This reminds me of something videogamedunkey made:

The level of discourse here, and more importantly, the amount of courtesy on display, was something that appealed to me during the time when I just lurked and watched Gameological’s regulars do their thing. I’m glad I started participating; it’s worth the hassle of muddling through Kinja’s interface, & limited…

There’s an old argument about the MPAA age ratings: “This system is perverse because only the films which show the consequences of violence are punished.”

I’ve been playing Bethesda’s sandbox-RPGs for a decade now. And I’ve never fast-traveled in them. There are other self-imposed rules I’ve set for myself in their games (such as not using stimpacks in Fallout 3), but this is the one rule which every single playthrough has in common.

How apropos. I like how the author specifically mentions deck-building as its own specific form of play, and of the player archetype which, regardless of power or efficiency, asks themselves, “How do you win with [insert weird card here]?” and ends up with a puzzle to solve.

I appreciate the counterpoints about the perceived vs actual participation in the competitive scene, in relation to the playerbase as a whole. Maybe my perspective is skewed because the internet has so much Spikey magic content, or because some of the people I meet at stores on draft nights seem mildly annoyed to be…

I approve. Making one of my playthroughs with the goal of murdering the entire world has been consistently fun when I’ve done it in Bethesda’s games.

That’s an interesting question, about good examples of non-romantic relationships in fiction, although I’m having a hard time answering it because it’s not so much looking for a trend as it is looking for the absence of a trend. Your use of X-Files as an example of this kind of “inevitability” in storytelling is a…

Magic: the Gathering is good at player retention because of its depth. A player who buys into the newest set can opt into the Standard format, which comprises the last two years. A player who sticks with the game long enough to see his prized cards rotate out of Standard can then opt into Modern, which comprises the…

Definitely with you on the collectibles hampering momentum: the youtuber Super Bunnyhop advised in his review to save all that bonus secret-hunting stuff for one’s second playthrough, and that’s advice I took to heart. I didn’t bump up the difficulty to Nightmare, I only played through on Ultra-Violence once more, but…

Opeth - Dirge For November

I too bounced off of Bioshock once my inclination towards resource management uncovered the optimal strategy of “throw yourself at the bad guys with a wrench over and over until you’ve chipped away all their health,” which wasn’t fun at all. I think the designers intended for the game to be a Call-of-Duty style…

Death is an intuitive failure state: video games setting up a challenge for the player to overcome have defaulted to death as a hard reset since the very beginning. I remember Tycho from Penny Arcade describing the process of trying, failing, and gradually getting better at a task as, “building a bridge of corpses…

Well, this question presupposes that a developer-intended function is too good for ‘em; that player creativity is king in this sadistic funhouse. So my answer is how I dealt with enemies in Final Fantasy Tactics: In any given skirmish, after reducing my foes down to a lone survivor, I would surround him on all four…

It is healthy to be mindful of how much time you’re spending on entertainment and escapism, to seek out a balance in your life and keep things from being unhealthy, but don’t feel too bad about your time in GTAV. There’s progress to make in it, to be sure, but it IS primarily a playground, and a high-quality one at…

No noteworthy video gaming to report this week; my leisure time was taken over by a different hobby. I returned to my home province this summer, after living elsewhere for a year and a half. When I moved away, I put my substantial Magic: The Gathering collection into storage, but I still collected all the sets that…

One unfortunate thing about adulthood, about being cursed with the knowledge that the society we live in is not a static external “thing,” but instead is something we create with every action taken and idea communicated - a verb instead of a noun, if you will - is that the concept of universal human rights, as an…

That nostalgia hook is just as strong for the Zelda series: Whichever one you played first as a child is the “best” one.

And creepers don’t burn up in daylight, meaning that you can never be completely certain that the coast is clear. I remember being up on the second floor of my tower, contently sorting the inventory of a chest, and hearing that hiss right behind me, in what should have been a perfectly safe inner sanctum. That was two…

Well, that humor and joy you wanted does show up in the sequel, which, and this is going to sound weird, is one of the reasons I hated it. The first film went through the motions of actually having characters and a plot, no matter how basic or lackluster that ended up being. Expendables 2 doesn’t care anymore, and is…