TheMightyEthan

Before I respond I'm going to admit that I only read the tl;dr version and not the whole post. So, that out of the way: What do you mean Nintendo's not doing any worse? I'll give you that the 3DS is doing fine, but it took Sony and MS less than 6 months to surpass lifetime Wii U sales when Nintendo had a year head start on them.

Huh, in my experience the only people I know who have consoles are people in my own generation or younger. I don't even know any older people with Wiis, and that's the stereotype for the non-gamer gamer. The 360s thing doesn't surprise me though, that's the default console for stuff like CoD.

@SL: I would agree with you, except I don't care for mobile gaming. @TC: Do you have sources for any of that? You can't say "a bunch of news sources are reporting X, but it's just not true" without information to back it up.

Meh, as long as we get the good, full-fledged retail games too I don't care. I would buy every single Wii U game I own in a heartbeat if they re-released them on PS4/Xbone (all 4 of them).

I'm sure the terms will continue to evolve, and would guess that as games reach the level of acceptance of movies or TV, where everyone partakes at least occasionally, then the word "gamer" as a catch-all for anyone who plays games will fall out of use because you're right, at that point it would be a meaningless term. But we're not there yet.

I can see what TC is saying, and even agree the arguments make sense, but ultimately I've got to agree with FLD that the term "casual gamer" is already taken, and you can't just redefine it because you think your meaning is better, that's not how language works. I think the best thing is just to use the term "gaming enthusiast" like you are, as a distinct subset of gamers who are "into" games on a level that other people aren't, and not worry about assigning a label to non-enthusiast gamers.

The Wii U is dead because it's only sold 6M units to date. Nintendo is rapidly burning through all that money the Wii printed for them. The reason people (myself included) want Nintendo to go third-party is because we know Nintendo makes great games, we just don't want to have to buy a console solely for them. I own a Wii U for Nintendo first-party games, but I wish I didn't have to. You may like the gamepad, and that's fine, I do too, but you can't argue that it's successful as a product for the for-profit Nintendo corporation.

Yeah, pretty much the only time I want the gamepad on is when I'm playing on it because my wife is watching TV.

Yeah, in my experience usually when cops are jerks (even when they're overreacting) it's because the person they're dealing with was being a jerk. Usually if you act courteous they'll act courteous to you. This is obviously just a generalization though, and sure some people, including some cops, are just dicks. I think it also has to do with the area you're in. Not necessarily big city/small town or anything like that, just that each department kind of develops its own culture, and so some of them are nicer than others.

In my experience cops are generally as nice as anyone else, but like anyone else sometimes overreact weirdly.

Yeah, I already owned most of the games from being free on PS+.

I think I would be qualified to seriously critique games of I knew more about art criticism in general (literature, film, etc, symbolism and whatnot). As is it's not that I think I'm not smart enough, I just don't have the background knowledge to discuss it in much depth.

Well at least we can all agree that, strictly as a sequel to DA:O, DA2 was bad.

GTA IV had more expansion pack style DLC too, which was nice.

I bet you think strippers like you too. Of course, they laugh at everything I say!

I tend to only buy DLC's that are fairly significant chunks of additional singleplayer content for a game I already really loved. Stuff like Freedom Cry or Burial at Sea. Though I'll admit that Bioware tends to get me with the DLCs for their games.

That's weird... *Edit* - Also DINO CRISIS 2 FUCK YES!

I consider myself the smartest person I know.

I didn't realize all the ages are 100 years. Yeah, that is really fucking stupid. It should just be 9:40 or 40 Dragon, and it should be possible to get to like 9:157 or whatever.

I think it fits with the choices thing, because it's still a disconnect between the story and the mechanics. In this case the mechanics being "you get to choose your character's actions" and the story being "haha, just kidding!"

No, it's basically right after DA2. *Edit* - More specifically, Dragon Age: Origins starts in the year 9:30, Dragon Age 2 goes from 9:30 to 9:40, and Inquisition follows the events of a book called Dragon Age: Asunder, set in 9:40.

Alright, just finished this so now I can open the spoilers. I also agree with Jack's second possibility. It just seems to fit better to me. To expand a little bit:

I also just finished The Wolf Among Us. I really liked it, though I'm not quite seeing the people who are saying it's better than TWD Season 1.

My contribution to the Dragon Age discussion: Dragon Age is slow. Slow != bad. I also agree with some of the things Strangelove has said. Some people really do complain that having health bars in Assassin's Creed breaks their immersion, and that's just silly (equally as silly as the original creator who came up with the modern frame specifically because he felt like the HUD elements needed an in-game explanation in order to not ruin the experience). I do agree that immersion is important, in the sense of suspension of disbelief, but saying really basic things like HUDs or regenerating health break your immersion is just as silly as saying film grain or cigarette burns break your immersion in film, or the fact that Elmer Fudd doesn't die when he gets shot in the face breaks your immersion when watching Looney Toons. Likewise, for me ludonarrative dissonance only becomes an issue if the game presents itself as though you have choices, but then the narrative doesn't react accordingly (which is not to say your choices have to have the "right" consequences, just that the game needs to acknowledge them). Take for instance Catherine, which I love to rant about: in gameplay you get to do all kinds of things to indicate whether you want to be with Catherine or Katherine, but no matter what you do as soon as a cutscene starts Vincent flips out about how he wants nothing to do with Catherine and only wants to be with Katherine. It's jarring. If a game doesn't want to give me choices that's fine, whatever, but don't design it so that I feel like I have choices but then as soon as my character's in a cutscene he acts in a way that's completely counter to the way I've played him to that point. But stuff like Drake being a mass murderer? Who the fuck cares? It's silly to take a work any more seriously than it takes itself (the one exception to this being if it's doing something harmful to society overall, such as reinforcing negative stereotypes or something).