@Tidal_Abyss @FranklynStreet Well, except it's not. Can you provide a link to where it's available on any of those platforms? I don't see listings for it anywhere-- from PSN, to Steam, to Amazon, to Gamestop. The last 3 don't even have a listing for it with an availability date-- there's absolutely nothing.
What platforms is Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons out on this week? The release date is still unlisted on the Gamespot page and on other sites, and it's not on the weekly PSN update this week, and it's not yet listed on Steam at all. Wondering where it's releasing this week or if the release has been pushed back.
@Saketume What really burned me was how they made this the main selling point for the game. I did two playthroughs... one making instinctual decisions, and a second playthrough choosing everything almost extremely the opposite to try to see some of the content I'd missed out on. There was virtually no difference, apart from a few cosmetic or extremely fleeting, temporary branches in story trees.
From the way the audience responded to what they were marketing, I hope that they are building Season 2 in advance with enough variable content to actually deliver the experience they were promising with Season 1.
@tionmedon Well part of it is that a console is designed to play on a television in your living room, whereas a PC is on a desk. Granted, that is changing a lot with what PC's can do these days, and as someone else has said, Steam is thinning the lines even further with their Big Picture.
But... the main reason a lot of people play consoles is that they don't have enough computer knowledge and/or want to spend time dealing with mods and fixes and driver upgrades and the like. They want to be able to just put a game into their device and play. Part of what you're paying for with a console is the "couch-tv gaming experience," but an even bigger part is knowing that everything has already been done for you and you can just play the game without having to have an IT skillset.
@SauhlGood @IgotEpixx @SauhlGood @IgotEpixx Dragon's Lair is not an adventure game. Try the text adventure Infocom's, the Sierra On-Line series like the Police Quests, King's Quests, Space Quests, Leisure Suit Larry games, and the Lucasfilm games like the Indiana Jones games, Loom, and The Dig. Those are adventure games. Dragon's Lair was an arcade game where you pressed a button to determine the next FMV. Very different.
Thought I'd reply with the part 2 of this that has disappeared down the page:
Studies have shown that playing a video game in cooperation with another living human being, EVEN IF THAT VIDEO GAME IS VIOLENT, builds positive, life-affirming bonds and increased skills in communication. In other words, real life takes precedece over shooting some computer pixels with other computer pixels. And with the most violent video games, there's even a rating systems to encourage the games to be used by mature adults and not children in an earlier state of social development. If there's a failing with this system, it's the poor parenting skills that need to be addressed. If you want to lead a crusade that effects change, go after the parents who buy the children inappropriate games, but don't just take them to task for that. Get to the real route of the problem: shine a light on the large section of the population that doesn't raise their children well, that feeds them fast food and junk food and provides poor nutrition, that prevents their education with a poor learning environment at home and a dismissal of the educational system, that beat their children, that shame and guilt them until they've created deep abscess in their personalities-- that mold them into physical and emotional messes ill-equipped to deal with social reality. Or is the real problem that focusing on such a deep-seeded social problem wouldn't allow the excuse of simply finger-pointing at something so easy for you to vilify? That creating positive social changes with lasting positive effects would require wisdom, understanding, determination, and a work ethic that you're not capable of grasping, much less capable of committing to?
In a world constantly at war, where United States teenagers are often seduced by the army to go kill foreigners in another country via patriotism, and relent largely because it's the only economic solution they may have as a step out of the multi-generational depressed financial climate of their lives, a violent video game is nothing new. In fact, it's trivial compared to reality. A military shooter video game simply takes the fabric of our reality to tell a story. Rather than blaming the media, perhaps you should be lobbying for ways to change the nature of our military. Perhaps, instead of targeting children who are too young to legally consume alcohol, and then breeding authoritarianism into them so that in a battle they will continue to follow orders and kill until they are killed, who won't submit to a crisis of moral conscience the way an older, wiser person with more life lessons and experiential wisdom might refuse a military order, perhaps our military should be focused on recruiting soldiers who are actually making their own choices and not being manipulated.
