Recent content by Akafrank

Thanks Shamus: Whenever people talk about how narrative in games can be overlooked I think of Vanquish. Loved that game, the mechanics and the play. Tuned out of the narrative in the tutorial, and never went back. I think the thing few were expecting is how much the narrative in ME3 mattered...

I am not sure if folks know that Yahtzee regards people who are not him as . . . (insert verbose derogatory statement). He was going to tell ME fans they were idiots because that's his thing. He is gaming's Don Rickles . Next week he will be instulting someone else for liking or doing or...

The other games that you mentioned had massive narrative issues prior to the endings. Bioshock had a good ending, it just happened before the game was over. Bioware can do what they wish with the ending. They have no obligation to the fans or the customers, but they do have an obligation to...

The people calling Bioware names and accusing them of wrongdoing are not helping anything. The people calling Bioware fans names and accusing them of wrongdoing are not helping anything. Games happen at the intersection of authorship and experience. Accusing one side or the other of being...

Thanks again Bob. Really interesting episode.

It is ME3's decided ambiguity, the deliberate obfuscation, and the fact that it, while telling you it is over, it is also telling you that you can never know how it actually ended. The end is or is not a dream, is or is not part of the game's reality. It is not that it ended poorly, it is that...

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/9/24/

Last I checked I wasn't. More or less suggesting promoting good as apposed to lauding bad. But I don't want to keep you, I am sure their is much to be damned, and so little time.

More and more it seems, gamers in fact prefer bemoaning games to playing them. It strikes me it would be smarter for the industry to spend less time and money developing good games and just release better effigies. Why take the effort to make better games, to do QA etc. when the audience is more...

More and more I wonder what it must feel like to be a developer. To spend years working on something, heart and soul, only to have your audience voraciously tear it apart, pick at every misstep, offer personal insult and in some cases threat. And then to have to go back to work the next day, if...

Any moral or altruistic values aside. If you want developers and publishers to dedicate more money, time and effort into protecting their work, if you want games to get more expensive, if you want fewer pc titles, if you want more invasive DRM's then piracy is definately the way to go.

Peggle

I believe, regardless of it's influence on the conversation, that piracy is in fact stealing. A team of designers, artists, programmers, administrators etc work 3+ years, creating something in which they have great personal and professional investment. They do this for the purpose of creating a...

I wish I could claim otherwise, but yes, I spend too much money on games. I really do. I spend it on games that intrigue me in some way, graphics, story, gameplay or hell if they just look fun. I am fascinated by what game designers do, this "from scratch" creation of substance, movement...

So are you suggesting that video games are somehow your inalienable right or do you apply this logic with every commercial product/service?