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Pisscubes wrote:It's very funny for me when I start feeling like telling tales of playing Zork on a TRS-80, Adventure on the 2600 or Megaman on the NES the first time 'round like I'm talking about "...walking to school in three feet of snow, up hill both ways", because I never mean it to sound that way. I LOVED the games of my youth. But it was a lot more of an isolated thing. I feel like since now you can download whatever the fuck you want if you have the money (or pirate ALMOST anything the fuck you want if you don't), it may not be as easy for people to spend so much time mastering one game. So the games have to be flashier, of course, but also have to be a bit easier in someway. They're afraid that if someone gets stuck, they'll just move on to another game. Set that side by side with my mom letting me bike to the local video store where I would have enough money to rent one (1) game for the weekend and that was that. So you'd play outside during the day if it was nice but other than that-- that game was your weekend. You sort of HAD to spend time going over it like Rainman, over and over until you got it because what the fuck else where you going to play?

You are absolutely correct, especially in the case of Zork and other similar types of software. There will never be games like that again, precisely for the reasons that you've described. Interactive fiction never went away, people have never stopped making it - and we've been seeing a full-on revival of the visual adventure game for quite some time now. It's not the same stuff though, and it can't be - both because of the people developing it and the changing expectations of us as consumers.

Those original Infocom titles and the early point-and-clicks were special because they existed in a unique time and place. They're certainly not 'better' games - it was just circumstance and limitation giving way to an inimitable character. The people making those games were of a different generation, and were plowing into absolutely unexplored territory as far as technology, craftsmanship and industry are concerned. That is invariably going to birth something completely different than a contemporary designer developing for an established market with preconceptions and expectations on both sides.

The language and flavor of the Infocom games are very very heavily influenced by academic and nerd culture of the late 1970s - Tolkien had not yet been thoroughly exploited, and the notion of exploring a dungeon was exciting and not something which required a new spin or elaboration in order to seem novel. There is a dreamlike quality to them which I have never discovered anywhere else, which I think also comes from a slightly more innocent approach to fantasy. Modern and romantic objects appear right next to each other without any need to explain themselves, with this weird infuriating nerd humor anti-logic - it all has much more in common with Lewis Carroll or Neil Gaiman's more whimsical stuff than the stern, 'mature' Game of Thrones feeling you see in games like Skyrim trying to capture today.

I've never been able to re-experience the feeling of playing through those games. I've tried, but it just never comes to me - even in moving through Infocom games I never played in the first place. The online multi-user dungeons were dying when I discovered them in the late 90s, and the ones I loved the most are now all completely gone, wiped away without a trace. It's a weird and overwhelming feeling, feeling sad and nostalgic over the loss of worlds which never actually existed in the first place.

All of my best music comes from that place, it's what I try to summon up when I make anything that isn't just for fun - and obviously why I named the project Telnet.

i thought the discussion about difficulty in games (thanks KRB) had a lot more potential than yet another reee nostalgia trip, but whatever dudes

mostly i'm just sad that in-game hint systems have taken the place of actual logical, self-evident game design

ARROWS ON EVERYTHING

ALL BUTTONS GLOW

So true. I realize the average gamer wants to put next to no effort into a game but at least give me the option to turn all that shit off. Far Cry 3 had an awful, awful amount of clutter on the screen.

Minimal HUDs, exploring the game and its mechanics on your own = .

Why Dark Souls was so great.

riley-o wrote:Why Demon's Souls was so great.

The final boss in Demon's Souls has basically become my paradigm for "good hard" and the kind of effect that has. When I was a few attempts in, getting to the point where I knew how to beat him, but I just hadn't quite pulled it off, I got to a mental state that a game hadn't put me in since the final boss of Musha Aleste on Sega Mega Drive. Palms sweaty, heart pounding, and Matrix-focused. And the reason the game produces that feeling is because a) a lot rides on me not dying because it'll take a long time to get there again and b) because I know exactly what I have to do, it just requires me not to even blink and maintain that undivided focus for long enough to win. That's far from the only thing that's great about the Souls games, but I do love that they've proven you can still do this in games without seeming anachronistic.

Otherwise, I'd really hope the future of high difficulty settings lies in jacking up AI ability. Killzone 2 did this beautifully. On lower difficulties, the enemies just do the usual whack-a-mole cover shooter stuff, and on higher settings, they flank you, smoke you out of cover with grenades, etc. It seemed to be as simple as certain attack patterns just being locked out on medium difficulty (DmC does this too), and it worked great.

Games like Battlefield 3 do me no favor when I go back and play pure FPSers like Serious Sam. I had to survive literally 100 charging bulls and countless other things shooting lasers & rockets at me in a small arena and they killed me about ten times before I got a feasible attack strategy working.

