The Bard

Yeah my problem is that I start it up every few weeks, die, and immediately quit out because I just don't have the patience for it right now . If I made any sort of effort I could get through it in one sitting, but it's so boring that I can't be fucked.

I still truly can't be arsed getting through Sen's Fortress. Dark Souls is a game I really like, but I don't have the sort of lifestyle that can tend to the level of couch dwelling focus you need to get anywhere with that game. I'll start playing it again when I go stay with my parents over the summer; all my basic human needs taken care of, I'll finally have time to finish it. Really looking forward to this on PC though.

I saw Dead Poet's Society for the first time since I was fourteen (I was on a bus in Berlin listening to Guns N' Roses and insisting someone swap this sissy shit for Terminator 2) about a week ago and it's pretty much me all over. Boarding school life as imagined from the perspective of an overly sentimental literature graduate, loved it so much. Particularly loved the way it portrayed the aphasia that catches even the most outspoken and eloquent person when their childhood dreams are faced with parental pragmatism.

Yeah we couldn't get a Youtube account hooked up for some reason. Cheers for the tip btw, think I might just record on my PC next time, getting garageband to record is a long winded ass process.

That went very well, I talked too much, but what can you do. Had some really good discussions about the various games we've currently been playing, now we just need to figure out how to record from google hangouts via garageband.

My and the woman companion have been working out how to bake stuff with non-wheat flower or dairy, and it's actually been fairly successful. Would love to give this a go and get a few more things in out repertoire; craving some triple chocolate cookies at the moment! @Daft, your marble cake on instagram looked so good I want to take it to a hotel room with a bottle of cialis.

Planned obsolescence? It'll likely force you to buy these games again further down the line when they become available as part of a virtual console type platform on future consoles or as remastered HD versions. The thing with some of the games you mentioned, and with a lot of games that do well commercially or critically is that they're released as part of a GOTY pack a year down the line with the initial patches included in the hard copy. Doesn't apply to all games obviously, but I hope Microsony have some sort of contingencies in place to deal with this sort of thing, or maybe we'll only be able to play old 360/PS3 games on modded consoles that can access updates and patches hosted on third party servers.

Also, if we plan to record an hour's podcast, we should aim to be there twenty minutes beforehand so we can check levels, and set up back up recordings in case one fails etc.

Seem to be more active on the forum these days, so I'll likely come

@Goron_3. Idle Thumbs is pretty much the only gaming podcast I can stomach listening to continuously. Everyone on there is outrageously intelligent, all of them have worked on or are working at game studios at present, so they can decompact what makes a game the way it is in a way the explains its design principles, and most of them have been in the press side/ are writers, so their explanatory powers are pretty much unparalleled in the gaming podcast world. They're also always fucking hilarious. There's also GFW Radio, which is to me, the best podcast I've ever listened to in any subject, but it ended in 2008. There was a lengthy discussion they had on Braid which I've been meaning to send you for ages but never go around to, I'll hook you up at some point, you'll love it.

I busted my leg about eight months ago over the summer, and didn't go to the gym for that entire period. Have just done two full gym cycles, having gone a total of eight days over the last two weeks and fuck, I'm so out of shape. My bench press has gone down from ten reps on 80kg to eight reps on 60kg. It's going to take at least a month before I'm not sore after every workout.

@Rummy, yeah, I don't think podcasts are something that should command the entirety of your attention. They're something I tend to listen to when I'm doing the dishes, or playing some disposable iOS game. It's natural to get a bit restless if you're just sitting there doing fucking nothing, in the way that might not be with music; music is naturally engaging, sometimes listening to people yammer about the minutia of their playing habits can get a little long winded.

Cool, I've never listened to those guys. I think if this goes ahead, one of the best things will be that everyone is used to a different style of podcasting, and a different way of looking at games. Hopefully some great conversations will come from it! Also, going to jump the gun and suggest Resident Evil Zero for first game club! .

Out of curiosity, do any of you guys listen to Idle Thumbs?

Tragic magic. I take it you also live in a shitsled. A burner bonzo. A methmobile. @Sheikah That's fair enough, I guess we just look at games differently. I subject games to the same standards that I do film and literature, where age doesn't ever mean obsolescence. For the record, my complaint with those games isn't a technological one, it's to do with level, weapon and control design.

It's not a matter of whether it's right, it's that we just do re-evaluate for most things. The things that tend to be most enshrined in our memory are things that we did have very emotional early experiences with, and we don't want any progress in our intelligence or knowledge to interfere with them. If someone came to you today and asked you to refer them to the "best" FPS available today, would you recommend them Goldeneye or Perfect Dark? If you did, that person would be entirely certain you'd puffed purple before you made that recommendation. By contrast, if someone came to you to ask you for a good action adventure game, you likely wouldn't bat an eyelid in recommending Super Metroid or Link to the Past, and rightly so; those games are, in design terms very well put together (if you want me to substantiate this further, I will). That's the way I look at the situation. Then again, games are still an art medium. Who am I to say you should read Alexandr Solzhenitsyn instead of Stephenie Meyer?

