy. Let's have sex.
  • GatsbyGatsby Registered User regular
    chiasaur11 wrote: »
    Blake T wrote: »
    Game facts.
    After they (finally) shut off the halo 2 multiplayer. It continued to be played for a month or two as people discovered that if you didn't turn off your xbox and stayed in multiplayer you could continue to play.

    So people just left them on.

    It was interesting to read about as it happened. The slow fading away of the last systems playing it. Just lights blinking off, numbers ticking down.

    End of the world, in a small way. Love that kind of thing.

    Conversely, it was great seeing the whole of Australia lit up on the world map when I played Halo 3 and Reach on the first day, yet the entirety of the US was pitch black because technically it was still the day before.

  • MrMonroeMrMonroe passed out on the floor nowRegistered User regular
    Vivixenne wrote: »
    2. Breaking down the microtransaction model - critical reflection of the advent of microtransactions in video games

    there was a fantastic article written on this subject (that had the unfortunate characteristic of being extremely long) that I can never find when I want to

    It was written by a journalist and game enthusiast who decided he would go work for a company that makes facebook games and such other vampiric forms of addiction-farming, and spent a few years building the math behind the models of how much to charge for each incremental unit of energy and how long users would have to wait to build up that energy to maximize the likelihood that they would spend actual money dollars on it.

    Unfortunately I was not smart enough to bookmark it and I can never find it.

    Also: I didn't realize y'all had included my high-school friend's article. Bastard never told me about it after I tipped him off that it would be a good place to get published.

  • SoaLSoaL fantastic Registered User regular
    hey @Druhim http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/20/do-auction-houses-suck/

    Raph Koster talks about what he did when designing the shopkeeper stuff in star wars galaxies

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  • AneurhythmiaAneurhythmia Registered User regular
    Did I miss the stream?

  • OrikaeshigitaeOrikaeshigitae Registered User, ClubPA regular
    yeah. i suspect i'm going to have to wait until i move to do anything other than stream my desktop.

    in related news, moviebob says interesting things about comic books, but i suspect that he's incredibly insufferable.

    also, i'm really bitter about the impact of the games press!

  • MeldingMelding Registered User regular
    what makes you assume he's insufferable? because he's a giant nerd, or?

  • Indie WinterIndie Winter die Krähe Rudi Hurzlmeier (German, b. 1952)Registered User regular
    question:

    I never played any of the Thief games

    are they still playable today? from a graphical and mechanical standpoint?

    also, are there any must have mods out there I should try out if I do end up playing?

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  • GoatmonGoatmon Companion of Kess Registered User regular
    Thief 3 is dated, but still pretty playable.

    There is also a 3rd party progrma you can install that lets you add in a bunch of spruced-up textures that make it look much nicer and let you alter Garret's outfit.

    Switch Friend Code: SW-6680-6709-4204


  • AnzekayAnzekay Registered User regular
    Orki would you be interested in some articles about character development in video games?

    kinda vague ideas right now but I know there's more than one article in me on the topic

  • OrikaeshigitaeOrikaeshigitae Registered User, ClubPA regular
    Melding wrote: »
    what makes you assume he's insufferable? because he's a giant nerd, or?

    oh he has this big ol' snortfest on his recent episode about how much he hated high school and american pie is the emblem of everything wrong in his life

    @anzekay certainly! @olivaw did two of those and they were great, i want more

  • Indie WinterIndie Winter die Krähe Rudi Hurzlmeier (German, b. 1952)Registered User regular
    Goatmon wrote: »
    Thief 3 is dated, but still pretty playable.

    There is also a 3rd party progrma you can install that lets you add in a bunch of spruced-up textures that make it look much nicer and let you alter Garret's outfit.

    I understood Thief 3 was the bastard child of the series, that 2 was the best one. This is not the case?

    wY6K6Jb.gif
  • AnzekayAnzekay Registered User regular
    excellent.

    what articles did he do? I'd be interested in seeing what has been covered already

  • chiasaur11chiasaur11 Never doubt a raccoon. Do you think it's trademarked?Registered User regular
    Goatmon wrote: »
    Thief 3 is dated, but still pretty playable.

