Nintendo's WiiU features a rather robust online community that allows users to submit literally anything they can draw on the touch pad (or short twitter sized typed messages). There was also an invitation-only official Nintendo community whose name escapes me (I think it had a name that referenced the Metroid games) that they tried several years back. It was just an internet forum, though I didn't get involved and don't know how it turned out. They also do "Camp Hyrule", which gives players various activities to perform (such as writing poetry or doing art) to promote social activities. Lastly, Nintendo does have a forum for online support (which includes hardware problems as well as problems with playing games).

As far back as Pokemon Gold you had the ability to trade letters containing any message you want, though Nintendo scaled that back before online trading appeared. The modern games allow trading and battling with anyone in the world.

So Nintendo has dabbled in online quite a bit over their history. They aren't completely unwilling to deal with policing lots of online content.

I personally suspect their hesitation to make a "Pokemon MMO" has more to do with mechanical difficulties like forests filled with players or spoiling the mystery of the haunted mansion when it's filled with people doing a roleplaying fight club all the time. The intricacies of policing trolls is just one additional consideration.

I suspect that's also why there exists no obvious third-party pokemon MMO contender after all this time. You'd have to pretty radically alter the mechanics of the game to make it make a lot of sense in an interactive MMO. Better to just let people trade online, and otherwise keep the exploration and catching mechanics as they are.

After level 1-1 in Mario, the training seems to end. The later levels seem to offer a variety of settings and enemy configurations (like world 3-2 which features an almost completely flat level with lots of enemies, or world 6-2 which features a tremendous number of pipes) but don't seem to offer much in the way of carefully crafted challenges. In that sense, I would argue that there are many levels designed to be "Fun" because they focus more on visual variety than difficult obstacles for the player. The second level is "fun" because it's suddenly a setting in a cave, and features weird obstacles like that set of vertical pillars that requires a lot of jumping but no threat of injury, or the goombas falling off of ledges that surprise you, but aren't otherwise any more dangerous than the pairs of goombas you've already encountered.

That's sort of an interesting bit that the early games had that the later ones seemed to do less - the later games seemed to emphasize world themes (Ice world, pipe world, mountain world, etc). Aside from some stages having "night" backgrounds or swapping hilltops for mushrooms, all the visual variety of the stages was achieved with different combinations of the same enemies and obstacles. They didn't rely on unique enemies or gimmick obstacles. I'm not sure if it's a better way to design a game, but it does show they maximized the benefit of a very small number of assets.

I haven't played it in a while, but Leap Day was cutesy, fun, and definitely good for multiplayer.

http://www.leapdaygame.com/

The game is most easily described as multiplayer Spacechem. You either start or join a game in progress then work together to build a huge machine to allow anthropomorphic flan to build and sell goods to earn money to buy bigger machines. To win the game you and the other players (a total of four to eight) must build a machine that builds a specific set of goods and delivers them to the towers for the boss.

The multiplayer aspect comes in since trading goods to another player causes you to both earn money for the sale (so selling a $100 rock by yourself earns only you $100, whereas trading it to another player who sells it earns $100 for each, plus a bonus). It also gives you more space to build more complex machines and more quickly build expensive goods to sell. So, the game is strictly cooperative. Everyone wins together, and there's never a benefit to sabotaging another player.

The only downside is that matches go on for days (that is, games have a time limit of a few days and it takes most of that time to win) so it's a game you play for a bit, try to make the best machine you can within your budget, then leave the game alone for a while so you can come back later and improve your machine with your bigger budget. If you're looking for something to play actively for some time and then put down, it will not deliver.

Then again, it's F2P (financed by buying inventory slots and custom avatars) so you don't have anything to lose.

I think you're right that the majority are honestly attempting to help and are just being thwarted by the lag and impossibility of navigating a menu in this format, but there are clearly trolls throwing in Starts while walking on easy paths, throwing out Rights during battles when there's no need to do so (it enters the Pokemon and Run commands, which are useless when you're on your last pokemon in a trainer fight), and spamming Down when trying to cross narrow ledges. There was no reason for anyone to be accessing the menu while trying to get the Silph Scope after Giovanni, yet the menu was opened and Dig was selected after much confusion. That was doubtless an intentional move to get the goat of Rocket-HQ-weary players.

It also seems like people are way too eager to access the PC knowing that it carries such a huge risk of releasing pokemon. They just earned a Hitmonlee (named CCC) then released him almost immediately after while trying to pull him from the PC. I suspect there are some people who aren't trolling but are willing to push the group towards risky behavior just to see the results.

Yeah, Angry Birds was devised around a merchandising strategy rather than just being a game for its own sake. On the other hand, starting out with the game means that it was less likely to spoiled by competing interests like shoehorning in plot elements from a movie.

I haven't played this either and was hoping somebody would comment on it.

