I had just assumed you police yourself and if you see yourself hit a pipe you start over your count in your mind. It's the ultimate in adaptive difficulty.

RIP imagination.

http://www.eonline.com/news/512193/someone-made-a-real-life-version-of-flappy-bird-and-apparently-it-s-as-hard-as-the-iphone-game

This article suggests they may have gone with magnets on the pipes and when the bird gets close to the pipe the magnet signals it to close the box and end the game. Probably it has something to do with electrons, but I'm a Physics 1 guy and not a Physics 2 guy so don't ask me.

Actually, I thought the survey length was perfect. Psych 101 - the easier the survey to answer the more responses you can get.

I went ahead and filled it out for you.

I would've liked multiple choices because most of these things motivate me.

I picked "More game" as a choice ultimately because I love the idea that there's always some new place that I haven't seen yet, until inevitably I've explored the entirety of the game. Locked doors are a powerful motivator for me in a game.

I think the dilemma isn't so much finding the right rewards, but to avoid giving the rewards for the wrong reasons. A good rule of thumb is to think about whether or not the player would enjoy doing a quest if it didn't offer any reward at all - if the answer is no, then it doesn't matter what the reward is, the quest needs to be revised.

Giving out gear as rewards is also tricky, because you need to be careful to keep it balanced. If it's too good then the game will either be effortless for players who do all the quests, or way too hard unless the player does all the quests. Making rewards lean more towards fun than utility is always a good strategy, like in Shadow of the Colossus where the unlockables included a lot of weapons that were impractical, but let you do funny things like distract the AI.

Giving out narrative as a reward is probably the least used method, and one that more developers should use. Discovering the truth behind a crime, teasing out the details of a character's past, or even just receiving an amusing bestiary entry are all great rewards that can be interesting without upsetting the balance of the game in any way.

For RPGs you might have to dip back in the regular Wii library. The Project Rainfall games ranged from good to great. You'll need a wii remote to play them, though.

I really liked Wonderful 101. If you played and liked Viewtiful Joe or Bayonetta it's got a similar style, and they did a good job sprucing up the game with stylized graphics, big detailed levels and unlockable characters with fun to read bios. If I recommended one WiiU game, that'd be the one. It's got a good post-game where you can collect bottlecaps and figurines for searching levels and completing challenges, so it has both short and long-term appeal to it.

Nintendo Land has some good single player to it, though the multiplayer constitutes a decent chunk of the content that you'll miss out on. It can be a great single player game if you're the type of person who likes replaying a game until you get a perfect score on each level. If that sounds awful to you, then you may want to skip it because that's another big chunk of the content.

Game and Wario was a mixed bag. It has a decent amount of content but a lot of it boils down to replaying the minigames for arbitrary high scores to earn coins to unlock more toys. If you're not a fan of the Warioware series you might skip it (Smooth Moves was better even though it lacked the Toys menu).

NES Remix is download only, but pretty fun. It's got stylish menus and builds some clever challenges out of the assets of the original games. Even if you don't bother to replay all the levels for rainbow star scores, you get plenty of content for the price. I've played nearly all the games in it before, but it still feels fun and original.

I picked up Pikmin 3 but haven't played it yet due to Persona 4. Mario 3D World also looks nice, but I haven't picked it up at all yet.

Like Alastair suggested, though, the WiiU's third party line up is really forgettable or just multiplatform games.

Dragon Warrior's monster design is really great.

Demon's Souls had the NPC Black Phantoms that don't respawn when you kill them, so it's not unprecedented. That struck me as a soft checkpoint system instead of anti farming measures, though.

The PR guy in the article says it's to stop grinding, but it strikes me as more of a handicap for poor players who need 15 attempts to beat a level (The Dark Souls variation on the Golden Tanuki from Super Mario). It wouldn't surprise me if that was also their intention, and they're just refraining from saying it for fear of turning off Souls veterans.

If it was just to stop farming, I'd think instead they'd decrease the monster's drop rates but keep it in the game. The challenge isn't just to reach the monster and kill it, but to still have sufficient health and supplies to kill what's beyond it.

Saw an animated add for the Diablo 3 expansion and had to wait until the end of add to verify that it was for a video game and not a movie.

And then I still had to google it just to make sure.

Persona 4 is fun once it gets going, but man if that wasn't the worst JRPG opening I've ever played. I think I clocked 2 hours before I finally got to start making decisions on where to go and when.

The idea of forcing time to march forward relentlessly while you're trying to progress, though, is really great. It sets an interesting mood for the game. Hopefully I'm over the introductory hump and the rest lets me stay in control.

I finished Assassin's Creed 3 and liked it.

I really liked the finality of the ending (at least for Connor). You could keep exploring the world to do side quests, but in the end the war is over, the villains defeated, and the homestead at peace. It was left open that there could be DLC, but even if you skip that you get a complete story with a satisfying end.

Some of the sidequest content leaned on the grindy side but it was transparent about it and made it optional. The really good stuff (like the treasure hunting sidequest that had some fun, original maps to explore) could be done without ever bothering with the "kill 5 guards with the rope" type objectives. I also liked how the optional objectives tended to be reasonably challenging, while letting less skilled players ignore them.

It seems like a good resource for a unbiased depiction of the history of the US revolutionary war. It explains both the popular depictions of major events as well as their more probable causes (like pointing out the inconsistencies of the popular engraving of the Boston Massacre) and doesn't sugar coat things like the mistreatment of the native Americans by the colonists and George Washington in particular.

Overall a pretty good game.

Guys, guys guys. The Minecraft movie will be.... a blockbuster.


YEAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!

(Yes, really)

Oh man, that's the best pun I've heard in months.

