2008 GOTY awards

[Solver]

Would you say that playing with people you know is a requirement for enjoying it? Or do random people work just fine?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Solver
Would you say that playing with people you know is a requirement for enjoying it? Or do random people work just fine?

People you know certainly helps a lot. I've never played fully random (always at least one other friend), but it's still good. You just run into the occasional ******* and have to boot 'em is all.

In Left 4 Dead you truly have to work together to survive, so most people work pretty well. Strangers regularly revive me, heal me when my health is low, etc.

[DaShi]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Oh, meant to say I'm also glad about Spore, where the outcomes across the board show how right I was and how wrong certain other forum posters were.

I've got to give you credit for that one. I was expected Spore to be very good, but I'm so glad that I never bought it.

[DrSpike]

I wasn't including you as you saw the light in time.

[Solver]

I am somewhat surprised with Spore. I was not really expecting it to be a good game (or, more precisely, a game that I'd like) but I was expecting it to receive excellent reviews throughout and to be a strong contender for GOTY. As it is, looks like Fallout and Left4Dead will pick up most GOTY awards, and games like Mass Effect and GTA are also ahead of Spore.

[Felch]

Originally posted by Asher

The bugs were:
- it wasn't autosaving correct
- after I was killed by Megaton residents, it would respawn me in the middle of town where they would instantly kill me again. and again. and again. in an infinite loop.

If this is by design, then the game instantly disqualifies itself from GOTY.

I'm not sure about the autosaving problem you had. However, if you enter or leave a building, the game autosaves (this is the default setting, adjustable in options). My guess is, you were in a building, did something to piss off the town like stealing and then defending yourself, and when you left the building it autosaved. So everytime you died in town it would jump you back to the last save, which was as you were leaving the building with everybody mad at you.

It's certainly a debatable design decision to make the whole town attack you if you defend yourself from an angry victim of your own theft. However, not making the entire town mad at you would allow players to steal, kill the person they angered, and then move on without consequences. It's kind of a tricky situation to balance. In the Elder Scrolls they used town guards, who were often astonishingly omniscient. In the end, no game is perfect, but I think Fallout was a mighty fine effort.

Perhaps if the aggro in the town was linked to people witnessing the crime, or finding a dead body, or something. Also it would be nice if there were a way to placate people you've pissed off. In my experience, if you steal accidentally they just recover it. Once they're fighting you, it's pretty much to the death, unless you run away. In any event, it's an understandable criticism, but you should give it another shot when the patches and new content come out.

[Asher]

I'm not upset with the aggro.

I am upset that once they do aggro, the game was over. I had to revert to a manual save I made 30 minutes earlier.

Again, the issue isn't the aggro, it's the fact that they aggroed OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER ad naseum such that it BROKE THE GAME.

[DrSpike]

What Felch described is probably what happened, and as he said you can adjust how the autosave works in the options.

So if you want your 'natural' play style where you piss everyone off then perhaps you should exercise that option.

[Asher]

Stupid default options combined with stupid game mechanics does not GOTY make.

I'm not buying into your asskissing excuses. This is supposed to be a playable, open-world game. Being an evil jackass is supposed to be one of the possibilities. Stop pretending like it's not.

[snoopy369]

It's perfectly playable by nearly everyone else. Stop blaming user error on the devs

Heck, if you only lost 30 minutes, why are you even whining? I lose more than that all the time... when I forget to quicksave regularly, which I do, when I'm not a moron. When I forget to, then I deserve what I get

[Asher]

Originally posted by snoopy369
It's perfectly playable by nearly everyone else. Stop blaming user error on the devs

You're exaggerating. Most gaming forums are full of people upset with how buggy the game is. It is not user error to steal something in the game (which is permitted!), then have a combination of poor design decisions and bugs work together such that the ENTIRE GAME IS TOAST unless you were fortunate enough to make a manual save (which I had, a while before). That's not user error, that's dev error.

As for "reading the manual" and how it described this would happen, I bought the game off of Steam and I've no physical manual or even any idea if a PDF version was in the steam copy...

It is not a reasonable expectation that the entire ****ing town would instantly swarm you and kill you over and over and over and over again until the end of time because I opened someone's ****ing cupboard in their house. Ridiculous.

Heck, if you only lost 30 minutes, why are you even whining? I lose more than that all the time... when I forget to quicksave regularly, which I do, when I'm not a moron. When I forget to, then I deserve what I get

Because it's completely unacceptable, and apparently I have higher standards than you. I certainly have more games to play than you.

I was playing Fallout 3 til I ran into all the bugs (the crash to desktops + this annoying bug I keep talking about), and it immediately went to the bottom of my massive pile of "games to play".

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Asher
Stupid default options combined with stupid game mechanics does not GOTY make.

Funny how none of the many people that have played Fallout 3 either here or at other forums I read have had this problem.

I agree with Snoopy - stupid is as stupid does.

[Asher]

Originally posted by DrSpike


Funny how none of the many people that have played Fallout 3 either here or at other forums I read have had this problem.

I agree with Snoopy - stupid is as stupid does.

Your troll is tired, let it go. I'm not biting.

If you want to argue it is reasonable to expect for an entire town to immediately be summoned and kill you 1000 times over for opening someone's cupboard and thus ending the game unless you had a prior manual save, then you can feel free to, but that doesn't make me the stupid one.

PS: A cursory google will show you I am far from the only person to have had this happen. In every instance, you've got some eunuch trolls such as yourself who simply say "well now you know why you need multiple saves!"

Any game design that relies on users making constant and frequent saves is broken.

You have been owned, move along now. I tire of you.

[Solver]

I now wonder if the Valve guys are going to do one of those free weeks or something for Left 4 Dead. I looked at some of the articles about it - I'm still not a fan of zombie apocalypse type stuff but apparently the game itself is very good.

