Cyber Rat

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33383/Report_Sony_Granted_Subpoenas_For_Hotz_Web_Provider_In_PS3_Jailbreaking_Case.php Seriously? They get to see the IP of anyone who visited Hotz's site, has him on Twitter or has seen/commented on his Youtube video? What the fuck, America?

Bought BIT.Trip Runner for the PC. If I get paid this month, I might manage to pre-order Portal 2 as well.

I'm actually gonna try and main Johnny Cage. It will make victories all the more sweet.

Clive Barker's Undying was very scary until you got the scythe. Then it became easy mode.

I regularly play pen and paper RPGs and sometimes GM them (I'm currently a GM Storyteller for a World of Darkness Werewolf campaign set in Japan). I used to play Magic: the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh!, the former I stopped because the community was full of assholes and because it cost a lot of money, the latter because it cost a lot of money. Oh, and I RP in an MMO as well with some characters. Those are about the nerdiest things I do. I'm guessing I'll start collecting nerdy stuff when I get a job (like collecting toys figures).

You can do it! We believe in you!

A market for "new gamers with lower skill thresholds" opened up with the Wii. It is slowly dying out because most of the "new people" lost interest pretty fast (or they didn't really have the interest to begin with). As far as graphics go, trust me, people who don't game can't tell the difference in graphics between Dead Space 2 and Morrowind, nor do they find it relevant. And as for deep stories... Why would people play because of the story? A lot of games revered for their stories have either been done before much better, or are only good compared to other games. Exceptions do apply, but Heavy Rain's story alone is laughable without the interactivity. There are a lot of those, they just aren't "in yo face" like mainstream titles.

I've heard that specific book/film comparison before. I think it's on a case-by-case basis, really. You just have to look which games benifit from the difficulty they have, and which don't. Heavy Rain obviously would gain nothing from notched up difficulty. While games where the challenge is more important than the actual story (for example, God of War), would leave an average experience if played through an inappropriate difficulty (like, if you're a veteran player and choose easy for some reason). But I don't believe a book/film comparison is good at all. You have to find a common thing they have. So, while it's reasonable to compare the plot progression in a book and a video game, since they both share the fact that they (usually) have a plot, you can't compare them as a whole because interactivity sets video games apart from everything else. That's like me comparing movies and books and saying movies are better cause of the visuals. I think that's what the point of a difficulty slider should be. And players shouldn't be penalized for playing on easy and having to play on hard for the "True ending". If you can't incorporate a proper sense of reward for beating the game on any difficulty, it's a design flaw. But saying games should be more accessible like books and movies is silly. You'll just end up with an empty experience if the game doesn't deliver in other aspects. An example that comes to mind, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Very accessible difficulty and no penalizing for skill-based performance, and yet it delivers in atmosphere and story (although the atmosphere is different from other SH games, but that's a different issue). Increasing the difficulty in that particular game wouldn't have added anything to the experience, really. So, Heavy Rain might have done it right as well in terms of being accessible and not "locking someone out of content"*, but you can't and shouldn't apply it to most games which don't rely on story and atmosphere as much. And yes, I am aware that that IS the issue, but people should accept that some games are meant for entertainment, and others are meant for EMOTIONs. Neither are a bad thing. Creative works should contain both. *Funny thing about this. I know someone who couldn't finish Heavy Rain because of the scene Dean mentioned in his spoiler tags. Technically, he was locked out of content for lacking a stomach. Which isn't much worse than being locked out of a game because you lack reflexes.

Since both God of War and TM featured a pretty good arsenal of weapons (and well, killing was the point of both series), what would his dream weapon in a game look like? (Or if he already made it, what is it?)

