Your writeup seems to indicate that “expendables” can be purchased with both credits and pixels. Is there any overlap? If so, there’d have to be some (perhaps implicit if not explicit) exchange rate between the two currencies. That would, I think, bolster the real-world analogy.

Interesting question, just what proportion of areas in a game do we want to be meaningful in terms of game progression, and what part do we just want to be meaningful in terms of fleshing out the setting? (Parts that don’t do either can safely be jettisoned…) Shadow of the Colossus shows that you can profit from quite a bit of the latter; but there are no end of RPGs that have you traveling through pointless scenery. (Hmm, maybe the lesson there is that, if you’re going to have areas that exist to flesh out the world, then they should focus on that and do it well, not be cookie cutter areas whose barrenness they try to distract you from with pointless combat?)

One specific example that bugs me: the presence of Captain Anderson and Ambassador Udina on the Citadel. They’re at the center of the galactic government and their existence and role is a direct consequence of your actions in Mass Effect 1. And there they are, and you can talk to them, there’s even a side quest to do something with them. But the interaction is empty, they have no real influence, and your relationship to them is strangely empty given that you’re representing a genocidal illegal terrorist organization. I think Bioware couldn’t quite rationalize all the themes here. So that’s a negative, but I admire these games that I can even have a discussion about something as subtle in a videogame.

One puzzle I’ve been playing recently is Numbrix. This was apparently developed by Marilyn vos Savant and an instance appears weekly in the Parade supplement of many Sunday papers (e.g. SF Chronicle). I’m sure you can find examples easily online. The premise is pretty simple, but in solving the puzzles I find that I have developed, and have to apply with pretty good variety, a bunch of different rules (theorems). I don’t think I’ve ever had to resort to a backtracking search. In many cases the next move is fairly non-obvious, though, which of course leads to the development of new theorems. It also helps that most puzzles are solvable in 5-10 minutes.

This is as opposed other number puzzles such as Sudoku, particular the Monster Sudoku (16×16, symbols 0-9A-F) that appears in the Pink section of the Sunday Chron. That gets tedious pretty quickly and really seems to be more of a test of endurance than anything else.

Yeah, I don’t know how easy copies of Shenmue would be to track down; I’m also a little worried that battery-backed memory may be starting to go dead now (Dreamcast VMUs), but maybe that’s overblown. So, with the current state of the VGC, it probably wouldn’t be a good choice. Then again, maybe that’s a bug with the current state of the VGC; if a few Shenmue fans want to get together and play it, why shouldn’t the VGC welcome them?

I’m having some problems with Yakuza 2 as well. It does remind me a lot of Shenmue, but when it does, I’m usually thinking, “I should play Shenmue again,” because Yakuza just isn’t cutting it. The biggest annoyance for me is the camera. It’s confusing every time I walk a few yards and the camera shifts to a new fixed perspective and suddenly I have to switch directions on the analog stick to continue in the same direction.

Sometimes the objectives are unclear as well, so that stops any momentum I have built up in the story. I’m also not a big fan of grinding for money to reach some arbitrary goal that lets me continue the story.

The thing Yakuza 2 is really missing, as a comparison to Shenmue, is the calendar system and the small things, like you mentioned. In Shenmue, I really enjoy the feeling that the world is doing its own thing around me, and if I wanted to, I could just stop and live a normal life, going to the store, working a job, etc. in that space. Yakuza 2 seems much more linear in that way. The world is there to lead me through the story, and though there are lots of optional sidequests and side activities, they don’t fit together into a living place like Shenmue does.

bye bye linkedin!