Gamefront does a decent job outlining why the ending sucked.

http://www.gamefront.com/mass-effect-3-ending-hatred-5-reasons-the-fans-are-right/

The ending doesn't make sense, it makes no sense in the context of the game, it makes no sense rationally. Good literature is still rational, no matter how much symbolism you pack into your writing.

It also contradicts every precedent established in the game, by Shepard not arguing with the very poorly implemented DEUS EX MACHINA, he just takes the 3 options for granted, despite the very nonsensical explanations given to us. Then the 3 choices, which don't make much sense either!

• How does destroying an energy conduit with a gun, facilitate a process to destroys all Reapers?

• Why does Shepard need to stand 3 meters in front of that soon to explode energy conduit? He was hitting it already from much further behind, getting any closer does nothing in terms of the damage the gun does.

• How does controlling the Reapers disintegrate your body? What process is that?

• Why does Synthesis also require a human sacrifice, why does this process need a whole human body? And why not one of the dead bodies that are lying around in the millions below?

Those processes make as much sense as Jesus dying for our sins on the cross, they are nonsensical and irrational.

The symbolism of self sacrifice only makes sense if it is due to circumstances that require the protagonists sacrifice. Not if you create a convoluted process that arbitrarily demands the life of the one facilitating it.

Yes she had a team, but hasn't really talked about them cause

>So far I’ve chosen to keep my small crew out of the limelight to try and shield them from any potential harassment. When I feel it is safe and appropriate to introduce them I will do so.

Giant Bomb and GameSpot both released similar statements yesterday.

http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/letter-from-the-editor-10-17-2014/1100-5049/

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/an-important-message-to-our-users-regarding-online/1100-6423008/

No, it's pretty much just the slut shaming. The quest is about Haelga -- her niece hates her and wants to punish her, so she asks you to collect evidence from three different men that Haelga has slept with. You're to confront Haelga with the evidence and literally shame her. There's nothing wrong or dangerous about what Haelga is doing.

That said, you can choose to not do it. As we discussed previously on SRSGaming, though, there's really no obvious sign in the game that you doing that would be an immoral choice, in the same way that there are signs that theft and murder are immoral choices. For instance, completing the quest could have made everyone else in town think you're a shithole. Maybe it would reduce your chances of getting married. That would have been awesome.

EDIT: Oh, here's a great article about that quest.

>Moments after spawning, before I’ve even collected a single item, I encounter three heavily armed players on a beach. They tell me to put my hands up, then to kneel and not to move. They handcuff me and collect blood from me. Then one shoots me in the back of the head.

>This image is the moment of my death: you can see the shell casing from the rifle shot as I’m executed.

This is one of the most truly horrific things I've ever seen in a game. I guess shit like this really would go down if the world became completely lawless overnight, but that doesn't make it any less upsetting.

As much as I enjoy survival horror as a genre, I don't think I have the stomach for DayZ. The idea of actual people, not AI, behind acts like this is just too sickening.

edit: I found this tumblr on metafilter, and one of the comments there is just amazing: "It's the perfect Libertarian Utopia simulator."

exactly

10 to 1, dollars to donuts, this game becomes a reddit classic overnight.

We exchanged a bunch of comments in the thread I linked. So much "Aww shucks, I'm sorry it turned out this way but I wouldn't have done it differently anyhow". Funny how naive people here were about him.

Edit: /u/ladygamedev sums up how I felt about here. She doesn't seem to be active anymore though, shame, I liked her.

Company run by a bunch of rich white guys being ignorant of harassment that minorities receive? Not surprised.

That said, it's not like they didn't get told off last time they did this (although it took them fucking years to respond and change the policy)

Lots of evidence for it being Zelda, which makes me incredibly happy. Also, relevant quote from an interview with Aonuma back in October (emphasis my own):

> It sounds like A Link Between Worlds and the upcoming Wii U Zelda are going to break a lot of conventions in the franchise. What other conventions do you think need to be shaken up? > >Aonuma: First of all, just because I maybe want something to change doesn't mean it actually will change. I think things like the settings for the characters [could be changed]. For example, we have Zelda, it's the Legend of Zelda, but it's not necessarily Princess Zelda. You have all these characters that keep coming up over and over that have the same basic template and I think that changing that could lead to some really interesting gameplay as well.

