Worth Reading: 07/27/12

You can stop pestering the creator of Slender now, y'all. He got in touch with me, and I’m putting together a feature that should hopefully be on the site sometime next week. No promises, though, since it would require me actually playing Slender again.

Apparently Slender has been updated with fog, too? Just...ugh.

It would make sense to keep some of this coverage until October for Halloween-timing purposes, but I’m a year-round horror kind of guy, so it’s not as though I’ll run out of games or ideas by the time September closes out. I still haven't touched System Shock 2.

We’ll see about having me pop onto the podcast for a brief appearance next week via phone, but I’ll be back in the office proper on August 20, a day after returning from my honeymoon in Hawaii. I’ve been keeping a small list of games that have slipped through the Quick Look cracks since I’ve been out of the office tending to personal matters, and you can be assured that I’ll be cranking those out when I’ve returned. I Wanna Be the Guy: Gaiden, anyone?

I’ve been putzing around with Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD the last week or so, too, even though I had my copy of Eternal Darkness shipped out here. I’m unsure how Stranger’s Wrath never made it into my Xbox, but it’s wonderful to have such a well-done update available to indulge my interest. And, no, the "twist" was never spoiled for me.

Don't spoil it for anyone in the comments, okay?

Hey, You Should Play This

• Warbler’s Nest by Jason McIntosh (Browser, Free / iOS, $0.99) -- www.jmac.org/warbler/

Sam & Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, The Journeyman Project, Tex Murphy--these are some of my all-time favorites. My interest in games, especially adventure ones, came long after the text adventure had been phased out in favor of stories with capable visuals, though. I have, regrettably, never played Zork or Adventure. Designer and former Kill Screen editor Chris Dahlen recently mentioned a game called Warbler’s Nest on Twitter, a short horror tale in the interactive fiction category. Interactive fiction is just another way of saying text adventure, by the way, and Warbler’s Nest delivers on the creeps. It’s less than an hour of your time, depending on how much you dig around, and if you don’t feel like spending a measly $1 on the App Store, it’s totally free to play on your browser.

And You Should Read These

• "End Game" by Jason Schwartz for Boston Magazine

If you’ve been waiting for the definitive piece on the downfall of 38 Studios, it was filed this week at Boston Magazine. The 38 Studios saga has not yet finished playing out, and I don’t doubt there is more material to mine, but the above piece does a great job of outlining what went wrong, including comments from Curt Schilling himself. It’s...admirable Schilling still believes in his dream, but the story makes it clear his idealistic view of himself, the company, and prospects for Project Copernicus are much to blame for what eventually ruined 38 Studios. You want to feel bad for Schilling being unable to make his dream come true, but you feel worse for the lives hugely disrupted in his wake.

• "Metacritic Mind Games" by Maria O'Brien for Persistent Gore Enabled

Irrational Games was subject to some rightful criticism this week for making shipping a game with an 85+ score on Metacritic a requirement to apply for a design manager position (that bit has since been deleted). We know that Metacritic quietly and destructively influences industry decisions, such as studio bonuses tied to certain Metacritic ratings. O'Brien puts the ridiculousness of this requirement into stark clarity, underscoring its biggest pitfall: eliminating perfectly qualified individuals who happened to work on shitty projects that turned out shitty for reasons that have nothing to do with their job as design manager. In the case of Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian Entertainment was denied bonuses because they were tied to an 85 rating on Metacritic, and the game received an 84. Awful.

If You Click It, It Will Play

I Don’t Know About This Kickstarter Thing, But These Projects Look Neat

• Volgarr the Viking, an old-school brawler that I'd originally written down as the much cooler Volgarr the Biking.
• Knock-knock, a new game from the creators of Pathologic, a game I've heard much about over the years.
• Steam Bandits: Outpost, F2P town builder promising to avoid bullshit plauging rest of the genre. Hope?

Oh, And This Other Stuff

• If you want to know why I didn't run a story about that Apple patent, here you go.
• The way Tomb Raider creator Toby Gard speaks about how players use Lara Croft is thought-provoking.
• Prompted by an AIM conversation with Dave, did you know Levelord still exists? Read this recent interview.
• I don't know why this Turok 2 review randomly showed up in Edge's RSS feed this week, but I'm glad.
• Jonathan Blow weighs in on the problems with certification on consoles.
• When Gabe Newell decides to speak about the future, we should all be listening very closely.
• Folks have reconstructed the deleted parts of Half-Life 2, and maybe it was cut for a reason.
• Ever wondered what it'd belike to play Max Payne 3 if you lived in São Paulo? Wonder no more.
• A closer look at the relationship between STALKER, the series it's based on, and the original inspiration.
• The creator of Dyad, Shawn McGrath, is a pretty crazy dude, and his story is really interesting.
• Maybe this isn't the best use of your social gaming money.
• People don't really leave Valve, but this guy did, and the reasons why are fascinating.

weekend worth of goods

this is one of my favorite features....

