Withywarlock

Much as I like slacktivism and the things petitions have achieved, I don't think that's going to make anywhere near as big an impact on the games industry as voting with one's wallet. I get the arguments against voting with one's wallet when so-called 'whales' can undermine all that progress instantly and unwittingly, but that also applies to petitions. I can sign a petition and still buy a video game sight unseen, just like how people aligning with Boycott Modern Warfare 2, err, bought Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It's not enough to sign away the problem - it takes a whole lot of habitual changes to pre-ordering, not viewing hype material (even downvoting a trailer helps it get into more people's feeds) and waiting for sales on season passes for this to change. Had I still access to my Change.org account I'd sign if only to help a fellow forumgoer, but I say with heavy heart that I don't think this will work. I'd like to be wrong though. ^^

I liked Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout's presentation because it was like game shows such as 50/50, It's a Knockout and Get Your Own Back, but I can't think of many video games based on TV shows. Fort Boyard has a video game but at £22.99 and Mixed reviews on Steam I don't fancy finding out for myself how true it is to the show first-hand. My partner liked Buzz on Playstation 2 many moons ago. If she's still got it we may have to dig that out. I think the PC equivilent is Jackbox, though it's my understanding that streamers and their audience can play along with that too. Beyond that, the only other original quiz show game I can think of was The Guy Game, but the less said of that the better.

There's some good comedic material in the Barbie animated stuff, and in one of the PC video games I seem to recall? Not that I make a habit of watching it, I just see stills in memes. Honest. Ahem. In terms of educational games I only remember Reader Rabbit and Rayman Junior. There wasn't much choice in the UK for such games compared to the US, which had Carmen Sandiago among other intellectual properties. Other than that I can't think of anything for super young audiences. When I think of children's games I typically think of the Disney platformers on PS1 (Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue, Tarzan) or more recent ones like A Hat in Time or Yooka-Laylee and The Impossible Lair.

I'm not overly familiar with Capcom and their arcade sticks, so perhaps someone here could tell me if Mega-Man would work well with one? And would it work well enough to justify spending $270? I personally can't see it myself, especially when the stick is attached to that dinky TV. It looks so uncomfortable to have on one's lap or on a desk, but perhaps my inexperience with such things is what makes me so indifferent or against it.

I don't have any gaming merch any more, as I find it tacky unless the entire room makes it work. Mine doesn't. Instead, my gaming space is set up as an altar of sorts; skulls (and skull accessories), incense and no small amount of wires sprawled across the place give it an air of a particular Black Sabbath song. I call my gaming space "Computershrine", which I like to draw upon while writing works for my fictional setting of Techropolis.

On a sentimental note, my romance with Zevran from Dragon Age: Origins was a personal revelation, so to speak. Because of that I can't think of any romance that has, or likely ever will, be quite as rewarding to me personally than that. Otherwise, pretty much all the romances from Valkyria Chronicles. As you finish the game with soldiers alive (permadeath applies to all squadmates), their profiles get an extra paragraph telling of what happened after the war and who they went on to marry, or mourn in some cases. And not just who, but what, such as the Gallian armed forces, budding music careers or humble hobbies.

This is a debate I've long had with World of Warcraft, and I've never had a perfect answer to it. What about people who disconnect, or have an emergency outside of the game, or go AFK to prevent having to leave as such, or... Much as I'd like to find compromise I can't think of one. I think the answer therefore is yes, there should be a penalty. When joining a group activity you are signing a social contract that suggests you will stay with the group until the agreed upon content is cleared (a boss, a mission, a certain item has been obtained, etc.) The key word being suggests. There's no obligation or court but that of public opinion that dictates you should stay. Now you shouldn't stay with a group that hurls abuse and gives you grief, and that doesn't warrant punishment as such. But if you leave, you're still depriving a group of a player which the content is based around. The game can't recognise the context for your leaving, and will issue a punishment because its criteria of you leaving were met. This is why I say if you must do group content that requires communication of any kind, go with friends or don't go at all. As I say in this video, a random grouping tool is just that: it is not a random good group finding tool. It is not a random friendly group finding tool. It is, above all else, random with certain criteria to be met. With convenience comes the price of not getting a perfect group.