    There is also a 3rd party progrma you can install that lets you add in a bunch of spruced-up textures that make it look much nicer and let you alter Garret's outfit.

    I understood Thief 3 was the bastard child of the series, that 2 was the best one. This is not the case?

    Seems some people hold that opinion fairly firm. Tom Francis, of PC Gamer, had a bit about it on one of his old blogs.

    "I've been keeping fairly quiet about this, but I really can't make myself like Thief: Deadly Shadows. What's odd is that my problems with it aren't subtle, ineffible qualities, they're glaring errors in the game that the mechanics seem to shove in your face almost intentionally.

    The very first second of freedom - the last objective in the tutorial mission, whereby you have to steal the Lord's purse from under his nose as he talks by the fire - immediately goes horribly wrong. The fire is illuminating the purse and the two people talking, and would evidently illuminate you if you got close to it. So I fired a water-arrow at the fire, straight between the two conversationists, not caring that they would see because everything was going to be dark. It extinguished the fire with the horrible cartoon plop! noise with which they've replaced the gentle hiss of old, and the two continued talking without so much as a pause. It absolutely forbids you to forget that this is a game; a flaky, flaky game that almost never makes even a little bit of sense.

    What were my other options? Unless I extinguish the fire, I have to take the bag in broad firelight, with both people looking at it - which I can do, it turns out, since I can pick things up from three metres away with an invisible arm that also renders people unable to detect whether the item I have taken has gone or not for a good thirty seconds. My third and last option would be to use a noisemaker arrow to distract them - but the conversation is important to my next mission, so the game can't let me avoid it, and the two won't be distracted.

    The horrible, gaping flaws in the game's mechanics absolutely surround you from the word go, and are far harder to evade than the City Guard. Worse, all their immersion-shattering interventions to force you to hear this boring, badly acted conversation fail anyway - every method of getting the purse takes less than a quarter of the time it takes the two of them to get to anything relevant in their conversation, even including planning time, and so you're indoctrinated into what turns out to be an inescapable staple of the game - moving on to a new area, having no idea what you're supposed to be doing, having no objectives to complete on your objectives screen, only to be scared witless in five minutes' time by a voice that you'll later realise is your *own character* loudly and crudely voicing a summary of what you're supposed to have just heard, despite the fact that the conversation is now several hundred metres away in a closed room.

    Later, this will happen even when the participants in the conversation are not only in a locked room three floors underground on the other side of town, but also long *dead* by your own hand because you'd become so achingly bored and insulted by their poorly written and over-acted lines.

    Over-acted is the best the voice-acting gets - it may be a feeble attempt to make the guard's relentlessly vocalised 'thoughts' about your location funny, but either way it's just atmosphere-shattering and intrusive. The worst it gets - as far as I've heard - is Black Market Bertha, a 'fence' for your loot whom it is sadly impossible to avoid visiting. I think she's trying to do a sort of smouldering voice, and her character is meant to be impressed by Garrett but trying to hide it. They like to rub your face in the idea that men fear or respect you while women desperately desire you - something I particularly like because I'm a pathetic husk of a man who plays computer games in an attempt to live out feebly conceived and embarrassingly puerile fantasies about my social status and sexual prowess.

    It's hard to tell, though, on account of how spectacularly, agonisingly bad the voice is. I'm only able to accurately express how low on the scale of bad voice acting Black Market Bertha is by actually drawing the scale of bad voice acting. There are no words with which to label her position on this in descriptive terms, so I've resorted to simply marking it with her name:

    http://www.pentadact.com/bertha.jpg

    The flakiness of how characters in the game react to you is so chronic that I ended up slavishly obeying what I could only guess the developer's wishes were. I'd actually leave the computer to make a cup of tea when I heard a conversation start, because moving would break the game and listening would destroy my mind. I hate hoop-jumping, but I'd rather that than having to jump through invisible hoops that are on fire with invisible fire that kills you and if you save whilst near the fire that also ruins everything.

