finished knights of the old republic 2(with the restored content patch).
 
i don't really know how i feel about this game. it's got these moments that are genuinely brilliant and well-executed, and other moments where you're just playing a videogame. part of that comes from the fact that it was handcuffed to the [dreadful ][/dreadful] star wars universe as well as the completely unplayable kotor system, so it's a bit of a miracle that it manages to actually be fairly legitimate despite some terrible baggage. but i guess i can't get over how great this game could have been without all of that. sure, they had problems with running out of time at the end, needing to cut some neat stuff, but even after having played it with a lot of that restored i'm more inclined to blame the imperfections on their predecessors than what happened at the end of their production schedule.
 
this is still probably one of the better rpgs of the past decade, but it could have been so much more. you rip the malignant fist of george lucas out of this and i think you have THE game of the last decade.
 
PS their misuse use of ed asner in this game is unforgivably bad. a game with a pretty fair assortment of interesting characters and they give him THE LEAST INTERESTING ROLE IN THE ENTIRE GAME. what bullshit.

i just played like 3 hours of playstation magazine demo discs, this was the highlight (and the end to the evening): http://www.twitch.tv/gidgetnomates/c/1945603

finished knights of the old republic 2(with the restored content patch).
 
i don't really know how i feel about this game. it's got these moments that are genuinely brilliant and well-executed, and other moments where you're just playing a videogame. part of that comes from the fact that it was handcuffed to the [dreadful in every way] star wars universe as well as the completely unplayable kotor system, so it's a bit of a miracle that it manages to actually be fairly legitimate despite some terrible baggage. but i guess i can't get over how great this game could have been without all of that. sure, they had problems with running out of time at the end, needing to cut some neat stuff, but even after having played it with a lot of that restored i'm more inclined to blame the imperfections on their predecessors than what happened at the end of their production schedule.
 
this is still probably one of the better rpgs of the past decade, but it could have been so much more. you rip the malignant fist of george lucas out of this and i think you have THE game of the last decade.
 
PS their misuse use of ed asner in this game is unforgivably bad. a game with a pretty fair assortment of interesting characters and they give him THE LEAST INTERESTING ROLE IN THE ENTIRE GAME. what bullshit.

shit dude, i gotta play this game at some point/soon so that i got something to gush about with you. idk if i told you this (i think i have) but i think this was the first game (i played it for short time) where i chose to kill this innocent guy (right at the beginning of a planet) just out of fear that he'd still tell everyone that i'm a jedi... i didn't like that the mentor scolded me for this (what??? isn't this a genuine possibility ya stupid hag??? graaagh!!!) but regardless i thought it was POSSIBLE and you know, it seemed that it would make the whole planet like HOSTILE or something. in kotor 1 it would had been logical to just let the guy live and you just never see him again/no consiquences whatsoever and +10 to hot loveinterest babe or fuck, +100 jackpot with all party members influence

theres a deal on newegg where you can mafia 2 for free (rebate covers cost) is the game worth getting?

cool beans.  i saw gamespot gave it a decent review. haven't actually played through anything new in a while, and it looks like my laptop should be able to support it, which is a plus as well, as games have finally gotten to the point where my old mbp won't meet minimum requirements anymore (not bad for a 5- year old laptop)

nope

i'm not familar with it, if i can find it cheap or something maybe, but im mostly just jumping on this because its free

has anyone been playing metal gear rising
 

restarted GTA4 and just taking my time with it, chilling with Roman and just lounging around like a DIGITAL LIFE SIMULATOR because y'know, can't get a real life. But nah, it's good. Even though I've played through it countless times before, it's a solid game, and really cool. Kinda unbelievable how much of a step up from SA it was. Still one of the most believable in-game worlds around. Plus the choice of radio stations (reggae, jazz, fusion, new age, hip hop) is A++++

restarted GTA4 and just taking my time with it, chilling with Roman and just lounging around like a DIGITAL LIFE SIMULATOR because y'know, can't get a real life. But nah, it's good. Even though I've played through it countless times before, it's a solid game, and really cool. Kinda unbelievable how much of a step up from SA it was. Still one of the most believable in-game worlds around. Plus the choice of radio stations (reggae, jazz, fusion, new age, hip hop) is A++++

I like to think of it as a step down in a way. In terms of repetitiveness And less RPG elements.

Anyone talking about innate spatial qualities and a truly immersible experience versus innovative mechanic-ology and inventing your own experience based on player interaction with emergent systems. I am addressing this to you:
 
I have been playing Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers. I saw a video of it linked to the side right after watching some gameplay footage of Proteus. Now I do not disagree with proteus as a concept (as long as nobody expects you to pay for playing it), I am just saying that I bought Tiny and Big just based on what I saw from someone playing the demo level on a youtube video.
 
I have been playing it, and for MY money, it has been basically the most ideal balance between the two qualities being discussed in the last few posts I have ever seen. It can be true how easy it is for game developers to be mired in one or the other, but find one good application of both at once, and you quickly realize they are basically just like two sides of the same coin. It is the ideal, that type of balance. Hard to pull off with a heavy weight of creativity applied on both sides of the scale. Difficult, but not impossible.
 
