thesquarepear

I was bored with the detective minigames in the Batman Arkham games because there is no way to fail them and I hate pixel hunting.

I haven't heard of other great detective games (except Sherlock Holmes of course) so I was wondering:

What are the gameplay hooks?

We have already seen the main objective is recreating a crime by ordering sequences from a scene. This would potentially give you the cutscene as a reward and just send you to the next area?

It looks great but I'm not sure if it will be enough gameplay unless the story is really great.

I hope it doen't degrade into adventure game tropes like pixel hunting and inventory trial/error or on the other hand turn into a shooter or similar.

bluesnews ?

I miss Dave Snider's opinions on games.

Honestly though, twitch and twitter are doing well I guess.

Do you like tragedies and David Lynch movies? If so, you should watch to at least the middle of season 2. I saw the series for the first time a couple years ago after growing fond of Lynch's movies. Slight spoilers follow.

The first 6-7 episodes are a slow burn that builds the backstories of characters and gives clues to the main plot.

Then shit hits the fan from the season finale until the middle of season 2. These episodes are some of the weirdest stuff that has ever been shown on TV in the classic style of David Lynch that you either love or hate. Personally I love it because its postmodern TV that explores the potential for evil in all of us.

Sadly after that the show starts spinning its wheels in random subplots (which I guess is what Ryan meant sucked) but Lynch comes back to finish the series in greatness.

Twin Peaks hit the right style when grunge was spreading and it pioneered continuous plots in TV episodes. The main plot might be hard to follow but it is suitable for rewatching.

Thanks for the impressions and nice to see Piranha Bytes' fans around here. I like the unique handcrafted content in their games unlike the recycled dungeons that plague the genre.

Hopefully Giant Bomb will do a quick look of the PC version even though it seems like you need to put some time into the story first. I feel like Vinny would like it the most but AFAIK the east coast is without PC yet. @drewbert might you pretty please do a quick look of this german game? :)

Risen 2 waits longer to give the player story choices and skills than the first Risen (I think you get to choose factions on the third island). I still haven't finished it because I spent too much time on the side quests and exploring everything.

I've tried playing the Gothic games for the first time recently but I feel that they haven't aged well.

Why do people complain that Piranha Bytes keeps making the same game when story driven adventure RPGs are so few and far between (isn't Dragon Age more focused on combat and romancing your crew members than actual adventure)?

I guess the touch pads will provide good support for mobile and mouse/keyboard games but I'm not sure if it will work well with games like Star Citizen or Elite

Though I wish they had tried something radically different like using your index fingers for analog directional input instead of simple bumper buttons. I think we are much more capable of precision input with index fingers than our thumbs because that's what our eyes focus on.

This is hardly a new thing

I hope there is still room for good articles and the Gertsmann reality show on the interwebs.

I don't think writing like other creative endeavors is an profession as much as it is something some people can't help doing. Technology has made it much easier to share your work so the competition gets a lot tougher. I bet there are plenty of musicians who have written songs in a day that are wildly successful and then labor on some album for years that never finds any audience.

Terrarias dark caves are creepy and that makes you spam glow sticks into a dark mine to light your way. Miasmata made darkness frightening as well but managing the day/night cycle became frustrating to me.

My favorite is State of Decay because the story is great with a group of survivors and the world is enticing.

The hardcore mode in Fallout: New Vegas never seemed hard enough because I had plenty of food and water after a couple hours.

The Long Dark looks really promising from Griffin McElroys video. It is set in the winter in the Pacific Northwest and you need to stay warm by lighting fires in shelters. I will wait until they release the story because that is what I want to see more of in survival games.

Great job! The term egg whites has always confounded me because they are transparent uncooked and why would you ever just use one part of the egg?

I've had vague 'fantasies' of living a dishwashing free life and finally Dan has become a leading example for all of us.

I hope Dan is a good sport about humiliation but I fear the 'in-jokes' might stick too well (Brad). I guess I'm saying "Don't be a jerk".

@fisk0:

State of Decay also uses it to great advantage and I love that game in spite of the floaty feel the car driving in that engine has.

My impressions of Cryteks history follow.

Crytek and other european studios like Dice repeated the success of US PC game studios like Epic and id that built their own engines for FPS games. They followed the same progression that Epic did to consoles but too late. Epic released Gears of War at the right time in 2006 whereas Crytek, Dice and id released Crysis 2, Battlefield 3 and Rage in 2011. It probably doesn't help that Crytek's initial target audience was the european market where a large share are PC gamers who were alienated by the new direction.

I have this strange feeling that the ambitions of CEO Mr. Yerli are driving the company into the ground from buying up studios rather than nurturing creative integrity. I guess they have at least tried something new compared to id (bought by Zenimax) and Dice (slaves of EA).

As someone who enjoyed many hours of my late teenage years toying around in their first engine map editor (supplied with Far Cry) much like people screw around in Minecraft today, it makes me sad to see them struggle.

Really happy for Klose getting a World Cup after getting so close the last 3 times. He has really shined playing for Germany (even though he's born Polish).

I wonder if Messi is still playing in 4 years. He seems burnt out.