Tale

I've grabbed Blood Dragon, Super Scribblenauts, Brave New World, and 400 Days (not on sale).

An adventure game about relationship drama. I never really got into Facade.

I didn't mean it that way. The romance is second fiddle to whatever passes for the main storyline in those games. And its mostly juvenile. I meant a game where the theme is love and relationships between mature (or maybe not so mature) individuals - the adventuring elements of the story are secondary to it, not the other way around. Have you played Tales of Monkey Island?

So, half the adventure games I've played. From Monkey Island to Deponia.

The part I like is how she got to keep the tech she worked on. We heard about it back in the day, but it's still cool. http://www.develop-online.net/news/44746/Valves-perfect-hiring-hierarchy-has-hidden-management-clique-like-High-School

I think that's unfair. Sometimes the demands definitely seem stupid in hindsight. But most of the time the explanation is not that they're stupid, it's that their objectives are different than what we would like them to be. Lots of the time, they're going to aim to get the largest audience they can reach, when that doesn't intrinsically do anything to improve the product. That's like a whole other axis on the chart.

I thought we'd done away with mousepad boxes by that time. I recall BG2 and Throne of Bhaal being amongst the last.

Let's call it a hair worth splitting. Publishers can fund the thing you make, as well as try to help "prepare it for market." Which can be influencing it lightly or heavily. But then sometimes they just press discs for you. Valve's relationship with EA is unlikely to have been the same as Insomniac's.

You can sell any inventory item for real money.

Wait for daily!

Why not? I found the story stupidly shallow, but its still really fun game. Because I haven't upgraded from XP yet. I'm saving that for my next build.

Far Cry 3 is the one I'm voting for. I hope Blood Dragon is part of the sale. I can't play Dishonored and already have Borderlands 2.

Did you like 2? Well, it's kind of like that but less compelling. Ridiculously slow start, no new mechanics of interest, and a storyline that just isn't worth the effort of insulting.

Mars: War Logs was listed as a daily, then replaced with Antichamber. It didn't have a daily counter, so that might have been a mistake, Antichamber does have a daily counter. I want to get it though. Hopefully it gets a deeper discount later. I wonder if there's a chance of Brave New World getting even a 5% discount on Civilization's turn. How is Defiance? I'm falling in love with the show.

Yeah and it makes me laugh But I would say we are all in agreement that GTA is the superior game ????? Than SR? Hell to the no. I share this opinion Saint's Row 3 had a nice variety of interesting vehicles, including VTOL jets that fired lasers. And the missions provided variety too. Every GTA I've played was just lots of the same from beginning to end.

Amazon usually price matches. Or has for the past two at least.

I see what you mean. That the devs are chaps with families. I'd really like to know what 'our' devs think about this. On some level it makes sense. (in the way that ideas look good on paper) I think we need, and can expect, to see more of this. The average age of gamers is supposedly somewhere around 30. This puts them at late teens/early twenties to play Baldur's Gate II, the game that really kicked off RPG romance. But also at the right age to play games like Lunar and Final Fantasy VIIat the peak. And now they're the same people raising children. I expect in about another decade we're going to see the mid-life crisis as a topic in videogames. I'm sure there are. I'm not trying to paint the now as if it's a revolution. But I suspect there's a bigger audience for it than ever before.

Two of the three games I mentioned have it as adopted daughters, with the majority of the development being on establishing that relationship.

Father/daughter dynamic seems to be popular recently. Nier/Walking Dead/Last of Us, okay that's all that comes to mind off the top of my head. It's probably some combination of the developers getting older and coming into their own families, but also the audience doing the same.

Midweek Madness ends 6 hours earlier than usual this week. A good indicator that the summer sale will start on Thursday.

I got bored with GTA IV before completing it. I'm kind of with Drowsy on the repackaging. I played III, played some of Vice City, and felt it was too much of the same thing. Got IV on sale and more of the same. In Rockstar's defense, the heist thing they're doing here looks drastically different. But we'll have to see if those make up the core of the story missions or if that's just something you do occasionally, with 90% being the same things we did since III.

I have a whole other week of house sitting. *shakes*

I haven't played anything since Monday. I'm going through withdrawals, man.

I still can't get over those thigh pauldrons.

Pacing is the tempo of highs and lows. Combat segments to puzzles, that sort of thing. The opening of gates that yield rewards to open yet other gates is progression. Whether or not it fits the definition of character progression (and whether you define that as character skill or character sheet) seems beside the point of whether or not it is part of progression systems. There is a progression. You won't be able to deck yourself out in +5 equipment at level 1. You have to earn that by getting the recipes and associated materials. And it does provide additional benefits to the player that aren't handled by straight equipment drops. Which is far more important than what word you want to call it.