(Warning: this is one very big "IN MY OPINION" post. I do not want this to come across as a fact, because I cannot claim it is.) I think Cage is overgeneralizing things. While the kind of games he described are dominant at the moment, there are a lot of games which go beyond your typical "guy with gun/sword/fire flower" concept and reach as close as a creative medium can to becoming "art". There's something he criticized that sounds completely like Heavy Rain, but I don't want to argue that point because it would sound as if I'm attacking his hypocrisy instead of his actual arguments. However, this bugs me a lot: There is so much wrong with this argument, it makes me want to cry. This is the basic plot structure of storytelling: Exposition: the beginning of the story, establishment of setting and characters Conflict: the problem(s) faced by the characters Rising Action: events in the story leading up to the climax Climax: the culmination of events in the story, point of highest reader interest Falling Action: events leading to the solving of the story’s problems Resolution: how events and problems of the story are solved This was established in Ancient Greece and all forms of storytelling adhere to it or subvert/deconstruct it. But it is something everything comes back to. It's what movies used in the 1920s and what they use now, regardless of genre or artistic merit. Just because technology has advanced as much as it did in the past 20 years doesn't mean the old is bad. Of course, the plot structure works only for the story and gaming is unique in the regard that story is merely one part of it. I think that gaming probably has its own "structure" which isn't official yet (that I know of at least), but involves being challenged and overcoming said challenges for a reward. Even Heavy Rain has this. How do you save everyone and get the best ending? Successfully overcoming either reflexive challenges or decision based challenges. Your reward is getting the best ending. Were Heavy Rain truly innovative the way he makes it out to be (and by the way, I liked Heavy Rain as it is now), there would be no right or wrong choice and you would never feel rewarded (note that this would be a deconstruction of basic gaming concepts only if it wasn't railroading. If you're being railroaded to failure, then it's not deconstruction, it's failing to realize basic gaming concepts - i.e. bad game design). As his argument stands now, I don't think it's a criticism of gaming not evolving, it's criticism of two genres. FPS and platformers, because of gameplay and plot. He didn't get into basic gaming concepts (which he seems to try and make it look like he is) either because he doesn't get them, or because if he did, his games would fall into what he would be criticizing. As for wanting more "mature games". Same can be said for all creative mediums. You have good stuff, you just have to know where to look. Problem is that gaming is an industry, thus profits are a priority, thus more of the same sure things gets released, thus things that should earn money get the most media and marketing coverage. Movies were first nickelodeon entertainment machines, then evolved into something more and feature mature storylines as well as sheer entertainment. Games were also initially entertainment only, but we have long since reached the point where telling a mature storyline is possible. There are mature games, you just have to look for them because they aren't in the spotlight. Which is good, because marketing a game under a spotlight as mature can be sad. And, in regards to Bulletstorm (since it got mentioned), I think it's a very good example of a mature game. Typical tropes played to 11 and then deconstructed. Fabulous.

Can we ban analogies from the forums? Nobody knows how to use them. I can't look at day-one DLC as accessories. I think there's something just inherently wrong in selling someone a game and then charging for more content right away (note, I am not talking aobut DA2 specifically, I know you can use a voucher/code/whatever. You still have to go through some hoops to access what you should right away). I think DLC should be used to get people to come back to the game after most people have played through it. Mass Effect 2 does it both good and bad I guess. The day-one DLC feels like cut content (and yes, there's still enough stuff without playing the DLC), while the later DLC did get a lot of people to come back to the game. From a publisher's point of view, it does handicap used sales. It's not an alternative ending to a movie where you have to wait for the Blu-Ray version to see it. It's not a minibar in a hotel you pay for additionally. It's content made and finished during the development time of the game which requires an additional fee, an Internet connection, or whatever so you could access it. I'm ok when developers talk about DLC in the sense "Yea, we didn't manage to fit in xyz on time, so we'll probably release it at a later date." But people seem to buy it regardless. I think the publishers did a great job, I have to commend them. People have no problem putting up with anything in the gaming industry anymore.

There's one fun exchange with Jon: I love gamer rage <3

And .

Get a Worms title and just set it so you two play against the CPU. And in case you own a Wii, Kirby's Epic Yarn is great in coop.

I used the Plasma Cutter against the Big Bad Evil Person and the Marker. I think I used a few Line Gun rounds on the kids.

I wish to cry out the rage of a thousand suns entering supernova simultaneously across the whole Cosmos when some human being on this sorry excuse for a space rock says "nya~".

I just found out Shadows of the Damned is coming out for the PC. I'm adding that to my "looking forward to" list. Bah, seems it isn't actually. Ok, I still have Alice: Madness Returns to add to the list.