SomTervo

Anybody up for a small bit of Xbox 360 multiplayer on this later tonight? I have to review the game for tomorrow for a student paper and need to try out the multi, preferably with pals. I'm simultaneously writing an essay so will probably be up until very late, we're talking 0300 or 0400 GMT.

That's by the Marx Bros. True classic. Also exemplifies a great linguistic phenomena. One I heard was... So in ancient Rome, the local prefects got word that a woman was running around the market masquerading as the emperor. They went to investigate, and when one of them finally spotted her, he pointed at her and shouted to his colleagues 'CEASAR!'

Watched Turtles Can Fly the other day. Harrowing. Amazing.

Holy shit. They are not the same friend. But that is incredible. The facial expression is unbelievably similar. That is awesome. Hah, nah. Just suited up for some reason. Slightly oversized suit. I really can't remember. Ridiculous. Here's a treat

I followed... shirt, bro. Me (left) and my pal on halloween. Literally all I did on halloween was wear normal clothes, pop into a party (this one) for about half an hour, then leave. Wanna see a real dealbreaker? Fuck blue steel. How do you like... Magnum: That is one old fucker of a photo right there.

You're right from a gameplay standpoint, but in the GTA games of this generation R* have explicitly said that they are going for reality in the stories/ worlds. True-to-life crime stuff. Even though it's still ridiculous fantastical action in gameplay, the actual stories and dialogue are grounded in what would actually happen. I don't think they want to undermine that. True thing about them not knowing each other and gradually finding out about each other. Would be a lovely narrative. Tbh, we don't know how the narrative will pan out from the open; maybe that will happen? We have to start as one person only, obviously. Perhaps the other two aren't just thrown in immediately but seen from a distance and gradually integrated?

That's a good idea. The three characters' lives will probably still intertwine a lot, knowing Rockstar. But to have some more subversive layering threads would be cool. The characters are still fairly distinct though? Like you don't play all three all the time, there will be whole plot lines of phases where you only play one of them. I loved the bit where it said the characters you aren't currently playing go about their day to day business. That's awesome. True thing. Is that indicative of inherent sexism in the industry, or the series? Or it could just be justified through biological bias? "Women aren't strong enough to do all this manly action shit" yadda yadda.

Yeah, that shit's crazy right. The only things I'm skeptical about are having an actual GTA OST for the first time, which is dynamic and plays during missions, and also the 'one disc per character' combo for the 360. But is that confirmed? I've just heard several random street-word sources saying it. Wouldn't be the worst, but it would be inconvenient. I've been longing for a gameworld this big for so long. Tbh, Ass Creed 3 is actually scratching that itch right now. But GTAV will just plunge it's fist right through my itchy skin. A lot of people are flipping out about the three protagonist thing, but I think it's a great idea. Will help counter a lot of issues GTA has always had; downtime, middle-man ability frustration, one-man-army frustration (I got that bad with GTAIV, it just isn't believable how much of a powerhouse Niko is), and death-frustration. Dying in GTA is one of the most annoying things. A last stand mode or NPCs who can help you would solve this- I'm hoping they drop something like that into GTAV. EDIT: Also, unlikely but would be awesome, campaign co-op? I mean the framework for three autonomous player-characters is already there. Although some missions only have one and some have two or three. Still!

I agree with everything you just said. Sweet shit man.

This game is a lot better than I expected. A lot. It's largely what I've wanted from the series since AC1 was disappointing in several ways. Loving the absolute Princess Monoke vibe in Sequence 4. Also, the end of sequence 3. Best bit of storytelling the game's done thus far. Fucking ingenious.

Ehh, my point more specifically is that it lacks narrative emergence. So while yes, you can kill the hooker or not etc., that's more 'sandbox' emergence. If they added different ways to play narrative missions and shape your own narrative in story missions (albeit in small ways), which is what I'm arguing for, it wouldn't be the same. It'd be emergent level (i.e. narrative) design, not emergent game mechanic design. Like the general sandbox stuff is emergent, as a sandbox full of game mechanics. But linear levels are the opposite, and the early GTA's never had levels/ missions as tailored or intricate as the ones in current GTA's. It's in these contexts that the devs could put in the tiniest bit more effort in route and space design, and less player direction, to make the narrative in these tight sequences more emergent.

And there's nothing remotely close to that level choice or emergent level design in GTAIII onwards

But the problem is that in GTA's level design, that openness exists already. I suppose my issue is that they prescribe what the player actually does, far too much, despite giving the player physical freedom. Just Cause 2 is an equally, probably more open game, yet when you're told to destroy a SAM site or something, it simply puts the waypoint there and lets you go at it. You can fly in, walk/ climb in the back, walk/ attack the front, suicide drive in, etc. In GTAIV this freedom already exists, but when you're told to attack a factory or something, the game will direct you to the entrance it wants you to enter by, direct you through the building how it wants you to, then direct you out the exit it wants you out of. In the example I gave above, it would take the slightest, slightest bit of ingenuity to add a backdoor to the building, or a way to get through without subterfuge: and more importantly, maintaining GTA's style of direction, it would take nothing just to have a moment before you start playing which pans the building, shows you points of interest, and a caption reads: 'explore this area. There are many ways to get in, some of which involve going incognito'. And that's all it would have to say. GTA already does ridiculously wordy stuff just to tell you how hospitals/ police stations/ safehouses work. Like, how many tenament buildings are there in GTAIV that have stairwells which you can enter and reach the roof by? Tons! And how many are not redundant? Almost none of them. There are maybe two or three that are used in the story. Even in the 'business man kill' level, it would take nothing to design a way to hop across from an adjacent roof onto it. Sure, you can argue that this would open up GTA's gameplay too much, and just confuse/ bewilder the player. But as it is, the missions do the opposite, and they feel too closed or restricted. A lot of the open-air combat levels do capture a sense of this emergent level design, but they don't do anything with it and it only lasts a second. I think they need to sort that shit out. For most missions it's fine having that constant player direction, but as I said it would take a tiny bit of ingenuity to make, say, one area per several missions into a bit more of a narrative playground. Anyway. GTAV looks good. That preview's out soon eh eh.