I was pretty surprised that I was downvoted for calling him on his shit here in SRSgaming. This whole thread was like bizarro SRS where the witchhunter Numero Uno was getting upvoted.

Blatantly posting this again, despite being exactly one month old, because I never saw it discussed on SRSGaming and I think it's one of the most interesting and insightful articles on #Gamergate.

The Paranoid Style in Gaming Misogyny.

Have you seen the Archive.org Internet Arcade? I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing you're talking about, but they seem to be doing something to keep old arcade games around. (Hopefully they don't get a takedown notice or some shite like that)

Also worth checking out the JSMess website (JSMess is what the first link uses), as it has a few demos for certain platforms as well.

As for old ROMs, I love-love-love Discs of Tron. I spent a long time trying to get a decent modern-day clone of it, and never found it. The closest I could get was Ricochet, which was ok, but it was no DoT.

There were a few announcements aside from the Lady Link speculation in the above conversation. As of now the ratio of female to male playable characters in Hyrule warriors is 3:1. Smash Bros. Wii U has announced Palutena, Rosalina, Wii Fit Trainer, and girl Animal Crossing Villager. Miis can be women. I'm being optimistic and hoping for a Ms. Pac-Man skin. This does not make the ratio of playables in Smash 50/50, but it's getting closer.

Contrasted with Assassins Creed cancelling plans to have a woman playable assassin, I thought I should let Nintendo know I approve of their choices so I bought a Wii U. I was going to eventually, but E3 sped it up.

Edit: Apparently, I did not mention a few announcements. Bayonetta II, Spaltoon!, and Xenoblade X all have female protagonists.

Am I the only one who sees some classist undertones (and generally shitty things in general) in this? Ugh.

It's pretty shitty to say people are ants and that they're only worth as much as they're willing to pay and that people who can't afford games are basically subhuman to them.

Also despite the author saying so, I don't think this what all developers think at all! I don't even think Phil Fish would agree with what this person is saying.

What's the with gripe of having to price things at a discount anyway? A friend of mine had a game on a Steam flash sale and made more money than he ever did, and his game generally sold pretty decently before that too. Also speaking of Phil Fish, the same thing happened to him. He suddenly ended up making a ton on Fez due to a sale, even convincing naysayers to give it a try. Just take a look at this.

Edit: Also, I understand the industry is a tough place, but this is some pretty awful shit to say about people, I don't care how upset you are about sales especially in an industry like this where everything just seems to be based on pure luck. Maybe complain about that instead or how overstated the games market is, instead of calling people ants or calling them worthless for not paying $20 or even $100 for your games.

After reading this, I'm really not inclined to play any of their games if this is how they treat people, but hey, looks like that's what they wanted so mission accomplished, I guess.

You know you've reached a new level of delusion when you're supposedly fighting for media ethics and transparency while championing someone on the Koch payroll, which you never seem to mention, even during your "factcheck" articles on a website where anyone can post official looking articles and feel important.

Apparently frostbite is a notoriously difficult engine to work with. While there were many other problems, the lost time and money, and thus opportunities from Frostbite wwere a major problem for the game's dev cycle.

Or as I said before: >Except they would have saved money in training if they had stuck to Unreal. It was just plain foolish. If they were going to switch to Frostbite, give it 3 years or so to iron out the bugs and build a corpus of experienced programmers. Frostbite was simply unready for prime time, and probably at minimum 40-50% of the game's issues likely can be traced back to that on some level, once the opportunity and time losses are factored in, let alone money.

obviously it was the best alternative when computers werent powerful enough to do full 3d at the detail prerendered sprites could. some prerendered sprites have been used fairly recently and look pretty good doing it. see sim city 4 and xenonauts

Skullgirls - A couple people have been telling me that I really need to learn to start doing resets in Resets: The Game. I'm well aware that's holding me back, but I literally just don't know how to do resets. With some experimenting I've managed to come up with some probably predictable things for my Val, but I still dunno what my options are for Robo or Para.

Street Fighter III: Third Strike - Last week was a fluke, my Ibuki is proven fradulent again. Sigh, I guess I really do need to sit down and actually practice this game again. So many games I wanna be good at, so few hours in the day. Oh also this happened.