It is odd with this particular game because the few times I found myself most stuck were in the early levels, where I was not expecting the path to be cleanly laid out for me by common platforming game tropes, and thought I needed to apply especially cunning problem solving skills to advance and cheat my way to the top of whatever obstacle I was currently facing.

sorry to reply in two parts all jarring like but i just finished the game now & i'm gonna thoughtdump. in terms of theorystuff i think my previous post still holds. but space in tiny & big is kind of interesting.
 
one thing the game does really well is use the physicsy stuff and the seemingly continuous geometry of chopping blocks up to obscure the feeling of following a precalculated path through the environment to chase after big. the event-chain-based time structure of the plot, although typical for today's games, was comparatively quite exposed. i genuinely did not know whether i was following a "correct" solution through each puzzle and it felt kind of liberating. the puzzles were still challenging. the incredible hugeness of the environment made the weighty things feel really big and heavy and out of control. i wanted a hardhat. flying objects felt like a genuine danger as opposed to a preconceived game-obstacle. the half-life games have a similar aesthetic at times in terms of the physical danger of stuff, but the puzzles and sequences feel more planned out and deliberate. there are still some puzzles in big and tiny where things seem to be there just so that you can use them to get by, but i often found myself using different stuff or using stuff differently than i originally intended.
 
that said, the space in the game is very geometric and absolute. there are either gaps or rocks. objects can be cut cleanly down any axis or they are unscathed by the laser. you die or you don't. one has the pants or one does not. it could be compared to a 2-colour bitmap, although it's not quite so blocky. there is the opposition between the gargantuan/impenetrable and the minuscule/fragile (big and tiny, heh) everywhere. it's not like mario where if you approach an edge slowly, you grab the side of it as you go over. any sufficiently large crack in the ground, visible or not, sends you plummeting to your death. because there are only two people in the world, there is also no possibility for a sense of place to be produced. the gods and the mole-things are fairly arbitrary and devoid of character, if aesthetically pleasing. all of the possibilities afforded by implying a social space and working to establish a sense of place are left unexplored. this isn't a flaw in the game per se, but it is (in my view) a flaw in the idea that it's an ideal/representative mediation between mechanical design and experience authorship. total godhood in the domain of chopping sufficiently close objects along a straight line works against this, also. hard to see things as having meaningful internal structure when you spend all day annihilating them.
 
anyways it's a pretty interesting platformer.

 because there are only two people in the world, there is also no possibility for a sense of place to be produced. the gods and the mole-things are fairly arbitrary and devoid of character, if aesthetically pleasing. all of the possibilities afforded by implying a social space and working to establish a sense of place are left unexplored. this isn't a flaw in the game per se, but it is (in my view) a flaw in the idea that it's an ideal/representative mediation between mechanical design and experience authorship. total godhood in the domain of chopping sufficiently close objects along a straight line works against this, also. hard to see things as having meaningful internal structure when you spend all day annihilating them.

 
 
Well tbh I never thought too deeply about the concept of experience authorship, and assumed most of the games that tipped on that side of the scale were games that oftentimes involved a character in his singular in a world that is basically nothing more than an empty canvas for crafting an experience with. I guess I always thought of authorship in terms of pure introspection rather than on the scale of a person's experience in relation to the entire world/setting around which that experience takes place (or even the world outside the one in which that experience takes place).
 
The one thing I felt remiss about while playing the game was involving that the only real option presented to me throughout the game was that of destruction. True that destruction was creatively placed, and it was a refreshing change to see puzzles purely in the perspective of where thinking only about how the spaces without stuff in it would solve my problem, rather than simply another type of puzzle that involves yet another variation on filling space with something (I would like to try exploring that very idea with the mechanics of Tetris, but like you mention earlier with the whole binary dynamic, it is very difficult for such a game to not turn out to be the exact same thing that Tetris already is). 
 
But the idea of stacking blocks on top of each other with the rope, no matter how creatively cut they might be, is too subject to the fickle mistress of accurate physics to ever accomplish anything that would even remotely qualify as "constructive". The whole time I was chasing down those godly undaroos I was thinking, "well if I commanded THAT ability, I could at least do some REAL playing with my freshly cut blocks, stacking them into arbitrary yet roughly balanced tower shapes like a child might" Maybe if he donned the pants himself and possibly upgraded his toolset with a glue-gun, it could open up the opportunity for a sequel where your character struggles with finding a constructive and useful place in a world where he could literally tear everything down and build it back up in any manner he so wished.
 
In short, maybe scribblenauts is a better example of that kind of balance (although one that might not be as good at what it is meant to do as people like to claim), but I am really in no position to philosophize on the matter. There are so many ways to explore so many aspects of the medium and it's potential, there really is not going to be a singular catch-all example of a game that monopolizes on every aspect of gaming that can be enjoyed. If there ever were, it could likely be the very last video game that ever needed to be made.