AwesomeOcelot

That's great and everything, having The Road: The Game, grey grey everywhere, and lots of old world buildings that have a lot of untouched old world stuff, but that's not Fallout, and I really like Fallout.

He has to be a millionaire, he's sold two of his game dev companies to EA and Microsoft. He paid $6m (according to wikipedia at least) of the Black & White development costs, and he's probably put a lot of his own money into 22cans. Some article is claiming about 2 months ago he said the iPad could be more powerful than the PS4 and Xbox720 by the time they're released. If that's true, he must be inhaling mercury because he's as mad as a hatter. Since Godus is going to be on smartphones and tablets, I can't trust Molyneux to deliver a competent PC interface or a game that uses the advantages of a PC like memory and storage capacity. I can see it being like the many other straight from the AppStore PC ports. He has got a really good record, but lets just say it's not trending upwards in terms of quality.

If you enjoy pressing keys when told to and repeatedly hitting the same key that's fine. GOTY, would press buttons like a monkey in a study on reward systems in simians again.

I watched the first 45min of gameplay, strange how they don't clamp down on that. It hasn't been 90% conversation but it has been over 50% non-interactive cutscene. The voice acting is pretty good, but the dialogue and dialogue system are pretty bad. It doesn't seem to track choices as well as one would hope, Lee says Clementine is not his daughter, but then everybody still calls her his daughter anyway. I gave up after the batteries incident, that's ridiculous. Unless things significantly improve later on, people are crazy.

If it's one thing games as a medium have mastered it's threat with an adrenalin rush, but I guess that would require them to give the player control of their actions and actually develop gameplay mechanics for fight and flight. It's something they're going to keep failing at if they approach it from the same direction. I think it's completely unnecessary, they're looking for a middle way that's not there, they either need to learn how to develop games, or start developing interactive fiction. I don't power game if I actually care, I don't think removing the game element solves any problems, but it's good to know The Walking Dead makes you care about characters and choices have consequences.

If they got rid of the timed dialogue and QTE, pointlessly simple puzzles, I could probably see the appeal of it, as a kind of Choose Your Own Adventure book or those branching interactive DVDs, previous attempts at interactive stories that aren't gamest, which all also tended to not be any good. Does it at least do the interactive fiction well, in terms of choices being real and having consequences? Very few games are worth it despite their gameplay, probably only two that I can think of.

When they updated the graphics engine for the Mac version and ported it over to Windows, adding 360 pad support, they made the Meat Circus easier (which you can change back in the options). I play a lot of platformers, the Meat Circus and most of the parts I had trouble with is because of context controls and camera angles just not working the way they should, and the bad support for gamepads making the analogue sketchy. Also the targeting system was completely useless, having one that worked would have made the bunny and Oleander easier to manage. Also I'm pretty sure some of the scripted sequences with the evil father broke half the time making it impossible not to take hits, other times it was hard to get hit. The best part was that due to memory leaks and graphical issues the second boss fight in the Meat Circus became unplayable as my frame rate tanked on a system that can play every game at 1080p. People were upset about Psychonauts not selling well, but it was a really bad PC port, the demo only had basic braining and the starting area, which were not interesting for me at all compared to virtually any other part of the game, which is brilliant for the vast majority of the time, even a lot of the platforming, if not executed as well as it should have been.

From what I've seen from video The Walking Dead is a terrible game, timed dialogue, QTE, and really simple point and click style puzzles. There is of course a comic and a TV show if I want to experience The Walking Dead, and there are several zombie games from different genres that are pretty damn great. Are the plot and dialogue competitive with different forms of media? Possibly, but adding a layer of terrible gameplay doesn't make those any better. It at least looks pretty good.

After you kill House, you'd think the PC would be the controller of the Securitrons and the Strip. House was getting half of everything sold on the Strip, he was also probably getting a percentage from the casinos. I would have liked more options in how the PC as an independent could leverage the soft and hard power at their command, an army of securitrons, a massive fortune. If the PC kicked the NCR off of the dam then they could sell electricity to the NCR. The PC could wipe out the three major slaving or raiding factions, Khans, Legion, and Fiends. Alliances with the Boomers, BoS, and Kings could have provided at least some security. Supporting the Followers with major resources. I think the independence ending was a bit too bleak when you hear what happens to the Followers, how violent and unstable Vegas is. The NCR ending is a little too good considering what corrupt authoritarian **** ups they are, can't even defeat the fiends or legion, considering the PC managed to do that virtually by themselves. I was not pleased when I first found out that my independent Vegas was worse than a NCR controlled Vegas. The endings are pretty awesome though. I would have liked to have been able to tell Veronica to go to the Sierra Madre instead of wandering the wastes alone. Dead Money's ending left me cold, that would be an incredible turn around, having that ending after how terrible they had it, how sad and lonely their endings are.