Twitch Plays Pokemon is an original concept in which hundreds of thousands of people can participate across countries and continents, and leverages existing knowledge of a very popular game while playing out in a very different way. It emphasizes cooperation in the face of adversity in hilarious ways. It's a positive thing that is continuously generating new interesting characters and themes on a daily basis, a huge improvement over your typical meme which just recycles the same images for months and years.

It's not at all surprising that it's grown so popular, and it's good that it's popular. I hope this continues on for a long time and the developer keeps experimenting with the format to try new games and present the players with new ways to play.

Then they're make Minecraft: The Movie as a video game adaptation.

Uncharted 2 kind of mixes the action and stealth in a good way. There are a few segments where the bad guys aren't aware of you and you can take them out with stealth if you're careful. Once they spot you it turns into a gunfight, so being sneaky helps even out the fight but isn't mandatory. Once the fight does start it's pretty easy to find some cover and start playing "normally".

Dead Space 3 does it in a kind of lousy way - there are some parts where you can sneak around the enemies and not get in a fight, but if they catch you and attack there's a good chance you'll die when you get caught out in the open. Most of the time you deal with the "Stealth" segment by sneaking just far enough to find a good place to make a stand, then you start killing everything.

But neither of those is a 2d game.

Are we talking about sidescrolling 2d or top down 2d? I liked Metal Gear Solid for the Gameboy Color. It's mechanically simple as far as games go, but it had a good mix of traditional action sequences and segments where you had to use your gadgets to keep out of sight. Making something like that would be a great place to start.

I'm looking forward to the sequence where they use a montage for the protagonist to build a huge redstone machine that lets you count to ten.

Minecraft: The Movie will be a money maker. Not necessarily because it's good or will sell well, but because the lo-fi 3D graphics and textures will cost next to nothing to make so it'll be almost entirely profit.

It looks like they're at the final series of battles now (6pm EST), though they have lost a few times. They'll probably finish the game in the next few hours if you want to watch!

Tar rooms in DROD are tricky to understand, since you can only cut them on flat parts. Depending on the situation, you can either trim them back completely (cut away more tar faster than it grows) or just plow right into the middle of it and kill the Tar Mother so it stops growing. You just need to figure out which plan of attack is appropriate for that room in particular and go for it.

The World Ends with You is pretty nice. The post game content involves replaying segments of the game to find hidden items or defeat optional bosses to unlock reports that flesh out the backstory. I like when games use narrative as rewards for quests. It's also nice to see that they've skipped obvious objectives like "collect all the pins" that have more to do with grinding than player skill. It was definitely a good recommendation.

I picked up Pikmin 3 and am looking forward to it. I feel like the games I've played lately don't emphasize exploration enough. Maybe the beautiful vistas in Xenoblade have spoiled me forever.

Nethack's allure comes from a colossal amount of content but you'll invariably have to consult a wiki to figure it all out. Etching words on the floor to identify wands, throwing potions at monsters and learning how to recognize their effects to identify them and learning the most efficient methods of finding and eating food are some of the things you need to cope with in order to be effective at the game.

It can be a good game if you resign yourself to study it in detail, but most people will want to get to having fun a lot quicker.

Most of the amusing content comes out of Anarchy Mode, though. I sympathize with people who prefer it. Democracy Mode is useful for accomplishing finicky tasks like the Rocket HQ Maze or the Safari Zone, but Anarchy Mode leads to hilarious accidents like bizarre pokemon names or randomly selected targets for TMs. The current balance where Democracy Mode can only be activated by a huge supermajority seems just right.

It's almost like an cartoon where Democracy Mode represents the heroes forming Voltron or summoning Captain Planet to help them escape an otherwise hopeless situation, only to immediately go back to their normal forms when Anarchy inevitably takes over again.

It's also nice to see this is generating a lot of original characters and situations. This is probably the best example yet of good implementation of emergent gameplay. I'm hoping this turns out to be the start of a new genre of MMO games.

http://kotaku.com/now-is-the-best-time-a-critique-of-bioshock-infinite-472517493

I can agree with all this criticism.

I felt like Bioshock 1 had less to do with the objectivist political narrative and more to do with the story of Andrew Ryan. Andrew Ryan was the main character of the game, and the plot twists regarding you and Atlas just existed to reflect upon him. Andrew Ryan hated what society on land had become and fled to create a utopia under the sea only to discover that he couldn't escape human nature. In the end he wound up becoming a tyrant to fight a tyrant, a fact that wasn't lost upon him.

I don't get the impression that the game is trying to prop up objectivism or knock it down, or even try to explore it in more than a superficial way. It's just a backdrop for the real game, in the same way that Desert levels in Super Mario Bros aren't documentaries on arid geography or Egyptian ruins, they're just a backdrop for a level.

I got the impression, and maybe I'm wrong, that what Infinite was trying to do was show the same kind of societal downfall that happened in Bioshock 1, except to let you be present when it happens and see the before and after. One of the last areas of the game (the chapter before the Comstock House with the graveyard) resembles Bioshock 1 very closely, with ruined buildings and non-linear exploration. The difference is that you saw the city and the people before it was destroyed, so unlike the original game you understood how it had once been very beautiful. I liked the game from that perspective, since it isn't often that a game lets you see the structures both before and after they are ruined.

The whole arc about Fink and Daisy wasn't about Fink or Daisy, and I don't think the game was ever trying to teach some lesson about slavery or racism one way or the other (Note, for example, the scene with the baseball early in the game - you get the reward later no matter what you do). It was all just about Elizabeth, who enters Finkton naive and leaves shaken by the realization that making things better isn't a simple matter. In that way, I think it's the same as Bioshock 1 - the political narrative isn't the focus of the game, it's just a backdrop for telling a story about the characters.