The central question that snakes through Planescape Torment in “what can change the nature of a man?” Thus, the fundamental focus of the game is on identity. But identity is a fluid concept at the best of times, and it’s downright slippery when the person involved is an amnesiatic immortal who has lived through many…

Yea, what the hell? I almost never buy games at release, and now I'm forced to choose between two? Ah well, I guess that there's no better time of year to be spoilt for choice for interesting games. Let all the generic ones come out in the summer.

There's a gentleman here offering a towel… shall I accept?

Subversive anti-advertising!

Ah good, my Courvoisier has arrive. Yes. Like you, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a post-mortem on the WiiU. It may have been a commercial failure from Nintendo's perspective, but it's been a roaring success from the "Me and My Family" perspective. I was a total skeptic of the touchscreen gamepad before I used it,…

That's what I thought it was going to be when I clicked on it. But then it was mostly close-ups of the console and a PR interview with the PR guy.

For games set in a city, I can't think of a single one where there's not a prepopulated map (well, I guess Assassins Creed takes a hybrid approach). Games set in the wild are more variable, but still I find they generally auto populate whenever you get close to something. But yea, there are certainly degrees of…

Yes! It still holds its magic, too. I recently went out with my kids and mapped part of our neighborhood using graph paper. Good times.

Sure, that's realistic. But again I would go back to the experience of it all. It's fun to explore a city in the same way it's fun to explore anywhere else. And again, there's a joy in discovery. There's a different feeling from taking an Uber to a pre-determined bar than there is from wandering around a certain…

Um, was this sponsored content? Because that was just a 3 minute advertisement for the Nintendo Switch.

Yea, that's a huge difference maker. I never understand why more games don't embrace the "mark your own map" principle. The joy of open world games should be discovery. Otherwise what's the point? If all you want is to give the player a series of discrete little experiences, I would argue that a linear format is a…

Absolutely - there are a bunch of games where achievements have greatly deepened my appreciation for a game and made me play it in new or interesting ways. Developers should look at them as ways of getting people to play in ways that they wouldn't normally. As cheesy as it is to give someone an achievement for…

It seems like a good strategy. The goodies that you can unlock truly make a difference. There's a circular saw which totally rocks, and "the secrets of defense", which when you have both your block virtually negates all damage.

It's definitely not a scary game after the first 2 hours which scared the shit out of me. After that it becomes moody, dark, and tense, but there's nothing about it that is truly dread-inspiring. And when I played it through the second time, all the dread had gone. So it puts on a good show, but the magic of the fear…

Yea, when so many people measure the worth of a game by how many hours you get out of it, it really creates a perverse impulse to pack the game full of low-quality experiences or repeat the same high-quality experience until everyone is sick of it.

You fool, you were supposed to get 0 Yakuza 15s, like I (and everyone else in the world except time travellers) did!

I guess I have decided to bestow Resident Evil 7 my highest honor: I'm going to try to 100% it. I don't do that for many games any more. The criteria is usually (1) the tasks involved in getting all achievements add spice to the game, rather than being dull chores, and (2) the game itself is still fun to play after…

You can also pick up your hand as an item after Mia chops it off! So that explains that part of things.

Sounds awesome. Maybe the way to go would be to take a page from the Dragon Age: Origins playbook and have characters react very differently to you based on your mutation (and what stage you are at). I imagine that big strong dudes have a very different reaction in life from sneaky telepaths. And then obviously…

Just like everything for the Genesis, the developers priority is to make everything Metal as Fuck. And then the gameplay, etc. follows afterwards.