Smorlock

A sincere thank you for all the fantastic features, videos, and stories. Your voice will be missed on the site! Can't wait to see what you do next!

I loved this article, and apparently I'm in the minority in thinking that artistic intent is really important and I always make sure to play all games in their "default" settings. What is the point in playing the game if you're going to alter the game? Then you're not playing the game anymore. Someone designed this game from the ground up with intent, and even if I don't like parts of it I feel like I owe it to the game design to play it as it was designed.

The black bars were probably intentionally meant to make the player a bit uncomfortable, which is what bothers me about devs giving players the ability to turn them off. Almost all player are going to turn them off because of that, but then how do you put that claustrophobic design into the game if players can turn it off? Most would argue it's pretty integral to the game.

In so many games I see players turning off effects like fog and noisy particle effects because it makes the game easier, and that is just insulting to me. The point of those effects is to make it a bit more difficult and it was all part of the design. If you turn it off you're just butchering the game and making something else.

@sterling: You don't necessarily favourite things that you agree with, but it's an easy way to save ridiculous tweets. I do it all the time.

@galacticpunt said:

...A Canadian?!

@mr_creeper: But it's not meant to replace anything. It's an entirely different control interface meant for entirely different experiences.

Weird, I thought it was by far the best WAU episode, and maybe the best Telltale episode since WD's first season ender. The pace of it was just really great, it moved fast and was exciting the whole way through.

@bacongames: Thanks for articulating how I feel about Max's Twitter reaction. He was coming from the right place, but being so hyper-aggressive in his communication isn't going to do anything. If someone on Twitter acted the same way towards him, I bet he would dig in his heels too, because like you said, fuck that guy.

I don't really get the point of this. It doesn't really seem to provide any critique or commentary... it's just an elaborate synopsis, with someone else's decisions.

I just played the episode, what's the point of reading the novelization?

Great article. I got into Porp along with Anna Anthropy a year or so ago, who are both really great, personal developers. Anna had a great term for these kind of lo-fi, personal experiences that I can't remember (or find, because her site is down), but I think she called them scratch games or something. It's cool stuff that I'd definitely like to see more of. People talk about games like the Last of Us being representative of "games as art", and they are, in their own way, but I think I'm much more convinced by these dirty, personal, punk expressions that are coming out of people like Porpentine.

So I guess Outerlands is what Phil Fish is secretly doing now. He wasn't featured at all in the pitch video but it says that he is responsible for Area 5, which appears to be the group making the documentary.