Super Mario Maker - Conquered some hard levels, did not actually spend any time working on those drafts I'd started last week. The more ambitious my ideas the lazier I am when it comes to getting to work.

Towerfall Ascension - Had some friends over for dinner on Easter, roped 'em into giving this a try. It's a ton of fun. Sucks that the dev is so adamantly against giving it any form of online or even AI opponents so I can play it some more when I'm alone...

Crypt of the Necrodancer - YO I FINALLY GOT THE CADENCE SUB-15! THAT'S SOMETHING! WOO!

did someone say games that start with b

BOKTAI BOKTAI BOKTAI BOKTAI BOKTAI

Got the newest Humble Bundle, so I've been playing that.

Papers, Please, LOVETROUSERS, and Monaco I already owned. LOVETROUSERS has some really fun gameplay, if you don't mind playing as a sorta-nazi. Papers, Please I want to enjoy, but couldn't get into it. The actual checkpoint gameplay I liked, but I didn't see the point to the personal-life stuff. Monaco is bad and I don't know why people like it so much.

I haven't yet played The Bridge or Gone Home. Neither one looks particularly interesting. Gunpoint is unplayable, it just refuses to run properly on my computer (I get, like, 1 frame every 3-4 seconds). It's pretty inexcusable, it's not a graphically complicated game. Hammerwatch also failed to hold my interest.

The gems I got out of this bundle are Steamworld Dig and Chase the Sun. In the former's case, it reminds me quite a bit of Motherload, an old miniclip favorite. I've played through it a few times now, it's a fun game to try and speedrun. Chase the sun has tight controls and you feel like you're moving really, really fast. It's tons of fun.

I've also been playing Sanctum 2. It's pretty cool. I used to love TD games, and I've always loved FPS's, especially ones that let you rocket jump.

Speaking of rocket jumping, TF2 is still my main game.

>To everyone in this thread who is struggling with depression, and the totally understandable refrain of "If Robin William's can't beat it..."

>You're not alone. This is kicking me in the gut, too.

>But remember... you are beating it. You're alive. You're here. And you're totally not alone. You're not alone in your pain, and you're not alone in your fears and doubts and sadness that he decided to give up.

>And he did beat it for a very long time, and had a life most would envy. People have died much younger, with much less life lived, and without touching so very many lives so meaningfully. By all accounting save one - he beat it the best he could.

>1) A really compelling strategy game that's easy to get into but has complexity that expands as you go forward that has multiple forms of victory (Like Civ or Rebuild)

it's an old game, but if you like civ you owe it to yourself to play Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

it is fantastic. it's like civilization (civ 2, to be precise), but manages to tell a story in addition to the strategy/civ building aspect - a story which becomes more like a personal saga once you finish the game, since there is a vast array of permutations of how it can go.

possibly the largest difference apart from the setting is that each faction now has a well-characterised leader, and they're all wonderfully diverse and fleshed-out personas each with their own vision of what future society should look like.

I have described it as civ 2 in space in the past, but on reflection it transcends its civilization roots and becomes something much greater. I could probably rant forever about how this game owns, but in all honesty you should just play it. :v

It seems it is in an all time low

Edit: for those wondering what to expect from this game, this review is great. Make sure you read all 3 parts.

I've heard good things, that mainly it's a Medal of Honor title. It came out on the Playstation 2 at the end of its cycle. And it didn't do to well. Some of that was blamed on a female protagonist, but they took a risk. So there's that.

Edit: But I haven't personally played it.

edit 2: Metacritic shows an average score of 86 with 0 mixed and negative reviews.

Little anecdote: Jon said Game Jolt, a games portal which has been a starting point for many hobbyist and commercial indies alike, "pretty much sucks" so haphazardly and carelessly, which was really a downer when the owner was working hard on improving the site (seeing as he's such a big name and all). Became a joke in our community heh.

They didn't name them here, but they have a viewable list of suspended players, when they were suspended and when the suspension will be lifted. https://magic.wizards.com/en/content/suspended-dci-memberships

I totally disagree. The nearest comparable AMD chip is the Bulldozer - known for being a total rip. The latest iteration of Sandy Bridge, especially at the sub £200 price point, is fantastic and is constantly promoted over the Bulldozer. Plus, AMD change sockets quickly too - the F1 was released in 2009 and was made virtually instantly redundant by the F2.

