I have to confess I've never played Rapid Reload, but Alien Soldier is great, as is everything by Treasure basically.

That's Anime-style (or Japanese-style) writing for you. DBZ for instance has the exact same bullshit. Also, characters constantly repeat themselves in MGS, drawing out the already lengthy cutscenes even further.

Actually I'm kinda surprised at how few mentions Nocturne gets around here. It's one of the best I've seen narration-wise, and some dialogues are great, the second dialogue with Aradia is one of my favorite moments in gaming. It had me made the most difficult decisions any game had me do, and I got quite strong feelings towards some characters.

Shin Megami Tensei is the series I usually point people to when they say JRPGs consist of tired cliches/don't have fun gameplay etc. Unfortunately, I haven't played Nocturne (or Lucifer's Call, as it's titled where I live) yet, but I have played Persona 2 and 4 as well as Digital Devil Saga (which has a refreshing lack of overlong dialogues  :D). All of them were great in terms of themes and plot, but nothing special as far as writing is concerned.

I'd agree that if you only play games for the story you've chosen the wrong medium to be a journalist in. But if your primary focus in creating games is story, that doesn't mean that you should just go make a film or whatever.

Absolutely not, but only if you use game-specific storytelling devices. For instance, Gravity Bone is almost all story (and style and atmosphere) with only minimal gameplay, but it wouldn't have been as good or memorable if it wasn't interactive. On the other hand, when I played MGS4 there were a lot of moments where I thought "for fuck's sake, why doesn't he just make it a CGI movie?".

I totally agree that games with bad stories emphasizing their stories is a problem, but I'd say the solution to that is having better stories, not returning stories to their once minimal place in games like Contra.

Why is it not? Why does every game need a story? Or better put, why does every game these days need lengthy and frequent cutscenes? I think some genres are better suited for narrative than others, is all.

The whole hat thing reminds me of Hook Champ.

Also, are hats going to be the only type of "armor" in the game? And will there be magical hats you have identify before using them?  :D

After having a bit of a procrastination day yesterday, I'm now working full steam (OK, 3/4 steam  ) on the menus and leveling system. This is a screenshot of the rather plain-looking but fully functional map screen.



Also, I'm keeping the room transitions as they are. Thanks for the input, Paul and alastair. 

Art looks fantastic! Reminds me of Konjak. I also like me some Gunstar Heroes. 

I was surprised to see Maryanne Amacher there.

i see my ability to start shitstorms with a simple comment hasn't disappeared

Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age had like the best writing I have ever seen in a video game, so I am psyched.

Really? I mean it's been a while since I last played these games, but I didn't think the writing was above average. Care to elaborate?

Well then, how about Shadowlands?
http://www.mobygames.com/game/shadowlands

Or The Immortal?
http://www.mobygames.com/game/immortal

Or Faery Tale Adventure?
http://www.mobygames.com/game/faery-tale-adventure-book-i

Nah, people manipulated tapes as far back as the late 40's. Look up "Musique Concrete" on Google. Granted, they were not rock bands, but still...

Also, how exactly do you think the Beatles influenced Metal? I honestly can't detect their influence anywhere (direct on indirect).

u speld freind rong lol

Holy shit! I wanted to say the video was lame before I realized the singer actually looks like this. That's hipster irony taken a little too far I guess.  :D

Agreed. Once you get into arguing semantics, the discussion is pretty much over, at least in terms of interesting content.

Anyway, I think the Monkey Island series has pretty good writing. I mean, it managed to crack me up a number of times, that's got to mean something.  :D

It's always a pleasure to introduce people to new music.  

I really disagree with this.  I'm sure there was a point in the history of film where people said that books were better suited to narrative than film, but no one says that now.  Yes, film narratives are different than book narratives (and TV narratives are different still), but it's clear that films can tell stories just as well as books.  And if anyone doubts that TV can tell good stories, just watch Battlestar Galactica for proof of that medium's rarely used power.  Video Games can offer amazing things in the way of telling stories, the vast majority of the possibilities just haven't been explored yet.

I was talking more about the current state of games when I wrote that. I agree that games have lots of untapped potential for delivering narratives and even mentioned it in a couple of my posts.

So you're saying you want an alien slaughtering simulation then?  Huh?  Because if it's solely about the mechanics with minimal context, then that's a simulation.

By your definition, Contra would be a simulation too. Also, I wasn't asking for "as little context as possible", I was critizing that games like Gears of War enforce their plot and setting too much even if they're not very interesting.

The roots of metal are in British blues rock which has fuck-all to do with the Beatles. See, that's one of the reasons why I think the Beatles are overrated. They're constantly being attributed the creation of genres they had nothing to do with. Back when I still read music magazines, I saw an article that credited them with inventing techno. I can't remember what the argumentation was but I thought it was pretty fucking hilarious.  :D

Haha, yeah Phaedra is good, but Tangerine Dream made a lot of crappy albums in their day. I downloaded their discography and it was 86 albums. 86!!! Only maybe 3 or 4 of them were really good, but hey, if we're not talking ratio, that's not bad at all.

Tangerine Dream exist in my mind as the guys who made awesome albums like Phaedra, Ricochet and Rubycon. I don't want to listen to their newer stuff because I'm afraid it might destroy this image. Edgar Froese has always looked like a German pimp though  :D
By the way, have you heard of Manuel Göttsching? He belongs to the same "scene" (Berlin school) as TD and Klaus Schulze but is a bit lesser known. His album E2-E4 has had a huge influence on House music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUiA0UOKIlc

Eduard Artemyev wrote some pretty amazing soundtracks on soviet synthesizers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJj9y4t9UnU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DhCVBUkvaI

In Soviet Union, synth plays you! Literally, because Soviet synthesizers are said to be pretty capricious.  :D

This guy is like the Russian Jean-Michel Jarre/Klaus Schulze/Vangelis and also completely new to me. There are times when I have the sudden urge to listen to cheesy new-agey synth music from the 70's/80's. The only album to come out of this sort of thing I listen to regularly though is Phaedra by Tangerine Dream. That album is just fucking otherworldly!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqWwbMdMrhQ

@1up: Do know Mono? I think you might like them. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Juilrg6oQ

I guess we should. It just gets me angry when someone who listened to Yesterday twice comes along and is all like "lulz teh beetlz are teh boiband and haz no talunt rofl only metal wif fazt gittar arpetchos iz gud muzuk ololol!!!!11"

Speaking of metal, I'm currently listening to Corrupted- El Mundo Frio. They're a Japanese band with an English name who sing mostly in Spanish. Now that's what I call a mindfuck.  :D

I don't think anyone has ever said that The Beatles were "some of the best music to ever exist ever". I think that the Beatles wrote a ton of cheesy crap and yes, like other people here, I tend to think they are overrated.

But to say that they were "nothing more than a glorified boy-band" is just plain ignorant of the contributions they made to the culture (pop-culture as it may be) of the 20th century, their influence on scores of bands that came after them and their skill as musicians. There is a reason why people listen to their music 40 years after it was written, and that reason has nothing to do with their good looks.

They actually started looking pretty fucking ugly once they started making good music. They were also one of the first bands to rely heavily on genre mixing, which makes them popular music's first postmodernists. And as I said, instrumental or vocal "skill" has zero to do with musical complexity or quality.

And as for 3 minute pop songs for the masses:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwQiQLqAKOA