This always bugs me. Universal Up.

Jebus812 · 1 day

It is more of a spelling or word choice error than a grammatical one.

veda- · 4 days

My favorite game. Played it many many times, and it blows my mind every single one. It was worth every penny, so make sure you have fun with the 52 dollars you saved over what I payed.

I propose you do something ridiculous with it, like go race Go Karts with friends, or take as many juggling lessons as you can get for 52 dollars, maybe get an ultraviolet tatoo that says "The Spice Must Flow".

k3ilbasa · 6 days

Do not buy the boxed set murder mystery parties, if you have any desire for the game to be well designed or if you want to have people roleplay even in small ways.

http://www.freeformgames.com/

These are the best I have seen on the market. I have played two and had a great time at both. Don't be scared to add something extra to them and tone up the theme because even if it is stupid, it winds up being fun. For example they had a little make a band mechanic in the Karma Club game, we had enough musically inclined people coming that we just decided to make that an actual make a band game, where each group made up some random song and played it. They were hilarious and awkward and tended to be about the game. It helped create a fun and hilarious atmosphere.

psignosis · 6 days

Salem has the Vikings and the Saxons as well.

tavad · 6 days

These are amazing. How do you get the Spray tool to actually work in a usable way? I find it so difficult to not over spray or get anything that looks acceptable!

BruceCambridge · 10 days

I am with Tarzan. This was not necessarily a bad move. If christina and alicia played like rational humans instead of morons, I think it was likely an alright move.

In fact I think it was a pretty good move. Its just to bad that it didn't pan out because Alicia and Christina were stupid.

Muskiebite · 1 month

It totally depends on what the hotel is like. If it is a really conservative nice hotel, or a lower end motel, it probably is too much. If it is a more trendy urban hotel I think it would probably be great. It just depends on your read of the establishment.

Either way I don't think it is so outlandish that it would prevent you from getting the job, however if it plays into other reservations about you, that you are young, hip, and individualistic and not going to fit in, then you should avoid it.

FalseOasis · 1 month

Agreed.

aliensmademedoit · 1 month

The moral dilemma which the distopia is based on is much more nuanced and arguable than most distopian movies. What makes the movie interesting and have lasting power to me, is even though I respect the effort and plight of the main character, I still want to make that society our future.

nicksnare · 1 month

Networking takes a ton of work, however in my mind, networking is just a way to access information and connections for both sides. Your skills matter, but without connections they don't get you that far. I think this is true for investment oppertunities as well, you are meeting people and talking to people in order to increase your odds of finding that perfect match.

Hard work goes a long way, but personally I would say it goes along way to just better your chances, because some people just get lucky with little work and some people never make it even though they invest their entire lives into it.

Clumpy · 1 month

It is odd that Merzbow is as popular as he is in the noise community, and I agree that it has little effect over other music. However if Merzbow started getting big, and the kind of experimentation with dropping melody, and creating ambient abrasive sounds were to catch on it would be a problem for me. This to me undermines the point of music. I am not saying politically that we should ban it, far from it, but we can ridicule the people that listen to it and articulate what makes that music bad. That is exactly what criticism is. We live in a connected world and it is important to express your ideas and opinions in order to try to influence the world to be how you want it to be. I want a world where everyone can listen to the music they want and make the music they want, but I would much rather live in a world where music I like is popular. Therefor I expose my friends to media, boardgames, videogames, because I want them to like it and enjoy it too. So where my problem with your quote,

Bad games don't make good games worse, they're just bad games.

is that we are in a connected world. The market for videogames is incredibly responsive. Genera's fade in and out of popularity and the number of titles within a genera is directly related to the success of games in that genera. Look at the wii. An incredibly successful system that was owned by lots of non-gamers. This changed the way games were developed for the system and led to the flood of mini games on there. Is this bad, I mean, as you say if people want it how can it be bad, but as far as the wii becoming a system with a healthy and diverse library of interesting, innovative and challenging games I would say it was bad.

