Generic video games thread

[Trotskilicious]

yeah, but still...first one probably has the tightest plot so i'm torn

granted if you power through me1 it'll take probably ~ 20 hours

[Luke de Spa]

how long would it take to do it "normally"?

edit: mass effect must be pretty old now, maybe there's a mac version my computer will run?

double edit: nope

[Luke de Spa]

next question: are the stories in these games as good as a great sci-fi novel you can name?

[Luke de Spa]

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

the asari, a race of all female unisexual aliens which closely resemble blue-skinned human females

yeahhhhh i can see where this is going

[Trotskilicious]

for the most part yes, i've written extensive blah blah blah reviews of them but the best bits are probably as good as anything STTNG has done, probably a lot of sci-fi movies, sci-fi anime and a fair shake of books. it manages to merge a lot of disparate forms of sci-fi into a cohesive whole. it's pretty pulpy/soapy though, but i favor that.

there is a fair amount of "fan service" from 2 onward (Miranda) so you may be annoyed by that i'm not sure. it's not anything that much worse than lulu in final fantasy x. there is an (optional) sex scene in 1 but it's not necessarily that tacky. honestly i'd say it's probably most comparable to ghost in the shell for its combo of thought provoking science fiction and unfortunate lowest common denominator male id pandering but the romances are entirely optional.

i think it's better if you play as a female shepard because since they wrote the part to be gender non specific, trending towards masculine, she is kind of awesome in that regard and the voice actress is really quite convincing

[Trotskilicious]

Originally Posted by Luke de Spa

yeahhhhh i can see where this is going

yeah, like i said

i actually kind of got over the asari thing

female shep makes up for a lot

[Luke de Spa]

well i just read the plot synopses for the first two games and it doesn't sound like my thing, tbh

i don't really go in for aliens in sci-fi unless they're very obviously not human (i.e. not star trek aliens – y'know, humanoid, a bit more emotional/rational + facial prosthetics)

i should probably just stick to reading novels. and trying to make things yeah yeah

[Luke de Spa]

are you still writing, t-lish?

[Trotskilicious]

yeap, lots of spare time as you know

[Luke de Spa]

what kind of stuff?

[Trotskilicious]

science fiction, doing a lot of reading on science/futurism/technological advancements/etc lately though because i think i'm probably not knowledgeable enough but is there ever such a thing anyway

i feel i should probably just try to write regular short stories though and work my way up

[Luke de Spa]

that's what i thought too, but then i thought well, everyone seems to recommend just diving in and doing what you want and fixing it up later. so i'm trying to do that

(i'm working on a near-future sort-of-sci-fi novel at the moment. i know exactly jack shit about writing fiction but i'm doing it anyway)

what's your stuff about? if you want to talk about it that is

[Luke de Spa]

the short stories thing seems to be Old Advice – used to make sense, you'd build a name for yourself in genre magazines etc., make things easier for yourself once you're trying to pitch long-form to an editor/publisher – but i don't think that applies any more aside from the craft side of things. still seems to me as though, well, if you want to write novels, just start writing novels and keep going until you get good at it

[Trotskilicious]

yeah i guess that's true and if it's polished enough i always thought i could just upload it weekly to a blog or something or just fish it out to publishers, there's plenty around...i mean there's a lot of opprotunity with the internet to get it "out there" but people looking at it is another matter entirely, and making a living at it...well that's even yet another thing

its basically kind of a mash up cyberpunk, gangs of new york and superheroes. it's set in a hypercity with a space elevator, but there's this kind of ring that while the central city seems technologically advanced and fabulously wealthy, as you move outwards it's like going back in time, so the suburban slums are practically 19th century hovels. most of it is of course about economic inequality, free market capitalism, and cultural impact of technological shifts. i want to play around with gene splicing, cybernetics, maybe AIs and definitely want to incorporate the social internet aspect, as well as how information on everyone is available it takes specialists to actually find it. there's also a kernel of an idea about ANCIENT ALIENS that i want to play around just to subvert religion in general (and have space magic). but then i think i might be encouraging that mularkey by actually going through with it.

the story as it goes is about this former merc that comes back to the city and attempts to take control of some of the neighborhoods in the suburbs in the interests of law & order and redeem herself after her ruthless pursuit of the bottom line. whereas the city as it stands is laissez-faire, but under threat of the central security firm whenever it feels necessary to knock back the competition. it's all a rather confusing mess so far. i really want to attempt to avoid a lot of tropes but sometimes its inevitable.

