Keyrock

Still The Talos Principle. I'm mostly down to collecting stars now. Many of these are insanely tricky. There's one I've bashed my head against for well over an hour and gotten nowhere. Still, I managed to get 2 more stars today and I'm not going to give in and look up a guide. I'll get all of these myself if it takes me 1000 hours.

Hi-diddly-ho ho ho! Have a stupid sexy Flanders Christmas!

That's a pretty glorious takedown. So, is this a sock puppet... No, couldn't be, we can clearly see it's a woman. She must be a house n****r.

Also, I'll vouch for The Last Remnant too. It's a good game if you're into jRPGs and the grinding that comes along with them. The combat system is really interesting and has one of the best implementations of QTEs I've seen in a game. I'm kind of sad Squeenix never used that combat system for another game. On the negative end of the spectrum, the leveling and upgrade system is a mystery wrapped in a conundrum wrapped in a puzzle smothered in enigma sauce. It's pretty much not explained at all in game and is so insanely confounding that there are internet guides so long they read like a full size novel attempting to explain it. I cannot possibly put enough emphasis on "attempting".

Anticlimactic yes, but I'll take that over Risen 1's endgame. That mega dungeon, as you put it, was pure tedious torture, as far as I'm concerned. I hate the endgame of Risen 1 with a passion. I found it so excruciating that I wouldn't wish it upon my enemies. what i liked about the dungeon is that it presented a chalenge for all the hard earned combat experience you (with the controls) and your character (levels, skills, spells) have gained durring the rest of the game. in 2, from the moment you get a musket and a couple of related skills, you can kite the world, final boss included now im off to start bioshock infinite Risen 2 has massive balance problems. Muskets are insanely overpowered and voodoo is hilariously ineffective in most situations. Despite how grossly underpowered it is, voodoo is a heck of a lot more fun to play with than muskets, in my opinion, making the voodoo path not only far more challenging, but also more fun.

Anticlimactic yes, but I'll take that over Risen 1's endgame. That mega dungeon, as you put it, was pure tedious torture, as far as I'm concerned. I hate the endgame of Risen 1 with a passion. I found it so excruciating that I wouldn't wish it upon my enemies.

Excellent news. D:OS is a great base to expand from and without having to make another new engine from scratch, much more of their time can be spent making the games more robust and fleshed out. Hopefully their expansion with opening a new office in Quebec will work out for them.

Agreed completely. You can make a game where killing is fun and exciting and still have the game show the horrors of those actions and make the player have to soul search. Sleeping Dogs did a decent-ish job of that, though I thought they could have gone a lot further with it. To make a game where killing is a central mechanic and purposely make it not fun is essentially dooming your own game to failure. As an aside, the next time one of these threads gets made, maybe we should call it something along the lines of "Culture Wars Thread", since we've expanded well beyond the scope of journalism ethics?

Agreed, mainly because I feel the pseudo medieval Europe fantasy setting is so insanely ****ed out at this point. Ancient Egypt, India, Persia, Native American, Polynesian, Wild West, Wuxia, etc. There are so many great settings to use, yet we keep coming back to the same setting again and again.

While that's good news, I'd prefer to do PayPal or IndieGoGo. They'll probably allow PayPal pledges once they hit their initial goal. If I remember correctly, they did so last time.

This is from the developer that did Remember Me, right? If that's the case then maybe it's for the best that the game doesn't include much actual gameplay and is instead a David Cage style movie game with an occasional QTE thrown in, though hopefully the narrative will be a lot better than a typical David Cage game.

Neo-Nazis are not automatically criminals. Sure, there are almost certainly criminals that are Neo-Nazis, but not every Neo-Nazi is a criminal. The act of being a Neo-Nazi is not in itself a crime, as distasteful as many people, myself included, find it. As for western culture not supporting criminals... We like to pretend and talk like we don't support criminals in western culture, but if you truly think we don't then there's a bridge I'd like to sell you.

@Longknife - First off, what is "TYT"? Second, I agree with these people that it was unprofessional of the Fox morning show woman to be that unprepared for a story. That said, I can't really look down upon her too much for her reaction to furries. I don't completely recall the exact moment when I first found out what furries were, but I can pretty much guarantee I was not able to hold a straight face. I also found it funny when the one TYT woman admitted to having acted the same way in the past then tried to suggest that their show shouldn't be held to the same standards she was projecting on Fox's morning show because reasons. Anyway, much ado about nothing, as far as I'm concerned.

Exactly. When I support freedom, I support everybody's freedom, not just the people I like. If I were to cherry pick only certain groups of people whose freedom I support, then I wouldn't be supporting freedom at all. I hate Neo-Nazis. I'm Polish, I have family that suffered and died at the hands of Nazis (obviously long before I was born) and they tore my motherland apart. Any group that revives and shares the ideals and practices of Nazis isn't looked kindly upon by me. I still support their right to free speech, to peacefully assemble, and to create things, whether utilitarian or artistic in nature. I find the Westboro Baptist Church to be disgusting. I think those people are scumbags, the lowest of the low. I still support their rights. I even support the hipster radical sex-negative feminist media's rights. I vehemently disagree with them on a many good things, as I'm sure we're all aware of by now, but I support their right to speak their mind and preach their drivel. I don't approve when Father McIntosh, Saint Anita, and Co. cherry pick, misrepresent, and outright lie, and I call them out on it, but I still support their right to spout their propaganda. Now, before you tell me that I'm suppressing the journalists rights by emailing their advertisers, keep in mind (and I can only speak for myself) that I have never emailed an advertiser and demanded they stop support of a site based on not liking the journalists point of view and ideology. In fact, I've never demanded anything in said emails. The emails I sent were to inform said advertisers of what I perceived to be ethical breeches by journalists so that they have that information when they decide whether or not to continue being associated with said journalists.

