PixlBit

I remember you talking a long time ago about some of the nonsense you had to deal with. I went in with a lot of skepticism this far because I know a lot of people have had trouble like you did. Things have been very different so far and they've been giving a lot of good information, and they've also been pointing out loopholes and places where the information has been made to "look good" or when the statistics aren't up to date. I'm trying to suss out the weaknesses in their system but so far I've just found a bunch of people who are quite honest about their strengths and proud of them, while also being totally transparent about their weaknesses or challenges a student will face.

Thanks Joe! I think it's great you're following that passion and getting your Masters. How far along into that program are you? How's it been going?

Nick, that's the best wall of text of all time. That kind of insight and encouragement is huge and I appreciate it

I've always been interested in your history and experiences with the craft, even before I started considering it as a career path. I'm definitely going to take your advice to heart and keep it in mind. If I enroll in the program and move down there I'm definitely going to be in a whole different environment and situation I'm not accustomed to, learning a lot of material in a field I'm completely new to, so I kind of cherish advice like this. It's a much appreciated part of the support system I have.

Thank you Shane, I appreciate the encouragement and positivity a great deal. Back on 1UP I originally started up a blog so that I could talk about game design and use it as a place to vent or think out loud. I think I might be able to finally get back to talking about design and have more substantive things to share about my experiences if I start this program lol.

It's completely unrelated to BF3 and Chima, but this song rocks.

You have the choice to have either protected or unprotected sex, and I tried to get pregnant by having unprotected sex outside the marriage with male prostitutes in Bloodstone, but it only produced STDs and never any pregnancy. I was hoping I could just get my lady hero pregnant some way and be able to mantain my lesbian marriage with Violet but I couldn't find any loopholes in the system or anything, and since there's no adoptions in the game it makes it even tougher. I knew that if I was going to get kids I'd have to marry a male in the game and have unprotected sex, but I had no idea how deep the rabbit-hole would go when it came to convincing your current partner to leave you. It got so bad, I was actually trying to play the Fable 2 storyline like a good-guy but not matter how many "good" choices I made during story-quests I always knew I was the scum of the Earth for what I did to Violet lol.

Yeah that second story is the icing on the cake of absurdity, I was trying to class the place up lol. I really enjoyed the story in the original FEAR, it's a really dark story of revenge and presents an antagonist that I feel incredibly empathetic towards, but the sequel just went way off the rails by the end. At the end of FEAR 2 she rapes you and by the ends of the visions she's got a sort of instant baby-bump, and it's implied that she forced you to have sex and she's trying to birth some sort of anti-christ I guess. It's so bonkers.

For me the most memorable romantic moments in games are all ones that are totally dark, outrageous, and hard to believe can exist in a game. Get ready to be disgusted and depressed, I have two examples that will knock your pants off.

Fable 2 is a game that gave me a lot of dark emergent stories through the romance system. I created a lady hero and set out to make her a lesbian. I found a suitable female mate in Oakvale named Violet, we got married, and I moved her into a idyllic upscale house around Bowerstone Market. For a while I kept my wife as happy as possible by fully upgrading the house, putting the family allowance as high as possible, having sex with her often enough, giving her gifts, and going for walks. But a time came when I wanted to start having kids and in Fable 2 they didn't give you the ability to adopt children when you're a gay or lesbian couple (which was rectified in Fable 3). I realized I was going to have to break up my lesbian marriage with Violet and find a male to replace her with so I could have kids.

The thing is, getting a divorce in Fable 2 isn't simple. You can't pick an option and break up a relationship diplomatically or amicably, you have to use the systems to make your mate unhappy enough for them to leave, which requires you to be a total psycho. I took all her allowance away, I stopped having sex with her, and eventually I started hitting her and things got crazy dark in a hurry. Since I had made her so happy earlier in the relationship her love values in the systems were super high and took forever to knock down, so it ended up seeming like stockholm syndrome because I kept having to abuse her to knock those values down, but she wouldn't leave because it takes so long to change status.

I would go off to Bloodstone and have crazy sex-trains with both male and female prostitutes, catching 4 STDs in a row during a visit there, and the news of my character's cheating catches up to my wife but it still didn't activate her divorce function. All of this absurd abuse culminated in me punching my character's wife and pulling out my gun and shooting it around inside our house, and finally her unhappiness was so low that she suddenly started crying, she made a declaration that she was leaving, and she ran out of the house. I didn't know how the game handled all of this so I ran after her to see where exactly she was fleeing to. That day in Fable was super moody too because it was raining in Bowerstone, so I chased her as she ran through the rain and eventually she went out the exit that leads towards Oakvale, where she was originally from. I assumed she was going back home, so a couple days later I went to Oakvale to see what she was up to and she was nowhere to be found. The place she once occupied was taken over by a completely new character. There's a lot of rabbit-holes to go down in Fable games and systems to interact with, break, and exploit, but this romance one was by far the most absurd and depressing. I ended up marrying a male and having two kids, but they ended up being a puppet family & I couldn't bond with them at all (can't even remember their names) because I couldn't ever get my mind off of my original wife Violet and the crazy dark story that unfolded there and all the awful things I did in order to scare her off. When Fable 3 came around I ended up not having any marriages, there could be a few reasons for that, but I think one of them was that I still felt bad about Violet.

