m76

Why would I need to travel to the past? You can experience past gaming right now without problems. Besides I have experienced most of what gaming has to offer since 1989.

I don't understand, how is Trump still the state? Are you suggesting he is still running the state or what?

Hell yes, games should not be sequel bait in the first place, they should tell a self contained story. Differences in the conclusion is what gives meaning to player choice. If all roads lead to rome, then what's the point of having player choice in the first place? And no, Roman, I'll not go drinking or bowling with you.

Games are a form of escapism, to get your mind off daily grind, to be something else or someone else. A game where the goal is to be art, or political statement is much like a car that's purpose is not to be driven. There is room for conceptual, and art pieces, as long as the escapism goal is met by other games. Educational games are another category entirely, when we talk about games we usually don't refer to games designed with that purpose.

I hope it won't be a scene to scene retelling of the events of the game, because that would be boring, and I'd be annoyed at the changes to the story. I also hope that it will focus more on Ellie than on Joel. My absolute favorite part of the first game was when Ellie was separated from Joel, escaping the cannibals.

And that is why I don't like it. A better story would've been one where not all of my actions are exercises in futility. I think if you are pyschologically compelled to do exactly what they say to you after "would you kindly" you'd know. As for booker, yeah he didn't know, I remembered incorrectly why I so disliked the story after 8 years.

There seems to be this new alarming trend of videogames being marketed around the personal cult of an actor or actress I have very mixed feelings about this, because while this might help to bring gaming closer to the mainstream, it is also at the cost of traditional voice actors, who can't get major roles if they all go to hollywood superstarts. Not to mention the budget implications of hiring people with multi million dollar salaries for games. In some cases it even has effects on the direction of the game, if rumours are true, cyberpunk 2077's story was completely rewritten to suit Keanu Reeves. Originally the character was very different, and only came into the story at a later stage. Which actually would've made much more sense to me. It was one of my complaints about the game that you don't have enough freedom to pursue what the game is actually supposed to be about, being a cyberpunk mercenary in an open world. But I digress, what do you think about replacing traditional voice actors with mainstream stars and using them to market games?

And here I was thinking that the goal of "entertainment" was to entertain your audience. Doing anything else is the very definition of self-serving. Divisive stories will always be hit and miss, whether you care to admit it or not.

No, it's a core mechanic of Dishonored, that there are two different flavoured endings depending on how aggressive you played. There is even a separate achievement for the endings.

There are several games that deliberately foreshadow events in their story. Sometimes they do right by it but other times the actual event does not live up to what was advertised. For example I recently played Dishonored II, and the game kept nagging me to stop killing enemies as this will turn the main character very cynical, and result in a very dark ending for the game. But when I got to the end, the so called dark ending, wasn't really that dark, so I was kind of disappointed. Have you had any similar experiences in games, where a promise of a big ending, or mission was not as expected?

Remember he is the self professed "abuser of characters". He did alienate a lot of fans with The Last of Us 2. It is pure chance that I happened to like it regardless, but I can understand how a lot of people were dismayed by it. Going to write a story that you know at best would be highly divisive is self-serving. So I curb my expectations for the TV show, I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than badly disappointed.

I'm pretty sure it will be a hit or miss. Either great, or absolutely terrible. While I liked the two games, I think Druckman can be a bit self-serving at times in writing, much like Kojima. If he can avoid that it will be great, if not, the show will be frustrating and painful to watch. My biggest concern for the show however is Pedro Pascale, his behind the scenes shenanigans on the Mandalorian bumped his reputation down a few notches in my eyes.

Since PC is the more versatile platform, I see no benefit in bringing games to console, I wish a lot of console games were on PC to be fully enjoyable.

I wish there were no artificial barriers in open world games, but also wish scaling natural obstacles should be more realistic. Even games like Tomb Raider do it wrong, because they only make ledges climbambe that you are supposed to climb. I think you should be able to climb any rock wall. it would be much more fun to find your own route to the top of the cliff instead of trying to guess the level designer's preferred route.

It was an example of using games as a political platform. Nothing else. I cited it as an example of what people who want no politics in games are complaining about. It's just the most obvious and widespread example. You claimed that Bioshock Infinite is hated because of politics, my argument was that the bioshock infinite relased a while before politics even started to become an issue in games. I'm aware of the fact that you and likeminded people want to paint me in a certain way, whether it is true or not. I just called out the hyporcisy of your prejudice, and here you are doing it again. You do realize that you are arguing against your own argument? Exactly, if I wanted "fap" material there is plenty of that nowadays on the internet, so why would I want that from games? But clearly you are not thinking logically but emotionally. And attractiveness is not a function of cup size. Is this another attempt at straw-manning, or a projection of your own repressed values? I said I didn't remember it, not that it wasn't in it. It's funny, you trying to prove that I hate a game over something I don't even remember being in it, or worthy of a mention in my original review of the game. (Yes I went back and read my own thoughts on the game) It was probably not attempting to equate current day events with the racism in the game, otherwise I'd have taken note. In other words you completely missed my point. Of course the twist would not be a twist if you were aware of it. My point was that the player character must be aware of it in both games, or at least have a very serious suspicion. Which is kept from the player completely. The hero's journey only works if the audience is aware of it. If I'm kept completely in the dark, and it is revealed at the very end that all my actions during the game were completely futile I won't be impressed by the clever twist, I'll be annoyed. You know a red herring is only a red herring if it doesn't turn out to be true. For the entire game I thought them being the same person must be a red herring, because it would negate the whole journey. Oh so I'm either stupid or a bigot if I dislike the game, LOL Now that I read my own thoughts on the game I recall that my main issue with infinite wasn't that the twist was only revealed at the end, it is that it makes all my work and actions during the game meaningless. The story could've literally jumped from the first 10 minutes to the last 10 minutes, and it would've made absolutely no difference in the outcome.