@khopps17 said:

this is one of my favorite features....

It has quickly become one of mine as well.

Man, now that I have Friday nights off from work I can go through everything. I can't wait.

Or maybe Mr. Blow phone games actually do tend to crash a lot but since they cost $1 and there is no one to complain to no one does.

Pledged tenner on the Volgarr just earlier today \m/

Adventure isn't a text adventure game. It's not even an adventure game (in the sense that you click "use banana on monkey"). It's more an action-adventure game.

I dig the feature, and you often have insightful stuff to say, and it's nice to see things I didn't know about, but the headers for every section bug the ever-loving fuck out of me. It's just so passive-pretentious-hipster-bullshit; it drives me quite mad: buttmad if you will.

I read through these every week, but a mere glance at those headers ignites my anal fluster every time.

Stop making such great articles, Patrick. You take what little time I had for relaxing over the weekend and force me into enjoying thoughtful and engaging content!

Bastard.

@Video_Game_King: You might be thinking of Adventure for the Atari 2600, which is in fact what @patrickklepek linked, but what he really meant was Adventure, the text adventure game that typically went by other titles, most officially "Colossal Cave Adventure", but "Adventue" is how everyone referred to it and how it became known as colloquially.

Or something like that.

@patrickklepek said:

I still haven't touched System Shock 2.

You're a bad person.

@Goldanas:

Yea, I was thinking that he was referring to a text adventure called Adventure (giving him benefit of the doubt), but that link prompted the response, as I've never heard of Colossal Cave Adventure.

That bit about the New Vegas guys not getting bonuses because of one Metacritic point, is just fucking brutal man.

I am all the way in on Knock Knock. Those Ice-Pick Lodge guys have never delivered a game that I haven't enjoyed. They're fucked up (not in the "dead baby joke" way, more like a really distorted guitar chord) and weird and some of the most punkasfuck things coming out of the video game industry.

In other Kickstarter news, Castle Story started kickstarting today and hit its goal within hours. It's a sure thing now; take a look and buy in if you're interested. $15 will eventually get you the game that I personally wish Minecraft would have been, sort of a building management game mixed with an RTS and garnished with a totally hot art style.

@Goldanas said:

I dig the feature, and you often have insightful stuff to say, and it's nice to see things I didn't know about, but the headers for every section bug the ever-loving fuck out of me. It's just so passive-pretentious-hipster-bullshit; it drives me quite mad: buttmad if you will.

I read through these every week, but a mere glance at those headers ignites my anal fluster every time.

...when did subtitles on a weekly aggregation article become "hipster bullshit"?

*São Paulo

I just finished Amnesia and Justine and now all I want to do is make my friends play and laugh at their reactions

@Scotto: It's not that the headers are there, it's how they read:

Hey, You Should Play This

Something about the style it's written in and the fact that it outright tells me what I should be playing/listening to/watching is entirely pretentious and hipster. It's a buzzword, I know, and it is often thrown around with little regard to its meaning, but that's the tone I get when I read it.

It's bothered me from the beginning, but like I said: it's probably just my own personal anus devastation, so don't pay it too much mind.

That Amnesia reactions video was hilarious and awesome.

Elizabeth looks so awful in that picture from Bioshock infinite. Like a poster child for horrible Western character design. Hopefully Levine and his buddies fix her appearance by February.

search for pewdiepie on youtube, he let's plays al the scary games including amnesia. He is one of them on the video above

@Goldanas said:

@Video_Game_King: You might be thinking of Adventure for the Atari 2600, which is in fact what @patrickklepek linked, but what he really meant was Adventure, the text adventure game that typically went by other titles, most officially "Colossal Cave Adventure", but "Adventue" is how everyone referred to it and how it became known as colloquially.

Or something like that.

Accurate, thanks for the reminder. :)

Don't record footage of IWBTG:G. That won't make for an interesting video.

Dammit Patrick how do you find all of these articles. Not that I'm complaining.

OH SHIT I have a bag of milky ways!

Creepy front page image much? Scaring the shit outta me...

Once again, Klepek knocks it out of the park. Digg what now? All's I need is some good ol' Worth Reading.

@thorkildsen said:

search for pewdiepie on youtube, he let's plays al the scary games including amnesia. He is one of them on the video above

That dude is beyond annoying.

That Max Payne 3 article is crazy.

Does Johnathan Blow even use an iOS device? From his tone about "No one complains about crashing or stability on the iOS market" it would imply that he is talking out of his ass. Not only do apps crash with nearly every update, but when you see an app that is rated under 4 stars, crashing and instability is always that case.

