WVUEers

@BBQBram: Is this supposed to be some sort of hodge podge "You use TV speakers like common rift raft and not surround speakers?" Comment. Because yeah... not that wealthy... don't have that much room..., don't care that much....

Wait are people really complaining that there is not a clear clock on the level where your client is kidnapped? I mean Jesus how much hand holding do you want?

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. If R* doesn't have some sort of time limit then they're just making their game lose any urgency they've built up, if they add a clock it pull away from immersiveness, and for the record I'm quite sure he makes a comment about needing to hurry up before you fail.

The game would have been awful if Rockstar tried to march to a beat of a different developers vision. Say what you will about it now but at least it's got a distinct taste and tone, do you know how difficult it is to match the tone of someone else's idea from almost a decade ago? It's like when a band tries to make the same music after a singer leaves, it's just hollow sounding, everyone knows what's happening but the band doesn't want to rock the boat. Rockstar could have done that, or they could have put their hearts into this game, and they did.

I also have to say having played both MP's in their heyday, I don't think that style would work now, the current MP works fine. Remedy says they would have gone a different route but that's not necessarily saying they would have evolved that style so it wouldn't be completely different. If Remedy puts out this exact game I doubt you hear the "What happened?"" claims, more of "It was a necessary evolution".

And for all the hub-bub about a R* style being stamped all over it, I don't see it. It's not like the first MP's didn't have a certain style that didn't mesh with it's publishers games. I mean I remember distinctly having the last half of one of the games take place in some sort of kinky sex dungeon, and another having dudes in their boxer shorts hide in bathroom stalls. The game series was never the upper crust of gaming humor or style.

I'm on the club level and when I come out of bullet time my sound stutters a little. I'm playing on PS3 and my HDTV is less than 4 months old, anyone else having this issue?

Man do I have fond memories of Tex Murphy. I remember my sister bought The Pandora Directive and even though I was in elementary school and so much of it probably should have been over my head I some how got it. I got that this guy was a wise ass detective ( kind of reminded me of my hero Indiana Jones), I even got that a lot of it was tongue in cheek. The story and puzzles were complex, but I got those two. I remember then blowing through Under a Killing Moon (I guess we play games retroactively in my house) when that got brought home. This is the first Kickstarter that actually has me interested. I like Tim Schaefer and I played all those games too, but none of them really connected with me like Tex Murphy.

@big_jon said:

@jakonovski said:

@big_jon said:

If they charge for an alternate ending that will be effed up, but changing the ending in general seems so dumb, where is the art in that?

I mean has this ever happened to a movie or book? It seems so juvenile.

Like I said to someone else, it has always been happening. So many of the arguments in this matter are made from a position of ignorance.

edit: like Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Blade Runner, to name a few that come off the top of my head. I mean come on.

Those were not swapped out in a few weeks because of fan outrage I would assume, video games are never going to be taken serious by the mainstream as a form of art if the ending of something as large as simply swapped because of a bunch of small minded fans, or at least until it is no longer something that happens. A re-release years down the line is not the same as adding DLC to change the ending a couple months after release, which may or may not cost money.

The ending was not that bad, and half the people who are unhappy about it seem to be mad just because it didn't end in a happy way. I mean there is nothing wrong with not liking it but this shit is just stupid.

Because that's not how that medium works. Video games are not movies, they are not books, they are not music. For someone so caught up in video games perception (honestly, who gives a fuck about that?) you do it a great disservice by holding it to the standard of other industries. Firstly, why the fuck do you care if video games are considered art or not? To me that's the stupidest shit ever, I wish this concept and ambition to be taken seriously as an "art form" would die, as a genre games gain nothing from winning this "we are art" shit parade people like to throw. Congrats, you're art, now what? The guy who creates murals with his own feces creates "art" too, so enjoy your company, because that's pretty much all you've gained. Secondly as I previously touched on, this medium is so incredibly different from all of the others, it's such a blend and immersion of them all with one huge thing that none of them can have, interaction. Gamers interact, they change the worlds they play in, they change the stories, games can be as free flowing as unconfined as they want. Everyone is bitching that now Mass Effect may alter things to the story, and I understand why people would be upset that the original vision is being compromised, but they're over looking that something kind of amazing is in fact happening. The medium of games is so responsive that now we're actually experiencing a story change in real time due to the wants of the fan base, that's kind of crazy. So yeah I get why people would be upset that someone who created this story has to change his vision of how it ends, but I don't understand why they'd be upset because it is compromising, or sets a precedent, or worse off defeats the concept of being taken "seriously. This is what videogames can do, they can adapt to their audience, so that's what we need to decide, if we want this or not. We don't need to bitch about our perception.

@DrRandle said:

And there you have it. Video games are no longer art. Thanks video game community for making sure we ruin that!

Is that what you really care about? Why does every get hung up on the term "Art". Fuck art, the ambition to create "art" is what ruins art. If something moves you that's art, no one should ever set out to create acclaimed "art", they should set out to create something that moves. You can bitch about someone having to change their vision for this series, that's fine to me, because someone did sit down and dream up this ending. But don't get pissy because now the fucking term "art" is moot. Who gives a shit? I seriously fucking hate the "games are art" discussion because of shit like this. Ironically now you're putting more people in a confining box by saying they can't change the ending, to me that defeats your whole "art" pissy tantrum. Perhaps that's what this medium truly brings to the table, it's responsive, it can be an amoeba and adapt and form to it's audiences demands and dislikes. Ever consider that? No, because now it's not "art" , fuck your art.

I don't see how this sets a "precedent" or any thing of that sort at all. To say it sets a precedent implies this is a common situation and now developers will feel the pressure to balk at their endings if met with disapproval. No, shitty ending is common in games, always have been but Mass Effect is a unique situation. Mass Effects ending is the culmination of 3 games, 5 years, over a hundred game hours, etc. It's ending is far more important to the series than say a game like Gears of War because so much of the game revolves around character relationships and the universe as a whole. To kind of leave such core themes in that series ambiguous is what is rattling people, not that the ending itself is "shitty". This will not start some sort of wave of game ending protests, games have shitty endings all the time, people accept that for the most part. The issue people have with Mass Effect is that the game seemed to completely disregard a lot of what drove the story and brought in fans. The only analogy I can think of for this would be if a game like the aforementioned Gears of War literally just ended in the middle of a level, because that's kind of how Mass Effect felt. While Mass Effect has shooting, it's true charm is it's interactions, and we never saw how any of these concluded.

@cikame said:

"Future Clarification" sounds like DLC to me.

Uh, yeah, how else would they do it? Magically transfer it to your game? I mean DLC doesn't mean paid DLC.

Since they started. I remember after Jeff was fired I was looking around to see where he would end up and he started a blog, eventually the site started and all that shit. But probably my earliest memory of GB is when GTAIV had just come out and Jeff and Ryan were playing it at desks right next to each other.