[Asher]

Out of interest, here's Counterglow's thread on the game. Title: Fallout 3 is the buggiest game I've ever bought

Issues so far-

1- Crashes like a bastard.

2- Prone to graphics breakthrough and flicker even after updating drivers.

3- Some side quests appear to be impossible to complete due to "Speak to...." tasks failing to trigger the necessary dialogue paths.

4- Disappearing/suicidal NPCs bugger up the plot.

Not impressed. Needs patching, badly.

awful game. i gave it away. i can talk to people in real life, why on earth would i want to have painfully slow and boring conversations with computer generated dick heads? that's not a game, that's torture!

the game for me went like this:

amazing intro
talking
talking
talking
leave underground place (thank god for that, no more pointless talking!)
pick up ammo
enter new place
talking
talking
talking
talking
talking
talking
talking
talking

give game to friend.

There's obvious quality problems to this game. Accept it, apologize, and kiss my ass profusely.

http://www.counterglow.com/forum/sho...threadid=41933

[Solver]

Counterglow == troll by definition

Although Fallout 3 does have a few bugs too many. I haven't experienced nearly as many as in previous Bethesda games, but there are still somewhat more than what I consider normal. At least none of them messed my game up.

[snoopy369]

That's worse than citing wikipedia for evidence in a political debate.

[Asher]

I've never seen such a sorry group of asskissers except for that time I accidentally posted in the Civ4 forum criticizing the game.

[Spaced Cowboy]

As a general rule, I usually save the game before doing something risky.

FO3 gets my nod for PC GOTY. I've been playing non-stop since I returned from China about 3.5 weeks ago.

I do feel myself getting close to the point where I'll finish the main quest soon, or at least push it on a bit.

[Felch]

Originally posted by Asher
Any game design that relies on users making constant and frequent saves is broken.

Did this remind anyone else of Yahtzee's review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky?

Zero Punctuation

I tried embedding, but it was acting up.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Asher

Your troll is tired, let it go. I'm not biting.

I would never troll you Asher.

I was however not convinced by the Counterglow 'argument'. Some people have complained about bugs but far less so on the 360 version it seems.

The only issue I've encountered is that it's sometimes a pain in the ass to select a certain body part using VATs. No lockups or crashes or problems with any quests.

[Asher]

Console versions are always less buggy.

[DrSpike]

Well then play your 360 version not your PC version, and don't get caught stealing again. You'll be fine.

[Asher]

I don't have a 360 version, you twit. When you buy the PC version, you get the PC version.

Did Ben Kenobi hack your account or something?

I've also no ****ing idea what you're talking about "caught stealing". You are channeling epic stupidity here.

[snoopy369]

You can't remember like twenty posts ago When your problems came from getting caught stealing

[Asher]

From the context of the sentence he was referring to PC/Xbox games, I thought he was accusing me of piracy.

I refuse to play open-ended games that don't let me be a badass. Such a restriction is one of many reasons why Fallout 3 is not GOTY.

[DirtyMartini]

once, when you were five
you enjoy steeeeealin'
it's just as simple as that

edit: xpost

[Spaced Cowboy]

If you were such a bad-ass, how comes the silly villagers kylt you?

LOL

There is a distinct difference between being a bad-ass and wanting to be a bad-ass.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Asher


From the context of the sentence he was referring to PC/Xbox games, I thought he was accusing me of piracy.

I refuse to play open-ended games that don't let me be a badass. Such a restriction is one of many reasons why Fallout 3 is not GOTY.

You haven't followed AliC's posts in the FO thread, have you. Her and her chainsaw-murderer friend...

And, as I said, I *killed* someone, at level 4 (not long in Megaton at all) and managed to do fine - I only reloaded from it because I wanted to be nice to people. You just got stuck because of your last save position being right next to the mercenary, I'd guess (the only guy who can kill you quickly in Megaton that I've met). If you want to complain about being unlucky enough to be caught by someone who can actually do something about your theft, go complain elsewhere... hereabouts there are actual penalties to being a bad-ass.

[Asher]

No matter how many times you guys try to excuse it, it's still either a bad bug or a bad design to perma-kill a person in the intro town for doing something the game permits. End of discussion. If you'd like to continue arguing stupidity, feel free to PM it to LOTM and have a gay old time discussing it.

Back to more interesting stuff:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/thum...r-game-of-life

LittleBigPlanet used to create 36-cell computer, game of life

By Ben Kuchera | Published: December 18, 2008 - 12:50PM CT

The levels people have been creating with the level-design tools in LittleBigPlanet have been interesting, but the video sent to us today may be the most impressive use of the game we've seen yet. Take a look.

"Since you wrote up the first LittleBigPlanet Computer, I thought you might take interest in this one. Some guys put together a 36-cell simulation of Conway's Game of Life inside a LittleBigPlanet level, and it's absolutely amazing," Nina wrote us. "If you actually go through and play the level, they provide you with all of the components—logic gates, their computer clock and edge detector, a multiplexer, etc—to build your own mechanical computer. "

The level is called "LittleBigLife" and the creator's PSN name is Corbu, in case you want to look it up yourself. The computer is running an artificial life simulation called the "Game of Life," created by Cambridge mathematician John Conway. Here are the rules:

For a space that is 'populated':
Each cell with one or no neighbors dies, as if by loneliness.
Each cell with four or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
Each cell with two or three neighbors survives.
For a space that is 'empty' or 'unpopulated'
Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated.

The rules look simple, but watching the "game" play out is always interesting, and the skill involved in making them work via LittleBigPlanet is pretty amazing; Media Molecule's title remains one of the most fascinating games of the year.