We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

okay, whatever, they exist, I was being a bit hyperbolous, but it's still true. Porn is often thrown in to make it sell better. And therefore you are having a problem finding a pornless game.

dating sims for women are more likely to focus on the relationship/romance aspects of love as opposed to the erotic, due to the perceived market demand of that demographic, although the latter may also be included

I don't understand the appeal of dating sims, mostly because of the reasons already stated. But i'd be up for reading some cute, harmless, romancey lady situations ◕ ‿ ◕

Lady Situations is the title of my new lesbian magazine. It is not in direct competition with Women in the Mood to Kiss, but the demographics overlap a lot.

I don't get the appeal of dating Sims either I mean they all speak some kind of babbling non-language, expand into clouds of static when they remove their clothing and have that ominous crystalline reminder that an uncaring god is watching and controlling their every move hovering a few feet over their heads
Can't do anything fun that requires two people without being certain that someone's watching, that's pretty creepy

I do like the term "ladyful" to describe games without any major male characters

i preferred hedges or fences

also, the "hell on earth: christmas eve" scenario as depicted in vgcats

I don't know if any of you guys actually have the dreaded Windows 8 but IF YOU DO: I converted that silly Amazing Adventure IRC bot into a single-player random text adventure app for Windows 8!

You can find it in the Windows store by searching for "Random Text Adventure" (it's free).

When I have a bit of time, I'm going to update it with real enemies/combat, more adjectives and quests, and better grammar. For now you can enjoy going around giving people stuff that they want.

HELLO DID SOMEBODY MENTION BOKTAI ONE OF MY FAVORITE GAME SERIES

It is indeed a very cool series with a very sad and painful gimmick that I would still love to see brought back - especially because with the 3DS, you could substitute the cameras for the solar sensors... this would be nice... :P

good luck playing them super. (seriously good luck) I never managed to get the cartridges physically, so I had to resort to ROMs which... have their own problems...

I need to find a not-as-broken ROM for 2 and an actual existing one for 3 still tho. ;;

Lunar Knights for DS was SUPPOSED to be the series sequel, and it fixed a large number of the series' issues but also added new ones and completely removed the actual physical solar sensor in favor of the weather system, which is kind of nice but removes one of the big THINGS the series had as its claim to unique fame... :P (it was still a fun game. I regret selling it to gamestop a while back, but at the same time I have the entire plot of LK memorized from 100%ing the game...)

don't feel too bad, i think used copies of lunar knights are like bargain bin prices

i'm more disappointed that we never got to see boktai 3 or a sequel to lunar knights, which leaves a large pile of unexplained cliffhangers, like for instance what the hell happened before lunar knights, or after lunar knights

well the main character's default name IS "Django"...

Boktai is a game series produced by Hideo Kojima on the GBA and DS where you fight vampires by charging your gun with real-life sunlight using a "solar sensor" (UV photodiode) on the cartridge.

I said it then and i say it now, it sounds pretty crazy, neat and inconvenient all at the same time.

Inconvenient, sure, but the perfect excuse to bellow “I HAVE THE POWERRRR”

Alternatively:

SPEAKING OF GAMES THAT YOU CAN PLAY OUTSIDE

INGRESS IS IN OPEN BETA

Basically it's run by a startup, Niantic, under Google and it is like geocaching and capture the flag combined with the future of humanity at stake! The story basically goes

deepbreath

'There is an race of beings, known as the Shapers, that live on another plane of existence and they have been around since the beginning of humanity and they are the source of all human creativity and innovation but now that we know about it our egos are all bruised so the Resistance want to shut all this down and turn humanity into a stagnant cesspool of repetition whereas the other faction in the game, the Enlightened, want a better future for the world so they're fighting against the Resistance to enlighten humankind'

But also mind you it only runs on Android and it's basically another data mining operation but it's still fun as hell and you meet lots of cool peeps. Like seriously I have met so many cool peeps.

The storyline is cool too except most of it's a Resistance propaganda mill. Like seriously, all the emotive language.

Alternatively, "There is a race of beings, known as the Shapers, that live on another plane of existence. They've been influencing our society in subtle ways for longer than we know, and now they're trying to make more direct contact. A group calling themselves 'Enlightened' want to just turn over the keys to the planet, no questions asked. The Resistance, on the other hand, are inclined towards taking some reasonable precautions, given that we know practically nothing about these 'Shapers', including potential goals and ideals, so just surrendering the human race to them would be a naive and foolish thing to do."

