rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

just realised no Personas either jesus y'know i don't care what these doofuses think about albums by bands but this is just unforgiveable shit

Only a developer with Rockstar’s extremely deep pockets and fanatical attention to detail could have made something like this, a re-creation of turn-of-the-20th-century US so lifelike that it is at times difficult to believe.

I was there

there's a few good games on there

no there all bad

so glad to see I'm not the only ILXor enormously psyched for Untitled Goose Game

haven't decided whether to get it ASAP or wait until Steam release though

i only found out about it today on the switch thread and i'm already more excited about it than i've been about a game for as long as i can remember

i can only hope that honking simulator becomes a thriving subgenre

didn't realise it wasn't Steam straight away :/

see how it looks in the morning, i really wanna get my honk on

i haven't played any games in idk 4+ years but this looks amazing.

no jrpgs at all, katamari and the double-up of ico/colossus as the only non-"AAA" japanese games

cave story is a massive omission if you're picking for cultural impact which they seem to be

i read it from the top:

good #1

witcher 3 absurdly high, suffers from map icon metastasis

halo mostly important for its innovations and its innovations are mostly "oh thank god they put in another stick now we can make a console fps"

bioshock just a lil too high, endgame is worse than system shock 2's

skyrim should be morrowind but that's okay of course

WoW prob too low tbh! i'd put it in the top 5 just for impact

resident evil 4 is peculiarly overrated and has been since release. sometimes people tell me it's their favorite game of all time; idgi. it's fun. it's got atmosphere. it's got a lake monster. it's got cramped lil maps pretending to be wide-open maps and you have to wander around them in circles a lot. have you played undying. have you played the resident evil 4 level of half-life 2. okay well i know you've played silent hill!

uncharted blah

not putting the sims in the top 10 is prob sexist

TWO GTAS AND NEITHER OF THEM ARE SAN ANDREAS AND ALSO YOU COULDN'T PUT MORROWIND ON?

majora's mask too low, an eerie masterpiece with some of the most punishing dungeons in zelda (not saying a whole lot admittedly)

haven't played the last of us because i object to games where you have to take care of spunky lil girls by (i'm imagining here) rescuing them from quicktime events, like having the developers on their knees just beseeching me to feel emotions

ico's prob good tho lol (bioshock infinite is not)

deus ex is at #29 of the century when obviously it should be #1 of all time. we'll move on

i thought josh in chicago's recent slightly disappointed frustration with shadow of the colossus was pretty otm

modern warfare okay whatever. i wonder if unreal tournament 2004 will make it, just kidding no i don't

arkham asylum: never got into this but played it enough to be able to recognize its excellent control system in pretty much every game that's been made since, so thanks for raising the bar

rest of this just kind of a random mush, katamari obv too low. surprised there's no token paradox game (mine is victoria 2) but i guess it's pretty overwhelmingly (wait... exclusively?) console action.

p sure last of us has no QTEs. i know what you mean about the setup - and cmon, zombie survival horror? - but it's a tremendous game

9am tomorrow bruh

9am PST :(

*dejected honk*

TWO GTAS AND NEITHER OF THEM ARE SAN ANDREAS

yeah this is def the biggest crime, san andreas is easily the best gta - perfectly balanced the sandbox and rpg elements across a colossal map packed with fun things to do

fuck a toy airplane level tho obv

GTA: SA is one of the greatest games of all time full stop

IV and V very much are not

few better moments in gaming than tanking your stolen airplane down the runway at San Fierro airport straight into the sunrise with "Freebird" playing on the radio

V owns imo

full disclosure: i've not played much because it crashes on my PS3 but i used to listen to my son playing it a lot and it was just like being screamed at for hours by some cunt who'd read the Wiki summaries of Breaking Bad, no wit, no joy, no fun

Retaking that one territory in SA which was like 2 steps wide by 8 long wasn't fun - but even just having "retake all your territories by hand" as a plot point more than makes up for it.

(I will rep for GTAIII, but I'm aware I'm on my own there)

nah i like all the versions of 3 tbf, just SA spoiled us forever

i dunno if i'd want to replay much of it again tbh but iii remains one of the few genuinely revelatory gaming experiences i've ever had

I have fond memories of IV because it was the first one that looked absolutely gorgeous, the streets shining in the sun after a rain shower. Also I spent far longer than I should have done grinding multiplayer to get a silver medal.

iv looked amazing but niko moved like he weighed 3000lbs

even a bad GTA is GTA so i've put plenty of hours in on IV but half those hours felt like wandering around in the prettiness looking for something fun to do

tbf GTA2 is probably the worst but i gave up on that after about an hour

9am PST :(

goose game is 9am PST (5pm BST?) on Epic but the Switch version is 9am in your region, so someone has it on twitch already

he's having fun but I guess it's more fun to play than to watch someone wander around in and I didn't want to see how to do all the things in the training area so I stopped watching for now

yeah i have no Switch :/

i stopped watching the trailers quite quickly cos they felt too spoilery

after work I'm gonna party like a horrible goose on switch

sorta curious about dipping into another gta, have only played bits of vice city & IV (hated the latter because it was so dreary). but the things i want to do are ignoble & probably I am better off just being a horrible goose instead