The heatsink on the Phenom 2 was pretty damn difficult to get in place, but the i5 is not only fairly easy, it also has a ton of third party heatsinks available for the OC enthusiasts.

Intel and AMD used to have near equal market shares but since their Phenom 2 processor, they haven't produced anything that can compare with Sandy Bridge. I mean anything. I will sing your praises if you can find a comparable chip to the i5 2550k or i7. They don't exist.

Yea it needs to be a more than "click buttons furiously to win". I mean Skyrim added dual weilding which was awesome, and I think staggering with a power attack was new too. But the whole "move left/back/forward and attack for a different attack type" is getting kinda old. Especially how useless the "move back" attacks were since you were moving AWAY from the enemy making it impossible for that "paralyzing unarmed moving-back attack" to land. I'm curious how the control are in Chivalry, that just came out and is also a FPS hacknslash. I want to know if it improves upon Elderscrolls combat at all. I'll be looking up reviews after this. But for ESO, I hope it's something like Tera, where it's a main attack with situational hotbar abilities. I mean, even if it does end up being just is a mediocre wow-clone, I'll check it out cause it's fucking elder scrolls. I played Star Trek Online more cause of the fact it's star trek. Oh and sexy catmen.

>I'd like to see a study that confirms that statistic.

You say this, but don't give a study about your claim that most woman gamers don't play 'real' games? My statistic was obviously hyperbolic, but I've only seen one critic who wasn't overtly misogynistic.

>You minimalizing the scale of her work doesn't change the fact that she did it with the intent of spreading awareness of an issue and, doing so, is trying to educate masses.

That's not my words, that's hers:

>With this in mind, I will create a curriculum with teaching guides and classroom activities to accompany this Tropes vs Women in Gaming video series. My hope is that this curriculum can serve as a small example of how discussions around gaming can be an important part of media literacy education.

The videos were not intended to be a critical analysis of all video games, that would take far too much work, and probably isn't even possible in her format. The idea is that they're an introduction to a wider theme across gaming.

She is trying to educate the masses, I never denied that, and you're deliberately misrepresenting my words. The problem is that you're expecting something more than she can give, as well as concern trolling about her project. Her intention was never to do an in depth analysis of all games, it as a simple video series.

God, you're acting like she triggered some kind of massacre or something.

Read Only Memories is in a bundle presently for next to nothing BTW. I haven't gotten very far but it's quite charming.

(Indie Gala serves up the worst of the worst shovelware so I don't recommend it generally, but once in awhile they have something decent.)

Skullgirls, Vampire Savior, Lethal League - blah blah fighting games blah blah hitting buttons blah blah

Crypt of the Necrodancer - Trying to get sub-9 Cadence, keep getting dunked from pushing too hard. I did get this wacky RNG today and actually finished that run, but it was pretty far behind pace.

2064: Read Only Memories - Only just started on this, hasn't quite hooked me yet but I'll see if it gets more interesting soon enough.

Lots of great stuff on 3DS, I'm not even gonna bother rattling off a big list. I just hope the Switch has enough battery life to fill the same role. Still sucks that I can't have a proper d-pad on the go though...

As for phones, eugh. It's all trash, all of it, the race to the bottom utterly destroyed the platform. The only thing that's any good is the port of <strong>Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection</strong>, because it's just some nice puzzles with no nonsense attached.

"tumbler pronouns"

um excuse me but...i don't think that's true

> I'm guessing this is probably true for older Street Fighter games as well, but I don't know the numbers.

Not to defend SF2 as not sexist, since it so clearly was, but all the characters had the same health and took the same damage. See the DAMAGE section here for a pretty good break down.

Not quite.

