The Gaming Den

That is patently obvious to anyone who has met you.

Has anyone ever just reached a period of time where they feel like they've played all their games over and over, and are just bored with 'em all? And you want something new and exciting, something with big bouncing, bare female breasts smacking someone's head with enough G-forces to smash open said head like a watermelon?

Well, today I felt that way. I was so very bored, I was contemplating going outside to play. Fortunately, this feeling passed before I did something dangerously healthy.

But, does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with these malaise-filled lulls?

I generally have a bunch of games that I've been blowing off when those lulls hit, and forcing myself to start playing one of them normally does the trick. Or I go watch a bunch of TV or read a book.

I beat Dishonored the other day, and I'm going to have to give it like three thumbs up. It was so good.

The art direction and character design were beautiful: They matched the Victorian setting so well. And the fact that the game wasn't technically demanding meant that I could run it on my 3 year old laptop without any problems at all.

But seriously, let's talk gameplay. Arkane was able to distill what 1st person perspective means better than pretty much any developer I know. The movement felt so smooth. I was sliding around just for the hell of it. And I don't think I have ever played a game with better 1st-person melee combat. It's not quite Dark Souls, but Dishonored manages to set up rhythms of blocking and countering so well. In addition, the decision to give your character supernatural abilities turned out so well. Dishonored is the closest I have ever gotten to playing a Nightcrawler-type character. Teleporting up to someone, choking them out, and then teleporting back into the shadows is one of my gaming moments of the year.

It's also worth noting just how much choice there is in this game. Human Revolution was very vocal about how all of its levels had paths, but it ended up feeling so artificial. Dishonored, on the other hand, organically creates large, believable environments that can be traversed in many different ways.

I should note as well that the game probably took me over 20 hours to beat. I was being pretty thorough and nonlethal, but I also kind of rushed through the last level. Since I was doing a (mostly) nonlethal playthrough, I did not use a lot of the neater weapons and powers that killed people. So I could definitely see a replay being justified.

Also, to anyone who gets it: Make sure you turn off the objective markers before you play it. Not having a destination constantly shouting at you makes the exploration and ambiance so much better.

That being said, the experience was not flawless.
Problems:
1. The writing and dialog were not very good. This meant that the main plot was never very engaging. This would matter more if the gameplay were not so dynamic, I feel.

2. They chose to make the protagonist silent. This was not the proper decision. Silent protagonists work in games where the protagonist is never needed to have any real reaction to any events outside of how the player feels. We don't care about Gordon Freeman's feelings at all, because he's just an avatar for the player. But in Dishonored you play as a specific dude: Corvo, the Lord Protector of the Empress. He's falsely accused and imprisoned for a terrible betrayal, and then the entire game is about him getting his revenge. For a revenge drama to work, we need a protagonist with a personality. Corvo could have been written as anyone, but the designers chose to write him as everyone, and that was a very poor choice.

3. The first six or so missions are utterly brilliant, and extremely engaging. Then there's a late-game (predictable) plot twist, and the game never really manages to pick up enough steam again. The mission after the twist is far too long, and the last two missions are almost perfunctorily short. This leads to a really rushed conclusion and ending sequence. They could have fixed this by making the plot better, but they did not.

4. Nitpick: In Arkane's previous games, you could see your character's feet while moving. Here, you cannot.

Shrapnel wrote:And you want something new and exciting, something with big bouncing, bare female breasts smacking someone's head with enough G-forces to smash open said head like a watermelon?

I can't speak for the G-forces part, but other than that, that's my sort of game!

Shrapnel wrote:Has anyone ever just reached a period of time where they feel like they've played all their games over and over, and are just bored with 'em all? And you want something new and exciting, something with big bouncing, bare female breasts smacking someone's head with enough G-forces to smash open said head like a watermelon?

Well, today I felt that way. I was so very bored, I was contemplating going outside to play. Fortunately, this feeling passed before I did something dangerously healthy.

But, does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with these malaise-filled lulls?

The latest Humble Bundle is about to end, and you can seriously get thirteen games, most of which are awesome and cool and strange for like seven bucks, which should at least inject some new gaming blood into your veins.

