#thomas ella

[thomasella]

Delilah is very much an “unseen” character. Chiming in from her vantage point perched on a nearby mountaintop, Delilah is but a voice crackling in over a walkie-talkie. You won’t see a picture, video feed or any other physical representation of her; you’ll only have her voice to go on.

“I feel like it gives the player the freedom to decide how he feels about her based on conversation alone,” Jones said. “I think all too often you’re introduced to a character and you’re supposed to feel love at first sight or disgust at first sight or whatever they want you to feel based on how the character looks. But not having that with Delilah, I think it opens up a whole realm of possibility for how you decide you want to interact with her.

“Is she someone you want to be a little chummy with, or a little flirty with, or standoffish towards? It’s completely up to the player, which I find really fascinating.”

I got to speak with Cissy Jones last week on her role in Firewatch, and she made some very interesting points about her character, Delilah. I especially loved this one about how the player has no physical appearance with which to judge Delilah.

[thomasella]

Everything about Attractio screams "knockoff" like a "ROLAX" watch, but don't be fooled: if you're a fiend for devious puzzles, this is the real deal.

To put it mildly, there is a lot going on in Attractio. The game eases you in gently, but it takes off the kid gloves very early and only gets harder from there. By the end, every single puzzle room was stumping me over and over in stages. I’d solve one part and feel brilliant, then get stuck again immediately afterward and feel unbelievably stupid. I spent an hour and a half on one puzzle; I spent two days on another. It’s the kind of game you’re going to need to walk away from occasionally and let your subconscious take over for a while. It is a perfect mixture of satisfaction and relief when you finally solve a puzzle.

I’m normally not much of a puzzle game guy, but I’m glad I pushed through Attractio. Some really excellent design.

[thomasella]

Every issue in the video game industry, to the press and the enthusiast crowd, feels like the most important issue in the world. From the failed launch of a game like Assassin’s Creed Unity or Halo: Master Chief Collection, to the failed ambitions of a game like Destiny, to the questionable DLC practices of a game like Evolve, we wrap ourselves up in these issues so tightly that we cannot step back and see them for what they are: insignificant.

I was on a bus to New York with my girlfriend when I read the original Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview. It really took me aback in how needlessly brutal it felt, and I had this entire piece in response written before we arrived. It’s well worth checking out; some really interesting discussion went on in the comments.

[thomasella]

I still love this interview I did with Erik Asmussen, the sole developer of Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball. I asked a throwaway question at 40:30 not expecting anything really, but his answer got so crazy and fantastic that I ended up needing to move away from the mic because I was laughing so hard.

[thomasella]

The comparisons to Earthbound run deep in Citizens of Earth, but it feels much more like an homage than a standalone product; it’s an extremely mechanical experience. The world doesn’t unfold organically the way Earthbound‘s Eagleland did; it is simply thrust upon you. After 15 minutes of play, I already had 14 open quests to complete. After 20 minutes, I had 18 open quests. After an hour, I had completed 11 quests and still had 23 remaining. I’m 10 hours into the game now, and after playing for about an hour and a half before taking a break, I am exhausted. The main quest I wanted to finish today split into three sub-quests to complete, one of which split into another three sub-quests. When I had finally done everything and the game’s next chapter immediately threw three more sub-quests to complete, I had to stop. “This is a young man’s game,” I thought.

I still haven’t finished this game. Sometimes I think about going back to it and finishing it off, but it’s not going to happen.

[thomasella]

For Christmas, I bought my family a couple Google Cardboard sets. No one in my family is a gamer and only my brother had heard of Cardboard previously. But within minutes, they were teleporting from Paris to Tokyo, Venice to the Great Barrier Reef, and suddenly virtual reality became their new favorite thing.

It’s fascinating how wrapped into the experience you get even by something as simple and cheap as Cardboard. I can’t help but imagine that virtual reality might be ~the thing~ that finally tears down the wall preventing regular people from enjoying games.

[thomasella]

“Is it more important that your choices in a game matter, or that they feel like they matter?”

That’s the question that opened my review of the first episode of Telltale’s Game of Thrones series nearly a year ago and it’s the question that lingered in my mind as I played each subsequent chapter. Playing Game of Thrones feels like walking through a house of mirrors: at first glance, endless paths stretch in front of you — infinite, overwhelming possibility — but you quickly learn it’s nothing more than an illusion. It’s been that way with Telltale’s adventures for some time now, of course. Anyone who’s played one since The Walking Dead knows how they work: divergent choices funneled into convergent paths. They’re movies with light interactive elements in the form of dialogue options and quick-time events. In the moment, it feels like you’re truly shaping the story with your influence, but one trip to YouTube to watch how else it could’ve played out is all it takes to shatter that feeling for good. After six episodes and dozens of hours, I had made hundreds of decisions, but only about three or four in the final two episodes truly changed anything about my experience.

I can’t tell you how happy I was to be writing my seventh—and final—review of this game.

[thomasella]

It’s hard to say anything new about Telltale’s episodic Game of Thrones adventure at this point that hasn’t already been said five times prior: it’s buggy, it’s boring, it’s ugly and it feigns player agency in a surprisingly insulting way. With Episode Five – A Nest of Vipers, however, Telltale did something completely unexpected: it ended the episode on a choice that mattered. A life-or-death decision that asked you to choose between two prominent characters, this choice not only raised the stakes for the player, but for Telltale as well; the developer would need to build radically different versions of Episode Six to fully realize the consequences of that choice. Now, having played through the entire episode twice to experience both versions, I can confidently say that while Episode Six does a better job than any previous episode at making good on the player’s decisions, it’s still kind of a mess anyway.