googoogjoob

There is no way for an Inform game to know whether or how many times you've saved, as far as I know. I don't think the source for Curses has ever been released, but it's possible to disassemble z-code games in a way that pulls out all the potential text you can see in the game (and any unused text), and if there was an actual last lousy point, it would almost certainly have been discovered in the time since the game came out. I'm almost certain the "missing" point is a deliberate poetic echo of the end of the story. I wouldn't say I judge the whole game on the last point thing. I still think it's a generally very good, well-implemented puzzlefest adventure game, and it's historically important for the IF renaissance it led to. It just doesn't really connect with me as a work of art in the way I find most satisfying. (Also, as interesting as the themes of the game potentially are, you are still going to spend most of the game fiddling with, like, the frustrating sliding-block puzzle, or typing out PUT STAFF IN SARCOPHAGUS. CLOSE SARCOPHAGUS. OPEN SARCOPHAGUS. TAKE STAFF a dozen times.) I think the romance with Black is good. It's underwritten rather than tastelessly overwritten in the way a lot of genre fiction romance is, and you can read as much or as little into it as you want. This might be considered a problem in that it leaves the romance sort of half-integrated with the main story of the game, but this doesn't really bother me a lot. Having the characters' genders remain resolutely undefined is a nice touch, and surprisingly progressive and tasteful for an adventure game from 1995. It's also the sort of thing you can only really do in a purely text-based medium. PS it's probably too late to save this topic, and all the stuff about art and IF should probably get shaved off into a separate topic.

I mean a) you end up not actually finding the map the search for which set off the entire game, and then b) there's the meta-joke of the omitted traditional "last lousy point" so you end the game with one point less than the claimed maximum (unless you kiss your aunt immediately before ending the game, and end the game before the temporary points this gives you wear off, in which case you can end the game with a few points above the maximum). The former comes across to me as a little bit precious, and the latter is sort of dated by the near-death of scoring systems in IF which happened within a few years of Curses's release. I would define puzzlebox storytelling to mean stories could easily be told in a straightforward, coherent way, but which are deliberately told in an obfuscated and difficult way either in the usually-misguided belief that this will make the story itself more interesting, or in a cynical ploy to drive consumer engagement. Part of the definition has to hinge on there being one "correct" reading of the story which must be deduced by the consumer(s) from the hints and clues to it in the work. I do not think a work which deliberately disavows the existence of any authoritative interpretation can be a puzzlebox. (Where definition gets tricky is with something like Lost, where the writers clearly intended at some point for the story to be tied together and for each of the pieces to mean something, but then kept adding to or changing the intended story, and eventually failed utterly for a variety of reasons and had to throw out a lot of the hints. The "correct" reading as ever-receding chimera: a bunch of puzzle pieces that ultimately do not fit together.)

Implication/explication can cut both ways for me, I think. Curses is, to me, an almost-interesting mixture of an initial setting and premise I do not care about at all (a crusty manor belonging to a house of eccentrics; finding a map in the attic), the eclectic fantasy (and intermittently sci-fi) elements, a bunch of lightly-implemented scenarios strung together with very light plot elements, and then the joke ending (spoilers for this 25+ year old game) which never worked for me. Jigsaw means more to me because I'm more invested in 20th century history than in slightly twee British fantasy (and I think Jigsaw has generally better puzzles and a more consistent tone). Even though no given scene or setting in Jigsaw is particularly deep or fleshed-out (except maybe the Titanic), I know and can recognize each historical scene, and the knowledge and feelings I already have about these scenes, I guess, lets me bring what I already have and sort of meet the game halfway, so the game means more to me. (Putting part of this another way, you could say Curses's metatextuality is oriented towards TS Eliot and Greek and Egyptian myth, which don't mean a lot to me, while Jigsaw's is oriented towards real history- and Lenin's sealed train or the ULTRA codebreaking operation mean more to me than the story of Andromeda ever did or could.) So Far has some beautifully-written settings, but you only ever see them briefly and in no real depth. All Roads takes the unifying mechanic/image of So Far (traveling via shadows) but puts it to more focused, deeper use. Neither game actually explicitly spells out its story, but So Far is sort of a series of memorable but disconnected dream-like images and settings, while All Roads uses its little hints and implications to limn the silhouette of a bigger story. At the end of each game the player is left with a lot of questions, but in So Far you get the impression that the questions may not have answers, and if they do, they are irrelevant; while in All Roads you get the impression that the questions do have answers, which you might be able to deduce, and which might make the narrative more interesting or meaningful. Both of these have a sort of beauty, but I find the latter more compelling. (Although I'd distinguish the latter sort of thing- a story which might benefit from close reading or multiple readings- from the increasingly-popular "puzzlebox" mode of storytelling, which I hate, where the narrative is deliberately obtuse but gives you a bunch of hints or clues, and the "fun" comes from simply attempting to work out what actually happened, preferably on Twitter or a popular forum for maximum exposure and buzz and free marketing. It's sort of a fine line between the types though.)