We no longer live in the 1920's-1940's, where men of 20 were at their physical peak and men in their 40's and 50's were approaching old age if not the old end of middle age. Today, men in their 30's and 40's are just as physically capable as men in their late teens, and in fact much more mature and emotionally evolved. Yet our military continues to target the youth, and it has to be because they have not yet learned politics, or, in many cases, a clearly-defined personal morality. Perhaps your time would be better spent addressing these issues, and attempting to reform military selection and recruitment. Perhaps a much larger issue than video GAMES, is the way our country uses its citizens and then casts them aside, with little regard to the behavioral lessons and programming they've implemented in a section of the population. Perhaps that spreads to a larger section of the population, and is a part of how our government regards its people. Perhaps, in addition to this, we need better gun laws, better health care, better mental health care, better social programs, more funding for our own people versus funding our attempted control of the rest of the world. If we have a lot of violent video games right now, it's simply because we live in violent times, and those games are reflecting our reality. Perhaps you should spend your time addressing reality and not wasting it on games.
Perhaps helping to lobby for some or all of these issues would actually be worth a politician's time, might actually address a genuine problem and attempt to fix it, instead of this ridiculous dog-and-pony show you're spending your time with, identifying evidence of many social problems as the social problem itself. You're making no more progress that a Puritanical minister conducting a Salem witch trial or a 50's book-burner blaming Lawrence, Lee, and Salinger for the woes of mankind. Grow up, grow a pair, and get out there and fight the kind of fight the people actually need you to be fighting-- and stop wasting your time with trivial nonsense. You're embarrassing yourself, and if you don't wake up soon, you will have wasted both your career and your life on a trumped-up cause that amounts to nothing.
Studies have shown that playing a video game in cooperation with another living human being, EVEN IF THAT VIDEO GAME IS VIOLENT, builds positive, life-affirming bonds and increased skills in communication. In other words, real life takes precedece over shooting some computer pixels with other computer pixels. And with the most violent video games, there's even a rating systems to encourage the games to be used by mature adults and not children in an earlier state of social development. If there's a failing with this system, it's the poor parenting skills that need to be addressed. If you want to lead a crusade that effects change, go after the parents who buy the children inappropriate games, but don't just take them to task for that. Get to the real route of the problem: shine a light on the large section of the population that doesn't raise their children well, that feeds them fast food and junk food and provides poor nutrition, that prevents their education with a poor learning environment at home and a dismissal of the educational system, that beat their children, that shame and guilt them until they've created deep abscess in their personalities-- that mold them into physical and emotional messes ill-equipped to deal with social reality. Or is the real problem that focusing on such a deep-seeded social problem wouldn't allow the excuse of simply finger-pointing at something so easy for you to vilify? That creating positive social changes with lasting positive effects would require wisdom, understanding, determination, and a work ethic that you're not capable of grasping, much less capable of committing to?
In a world constantly at war, where United States teenagers are often seduced by the army to go kill foreigners in another country via patriotism, and relent largely because it's the only economic solution they may have as a step out of the multi-generational depressed financial climate of their lives, a violent video game is nothing new. In fact, it's trivial compared to reality. A military shooter video game simply takes the fabric of our reality to tell a story. Rather than blaming the media, perhaps you should be lobbying for ways to change the nature of our military. Perhaps, instead of targeting children who are too young to legally consume alcohol, and then breeding authoritarianism into them so that in a battle they will continue to follow orders and kill until they are killed, who won't submit to a crisis of moral conscience the way an older, wiser person with more life lessons and experiential wisdom might refuse a military order, perhaps our military should be focused on recruiting soldiers who are actually making their own choices and not being manipulated.