You can go check out Newgrounds and see if there happen to be any interesting games each day. Usually not - you can expect to see so many of those physics puzzles where you click to remove the blocks and try to remove all the X without losing any Y. Which can be fun at first, don't get me wrong. But sometimes there's a cool semi-puzzle-platformer or something, and it introduced me to Monster's Den, which is fun. I'd like to see another in that series that goes back to the mechanics of the first one.

The Pokemon Tower Defence game is amazing just for how massive a projet it is. I actually paid some money for that one, and considered it an acceptable expenditure - though because it's constantly updating (or was), when I went a few weeks without Internet I fell so far behind that I couldn't be bothered picking it up again. It's largely 1Gen, with a different story and a couple of cameo appearances from other Gens, and with some 5Gen moves.

You could also go to /f/ on 4chan and look for [G] tagged things. 90% of the time it's either an incorrect tag, Super Deep Throat, one of the many "Frustrating, bordering on impossible" games in the style of IWBTG, or the drawboard thing where 100 people all access the same whiteboard and nothing of value occurs because they're all fuckwits. But occasionally you get something cool like Sim Brothel or a tank battle game or something.

Yes, those are all flash games. The reason is my PC really can't handle much - even flash games cause lag and the fan to whirr, and the Doom Roguelike would cause the fan to spin at full power.

Blicero wrote:2. They chose to make the protagonist silent. This was not the proper decision. Silent protagonists work in games where the protagonist is never needed to have any real reaction to any events outside of how the player feels. We don't care about Gordon Freeman's feelings at all, because he's just an avatar for the player. But in Dishonored you play as a specific dude: Corvo, the Lord Protector of the Empress. He's falsely accused and imprisoned for a terrible betrayal, and then the entire game is about him getting his revenge. For a revenge drama to work, we need a protagonist with a personality. Corvo could have been written as anyone, but the designers chose to write him as everyone, and that was a very poor choice.

And that is 100% because of the stupid morale choice mechanic stuff. If they wrote Corvo one way, you being a brutal crazy murder bastard would make no sense. If they wrote him the other way, it would be really weird when you never killed anyone.

Now, there are a lot of ways they could have dealt with this, but that is the reason why they fucked up Corvo so bad.

Koumei wrote: it introduced me to Monster's Den, which is fun. I'd like to see another in that series that goes back to the mechanics of the first one.

I fucking hate when they added actual durations besides "the rest of the battle" to buffs.

The only fun thing about that game was seeing if you could stack all your guys health regen and immunities high enough to heal to full during every battle, thus starting at full power.

That and blinding all the enemies for the rest of the battle on the first turn.

Yeah, I really wanted to like MD2, but the short durations just made buff routines pointless - or for that matter, almost any buffs at all pointless. It just encouraged spamming the same attacks over and over. And I missed setting up 200% Damage Reflection teams.

But new character classes to play with options for, and the idea of each class having three stances to adjust how they fight, those things I liked. But yeah, I went back to the original because combat was more interesting.

I prefer the newer Monster's Den games because those're the ones where you can upload any picture as your character portraits, allowing me to have Dr. Phil as my party Cleric, and Hurley from Lost as the Fighter.

How many people made their wizard a cock and balls? :/

Kaelik wrote:
And that is 100% because of the stupid morale choice mechanic stuff. If they wrote Corvo one way, you being a brutal crazy murder bastard would make no sense. If they wrote him the other way, it would be really weird when you never killed anyone.

Now, there are a lot of ways they could have dealt with this, but that is the reason why they fucked up Corvo so bad.

I don't know if that is true. My suspicions are that you could write a voiced Corvo whose personality could encompass both a "nonlethally take down targets" and "murder those who get in his way" playstyle, maybe with a bit of dialog variation. It certainly would have required more work though.

Arkane would have risked running into the Niko Bellic/John wotsisface problem, though. I don't know how much narrative dissonance that would have induced in the audience, though.