I'm turned off by the thought of having to buy all those figures for something I'm going to play single player, since collecting toys just doesn't interest me. I really, really like the idea of the game having a mechanical component to it, though. I think maybe I'm in a minority but I like the idea of games exploring new methods of interaction like motion control or unusual input methods (combination button and touch commands, for example, or the bongos for DK Jungle Beat). If they made a version of this with a small number of figures and a good game around them I might be interested, especially if they make the act of selecting and placing the figures is a good test of manual dexterity to put them in the right spots or facing the right direction. Maybe a game designed to hold the controller with one hand (at least some of the time) while using the other to manipulate the figures would work.

Gonna be interesting to see if they manage to switch it over. It looks like it takes a super majority of votes to switch from the active mode to the inactive one. It could also be a spoiler since you can't vote for the democracy/anarchy scale and issue commands at the same time. I'm not sure if the chat is throttled to prevent somebody from making a bot to issue commands faster than a human could type them.

I'm a little worried that queuing of commands isn't going to work the way anyone thinks, though. The appears to be accepting commands at the frame rate of the game, which is way faster than the player character is able to move. A command of down2left2 isn't going to make the player walk down then walk two to the left - it's going to make him walk down one then punch down once and left twice while he's walking and not affect the game. Nevermind that the game considers changing the direction you face to take a command.

It's also unclear if he's capped the number of commands per line. start1000000 would otherwise be a valid and really obnoxious command. Also presumably it ignores commands made while executing a string otherwise several consecutive lines with multiple commands is going to queue up a lot of commands.

Which would be really interesting but in a different way from the way this stream was interesting over the weekend.

I was thinking, probably the one big weakness of this format is that it's impossible to know the status of the game without referring to an external source (checking menus is very nearly impossible, especially for thousands of individuals coming in every few seconds). It might be a lot of fun if somebody designed a game explicitly to be played in this format, including a menu that is visible at all times so that players can hop in and immediately know the state of the game and with original puzzles and areas so there's a sense of discovery as they progress.

EDIT: Guess they did take this stuff into account which is good. But yeah, Democracy is nice for getting fiddly parts done but it is missing some of the appeal of bizarre random behavior-

http://sheltered-reef-4687.herokuapp.com/ Somebody made a thing that tracks which buttons are being pressed. It's not clear how much lag it has compared to the game, though most of the time it seems to lean in the directions you'd expect it to lean. It's still fun to watch while you watch the stream.

Yeah, going for Eevee was ridiculous. I think no small part of it was people getting overconfident in their ability to do this. But hey, it's where we are now.

I did some reading of links and it looks like a lot of people are intentionally spamming start to try and slow down the character's movement until the game catches up on the lag, so my perspective of those people has changed. It sounds like they did this intentionally and forcefully to get up the ledge with success.

The more I read about this the more interesting it gets as a combination of a social experiment and a video game puzzle where you have to approach pokemon with a strategy you'd never consider otherwise (never before has crossing a ledge or cutting a bush posed such a serious obstacle in one of these games).

They should clarify - do they want candidates who have no idea what to say to a woman in a bar and are aware they have no idea what to say, or are they also accepting candidates who have no idea what to say to a woman in a bar but recklessly attempt to initiate conversation anyway?

The comment about surgeons who play video games performing better (In Gimmy's link) reminds me of the end of Trauma Center, which informs the player that beating the game doesn't qualify them to perform surgery. If they already are a surgeon, it states that they should never tell their patients how many times the failed while playing a video game about surgery.

I want to play the demo, but part of me wants to save it all for when the game comes out for real and be surprised by everything.

It sounds like the developer has helped a little by temporarily throttling the Start button so it doesn't activate as often (a lot of people were trolling by spamming start to keep opening the menu). He's also expressed that he may hop in and mod the game if it becomes impossible to progress (the Safari Zone and its step limit could prove impossible to overcome, for example).

It is pretty amazing, though. Between people who don't know where to go next, people intentionally trying to sabotage the game, and the normal difficulty of navigating a menu with 20,000 people at the controls it's amazing they managed to get through caves of random battles as well as they have. It's also odd that trivial parts of the game seem to form almost insurmountable obstacles - one route has a long ledge you cross to progress, but since a single "down" command makes you fall off, crossing it in this format takes hours. Worse yet that when they finally managed to cross it they died to the next trainer.

Despite showcasing just how much of humanity takes pleasure in nothing more than disrupting others, I think overall it's encouraging to see that despite this they are slowly and painfully making progress.

You also can pick between the pronouns him/her/they separately from your selected gender. Your gender targeted ads are based on those three pronouns, not the gender.

It's a game we all can play! http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon

This really is absolutely amazing.

Seriously, I can't stop laughing at this. This is hilarious!

Article not found?

Preorder weapons really suck, and I wish they wouldn't do that. When they do I'm left wondering if using the preorder equipment will break the balance of the game if I use them, and if I opt out I didn't actually get a bonus. Cosmetic rewards like weapon and armor skins or even bonus levels are way better bonuses.

At least in DSouls there's an upgrade system so that the bonus weapons aren't necessarily the weapons you'll use outside the first few levels.

Just add a way to also vote against tags and I think it'll quickly balance out. Once it's been out for a while and people get distracted by something else I think the tags will equalize and start becoming more useful. Or at least, the joke tags will be limited to the really funny ones (Bureaucracy 'em Up for Papers Please was pretty clever).