That was a pretty uplifting story, it only gets worse in my second example, but luckily it's much shorter and sweeter, but it has a major spoiler for F.E.A.R. 2 for anybody that cares. My second most memorable moment in game romances was the very end of F.E.A.R. 2 where the main protagonist Beckett gets raped by the main antagonist Alma, who is long dead by the way and exists as a Paranormal Activity type of entity except amplified on a giant scale. You have to go through a terrifying end battle sequence of visions, and it's implied by the end that while you were having these nightmares in your mind, in the real world Alma was raping you because she is standing over you rubbing a clearly pregnant belly.

Best game romance ever, raped by a ghost.

I just finished A Feast for Crows and I liked it, so whenever you do that one I'll look forward to what you think. As for A Storm of Swords I really liked the death of Tywin, I'm just wondering how they'll handle that on the TV show, if they do it at all. The ending threw me for a curveball, it gets even weirder with that character in the next book.

Storm of Swords was by far the most painful and difficult book in the series to read so far, all my favorite characters were either killed or being treated poorly. Feast for Crows isn't nearly as much of a downer, it's pretty interesting, cleanses some of that pain, and moves along some characters nicely.

I like the Robocop trilogy a lot, each of the 3 are great in their own ways. The 1st two are rated R and they're really intense and dark, but one thing I actually forgot over the years is that Robocop 3 was rated PG-13, and I like that movie a lot. It's less dark than the previous two but the third film is by far the weirdest and perhaps coolest. Robocop has a jetpack, there's a samurai ninja robot he fights, it's fucking bonkers but it all holds up well and delivers a fairly satisfying dramatic action story about the Detroit cops going to war against the OCP and their mercenary band of gang members and para-military. When I heard the remake is PG-13 I hated it at first because the first two movies were super dark and built on Robo taking down violent criminals and druglords in pretty graphic ways, but once I realized Robocop 3 wasn't rated R and how much I liked it, I came around. I'll be interested to see what they end up doing with the remake and if they touch on the same themes. The original trilogy did a pretty good job of exploring all kinds of "is he human or machine" themes, corporations taking control over goverment functions in a city, and other things.

I can relate to Julian saying his tastes might be changing a little bit. I don't know if my tastes are changing permanantly, or to what extent they might be changing, but I've been feeling a little different the last couple months. I haven't been able to get super into the shooters and rpgs that I've tried lately, and they're all lauded and were highly recommended to me. I've been going back to Spelunky every night and it's been pretty much satisfying all my gaming needs single-handedly for a couple months straight now. I started The Witcher 2 for 360 and for now I'm on the fence about if this is even a good game. I've heard plenty about how those games feel different and it can be tough to get accustomed to the flow and difficulty of them, so I'm still in a probationary phase (lol) where I'm thinking maybe I'm not playing it right, or maybe it eventually gets good.

I played the tutorial and everything in it made enough sense that I thought it wouldn't be hard to get into. There's two-handed melee combat, a set variety of magic spells to upgrade, traps you can set, bombs to throw, and knives to throw. It doesn't seem like there's any shields, all your blocking is done with the sword, and there's an ability to parry and riposte. Since Dark Souls is my favorite RPG and I like that combat a lot and think it's designed well, those terms bring a certain expectation to my mind, and Witcher 2 has been off the mark altogether. It took me till level 6 or so to simply unlock the ability to parry, it takes longer yet to unlock the ability to riposte, I still have to get that mechanic. I don't understand why those things aren't available from the get go, they seem like they're necessary in order to do combat. Without parry/riposte the combat is a cluster of clumsy diving, swinging, and often getting surrounded and killed, or chased down and killed. There's no flow to it and it's just a mess.

The entire prologue of Witcher 2 (which is a big meaty chunk of game, at least a few hours deep) is real crap to play and makes a nasty impression. The combat just makes me want to play Dark Souls where at least things make sense and work well. There's even a forced stealth section where you have to get out of a jail and all it makes me want to do is play Splinter Cell. Witcher 2 has just about every system and mechanic I tend to love in RPGs between parry/riposte, stealth, trap-setting, buffs for you weapons, robust crafting, and many other things but none of it has come together yet. It's mostly come across as, "I think it's great they're trying to do all this, but this execution isn't very good. Why do people think this game is so great?" I still have some hope, I'll wait to see if the game finally gets good, but as of now I still have yet to do a single satisfying thing mechanically. Story looks really good though, I'm into the cutscenes at least.

I'm going to go play more Spelunky.

Julian from the NWP podcast here at the site would love that you had a Jason Statham marathon, on the show he's been doing a long running gag called a "Statham sighting" everytime Statham gets mentioned on any given show. It doesn't happen all the time but when it does it's super random and when Julian is editing the podcast he always adds a short audio clip from a Statham movie of him saying a tough-guy one liner. Everytime I watch a Statham flick I make sure to tell Julian on twitter that I had a Statham sighting recently.

Speaking of the devil I actually had one recently, I watched Redemption and thought it was pretty good, although it got a lot darker and more emotionally draining than I thought it would be (not that that was necessarily a bad thing). The next Statham movie I have on my Netflix cue is one he did called Blitz, I think.