>Two former high-level Popcap employees both told me a different story entirely. Fan was let go, they said, as part of a larger set of layoffs in August 2012 that left 50 Popcap employees out of jobs. During these layoffs, Popcap decided to close its office in San Mateo, California, where Fan had worked with two other people. The decision was made by Popcap’s management, the sources said, and it came after months of discussion and debate.

https://kotaku.com/widespread-rumor-about-ea-firing-plants-vs-zombie-crea-1820649466

This piece my partner wrote compares it to a Hofstadter piece from the 60s about the paranoid style in American politics: https://medium.com/@handler/the-paranoid-style-in-gaming-misogyny-1d412f212bda

(I'm biased but I think it's pretty great)

In an attempt to persuade those who were considering checking them out but didn't feel they had the time or could be bothered to google them. Here, for your clicking pleasure!

Digital: A Love Story

don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story

Oh and they're both awesome, especially Digital.

Dumped a little bit of time on Devil Daggers, a little bit of time on Jet Set Radio, a little bit on Of Orcs and Men and a little bit into Unity. No major progress on anything.

On streaming - I don't really watch anyone. I do watch the stuff Slowbeef puts up on his Youtube channel after the fact but yeah I almost never watch streams live. A lot of this is I'm just like "I could be playing games myself so why?" and a lot of it is down to most streamers people recommend are yanks and I'm not staying up to 3am to watch someone stream a computer game.

Assuming my cold doesn't get worse I will be streaming myself playing an obscure Ukrainian open world FPS/RPG called [the Precursors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precursors_(video_game\)) tonight at about 10PM UTC if anyone is interested in watching me not be that terrible good at computer games. This is my twitch channel. I've been messing around with OBS and stuff so I will have fancy things like the chat being displayed on the stream itself ~wow~

Access to academic research is definitely an issue, though I don't claim the knowledge and experience to suggest or evaluate solutions that would maximize fairness.

Assorted thoughts:

• My college cuts alumni out of database and library access after they graduate, but my grad school's policy seems to be to extend access indefinitely, which I'm super grateful for even when I don't take full advantage of it. What do most colleges' policies on the subject look like? And keeping in mind that not everyone goes through college.

• Many academic publications don't really seem to know much of how to handle digital media (though maybe actual digital-media-studies types of fields are doing okay). Even when there's explicit interest in incorporating audio and video in digital-format publications, for instance, it seems to be very shallowly implemented and not well-designed for actual readers' use/convenience.

• The way that the parser IF community has historically handled this issue is very interesting to me, but "the parser IF community [...] historically" is much smaller-scale and more technologically uniform than "the entire history of digital games ever". Like, can you imagine "all of the various" game developers creating a "treaty" decreeing "a common format for cover art, bibliographic data, and so on"? And now that other types of text-based games are gaining popularity, the same problem has begun to arise -- Twine(+) writers and players didn't develop from the same roots and never signed no damn treaty, not to mention what seems to be a greater technological divergence, so would-be IF archivists are fretting rather.

Effing very, but I'd rather attribute that to the excellent tutorials. I didn't know a speck of C# before getting started with it. You can test in no time and you can actually make "public" variables that can be seen and messed with directly in the editor as the game is running -- excellent for debugging. The real fun starts once you learn to use Serializable classes. All in all, once you've got your assets, you're pretty much done.

When designing enemies for my shooter, Bloodcrusher ii: Kill All Mans Edition, we realized early on we had neither the budget nor the ability to make enemies terribly smart or tactical. Nor did we really want to, what with the retro Quake theme. So instead we were like, let's just make them all incredibly simplistic and predicable, but in unique and varied ways. So we have the shield guy too slow to turn when flanked, the gun guys who always make the mistake of running when you get too close, etc, while also having movement patterns that are straightforward, but create a challenge in aggregate (the guy who always runs to the right and fires when he sees you isn't challenging until you are dealing with him, a turret, and a guy who charges you directly.)

So vindication here is pretty great. :D

I'd make it, but my programming experience extends to reading the introduction of the C++ Primer. It'd just lead to a vicious circle of me getting a kickstarter for my Ron Paul game, failing to deliver, running off with the money, and some other SRSister making a joke about "Am I free market, uguuu~?"

And then the cycle continues until someone actually makes the game. At which point the world ends, because said game would be the crux of human existence.

Skullgirls - I think I've run out of things to say about this game. I, uh, like the part where I punch people?

Vampire Savior - Goddamn this game is just so good, I wanna try and learn it seriously now. Capcom where's Darkstalkers 4 already?

