Worth Reading: 12/21/12

Cat knew to split

Edit- we have been waiting for HL3 for way too looooooooooonnnnng. I can do my mouth gun noises with my fav music in the background, also.

Not that I am criticizing, it has come to this, I agree.

@patrickklepek oh goddammit patrick :( ,

why the hell did you link the text from that far cry 3 story and spoil the game for us people who haven't finished it,

its cool if you didn't give a shit about the story, but man others here were enjoying the storyline :(

@Little_Socrates: Why you posting spoilers about the game that someone else wrote, use the spoiler tag next time if you are just going to copy\paste other peoples opinions.

@mrfluke: @Mr_Scumbag: @AutoBarn: @billyhoush: Folks, it was the writer clearly discussing story elements of the game. It's open-spoilers territory from, like, the second sentence. If you kept reading after he said "the sex scene [at the midpoint]," it's you who fucked up.

A spoiler warning would probably be smart so people don't make the same mistake, though.

@Little_Socrates: but was that text from the actual story really necessary to post into the worth reading story though?

i do concede though that i fucked up and didnt scroll fast enough through it, but still doesnt change my disappointment that patrick would link the spoilers from that story into his story though,

and id imagine as more people see this worth reading its gonna be more than us 4 you replied to thats gonna be pissed about it,

@patrickklepek said:

Plus, without any talent whatsoever, you can create something that sounds downright beautiful.

I'm inclined to agree... with the no talent part, anyway. :p

@GreggD said:

@AjayRaz said:

oh hell yes. it's nice to see Black Out Band's Video Games up there. also, that Housefly game is great

It's such a terrible song.

I know, it's so great

@Little_Socrates said:

@Napalm: That was Flight of the Valkyries playing during that scene. It was a reference to Apocalypse Now, which is the film they effectively were sending up with large portions of the game. The text in italics has deep spoilers about Far Cry 3, so skip it if you don't want to spoil that game for yourself.

I haven't played Far Cry 3, so I'm taking both of you at your word. Not to be a dick about it, but it's pretty funny that someone could confuse Ride of the Valkyries for one of the pieces from Star Wars.

@mrfluke: Well, it's the thing that got me to read the article, so it definitely helped. But I agree that more people will probably chafe (though I maintain it's not really his fault,) so he should probably throw a spoiler tag in there just in case.

@BisonHero: Unless I wasn't paying attention and there was five seconds or so where a Star Wars piece plays, the entire scene is a turret-gun helicopter sequence choreographed to Flight of the Valkyries. It's the only reason I even remember how that mission went down. (Though, to be fair, if you don't give a shit about classical music, I could see how you could mix it up with The Imperial March.)

@Bourbon_Warrior: ...hate to double-post so quickly, but I just saw yours. I wrote all that, it wasn't copy-pasted. I just write a lot.

@Animasta said:

@GreggD said:

@AjayRaz said:

oh hell yes. it's nice to see Black Out Band's Video Games up there. also, that Housefly game is great

It's such a terrible song.

I know, it's so great

And how.

@Little_Socrates: if it got you to read his article then, more power to you,

but i hope for next time he considers putting a spoiler tag in there somewhere for us stupid people that didnt scroll fast enough :P and are sensitive to spoilers in games.

@Little_Socrates: I know most people are going to remain oblivious to the vast majority of classical music, but I've always hoped that there were a handful of pieces that people would at the very least recognize from Looney Tunes and other popular culture, and bother to learn the names of and that they are distinct from film scores. Alas, that does not always come to pass.

Man, I haven't seen that Half-Life 2 man made sounds mod in forever. Great shit.

So Kotick doesn't know how the internet works.

Those games all look pretty cool, I'll have to check them out.

@KoolAid: I'm going to assume that you chose the citra ending, cause that one was definitely interesting.

Haha that Tim Schafer "interview" was awesome!

I don't know why Soul Reaver is there but ok!

I'm a huge fan of A Lesson is Learned by the Damage is Irreversible. But I hope that's not a new comic that's few and far between. It's been too long.

Podcast marathon? So there will be a podcast for every GOTY category i assume?

I can remember time when I thought games would never surpass Soul Reaver.

It was right around the time I thought TOOL was the greatest band of all time.

Fuck yeah, Soul Reaver.

A little spoiler warning on the Far Cry 3 article would be nice. Thanks?