And if Arkane was pressed for time, I suspect that the decision to focus on gameplay over characterization was the superior one. That being said, Arkane has never delivered a compelling plot (or dialog or main character or...basically anything related to words), so I'm not surprised things turned out this way. Harvey Smith can only do so much, I guess.

I don't know if I would call the morality mechanic explicitly stupid. Your choice is between nonlethal takedowns, which are harder to perform but have better consequences, and murder, which is easier but worse in the long-run. It's a tradeoff that works fairly well, as far as morality mechanics in videogames go.

It's easy to write a character who doesn't betray either of two moral paths in a game with binary moral choice. Just make not letting other people in on his true motivation part of his character. Then put the resolution to his character arc, the part where he finally admits what he's really after, in the ending cut scene, since that's going to be different depending on your choices anyway.

Or you go the Count of Monte Cristo route. The guy's moral compass is skewed so that he can justify some really horrible things but not so skewed that he's absolutely incapable of empathy and compassion. If you do it well, all potential choices are in character, because humans are complex.

A QFG clone I am looking forward to now has a Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/HeroinesQuest

Koumei wrote:You can go check out Newgrounds and see if there happen to be any interesting games each day.

I find that Newgrounds is also good if you want to play video games with boobs in them. I like playing the quiz games, because it's good to know that paying attention in school is finally getting me some return on investment: seeing anime boobs.

Yes, I am aware there are anime boobs for free on the internet, but boobs are more special when you've earned them.

Dark Souls:

Manus is actually hard. Also, the Sif summon sign either isn't there, or I'm not looking in the right spot.

That being said, I'm starting to dodge -some- attacks consistently, so I'll beat the bastard sooner or later.

Looks like Steam is having a big sale. Waiting a week because I'm a cheap fucker has worked out for me.

K wrote:Looks like Steam is having a big sale. Waiting a week because I'm a cheap fucker has worked out for me.

I got seven cheap little indie games for eleven bucks. Then I blew a bunch more money I perhaps shouldn't have. I can understand why Steam is so successful.

Been playing around with mechwarrior online a bit. pretty fun, but...

• learning curve is pretty steep - the control scheme is "realistic", so mechs can only go forward and back with the torso twisting above the legs. it's wasd+mouse, but the controls are more like vehicles in other games than the standard FPS controls.
• there's no newbie training ground or anything, not even a way to practice piloting outside of a friendly-fire enabled 8v8 on the ladder. presumably this will change by the it goes from open beta to officially released, but currently your first experience with the weird control system is a real match.
• HEAT. so, heat issues are pretty much expected for the universe, but most of the starter mechs have no direct fire weapons but lasers, and the catapult in particular can't fire more than a few shots before overheating. it adds depth, but when combined with the control scheme, it means the first time you get up close with something, you blunder into a wall, panic, fire, overheat, and then die.
• the in-game currencies are a bit of a pain - there's c-bills, which you use to buy mechs and parts, and xp. when you're using the "trial mechs", you don't earn any XP and you earn cash at about two thirds the rate that you do once you buy a mech. Wouldn't be a problem, except that I didn't see anything about it until googling around to figure out why I wasn't getting XP.

Overall, fun, but if you don't have a bunch of time to pour into the learning curve, I'd wait until it's got a noob mode or until the big rush of new players at official release

I took a day off yesterday to get a whole heap of necessary, important things, like arguing with builders about the state of my non house.

Steam stopped that. Damn you steam!

I did get some satisfying arguing done, but more could have been done had I not been playing games.

On MWO, dan has a series of articles on it, which I consider worth reading if you're interested in playing

K wrote:Looks like Steam is having a big sale. Waiting a week because I'm a cheap fucker has worked out for me.

Cheap fuckers REPRESENT, yo. Thanks for the heads up. Gonna buy some stuff on my wishlist.

I beat the new Borderlands 2 DLC. The Torgue Campaign of Carnage.
Mister Torgue is hilarious.

One thing I like--it doesn't skimp on the badass enemies and loot drops. It's challenging. One of my favorite bits is "Start a barfight. Be the last one standing.'

And the new heads and such are generally pretty cool. Commonly available in the vending machines in the area.

Can anyone recomend me a good FPS fire fighting game?