Purkake

A friend's/relative's/pet's computer then?

I'm sure there's a zombie mod for Hearts of Iron. Plus it's all about vampires now and Operation Darkness has strategy vampires covered.

We lack any good zombie strategy games or sims. Plants vs Zombies? Why do we need zombie strategy games and sims? What's wrong with the zombieless ones?

Thankfully the zombie craze has mostly died down by now. We have had enough zombie things for a good long while now. Still looking forward to Dead State, though.

Looks cool, but adding I don't think it warrants a whole new subgenre. Also Rock Paper Shotgun doesn't get nearly enough love, they have excellent PC and indie game articles.

Bargain bins or deals where the publisher buys back the extra.

The developers have already been paid, it's the publishers who are complaining.

A good old fashioned video game burning? You would at least make headlines...

The replay thing is somewhat mitigated by multiplayer modes, but adding one to every game hasn't really helped the situation. I'm all for smaller budget digitally distributed games. @Raithe: At some point time will be more valuable than money, so people don't want to finish games they don't enjoy.

It looks pretty bad at the moment, but apparently Stardock has already released a patch and will probably continue releasing them. PCG has indeed been going down the drain for a while, even their podcast sucks now.

I doubt it. It wasn't a long time ago when someone from Obsidian said that they aren't working on the game as the Mandragon fellow was still trying to secure funds for it. And I believe Obsidian was already working on 3rd project at that point. Knowing Mandragon's past with the license I'll believe that someone is doing something with the license when we actually get some screenshots/pictures/video of the possible games, tv series or movies. They have the uncrowned king of Malkier, last of his blood working on the game? @virumor: What if you ARE the ancient evil?

Well, don't keep us in the dark, what's the general consensus?

Do you really hate Portal that much?

The Gamestop used game business is pretty horrible as well. Publishers do really need to make up their minds and stop half-assing it. Either grow a pair and cut retail out of the loop or live with the second hand market. They can't continue to push the retailers forever, if they keep this up, they will both end up crashing and burning with the budgets being what they are.

No, I meant destiny_driven, I remember your story from the previous page. The universe does indeed seem to be against you(both) Maybe try it in another computer?

Did you try to return it?

Trackmania too.

Gamasutra has a pretty interesting analysis of Portal as well. And there was some tech demo of Bethesda's Radiant AI, where they gave everyone distinct objectives which lead to them having to tune it down for the final game when a peasant killed someone because he needed to rake leaves, but didn't have a rake. You could write a pretty interesting paper on that as well... EDIT: Here's the article.

@Everyone deciding to play ToEE for the first time: For the sake of your sanity get the Circle of Eight community patch before you do anything, this game has more bugs than a cheap motel.

I remember it very vaguely...

Don't get me wrong, having an intelligent discourse about a non-Bioware/Obsidian/Bethesda game is a welcome change.

That part is nice, yes. The stained glass windows in the background are really cool as well.

It's very unresponsive and clunky to use, though.

I'd say the mod scene is surprisingly large for a console game. Also, the Wrecking Crew is an awesome pass-the-controller game for parties.

Wow, you're jumping off the deep end there, Maria Good post, I agree that "self vs social performance" in Portal is perhaps looking too deep into it and good point about Psychonauts as well. There are still quite a few things to look for in Portal, but a lot of them would benefit greatly from playing some other games as well. You could discuss the identity of the player vs the identity of the character, video games in general with the sharp contrast between the lab and the backrooms, maybe GLaDOS as a character(she does have a surprising amount of depth) and probably a whole bunch of more abstract liberal arts-y things. It does seem like a pretty good choice for starting an interesting conversation, at least.