Hey, I’ll have you know I once won a game of Defcon with zero casualties. One in a million chances happen all the time! It’s like... physics or something.

I’m a little concerned about planet/star variety... one of the things I loved about exploring Freelancer was the sheer variety of stuff to see in what was a very small game by comparison.

And it wasn’t just about finding things you could actually interact with - one of my favourites was a system in which there was…

I would be interested to know how exactly the player starting locations are chosen in this regard - watching someone *else’s* stream of the game, I couldn’t help but notice some massive similarities to this one, in terms of life content, colour palette etc, environmental threats etc.

Given that the game must spawn all…

You ever play Freelancer back in the day? Now *that* game got exploration right; great variety, brilliant sense of discovery. Shame the main story was kinda short and badly designed.

Now how about the guys who made the new XCOM games... do a remake of Chaos Gate?

Everybody wins.

Preferably without the “SPACE MARINES DON’T USE COVER!” nonsense. Of course they use cover. They’re highly trained. Why the hell would they not use cover?

Also, please give us a main character who wears his damn helmet. The helmets are absolutely badass.

Deathwing, yo! Get you some Dark Angels!

Eeeh... wasn’t a fan of New Doom. Didn’t like the art style - too much shiny generic science fiction stuff, not enough steel and rotting meat and 80s cinema practical effects.

Actually started making levels for the original Doom games with Doom Builder 2 - it’s fantastic. Like a game in itself. The engine is so…

Nah, I think that one is kinda fair - when everything is highlighted, nothing is highlighted. You ever play Freelancer? Considering that game’s “galaxy” was so tiny, the exploration was excellent... because it had good pacing.

One system, full of planets and stations you could visit. Find an uncharted jump hole...…

Erm... not really. NMS would have to try really, REALLY hard to be as disappointing as Duke Nukem Forever... given that with Duke, we didn’t get *any* of the stuff we’d seen in the various trailers we’d been drooling over. Not even the art style survived its development hell.

So Starbound is worth it? I’ve been toying with the idea. Not such a fan of sidescrollers, but... the *concept* always looked kinda cool. What I’m really after is a good sense of exploration and adventure.

As for Spore... to be fair to No Man’s Sky, Spore’s actual gameplay scope was claiming to be way, way, waaaay…

The price of things is rarely based on its value. Just look at the situation most authors are in - I spent 2-3 years of my life writing my second novel, which I will be trying (and probably failing) to sell for £1.99, despite it being about 700 pages long. And that’s with the generous margins of publishing an e-book:…

That’s a very common pitfall with ambitious indie ideas - just look at that “Infinity” game, going back a few years - long before No Man’s Sky, this one guy was coding an absolutely *stunning* engine: procedurally generated planets with realistic visuals, procedurally generated nebulae... looked beautiful.

If he had…

Now this is something I find fascinating. Do you actually find Doom 2016 *more* violent than the original?

Because I really don’t. Playing the original again, it’s a remarkably horrific and dark game - its monster design is clunky and deranged, its weapons and their effects quite rugged and brutal with some wonderfully…

What I find most depressing about these studies, is that gaming is worthy of a whole lot of studies. But *real* studies. Proper scientific methodology... which none of *these* studies ever seem to demonstrate. It’s always just “We had some people play some games then made some general observations, with no idea as to…

Everybody seems to get very confused when it comes to this whole issue. People seem to think that kids witnessing violence will become aggressive.

Then in the same breath, they’ll often talk about desensitization. But desensitization is numbness. To be desensitized to violence is to become inert to it - to witness it…

Not for the most part. All of it. It is all nonsense.

Kids are not turning into little shits these days because they’re playing violent games. The correlation just doesn’t hold up. There are *toddlers* screaming violently at parents in the supermarket, kicking and biting adults, and that’s nearly always where it…

You can stop the toxicity from existing in the first place, but nobody wants to actually accept that you *can* avoid this kind of behaviour in general.

And I’m not talking about some tweak to a game, or even to all games. I’m talking about actually teaching your damn kids to understand that good sportsmanship serves a…

“The early titles buckle under the weight of over ambitious systems”

Aaand I’m gonna stop you right there. System Shock 2 doesn’t buckle under the weight of anything; it streamlined the experience after System Shock 1, its UI remains one of the finest ever made (legible, clear, with nothing more than a single click…

Totally! And that movie was a perfect example of how to do a story like this - You keep it very simple. It’s the reason Dredd worked so well. It’s the reason Fury Road worked so well, and allow the action and the characters to take center stage.