I remember it for my ex wife drowning my Sim in the pool whenever she was mad at me.

Where did the "casual games" conversation come from? It just seems to have popped up out of nowhere. Anyway, the mention of Tetris as a potentially casual game made me remember this decidedly not-casual video of it: link

I've noticed that whether a game is "hardcore" or "casual" tends to be defined by the actual game developer a lot of the time, and barring that, certain genres are considered to belong to one or the other. RPGs are generally hardcore, whereas marble poppers and match-3 games are traditionally considered casual. It's kind of a pointless distinction, though, because having played through the entirety of Sparkle 2, I can say that there are some truly difficult ("hardcore," even) moments. Android and iOS games have blurred the line even further, with many games marrying the casual gameplay that's suited to touch-devices with deeper systems borrowed from hardcore games.

Oh, and I liked The Sims 2. Later entries, not so much, but there was something magical about creating families, only to tear them apart by tragedy (house fires have always been my personal favorite) and force them to move on. Rinse and repeat. This must be what George RR Martin feels like all the time.

And how much of that is due to insecurity rather than actual offensive intent? Artsy types are stereotypicaly so self-confident right? Not prone to depression at all, for a totally random example of a malady...

Both sides are constantly radicalizing the arguments... both sides. The only thing that somewhat redeems one of the sides to me is its willingness to cede authority to objectivity / reality. The other side is a wonderful reflection of the postmodern cult of the subjective perception trumping reality / objectivity.

Maybe not pertinent to all RPGs, but JRPGs specifically seem to be considered casual by haters and hardcore by fans. It's funny.

Just lends more credence to the idea that the whole casual/hardcore distinction is a load of bollocks.

See, this is where the one-sided witch hunt of sites like DeepFreeze comes in - I'm not saying that indie press, awards and devs are free from nepotism and corruption, I'm saying - what's on the other side?
AAA with pockets deeps enough to buy reviews and critics with good ol' cold, hard cash rather than personal relationships and sexual favours, and they've been doing it since the start, since the 80's!
Mr. Fish seems like a strange choice, whatever his personal politics may be, Fez is still very much a 'traditional' metrovania with plenty to please a 'hardcore' gamer, as long as their tastes are a little retro on the graphics front
Sure it has an 'innovative twist on the metrovania formula' but most of them try to bring some new gimmick to the table...

Well I guess now that I've stepped into a GamerGate discussion I might as well jump back into it. At least it's contained to this thread apparently.

Yeah, this was a criticism I've had of GamerGate since a while back. They claim to care so much about ethics in video game journalism, but they focus on indie devs and the alleged influence of feminists/SJWs, and miss the much bigger and longer-running problems of review copy policies and clout, the "eight point eight" phenomenon, the entire enthusiast press and the hype machine...

If they're gonna claim such a moral superiority that they claim, then they ought to be going after the really big issues, rather than simply chasing after pettier issues and making that their reason for being. Alternatively, they could stop pretending to about journalistic ethics and simply state outright that they're an anti-feminist or SJW-hating movement or something -- because, let's be honest, while I can see them arguing against the change of the gradual mainstreaming and maturing of video games as a artistic medium (albeit still a popular one, like movies and TV shows), arguing against change itself is pretty pointless and a waste of time. And it's not like the non-artsy games are going anywhere anyway.

Yeah I sometimes wonder if GG is anything other than the natural force of inertia...

Can you prove this? That'd be huge. The only reason I haven't seen GG focus on the big-name studios and their corruption is because it's way harder to prove apart from the rare Jeff Gerstmann-esque blowups, it being one of those things everyone suspects but no one ever seems to have hard evidence of. I'd love to focus on that if you have anything to contribute in that regard, though.

Still, finding unethical journalists in any way we can is bound to weed out those who would take bribes like that, too. I doubt there are separate divisions of game journalists who receive sexual favors and monetary favors. They're probably all the same group of people.

Which is far harder to find and prove since AAA cover their tracks damn well.

Deepfreeze would if it could, but that kind of info can hardly be accessed without hacking. Relationships are far easier to track.

And have you forgotten how hard gamers in general have been shitting on sites for accepting money? They have so for quite a while. Proof /v/ the musical 1 dates from a year before GG and yet both musicals have as a focus the corruption and shitty practices of AAA Developers that milk their gamers.
Showing that the issues of #gamergate date back long before august 28. People who say it has ever only been about hating Zoe are wrong. She is just the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of this whole case. The final straw.

It's sad the financial corruptions of AAA are hard to find and expose, as we'd need to somehow review every transaction made (which isn't as easy as seeing who supports who on patreon) but if you have them, send that info to bonegolem, i'm sure he'll love that.

Hell where is the time where journalists exposed corruption instead of partaking in it? Where are those comic/cartoon journos who go to the extremes to find who is corrupt, even when there boss tells them to stop.
(hilarity on this may be the best reply Anita got on one of her newer vids)

Whoa, crap, Anita actually made a video about stuff she LIKES? Finally - I've been saying she should do that, to balance out all the criticism she makes all the time since the start...

and at least the positive aspect was not "the character is nothing. 0 development both visual and character. We know nothing and don't see sh!t. It's basically few big pixels with no personality. This is the perfect female." this time around. But then she started shitting on how every woman in the witcher 3 has super revealing clothes, which they don't, and are all the same body type, which they aren't. One would nearly suspect she hasn't touched it.

The way I see it, gone home requires more patience in state of mind to play through. If the player is not in the right mindset; ie wanting to skip the story and get the gameplay, gone home will fail to impress the player. For someone to enjoy it, IMO, there needs to be certain conditions that must be satisfied. They shouldn't be looking for a complex mechanical puzzle like Dark Souls or the like. Enjoying it proves you can immerse yourself easier basically, or that you can feel immersed without needing too much gameplay, and the game's writing is enough to do that. So people who are really used to being mechanically and narratively immersed and require both factors to be immersed won't feel immersed. So no right or wrong; just taste with this one. Some people may have the opposite. They may not feel immersed in the Souls-like narrative style because the narrative element is mostly hidden and can only be found through exploration. So mechanically and narrative are basically two parts of the whole game; and most people have particular tastes into how much they want of each. So its subjective is what I'm sayin :D
You do realize me saying that back then was a joke right? And you taking it seriously meant you have belief the proGG can support tolerance. So kudos for being a castle-gate more openminded than Vain.

Do you not see that antiGG has been shaming and hating from the start? Gamers are dead? Gaming=intolerance?? What kind of mainstream media slob would believe playing a game would cause someone to change their behavior to the delicious media fantasy of ''exclusion''? AntiGG and SJ in general suffers from HUGE intolerance complex. They don't just express their dissatisfaction on twitter, and get called intolerant. They try to remove the thing they don't tolerate. So yes, if AntiGG wants mechanically-focused gamers to stop insulting antigames, stop the stupid intolerance to any game which offends you [ie; them, not actually you].

Chairman Pao has mutated Reddit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBmScggN-dc

i don't about you, but REAL journalists and old-media mostly believe accepting free games and party invites as "corruption". and that's an open secret (game reviewer accepting free stuff) for the longest time.

the supposedly evil old-media and and some of their journalists have spelled it out pretty clearly . professional gaming media and reviewers are fundamentally corrupted... and the GG reaction is overt and rabid.

if any old-media corp behaved like gaming media, they would at least be mocked endlessly like foxnews. but death threats? that's crazy.