Either way, though, if you're looking for new games you're better off asking a dedicated community (eg, if you want Roguelikes visit a roguelikes forum, if you want exotic stuff go to an Indie forum like this one) or knowledgeable friends/reviewers than the world at large - you're just going to wind up with an average of everything otherwise.

So, I think the tags will get better soon even if Steam does nothing, and that when they're working they still will be a sub-average way to locate interesting games.

Mobile F2P games don't require any level of skill to play them for free, though. If you set out to play them for free you'll succeed every time. If you set out to 1CC an arcade game you're going to lose quite a few times while getting there. In practice microtransaction games have the advantage, especially for people who prefer to play them as virtual ant farms.

That's the reason why arcade games are becoming rare and mobile F2P games are commonplace. Arcade games just aren't a good value to the average or even above average consumer in practice.

I think maybe you two misunderstood his statement -

He's saying the ability to aim anywhere on the visible screen (without turning) in an instant is great. It's the same kind of precision you get when using a mouse on the PC. He's not talking about aiming at the side of the screen to turn being instant.

XIII was awful, but XIII-2 was really good.

My first experience with video games was shitty Atari games right before the crash. I promptly moved on to playing Rogue with my dad on the PC.

Nature will find a way.

Disappointed that Darkest Dungeons doesn't even explain how its "Affliction System" works and made $75k in a day.

It seemed pretty clear to me - afflictions grant various special effects that have positive or negative benefits, like a warrior with alcoholism who does more damage but becomes unpredictable in combat, or a rogue who becomes afraid of undead and is unable to effectively fight against them until you give her some mental health treatment in the monastery. Afflictions are tied to in-game mechanics, like a phobia might develop as a result of taking a nasty hit and nearly dying or you might get addicted to something by using it too often. The game seems like it'll mechanically function like a typical dungeon crawler except that managing your bonus abilities and penalties is a little more complex than your typical game where you just buy them off a skill list.

In theory it could give a feeling of tabletop roleplaying to the game by having characters develop traits that suggest a personality without baking it into the character via cutscenes and dialogue. I'm not surprised it found an audience so fast.

I actually liked the Dark World in Prime 2. The corrosive effects when you're out of the light gave it a claustrophobic effect even if you're not the type to suffer from claustrophobia. I also like how they were willing to go for different upgrades for Samus like the water jets and echo visor instead of just reusing the wave beam and xray visor. The enemy in the third area that causes your visor to crash and force you to manually reboot your suit is one of my favorite enemies of all in any game. I would go out of my way to let it attack me just to watch the reboot sequence.

What Prime 3 lost in uninteresting characters and story it made up for with the excellent controls (summoning your ship for airstrikes was smooth and fun, and ripping panels off walls with the whip really got me into the feel of the game). I also really liked everything about the steampunkish sky city zone and the final area where you battle the last boss. If they'd just titled it something other than Metroid Prime 3 I don't think there would be anything to complain about with regards to the setting.

Played through Dead Space 3 and really liked it. It's not the same game as Dead Space 2 (and not quite as good overall), but it's good in a different way. Isaac in the first half of the game is kind of an annoying cliche action hero (Go fix this thing because nobody else has a plan!) but after the weird but funny humor of the giant drill fight (Ellie! A giant drill is trying to kill me!!) the story gets interesting and has some fun action sequences. I didn't care for the last few chapters in the bland ruins, though, and the optional missions were devoid of interesting setpieces that made DS1 and 2 so much fun to play. The only thing about the story I didn't like was that the ending (after the DLC) is just a cliffhanger. I preferred the first two games where they could have ended the series after the ending without it feeling incomplete.

I played some coop with strangers and it was really good, actually, though not horror in any way. The one mission where you pilot a shuttle is especially good with two players - one player pilots and the other mans the turret (in solo you fly and man the turret at the same time). At one point one player has to go fix the engine while the other player tries to keep you alive on the turret until you get back. It was a really good piece of asymmetric gameplay and one of the few places in the game where even in coop you feel vulnerable and threatened. I also like how the coop optional missions use hallucinations for only one player to break up the narrative a bit - playing two people together and trying to explain your different viewpoints seems like a fun exercise to me.

The weapon crafting system is a point of weakness to me. During the first run it's a bit fun to experiment with different combinations of tools and tips to make something powerful, but on subsequent playthroughs (including hard mode) you just build your favorite weapon by chapter 5 and then tinker with damage upgrade chips for the rest of the game.

Hardcore isn't as good in this one I think, since the game is overall easier (one-hit-kills from exploders aren't as much of a threat in this one and they toned down the instant-death crashes in flying sequences) but now you can't make save checkpoints (without cheating with a USB at least). I preferred DS2 where you had to strategically pick your save locations and plot out your node upgrades all the way through to the last chapter. It's also pointlessly punishing to make the player start over an eight hour run because they hit a wall in the last chapter and got insta-gibbed.

Overall an above-average experience, I think.

I think his problem is he has a really lousy pickup story for Asian women. That's sufficient to explain it without the need to add politics.