Jigsaw is so, so much better than Curses. There's a lot of IF I've enjoyed, but not a lot I would call good art... Jigsaw, Make It Good, All Roads. (Ingold is great. 80 Days was great but only sort of IF; Heaven's Vault looks great.) The Dreamhold, Spider and Web. All of Plotkin's games are sort of mechanically beautiful, but he's so much better at implying than at fleshing out interesting details that they only occasionally really connect satisfyingly. Maybe Aisle. I like or at least do not hate basically everything Emily Short's ever done but I think only Savoir-Faire is really great of her stuff.

I think Cliff Johnson's games, and also System's Twilight, have a sort of austere beauty to them as a result of their total dedication to being what they are, and how well-crafted they are. (But also: I played them like 15 years ago and have no real interest in playing them ever again.) A problem with video games being great art doesn't have anything to do with how old the artform is, I think, but is a result of several intersecting and complicating economic factors, which I was gonna explicate in detail but then I realized this post is already much too long so I excised it. It's more possible for small independent developers to make good art than big-budget established developers, but indie devs don't have the same resources (money, time, staff) to devote to something the way a big dev can. Another problem with video games as art is that most video game developers seem to be stuck conceptualizing video games as being, basically, movies shackled to crosswords. I think for a video game to be great art, form and function have to coincide perfectly, with the mechanical and thematic elements reinforcing each other to result in something greater than the sum of its parts. I think Cliff Johnson's games do a good (but relatively primitive) job of this insofar as they sort of slave the thematic elements to the mechanical elements in a way which I think is effective. I think Papers, Please is another good example of a game which has its mechanics and thematic elements perfectly tailored for each other, although it ultimately does not do anything particularly interesting with them. However, most games think of these elements as being essentially segregated, and use the thematic elements either as another little incentive to make the player keep playing (play more unrelated gameplay to see what happens next in the story!), or as an unrelated domain which has to exist to justify the game itself, or as an opportunity to communicate some story or message the developers cannot or do not know how to communicate via gameplay, or more often some combination of these. I hold out hope that eventually someone will manage to synthesize the two elements in a successful, satisfying way, though I have not yet played a game that does so. A last major problem, related to the prior problem, is that the games which do get praised for being good or great art tend to be crude melodramas stapled onto middling gameplay. The people who review video games professionally tend to be uh. Undiscerning would be the polite way to put it, I guess. Video game reviewers tend to be essentially hobbyists who are just glad to be getting paid to write their reviews. They might like or dislike a video game, but they tend to be very poor at explaining why they do or do not like it. Most of them have a sort of lingering defensiveness about whether or not games are a worthwhile thing to write about or dedicate your life to, and many are extremely eager to seize on any opportunity to argue games are "actually art" as a result. Both reviewers and popular audiences tend to favor works that manage to make them feel strong emotions, regardless of what those emotions are or how manipulatively or incoherently the game makes them feel these emotions (although this is also the case to an extent with popular cinema and literature). Video games has not yet developed the robust critical industry that literature or film or music have, which I think is necessary to a healthy artform. (Not that plenty of terrible films or books don't get released even with their artforms' established critical industries, but on the one hand good art criticism allows consumers to work out their own tastes more clearly, and allows artists to learn more effectively from the strengths and weaknesses of other artists; and on the other hand it would be very difficult to find a professional literary critic willing to defend something like The Da Vinci Code as great art, while it is distressingly easy to find professional video game critics willing to go to the mat to defend something as simultaneously dull and reprehensible as Bioshock Infinite as one of the best video games ever, and a crowning achievement of art.) As long as it's possible for a video game (The Last of Us) to get extremely positive "buzz" (however many dozens of Game of the Year awards!) and extreme critical acclaim (95% great on Metacritic!) by being essentially a mediocre third-person shooter awkwardly coupled with a sub-mediocre melodrama plot that rehashes and recycles decades of existing fiction, there is no real economic or social incentive for game developers, already in a risky hit-based business (a large majority of the profits are made by a small minority of the releases, and most games lose money for the publisher), to try to make truly original or brilliant work. (Not that there aren't those who try anyway.) (Sidebar: some games which I think are good art: the Blackwell series of adventure games; The Real Texas; Night in the Woods; Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile; The Deadly Tower of Monsters; the first third of Knee Deep; Windosill.) (Excited for someone to violently disagree with my theses.)

