Joseph Bulock

Maybe for you, but I have higher standards. Different standards, mabye, but I wouldn't call them higher.

How the hell do they come up with 1 BILLION dollars worth of damages? Every single home would have to average $666,666 in value. While I know San Diego is expensive I seriously doubt that number. That's actually a decent average for a home out here. A three bedroom house in a decent neighborhood is easily over 1 mil. San Diego is cheaper in some areas, but sections of Escondido are very upscale, and some of what has been damaged are very expensive vacation homes out in the wilderness. Also, many structures that are not houses have been destroyed. That number is actually probably a bit low.

Obsidian is totally safe, and so far, all of us have been lucky enough to avoid fire damage to houses and what not, though a number of us could see fire from out bedroom windows. San Diego has been the worst hit so far. They had the bad luck of having the last fires to start, so while the first couple (sadly in Malibu) got lots of support, San Diego fire fighters have been on their own, and they're battling the two largest fires at the moment. The winds have also slowed the ability to get tankers up in the air and dumping water and retardant chemicals. Federal support was a little slow, but not nearly as bad as other disaster support recently. Support from other states is supposed to start arriving today as well, which is a bit disappointing as well, but better late than never.

Get a few more folks in there and we'll schedule a battle...

The bots in those games are pretty terrible. Valve did make some decent bots for CS, but they still don't match human players. Considering the strategic depth of TF2, I don't think you'd ever really want to play with bots.

TF2 has been monopolizing my free time. I'd pay the 50 bucks just for it, and would probably pay another 30 for the other two new games that come in the orange box. Compare that to Hellgate, which has a subscription model that I'm not too fond of, and I think it's a pretty easy choice. That being said, I am still really interested to see how Hellgate turns out. I loved Diablo II, and it looks like it could have a lot of the same high points, minus the great servers at no cost to the gamer.

I've been going through the Paranoia Agent series after enjoying Paprika (a film by the same director) a great deal. Both are very weird and hard to follow at times, but with amazing art style and a challenging story that engages me much more than the standard ninjas almost killing each other ad nauseum.

I like macs for many things. They are fantastic for video editing, as is their software (Final Cut Pro), and Mac's are very stable machines. That being said, they are in many ways a console. They don't upgrade well if at all, and are almost always overpriced. The upside is that the parts work very well together and the OS and software need only support a tiny range of hardware. There's a lot of things to be said for stable machines that almost always due what you want them too without crashing or taking a few days to troubleshoot. That being said, they are crap for games and awful for anyone on a budget. On the social side of things, many mac users are morons, which means only that they are in fact, actually people and not the next stage of human development. PC "hardcore" are just as obnoxious, but instead of boasting about things that they don't know about, the boast about things that no one else cares about.

It is also rumored that the Intel quad cores are getting a massive price cut on July 22nd. I'm personally waiting for that to build my new rig.

I think one of the worst things that every happen to gaming was the establishment of the holy title of "RPG video game." That is not to say that I haven't enjoyed many games that most label as RPGs. I hold Fallout 2 and Final Fantasy Tactics up as my favorite games still to this day. Both of these are called RPG by most folks, though the gameplay experiences of the two are almost entirely different. Some people would argue that one or the other is a better "RPG" than the other, but not without having to state a 10 page thesis of what an RPG is, and I have no desire to listen to another person tell me that class based leveling, the ability to pick one's race and gender, dialog choices etc. make a game an RPG. The term is great for pen and paper. The term fits horribly for interactive electronic media, and is probably one of the most overused terms in gaming reviews/discussion/promotional material.

I'm a fan of the d20 stuff, especially Iron Heroes. I'm also a sucker for cyberpunk/transhuman stuff, and therefore am quite fond of shadowrun, despite its flaws.

I was looking forward to Hellgate a lot more before they announced that you'd have to pay a monthly fee to use decent items and have convenient storage space. They don't sound like they're doing enough to justify a monthly fee, and instead are going to crapify customers that only give them fifty bucks. That doesn't really make sense to me.

The worst part of this is that Nvidia does seem to have much pressure to pull a price drop since their midrange guard already beats the heavy hitter of the new AMD card. I was really hoping to pick up a cheap 8800GTX, but that seems much less likely. I was also going to pick up an AMD x2, but Intel just announced price cuts on a quad core that would be as cheap as the x2. AMD has been my favorite for a long time, but they just don't seem to be competing the same way the used to.

Only if you want to go back to spending lots more money again. For the budget builders, today seems like a better day. I hope you didn't think I was advocating the so far untested R600 like some obnoxious ATI fanboy.. I was thinking what metadigital was thinking. Oooooh. That's a bit more reasonable, though I'm not sure how much the 8600's will drop given that Nvidia seems to have priced them to make the R600 less attractive before it hits the market.