Crypt of the Necrodancer - I may have had one good run, but everything else is lots and lots and lots of dying. Forget PBs, I just need to work on consistency.

Super Mario Maker - Alternating between stealing as many WRs as I can and practicing segments of my new Kaizo now that the design is finalized. Not actually doing full clear attempts yet though.

Shin Bokura no Taiyou: Gyakushuu no Sabata - Okay so I found the best fucking thing! An Android emulator that lets you use the device's light sensor as an emulated Solar Sensor! Sensitivity's a little weird, takes a lot to get one bar but then not much more to shoot up to ten bars, but it's the closest I'll ever get to being able to play this properly so I'll take it.

remove all the gamers

There are actually apps available for smartphones that will let you simulate every kind of color blindness in real time. Check it out :-)

It's worth checking out this site to see how your computer will fare. Otherwise, I heard that the framerate can dip below 30 on consoles (like Dark Souls) so that's worth considering. Besides that though, people liked it enough to merit a cult following and a re-release so I can't imagine it being terribly sub-par on console.

I totally romanced Piper so it's definitely possible. I also found a Grognak the Barbarian costume, as well as a Silver Shroud!

> I'm just vehemently against dismissing a suffering person whose heart is clearly in the right place because they are not the Perfect Poster Child Victim.

On a related, timely note: https://medium.com/culture-club/face-it-black-people-michael-brown-let-you-down-b3b4408cec82

There's a .ini tweak that can unlock the framerate.

Looks like a good bundle. I've had my eye on REmake HD for a while (originally played on GameCube and loved it), plus finally getting to play the Dead Rising series.

Also, heretical as it might seem, DmC: Devil May Cry is probably my favorite DMC game <_< and I'm glad more people will get to try it.

i hope so! i think they're getting there. i mean there are, like you said, interestingly desgined female champions, it would just be nice to have some variation from the thin yet well endowed standard that almost every single female champ follows. i think riot could take some inspiration from bloodline champions, every champion has a really unique design and fits the role perfectly imo, some bits are a bit questionable (the game sort of has a 'tribal' theme so make of that what you will) but the actual characters themselves are really interesting and well thought out, plus they have male/female skins for every one of them which is cool. i wish more people played blc :(

Warframe is wrapping up Tennobaum right now. If you gift people in-game items (paid for by microtransactions), they're cutting a check to charity with part of the money. They just hit the mark for $100k

I'm so excited! I think I've loved every game Wadjet has done. I got the Blackwell bundle super cheap at GOG and can't wait for more. Although I am bummed that it'll be the last in the series.

Also, all of the games are made with Adventure Game Studio, so if you're on linux like me you can use the linux port to play them. The only trouble I've had with any of their games was the very ending scene of resonance.

Technically, it stands for "interactive fiction", but as you might imagine, that phrase as a literal descriptor could be applied to very many things. Traditionally it has referred to parser-based text games, such as the classic Zork and so forth; after text adventures yielded to video games in the commercial space, the artform was kept alive by a very dedicated hobbyist community, where experimentation flourished. In the last decade, other forms of digital text games have also risen to popularity (...calibrated for text-game levels of "popularity", of course), which pushed the aforesaid hobbyist community and various narrative/game-design wonks to reconsider the boundaries of "IF" and how/where that label could be expanded with fruitful or interesting results.

The &quot;IF&quot; tab on the Inform 7 website has some more history, and Andrew Plotkin's IF page is also written as an introduction to IF!*

*Bias check: these resources are both slanted toward the parser side of things (Inform 7 being a popular language for writing modern parser IF, Andrew Plotkin being one of the luminaries of the medium). Plotkin and the prominent folks involved with I7 are interested in many kinds of intersection between text/narrative and play, but they are going to be shaped by their experiences just like anyone else.

Apparently Twine 2 is Android compatible, according to that link. If that's the type of thing you're after, look into that. As for something more graphical, I don't know what falls between that and Unity.

For a good discussion thread that will not leave you foaming with rage, I recommend the comments on metafilter.

The free indie game Tale of Scale does this mechanic already. And does it well. :) Bit short maybe, but fun to toy around with. Love the way they frame it too, reminds me of when I was a kid and played with perspective.