I didn't like the new comics section. I like that Patrick is showing me stuff I wouldn't normally see, but I just didn't care for it. I would like to say though, I love "Worth Reading"s as a whole.

The best aspect of Old Man Baby is probably the death effect.

@Ted_Mosby said:

Worth mentioning that Word Quest costs money after the second level, unless I'm just doing something wrong. :(

Yeah, I was bummed by this too. It seems like it might be awesome, then the third "quest" - after you just get enough stuff for your first upgrade that they don't even let you try out - is to buy the game. Maybe I'd consider it if the demo wasn't so bloody short.

Brilliant. Far Cry 3 spoiled now. Thanks for saving me $70.

@AutoBarn: Trust me when I say Ubisoft has spoiled far more important scenes in the game through its E3 press conferences. They pretty much showed the best half-hour of the game in its entirety between the two showings. Nothing else in the game is even close to that good.

@richyeah: Adding you in, too. If you were buying Far Cry 3 for its narrative turns rather than for its gameplay, aesthetic, and thematic statements, it wasn't worth the $60/$70 anyways. Also, the referenced ending is only one of two endings the player can receive. It's still probably worth playing for all the other stuff, especially if you haven't seen the E3 press conferences to actually SEE the pivotal scenes they spoiled.

But @patrickklepek , you should almost definitely add a spoiler warning to that bit by morning, even if I argue that the people who read on forward are the ones who fucked up and that Far Cry 3 spoilers almost serve more as a consumer warning than as a disservice to the community. But, no need to get people's goat when there's a pretty easy fix there.

@Little_Socrates: Well, that's the point isn't it? I'm keenly aware of the E3 press conferences and particularly the notorious sex scene (indeed, that's what I was referring to when I mentioned the sequences referenced in the marketing of the game). I'm not a spoilerphobe, I follow the drip-fed feature reveals of most major game campaigns. But again, there's a big difference in revealing key sequences along the way and flat out spoiling the ending of the game in such an abrupt and unexpected way. No matter how much you know about a game -- and in the current landscape, it sometimes feel like the audience has seen half the game by the time it has been released -- the resolution is the thing. Uncovering the ending of a game is the key narrative driver in most player journeys, and to have that spoiled is to remove one of the major motivations to play.

And to continue reiterating that the readers on here who are pissed off about it have "fucked up" is just wrong. Patrick fucked up. I read 'Worth Reading' for his often insightful thoughts on the industry, and to be encourage to discover and play more games. In this case, it took away my main reason for playing one.

@AutoBarn: I suppose we fundamentally disagree. If you're reading an off-the-cuff remark by the writer, I'd generally assume they're going to remark how said remark is going to connect to the ending. They always do; the ending is generally the statement of a game's story, as it is here. It happened with Spec Ops, and it happens in conversations about film, too. It's an interview that clearly INCLUDES spoilers from the jump. And you chose to read the rest of the sentence after "having the end of the game be _____," I'd say you're the one who fucked up. Like, self control exists! I'm not saying you're a bad guy for reading on, but it's not Patrick's fault you read the rest of that sentence. Yes, he should add a spoiler tag. No, he is not the one who "fucked up," and that sentence was a factor in convincing me to continue through to the article.

And, again, if Far Cry 3's ending was a reason you were going to play Far Cry 3, he did you an incredible favor, trust me. The game "ends" long before its conclusion due to boneheaded narrative decisions, and the game's ending does not properly resolve. I posted a rant on it a couple comment pages back, so I'm not gonna reiterate it, but the ending 40% of Far Cry 3 is largely a bummer.

But if you're really hung up on it, there is another ending to Far Cry 3, and it is based on a choice that has significant context not layered in that quote. You'll either fulfill what you've read here, or you'll make the other one. That can be your call. If you were gonna play it, this is a dumb reason not to do so.

Spec Ops The Line story ranks as one of this year's disappointments and not only because of its lack of payoff for a promising premise.

FarCry's 3 story on the other hand was pretty alright.

Lets not please put personal opinions in a form of a statement that reads as if it is a universal truth shared by all, or as if it's a de facto shared opinion.

That word quest seems like a cool idea other than having to pay $4.75 to play more than the first introductory level... So it's not really "free".

The dumb ways to die parody was great. But fuck you Patrick Klepek for reminding me of Blackout Band

@Little_Socrates: Did you ever feel that the piss poor story took away from your enjoyment of.. y'know actually playing the game? After a while my dislike of Jason and the hap hazard way the story felt flung together started to affect my ability to appreciate the well crafted systems that were in place totally independent of that mess. I think it's a shame games that try and have an intelligent story so often come off as having a chip on their shoulder about actually being a video game.