I don't know anyone like that in person; such people are typically on Twitter or whathaveyou, saying things along the lines of grown men should be making furniture and hosting barbeques instead of playing with children's toys. I suppose that's part of the hate - video games were for the longest time advertised as toys, their demographic being aimed at families with young children. I'd say it wasn't until the mid-PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era that games were seen in greater regard as for everyone. While I can understand concerns of them contributing to some national infantilasation or fetishising (though I strongly disagree with them), I think a lot of those concerns could be allayed if people saw what the games consisted of. I remember one time criticism being levelled at a Batman video game because said critic saw Batman as a children's intellectual property, when in fact the games can be quite grim and unsuitable for children to say the least. To those who criticise video games I say they should play them. Having experience is the grounds for any good discussion. Those who have and have had relationships destroyed, lives lost or other things I can totally understand. It's those people who have merit in this argument.

It was from an understandable fit of rage. It was the most difficult ~6 hours of our experiences in gaming, and I'd robbed him of an achievement we were supposed to be doing as a team.

The Brotherhood of Steel in just about all installments of the Fallout series. I have to agree with Mr. House's summary of them: "...they're ridiculous. They gallavant around the Movaje pretending to be knights of yore. Or did, until the NCR showed them that ideological purity and shiny power armour don't count for much when you're outnumbered fifteen to one. The world has no use for emotionally unstable technofetishists." While I get that if they weren't so rigid with their recruitment and use of technology they'd be incredibly more powerful (and in being so, completely uninteresting), this applies to all the other factions, a lot of which having come from less and changing so much in their lifetimes. I'd hate the Enclave more if anything practical remained of them, as they were eugenicists who believed anything exposed to radiation was as mutant as the FEV-riddled Super Mutants.

Fell in and out of love. For a less sentimental answer, being the sole survivor of a Left 4 Dead mission on the hardest difficulty. My mate unfriended me and added me not long after because it meant having to do it all over again. He got his own back by doing all the other missions without me though. Cheaters only prosper one in four times, as they say.

My answer remains the same as it would the question "which games are better with friends?" which is to say "all of them." Like friends, the quality of the experience depends entirely on the mod. If you have a friend who isn't fun to talk or interact in another way with while gaming, then naturally the experience is going to suffer. Supercars in Red Dead Redemption 2 might make the game considerably faster, but that doesn't help if you want a ploddier experience. I don't mean to come off as snarky or aggressive with this, if my tone in any way implies. I just think the matter is that black and white. I wish I had the answer. Perhaps console manufacturers don't want to take the blame if things go belly up from having too many mods?

I think the Loyalty Mission system prevents romantic relationships from having dire consequences. NPCs seem to have taken things quite nicely in Mass Effect 2, and in 3 I remained true to an old romance. So, no, I can't think of any consequences of fooling around or ultimately having to choose one over another.

The principle alone is why I'm totally against pre-orders, with or without tat such as statuettes, shirts and mouldy helmets. While I wish I'd preordered Fallout: New Vegas in retrospect (and liked the game when it came out, that would've helped), I'll not lose any sleep over losing one of the few things that merits the "Collector's Edition" affix in this industry. I no longer subscribe to the idea of a game running out of copies, not where digital distribution is ever more liberal and physical copies can be produced long after release. If there's any reports of Cyberpunk 2077 selling out on store shelves, I'd love to see the overwhelming number of articles in order to begin justifying pre-ordering. Or better yet, take a page out of r/patientgamers' book, and play older, cheaper and perhaps better games while you wait for a sale when copies new and used will be much more freely available. You're still buying a bad game sight unseen. If I'm wrong about it being bad (which isn't as often as I'd like), then that's a lot better than being wrong about it being good. Until then, people who pre-order must shoulder a noticeable portion of the blame in regards to why there's such a scarily high demand for unfinished to outright broken games, as I had in 2014.

They'll continue to try, Lord knows they can afford it, but whether they succeed is another matter entirely. As said in another thread, money can buy neither the time nor creativity required to make a good game.

I would say that World of Warcraft absolutely is an MMORPG, but it isn't in any sense of the word good at being one. The instancing, the immediate grouping tools, the pockets of players at any one time existing only in high end content.... it's just not. The only time I've ever felt WoW was an MMO was during my time on Argent Dawn EU, or during certain launch events that quickly made me grateful for all the stuff that isn't massively multiplayer.