[Luke de Spa]

that sounds pretty awesome. i'd read it. the hints-of-ancient-aliens-thing can actually work quite well – have you read richard morgan's takeshi kovacs novels?

tropes are fine so long as they're played with/criticised a bit imho

[Trotskilicious]

yeah i think i'm critical enough to recognize them and nonconformist enough to subvert them

i'm already pretty fond of my heroine, she's not one of those tired sex bomb warrior babes she's deliberately androgynous, mean, violent and exceptionally clever. but i also don't want to make her *male* which is a fine line to walk sometimes, especially since obviously i cannot conceive of what it is to be a woman. i just don't want yet another epic story about the white man saving the universe. i want to make sure that even though she's doing what seems to be the right thing her methods are always suspect and her motives are not entirely clear. I want a bit of a Joan of Arc angle for the first part, complete with malfunctions of her cybernetic brain that manifest as visions of destiny and then proceed to turn her into napoleon and robespierre (not sure why it's all french).

i also made a rule about having only three white protagonists (all step-siblings) and a varied ethnic cast. the future in my estimation is predominantly populated by chinese and indians, to the point where even the economic situation is controlled predominantly by non-whites. China Corp.

[slunken]

i decided a couple weeks ago to turn cops comic into a full-length (or at least regular) thing with a quasi sci-fi edge. although i might change the title to reality comics. i want to introduce a futuristic world (mainly two areas - a slick ultra city and a bombed out post apoc ghetto) but still have the "main characters" be very classic kind of like a cop buddy movie where one of the cops is maybe a dog a la turner and hooch. so its introducing a neutered idealized image of police protection (and comedy!) into a hyper-real shitstorm of a harsh modern world. and there is something futuristic to do with dreams happening too and how that works adversely to reality.

maybe. still in the planning stages. or i might just start going with it.

[Luke de Spa]

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

yeah i think i'm critical enough to recognize them and nonconformist enough to subvert them [snip]

that definitely sounds like my cup of tea. how far through are you?

edit: it's cool that you're going for a non-white-dude approach. do you have non-white-dude test readers? (or will you, if you're not that far along?)

i'm just getting started on mine, having finally parked/ditched the comic fantasy i started working on in 2006 (the more i wrote, the less comic it got, and the more frustrated i got with ripping out the more whimsical elements to fit)

[Trotskilicious]

mine sprawls relentlessly with no real narrative focus so i can't even say how far i'm through it because so much of it is plot skeletons, notes, partial scenes, ideas, and etc

i'm not sure why but i have this block about thinking my plots aren't interesting or getting hung up with describing every damn detail of a particular neighborhood or running into a logical problem that, considering popular culture in general, only i'm going to ever notice

and i definitely will want the input of women, and i know a couple that already think it sounds great

[Trotskilicious]

Originally Posted by slunken

one of the cops is maybe a dog a la turner and hooch

uplifted genetically modified dogman

[Trotskilicious]

trapped between dogness and personness

my story has a gorilla/man

[Luke de Spa]

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

i'm not sure why but i have this block about thinking my plots aren't interesting or getting hung up with describing every damn detail of a particular neighborhood or running into a logical problem that, considering popular culture in general, only i'm going to ever notice

if i were to approach this in my day job, as a designer, my first inclination would to be pretty ruthlessly utilitarian about it. basically, how sophisticated does your explanation of something need to be in order for your target audience to not question it too much?

first question to be answered: what's your target audience?

etc. etc.

i can't speak for how successful this approach would be for writing fiction but it certainly has helped me when doing product development or designing interfaces. for a given audience, "acceptable fidelity" ultimately is more important than (a more abstract) "high fidelity", essentially

[slunken]

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

uplifted genetically modified dogman

pretty much

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

mine sprawls relentlessly with no real narrative focus so i can't even say how far i'm through it because so much of it is plot skeletons, notes, partial scenes, ideas, and etc

i'm not sure why...

i think this can be part of the fun. i think of mine (and handle mine) basically as very short stories that all have an over-arcing theme. some of it may be very related to the main theme but some of it may just be wallpaper and tone. either way its constructing a universe.