Closure, it's great, but it's really counter intuitive, really challenging. I solve the puzzle and then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory constantly because I mess up something that's solved just by trying to get around. When you mess up it's usually curtains and you have to start the level again. I'm on the second chapter (or whatever group), I think that's 48 levels, been playing a for an hour or two each day.

Apparently Steam forces available updates, and the "do not automatically update" option is only for games that don't get patched, and it stops Steam from "fixing" modded files. Never wanted to keep the old version of a game on Steam yet, but when I got FarCry I later learnt that a patch not made by the developer but the publisher has turned the game into an unplayable mess, well done Ubisoft.

Has Molyneux suffered brain damage at some point? A lot of things can be said about Black & White's interface, intuitive is not one of them. Fable was one of the best action adventures, it's never a RPG, it's so weak in the RPG department, lots of games come out now with more RPG elements that aren't described as RPGs. I was watching an interview with Chris Taylor (Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander) and he said something like "RTS works great on consoles, just give the interface 4 hours". You are a great programmer and designer Chris, but after 4 hours of learning the interface it's still not going to be comparable to a mouse in terms of speed or precision, which you can pick up in a few minutes. Sometimes it seems like people who create great works apparently do so by complete accident, or they must have had input or a team around them that were way more important than they were given credit for. Sometimes it's as if they don't actually play games. Then again a lot of really badly designed games sell well, completely linear and scripted shooters, games primarily consisting of QTE, and 3D movement with fixed 3rd person perspective. Most of these decisions are taken because they want to do something with the graphics or the plot, but it's easier when you take control away from the player, and making the gameplay boring, repetitive, simple, and frustrating is apparently not a concern. It's hard to feel confident about the project when Crysis 2, Max Payne 3, Sniper Elite V2, and Wheelman are cited. Crysis 2 was all right but it was no where near as good as Crysis, and it's hard to understand the design decisions of Max Payne 3, the first two games were great. I did back BS5 even though I hated BS2, BS3, and BS4, if I can forgive Charles Cecil for past crimes, I think Molyneux probably deserves one final chance.

You need to install the Deux Ex unofficial patch because a lot of its tied to processor speed making the dialogue and wall mines mess up completely (how developers thought that was a good idea in the 90s I will never know, it's forgiveable when games were developed for specific hardware in the 80s), and it's a good idea to use the DirectX 9 or 10 shader upgrade. The only games I haven't been able to get to run on Steam with Win 7 are the first two Hitman games, Max Payne (there is apparently a fix but I don't like to install executables from forums without known authors), and the Abe's Odyssey/Exodus games.

Requiring to have a intrusive third-party program that, unless properly configured starts at launch is so subtle DRM that people don't notice it? Um. Not so. I kind of gave up on my Steam & DRM hate for a while, given that a lot of games that I wanted required steam. So I gave up. I soon got my hate-vigour back when steam updated a game I had even when I had specified the auto-updates off and if I recall correctly, I was even running steam in offline-mode. The problem was, the update broke the game for me, in addition to breaking the mods I had. Never again to Steam. Was that the re-organising files into a more efficient format? Yes, Steam did update all or most games to a new format that you didn't want to update. It was a system/steam client update for a new content delivery system, not a game update. It was done for important reasons and there are benefits to it, but it did break people's mods and unofficial patches.

Lonesome Road was good, probably my 3rd favourite DLC, a bit too linear and I didn't really like the warhead mechanic, but the plot was good, the combat with the Marked was a bit of an improvement on the main campaign. Way better than Honest Hearts for me.

Dungeon Siege was a really interesting game, it was definitely technically impressive and very tight mechanically, but story, art direction, questing, environments, combat variety and depth, were sub-par and it was really linear, most of which was by design or due to having a small team and limited budget. Whenever RTS engines are brought to RPG's there's a lot of improvement, WoW used the Warcraft 3 engine, Infinity Engine was originally a RTS engine IIRC, and Dungeon Siege is by Chris Taylor who made one of the best RTS games ever (Total Annihilation) and wanted to bring RTS elements to a Diablo inspired game. I didn't like the inventory system in Dungeon Siege because of potions taking up one slot, that was damn annoying. Pack mule, sacrifice a combat party member for more inventory space, that was a great idea, which Torchlight used and expanded on. Realistically a pack mule would probably be able to carry more stuff than what's represented in Dungeon Siege. I like the idea of support party members, perhaps like the Torchlight pet mechanic you have a salvager who for a percentage of the profits follows you around and sells the stuff you don't pick up, or like the miners in Neverwinter Nights 2, you mark places where there's loot to be salvaged, and you get a percentage. Maybe even have a wagon or even a caravan, but it limits you to roads and if it's not in a protected place it's vulnerable to raiding parties, so you still have inventory concerns when looting remote dungeons but inventory isn't a complete pain when you're picking up supplies, or travelling from town to town. I want as many options as possible, I want tiles, drag on drop, ctrl/shift select cut and past, lists with search, lists with sort, so I still have all the gameplay surrounding the inventory of classic games but none of the pain or time waste. Categorisation would be great, especially with your own categories. So many games really fail in things you're doing a lot of, while development time is disproportionally spent on things that aren't used, might not even be seen, playing New Vegas is painful because of Bethesda's designed for console interface.

