So with 'The Movies' having rounded out the Arland streams (I think?) ...am I the only one who thinks that they've been really great? I can't recall all of what they were, but even just in the last week or two, KSP, Gunpoint and The Movies were all great watches, as was Jer doing God Hand and Alex/...

Just a quick note, the YouTube upload of The Long Dark is being blocked (at least in Canada) by SME. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUxhrXsMj88).

Exactly, Tresspasser had an entirely novel physics engine (at a time when the physics in most games was "objects fall towards the ground"), entirely novel enemy AI, tried to pioneer HUD-free 1st-person gaming (you checked your health by looking at a tattoo on your chest, which is an intere...

The thing about Trespasser is that it isn't bad due to lack of effort, it's bad due to biting off way, way, way more than it could chew (or the hardware at the time could handle). It tried to completely re-design first-person gaming from scratch, and simply didn't have the resources to pull it off. ...

Another one for the list should be Gunpoint. It's got a delightful sense of humour (not over-the-top, despite the jumping pants), fun gameplay, and the ability to KO a guard and then punch them until your mouse breaks from all the clicking!

I'm like Kapol in that there is an upper limit. Too much hype makes me far less likely to want to experience something, because I feel like I'm being pressured into it. One, two, or even five people saying I'd like something? Sure. Fifty? I'll wait a few years to look at it, if I ever do. Plus, one ...

So, a game I think would be right up Alex's alley is Never Alone . It's an indie game in which you play a little Inuit girl, with a lovely art style and setting based on Alaskan Inuit lore, and it has a cute little arctic fox as a playable character! It was actually made specifically to help spread ...

I think horror with a weapon can work, but you have to still be quite outmatched. I'm not saying you make combat clunky, but make the enemies fast and accurate, say.* Just something so that you can win if you choose to fight them, but it'll take loads of skill to win against more than one at a time,...

And we will see how dead the AAA industry is, when on November 4th the newest carbon copy of Call of Duty: One as good as the other is released and the hordes will come forth to consume. And nine days later, when about 6 Million people will get Warlords of Draenor. Call of Duty is doing great. WoW ...

AAA games aren't dead or dying, they're stagnating, which is different. We've seen this stagnation before, it used to happen about once per console generation. It's also what Hollywood goes through every decade or so. We may eventually see more big publishers collapse, but the idea of big-budget gam...

For those who haven't had enough of the Zoe Quin and Anita Sarkeesian tempests in teacups, Ars Technica has a pretty good write-up about both.

I don't quite get Five Nights at Freddy's. It's basically just staring at a couple of jpegs for 5 minutes and then a predictable jump scare. It's an interesting concept at least, I'll give it that. Major caveat in that I've not played the game, but I think that the fact that you ave agency, but tha...

I don't know that Valve can do anything to devs who don't complete games they put up for early access, other than removing the title from the store. Gamespot can't sue publishers for releasing broken games, after all. As for Steam's quality control: Valve is, by all accounts, doing everything they c...

Everything I've heard about Five Nights at Freddy's makes it sound ideal. It's inexpensive, not hugely long, and hella scary, by all accounts.

I don't mind Early Access, as it can work quite well for some titles. What I find frustrating is that they're on the same part of the store as full releases and there's nothing to indicate that they're EA until you click on them and load up their store page. Mind you, I find the entire "New Tit...

So, just sat through an excruciating half-hour video that claims to prove the conspiracy theory, so here's the issue distilled: It raises four points that seem at all valid to me, which are as follows: - Zoe may have slept with a journalist who wrote a favourable article about her game, Depression Q...

My understanding of the Zoe Quinn situation: She's being accused of "sleeping her way to the top" by seducing a half-dozen gaming journalists to get favourable press coverage. So far there's no evidence one way or the other on this (which is enough for me to discount it 'till/if some shows...

Yeah, it's worth noting that playing a game while doing a running commentary is much harder than it seems, and gets even worse when you interact with a chat. Puzzles, in that environment, can become nigh-impossible to solve properly because your already-not-actually-capable-of-multitasking brain is ...

I don't know that it's puzzles, per se, that are the problem so much as it's bad puzzles.

I think people are expecting too much out of their entertainment media. There aren't that many uniquely creative people in the world. How many pieces of music last for decades, how many books are remembered and still read years after the author has died? How many movies are recounted for their uniq...

Yeah, Alex's problem, as I understood it, with Erin was that the "Sassy younger woman who won't take orders and messes everything up and needs a man to save her" is a ludicrously common way to portray female characters.

Oh, the needless tedium is a definite mark against, but the games as a whole are solidly average-to-a-bit-above-average, IMO.

Were they sent back in time? I think maybe they were sent to an alternate dimension, or something? It doesn't really matter, the game is still awful, I'm just highlighting how utterly incomprehensible the plot was, too.

Aw, don't mock the Avernum games! They've got solid writing and, while the actual game mechanics are needlessly tedious at times, they're not bad.

I remember trying Another World a couple years back, and yeah, "stupid hard" is a good description of it. It's essentially the forerunner of FMV games and QTEs, combined with no on-screen prompts. I mean, very imaginative setting and ideas, but ye gods the difficulty. ...Which might be qui...