Well, when I say great art, I mean, uh. Art which creates in the consumer an awareness of the Sublime, in the Romantic sense, which is sort of undefinable, and is totally subjective to the consumer. There are books I think are great art, there are pieces of music, there are paintings, etc, but my experience with video games is that maybe none of them ever actually reach that point, and thus might be entertaining or interesting, but I would not describe any of them as "great art". But again, this is a totally personal perspective, and I am sure there are video games that fit the same role in some peoples' experience as a particular work of art does in my experience, and apart from that, what each person would describe as "great" art is unique as well. My former comment should be understood in light of this. Anyway this is all tangential to the topic, I think.

Usually you can disarm one mine, then quickly click on a second nearby mine and disarm it before it goes off, but you can only do this in the real-time non-combat mode, and it might take a few tries.

If I had a quarter for every horrible speculative fiction sex scene I've read... The thing about video games (even more so than art in general) is that in my experience, very very few are actually what I would describe as good art, and almost none, if any, are great art. So, at the end of the day, what I want from a video game tends to be just enjoyable escapism rather than insight on the human experience. A romantic subplot can be fun and endearing if done well. But, there are few things more excruciating to read (or play through) than an overlong, poorly-written love scene. The romances in Bioware RPGs tend to be competently written and fun. They are not brilliant or meaningful, but that's fine because they're in games that are not, on the whole, brilliant or meaningful. The best they can hope to be is satisfying and memorable. But, as I mentioned above, it takes dedicated work from a professional writer to get each potential romance into shape and ensure that each major character is consistently characterized and has a consistent voice. The companion writing in the Avadon games, and the romance subplot in 2, in my opinion mostly fails to meet the bar of being fun or memorable, and so has to be considered a failure. Unless Jeff plans to hire another writer to work on things like this, or to take twice as long to write the games himself, I would prefer that in future Spiderweb games he sticks to his strong suits (imaginative worldbuilding, memorable eccentric minor characters).

I am not sure there are any video game writers or designers I know of who have the delicacy to write a really great, convincing love story, and I am not sure it is possible to systematize romance in a way that is remotely satisfying in anything but the most simplistic, escapist way. Also, it's worth noting that in big-budget RPGs like Bioware's, it's standard for each companion character/romance interest to be written by a separate writer, so each one can get enough attention to be developed satisfactorily, and so that each one feels different from the others. A major problem with the Avadon games, I think, was that since the games are written by one person, it wasn't possible for each companion, or the love interest in 2, to get enough attention and care put into them, so they tend to be a little flat and harp on one note in their characterization. I think it's better to simply not have a romance subplot than to have a half-baked one.

Almost certainly begin development, given that Queen's Wish is currently in dev.

Shaper medicine seems to be fairly advanced, and in the area of healing physical wounds (that is, as opposed to fighting disease or body-systemic issues, like Alwan's), they seem to be capable of a lot more than in real life: I know it's maybe shaky to extrapolate from game mechanics to lore, but healing craft being considered a Shaper art, and healing spells drawing on essence, imply that Shapers are willing to use some minor shaping on themselves and others to, for example, close up a laceration, or set a broken bone and speed up its healing. Thus, I suspect that the number of cases of Shapers actually losing limbs would be vanishingly small. However, if a Shaper actually did manage to lose a limb, I think it'd probably be pretty heavily tabooed to actually shape up a new arm or leg. Part of this is because of the demonstrated Shaper aversion to (visible) human body modification, but also because I do not think a Shaper could simply shape up an arm: Shapers are never shown as being capable of simply shaping body parts, only full living beings. When a Shaper experimenter wants a glaahk eye, they have to shape the whole glaahk, then kill the creature for its eye. Creating a prosthetic limb would require shaping a human (EXTREMELY taboo), or shaping a humanoid creation, killing it, and trying to transplant the creation's limb to a human body, which is probably even worse than the self-shaping of like the Geneforge, because it'd result in a huge undeniable desecration of the human form. As for aging and so on: there don't seem to be any unnaturally old Shapers in the game world. Having superior medicine incorporating low-level shaping, as they do, I'd imagine they'd probably tend to live a good bit longer than non-Shapers do in their (pre-modern medicine) world, but I doubt they would be able to artificially extend their lifespans using Shaping in a way that would not be tabooed. They might be able to perform simple cataract surgery, which would be licit, but I doubt also that they'd be able, even if they wanted, to shape away problems like dementia or Parkinson's, etc. The brain is so delicate and complex that we in the real world have no solutions to these problems, and the Shapers' understanding of biology seems to be mostly intuitive and nontechnical, as seen in how knowledge of DNA is restricted to a very few, mostly rogue, experimenters in the world of the games. Some creations are deliberately made to have higher or lower intelligence, but this seems to be more the result of many, many iterative generations of creations with small near-blind tweaks made to each generation, and probably also selective breeding programs, like weird fantasy dog breeding. (That said- shaping COULD cure dementia, but only very slowly, and by probably killing many hundreds of test subjects, because the Shapers do not have the theoretical framework or practical abilities to be more precise or less intrusive.)