I think we've pretty much established that bad hard is when the HP to damage output ratio is just stacked against you more and more as you turn up the difficulty. It does force you to get better at the game because there's less room for error, but it really doesn't make it more interesting. Good hard is anything that forces you to pay more attention and really understand what's going on so that you can manipulate it to win - whatever that means. I personally love side scrollers that require me to memorize every inch of a level, and to this day, I enjoy playing Revenge of Shinobi on the highest difficulty at least once every month or so even though I'm basically watching my muscle memory play the game for me. That's sort of an autistic enjoyment of videogames that I'm not sure there's much of a market for anymore today, though. Enemies having clearly readable attack patterns that you have to respond to works just as well, and increasing the complexity of those patterns and to what extent they're triggered by player behavior is just as good and more nowadays gamerz compatible.

spacehamster wrote:

riley-o wrote:Why Demon's Souls was so great.

I was worried that I'd actually said this for a second but I eventually sorted out your evil deception, you fucking villain. I made a point of saying Dark Souls because we're specifically talking about how games like Farcry3 these days lead you by the hand through everything you're supposed to do, where Dark Souls really left you entirely in the dark about which direction you're going because of how the set was all in one lump of open world, not in different portals in a nexus (levels essentially) which made it a lot clearer where you where going. I was still discovering different ways the Dark Souls world tied together weeks after I first played the game because there weren't fucking flashing arrows and glowing door knobs.

I agree with what you're saying about the False King battle as well, but your chicanery will not be forgotten easily.

FVBTVS wrote:

oh god yes

riley-o wrote:
I agree with what you're saying about the False King battle as well, but your chicanery will not be forgotten easily.

I actually wanted to cross it out and write "Demon's" next to it, but we don't have the BBCode for that, apparently.

Anyway, I certainly agree DkS used the open nature of its world to exactly the right effect - when I first started, I immediately wandered off in the wrong direction (towards the Catacombs) and spent the first two hours wondering why I kept getting slaughtered until I figured out I was supposed to go the other way first. I just think that's only one aspect of what makes the game great, and it's pretty much the only think DkS introduced - everything else was already established in DeS.

riley-o wrote:Why Dark Souls was so great.

God I love reading stories about people going to the left and getting thrashed by the skeletons. Then, they whine about how the game is too hard and doesn't teach you enough.

spacehamster wrote:Anyway, I certainly agree DkS used the open nature of its world to exactly the right effect - when I first started, I immediately wandered off in the wrong direction (towards the Catacombs) and spent the first two hours wondering why I kept getting slaughtered until I figured out I was supposed to go the other way first. I just think that's only one aspect of what makes the game great, and it's pretty much the only think DkS introduced - everything else was already established in DeS.

Edit: Shadowrun Returns looks amazing. Need to pre-order that.

Still need to play through that one! I've started it a few times, and it always seems promising - one day.

Played the first episode of The Walking Dead last night and it's pretty cool, I do like the timed choices you make and how all that works, the game design is great. One thing I absolutely fucking hate about these games though is when you have a bunch of choices in what you can say but your character doesn't say the thing you chose -- I don't mean like it thinks you hit the wrong button, I mean it re-words your choice and becomes something totally different. Say what you said you were going to say asshole ! I didn't choose to say that other thing !

Pisscubes wrote:A: Wanna fuck my asshole after I lube it with bacon grease?

Got The Passion of the Croft today because eh. Does this ever get good?

Alpha Protocol is still the king of dialogue choices and did it so much better than The Walking Dead.

Just played the GoW Ascension demo, and I'm not exactly beside myself with excitement here. What actually bugs me more than the whole sense of been there done that you guys already mentioned is the fact that it just doesn't seem particularly well thought out. That whole sequence in the rotating box is just a mess where you basically can't see what's going on and just mash the square button hoping Kratos'll hit something. And that's one thing the GoW games have always been good at. Oh well. Not cancelling preorder.

Pisscubes wrote:Look, we all know how I feel on Alpha Protocol, but even YOU have to admit that it was totally guilty of the same thing-- choosing some dialogue option that didn't end up being what you assumed it would be.

I think your memory is a little foggy because that kind of mistake is basically impossible in the game. You chose tone (Aggressive, Suave or Sarcastic with a few different options added during specific conversations) not the words and it actually made the conversations worth hearing again in a second playthrough. That to me is a much more interesting and clearer way to do dialogue options in games.

riley-o wrote:One thing I absolutely fucking hate about these games though is when you have a bunch of choices in what you can say but your character doesn't say the thing you chose -- I don't mean like it thinks you hit the wrong button, I mean it re-words your choice and becomes something totally different.

what situation are you thinking of specifically? i thought the walking dead did this WAY less often (and can't think of any major exchange where it happened) than every bioware game ever, for example, especially the debacle that was dragon age 2 where what you said above happened in like every conversation.

I just played it through for the first time, and I only really felt that way a few times. not bad.

how different can it get from playthrough to playthrough? I started another game and found quickly that you can't stay on the farm. that was a great disappointment. not sure if I feel like continuing if it's all going to be basically the same scenarios played out with different personnel.

the game was fun, though

i'm watching my gf play right now and she's basically made completely different decisions than i did... honestly, nothing she's done has made the plot advance in a significant different way. even seemingly big decisions work themselves out quickly to keep things heading in the same general direction. examples (don't read unless you're finished with episode 3):
it's sort of disappointing... it'd be cool to have larger plot divergences in season 2 for sure.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/09/ ... ll-cost-70

only good thing about this is that is was reported by fucking pachter