Only if you want to go back to spending lots more money again. For the budget builders, today seems like a better day.

I'm building a new rig myself right now, and between the AMD x2's getting their prices cut in half, and these cards coming out, it's actually not going to kill the bank to build a rather capable gaming ring. This is, of course, just me talking and I in no way represent the greater preferences of Obsidian Entertainment.

By asking you to do so, I was asking for a more coherent and clear definition, because the one the article fails to actually clarify what it defines as narrative and the structure of narrative. They seem more like shallow examinations of three perceived methods used by developers, abounding with many empty comments and bold statements without any substance behind them. For example, You claim that game developers attempt to make games as movie, but fail to understand the strengths and techniques of the cinema, and at the same time doing injustice to the workings and strengths of interactive media. Cite a few examples of how this is occurs, or where you perceive that the failings are most visible. Don't just tell me that games are movie so game that feel to much like movies are bad. You did nothing to prove that any of the flaws were non-existent. There is no substantive evidence cited. Insulting a reader that disagrees with you does not strengthen your position, no matter how many times you do it. The fact that many people on this board are missing what you claim to be the point of your article is probably pointing to a failure in the writing and not the readers.

Last time I checked the company handbook, I'm still allowed to have differing opinions from Josh. That being said, Josh has probably though his through for a couple extra years. And seriously, there is only one "L" in my name.

Maybe you should define how you think narrative plays out in a standard game, and how you think it should, and perhaps cite examples. This was the largest flaw in your article. Lots of rhetoric and psuedo-theory without any substantive evidence. And not to beat a dead horse, but I wonder at your idea of role-playing.

What is it with you making sense and being moderately reasonable lately?

I have no idea how you get that from what I quoted. I think if there is an ultimate argument to this article, he has done a very poor job of supporting it, and much of his evidence is shoddily constructed. I've read and written papers on the interaction between film and interactive media, as well as the narrative structures that can be found in both. This paper takes a very small sampling from both mediums, apparently chosen only to support a theory that doesn't even fit his small sampling. This paper new what it wanted to say before he looked at the media, and did not bother to actually examine the experiences and narratives of the games he mentions. It's a weakly constructed argument, and proves true only for the most selective samples from both film and RPG games. I don't know if you wrote this or something Girias, but I don't know what you see as the strengths of the argument in this article. Any argument that is built on faulty evidence is lacking.

From the article: What is commonly described as videogame narrative is more of a pastiche of narrative elements than an analogue of traditional narrative found on other mediums. To illustrate this point, consider a videogame and a theoretical movie adaptation of said videogame. Any such example would be confronted with an obvious truth - a videogame contains a dynamic system of events that is not translated into a movie based on it; we can reduce or explain a game experience or session by narrating the events by the order we experienced them, but the account will not be in any way similar to the experience the games provide on an individual basis. The long journey that the PC in Arcanum must do from the IFS Zephyr to the final stages of the game are a gameplay experience that would never translate well into a movie because most of the experience is governed by the dynamic systems the game is based on – combat, character building, character dialogue that take into account character race or ability scores, and interaction with surroundings. Gameplay events such as rummaging in garbage bins looking for items to combine, gambling with sailors in the docs, asking everyone in town for rumours or managing an inventory are situations which elicit no favourable response from a movie audience. Since movies are based on a selection of specific and relevant events, the movie itself may not contain a recognizable narrative to players who experienced the game in a different way. On the other hand, the kind of narrative that a movie is based on would make up for a rather dull experience on the videogame spectrum since for it to function it requires that the central characters are set on a linear path across the previously established temporal sequence of events; an immutable chain of situations which converge onto a predetermined path based on predetermined situations. He 1) has a very narrow idea of narrative structure, both in games and the cinema, and 2) doesn't use great examples for games and has no comparison film to set against the situations in the game. He seems to be very set in a Hollywood action / horror film idea of the cinema, and is definitely not considering many alternate genre and narrative styles that do not include only the most relevant scenes to the story. He also seems that games damage their narrative structure by including gameplay elements. I'm not sure if this is really the case in all games, and it seems a shallow way to examine the dynamics of an interactive experience.

It makes a lot of jumps in logic and makes very one dimensional comparisons between video games and cinema. It assumes that because movie adaptations of games tend to work differently than the games themselves, that it is the games that have flaws in their narrative structure. This is an incredibly poor argument, and he never explores it in any manner that could be called intelligent.

I'm really interested in the protagonist for this one. I have to say that playing an older Russian thug is by far the most appealing choice so far. The Italian mafia was fun, and the thug life was an awesome change up, but I can't wait to play a Russian. I just hope they throw in enough "In Soviet Russia..." jokes.

Looks fun to me, but I've finished all of the GTA games since III, and have always been happy with them.