We no longer live in the 1920's-1940's, where men of 20 were at their physical peak and men in their 40's and 50's were approaching old age if not the old end of middle age. Today, men in their 30's and 40's are just as physically capable as men in their late teens, and in fact much more mature and emotionally evolved. Yet our military continues to target the youth, and it has to be because they have not yet learned politics, or, in many cases, a clearly-defined personal morality. Perhaps your time would be better spent addressing these issues, and attempting to reform military selection and recruitment. Perhaps a much larger issue than video GAMES, is the way our country uses its citizens and then casts them aside, with little regard to the behavioral lessons and programming they've implemented in a section of the population. Perhaps that spreads to a larger section of the population, and is a part of how our government regards its people. Perhaps, in addition to this, we need better gun laws, better health care, better mental health care, better social programs, more funding for our own people versus funding our attempted control of the rest of the world. If we have a lot of violent video games right now, it's simply because we live in violent times, and those games are reflecting our reality. Perhaps you should spend your time addressing reality and not wasting it on games.
Perhaps helping to lobby for some or all of these issues would actually be worth a politician's time, might actually address a genuine problem and attempt to fix it, instead of this ridiculous dog-and-pony show you're spending your time with, identifying evidence of many social problems as the social problem itself. You're making no more progress that a Puritanical minister conducting a Salem witch trial or a 50's book-burner blaming Lawrence, Lee, and Salinger for the woes of mankind. Grow up, grow a pair, and get out there and fight the kind of fight the people actually need you to be fighting-- and stop wasting your time with trivial nonsense. You're embarrassing yourself, and if you don't wake up soon, you will have wasted both your career and your life on a trumped-up cause that amounts to nothing.
Your dismissal of video games and the gaming community, telling them they "have got to just quiet down," and that, as the primary audience of a media being questioned, they "have no credibility in this argument" is incredibly willfully blind, ignorant, and simply insulting. All my life I've been interested in storytelling, pure and simple. As a result, I'm an avid fan of everything that encompasses, from literature to film to comic books and yes, video games. Blaming video games for social violence is simply an obstacle in the path of dealing with the real problems-- gun violence (you know, the tools of the actual crimes), poor parenting, and a society ill-equipped in terms of mental illness and social aid. Your stance against video games is akin to the book-burning of great classics decades ago, and equally as steeped in tyrannical conservative fear and ignorance.
The reason that I am more interested in video games now than ever, is their increasingly widespread popularity, higher budgets, and ability to tell a story that includes an audience as a part of that story-telling experience. As consumers of literature, television, and film, we are simply passive watchers, taking in a story that enfolds before us. But with video games, we have the ability to play a role in that enfolding story, to be a more active participant in it-- and that is thrilling, and a much more immersive experience in the ongoing evolution of storytelling. This is the future.
Video games, as an industry, saw a banner year in terms of story-telling and its effects in 2012. Two of the most-praised games were Journey and The Walking Dead. Both of these games focused on emotional storytelling, on having an emotional effect on the player and creating empathy. The Walking Dead may take place within a violent landscape, but it hails from a critically-acclaimed comic books series and a ground-breakingly popular television show, and neither of these source materials or forms of media are in your crosshairs. And Journey has no violence whatsoever. It's a game that seeks to unite lone travelers and give them both archetypes and a meta-story structure about the journey of human life, the will to live, and the value of companionship. It's a life-affirming game if ever there was one.
Do violent games exist? Yes, they do. But so do violent films, television shows, and books. We don't see the same kind of witch hunting going on with film or television, but to be fair, it's still there to some degree. Still, the media that's been around the longest-- literature-- has for the most part passed its trial of reactionary social blame. Rarely do we see book-burnings happening any longer; and for the most part it's become accepted that blaming this form of communication and expression will only add problems to our society, and not solve any. But the world you seek to create through your crusade is the same one that would have The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo banned, where mass burnings of the works of Elmore Leonard, Michael Connelly, Jim Thompson, and James Ellroy would be commonplace. Have we learned nothing from history? These are the forms of expression and communication that help us to come together and learn about our shared human experiences, that help us process the world around us. As a non-video game player, what you seem to fail to grasp are the stories about the human experiences being told even in the violent games you demonize.
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