(Just to even out the propaganda levels. :P)

I can't honestly claim to have played in a while, as I found the game getting rather same-y fairly quick, but I haven't exactly been anywhere near at hotbed of coordinated planning. If there's a group around that's playing, I bet it could be pretty fun.

the perfect excuse to bellow “I HAVE THE POWERRRR” "Taiyooooo"

It's no more inconvenient than something like Tilt 'N' Tumble or Odama. The gimmick just happens to be that you need to play outside. I think that's perfectly reasonable for a handheld console.

It's not even THAT inconvenient considering that part of the concept is that you want to conserve your gun's energy as much as possible and actually be stealthy. Hell, if you stay in strong sunlight too long (Strong sunlight allows you to perform a full recharge almost instantly, and your gun will slowly but automatically recharge while you are standing in it), the gun overheats and you have to get out of the sun or else you lose the capability to attack!

...That and if you have the time (which translates to several weeks) you can grow an infinite number of item refills for the gun's energy bar.

you can also be impatient and juice them puppies with your spread gun

Pines, the propaganda levels are nowhere near even. I'm the one evening it out here what with every single ingame media and story being biased against the Enlightened.

In fact, the Resistance is more of a reactionary, emotionally-charged movement than a rational or reasonable one, analogous to the Romantic era after the Age of Enlightenment (otherwise known as the Age of Reason). Romanticism, despite its pretty name, was essentially a throwback against the scientific, philosophical and ideological advancements during Enlightenment.

Ooh ARG-tastic! I'm tempted to figure out how to make this run on my clunky Archos70

you can also be impatient and juice them puppies with your spread gun

yeah but that makes everything too easy

Hey supes, I know we don't agree on video games sometimes but I get the feeling we'd both agree with a lot of what this guy says in his video game writings (I enjoyed his Bioshock/video game review piece the most but the Zelda one reminded me of you)

There are some good points (item utility vs quantity and and the item-as-key plague that causes item atrophy and/or death, especially outside certain dungeons; storytelling via the world rather than or in addition to storytelling via plot; the Zelda series not having as-fully embraced the third dimension as it might; allowing the player to discover their path rather than informing them of it; not being afraid to let the player fail and learn from failure), but they are points others have made more eloquently, more succinctly, and without dancing alongside "should" and "must". Zelda could be doing its shit better, and it could be doing its shit more like it used to, but the two aren't logically equivalent. The argument is an interesting one but I don't think the angle of approach is as accurate as the author might like.

Majora's Mask, I think, approaches his "ideal" Zelda without sacrificing modern... something-or-other. The plot of the game, as a whole, is fairly minimal: There's a mask, it's bad, please get it back for me or the world will end. That's basically it! Every other narrative thread is contained within the world, was already happening before you got there, and will not care if you leave it be. Yes, it's more directly communicated than "what few people yet live must live in caves," but you'll get more direct communication if you want people and townships that feel real. And you do want that, to communicate that there is a world that exists, that is in danger, that you ought to save from the coming apocalypse. The major masks are keys, yes, but the way they're utilized as keys gives a sense of progression as the world opens up before you, and grants them utility with mobility upgrades and modified modes of combat. They have those secrets which, oftentimes, are obscure and obtuse, but the game both gives you a book to keep track of everything with and doesn't require you decode every secret before you can finish the game.

Basically Majora's Mask is great and I'm not sure why he doesn't talk about it more, particularly when he gets to the "where should Zelda look for inspiration" bit. In fact, he seems to avoid talking about, skim over, or sort of dismiss things more recent Zeldas have gotten right. The argument was so broad, so cynical and so rambling that I'm left not entirely sure what the problems are, or if they even are problems.

The difficulty thing is part I figured you'd agree more with than I would :L

The very original Zelda, though, is much different in flow than the later ones, in a way you seem to be glossing over? Like, yes in some parts you need the raft or the candle or whatever, but the game is much more open in sequence and I remember often doing dungeons out of listed order. Not to mention that instead of each dungeon being where you find the next item/reskinned key, in the original many items were found in the overworld to be discovered or worked up to and many of the dungeon items were purely to help out with play rather than necessary to get past certain locked out areas.

On this topic, and relating to the "obvious cracked rock" bomb targets, is that something in a game that's actually helping the game? If bombs are just "use on this obvious bomb rock to make bomb rock go away and pass", if hookshot is largely "point at obvious hookshot target that looks totally out of place here to pass", if the bow is "shoot the switch to raise the bridge and pass", are those parts being in there even improving the experience at all? Why bother with the bomb rocks at all? I mean, I can see that if you see them from a distance it lets you go "ok I'm gonna bomb that to go see what's behind it" which can give you a nice little minigoal, especially if it's off the path and not something you have to do, but usually they just sort of exist to make you switch items and spend time blowing them up. It just sort of seems to be going through the motions for the most part.

