I think I'll pass. At least until someone plays through and tells me otherwise.

The vast majority of tearjerker examples you'll see in this thread stem from cutscenes or elaborate scripted events, which is kind of cheating. It's not the game making you sad, it's the story.

Tragedy is central in narrative, but in game rules? Having something spontaneously tragic happen to your avatar will typically result in loading a save and user frustration.

Are you sure you want to assuage your users' frustration by giving them Super Monkey Ball, of all things?

1) The art style in this cel-shaded trailer does not do the kinetic energy of the first trailer justice. I would ordinarily praise the more impressionistic aesthetic, but this one gave me E-ssurance vibes.

2) I hope they put some randomization into the first person animations. Watching the exact same animation of your body fill the screen every time you did the same move would be offputting.

The freedom afforded in GTA III was critical to that game, in that moment of time. Against a backdrop of 20-hour linear games (with branching paths, to be sure, but still a solid 20 hours between you and the end), the ability to drop into a game and just hang out, do whatever you felt like, was refreshing.

Now we have MMORPGs and the Wii. For anyone who bemoans the loss of ambulance and firefighting missions, can you honestly say that the future of the GTA franchise lies in aimless wandering and minigames?

I was personally sold on GTA4 by the intro videos floating around the intertubes. It was similar to how I felt about the Bioshock intro. It might not be the Godfather, but it's got me intrigued nonetheless.
On the other hand, I haven't gotten around to buying my own GTA4 or 360 yet, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

TF2 players are older, partially because TFC was 10 years ago, but also partially because nobody seems to have bought the orange box off store shelves. I imagine that a large number, maybe a majority, bought it over Steam, and that means a credit card.

I hate the $60 4-hour game as much as the next guy, but if a game takes more than 40 hours to complete and enjoy, it doesn't seem likely that I'll be finishing it. I liked the Super Mario Sunshine approach, with the final cinematic at 25% base completion, but a real incentive to go for 100%, and the real 100% after that for the OCDs.

From a busines perspective, it certainly makes sense compared to the previous status quo. Over the course of 5 years, I had probably put 3000 (thousand) hours into Diablo 2 for $50 and a $25 expansion pack, with Blizzard footing the battle.net bandwidth bill free of charge. People put more time into WoW, though Bliz gets paid for those, but monolithic, massive time-sink one-time-purchases like Counterstrike have no real business model. Madden knew in '88, that the money flows directly from a fixed shelf-life.

I imagine that with the wide variety of browns that modern game engines render for us, red is the hard one to see in FPSes.

Reading the article, it's really quite moderate, to the point where I'm surprised it saw print.

They're not a torch-wielding mob or a cabal of out-of-touch anti-inter-tube legislators out on a witch hunt. They're concerned parents being concerned; because they're parents. I'd cut them some paranoia slack, especially if they're being as level-headed as they are.

What exactly is Valve's next game (after left 4 dead)?

No sense taking risks with the only thing that matters.

If your trailer kicks savage ass, people will go to see your movie. It's that simple.

Back when the original Command and Conquer came out in 1995, ISPs were not prevailent. Still, the game came with networked multiplay in local LANs, as well as direct modem-to-modem play.
No intervening routers or protocols or fibers. Just a custom modem driver where you would enter your friend's 7-digit phone number, and play across the copper wire.

The brawl friend code system is less user-friendly than calling your friend and manually sending binary game data across the phone line.

In the first multiplayer game, there weren't enough blocks left on the board for player 1 to catch up to player 2, but gameplay continued anyway. It's not an obscure scenario, and it's not so difficult to implement that you'd put off until after beta. It's just something that the designers shouldn't be careless enough to overlook, and makes me wonder who's in charge.

Hey, what's this video game? ;)

(72 wpm)

But then I watched it a second time, paying attention, and noticed that all the good jokes are in the visuals, not the audio. It's strange how splattering something with blood makes it funnier.

Honestly, this is probably more of a mistake by DC than by Midway. Mortal Kombat is just pathetic next to street fighter and SNK/Capcom these days.

DC's brand wouldn't mesh with MK's, because DC's is GOOD.

Then again, if you go by their books, I make more money each year than Hollywood does.
[en.wikipedia.org]

They should've gone with pressurized jets blasting blood spray across the wall. And gallery patrons.

However, I do hope that they revamp their marketing approach for the Wii launch. They need to be aiming at a broader demographic, as their last targeted demographic (myself included) has already bought season 1.

Honestly, if you're going to make another space shooter, why not make it starfox? Another floaty racer, why not FZero? RPGs: Mother, Fire emblem, Zelda, & Pokemon. Platformers: Mario, DK, Kirby, Metroid, etc. You can only satuate a genre so much before it makes more sense to just adpot an existing IP.

Pikmin stands out because Nintendo had never done an RTS before, and some of the others just don't make sense for a fighter (the advance wars characters aren't nearly iconic enough and were even left out of the latest sequel, and cooking mana would be a turn for the macabe).

But what new game type hast been invented that would Nintendo adopt? The only thing the industry's making nowadays are script-heavy FPSes, multiplayer FPSes, and Third person shooter RPGs (and sports games, I guess). Elements like acrobatics and contextual environment interactions are making their way into mario and zelda, but how would Nintendo make a cover-system game?

Actually, now that I've asked the question of myself, I think I'd like to see Nintendo make a new IP in a physics-engine game (i.e. Portal or Crayon Physics).

I get the feeling that "Overclocked: Star Wars" wouldn't fly.

The recording of Crash Into Me at the beginning sounded more like one of the covers than the original. Is it just me?

Of the hundred movies you've watched, the two you saw in theatres were Spiderman 3 and Snakes on a Plane?

I don't think we want to be sending Hollywood the wrong message here. We want them to make *better* movies, not thinly veiled marketing campaigns.

My limit would be at $7.50, but I'm cheap. =O)

Everything's kind of plastic and shiny, instead of brass and covered in coal-soot.

From what I've heard, Mass Effect is basically pornography. I don't quite recall how that one turned out.

I do hope that at one point they actually add the "Rocket Lawn Chair Slug".

What's the internet coming to?

I think now to the obscene amounts of money Blizzard is making applying those game concepts to WoW. It's getting to the point where WoW doesn't belong on these subscription charts, but on a chart of national GDPs.

Assuming $15 a month and a gross revenue of $1.8 billion a year, they'd rank at #152 out of 183 on this list:
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)"