What is popular does effect me. Looking at music again, it isn't hard to name a decade of music that you or I like. I tend to be really into post punk and new wave from the early 80's. I have loved this surge of 80's retro that has influenced bands like M83 and Junior Senior. I feel like the period of 2005-2010 had a surge of music that I have liked that stems from this influence. It has become popular and creates feedback, these artists play off eachother and new artists rise by being similar to them.

In videogames the same thing is constantly happening. I don't know if you are political, but this statement makes me think that you wouldn't be willing to criticize a politician, because they were elected. Just because something is popular doesn't mean that it is culturally moving in a positive direction.

This isn't super important, but I don't think I am one of those super nostalgic gamers. I play tons of newly released board games now, because many of the things that I liked about video games seem to be better implemented in modern board games. With videogames I really have always been very picky. While you are right about the Transformers/Call of Duty comparison, I really do think the videogame industry is in a worse place than the movie industry. There are a handful of games I really like, some of which are old, but some are fairly new. Some even have cut-scenes and are action games, I loved Mirrors Edge for example. Even X-Com, one of my favorite games, which is clearly older I didn't play until college, 12 years after it was released.

I don't play the games I don't like, and there are a few games every year that wind up being good, but some of the games the industry holds out to be the standout hits I think have serious problems. The assassin creed games to me feel vaccous and lifeless. The combat is boring, the interaction is low, and the entire game is just connecting together the story elements.

10 years ago the way people talked about the direction gaming was going was not as focussed on graphics or becoming more cinema like. The talks were about how increased processing power means more Artificial Intelligence to play with. I remember before Oblivion Came out they were experimenting with making a dynamic economy which was happening behind everything in the game. This would mean that every person in cyrodil would have to eat, and have to buy that food or steal it, and they would have to get that food from someone, and food would have to be brought into cities by caravan and so on. Having this background system to the game was something they tried to have there because it was an ambitious way to increase the ways in which what you do effects the world. It was a way so that because I kill every carrot farmer in my game and you don't in yours, our game worlds might become vastly different from one anothers. This wound up not working because it would run into problems where not enough food would get into the city and everyone would get hungry, stop working, and leave to forage in the woods as that was the nearest food source, and then never go back to work. Clearly it wasn't ready for the game, but the sad thing is that instead of experimenting more with this kind of idea when they moved onto the expansion or Skyrim, instead they played it safe. They made sure there were more unique voices and more quests lying around, but the world still has that starchy feeling that everything is just sitting and waiting for you to walk on by. The move away from ambition in the game industry is what makes me sad. And you are right it isn't universal, but I felt like stories like that Oblivion one were the kinds of things that got people excited at the time. Now the video game industry seems more excited about the flourishes, about the story, about the details. I think we should be critical of games that aren't pushing the boundaries. We should want games to be more than a cinematic experience with button mashing. It is to reminiscent of Brave New World where their movies are just porn and explosions. I mean if the goal is just enjoyment why not, but that isn't what makes me respect games, and not the direction I want to see the game industry moving.

Sorry that was so long.

nicksnare · 1 month

In real-estate you are right the role of the dice is unrealistic, but in general I think you could say that what business opportunities you are presented and come across, especially in early stages of business, are fairly random. Perhaps if you could buy/earn pieces to let you move +/- 1 space to give you more control it could simulate your ability to invest in finding better opportunities.

Clumpy · 1 month

Wow. I had never thought of it in that concise of terms. Such a good point!

Clumpy · 1 month

I think you are right that most games are not based around their stories, and don't really need to be. In my mind when you describe what makes a JRPG good you are going to talk about that games leveling and items work. It is a game about mechanics, and the fun of the game stems from putting the player in problem solving situations where you have to make choices in how to level/equip your characters so you are best situated to move on in the game. If the reason you are playing the game is primarily to see what happens to the characters then I guess I am wrong, but my draw to that kind of game is with the parts of the game that are open ended and chosen by the player. How I level my characters, what team of characters I build.

