Blarghagh

The PE boards terrify me. I am hyped for the game but any opinion posted there just gets flamed for not being enough yet simultaneously too much like either Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale.

Adding my 2 cents to the sequel title "speculations" : Torment 2: Numenera Boogaloo

Steam has Greenlight so they don't have to wade through mountains of crap and have to check the legal side of selling all of it. Case in point, a billion Slenderman games have been posted and all of them would have been denied due to not owning the rights to the character nor having permission to use it, but now Steam only had to deny the two or three that were actually popular. It saves literally mountains of work.

Ravenloft would be pretty awesome. I'd love to see Avellone playing with pretty much every horror trope you can find.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X07xNrVd7DU&feature=share Someone drove a truck full of Ghostbusters DVDs into a warehouse full of Men in Black DVDs and ended up with something that looks as fun as it looks stupid.

Yeah, Routh was a great superman and I almost wish he was given another chance, but that was ruined by that film being a huge failure on every other level.

Source Code's not bad either, if more action orientented.

None of my news networks are reporting anything. I heard something about loss of life and limb? EDIT: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/us/explosions-reported-at-site-of-boston-marathon.html?_r=0 2 Explosions at the finish of the Boston Marathon. Unknown cause thus far. So far dozens wounded reported and 3 casualties.

He's got my vote.

I don't know this setting but I thought the main character conceit of an abandoned body taking up a new consciousness is quite nifty

Wow, that sucks. Interesting to see it from that perspective. An interesting experiment would be to go play some online games with an obviously female monniker to see how much more abuse you get.

Doesn't seem to be a female thing because I do much the same thing.

I assume there are a lot more women here than we think that we just tend to assume are men due to gender neutral user names like the good lady up there. Most women gamers I know don't advertise their gender (nor do they have to) because it often leads to unwanted attention. Even if it's not harassment (of which there is a lot) but I assume it's also annoying to have the same conversation every time someone realizes you're a woman. This place is pretty good about it most of the time, at worst displaying apathy and at best being entirely accepting. There's other places that aren't nearly as forgiving, ranging from horrible harassment (see the website fat ugly or slutty that documents some of this) but also just as annoying are white knights - the worst kind of sexists, they who might as well be writing "come here women, I'll protect you because I know you can't" on their t-shirts. Also INB4Volo screaming "Misandry!"

Don't care much for Age of Wonders but I'm happy another relatively big release is coming out of my tiny country. I thought I was going to have be ashamed of our stupid Killzones forever.

Pretty sure it's out there considering I played it personally.

Did you see The Hobbit in 48fps 3D? Because I tend to get painful eye strain and headaches from 3D but the 48fps was smooth watching.

I keep hoping they do a single player Warcraft RPG. They should totally bring back that cancelled graphic adventure. The genre is back! Nah, you can find the parts they made online. Abandonia has it, I think, but I'm ot sure. They should make a new version, not bring that one back. It was terrible and deserved to be cancelled.

I agree, both Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain were enormous failures as games. Due to the lack of meaningful choice it became a series of meaningless cutscenes interspaced with even more meaningless and menial gameplay. It demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge about what makes a movie good nor what makes a video game good and as such their bad combination doesn't work at any level. Worse, they're obsessed with this idea that realism is the only way to tell a story and David Cage is downright disrespectful to thousands of games which exhibit more emotion and depth with a hundred polygons than he will ever be able to with a billion. Man, when Blizzard said they were going to announce something that wasn't a sequel, expansion or that Titan project, I somehow got the idea in my head that they were finally going to do something new or interesting. WarCraft TCG? Wasn't there one already?

That's how I saw it, yeah. The Hivemind is , y'know, despite the Zerg origin story explicitly stating they were created as a Hivemind to rectify the mistake they made with the Protoss who were too individual. But then, according to the books, both were made to be exactly as they are for another purpose! This lore has been mangled. I wish Blizz would pay more attention to the lore.

