It's funny, when I played Firewatch I couldn't help but feel that the Ned and Brian subplot felt extraneous compared to Henry and Delilah's relationship. I never considered the thematic links between the two plots, but you're totally right; the game reinforces its discussion of responsibility to those we care about by showing how Ned failed in his duty to his son. I think you may have bumped the game up a few notches in my GotY list!
Also, regarding your preamble about walking simulators, one thing I can't help but wonder is how Journey has seemed to have side-stepped the criticism that is lobbed at Gone Home or Dear Esther. I mean, Journey is absolutely a "walking simulator" in that the primary gameplay is wandering around and seeing the sights, but it's almost universally lauded. The only difference I see is that one game came out of Sony's traditional developmental machine and that rest came from independent developers who have been labelled with a certain infuriating three letter acronym. Food for thought.
Glad I could help. I've still not played through Journey as I don't have a Playstation, but I did think about this while writing. I think one thing that keeps Journey from being called a Walking Simulator is that it's obviously not a Steam game and that's one of the places that phrase gets most commonly used. I also think that a lot of the time people have used the "Walking Simulator" term as a criticism, it's because they're not interested in the subject matter of the game. Gone Home asks you to have an earnest emotional experience involving family and romance, Dear Esther requires you have some interest in poetry and mournful, very human monologue. These aren't the things that a lot of the traditional gaming crowd are coming to games for. Journey, on the other hand, is narratively minimalist. It has religious overtones and explores media theory, but you can play through the game without having to think about those topics, it can be just a nice walk across the desert.
You can see a similar thing happen with The Stanley Parable. It gets called a "Walking Simulator", although generally more neutrally than games like Gone Home have been, it doesn't feel like The Stanley Parable has been attacked a fraction of much for its mechanical minimalism, even though it has fewer mechanics than Gone Home. Again, I think it's because the traditional gaming audience aren't going to butt up against any of the explicit subject matter in the game. It's a game about games and therefore has appeal to anyone really into the medium.
in essence i just read a blog about answering "what is firewatch?"
When I started writing this I did try talking about why the editors had a tough time answering that question, but that didn't really pan out. They got very distracted, but I also suspect it was made harder to answer that because there are no neat genre terms that give you a full idea of what this game is.
I used to listen to the Idle Thumbs podcast pretty regularly, so it was a delight to play Firewatch after hearing those dudes talk about game design and what they enjoy about games for so many years. I immediately reloaded the game with the audio commentary on after finishing it the first time.
It's hard not to think of Far Cry 2 when you see how committed Firewatch is to its first-person POV as Henry is hopping over logs or pulling up the map without pausing the game. I think I even saw an object roll down a hill.
Henry and Delilah were such realistic depictions of adults with believable problems that I fell in love with their banter and innuendo. It was a breath of fresh air to play this and Virginia recently (although the latter deals in the more surreal).
Thank you. I should really dig up that audio commentary, I'd completely forgotten the Idle Thumbs guys worked on this until I saw the credits. In an odd way Firewatch manages to execute on that "Imagine no minimap" thing Molyneux was talking about years ago, it just does it in a way that no game could really copy without working in mechanical quirks which serve a pretty specific purpose here. I should play Virginia as well, but there are a lot of different things I should play at this point.
@chaser324: See, I think I like Most Wanted better than Hot Pursuit, it's just a crushingly less ambitious game. I think the handling is looser in Most Wanted in a way that fits with Criterion's style better and it had a lot of the good things about Paradise in it, but because it's this not-quite-Paradise, the whole time I'm playing it there's this voice at the back of my head saying "This is pointless, you could be playing Burnout now". The only real reason to play Most Wanted is out of pure curiosity or because you've exhausted the content in Paradise.
@quantris: I'm not sure if that is skippable, but it is weird that a game that the game almost goes out of its way to seem sterile with those elements, instead of just leaving them alone. Again, when you watch an equipment unlock video for the police and then you watch the racer equivalent of it, and they're almost identical, you start to wonder what the point is. I mean, they explain the same idea twice.
@colonel_pockets: Thank you. I knew my opinion was probably in the minority, but I'm happy I've had constructive responses and a few people have enjoyed this anyway.
@damienduerst: My problem with the game isn't that it's not Burnout, but that it repurposes so many ideas from Burnout without understanding the context and implementation that made them work in that game. I keep pointing back to Burnout Paradise because it acts as a good reference on how to pull off concepts like shortcuts and vehicular combat; I can easily compare Hot Pursuit to Burnout Paradise show what Hot Pursuit is doing wrong. I think we may be coming to the game for somewhat different things, but I think the meta-rewards and speed are something the game is trying to use as a source of enjoyment and it doesn't pull them off correctly.
