The Fifth Annual Coint and Plick Poll for Best Video Games of 2011 - Part One: 74-109

The puzzle that ultimately did me in for MI was opening the telescope and using the flint and the lens and the gunpowder to blow up the dam to flood the valley to lower to dead body so you can get the rope and climb down into the ravine to get the paddle for the rowboat so you can visit the cannibals. I couldn't figure out how to blow up the dam after solving every other puzzle in that game on my own and I finally broke down and bought the walkthrough (lol pre-internet walkthrough availability days).

dude i probably rang a helpline at some point in MI

All my undergrad friends were playing MI at the same time; we sometimes went to the phone box and spent a night's worth of beer money ringing people to ask if they had answers.

it's an obvious point that the puzzle solving in that kind of game never changes in approach, only in degree, and there's no real learning and grwoth taking place.

I guess that's sort of true? But there is definitely a method of learning about what that approach is, how to solve the puzzles you're presented with. There's a conceptual framework being built - yes, you could brute force the game by trying to combine literally everything but it's better to think laterally (though actually, MI is a bad example here, as some puzzles I only ever solved through brute force).

lol i deleted amazing breaker last night without ever playing it X:

That was a problem I had with the newer Telltale Monkey Island games. I no longer have the patience for the kind of brute force trying to solve puzzles, or trying different things dozens of times until something worked (and hearing the same recorded dialogue each time). Maybe because the gap between those and the last MI game I played (number 3) was so large that I forgot how to enjoy that kind of puzzle solving? Interestingly I never lost my joy in playing IF maybe because you don't have to sit through prerecorded audio + video but can just scan the text telling you that the approach didn't work.

yeah i only briefly looked at that last MI thing but it seemed like 10 minute unfunny cut scenes with a bit of pixel hunting in between

Mordy thats a great essay, made me think of my favorite review of recent years (and one which made me buy the game which is awesome), the destructoid perfect score for Deadly Premonition

http://www.destructoid.com/review-deadly-premonition-165168.phtml

particularly the last several paragraphs which kinda hit the thing you're looking for i think

Oy, yeah, I hate cutscenes. I also tend to play with audio off and have found that a lot of people don't even bother captioning their cutscenes, so they are even more dismally dull. An intro and an outro is enough, and even those aren't necessary.

i am looking forward to Breaker feedback. It's not the best game ever, but it's my favorite iteration of the "use a slingshot to knock shit down/blow shit up" mechanic

loved the essay mordy

in past month or so (since i finally bought a current gen system) i've been really into gaming again and one thing i feel is really missing is good writing on the subject. compared with my other obsession (music duh), this area is definitely lacking but also presents an opportunity. i'd love to see ILX writers get together and do a Stylus-esque website on games.

for example, i'd love to see an essay by difficult listening hour expanding on the struggle to get games running on Wine. i've definitely been there: recently i spent hours tweaking config files to get Oblivion running on my Mac under Wine. when i finally got it running, it turned out that ALL the character models had black skin, like 0x000000 black, and yet i still played through the game. i feel like a good writer could be able to explore why it is that we can spend hours trying to get games running 'good enough' and still be able to get the same amount of enjoyment as if it had been played on a top of the line machine

OK let's do it. Z S is full o'beans, he can set us up something. I've got a domain I'm not using.

if anybody wants to workshop essays throughout the poll, send me a draft and I'll integrate articles amongst the results.

and sure, I'd write about gaming every now and again myself if everybody starts a site. I hit up m@tt to try getting on the g@m3!nf0rm3r teat with a sample piece and never made the grade, sadface.

Though Mordy, you should forward him your piece for the front page "industry professional" slot and see if he's interested.

im in if i can host "jjjustens sweary corner of exuberance and hatred"

can I do capsule review/impressions, because I don't have the patience to write more than 100 words at a stretch

Forks Video Game Haiku

If you argue that
Deadly Premonition sucks
you hate fun, don't you?

did anyone other than me ever actually play deadly premonition btw?

i really wanted to abbrev the name but yknow

er i did and i couldn't get past the first ten minutes
i honestly needed to try harder

forks I would be up for revising and fleshing out the thing I wrote for my ballot if you have time to do an editing pass on it/you think it is worth it!

cointandplick.com is available fwiw

Breaker feedback

I played through the trial back when it came out. It was pretty fun but it didn't really make a huge impression on me. I thought the overall design of everything other than the cool crystalline structures was sort of ugly and clunky. But it's worth a dollar for sure.

oh yeah dude if you dont hate the first 45 minutes you dont have a pulse, but think of it as a test to keep the unwanted out. after that its all gold xposts

i am basically too poor to play new games (and the only current-gen console i own is a wii anyway, which isn't a console it's a netflix box) but i rearrange my canon a lot and gchat to (sympathetic, usually) friends in the middle of the night about betrayal at krondor or unreal tournament or beyond zork or whatever, so i am always up for writing general stuff/stuff about older games.

i think the reason i put so much time into grappling with wine bullshit is that it reminds me of spending so much of my adolescence trying to find (and then coax into operation) games i could play multiplayer with my best friend who lived on another island and had a mac. (what am i saying. we still do this, except now it's linux-to-mac, so it's even more of a frustrating abstract exercise. the only game that's ever really been reliable is good ol starcraft.)

if you guys start a website, i'll solicit contributions from a buddy of mine who is a for-real published poet, and has written poems inspired limbo and dark souls (i know how that sounds, but they're cool). also some essays iirc.

silby, go for it.
and somebody should squat cointandplick.com imo
and put up furry porn

your first haiku was better

I shouldn't make these decisions while I'm hungry

Happy to redirect the DNS to whatever someone wants to use to actually run a website.

hahahahahaha awesome

did anyone other than me ever actually play deadly premonition btw?

actually playing through this right now! (but very slowly.) twin peaks + silent hill + shenmue - what's not to love? except for the long stretches of totally broken gameplay, I guess.

love the solo car conversations to... whatever they named the DP equivalent of agent cooper's diane!

still, I can't help but wish the whole game was just about hanging out in this weird, off-brand twin peaks town and there weren't any of the zombie 'horror' bits. (do these get any less tedious btw?)

oh well.