    If you save when someone's talking to you, expect them to stop, say hello, then walk off leaving you without an objective critical to the game - or a save before you broke the game. I still have two critical artifacts I stole near the start of the game because I saved while the person to whom I was supposed to give them was talking, and my current mission objective is to recover these *again* from a monster that later steals them from the person I never gave them to. I have them both right there in my inventory. I have no idea what would happen if I got the motivation to play the game long enough to find where these artifacts are now supposed to be. Naturally his not taking them prevented me from getting the next objective from him, so I had to wander aimlessly around four different areas until I did whatever it was by accident, which gave me the objective without marking it as complete, then gave me two more no-one had mentioned.

    Encounters with enemies go wrong slightly less often - now and then a guard will hear you for no reason and run directly to your location, and if an enemy randomly detects you as you creep up behind them with the kosh, what would have been a one-hit takedown will take about fifty hits. They've even recorded special lines for your victims to insult you with as you rain what would normally be consciousness-depriving blows down on them - "Was that a joke?" - as though your victim's awareness of your existence renders their skull all but impervious to a ten kilo sack of metal being brought down on it with your full strength.

    The actual problem with enemy encounters is not that they break often, but that there's no situation that can't be solved with flash bombs - they blind everyone looking as you, they're dirt-cheap, you can carry hundreds of them, and they even kill undead creatures that weapons can never defeat. And because you'll be using them a lot, they were sure not to iron out an easily solved realism-shattering defect in their mechanics - blinded enemies can see perfectly well as soon as you hit them or interact with them in any other way.

    It has positive features: zombies are scary, The Cradle is scary, there is a story - albeit a frequently dumb and nonsensical one - and it's fun to have The Hammerites on your side and watch them beat your enemies to death (although they won't recognise that someone if your enemy just from them chasing you and cutting you up with a sword - you have to make a 'gesture' hit on them before an ally will recognise what's taking place as being combat). But the state of the thing - God."

  • AnzekayAnzekay Registered User regular

    Oh okay, cool! I think the first couple will be a bit more general, and then maybe some case studies.

    I like the idea of doing a bit of a series of articles. I'll see what I come up with.

  • OrikaeshigitaeOrikaeshigitae Registered User, ClubPA regular
    it's less that fact than his attitude about it, which comes off as based in superiority rather than a bad time

  • MeldingMelding Registered User regular
    Melding wrote: »
    what makes you assume he's insufferable? because he's a giant nerd, or?

    oh he has this big ol' snortfest on his recent episode about how much he hated high school and american pie is the emblem of everything wrong in his life

    Man, most nerds hated high school. I think we just got lucky.

    I hung out with the people the would be bullies were legitimately afraid of or bought their drugs from, you i don't know, but we kept a diverse group of friends.

    Not everyone has the charm we manage to pull off, or have to deal with shittier people.

    Also, american pie was a dumb movie.

  • MeldingMelding Registered User regular
    Well, he has admitted to having a grudge still, like every "Hey nerds, we need to stop being such shitty people. being arguably smarter doesn't mean we're better people" episodes he calls himself out on having the same problem, so at least he sees it as a flaw, rather then "nerds will take over the earth"

    Also, seriously i used to hang out with a guy that carried a 6 inch hunting knife on him at all times.

    that guy was crazy.

  • Dee KaeDee Kae Registered User regular
    That whole "Dear Esther" thing was pretty rad.

  • OrikaeshigitaeOrikaeshigitae Registered User, ClubPA regular
    i knew a guy like that.

  • OrikaeshigitaeOrikaeshigitae Registered User, ClubPA regular
    i always put that up to our high school being in the middle of a cornfield

  • MeldingMelding Registered User regular
    yeah, that probably played a role in it.

  • OrikaeshigitaeOrikaeshigitae Registered User, ClubPA regular
    Dee Kae wrote: »
    That whole "Dear Esther" thing was pretty rad.

    splain

  • Dee KaeDee Kae Registered User regular
    Reasons to carry a knife:

    1. You're a drug dealer.

    2. You're taking the drugs you're dealing.

    It's not one or the other usually.

  • Dee KaeDee Kae Registered User regular
    Dee Kae wrote: »
    That whole "Dear Esther" thing was pretty rad.

    splain
    Didnt' you stream playin' that like some days ago or what not? I popped in and it was a nice moment. Didn't know a thing about it then decided to read up on it and check it out after. Interesting is the word for it all.

This discussion has been closed.