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So what I gather from this mile-long wall of sophistry is that Gabe - a prominent dude by any measure - is a transphobic bigot who reacts to indignation with defensive snark?

Okay, then. Never gonna consume any PA-affiliated media ever again. If he wants to acknowledge and deny a group of people's professed gender identity, those people have every right to unequivocally hate him. If he doesn't want tor respect them as human beings, they don't have to either.

And retreating to arguments of "b-but Twitter sucks! It made me say those violently insulting things about people I don't personally know!" is just priceless.

If you're not familiar with the game, it's an open source, open world, post-apocalyptic survival roguelike (in the truest sense - turn based combat, overhead perspective, ASCII graphics with optional tile support) and it's been developed for the past seven months by a group of fans as a variant of the original Cataclysm (which Giant Bomb calls CataclysmRL for some reason). Here's a screenshot I took a few months ago (the game just reached version 0.6):

Since the game is open source, and you'll always be able to download it and play it completely for free, the campaign is rather modest - seven grand to hire on one of the developers full-time for three months, or longer if the campaign succeeds beyond its goal. It's really fun, and if the ASCII above turns you off, one of the first goals is finishing a graphical option that was left unfinished in the original Cataclysm.

I'm not a developer, though I've been following it pretty closely since it was a simple mod compilation for the original game.

If it sounds interesting, check out the campaign.

@ei8htbit said:

Roguelike?

Eugh, I highly fucking doubt that. All commercial "roguelikes" have either not been (FTL, Spelunky, the Binding of Isaac) or have been garbage (Dungeons of Dredmor, The Pit).

But who knows, maybe they aren't just cashing in on an indie buzzword and blithely ignoring three decades-plus of genre history like everyone else who uses the term in a high-profile context.

*Runs off to play another Samurai in Junethack*

The Tales of Maj'Eyal screenshot gallery is mostly comprised of images from a two-year old version of the game, a very old beta in which the graphics and interface had yet to be really worked on.

I added one new screenshot of the full-release interface, but Dave Snider's old screenshots are still there and give a much poorer impression of the game from its beta.

I'd like to remove the old screenshots outright, but if that isn't possible, what would be my best option?

This IS standing on their own two feet. At this point in the console cycle, a PC-led tactical strategy game? Would any publisher ever fund that? Fuck no. Kickstarter gives them exactly the independence you're joking about.

@duffman10: Yeah, I agree. Sounds a bit too much like a personal favor.

GB may be pretty close to Double Fine and Brad Muir, but giving their pretty average Kickstarter campaign coverage where all others were, at most, a blurb on Worth Reading? Double Fine Adventure was noteworthy for being first, but the atmosphere is different now. Why is Massive Chalice worthy of a front-page news post when Patrick and Ryan openly mocked games Camelot Unchained on Twitter, aside from the team being friends with Brad Muir?

@humanity: That's actually how most Visual Novels go. 999/VLR's puzzles are actually rather novel.

Instead, in games like Saya no Uta, Steins;Gate, and Katawa Shoujo, you make decisions at points in the story and just read along. But if the stories are good enough, which they very often are, why would you want to get bogged down in tedious minigames?

Polygon has good features - that XCOM story was pretty cool.

Polygon also has weirdly-uptight and super high-strung staff members.

I listened to hours of Justin McElroy on the E3 Bombcast, and he seemed NOTHING like the self-serious, fight-picking, almost... insecure dude on Twitter and on his site. They got a big ol' bundle of money to build what seems like The Atlantic of games journalism, but they seem to be taking the task so seriously they're falling up their own ass. I didn't get the impression of much levity, shall we say.

Choice example: Justin was going through CVs for a 'Game Critic' position and publicly mocked an applicant who professed his respect and admiration for 'game journalism', and was all "Learn what you're applying for, this is a critic position, not a journalist, grrrrr". I should probably find that tweet, just to make sure I'm not crazy.

This bleeds over into their moderators of all people. I posted on the actual review after getting pissed off about this independently, and a mod rushed in super defensive-like to defend the score system, and was a bit of a prick about it. I basically told him to fuck off, and then a "Community Manager" showed up to apologize profusely and tell me how awesome everyone is.

What the fuck? Why do you need a community manager for your video game site? You're not a publisher or a developer or whatever. Shouldn't EVERYONE at Polygon interface with the community, or are they spending all their time on pointless fancy video editing?

Also, it's gonna be super funny to see how Metacritic will respond to their flippancy with scores, or, more accurately, how they won't. They didn't do it with that Gamespot Natural Selection II review.

For what it's worth, I was right there at the very beginning, frantically figuring shit out in the early days alongside the rest of the Internet (I was on /v/), and I totally went into the Catacombs WAAAY before I was supposed to (but not before ringing the Church bell - I wasn't that stupid), and beat all of the Catacombs without a Holy weapon, which is the definition of suffering.

Having the Rite of Kindling sure made the rest of the game easier, though I'd definitely recommend you ring the second Bell before doing the Catacombs.

Also, to the untalented newcomers who expect the game to coddle them and be something that it isn't, hear this - bosses didn't previously drop humanity and homeward bones on their death. The range that enemies would continue to follow you used to be far longer. There used to be an unbeatable combination of two miracles and a ring that made a PVP opponent nigh-unstoppable - TWoP/WoG/Fog. The game is far easier post-1.05 than it was at launch, MUCH MORE SO because of the completion of the Wikis. I beat Dark Souls after 100 hours of pure determination, and if you just aren't very good at video games, don't try to project and rationalize it as the game's fault. (Though to be fair, about 20 of those hours were spent serial killing in the name of the Almighty Trap.)

Dark Souls is not a game that was designed for everyone who played it to beat it. That's something of a fundamental taboo in modern games, structured around taking your sixty dollars and giving you a slick six-to-twelve hour roller coaster ride that anyone who can use a controller can finish. That Dark Souls categorically rejected this, and instead offered something deep, compelling, maddening and even sublime, is why it has never been forgotten.

Thanks, Giant Bomb, for putting these scrubs in their place - you don't exactly have a reputation for being very good at the harder stuff, so it's refreshing to see that disproven.