Now you got me intersted. I like silent hill games despite the terrible game mechanics.

yeah, the mechanics are prob even worse than in silent hill. but the game is funny and has personality and that counts for a lot in my book.

it's also not particularly scary. I guess it gets a little creepy sometimes. maybe.

silent hill 1 is still the scariest game I've played. gave off a permeating dread; no cheap scares. (haven't played any of the sequels)

did anyone other than me ever actually play deadly premonition btw?

I played about five hours of it.

Also I made people watch the first 30 minutes of the game like five times.

I shouldn't make these decisions while I'm hungry
― tinker tailor soldier sb (silby)

oh wow! i'm honored!

http://cointandplick.com/ <-- I am just messing around with some stuff, I am not the guy who oughta be maintaining or improving the notional website in the long run cuz I am the biggest flake. Just the absolute biggest. But right now just having some fun editing some html by hand and trying out random webfonts.

also that represents like the absolute apex of my design skills right there

are we getting new games listed tnite?

like really this whole operation would be better off with someone creating a tumblr and me pointing the domain at it self xps

Played a chunk of Amazing Breaker last night. Biggest issue for me is the loading screen you get between hitting restart and actually getting to restart. It's probably about .4 of a second so it feels insane to complain about it, but there are so many other games these days that manage to eliminate it altogether, so it's become kind of essential for true just-one-more-go addictiveness.

Biggest issue for me was that I'm not very good at it, and I didn't find it engaging enough to get better. Which is weird - it's a game where the reward is a Big Explosion! - but when I got through each one I just went 'meh, what's the next one' (only played up to lvl 15). I probably played a little longer than I should just to see what wasn't clicking :)

What I didn't realise was that "Think Breakout with [..] a slingshot mechanism instead of a paddle" means "think Angry Birds", which I wasn't the greatest fan of (despite playing all the way through). Not sure why, something about it being in an awkward spot between arcade and turn-based gameplay. But I love Orbital so ¯\(º_o)/¯

Played a chunk of Amazing Breaker last night. Biggest issue for me is the loading screen you get between hitting restart and actually getting to restart. It's probably about .4 of a second so it feels insane to complain about it, but there are so many other games these days that manage to eliminate it altogether, so it's become kind of essential for true just-one-more-go addictiveness.

― JimD, Friday, 17 February 2012 10:53 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was often raised as an issue by spectrum reviews in 1983. you'd have thought they'd have worked it out by now!

http://i39.tinypic.com/jzi1oy.jpg
#109: De Blob 2 – 360 / PS3 – 5 pts - 1 vote
Official Game Site
http://www.videogamesblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/De-Blob-2-Review-Artwork.jpg
”Who is the hot girl in de blob 2 commercial?”
Metacritic
Gametrailers
jjjusten: - My number one palate cleansing chill-out game for 2011 is a somewhat slight charmer that manages to at least bring the 360 a taste of the charm of the PS2 era Katamari stuff. INFINITELY superior to the first one, which was cute enough but cursed with the dreaded wiimote sickness and inaccuracy of play. You do have to ratchet back your pulse rate to really dig in on this one, but once you do it is full of rewards.

Was it better than De Blob? I liked De Blob for a while, but lost interest halfway through –– the controls were too annoying, and the difficulty ramped too quickly. As emil.y said elsewhere, it really sucks to die in some games, and this was one of them: the timed challenges, the lack of save options, the repeating of dumb shit and cut-scenes ... does 2 fix any of those?

^^^ This about the controls. It was super fun until the difficultly level got higher and the controls became more and more annoying to deal with.

I probably should mention that Amazing Breaker is one of my favorites of a new style of gaming that I guess you could call "intentional time wasting": it's good for commutes and waiting in offices or playing as I fall asleep and whatnot but I never felt compelled to break it out and play as relaxation. iOS games excel at this and I'm not sure how you "score" something that is diverting first, foremost and only.
I smell an essay!

I got ico/shadow of the colossus at xmas time. I've only played a small bit of shadow of the colossus and it's certainly beautiful but I have definitely had issues with the camera that make the game more frustrating than it needs to be.

i didn't mind it the first time around (on ps2), but maybe i've been ruined by decent game UI by now

this reminds me of my reaction to the beyond good and evil 360 port - super excited until i spent a bunch of time staring at walls or getting nauseous as the turn ratio ratcheted out of sync.

i couldn't hang with that one either

yeh i was a bit disappointed when i replayed SOTC over xmas
the clunkiness of the controls didn't help, but i think the main problem was that the game is at heart a puzzle platformer, and once you know how to do the puzzle part the rest of it becomes kind of rote - there was only one colossus i didn't immediately remember how to beat :/

#76: World Cruise Story – Android – 10 pts – 1 vote – Top Android exclusive

lol something so sad about that

― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Wednesday, March 14, 2012 5:05 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha i know, i would have played it ON IPHONE but i needed that 4G mang

it is literally the only game installed on my phone so it is sad, lol and appropriate

The Fifth Annual Coint and Plick Poll for Best Video Games of 2011 - Part Two: 51-73