@csl316: Maybe because Soul Reaver & a bunch of the games in the franchise recently popped up on steam & are part of the steam sale? Not sure but that makes the most sense apart from it being wicked cool.

Just love the Soul Reaver opening video & the other cutscenes in this series have been pretty good, shame we might not see anything more of that franchise anytime soon. As informative as the dumb ways to die video is, the stupid looking dancing between the information just kills the idea of watching any more of it especially with the sound on. Just feels like padding to make your video 3x as long.

Oh boy Soul Reaver intro, I watch this at least twice a year, followed by a methodic scroll through the series' OSTs.

@Wampa1: Well, I think the story was a big reason I stopped enjoying the game about 1/3 through, but I also blame the mission design in the 2nd chunk of the game being generally pretty weak. The Buck levels are pretty much all kind of impossible to stealth and are generally dull to play, the "boss fights" were all pretty underwhelming in terms of gameplay and narrative satisfaction, and I can't name a mission after meeting Buck that I really enjoyed playing for the sake of playing it. I did actually enjoy the second island more than the post-Buck first island, but not by a whole lot, and there aren't that many missions at that point in the game. Certainly not ones I remember for their gameplay, apart from a frustrating run-in with that valley and both of the awful vehicle sequences.

My personal opinion is that the first 8 hours is some of the best video game I played this year. But, well, there's two thirds of that game that need to pull more weight, and Ubisoft kind of ensured that it didn't happen for me narratively thanks to the E3 demos, and the mission design just wasn't all that great from that point on. Not every game suffers from that problem. I think Spec Ops: The Line really only falls apart gameplay-wise when you're confronted with the last 20% or so, and I think Hotline Miami was fun all the way through. Fez, Journey, Braid, they all pull the gameplay off extremely well.

But Far Cry 3....well, I'm in the minority in thinking damn near EVERYTHING falls apart once you meet Buck rather than just the story, but even when Far Cry 3 "fell apart," it was able to pull itself back together by giving me more towers and outposts to capture on the second island. It gets too easy too soon, and it's generally a huge disappointment after riding so high on those first eight hours. But I still ultimately like the game, and I think it's worth playing, especially without being spoiled about that press conference stuff I keep mentioning. It's just...well, I don't understand how it can be near ANYBODY's Game of the Year, seeing as how the mission design got so much weaker once Buck got introduced.

@Tennmuerti said:

For me, Spec Ops The Line story ranks as one of this year's disappointments and not only because of its lack of payoff for a promising premise.

FarCry's 3 story on the other hand i thought was pretty alright.

Lets not please put personal opinions in a form of a statement that reads as if it is a universal truth shared by all, or as if it's a de facto shared opinion.

Fixed! now your statement doesn't read like if its a universal truth :P,

i do agree that patrick uses a lot of "absolutes" in his writings though.

What's up with those Destructoid GOTY noms? We're they playing the same games as everyone else? Although those comments were the best I read these year.

I just wanna' play video games, YAHUR!

@AutoBarn: When the writer is involved, yeah, actually, they do tend to reveal the ending. Especially in games, but also in general interviews. The ending is supposed to be your statement, so it's pretty relevant to talk about the ending when you're talking about your work. Not all discussions of story, although they USUALLY seem to involve a full discussion of spoilers. The only time the ending isn't discussed is if it's a complete wash, which means the writer fucked up in several other ways first.

@Video_Game_King said:

Wait, what's Soul Reaver doing here? The game was kinda average, from what I remember.

I remember really liking Soul Reaver when it came out. Closest thing to a 3D Zelda game on the PS1. The power ups and the world transition were awesome, not sure what it plays like today though mind... Hmm.. might be one to revisit in the new year out of curiosity :)

@BlatantNinja23 said:

@KoolAid: I'm going to assume that you chose the citra ending, cause that one was definitely interesting.

Actually I didn't. But I did find this interesting

This is another inconsistency that you could explain either as bad writing... or the writer trying to intentionally make the game very strange and surreal.

justwannaplayvideogames... yahurr?

Damn...looks like If I dont want Far Cry 3 spoiled I gotta finish it from Christmas day when I get it (hopefully) and the podcast discussing it comes out!