I was just in Curry's and resisted the urge to buy a Switch just to be a horrible goose 3 hours earlier

a 9am PC release would have been perfect, I have the day off as leave but also have a cold so feel slightly cheated, a snuffly day on the sofa being a goose would've been a good compromise

(on the plus side I've pleaded too sick for German class this evening, which frees up the evening for some goose-ing, unless I baulk in horror at the price or the Epic Games t&c and wait for Steam after all)

I finally read that Guardian list and it mainly just made me feel old because I've not played that many of the games on it and also is Skyrim really 8 years old already? oof

(answer courtesy of wikipedia: no, but it will be 8 years old in 7.5 weeks' time)

(I will rep for GTAIII, but I'm aware I'm on my own there)

Not at all, I rate the 3-D big-ticket GTAs like so: 5 > 3 > SA > 4 > VC

ya 5 is good

I'm a really big fan of the GTA3 soundtrack tbh. I kind of preferred when it was all unique music! It created the world more effectively, as nice as it was to speed down the highway and have "Music Sounds Better With You" come on just as the sun rose

A friend of mine was crashing at somebody's house when GTA3 was in development, and randomly improvised some vocals for him and the results became "Stripe Summer". I love that song! Good project name, too: Dil-Don't. Ha

<3 ha that song invented chillwave (maybe)

Guessing the goose game which is untitled might be £20 in which case I dunno on the one hand I drink thru that in a couple of hours on the other hand that's why I need to think twice about reining in my spending

xp Quite possibly! It's such a great song! I get songs from that soundtrack in my head all the time. Also, when the radio host Lazlow grills Fernando. "Where are you from?" "I am... Latin."

https://www.wired.com/story/ripper/

enjoyed that, thanks! do wish Wired had let in a *pinch* more self-awareness about which publications it was, exactly, that built the hype train around FMV dreck like this...

Quinto Martin sounds like quite the character.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/education-gamification

Lots of interesting stuff here, for example:

"You might assume SimCity isn’t a deliberate political project, just one that happens to be built on the particular presumptions and expectations held by the sort of white-collar designers employed by Maxis and later EA. However, in the case of SimCity, the ideological roots go much deeper to the spotty sociology of the anti-Great Society polemic Urban Dynamics, written by MIT computer scientist Jay Forrester. Urban Dynamics outlines an argument against taxation and social services, claiming that governments could better address poverty by catering to the needs of business. Forrester made these arguments in 1969, supporting them with then-state-of-the-art computer models. Will Wright, the original designer of SimCity, was inspired by Urban Dynamics and used parts of it to build his game. This isn’t something the game tells players. Players cannot adjust these inbuilt assumptions; they cannot interact with the model itself. They can only play in the margins of the inputs and outputs while the black box remains inaccessible. "

Been watching Movie Bob's channel and seen this comment, entirely new info to me

Back in 2012 The Escapist fired a whole bunch of content creators all at once, where once they had new content spaced out for everyday of the week they were reduced to Zero Punctuation only. The people who had bought out the Escapist and been replacing it's overseer staff were all very, very Rumsfieldian levels of conservatives. So folks like Bob, James Portnow, Lisa Foiles, Jim Sterling, Wisecrack were all told they could either support Gamergate or get out. Even those with semi-conservative politics did not like the ultimatum and there was a mass-"Letting go" except for Yahtzee, who the site bent over backwards to keep. They replaced the other days with pod-casts about how much the PCs were ruining everything.

This video, was one of many years Bob had put out for old movies before he left, which he had no access to. Go back to Bob's content post 2012 and you will see he just mentions he was on other websites and could not even mention it by name, let alone reference his own videos, same thing with Extra-Credits, and Jimquisition. It seems the new staff of the Escapists, which is to say the old staff who bought out the site from the previous crew, has allowed Bob to post the videos on his own channel, illegally tying it to him if for any reason he gets kicked out again.

first paragraph i understand - second paragraph, what? if the videos were work-for-hire doesn't "Escapist" own his videos regardless?

that is incomprehensible

That's some really proactive conservatism, considering Gamergate started in 2014.

the creators quitting/being fired happened in late 2014 and it was indeed due to the site supporting gamergate. one of the site's owners published an article pretending to be an unbiased look at what game developers thought of gamergate, but he had solicited the opinions from a toxic 4chan board and got predictable results.

btw, yahtzee said a few vague things about being against censorship but never addressed gamergate directly.

https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/3kxed3/the-ambitious-future-of-dead-cells-is-ditching-co-ops-for-capitalism

btw, yahtzee said a few vague things about being against censorship but never addressed gamergate directly.

― wasdnuos (abanana), Monday, October 28, 2019 6:10 AM

I remember him saying something, either in a video or column. Something silly about him not seeing how sexism effected the creation of games (the gaming community itself has always been the much bigger problem), but mostly it seemed like he just didn't want to get involved in the discussion.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4aggzm/civilization-and-strategy-games-progress-delusion

sorry 4 vice but this explores some thoughts of value