While I haven't played any newer JRPG's I know a common complaint with the newer Final Fantasy games was the length of the cut scenes. I had a roomate who played through FFXIII when it came out and seemed frustrated not only by the length and prevalence of cut scenes, even though they were beautiful, but also in how he felt the game pushed him into leveling in a certain way and focus on certain characters.

Perhaps the discussion above was too focused on story on its own, because there are many other ways to get at player choice and the things that videogames are good at doing. When story becomes the priority in the game, and mechanics and player choice suffer, I think that is a problem, and in my mind cut scenes are an example of something which is overused and leads to the creation of bad games.

Clumpy · 1 month

Every medium has different strengths. TV is good at doing long character arcs and having you follow and relate to a situation. Movies are great at exploring an event, or a theme, or a breakdown. Books are better than either of these at showing internal monologue, how we think about things, philosophical questions. Comics are best at humor, and creating iconic situations, and exploring emotional responses to situations, at times situations that would come off as very boring in other mediums. Music connects us directly to an emotion, the story of the lyrics is not as important as the emotional response to the music, a song can give us a more general sense of nostalgia, or sadness, or excitement than almost any of these other mediums.

So what are the strengths of videogames? In my mind videogames give you a sense of frustration and accomplishment. This is what the earliest videogames were based on, losing, struggling then eventually improving and winning. However we have clearly moved far past that as the only thing videogames do well. Problem solving, or rewarding cleverness has become a big part of what we like about videogames. Whether it be playing an FPS stealthily or playing monkey island, the goal here is that you feel like you are doing a creative clever task. As far as story goes videogames allow for something no other medium ever has, the concept of options and choices. In some games the entire narrative is in your head, like Xcom or Civilization, while in others the story is a more traditional story but is driven by you, the player, completing tasks. While some games with complicated stories have pulled this off well, Deus Ex, The Last Express, LA Noir, some of the most celebrated games have stories which are merely stripped down predictable archetypes, like Zelda. This doesn't seem to hurt the game very much, and in many ways improves it.

However when a game is not playing off its strengths in how players respond to it, and is instead acting more like a movie or TV show, or Book, it isn't being a good videogame. There are plenty of videogames which feel like they would be better if they were made for another medium... and this shouldn't be.

Clumpy · 1 month

In music Merzbow is innovative too, but he takes everything that I think is good about music and destroys it.

There is no doubt a place for innovation in gaming, and music, and art, however we shouldn't commend people for bad ideas. In fact to not do so is to undermine the entire idea of criticism. If we strip both difficulty and choice from games, we are just watching a movie while pushing buttons. Even if the story is amazing, I refuse to call that a good game. Even if it was entertaining, I would critique it by saying that it could have been made as a movie/TV series instead, because what was added by making it a game.

It's ironic that I feel like many of the people that respect videogames the most and try to say this is an equal art form to literature and cinema, use games which are just watered down versions of those generas to make their point. Games which are story driven can be good, the thing is that modern ones just tend not to be. Look at 'The Last Express'. When they made that game they made it by taking elements from agathy christy mysteries and movie mysteries, but then they reworked the story so that it was integrated with the game mechanics. Part of the way you solved puzzles was by failing at solving them, going back in time and using clues as to how you died/who killed you to figure out what was going on. It was a story that would have made a terrible movie or book, and it was a story where you in the cut-scenes was completely consistent with you the player. This was a very very well implemented story driven game, and yet it was made 15 years ago. What does that say about innovation in the medium?

The inconvenient truth is that, as gaming has grown and gotten bigger, it has become less innovative and creative. Today we have a litany of FPS clones that add cut scenes and increasingly cinematic stories in order to feel cutting edge or professional. And the fact of the matter is that the people that don't view gaming as an art but rather view it as an excuse to look at explosions and not think for a couple hours a day, that want their games to be easy and consumable, are eating it up.

I may have been a little harsh on Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain, because they were trying to do something that I think is positive. The problem is that they dropped the idea of having an engaging story where your decisions really mattered. Playing Fahrenheit after playing the demo of Fahrenheit was like the let down when you play a Peter Molineux game, except even worse, because at least when you play a Molineux game you can see where he tried to make the game interesting on the edges.