Link to play in browser

Maybe try flash games? If it's supervised, it could be safe and fun (and costless).

Here are two eye-spy with plot type games.

The Book of Living Magic

Memohuntress

If she's seven, you maybe could give her a typing game with non stereotyped characters.

This is my main beef with video game criticism as well, the kind of that seems to sprung from software reviews. I just read an old journal article the other day on Chris Crawford's games from the 90's by David Myers and what it really hammers home in the first four pages is that games had been thought of as anything but aesthetic products. (I use 'product' in a wider sense than you and it's my belief that this is how Vice used it as well). While I'm sure that academia has moved on from the sorry state of gaming research back then, it seems that gaming reviews and criticism have stuck in the same rut, for the most part, and Youtubers and such new forces just tend to follow after the patterns of their kin, which is boring as fuck. I don't want to waste 40 minutes listening to some dude who lacks the tools they need to accomplish their job of video game criticism.

I have 146 games at the moment and I feel I have far too much. :S I couldn't imagine getting to 800 but I suppose it's easy to succumb to the sales. Also, how is Dungeons of Dredmor? I got it during the sale and haven't started it up yet. I heard it takes a while so i've kind of pushed it to the back of my backlog.

Working through my own backloggery at the moment here. I'd recommend you make one, it's great for keeping track of your collection.

Is there a way to check what's in your Origin library without downloading the client?

Edit:

Plants Vs Zombies is free too.

I've been meaning to check out Tribes: Ascend but I just cannot for the life of me figure out how to get a beta key. I sign in to my account on the webpage (I have an account from checking out Global Agenda a few years ago) and it redirects me to the developer's website, where it tells me to input an activation key to get access to T:A.

I go back to http://www.tribesascend.com and it's already logged me out and doesn't give me a "here's what you click to get an activation key" button. I'm currently downloading the client, but unless I'm missing something here (or there's a "CLICK ME FOR BETA KEY" button in the client) they've made it impossible for me to play.

In alpha the main deal was beating specific levels with specific classes to unlock new classes and levels. Items were unlocked by increasing a hidden number, which would seed more powerful stuff in shops. It's available free here if you feel like trying it out. So "beating it with only 5/15" would make a decent amount of sense both from a difficulty and a gameplay path perspective.

Any other game devs here? I do it as a hobby.

If you think a Steam backlog of unplayed games is painful, imagine a backlog of unfinished game projects. A $60 game that you haven't played vs. a 160 hour project that ONLY you have played.

I keep going back to Dark Souls II. Majula is my happy place. I like doing co-op and duels in plain-looking outfits and weapons. Shortsword is my bae.

Discussion topic: an underappreciated game is A Dark Room. It is a clicker idle game in the genre of Cookie Clicker and Candy Box. I love this game because it has fantastic atmosphere despite minimal text and art. This is a game that slowly reveals itself, and following it to the end is a rewarding experience. The playstyle and story evolve in a series of delightful twists that play on our expectations as gamers. I want to talk about this game for hours with another gamer or dev who's had the same experience.

> you don't have to pay for a server like you would on the PC.

You don't need to pay for a server. If you're on the same LAN you can just go here and download the server .exe or .jar and have everybody connect to that server.

I've been waiting for this to come out since about when it was first announced. Was good. Reminds me of Train Song.

Very similar to a book or movie. I've had a bit of trouble dealing with games that make me sit through plot or scenes designed to immerse you without providing any sort of gameplay-- AAA titles have conditioned me to hate them-- but I'm starting to enjoy it now that it's being done well. Sometimes. Not in AAA titles.

The game of telephone that powers gamergate is already spinning up, I see. Watergate Exposed (not Watergate: Exposed) is a book, not a documentary.

A book from 2011 that is not especially important. And if they are deliberately referencing it, it's probably the most obscure reference Nintendo has ever made.

Also, note how the subtitle refers to the "Watergate Seven", but that little tidbit doesn't reinforce your gaslighting, so it goes ignored.

It came back to my mind after browsing through 1001 Videogames You Must Play Before You Die, or rather this interactive list. I don't have a warm spot for JRPGs as a genre since they seem so very grindy and prone to excessive length and my standards for video game narratives have only gone up, but probably I have space for one good JPRG still.