Haven't played Lonesome Road yet, but so far my favourite DLC is Blood Money, loved the characters, the dead ones were great too, not so much Dean Domino, I didn't really get that guy. Old World Blues, in terms of gameplay wasn't great, but the environment was interesting, I loved the references, the plot was cool, and it was really funny. I didn't like the talking to your own brain, or not having a brain, that didn't make sense, and I'd like that stuff to be on periphery and rare like the special encounters. Old World Blues reminded me of Psychonauts from early on, as if Raz was in a crazed sci-fi junkie's brain that had nerd issues in high school and was obsessed with reds under their bed. Honest Hearts, didn't really like that much at all. The enemies in that were bullet sponges, also the giant green geckos murdered me a lot, killed me quickly, came out of no where, were super fast, and clipped through the terrain all the time.

That's embarrassing, don't call yourself a legendary computer game designer. I know Guido Henkel has been a developer on many great games, but I don't really know his role in most of them. Neal Hallford on the other hand, those games in terms of writing don't fill me with confidence. The development studio, G3 Studios, only creates mobiles games that don't look good or original. Going to have to give this one a miss. I can't see this succeeding where Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall failed. Star Citizen needs to stop spamming the updates. Give me a daily breakdown on stretch goals met or something.

Using a VK machine.

it's pointed out through history and dialogue a few times that NCR aggressively expand and assimilate the same way Caesar's Legion does, and the NCR bite more than they can chew. It would have made sense after upgrading the Securitrons for the NCR to back off, as they'd do with the Boomers, as you can do with the BoS, but it's pretty much inevitable that New Vegas, the BoS, and the Boomers will get annexed if NCR win. Negotiating a better treaty would have been acceptable to the NCR if the alternative is them being kicked out or wiped out, so that New Vegas isn't colonized and made a vassal. House is a tyrant, of course he's going to want to exterminate the BoS because they're powerful, and House wouldn't admit to himself that he needs the Courier, so he'd probably turn against the Courier anyway if the Courier denied him. Yes Man also serves no purpose to House, and is a legitimate threat to him. Same with the NCR, they're a threat. House will try to eliminate the threats to his plans for New Vegas, the only way to keep him is to lock him up in a closet Deus Ex style.

The moment I realized Bethesda had a sense of humour was when they asked me to find the android in Fallout 3.

Surface Pro's release date is before Haswell's. Cortex A9's power consumption is 0.5-1.9 W. It also remains to be seen whether the Haswell 10w TDP chips will be up to the performance of the 17w TDP Ivy Bridge chips. Will the Surface Pro have fans? That's unfortunate. That's why Microsoft, Samsung, Google, Nvidia, and Apple are relying on ARM when it comes to low power tablets. Show me the reliable independent benchmarks of A15 vs Clovertrail on anything, until then we don't know whether Intel have finally caught up or not. Same could be said for supporting any low power computer, including an Acer Iconia.

Power consumption and price. Price... not really. Power consumption? Just as good as ARM. Intel is rockin it in the mobile world as of this year. They might surpass ARM by next year if what they're promising comes to fruition. A full on Core i5 power in a friggen tablet isn't going to be beatable by any model of ARM based processors if they can pull it off like they're hoping (not a guarantee of course). Do we know the price yet? It wouldn't surprise me if it's $800-900. Power consumption is going to be terrible. It's obviously not going to be as good as ARM. We know how good ARM is, we know how bad the i5 is, the hardware is out for all to see already.

Power consumption and price.

They updated HL2 to the Orange Box version of source, it looks a lot better than it did on release. I like it's looks too, always have, but it really is starting to get bit rough on the edges. Facial animations are still top notch though. Bloodlines uses the same engine, facial animations for Bloodlines and HL2 still some of the best around.