I was getting really, really frustrated with how prescribed the GTA games are by the time GTAIV rolled around. Even the game mechanics shit with phones and the internet. Like, in the previews it was all 'oh you'll get a mission where you'll have to go online and apply for a job, then get into the office building and kill the interviewer', and I was anticipating it so fucking much because I had visions of true sandbox gameplay; you're told to kill the guy, but have no idea how to do it, so you go to the website, and find you can apply for a job, etc. etc. etc.- then in reality the game just straight up says: Go to the internet cafe. Go to the website. Apply for a job. Wait. Get a suit. Go to the building. Kill the guy. Success. They could have left it totally up to the player- like made it an option to do a full frontal, but very dangerous assault on the building. Or broken into a back entrance. Or paid someone to drive a car into the front. Or ANYTHING more fun or creative or flexible. But no. Missions in GTA are awfully, awfully linear and prescribed, and it goes against everything the game is meant to be about. At least the gunfights are pretty dynamic. I mean, this shit was fine in San Andreas and earlier because the missions were so wacky, but in GTAIV they really had an opportunity to open missions up and get creative with it. But they didn't.

Looks really good. Not a fan of the visual side of the trailer- the design/ gameplay is great, the editing is awful- but the themes and story look so great in this. The word cards and the script sounds brilliant, a step up from Amnesia which was decent but a bit on the naff side. This is still hammy but better actual quality.

Actual lol'd.

Nah, I know bro. More just irritated with the classic slow slog of PR info release

That's nice but it means nothing.

Please tell me that Adventure Time image isn't a massive spoiler? I have no idea what episode that is from or what that image suggests, especially in light of what we just talked about. But if it's spoilerey I don't like it.

Same man, I like the show, prefer the comic, but think the game is definitely the best. In every way. Best writing, best exploration of the themes, best style (after the first volume of the comic the art/design was just ruined for me. Tony Moore was the only way to go, and they didn't go that way. If they kept Moore I'd have put the comic stylistically above the game.) It's just so good. I have two savage essays and four gigs coming up, but after that Epi 4 is ON.

I frickin' love this series. It's got some of the best writing in a game I've ever seen. So good. My only issue with it would be that, seemingly, different decisions barely make a difference to how things pan out. This ruined a lot of the suspense for me. I looked online and found a lot of people complaining that even if you make a very different big decision second time round, exactly the same stuff happens. However, I'm hoping that this means, for the last episode, every decision you've ever made is going to come back to haunt or help you. I imagine the plot stays the same despite choices because in the first 4 episodes they really can't design later episodes to be that different for everybody. All the players have to go to the same place, have to encounter the same situations; because otherwise Tell Tale would be really designing several episodes per episode. The only chapter exempt from this is the final chapter. This is when the big decisions can actually take you to different places, even if it's only for the last few hours of the series. Everything could go horribly, horribly wrong, and the plot wouldn't need to follow the same template. I'm so looking forward to it. Two months! P.S. Haven't played epi 4 yet. But 3 was amazing.

The whole 'it's just a story' argument is pretty stupid. Your whole life is a story. You thoughts are a story. Your friend's and family's lives are stories. Everything is just a story. The whole universe is just a story. Just connected information encoded in an order over time. A story. So saying a film sucks because it's just a story is stupid. Every single film is 'just a story', it's just about what you encode into the story- deeper or shallower meaning, imagery, characterisation. And even a film which can be said to have no story, will still have some kind of story; a story of how it was made, what the ultimate point is, story through thematic and conceptual development rather than narrative. Truly what I mean is an 'act of persuation' more than a 'story', but I won't get into that. Edit: Ehh, should probably say something on topic. What makes a great film is the quality of its narrative. Content doesn't matter much as long as the narrative- shot-to-shot editing, composition of shots, peak and trough of drama, etc.- all fit together. Some films don't have the most original stories, but are absolutely great due to the quality of narrative. I realllly liked Looper for this. The biggest narrative gaff was that the first and second halves barely fit together- the only two bad bits of editing in the whole movie made this single point absolutely stand out. But the first half, alone, and the second half, alone, are incredible bits of cinema. Specifically:

I dislike subtitles immensely; in most types of games I find they ruin immersion. I wrote an article for my student paper (which I might adapt onto a PXoD when I got time) talking about how settings can really change any game drastically- one of my examples was Skyrim. When I turned Skyrim's subtitles off, I enjoyed the game about 100x more. It no longer became moving from a to b, collecting facts displayed onscreen by a character, then going from b to c to somehow enact these facts; I ended up having to actually pay attention. I ironically took a lot more info in without the subtitles and enjoyed it more. But I suppose it's less of an issue in Skyrim because all of the important dialogue is mano y mano with very little background noise, so there's not much to miss. In Dishonored I had it off. If I overheard something which sounded interesting/ important I used my Garrett-like-eye to zoom in on the convo, then you get the volume bumped up. Directional mic style. Then you also feel like a badass thieving eavesdropper. Which helped me feel immerses. I love how like Thief this game is so much of the time. Edit: end of a long day at work and my language is so broken. Also should probably say that I use really good headphones fairly loud, so I usually don't have any difficulty hearing or discerning dialogue.