Recent content by Bifford

I don't care about Half-Life 3. There are so many great FPSs out there, and here we are demanding something on par with the Second Coming of Christ.

Maybe Valve just doesn't care so much about Half-Life. Half-Life is just an FPS. Valve is now doing bigger things. Steam has brought Valve more money and influence than the Half-Life series ever did. They're about to launch a console now, which means they're ready to take on the big boys...

I'd like to see a bit more agriculture and industry in the east coast. There were plenty of settlements in Washington DC but never did we learn how they kept themselves fed. No farming or hunting. Unless you count trapping lizards. Oh, and there were like two dozen bandits for every...

Guns are a big part of American culture, and the right to own a gun is an important principle, even to many who don't actually own them. This is not the case with bombs.

I am not too concerned about women in games. Either way is fine with me and I'm too much of a loner myself to really care about gaming being a male domain. What profoundly disturbs me is the campaign of harassment many Internet gamers have waged against Ms Sarkeesian. These include...

Yahtzee knows that people don't enjoy his reviews when he's being nice.

The only complaint I have about Bioshock 2 is that the villain is a clichéd religious demagogue. Bioshock 1 had a very clever dynamic between Ryan, Atlas and Fontaine.

Saying it was all a dream can work if you plan around it from the start, rather than tack it on at the end after the main body of the story is already finished (like Mario 2, or the 9th season of Dallas). It works especially well if the setting is absurd. Examples include The Matrix...

While I was playing through Bioshock Infinite, I was certain the whole affair was a dream inside Booker's head. It would have explained some odd things in the game that the parallel-universes thing didn't, like the mysterious corpse in the lighthouse, the near-fatal baptism, and the confusing...

I'd be interested in a Mass Effect-style game where you play an Inquisitor.

I'd say the only thing about science that resembles faith is that the layman generally takes on faith what the scientists tell him is the truth. Yes, the evidence and arguments are there for him to study, and he might have read the simplified version provided to the public, but it is rare that...

I suppose Doom. Or was it Quake? I don't remember, but those are the games that made me a hardcore gamer, around which I formed my first obsession.

Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines had very clunky combat but a few monsters stand out as particularly bad. Like zombies. They like to grab you and eat your brains and you're stuck for several seconds while you try to break their grapple. There are a couple of levels that are full of them...

I accept evolution for the same reason religious types reject it: I've been raised on it and accept it pretty much on faith. If I wanted to truly understand evolution (theory and evidence) I'd have to study biology at college for three years. Yes, the basic summary has a compelling logic, but...

It's a lot of nonsense, really. It tries to be as grim and dark as possible at the cost of logic. How can humanity have stagnated for 10,000 years? The Age of Strife was bad, but they've had plenty of time to recover. 10,000 years ago we were experimenting with stone spears, so there's no...