ApocalypseWhen71

So for some reason after Giant Bomb moved to CBS it seems that two of my accounts are under the same email address, one free and one premium. Right now I'm only able to sign into the free one, the password for the premium one isn't working, so I can't view the subscriber content. However, when I click forgot password to get a reset email, I get the 500: Internal Server Error. Does anyone know what the problem is? It would be much appreciated.

I have to add The Haunting (1963) into the mix. Not a drop of blood, hardly any jump scares, you don't even see much of any ghosts, but I remember watching that movie outside at a campsite late at night, and good god does that one get to you. The sound design in it basically makes that movie, it's brilliant and will make you wary of every single creek in your house when you watch it.

Also, not horror movies, but David Lynch is great at having some truly terrifying imagery and sound design in a lot of his movies, particularly Eraserhead, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and bits of Mulholland Drive.

I think the issue is that video games are a huge medium, so it all depends on what you're looking for out of a game at a particular time. That's really true of any medium. Sometimes I'm in the mood to watch Breaking Bad and have myself a good think about morality and American drug culture, other times I just want to watch Parks and Rec and have a good time. It's the same way with videogames for me. I think the argument shouldn't be this duality between a good story and fun gameplay, ideally a game should have both.

However, if a game doesn't have both, it should really know well enough to play to its strengths. I've been playing Vanquish recently, and the gameplay is fluid and all around just ridiculous fun, but the story is TERRIBLE. Now, I've heard the argument many times that if the gameplay is fun why should I care if the plot is throwaway garbage? I care because they included that horrible story in the game. It is not fun to have my amazing gameplay interrupted every 10 minutes or so for awful dialogue and boring characters. On the other hand, something like The Walking Dead knows that it's strength is in its characters and story, so you barely spend much time in the actual "gameplay" sections (I would still count the dialogue trees as gameplay, but that's a discussion for another day). As such, I was never bored with Walking Dead trying to go around pixel hunting and combining items, because Telltale knew well enough that that wasn't the draw of the game.

Essentially I guess what I'm saying is that good gameplay is good, and a good story is good (obviously). Now, games with good stories with bad gameplay can be great, and many games have done pretty well with themselves just focusing on gameplay without a great story. But in my opinion a game with a great story and great gameplay is always better than one that compromises on either. And if a game can integrate those two aspects well into a meaningful whole, all the better. The issue comes when it can't do that, but the developers still spend a lot of time on something that isn't to the game's benefit, such as the Vanquish example above.

I know, a real controversial opinion of "why can't everything in games be great all the time???"