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That just means Chris Charla/ID@Xbox threw them some bucks. Or you’re saying that’s been Microsoft’s taste for exclusives?
please do this because im keeping up with this one and you are killing me
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Sorry, im trying to be appropriately snarky (as opposed to inappropriately) but i have recently realized that i just really fucking hate death of the author, man.
MAYBE I’LL MAKE A THREAD ABOUT IT!
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moving now, sorry for delay. please engage!
yeah, it’s almost surreally predictable – you can take two games that seem to have similar genre and similar aesthetic intent and microsoft will almost inevitably fund the more on-the-nose one
Finally played this last night, and I guess I don’t see the issue with player agency. It’s true that the choices you’re presented with are mostly meaningless alternate paths and simple questions of thoroughness in tracking down all details and notes, but at least for me, limiting the player’s perspective to a viewpoint character with only nominal involvement in the story you’re investigating doesn’t undermine its effectiveness as a game. At least tracking down the recordings is what Amy is actually on the station to do; it’s certainly no worse than most RPGs in which the characters are making decisions that affect the balance of power in the world while you-the-player handle the nitty-gritty of their provisioning, equipment, wildlife extermination and the occasional violent encounter with soldiers or other humanoid agents.
I’m also having trouble imagining this story working in other formats. Which is not to say that it’s impossible to adapt, but these characters would need more biographical info or documented interactions to work in prose, and I feel like Felix’s complaint that they’re little more than archetypes would be even more true in a dramatic performance of this story.
None of this is to suggest that my experience with the game was an unalloyed positive. The six crewmembers are a little gratuitously Good Simple Folk From All Walks Of Life, making the Venturis plot cartoonish in its wickedness. I also would have appreciated one of the crew complaining about the fact that apparently the station advertisements and Sergio’s announcements were prerecorded, since they still occured during AR recordings during the period when all communications were supposed to be impossible; it would have been nice to have them anticipate and sew up that potential issue.
Finally, I know achievements are the bane of verisimilitude, but I lost Tina’s skull in the hub after dunking it when I didn’t yet know I still needed it for Skeletina. I wound up searching the hub for like 30 minutes, and I must have examined every drink pouch and medicine packet like four times before I gave up and restarted. But! I probably would have forgotten about the developer commentary mode had I not done so, and just like the info placards in museums, I eat that shit up! Hurray for losing one-of-a-kind artifacts in zero G!
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early reviews of obra dinn are strongly suggesting it’s a much more interesting and interactive version of this concept, which is exciting
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This is a painfully accurate bottomline.
I have a copy of Tacoma on this computer for some reason. I just played an hour. If I wanted to read about labor problems for fun I would read selectbutton.net .