I said I didn't remember, not that it wasn't in it. I played the game 8 years ago. And as you can see it is irrelevant to my criticism of the game. So, what is your point?

You are retroactively straw-manning people. The keep politics out of games debate hasn't even started when Infinite came out. This is before even gamergate. And you are deliberately missing the point of it. When we say "Keep politics out of games" we don't mean keep political themes out of games, nobody wants that. That's a strawman argument, one that's getting very long in the tooth. What we want to be left out of games is political virtue signalling and references to current day politics. Like for example Mortal Kombat covering up women in the game for misguided political reasons, then not even having the balls to admit what they were doing. Or other games like Mass Effect Andromeda making every female character deliberately less attractive, even if it goes completely against established lore. And a lot of other games tried to de-feminize characters. It's as if feminism's greatest enemy now is femininity. It's utterly ridiculous and I want this campaign nowhere near my videogames. As for infinite I didn't even remember the game had anything to say about race or prejudice. The ironic bit is that you talk about prejudice when you are the one being prejudiced by assuming that if someone doesn't like the game it must be because of politics. Which is exactly how games journalism tries to demonize the gaming community: You didn't like X game that had a reference to this hot issue! THEN YOU MUST BE A BIGOT! So in a way it is mandatory to love games that has any kind of remote reference to politics otherwise you are some kind of "-ist". No wonder people want to keep politics out of games, when it is constantly being used to demonize them for not kowtowing to it. I don't want any political messaging in games, regardless of which side I fall on that particular debate.

I didn't like any bioshock game that much, if that makes you feel better. Bioshock was a direct ripoff of System Shock 2, only slightly worse in every way. It's big selling point was supposed to be the big daddy little sister pairs, but that got old after the first time you met one, after that it's just a generic enemy as much as any. And the so called "clever twist" in the story is a lie, because the player character must have been aware of it before the reveal, only the player is kept in the dark, which is a big reverse 4th wall break. Any relevant knowledge of to the player character should be readily available to the player. I can accept it if it's only a small part of the story, or in games where there are multiple playable characters, but making the whole story hinge on on hiding a very important fact about the playable character is not clever, it's an insult. And Bioshock Infinite does the exact same thing with the story. The whole premise hinges on the fact that the player is kept in the dark. Which is just lazy storytelling and infuriating when it is finally revealed. What makes infinite even worse than bioshock is that instead of being a relatively competent immersive sim, it is a generic action game.

About 95% of my work is done on PC, and that only reinforces my desire to only play games on PC. Having to switch to another device is highly inconvenient. In the past I even had my PS2 hooked up to my PC through a TV card so I could play console games seamlessly on it. And with every day I have less and less incentive to switch on a console. My PS4 hasn't been turned on since I played The Last of Us II in the summer. There is a good chance I won't be buying a next gen console at all.

Most modern games has a checkpoint based save system anyway, so you don't even have the opportunity to chose not to overwrite the previous save, the game overwrites it without question. It has happened to me a few times, but loading the wrong save is more often, especially with games that name their saves as "save1, save2, save3" without any further description.

I was addressing the OP.

IQ tests are somewhat flawed as they rely on knowledge and practice that might not everyone have. That doesn't mean however that geniuses don't exist, or that different people don't have different mental capacity for solving problems. Common sense is nonsense actually. it's trying to make sense of complex systems without actually understanding iheir inner workings. Common sense gets you flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and so on.

What you describe is akin to a constant state of dejavu. I mean to me dejavu moments feel like if I'm observing myself from a third person perspective. This might be off-topic but something fictional being more real than reality only happened to me with dreams. There was one particular time when my dream was so vivid, that I was convinced for an hour after waking up that it was real and happened the day before. It was really scary, and exhilarating at the same time.

I ain't a big fan of the genre, I mean I've played them too in the past, but only because we didn't have anything better. Nowadays you couldn't sit me down in front of a side scroller for more than five minutes. No matter how artsy fartsy. To me modern side scrollers are akin to the games trying to mimic 8bit computer graphics. To me those efforts mean nothing, let the past be the past. My favorite side scroller was probably Another World, which was remade a few years ago, but even that couldn't get me back to playing.

Nope, I never really got into Q3A, but UT2004 was a popular game, but I don't think I've played it in the last 10 years. Last time was at my workplace with colleagues in the middle of crunch during the night.