Yes because comparing entertainment media to confections is very much comparing like for like There are certain childhood joys, such as beating off to lingerie catalogs, which the wisdom of age disabuses you of. Fuck man, I used to spend hours upon hours playing the games that came build into my Sky satellite box. Just because an experience tweaks a compulsive mind, or that you have an engaging experience with something as a child, doesn't mean that you can't re-evaluate the thing's worth when you have recourse to a larger pool of experiences. Those games were enjoyable in a certain era, because of a dearth of similar experiences, just like smashing rocks with other rocks must have been enjoyable to Pleistocene cave dwellers. What I'm saying is Perfect Dark and beating off to a lingerie catalog are pretty much the same shit; thirty furiously frustrating minutes followed by chafing in your extremities and overbearing shame. Oh the shame.

Beating all the levels on ET is also something of a feat. It's also a bit of an inferential leap to go from a games difficulty to a meaningful representation of the skill it requires, rather than just the blunt force of throwing yourself at those levels again and again until you learn the precise way to do them. That's not skill, it's rote learning. Skill is what occurs when you apply learned rule sets to novel situations. If you enjoy them then that's cool. For me, they're unplayable for any sort of gratification other than going back to see how unrecognizably far the genre has come. Compare that to Mario 64 or OOT; still the best games in their respective series/ genres.

The idea that those games accommodate any sort of skill gradation is about as ridiculous as their overbearing auto aim, awful weapon balancing, stupid control schemes and the rest of it. Nostalgia does not a good game make. They were fun because they allowed for a unique social experience, but they're still terrible, terrible games.

I think that's mostly because Goldeneye and Perfect Dark play like utter shit.

I'll keep your objections in mind when I buy my fourth copy of the game when it comes out on PC later this month . Fair enough, I'll get back to weaponising my garam masala. The jihad must be fought on multiple fronts Baboooor.

A really good idea would be doing a game club every month, where we say we're going to play through this one game and then come together to talk about it. I'd rather that it wasn't games that everyone's already played and talked to death about though, perhaps more esoteric games would be a better bet, or maybe even well known games providing that some members of the cast haven't played them before? Like, instead of Metroid Prime, we could do Echoes for example?

Oh ok, maybe I misinterpreted, but my point still stands; he can play the game again, judging it on its own merits and maybe enjoy it for what it is without saying that his initial playthrough was "wrong," but rather just less propitious to a good time . It seems that the whole of his problem with it comes from him trying and failing to fit Resi 4 into the model that defined the first few games in the series. There's nothing wrong with not liking a game because the way you played it wasn't fun; it's part of that game's design to allow that style of play. What I think is kind of unhelpful is judging it entirely on the basis of attitudes that you bring to it from outside.

I'm not telling him he played it wrong, I'm telling him he refused to play it through all the way because of pre-existing expectations, which is different. In fact, he said he enjoyed it, but then doubled back on that assertion, which I interpreted as him wilfully misrepresenting his initial, ingenuous opinion because it doesn't jive with his idea of what a Resi game is and should have been. The mentality one has is undoubtedly a big influence. My point is that no given experience of a game is necessarily "wrong" because it isn't an interpretation of a stable experience. The game experience is created in a different way every time someone plays the game; and by this I mean the actual things that happen in the game are created by the consonance of design and interaction, unlike in a book for example, where you might bring a greater breadth of background knowledge into it every subsequent time you read it, but the series of words and hence the ideas that comprise the text stay the same. So the way you felt when you played it separate times might be different, but neither of those playthroughs is illegitimate. I was simply prescribing a (complete) playthrough for Baboooor that ignores its heritage, because I think it's a really fun game and I want other people to share that experience, not because I think his experience is illegitimate in differing from mine.

It was the most addictive game I've ever played, everything from the core gameplay where skillshots to different body parts actually matter and have an effect on the way any given scenario progresses, to the way environments are stitched together with an absurd level of geometrical cohesion. How weapon upgrades were handled (which formed the largest part of my motivation for playing through multiple times) in a cumulative way, and secrets like putting collectables together to make more valuable collectables... everything about that game was perfection to me. And it may not have been horror on the level of the first few games in the series, but it had a tension to it that was real in a way that it wasn't in the original games, because there it came from your inability to properly control your character, whereas in Resi 4, it came from the very real threats posed by your enemies. I remember actively thinking while playing through Resi 1 that any given scenario would have been so much more placid if I could actually maneuver my character without bumping into a pole every five seconds. If your terror is coming from input difficulties, then that just seems like shit design to me. I felt the quicktime events were pretty sparse and inoffensive, and you had fucking ages to react to them. I don't get the culture of telling people they "played it wrong." The whole thing that makes videogames unique is that they cater to a variety of playstyles. If your medium hinges on played input, it seems illegitimate to then go and say, no, your experience is invalid. Because it's not like he can then go and change it; the experience he had is the experience he had, and he's going to base his interpretation on it, and it's a cop out to then de-legitimise because it doesn't match the way you interpreted it. It's not like film or novels where you're 100% certain that the person you're talking to had the same experience you did. Also, the playing of a game doesn't really have much to do with the way you interpret its tone does it? If he didn't like the fact that it wasn't a horror game at heart, that really doesn't impact his playing of it. Babooor, heed the call, why the fuck did you not like this game. It doesn't jive. I don't buy that it's just because it was "called" Resident Evil, you're flip flopping between saying it was fun, but that it wasn't fun? I think if you'd given it a chance you'd have fucking loved it, and a lot of why you say you don't like it probably comes from you having rationalised afterwards that it doesn't fit into what you know as traditionally making up a Resi game. Play that shit again, I guarantee you it's one of the most rewarding experiences of all time.