You're right that many of the cars do make trade-offs, but the cars in Burnout Paradise also made trade-offs and the game never ended up as stiff or lifeless as Hot Pursuit is. It also bugs me that the highest tier of cars which you work hardest to unlock is also often not the best to drive in, and the trade-offs always end up making some area of the driving frustrating. It's annoying to find few cars that can handle both straightaways and turns, and the ones that make the health trade-offs might be the worst of all. It's not fun to try and run a 7 mile race where crashes are highly random and just a few of them will total your car.
@csl316: I think Most Wanted uses a lot of "single-player but with more people" in its multiplayer, but I also think the persistent aspects of the world and the way it moves almost seamlessly between single-player and multiplayer can trick you into thinking the two modes are less different in Most Wanted than they are in Hot Pursuit. The Most Wanted multiplayer does have these unique components like challenges, a totally different structure for how events are initiated, special bonuses and so on, which make it a unique experience in some ways. Again, I'm not saying the "single-player but with more people" approach is bad, I just think you need good core gameplay to pull it off and I don't think Hot Pursuit has good core gameplay.
@gtb08: I think the issue you run into with this line of thinking is that defining why something is "good" almost always comes down to an appeal to popularity. I just don't believe there is an objective "good" for media, only a subjective one.
@lobster_johnson: It's probably less of a drag if you skip through most of the music but there's still a lot to chew on there. To be honest I'm not even sure if Sega meant that Twitch archive to be there because it wasn't archived on YouTube, so it might only be around for a month.
@mirado: One of the sad things about the way Konami is doing things is there's not a lot of spectacle involved. Stuff like their 2010 E3 conference was a shitshow but it's an entertaining shitshow because they were still trying to perform to a gaming audience. Now they're pulling back from video games overall there's not much to marvel at.
@darth_navster: It took a while to grow on me. One thing that rubbed me the wrong way at first was the Events, they just bring out all the worst in this DLC. As I unlocked the new cars and spent more time on the island, both with and without other players, it got better though. The way it lays out its collectables really works and getting to really know the island let me develop an appreciation for all the wonderful work done on it.
@rmanthorp: Thank you. I don't ever get through all the podcasts and Quick Looks in a week, but as far as I know nothing's been said about guest columns. For the immediate that is the part of the site I'm most concerned about. That's been a very important platform for a diversity of voices on this site that has been continually producing surprising and heartfelt writing. In the longer term I hope we can get another person who's as interested in the cultural and deep-cut stuff when it comes to games criticism. :plur
@gaspower: I wonder who becomes official anime editor now. Maybe it's Brad.
@gbrading: Thank you, that's what I thought too. It feels longer than 13 months, but hopefully the move to VICE will mean that he has even more time, tools, and space to produce great articles/podcasts/videos on games.
Thank you for writing this Sparky. I don't feel frustrated or like I wanna call you out on anything, I don't think you're being egotistic here, I really appreciate the honesty in this post, I take the compliments here to heart, the encouragement motivates me, and I appreciate that you'd like to see professional recognition for writers like me. There is a strong element of writing for myself when I do write and making money is certainly not my primary motivation, but one of the things I do want is for more people to read what I'm putting out there, especially when I'm writing things that are making some fairly large-scale point about games or the games industry or the gaming community.
When the big CBSi site redesigned happened, I was strongly of the opinion that a lot of the outlets for showcasing user content had been taken away, and I got quieter about that after various newer alterations were made to the site. I guess I'd convinced myself that problems were more fixed than they were. But while it's great to have the Community Showcase on the front page and it's awesome that the Community Spotlight exists as a running series of articles for the site, I don't think it's enough. I think we've seen a serious decline in people writing blogs and wiki entries on this site over the past few years, and it kinda bums me out. Heck, even though I'm tagged in this blog, I didn't get a notification about it. That's an issue.
I also have great respect for almost anyone who can publish something as long as you have and put so much focus and effort into their work. I try to read other peoples' stuff all the time, partly to improve my own writing, but even at my best I'm not doing 3,000 words a day, let alone 6,000. I tend to spend long periods of time working the same 2K-5K lengths of text over and over and over. The long-form articles I've posted on this site recently have been the result of countless hours of work, and the more paragraphs I have, the more complications new paragraphs add. The more cohesive I try to make something and the more parts of something I write that are meant to wire into other parts, the more difficult it becomes to handle as a whole. Editing a 120K word manuscript sounds overwhelming.
But yeah. I'm glad you've got the response you have and I hope you can get more copies of that novel out there. Keep doing your thing Sparky.
I think I'm still recovering from E3 livestreams, but I wrote a thing about each of the press conferences this year: EA, Bethesda, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Sony.
@sparky_buzzsaw: The new treatments on that game do look nice, even if it did get further into the graphical fetishism than I like to go. Still, there is a strong secondary motivation for buying that version of the game that the industry is not going to talk about, and that's that there's no other way to play it on your Xbox One. I genuinely wonder how much people are looking to buy this version of Skyrim for the new graphics, and how much they're looking to buy it because the Xbox One lacks a lot of backwards compatibility.
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