kobr24

Someone coming from a different discipline might have new perspectives when it comes to game design, narrative, things like that. I think, for example, if people with a legitimate interest or academic background in art and literature were involved in game development it could be a great thing. I imagine most people who grow up wanting to make games aren't particularly interested in art or criticism/history of art for example (forgive the generalization). But they are very interested in games being accepted as a valid form of art on the other hand. I don't think he's referring only to voice acting but if he is your right about most voice actors being actors anyway, so it would be a stupid point.

I love this tear of games that Patrick is on. Welcome to my world. Although, Monster Hunter is pretty hardcore, definitely way more hardcore than a game like Dark Souls or Demon's Souls. Wonder if Patrick is ever gonna give the best game of 2011 a shot.

I don't think any feminist would argue that females should be inserted into these press conferences just for the sake of inclusion. It's just a reminder that the industry is male-dominated and that women have a disturbingly low presence in the industry. As far as presentation at a press conference it only makes sense that it's done by the leaders of any given project (the game designers, project managers, whatever). I think anyone calling out Sony in particular for not including women in the conference is missing the point, if Elizabeth DeLoria just looks at it and says "no woman on the stage...sony is the problem" instead of reading into the deeper issue of why females don't have success in these industries then what's productive about her rage? Would Sony pandering to females by putting Felicia Day up on stage to talk about something she had nothing to do with be any less insulting?

@turboman: I imagine that they'll still have records of what you've bought already through the PSN store. The ideal option would be to give people codes for the games they've already downloaded but I would guess they go the E-Shop route and just give out a discount.

Assuming I can opt out of some of the social features, I'm very interested. Does anyone know if the share/streaming feature can be used to archive or upload video? If there was a functionality to record gameplay and upload to youtube I'd go crazy making video guides for Dark Souls II.

@warlockengineermoredakka: How is the SC2 version? I have fond memories of "The Thing UMS" in BroodWar. I really need to get The Ship some time.

I fear people will gloss over this thread assuming it's somehow connected to the godawful facebook mafia game.

I disagree. I've played the game many times both ways (as well as over VOIP/IRC/etc.) and I really like forum games the best. Because mafia is so dependent on quality player input to have a good game, you can of course have a terrible game through any format.

Party mafia has really easy facial/vocal reads and the game is much quicker. Much more casual. That's fine, not a bad experience at all but forum mafia is a totally different game. Because a forum thread creates a log of every players input, cases are built around a players entire post history. Analysis is much more involved and requires a player to read between the lines, examine a players arguments against their history of posting and try to discern what the intent of their every action is rather than looking for facial cues like shifting eyes and nervous tics. Over a message board, it's a much slower and intense experience I think.

That's correct. Mafiascum has its own sort of metagame though so not everything on that wiki applies universally but a lot of the information is good. Particularly the article on WIFOM and some of the common logical errors. I find that the section on mafia tells in general is pretty lacking though, I think the game is too subjective to really play it based on strict rules of behavior.

@cloudenvy: Usually town has special roles that can act at night as well. Such as a detective who can choose a player to investigate once per night (by PMing the name of that player to the host) and then getting a PM back with that players alignment.

However:

1. The Detective can't simply announce his choices because then the mafia will know who he is and kill the player immediately.

2. In a game that has a cop, usually there is a "suspicious townie" role who will appear as mafia to the detective despite being town aligned. (The suspicious townie does not know they are a suspicious townie).

It comes down to determining which behaviors are indicative of a mafia alignment (which come with experience). For example, let's say the town is in a situation in a later day where there is a player(Player A) who is very obviously mafia or at least has a very good case against him. Another player (Player B) then comes up with a case on a completely different player (Player C)and encourages everyone to vote for that player instead. Upon close analysis of that persons case you find that they don't have very strong points. Maybe they are intentionally misrepresenting things that Player C had said earlier in the thread, or seem to be going out of their way to avoid commenting on the other more prominent case against Player A. That leaves a couple possibilities in my mind:

1. Player A is mafia and Player B is his teammate trying to protect him.

2. Player A is not mafia and Player B is mafia who feels pressured to put forth an original case. In his mind, this will make him seem helpful and engaged and will not appear as though he is a mafioso trying to hide behind an easy bandwagon.

3. Player A is or isn't mafia and Player B is simply a very bad townie.

What would I do as town in this case? Keep my vote on Player A. If Player A is lynched and flips "mafia", I will then strongly push the rest of the town to vote for Player B. Mafia can try to do things like intentionally defend townies to confuse the town, but the fact that the case was so bad would lead me to believe that the player has a good chance of being mafia anyway. Why would a town aligned player ignore a strong case or the discussion surrounding it to push a poorly constructed case?

One of my favorite tells is "parroting". Because mafia players communicate in secret outside of the thread (quicktopic/PM/IRC/skype/whatever they like), they will often edit eachothers posts. When you see a player starting to use specific words/phrasing that are the same as another player in the thread, I tend to assume they are mafia teammates. Certain posts have a very "pre-planned" or "edited" feel to them that are suspicious.

One very incriminating thing I came across in a game I played in was a statement like this. "Yeah, Player X is very suspicious and is probably mafia but I'm going to withhold voting for that player right now." I would immediately lynch any player that said that. If you think about it, there is absolutely no reason for a town player whose goal is to always find and lynch mafia to announce something like that.

In general, you're never going to always be right. I would say a player that gets about 70% of his guesses by Day 2/3 correct to be an extremely good mafia hunter. For players who don't like the subjective part of analyzing behavior, they can look at more objective things like voting records and the way that special roles/actions behave in the game to try to catch mafia as well.

@grand: I'd hate to see JRPG's return to old formats. The genre is stagnant and even I'm tired of turn based battle systems, regardless of what minor twists devs can put on them. I wonder if there is a solution without turning everything into either action or TBS. The thing I liked about FFXII was the mix between real time battle and familiar menu based tactical inputs. Unfortunately, the game ended up feeling pretty tedious after a while but I wonder if that was the fault of the battle system or the game not finding ways to make encounters more varied and just the general design of the environments and challenges.

@jasonr86: I have no experience with the XBox Marketplace but I hate the PSN store so much. If I could actually add funds to my wallet without driving down to the 7-11 to get a card I'd probably be less angry, but it all seems so clunky to me.