That movie was surprisingly good. I figured a movie about Santa and the Easter Bunny (among others) FIGHT EVIL would be ridiculously kiddie but it never once talks down to its audience, has some scenes that are quite epic and at the center is a moral that actually matters.

Yeah, I think that's what most feminists, including Sarkeesian, really want, but because we mostly hear them talking about the bad, their views seem limited. In an optimal world, that would be true. But sometimes I feel they are more interested in yelling about opression than actual resolutions. It could reinforce them subconsciously. But until someone creates an implicit misogyny test, we can't really tell. So in short, no evidence that shows correlation between princes peach beign kidnapped and real world misogyny. Absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence, especially since I haven't heard about any studies regarding this question. Until then, "such a correlation does exist" is just as good a hypothesis as is its opposite. Correlation =/= causation.

Not really. I think it's more that the devs are trying to hard with their games. Warcraft three should have really just been paired down to two sides in the conflict, with two campaigns. To much design and work went into the hero units (particularly in the campaigns) and the games might as well have been re-built around being RPG's rather than RTS's. Starcraft is more complicated, but I think what happened with 2 was that they just ended up focused to heavily on the multiplayer aspect. And the campigns suffer from a more free form mission structure. Thus what you do in one mission/mission set, has to be ignored in the others up to a point because they didn't want to put in the effort of having to acknowledge every possible permutation of mission structure. In WoL it meant that you've got four or five actual climaxes as each string of missions ends, none of which are really acknowledged by the other missions until you're in the final stretch. HotS is the same, you've got a bit more mission structure, but even then the overall writing and effort put into the design feels lower. The fact that you can split up your level design and "unlock" units at different rates, ends up causing the difficulty to skyrocket if you go a direction different. You could go into a mission with only banelings and zerglings... and face mutalisks. Also the game throws a few curves at you that then turn out to be sort of "oh yeah, this happened" rather than bigger moments. I can imagine a few moments that were completely underwhelming for what they were supposed to be (Hello Belial fight). And it doesn't help that your opponents aren't actually the "galaxy destroying evil" that we're supposed to have fought. Instead it feels kind of petty, and Kerrigan comes off as more of an emo monster rather than a sympathetic character (which is what they were going for). Actually, I agree with Entrerix that the old campaigns were better, and I think your reasons are actually why. Specifically, the focus. WarCraft, WarCraft II, StarCraft, they were all very focused on the conflict going on at the time. WarCraft III and StarCraft II both spend most of their time with conflicts of no consequence while the real fight is being set up. It feels very much like we're being gimped. It also helps that the old games had much stronger faction identity by way of them not all being "the good guys who band together to fight the nonplayable evil". I loved playing the evil Orcs in WarCraft II, or the evil Zerg in StarCraft. Now both of those seem to have just been "misunderstood". I think StarCraft II would have been better if it had kept its focus on the conflict between the three factions. Hell, so far the Protoss haven't even factored into the plot. They just "show up" occassionally.

Heh, I didn't realize that the Belial fight was what they were copying. I knew they were copying SOMETHING from D3 with that, just not exactly what. And yeah, they did a pretty serious retcon on both the Zerg origins, and Kerrigans relationship with Raynor. I was willing to let the Kerrigan/Raynor thing go in WoL because it seemed more like one of those "Character has a crush so he embarks on a crusade to save the crush". But in HotS they make it into pretty much "these two were passionate lovers prior to her infestation". Yeah, the plotholes and retcons are a bit infuriating, really. The most annoying part is where Narud turns out to have control over the Tal'Darim, whereas he spent a significant part of WoL paying Raynor to steal artifacts from them. He was paying him to steal stuff he already owns.

You guys do realize that the pre-StarCraft Tyranids were a lot more "technicolor Xenomorph" and GW basically admitted that they changed the design aesthetic to look more like Zerg right? I mean, I'm the first to admit that both ...arCraft franchises liberally ripoff the Warhammer franchises, but this isn't one. Also Calax, that was the way Zerg worked from the start. It's in the manual for StarCraft that the Zerg evolve by collection other species' genetic traits.

Ah, so it's infamous *here*.