dabe

@Warmachine: I can get behind HL2 & Braid (although they wouldn't be in my personal top 3 -- MGS2/Noby Noby Boy & possibly Dwarf Fortress/Yakuza/FFVIII/Demon's Souls/Persona 4/killer7/Talmit's Adventure/Streets of Rage or original Half Life).

I think the best thing about Half Life 2 (and all Valve games) is how they deigetically feed the player information/story/themes et al through the game world as opposed to cut scenes or menu/console/codex text. It affords a greater sense of place and immersion when the majority of the game is in your control. Sure, you can "break" the game by jumping around like an idiot while Alex or Eli is talking to you, but this should be allowed & encouraged in games (you're not playing a game until you're doing something outside of simple instruction or objective I'd proffer). Also an important reason for HL2 being so great is its journey & the scope you feel due to the traversal levels. Some criticise the driving & how long in the tooth it gets by the end, but it provides a sense of scale to City 17 and the surrounding area, allowing you to more readily digest the world presented.

Anyways, Braid is great and I look forward immeasurably to The Witness.

@CptBedlam: Indeed. Don't worry though, living in fear is a good thing according to the OP.

Dwarf Fortress - the genre.

Christianity has worked so well in culling/curbing violence in the past..

@mosespippy said:

@Contrarian: Straight sales figures can be deceptive. Remember is the PS2 era when half a million sales of a game was great. Now, depending on the title, 1 million sales could be a flop. More people are buying video games and consoles/handhelds now. The 3DS may be the fastest selling handheld but the amount that it's outpacing the past hasn't kept pace with how the overall industry is outpacing the past. Essentially it's market hasn't grown as much as the entire industry has, so that means it's losing market share. Five million 3DSs sold in an 18 Billion dollar industry isn't as impressive as 4.8 million GBAs sold in a 12 Billion dollar industry, especially when they needed to drop the price to do it.

I'm sure the 3DS will find it's legs. Remember when everybody was down on the PS3 for 2 or 3 years? The library of quality exclusives gave it enough competitive advantage to retake market share and catch up to the competition. It's still not where the PS2 was and it won't ever be. The 3DS won't be be in the same place that the DS was but it won't be another Gizmondo or NGage.

This post deserves to be quoted.

The 3DS isn't a failure, but its hiccups & problems so far have carved a somewhat accurate perception.

Avant/Firefox...fuck Chrome (for no apparent reason).

I enjoyed this quite a bit while playing LA Noire. Left it in the background quite a bit -- downtempo Jazz can be evocative, lurid, thoughtful & generally fantastic.

@Hailinel: It somewhat explains why the game moved to the DS though (& Microsoft "allowing" it).

@Jay444111 said:

@dabe said:

@Jay444111 said:

A game without a story is a Pong clone at best. It has nothing of worth and will continue to have nothing of worth and would be forgotten in time. A game with a story to be remembered will always remain in peoples hearts and minds.

Yup, nobody remembers Pong...

Yet who remembers it as fondly as a video game where a person cried over a characters death, a monologe, or birth? Who has cried by a game like pong? No one in the history of existence, Pong has had no influence other then to put down video games with amazing stories because of people like tourgen or Ebert. Video games have evolved far beyond what those pieces of garbage are now. They are only going to be known for creating the building steps to creating a art filled medium filled with amazing stories as it has been doing for quite a while now.

You can't state for certain no one has shed a tear while playing or as a direct result of Pong. So that is pointless rhetoric.

To suggest a simple game like Pong with clearly defined goals, mechanics & competition is a piece of garbage is quite amusing.

The medium is filled with art, yes, but to suggest it mainly comes through straight-story is reaching a bit I'd say (you like FFXIII so I guess our tastes differ -- immensely -- in that regard).

Quite frankly, I think you've heard/read or absorbed a lot of information but can't really apply said information in a constructive, critical manner, instead resorting to trollish comments and obnoxious ignorance. Thus any decent point you make (games can tell a story through cutscenes or not) falls upon deaf ears.

@Jay444111 said:

A game without a story is a Pong clone at best. It has nothing of worth and will continue to have nothing of worth and would be forgotten in time. A game with a story to be remembered will always remain in peoples hearts and minds.

Yup, nobody remembers Pong...