[slunken]

Originally Posted by Luke de Spa

first question to be answered: what's your target audience?

personally i stifle myself if i think about this too much

[slunken]

that is a downfall, i realize

[slunken]

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

trapped between dogness and personness

my story has a gorilla/man

so far i've just been playing with the idea that sometimes he's just a regular dog but sometimes he does human cop things like arrest people.

all my bad guys look like balding late-30s office workers so far

[Tchocky]

Spent a night getting the DLC episodes for Mass Effect 3, and then my PS3 yellow-lighted right after I started playing the damn game. Gonna be out of commission for a bit; getting it serviced later this week.

I never played any of the Mass Effect games until the Trilogy box set came out because (until recently) I didn't have a computer that was good at running games and I don't have an Xbox. I wanted to play through the whole series beginning to end, but I couldn't until the box set came out cos the first game was never released on the PS3 until then. Totally worth the wait though. I think Bioshock was the last game that I enjoyed this much.

The first game was a good blueprint, though the whole was definitely better than the sum of its parts. A slow start, cookie-cutter sidequests, driving around planets in the Mako (way to pad the game out, BioWare), a cluttered inventory system, buggy gameplay (Fun drinking game: every time the sound cuts out while you're playing ME1, take a shot), hit-and-miss shooting mechanics...I almost gave up on the game fairly early on; found myself asking "What was all the hype about?" about a quarter of the way in. I'm glad I stuck with it, though. The story really picks up after you rescue Liara, and the last third or so of the game was excellent.

ME2, aside from the godawful and boring probing planets crap, trimmed the fat and streamlined the game, making it much more enjoyable to play. Far less buggy, better voice acting, better combat, and although the core plot itself wasn't as good as the core plot of ME1, I think the characters in the ME2 were a little more interesting (I did miss Liara and Wrex, though; Lair of the Shadow Broker FTW). Loved Jack, Garrus, Mordin, and Tali.

The part in ME2 where you get Shepard drunk on the Citadel might be the first time a video game has ever made me LOL:



The little I've had a chance to play in ME3 makes me think it's gonna be better than the first two put together. And Liara's back! Yay!

Although I kinda know what happens at the end of ME3, I'm reserving judgment on the ending until I actually get a chance to play it.

[Tchocky]

Also...

http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/...65/788/2f9.jpg

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lh...jow9o1_500.jpg

http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/ma...iara-tsoni.jpg

[Sonic Johnny]

So I finally got back on the Xbox bandwagon today, four years after my last machine got RROD'd. Came with Forza 4 (blah), Halo 10th Anniversary (meh), Mass Effect 3 (i'm hesitant to start it cause I never played any of the other games - should I play it on its own or go from the start later?), RAGE (which I played on PC and was pretty nonplussed by), Just Cause 2 (YES!), and Skyrim (which I am choosing not to play cause I lost like 40 hours of my life to it on PC). Got a list of a few titles I'm definitely going to pick up (Assassin's Creed 3, Dishonoured, NBA13, Bioshock Infinite) - any other recommendations?

[Order 66]

i know you said youre getting bio infinite but you'll definitely want to get it before somebody spoils it. i just finished my 3rd playthrough... one of the greatest experiences i've ever had, and i'm not just talking about "gaming".

as for other stuff... i dunno. i'm more of a PC gamer these days. Spec Ops: the Line is something i'm playing right now... gameplay wise its nothing special but it has a really interesting story. its basically apocolypse now/heart of darkenss in Dubai. one of the most mindfuck-ish games i've played. dunno how it looks on 360 though... far cry 3 was alright but i regret paying full price for it.... i notice you haven't mentioned fallout: new vegas. if you've played skyrim i'm guessing you've played new vegas. but in case you haven;t, you'll definitely want to play that

oh yeah and sleeping dogs was fun