MuttersomeTaxicab

Also Dan Pinchbeck (of The Chinese Room) wrote SCARYDARKFAST which is a rad deep dive on DOOM. The stuff about the making of DOOM isn't anything new, but seeing Pinchbeck do a close reading of the different episodes is super cool.

RIP

@beachthunder said:

Update: You can throw out the exit button :P

Also, CRT flickering noises :D

GOTY 2015

A sort of FMV detective game from Sam Barlow, the creator of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (which may be a sore point for some, but I loved the shit out of that game) and the interactive fiction game Aisle. It looks like it's picking up some really positive reviews. I'm just excited to see a rad FMV game in 2015 that doesn't seem to rely on campy humour.

@excast: Plenty of good games don't find their audiences for a variety of reasons. My point is that a few comments on this piece have already expressed a very common fallacy that there's an idealized "good game" structure, and anything that falls outside of that structure is therefore bad, and implicitly deserves to fail. This is illustrated with a forced natural metaphor like "survival of the fittest (but with videogames)." Because, of course, opinions are always better when expressed as laws of nature or maxims.

What this viewpoint ignores (and Austin gets into this a bit in the article) is that a lot of current game development errs on the side of caution, and so there's a real benefit to encouraging and allowing companies to consistently experiment and fail, because those experiments sometimes have a way of making it into larger circles. Tale of Tales may have not really impacted the core gamer crowd, but a lot of developers and artists have been inspired by their work. Even if you don't care about their games, or even if you actively dislike their stance on games culture, seeing one fewer creative voice that's interested in pushing the envelope in this medium is a bummer.

Yo, if you didn't like the game, doesn't mean it's a bad game. I see this mistake a lot.

I loved my time with Persona Q, but Etrian Odyssey 4 is a *much* better dungeon crawler/game.

Etrian Odyssey IV is probably the best EO game out there. Has a free demo on the eshop and progress carries over to the main game. Worth a look if turn-based combat, first-person tile-based dungeon crawling and drawing maps on the bottom screen is your thing.

I'd get these but I'm a little short :c

@pyrodactyl: Oh totally using a FAQ. I actually like the platforming/boss fight stuff in La-Mulana, but you're 100% right about those puzzles being 90s adventure game levels of obscure. I don't think they've really done a significant revamp on most of the puzzles, though I suspect the sequel might be a little easier to parse.