Vault 11 earns my vote. I wonder if Obsidian took inspiration from the Doctor Who story 'Vengeance on Varos' for this vault. Don't click on the link if you don't want spoilers for how Vault 11 does its social experiment. The sound of Vault 92 is music to my ears. Vault 112 was a blast to the past, for all sorts of sandbox fun. And I'd love to get my claws into Fallout 2 again, if only for Vault 13.

Good on them for getting some job security and recognition for their work. I for one am rather pleased with a lot of the news of acquisitions, especially with lesser known studios like Next Level Games. ^^

I can see them doing it, but I can see a few problems: Green Eggs and Hamazon. Amazon's had what can only be described as a dire time of making video games, their Lumberyard engine being criticised for being unintuitive and hard to work with, and Amazon Game Studios' (AGS) few releases having to be recalled to see further work. Facebook doesn't have any game studios barring the Oculus guys, who have only made Lone Echo and two PvP spin-offs, with a sequel still in the works. Ready at Dawn have been hit and miss with The Order: 1886 and several PSP sequels to existing titles on home consoles such as Daxter and God of War. Protective. Detective. Electric Eye. I can't begin to imagine Facebook would make a video game without maliciously using it to dig dirt on its users, which it already does liberally and with little to no consequence. Achievements are already used as a safe measure of gathering user data, and the always-online component of games ensure that developers and publishers have metrics on who's doing what for how long and when, so they can incorporate such features into their next title. Facebook can and will do much worse if their games ever launch. Pain in the Ads. In addition to harvesting data I can also see them paving the way for games to have further advertisements in games, as we saw with 2K trying to worm unskippable ads into NBA 2K21. "Mistake" indeed. If anyone has the power to make it happen and completely ignore it, as they have with their social media platform, they can easily do it with the video game. As Amazon has proven, and I'm sure many big companies will continue to show us in the future, money can't buy you creativity.

We Happy Few and its three DLCs. It's a shame that you have to pay £45 for what are some of gaming's best content packs, particularly Lightbearer and We All Fall Down, which go to show that linearity is still better than attempting a procedural open world that requires as much as WHF's Wellington Wells. I could only recommend any of them when they go on a sale as the recent Steam Winter Sale at about a tenner in total.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery. This quote's quite relevent to my approach to playing video games and reviewing them: a game isn't done when it's got every feature under the sun, rather it's done when it has told all it needs to and no further changes can be made to make it great. In reviews, my review isn't done when I hit a word count, but when the reader is fully informed about the game they're reading about by the time I get to the word count.

I don't necessarily watch speedruns myself, but I enjoy two particular YouTubers who are involved in speedrunning: Karl Jobst and tomatoanus. Karl Jobst analyses historic speedruns, both the successes and the failures, legitimate and cheated runs. tomatoanus' videos I watch because he not only speedruns but explains his logic and has some very witty commentary alongside it. Interestingly, tomatoanus uses a heart-rate monitor and a Go-Pro to show what he's seeing on his screen and keyboard for the purposes of full disclosure, and I find such things quite entertaining to peek at during his runs.

All that was expected of thee was to chase thy carriage, Charles-Johannesson! In all seriousness I could see Rockstar doing a fantasy RPG well, with or without the self-aggrandising ploddiness they've adopted the past few years. I might not like it, especially when I've already got enough of that from the ponderous Medieval simulator Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but I could appreciate how well designed it is all the same. Camelot. Thy home. 'Twas at least afore thine skyward copulation did cause great dismay.

Sitting in an uncomfortable chair in Disco Elysium. I'm dead serious. That game is full of things that are endearing today when it would've been frustrating back during the height of point and click adventure games.

H.P. Lovecraft's poetry was published before the First World War, but his more recognised works were strange sci-fi and cosmic horror not long after the war. His works will be based on what he knew when he was born in 1890, to America's Roaring Twenties a decade before his death, so they're all gaslight penny dreadfuls/pulp fiction. He had quite a following at the time, but nowhere near the recognition until after his death. Authors like Stephen King and Clive Barker take great inspiration from his themes, and as said before many associate Lovecraft with betentacled green monsters and going doolally. You can find Lovecraft's original works all over the place, though because he did mostly short stories for magazines you'll be hard pressed to find them sold individually. You'll see them in all manner of compilations and anthologies, so if you do decide to read them it'd be a good idea to find one with the most stories so you don't end up with too many overlapping books.