In commercial video game development, the rule of thumb is the budget increases by $100,000 per additional employee per year (covering not just their salary but also equipment, training, etc).

I'm sure Spiderweb could hire another employee to work on a remake or whatever. The problem is that said employee would only be able to work on that one game, because all the profit from the game that'd go to paying for their salary would normally be ploughed back into the budget for the next game.

The remakes are confirmed to be the next thing Spiderweb will release after the current project, Queen's Wish. It'll probably follow the pattern the Avernum remakes did: one remake will come out a time, alternated in release with other games. I don't think it's ever been stated anywhere whether the remakes will cover the entire Geneforge series, or just Geneforge 1-3 (which use a much creakier and more dated engine), but I guess that by the time the remakes potentially come out, Geneforges 4 and 5 could be as dated as 1-3 are now. The chances of the games being merged into one are basically zero, mainly because Spiderweb's business model has been to put out one game ever year-to-year-and-a-half, with no span of two years ever having passed since 1995 without at least one Spiderweb release, and each game funded at least partially out of the proceeds of the prior game. Making a remake of all five games at once would take at least three years, and probably more, going by the rate the (new) Avernum remakes were made, and would require a much larger initial outlay of cash, which would disrupt the cycle. Carrying over choices between games, via imported saves or whatever, is also probably impossible, because that'd require every Geneforge after 1 to be rewritten on a scale much larger than the scale of the rewrites of Exile -> Avernum or Avernum -> Avernum remakes.

I replayed Avernums 4 through 6 in the past month or so, and honestly the quality of life stuff is the least of the problems with them.

slarty you gotta update this thread too. it's more interesting than the silly rating thread. also you gotta go back and fix every place you said "manifred" instead of "manfred", like you confused the names manfred and winifred

The EftP changelog hasn't updated, but there's a recent documented change to CS: Version 1.1 - June 4, 2018 Upgrades the game to a 64-bit engine. So I would guess EftP got the same change.

Having a lot of factions is interesting in theory, but unlike in Geneforge where each game is mostly open and you can aid factions depending on your ideological preferences, in the Avadon games you're basically on rails and your options are "do what you are ordered" and "do what you are ordered, but grudgingly". 2 is the only one of them with any sort of actually branching story depending on your choices, and the "branch" essentially amounts to playing through a different map halfway through the game.

That's the new $10,000 backer tier.

Maybe I'm just burnt out by fantasy RPGs but this sounds so. So generic. I am so tired.

Rate: Matter-eater Lad.

On the one hand, this is true (Yttrium, Ytterbium, Erbium, Terbium)... on the other hand, is this actually worse than Samarium, named after samarskite, embarrassingly named after a minor Imperial Russian bureaucrat, Vassily Samarsky-Bykhovets?

Your favorite fiction book Your favorite nonfiction author Your favorite and least favorite chemical elements.

Approximately 20 million dead, the population of China wouldn't regain its pre-war population level until well into the 20th century, and you still rate it above Wings, pirates, and Clippy. Rating it above Dickens and Queen is acceptable, however.

To be fair, Horatian and Juvenalian are Roman satirical modes, while Menippean is Greek and predates the others by centuries. So some overlap is forgivable, I think. Also: Your favorite superhero Your least favorite superhero C Auguste Dupin The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Kim Stanley Robinson Ferrets Otters Stoats Match Game