Gildermershina

Yeah, I saw it was there in the morning, went to work, came home, figured I'd watch it, but it's gone?

Okay, so the one thing that kind of bugs me about Dan is that he's not got many interesting things to say about why he hates certain things. He just says "X sucks, it totally sucks." with no interesting reasoning. I contrast this with Jeff, whose outbursts about Yoshi, or, holy shit, Nights, are FANTASTIC, and one of my favourite things on Giant Bomb.

I wouldn't want there to be two Jeffs necessarily, but having stubborn opinions about stuff is way more entertaining if you can back them up with torrents of futile impotent rage instead of a shrug of casual dismissal. Dan's opinions don't stand up to any scrutiny, he kind of backs away from them and admits they're based on nothing.

But it is fun to listen to someone I can scarcely believe hasn't just accidentally walked into traffic at some point in his life.

@unilad: At best this whole thread would turn into a "this isn't gaming news"-based meme contest wherein the joke overstays its welcome long enough that it eventually becomes funny again, or at worst it turns into embittered bickering about either "is news!"/"isn't news!" or android/iphone.

It is news about a thing that plays games, a platform where a lot of indie developers are focussing, and the story is so short anyway that even if it were not about whatever a certain person deems a game platform worthy of discussion it's certainly not worth pages and pages of discussion about it.

I also got the Clem alone with the baby ending, and I too was unsatisfied by how this is represented on screen. Smearing herself in guts and then walking through a horde, looking sad but strong, and somehow empty...

Maybe empty is the way I was supposed to feel about it. But I don't know, I wonder if they'd come up with something more interesting, have her at least stumble onto something that might lead towards season 3, even to have her see Wellington in the distance, or whatever, that would have given it more of a sense of moving forward.

Or maybe if the scene was paced better, or it was a montage, weeks of difficult survival with a good song over it, leading to the feint promise of hope, a little sign that season 3 is on the horizon. The TV show does that a lot, and it doesn't always work perfectly, but when it does it's fantastic.

At some point this integrity thing is kind of bullshit. I mean yeah, obviously if and when developers are paying for or in some way dictating review scores for various favours, that's a problem, but that doesn't seem like it's any more a problem in gaming than any other consumer media sector. But the notion that everything should be impartial and people should be reviewing games like battery hens with no contact or interaction in any way that might colour their views, that's a real weird knee-jerk reaction

If you bought a game you didn't like based on a review that said it was good, that doesn't necessarily mean the reviewer is lying and has an agenda, it means your taste is different. And my god, if you were the kind of person who hates a game like Gone Home, but you bought Gone Home anyway because lots of people said it was good, what the fuck did you expect? You have to go into things with reasonable expectations, and with the coverage available nowadays, nobody has a leg to stand on to suggest they're being duped into bad purchasing decisions.

I think there's a simpler issue here, some people don't like reading about certain things, and the more they find that topic being written about the more strongly they react against it. But here's a thought, if you're not that interested, you can kind of ignore it. Or if you disagree and have a reasonable argument, you can have that conversation with people.

What I want from games journalism/coverage/whatever is to find out about games, how they play, how they're made, how they pertain to culture at large, and maybe a sense of fun and personality about it. I think that's reasonable, and maybe I'm naive, but that kind of seems like the way things are for the most part.

I don't think it's a very interesting design, but I actually kind of liked the look of it. It was like "shit, I'm fighting a miniature gas planet made out of magic." And I'm kind of a sucker for the hardest encounter in the game just being tucked in a corner somewhere not participating in the end-of-the-world story. If you didn't like Ozma's lack of story impact, I'm guessing you really didn't like the final boss Necron. "Oh hey, I saw you guys fighting over there, thought I'd stop by and try to DESTROY ALL EXISTENCE FOR NO REASON."

Man, I remember spending a lost weekend playing that Chocobo Hot and Cold to completion. One of my favourite things in my favourite Final Fantasy.

I never did beat Ozma in the Air Garden though, that thing was ludicrous.

I also recall the Mognet thing being kind of awesome. Also, those moogles had great names. Momatose? SO GOOD.

Well, I sincerely doubt that, but regardless, this is not quite the same thing as stealing and sharing the personal private information of others, which I'm sure you know.

I think the problem is whatever they do with the story in a potential Half-Life 3, they've set it up to the point that they're going to have to start answering a bunch of their big mysteries, and when has that ever satisfied anyone? As someone who enjoyed the endings of Lost, BSG, and even Mass Effect more than the internet seems to. When it comes to ending a myth-heavy series, I'd rather have closure for the characters than anything else, but if those examples are anything to go by the internet will explode if they're not totally on board with it. It'll be the apocalypse. I have terrifying visions of Valve being doxed, Steam servers being taken out, a campaign of internet violence by a unsatisfied mob of trolls ultimately demanding the death of Gabe and the re-writing of the ending. That kind of seems like where the internet is going these days, and if that was going to happen with any game, it'd be Half-Life 3.

Anyway, if they suddenly put out a four-hour game called Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and that was it, I would totally be 100% okay with that.