And I played through the whole thing anyway, regardless of her feelings on the matter, even though it’s a brilliant brilliant game, there is something that I can’t quite square. After five minutes – as soon as they start talking about ‘The Fireflies’ and… I think it was pretty much the first time I smashed someone’s head against a table. But it is still… My wife plays Portal 2, plays things like that, and I got the Last of Us and I was very excited: ‘Right, we’ll play this together’.

“Well… I just played through the Last of Us, which I thought was brilliant. Put another way, I don't pick sides between A Portrait of an Artist and Finnegan's Wake.īut isn’t it the themes that are letting us down, not the graphics? Crysis 3 is beautiful, but show a clip of it on TV and it would look a little ridiculous still. I appreciate that sort of messy, ambitious project as much as I appreciate a very compact, tightly constructed experience like 30 Flights of Loving. Part of what I found so interesting about Bioshock Infinite is it tried to solve so many problems that previously existed in older Irrational games, and in the process of doing so created a bunch of new problems. We can agree or disagree with that value judgment, but I think it makes the accusation that he is simply being an apologist for bad game design ring hollow (although I also liked that Medium piece). His argument is that we should extend that same courtesy to games. That's an artificial construct that we've all internalized and accepted. If we were seeking out true fidelity to life we wouldn't see anything, but instead there is always lighting in night scenes in movies so the audience can see what is happening. Tom Bissell's compares seemingly weird game decisions to night scenes in movies.

This ties nicely into the Tom Bissell conversation, and the discussion you guys had about smashable pots in games.

My best guess is it became a convention because you spend so much time in these games picking stuff up off the ground, and this just makes it slightly easier to do so. I was thinking about the height thing in a first person game, since it was something we discussed during the stream.

Viscera cleanup game spoiler