Yeah, just another crappy article with a decent idea by a guy who thinks way too highly of himself.

@Goldanas: I sort of get what you're saying but on the other hand I totally don't. He's not saying what you should be playing, he's saying what you should play. There's a crucial distinction there: Klepek isn't purporting to lay out a healthy, balanced gaming diet for you, he's just recommending some supplements to whatever you have going on already.

I might be getting a little over-defensive here but I love the feature and the tone.

That Portal video is neat but is it really a speed run? Come on.

@Manhattan_Project: Yeah, it is really a speed run. What criteria are you using to differentiate it? They've dismantled the game and grokked every piece of it, and are now able to complete chambers with insane speed. Speed run.

That Max Payne 3 article from the perspective of a Sao Paulo resident was absolutely fascinating. I understand where he's coming from, but at the same time can't even imagine what it's like to live in an area where crime like that is so commonplace.  
 
Also, that interview with Levelord is awful. Aside from the poor translation, it's a really poor choice of questions as well.

Volgarr the Viking looks awesome.

@bvilleneuve said:

@Manhattan_Project: Yeah, it is really a speed run. What criteria are you using to differentiate it? They've dismantled the game and grokked every piece of it, and are now able to complete chambers with insane speed. Speed run.

Glitching out the game so you can skip goals is what makes me question it.

I maintain that In the Hall of the Mountain King is the most brilliant piece of music ever created.

That Jonathan Blow post is great. That guy's some kind of insane genius. I love to hear his thoughts on things, he clearly cares a lot about this stuff and he has really interesting thoughts. Microsoft's certification process is totally fucked and outclassed in every way by Steam, and it would be interesting to see them really try to get to that level.

That article about Stalker reminded me that Stalker is straight up one of the best movies ever made. I need to read that book.

So apparently two categories of speed runs exist: Out of Bounds speed runs and regular-ass speed runs. I guess "not actually a speed run" would have been too mean.

@Manhattan_Project said:

@bvilleneuve said:

@Manhattan_Project: Yeah, it is really a speed run. What criteria are you using to differentiate it? They've dismantled the game and grokked every piece of it, and are now able to complete chambers with insane speed. Speed run.

Glitching out the game so you can skip goals is what makes me question it.

Well, there's a different type of speed run for that. There are different philosophies of speedrunning, they all have different purposes, and they can all coexist.

Wasn't Stranger's Wrath HD supposed to be coming to PC and even the Vita? I can't get the original PC version to run for some reason (instant CTD) and I really wanna try it out.

@Manhattan_Project: If glitching the game means it's not a speedrun, then the majority of all speedruns aren't speedruns. :P

Love that video of Amnesia, cracked me up mostly because I can empathize/sympathize. XD

What's the story on who's been "pestering" the creator of Slender. I guess I missed that. Can someone fill me in?

@falco_eagle said:

@Manhattan_Project: If glitching the game means it's not a speedrun, then the majority of all speedruns aren't speedruns. :P

I guess. Maybe they should go by some other name. Glitch run maybe?

That Amnesia reactions video was hilarious and awesome.

"Oh shit, I have a bag of Milky Ways" is my new favorite thing.

So I read that 38 article. Started off ready to be like "Man, fuck Curt Schilling. What a dope." but by the end. As a man who has made mistakes in my life that I can't fix, the end of that article made me sympathize. That's not 'cackle as I ruin these peoples lives, go back to my money vault wuaha' that's... that's 1929 Wall Street everything-I've-ever-done-is-over harrowing. That's accidentally running someone over with your car because you were distracted. That's virtually Catholic levels of guilt and self-loathing. Man.

Project Copernicus is the scariest game of this year. Because helpless grief and regret is a far more horrifying and adult subject matter than fucking monsters trying to eat you.

That Amnesia video is a bit old now but damn is it still great. Twas a good read Mr Klepek thanks.

@Manhattan_Project said:

@falco_eagle said:

@Manhattan_Project: If glitching the game means it's not a speedrun, then the majority of all speedruns aren't speedruns. :P

I guess. Maybe they should go by some other name. Glitch run maybe?

They do go by another name. Glitch run exactly! Speed runs have different categories, and they don't compete with each other.

And doing some of those glitches is harder than playing the game through normally.

I liked the Blow article (which is unusual for me), but like a few other people in the comments, I don't know if I buy the idea that the iOS app marketplace is a better place because of Apple's lighter certification system. It would be nice if there was a middle ground, where games could get through certification faster but could be pulled back in for lengthier certification if there were enough crashes, bug reports, etc. As a Windows Phone developer, I get a weekly report with the number of crashes the game has experienced. It might be useful if there was some formula for (x crashes) / (total users) = (temporary suspension). That would also help prevent outdated apps from clogging up marketplaces as the OSes change and render those older games incompatible.