gogaccount111: Thanks, Nipsen! You certainly are accomplished in the art of flattery -- your post is more or less equivalent to a giant Mission Accomplished banner unfurling, only, err, without the irony. :)
(I don't post on Twitter.)
:p I'm told I'm too honest and critical to be any good at flattery - but was really impressed, was that. Listened a bit to the commentary, and heard the comment on "engagement" vs. "immersion", on the "timer" feature with the recharger. And it's spot on.. I've been writing (for free, like most people in games-journalizm do, apparently) about that a lot. Game-fans tend to ignore this part, even if it's the difference between.. Contra and Heavy Rain. People say "oh, the player's stories are better than ours" (like Chris Avellone added once, with some sort of forced grin), but they don't go into any detail about how the player fits in, outside the idea that the player should somehow adopt the story in the game as their own directly. Which really is a completely impossible idea - that's not how it works.
When you play Monkey Island, for example, you tend to wonder if you're seeing things from the perspective of Guybrush, or the story-teller - because it's not consistent. Schafer didn't make that mistake in Grim Fandango, either because we're playing Manny's conscience? And never playing his motivations or wishes. Or because maybe Schafer deliberately wanted to maintain a type of Noir style, where you never actually get told the penny drops when the protagonist sees something important, but only see it through the way the observations change. Likely that was conscious. But it's something you see break down in lots and lots of games with compartmentalized writing teams, that you don't have inconsistent styles, but randomly wandering viewpoints. Which would work in a book, but not in a game (at least unless you deliberately have a "meanwhile", or a mirror-sequence where you suddenly see the protagonist on a game-world screen, etc).
So really liked that someone actually understood that. Could definitely tell when I played the game as well. So not.. some weird intellectual technical admiration, that I'm sure you don't want to hear :D Even though I appreciate how much discipline you actually need in the writing to accomplish it.
(Oh, and go make a twitter-account! :p)