Should be the tutorial section of the game, give us background to who Ciri is, who Geralt and The Witchers are, and the game mechanics. Would be a perfect tutorial. I fully approve of this idea.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that it turns out the developers (all of them for this hypothetical scenario for the sake of emphasis) of Hatred are indeed Neo-Nazis. Does it matter? I mean, to any one person, the fact that a game is made by Neo-Nazis may matter and may keep them from purchasing the game, and that's fine. It's that person's money, it's that person's purchasing decision, they can choose to buy or not buy the game for any reason. But does it matter as far the game's right to exist and be sold on a platform so long as it doesn't break said platform's terms and conditions? Does a game made by Neo-Nazis have any less right to be sold than a game made by church going Christians, or a game made by a transgender bisexual person, or a game made by ragtag group group of developers? My answer is no, a game made by Neo-Nazis does not have any less right to be sold than a game made by any other group, diverse or homogeneous.

I've thought the same thing to myself several years going now. It hasn't worked out exactly like that any of those years for me.

Still playing The Talos Principle, 20 hours and counting. I could likely have finished by now if I wasn't trying to get ever sigil and star and without using any hints. As it stands, I'm almost certainly more than halfway done, but still have a ways to go. Some of the puzzles are fiendishly difficult, especially getting the stars. The biggest problem is finding some of the stars. Of the ones I haven't collected yet, at least half are due to the fact that I simply can't find them, much less collect them. I refuse to look up a walkthrough, though. The whole point of a puzzle game is figuring things out on your own. There have been puzzles that had me stumped for half an hour, which I gave up on temporarily, returned to, tried for another 10 minutes, gave up again, returned again, then finally had my breakthrough and solved it. I will figure everything out on my own if it kills me.

Fun Fact: I am pleased to see the game back on Greenlight. Fun Fact 2: I will not vote yes for it to be greelit. At first glance, fun fact 1 and fun fact 2 may seem to be opposed to each other, but they're not. I personally don't find the game appealing. In fact, I find it somewhat revolting. I have zero desire to play the game, and do not see any value in it, hence my refusal to vote yes. All those things said, I'm glad it's back on Greenlight. Why, might you ask? Because I do not feel my opinion of the game to be law. Just because I do not find value in the game (based on the trailer show so far, obviously, I haven't played it), doesn't mean someone else doesn't. My opinion is my own and it serves nobody else but me. I will not presume to pass judgement on the game for anyone else. Those people can do so on their own. If someone else feels they can derive enjoyment and value out of the game, and hence votes yes, that is their prerogative.

Like the Cynical Brit, what I'd really like out of Valve is an answer as to WHY they pulled Hatred off Greenlight. And not the "Based on what we've seen on Greenlight, we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we'll be taking it down." explanation they have already given, because that's a non-answer. The way I see it (and please, correct me, or provide an addendum, if I'm wrong/incomplete here) the only possible explanations are: 1) Valve deemed the game to be of too poor quality and didn't want to rip off their customers - Hard to take that possibility seriously given the massive amount of shovelware already for sale on Steam. b) Valve deemed the game broke terms and conditions due to the violent content/killing of innocents - Then why do they continue to sell Postal, Manhunt, GTA, etc? III) Valve felt a moral objection to releasing the game - See item b, Also, I do not feel it's appropriate for Valve to act as a judge of morality. D) Valve was pressured into it by an outside group - In this case I say Valve is chicken****. Five) Valve did it on a whim for no reason whatsoever - The scariest of all the options only added for the sake of covering all my bases (hopefully). If this is the case, that's ****ing frightening for a company with this much power to be making such decisions arbitrarily. Keep in mind that Valve is under no obligation to answer for their actions. Also keep in mind that you and I are under no obligation to purchase products from them going forward.

Looks like we're getting a Shadowrun Returns follow up!

The entire purpose of Greenlight was for the customer base to make decisions on their own without Valve's involvement, guidance, or judgement. Sure, customers make poor decisions sometimes, we're human. I mean, I bought Dragon Age 2, full price even, that was a terrible decision. The thing is, Valve needs to let the customers make their own decisions, good or bad, otherwise, what is the point in Greenlight at all? If you create a system whose purpose is to let the customers make their own choices without your involvement, then you get involved and override their choice, that system is completely worthless and serves no purpose.

Bruce with the predictably fascist "You people aren't fit to make your own decisions. Let Big Brother make them for you." argument.

Valve, of course, has the right to allow or disallow any game on their own platform. That said, this is a chicken**** move by them, especially since it goes 180 degrees against the very purpose of Greenlight. The whole point of Greenlight was to take the decision making process out of Valve's hands for smaller/lesser known/indie games. Greenlight's entire purpose was to let the customers decide for themselves what should and shouldn't appear on Steam. The customers spoke, they overwhelmingly supported the game appearing on Steam, yet Valve shut it down anyway.