I agree that the original Zelda was really hamstrung by our standards due to gameplay constraints at the least, and remaking it isn't the way to go (the author agrees, too :P). But I also agree that it had a much different feel that in some ways is better and I've been wanting to see in Zelda again since way before I read this article. I mean, look at how much appeal Skyrim has in its exploration and "sequence breaking" (if it even counts as such in that game), and that's a game with nothing at all to back up the exploration.

Do you agree at least that the franchise would be better if it weren't set up as a repeating linear sequence of "find overworld item, use item to get to dungeon, find dungeon item, use item to get to end of dungeon, use item to beat boss" where every step you can only really go one place and do one thing? Open, nonlinear advancement can be very shitty if set up poorly (on a macro or micro level), I agree, but if it's set up in a way that allows experimentation, failure and setback, and discovery, it won't just be a series of "oh this way wasn't where I needed to go damnit" until you find the "right" one.

Well, if we take Sid Meier’s definition of a game into consideration[1], my personal view (as someone who has designed exactly zero successful games and is therefore an expert) is that difficulty can be its own reward but it’s not for everyone. Most choices I would find interesting in a game mean that there is some complexity involved in the means available to me and that I’ve been fooled into thinking I have more control over a situation than I know I do. The only thing difficulty has to play in this is whether I’m up to the task or not (it is relative to the player, and can come from a number of factors such as ability and experience), and Nintendo’s target demographic (children) has only so much experience and can only handle so much complexity.

The item/mechanic creep that has come into many franchises of late (Zelda and Assassin’s Creed come to mind?) can be framed in terms of interestingness (I have also seen related concepts termed “meaningful skill”, “deep mechanic”, and “roguelike item orthogonality”; slightly different, but I think they kind of cut to the same core issue). Just throwing more in is not making things better. The additions need to interact in some meaningful way (and it’s certainly debatable how, but ultimately players can kind of tell if you’re insulting someone’s intelligence by adding a “kill everything” / “win the game” button or making an impossible situation).

Certain games (e.g. Roguelikes like NetHack, Roguelikelikes like Dwarf Fortress and FTL, some strategy games like Paradox’s grand campaign games) strongly violate the “easy to learn” part of the oft-cited “easy to learn, difficult to master” principle, but once you get into them, they can be very satisfying because (perhaps by accident more than by design in some cases) the choices are apparent to you and they are interesting (well, until you get blindside-clotheslined by something you never saw coming, at which point it gets added to your list of things to watch out for). Though they can also quickly turn into boredom if against all the odds you know the strategy too well.

tl;dr If the player can bring about the direct result of an action and it doesn’t really tie into any/enough other actions, you probably need to complect[2] your gameplay up a bit.

[1] (Partially in his own words). It is often summarized something like this: a (good) game is a series of interesting choices; interesting choices usually involve some sort of tradeoff between options in the outcome, where options are not all equally attractive (or at least not attractive in the same way), and the player is informed in their choice (though maybe the consequences turn out to be unexpected—this is a bit tricky to get right). Despite being a useful working definition or guiding principle in the game design phase, particularly in the turn-based strategy genre where he is a giant, some people see weaknesses in this definition. One of the greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses is that there is considerable flexibility and subjectivity in meaning of “interesting choice” even once you have taken Meier’s elaborations into account (if you even do). It takes some of the concept of “play” out of the equation; perhaps you may find futzing around with a physics sandbox to involve “interesting choices” (If I’m remembering correctly, Meier himself has contended that even rhythm games can be considered to consist of such choices, though in the linked article he concedes that it is probably not the best model), but some people consider these things to be a part of a “game” without necessarily being “interesting” or “choices”. Nonetheless, I find it a satisfactory explanation for why a lot of endgames stink from a player standpoint (that is to say, without considering the production issue where “few players even get there so why bother trying to put anything there?”); they tend to have run out of choices for you to make, and you can often feel it coming on as you see those choices going away and getting simpler to make, hence the ennui. I would personally contend that this is often mistaken for “difficulty” being too easy or too difficult; as I mentioned above, difficulty is relative to the player anyway. I don’t know that I could hazard a guess at tackling these particular problems. See also: paradox of choice. :truckpump:

[2] 1. (v., arch.) To join by weaving. To embrace, hence
2. (v.) To make complex, especially a sequence through interdependency (neologism, Rich Hickey, 2011).

[3] There is no [3] up there but god I wish I had organized this post better.