RagingLion

Depends what you like. I count Assassin's Creed as one of my favourite games but it would be true to say that the later ones just build on what was good from the first and so if you much of the enjoyment I still find in it is equally found in the following ones. I loved being able to move through these huge envirnoments so smoothly and satisfying which actually had loads of people populating them but that is all in the later ones. The setting is different though and although not as detailed as some of the later ones I really liked the whole Palestinian Crusader times architecture and feel.

There is more of Desmond and you can spend a bit more time effectively role playing as him and I quite liked that even if there isn't a tonne to it I felt like I really lived him more in the first one. The story and missions are all unique of course and might be worth seeing - I quite liked the feel of gradually finding the evidence which leads you to your target and this structure isn't used exactly like that in the later ones. The ending is harder and requires more skill to complete than the others and can get frustrating - I do think there's some really striking moments in parts of it though that I still can clearly think back to.

That is so seriously cool - I'll definitely be looking out for that when I get round to seeing IG:TM now. That's a really precious experience to have had and it's wonderful to hear all the behind the scenes stuff that happens and accompanies what begins as a small, simple act. I was feeling somewhat inspired by the end of the post myself as well.

Hey. Despite being a regular user of the site I was completely unaware until just now that there's a 'Major Games' tab in the browse/games part of the site where the important games, I guess, are listed for each year. I think it's a pretty cool feature, especially for going back to years you don't know so well and seing trends of when a greater quantity of important games came out or when that really innovative game that started a key feature of games or that everyone now cites came out.

I was wondering, though, how more games can be added to the list? Is this something that only staff or mods can do or do you need to have a certain number of wiki points to add (maybe delete?) games? I don't know if this is a case of knowing where to find where the correct wiki editing option is or finding a page where requests for this can be made, or if such a forum topic needs to be created.

I'm sure there are many games that should be added but the 2 I would suggest from just a casual glance is Shadow of the Colossus for 2005 which is pretty much a non-contestable game to have in there and then also a strong case can be made for World of Goo for 2008. Could someone please point me in the right direction of where to make these suggestions or how to go about sorting it out myself please? (I understand of course that this whole labelling of 'major' games could get contentious of course if lots of people want to suggest more).

When, from my normal game-related-reading/watching accumulated over time, I suddenly realise I know a ludicrous amount of detail about a subject (normally a person or company for me thus far) that probably very few other people have and then I think there's probably no one else on Giant Bomb that could do the wiki page for that subject justice in the way that I could. I might procrastinate for quite some time but then eventually follow through with going over material I've read again, seeking out added research sources potentially and writing a good wiki article. Naturally these will be things/people I'm interested in, otherwise I wouldn't have read so much about them in the first place.

I was completely sold after watching the trailer an age ago if I wouldn't have been already and had just been left to pondering whether to wait for a Steam sale or get this at full price. Now I know there's a DVD full of extra footage of people like Jason Rohrer I'm torn about waiting to get that since that would be great to watch.

Some of these panels were really clever and funny. I like.

Incredible work.

@laserbolts said:

Can't wait for the e3 podcasts. They are my favorites pretty much every year.

Yeah, same. Glad I have time to watch the E3 press conferences live again this year too, though maybe this one will be the last time. It's a fun time of year, even if I'm not personally interested in everything that gets announced.

Clint Hocking is the reason I might be interested in this. I absolutely adore Far Cry 2 and I really like what I've read in his blog - he's a clearly a thinker and want's to push things forward and I appreciate that. Clint Hocking was talking a lot about transmedia stuff around the time he resigned his last post - I'm really curious to see if that's going to be a big part of this game (although I probably wouldn't care about anything else other than the core game).

So, I read and re-rerad this and it's taken doing that for me to maybe grasp the single thread that's running through these thoughts since otherwise there's lots of different issues that you mention here.

When you say "But if we never learn to deal with the real world through these exercises, then we’re satisfying only the most basic part of our need for problems, and not putting that drive to good use. That drive...it’s what got us where we are. We should not squander something so great." I think the drive for solving problems that you are referring to being squandered is the ones that lies in the greater populace? Is that right? Because the first times I read that I thought you were referring to the squandering being on the part of game designers who have chosen to design games rather solving other bigger problems. But instead you're saying that game designers are creating problems that are holding the attention of the people who play them rather than those people choosing to tackle the bigger problems of life. And therefore games are acting as a distraction and often don't have any content that's really worthwhile in enabling people to deal better with the world around them? Tell me if I'm getting that wrong.

What thoughts do I have on that? Hmm...

I do think btw that those big problems that you admit are present in the world will probably have ever more empahasis put on them out of necessity. For example, management of limited resources and energy generation. It's really hard to know how our society now and it's attitude to the big problems of the day or desire more technological progress compares to any other. Did the large swathes of the working class in Victorian England have any concept of what a great engineer like Isambard Kingdom Brunel was up to and were cheering him on in his engineering feats as it were? I could easily see that most of them were just focussed on the steady grind of life. It's just so hard to know what the mindset of other people was from other times.

What are the problems you think that normal people should be striving towards and caring about anyway and which there is a danger that they might be ignoring? If you don't have a certain profession that enables you to materially make a difference to cutting edge things or aren't in a place of influence then what can be done. What is there to do? To impact? What you end up in terms of problems to solve around us are surely just the simple (and yet really not simple) social things of loving those around us and managing our relationships well. Caring for those in need and just generally being a blessing.

Games can have meaning and try to get things across, whether those are mesasges that you can see might have a direct short-term influence on the way you act, or are more indirect in just feeding your imagination and providing a new way of thinking about things which stimulates your mind, but which might allow you to later better undestand something and can have a positive influence further down the road. Of course, very very few games go for having a message currently that have a positive impact, a few more like Bioshock which I recently played have that thing which which can stimulate your imagination - in it's case the very existence of an underwater city or Rapture and maybe the type of society that was present in that game. Games aren't alone in often not providing stimulating material of course - lots of other media is the same.

Those are some thoughts - maybe some of those don't hit on exactly what you were trying to think about, especially if I still managed to misinterpet you. You've raised interesting points in what you wrote in any case.

When it comes to my own meaning in life, well, I want to provide a useful contribution through my job; think through the ideas of life and then pass on any useful flashes of inspiration to more people; find a special person to share life with, but ultimately I feel content because of a relationship with God - I'm a Jesus-lover/follower. That's how it breaks down for me.