Games Journalism 2018: We're taking it back!

Instead IV dealt with overall health though and not clearing out all your forests and jungles helped add to that health with one tech… I forget which.

Sadly, you’re right that many of the signataries did it “crossing their fingers” :(

The problem is that a “dark age” is not perceptible while it’s happening. In hindsight we can see that the long-term impact of overgrazing and deforestation, the evolution of disease organisms and humans/crops/livestock’s resistance to them, and the fluctuating output of the sun were important factors in history, but how do you put them into a game? Maybe like how winter works in Endless Legend? How would players react to that?

If you want to see the original piece attempting to expose Sid Meier’s wicked agenda, Campster made a video about it three years ago. This guy at RPS is basically taking his ideas, dumbing them down, and presenting them in whinier form.

Yes and no. See King Alfred’s preface to Gregory’s Pastoral Care for someone in the Dark Ages explicitly addressing the loss of knowledge.

That said, you also see people in what are considered to be golden ages doing much the same thing. See many of Horace’s odes, for instance.

Also as regards our current situation, the Sixth Mass Extinction is in relatively common usage.

This. Endless Legend managed the “global change of temperature” really well, though winter is easier to design both visually and thematically. Still, a similar design could be sufficient.

Also, isn’t Alpha Centauri a good example of “global change” implemented well?

“Ignorance” causes violence?? There are a lot of reasons for violence, some of them even justified as discussed here, but not sure “ignorance” is even in the top 30.

Lengthy but good.

An actually interesting, although not without lazy flaws, article:

and definitely worth discussing here imho.

I found the article a little sparse. It didn’t have much to say.

I’m amazed that I remember all the quests they talk about in the article though. Even the little minor quests. It just goes to show how different Witcher 3 was compared to my regular media diet, where most stuff I consume i tend to forget after a couple of years (unless I read the book multiple times, or watch the movie/show multiple times, or play the game multiple times). And yet, I played The Witcher 3 once, and I remember all those scenes.

I’ve noticed articles on spring, the sea and now religion in gaming in the past week. Something in the air?

Sorry. Chili last night.

Update your lazy Dark Souls reference bingo card.

When I played those PS2 era Japanese games like Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden and Onimusha and others, I always had this sense that I was missing something. It’s the same feeling that you get when you watch or play a sequel, and there’s references to things you don’t understand. You feel like there’s something you missed, something that, if you’d seen it or played it, would allow you to understand this game. I finished Ninja Gaiden on hard, finished Onimusha on Normal, and I even after finishing, I still had that nagging feeling. If only I’d played the previous non-existent game in the series, I would have been able to understand what was going on better.

With Devil May Cry, I figured maybe it would give me better insight into why the camera made me want to throw the controller every 5 seconds at the screen, even though I’d never had that feeling before in my life.

I think I lasted about 35 minutes into Devil May Cry. My friends watching from the couch all thought it was torture even to watch me play. If only I’d played the previous non-existent game in the series, I would have understood why I was asked to cross a room by going left, and then right as the camera changed, and then upward as the camera changed again.

That’s the problem with Devil May Cry in particular: it spent most of its life being developed as a new title in a completely different series, so the previous game did exist in a sense, but it was called Resident Evil 3. That’s why the camera is so bad and everything feels so much worse than in the later games in the series.

I read a Rock Paper Shotgun article this morning interviewing the devs of Two Point Hospital, a “spiritual successor” to Theme Hospital.

The article is long but really doesn’t seem to have much content. Maybe that’s because the devs are using the old strategy of talking about what they want to rather than what the interviewer is actually asking.

This isn’t intended to be a knock at RPS, exactly, but is anyone actually interested in articles like this? A more candid interview could be really fascinating, but this one comes across as mainly PR puffery.

Not exactly a journo article, but this Gamasutra blog is interesting:

“Enemies Can’t Be Cute”

Sometimes it’s straightforward. You want to kill hundreds of Nazis in Wolfenstein because 1) Nazis are a culturally-appropriate villainous group of people and 2) because they have their faces covered, taking away any human connection you may have. Protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz wants to kill Nazis because their authoritarian and fascist policies cause the death of millions.

Games like Ni No Kuni, Dragon Quest, Hyperdimension Neptunia and Pikmin beg to differ.

Enemies can be cute provided you kill/disable them in cute ways.

Seriously, who wants to kill this? Why would you ask me to?

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