I think Merzbow destroys music by trying to create A-Tonal harsh noises, destroying the melody, rhythem, instrumental sounds that I identify with music. Music is there to give me an emotional response and being innovative in a way which stops using the tools that gives music the ability to create those emotional responses is not good innovation and not something I am going to uphold as a good idea.
I think that games are being destroyed by taking out the elements of videogames which are interesting. If your games point is to do something a movie or book can do better, do it as a movie or a book. Videogames advantage is that they give you interaction, frustration, problem solving, accomplishment. A game that doesn't play these up, is failing to be a good game.

Clumpy · 1 month

I think that is exactly what the problem is. We expect games to take us out of the loop.

Clumpy · 1 month

He isn't from my perspective. I can tell you that the reason I play few videogames today is for exactly this reason. It has completely killed the FPS and action/adventure genera's.

Videogames have never been a great story telling medium for hollywood style stories, they still are not. Red dead redemption is an excellent example of this problem because you could have written a movie about John Marston which would have been good, but by having you control him and do constantly ridiculous and a-moral things made this story about a good guy getting redemption completely absurd.

Videogames today are trying to be like hollywood, but every story telling medium has its own quirks and strengths. Hollywood can have the tight scripted story full of explosions and excitement and it works, however to impose this onto a videogame is as foolhardy as thinking that a good book will translate into a good movie, or a good comic could be turned into a miniseries, or that a funny webcomic would make a good videogame.

It is possible to have a good translation from one medium to another, however it requires awareness of what makes each medium work. What does a videogame have to offer in the story telling department? It can offer the illusion of choice and consequence of actions, it can allow for self motivated direction, it can allow for problem solving. These are the strengths videogames have to offer, yet when you make a game which is either do a bunch of stuff to get to the next cut scene, or worse something like Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit or Heavy Rain, where you are essentially watching a movie with worse actors and direction, all the while pushing buttons to keep it going, you are not playing into these strengths.

The only thing I can stomach at this point is Simulation games, strategy games, and Mount and Blade. This is truly unfortunate as I feel none of these games are living up to the promises of the videogame industry in the past, nor even living up to the standards of games that are now ten years old. So he is not being overly dramatic.

FalseOasis · 1 month

The problem isn't that they are making the alliances day one, the problem is that they are keeping the alliances they made day one. I don't understand how after everything seems to have changed, the people in that alliance still feel like they are on equal footing.

panic_switch · 1 month

Africa is less about strategy and more about watching people be miserable. I thought it was worth watching but definitely not what I think of when I think of survivor.

didoty · 1 month

Who did you want him to vote for? Kim I assume? It just creates a tie and makes it possible he gets voted out in the re-vote.

Kim wasn't going to be voted out in the re-vote, her girls stood behind her.

Tarzan knew this going in, and did what he had to do to make sure he stayed in. If he voted for Kim and got voted out, I would be disappointed in him for being stupid.

Its not Tarzan's who has the crappy strategy, it is Alicia and EVEN MORESO Christina. It only would have taken one of them to be willing to secretly flip and they could have gotten Kim out.

didoty · 1 month

YES.

zoonkers · 1 month

I think it is even more than this, that he could have gone home. Creating a three way tie with kim, Leif and Tarzan means that you have 6 non kim votes that are likely to stay non kim, and 3 kim votes which are likely to stay kim. This means that in the revote the non kim votes are just going to choose who to get rid of, they know neither leif nor tarzan are serious threats for the end, so they could pick either one. Better to not take the risk and put the vote on Leif. Hopefully next week there will be another chance.

entp_in_florida · 1 month

Thank God someone else gets it.

entp_in_florida · 1 month

If Tarzan didn't believe that Christina was going to, then it made more sense for him to vote for leif. There would have been a revote and the girls would have block voted one of tarzan or leif out. They didn't have a hope without Christina.

UtopianComplex

TROPHY CASE

UtopianComplex

TROPHY CASE

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