[Tulpa]

how very internet

will you collect dogecoins in this new arcane kids venture
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[Tulpa]

For those not in the know, a pretty final setting bible for Glorantha was released, so if you just can't get enough of that KoDP lore, you can drop 150 bucks on an 800 page hardcover encyclopedia: http://www.glorantha.com/product/guide-to-glorantha/

I haven't picked it up yet because I'm not made out of money but man what a good time to be a fan of a rad setting.
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[Tulpa]

wait are the psp persona 3 and 4 remakes generally regarded as better than the ps2 versions?
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[Tulpa]

yeah that controller looks fun. glad they've managed to keep some pragmatic elements like physical buttons and a physical analog stick without losing the weird touch control owl eyes.
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[Tulpa]

fallout 4 will suck almost invisibly less than Fallout 3 unless they decide to poach the quest designers from New Vegas
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[Tulpa]

I was just wondering when/if the next crop of tabletop rpg hardened nerds would start designing cRPGs, but that'll probably never happen and the ex-Interplay crowd are the last of that particular line of design.
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[Tulpa]

how did Ninja Theory become a AAA developer? Have they ever released anything that wasn't mediocre at best?
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[Tulpa]

right but why did ninja theory of all companies even get the chance to play with that much money
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[Tulpa]

the level design, or "architecture", doesn't communicate anything about the world beyond a series of obstacles for the player character to overcome with the help of their giant ratdogbird companion.

It's almost literally scaffolding floating in a void. Like why is the evil-eye windmill sitting on a rail, who would build a rail on some unfinished scaffolding? How did it even get up there?

I mean we're talking about a short gameplay video but to use an adventure game comparison, the architecture feels about on par with Myst 3: vacuous prettiness and nonsense

(not that I could really tell how pretty it was because the over-bloom everything schtick has become overplayed at this point)
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[Tulpa]

parker, fancy graphics effects have become severely overused in the decade since Shadow of the Colossus

I don't know what you're expecting me to say. A decade ago, overexposed sepia-toned gamescapes were somewhat novel, a nice contrast to what was coming out in 2001-2005

Now? that unreal engine meat packing plant simulator has the same graphics options flipped on. All the bloom and high dynamic range and motion blur and depth of field blur that you could ever want is packed into every game and in the end it's mostly repulsive.

A decade on and Ueda is making a game that has the same visuals as his last game? I'm not interested. Shader effects are overplayed, and they're not being used to any kind of aesthetic end in TLG's gameplay video besides an announcement that this is an Ueda game.
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[Tulpa]

[Tulpa]

I just don't think there's a coherent reason why there would be a windmill on a rail floating in a void except that the developers realized that the player character would need to have some means of pushing the windmill away from his pet. When I watched the video, all I could see "these are the video game affordances for the player, they're just symbols for you to manipulate so that your pet griffon can continue moving forward" and expressly not "this is a mysterious fantasy world"

I'm not being unimaginative in thinking that the setting of that gameplay video feels flat and video gamey. Scaffolding over a bottomless pit is the 3rd person platformer equivalent of warehouses full of crates in a fps. Not all games need to convey a sense of atmosphere and place, but Ueda games do.
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[Tulpa]

I don't have a facebook so I don't know if this is the case but either way just in case. SBFB folks please don't link to or talk about my posts outside of SB.
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[Tulpa]

Designers and Dragons is seriously great if you have even the remotest interest in the history of RPGs

It's basically a comprehensive history of the hobby written by someone that seriously knows almost all there is to know.

It's not as narratively exciting as Jon Peterson's Playing at the World but makes up for it by sheer volume.
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[Tulpa]

I don't think I find anything to like in any Itagaki games.
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[Tulpa]

That's Gausswerks, cuba. Dude was responsible for coming up with actually clever and interesting Deus Ex prequel ideas years before DX:HR cocked it all up.
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[Tulpa]

[Tulpa]

The purpose of a (good, fun) top [x] list is to be provocative and unconventional, and this list fails to do that because it feels ridiculously short-sighted and contemporary instead of anything that would drive discussion.

Your film list analogy isn't far off from what top [x] books lists always look like. Either slavishly devoted to the western canon (the small part of it that's fairly appealing to modern sensibilities anyway), or so bleeding-edge contemporary as to be uselessly short-sighted, with nothing in-between.

Lists are an opportunity to surprise people and drive them to investigate things that they haven't heard of. Edge's list is "the 100 games I played for more than an hour last year"

So, the contentious idiosyncrasies of ABDN's manifesto list are exactly what make it valuable.

It should come as a surprise to no one that King of Dragon Pass and probably Crusader Kings 2 will veer dangerously close to the top of my lists
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[Tulpa]

16 months of delays is actually fairly light for a kickstarted video-game.
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[Tulpa]

And most importantly, they have good writing in the context of video game design. The quest writing works with the open world design instead of the dissonance of FO3. There's no divide between pursuing the 'main quest' and pursuing whatever whims you may have, up until the very end. You are not sequestered into a linear Washington DC Dungeon whenever you want your next dose of 'story'. Indeed, right at the end you are asked to go and interact with as many factions as you can find so that they'll have an impact on the last mission of the main quest line.
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[Tulpa]

I tried to get into Alan Wake but all I felt was "So it's just this for twenty hours?" and stopped playing after I got far enough in to determine that the game doesn't have anything of significance to offer me.

I don't think that the combat was good, but it also drove me nuts that the over the shoulder camera was angled so that the target Alan Wake aimed at was slightly off-center all the time.

It engendered the worst possible reaction to a game: boredom
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