Another blog:


http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/KaL+Yo ... 2528.phtml

ND Games page in english?

http://www.ndgames.ru/games/the_void/

Anyway what catched my eye was that "pseudo" cover in the void section. It would had give a nice box art also

That's an actual cover, that was supposed to be used for the English version, but the guys at Atari trashed it for some reason and decided to go with an edited original one. This is one of the things I never understood about publishers - how they decide on crappy titles and game covers.

It is a nice cover.


I think publishers decided that by asking a magic 8 ball.

I think so too.

At least I have no idea, why'd they have to tilt the girl from the original cover, so that she looks like a rocket that's about to flip over and explode.

That certainly raise the innuendo level by a few notches.

Steam forums:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... p?t=996636

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/10/col ... n_life.php

another one review

Good review, but isn't this Quinns 3rd review of the game?

As a side note: Phrase of the day: "A land which looks like a nuclear bomb test site redesigned by a feng shui master"

Eurogamer:

http://www.eurogamer.net/forum_thread_p ... _id=165329

Another review:

http://www.egcgames.com/content.php?id=1653

Haven't read it yet, but from the scores I would say they missed the mark by a few planets apart.

(Yes I'm biased in regards to The Void )

Eurogamer Review:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-void-review

[EDIT]: Well, the review is in line with Pathologic by them.

Still I cannot fathom why people complain so much about the difficulty. I played the original Russian version which was harder, in my opinion and found it a good challenge.

I think today's generation is a bit spoiled.

I could smell that '7' from a long way off. Not as brilliant or passionate as his Pathologic review, but still a good read. And he only used the word 'broken' once!

@Throdax: It is possible to arrive at 'dead end' situations in The Void, that do require reloading from an earlier cycle. That can be quite hard to accept. And as for 'today's generation' being 'spoiled,' I don't think that applies to John Walker who is a highly experienced gamer in (I believe) his early 30s

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/11 ... id-review/ — and another one on RockPaperShotgun (Guys, John, Kieron, Quintin, if you're reading this — thanks a lot for all the coverage, you're the best!) — pleasantly mentioning the super-duper-bonus torrent.

I wonder, if we're the first to release an official torrent of something among "paid" game developers...

Isn't that the same as getting in a situation, in a FPS, where you have a badass guys in front of you and you only have 1% health? Or having to restart a two hour mission in a RTS or a TBS cause you where obliterated?

Like Quinn said in his first review, once you learn the tricks of The Void, if you restart you play a much faster game, cause you know what to do.

Let's be honest Throdax, there are not many FPS where you can get into a position like that without doing something staggeringly stupid and even then the penalty is usually nothing more than maybe 2-3 minutes of progress. The RTS comparison is a bit fairer but still you're only talking about repeating one mission at the most and it's pretty clear where you went wrong. All of those situations are also less prevelant since those games usually also have difficultly levels.

Personally I like a good, tough game and I'm very much looking forward to my copy of The Void but I'm well aware of the fact that not all people feel the same. They may however by VERY interested in a game that goes to the interesting places that The Void does. A game like The Void already has a narrow appeal just on it's subject matter and style alone but throw in an unforgiving difficultly curve and you lose even more people. And these are people we want to playing more games!

Now I know that cheats are being released and there is work being done on an easy mode, so this is all fairly moot but I cannot stress enough that the barrier to entry for The Void should be it's content and themes. There are a lot of people who might be more interested in games, I know a few myself, if they knew there was stuff out there like this but an unforgiving difficulty curve is going to keep them away. I still believe that the challenge is a part of a games experience but bare in mind that the challenge you got from The Void is not comparable to that which someone attracted to the premise of it but fairly new or maybe even completely new to games would have.

You are right, there aren't many games now a days with the difficulty curve of The Void. I think that is the problem, "now a days". Currently gamers are taken by their hand in their games and using the FPS example: "Health too low? No problem! Wait in a corner and it will regen back."

Maybe the problem is in me, as a veteran Eve player, the undisputed king of learning curves. I do like a challenge in my games.

I'd liken it more to some old adventure games - like Delphine's Future Wars - in which it was possible to miss a vital object in an early room and then get to a point much later where you were totally stuck without it, there was no way to return to that location, and you had no choice but to reload from an ancient save. That kind of gameplay problem was soon eradicated by LucasArts, and was considered 'bad design.'

Now, I'm not saying that The Void is badly designed - far from it. But if some weasly, mohican-haired bony bastard of a Brother attacks me at the start of a Cycle and I don't have enough Colour to actually fight him, then I have no choice but to reload from earlier. And to get the Colour I need to successfully finish the fight, I may need to carefully replay a whole Cycle or more. Thankfully, this doesn't happen often and in the game's defence, it could be said that:

1. I was warned
and
2. The experience teaches me to be better prepared in the future.

My thoughts on the matter are simple. The Void isn't for everyone, but more importantly, a difficulty setting (easy, normal) would have helped it be a lot more accessible for people and still be the way it is for the rest who like it that way. Win, win.

Though I haven't gotten very far in the game yet (I'm still only on the seventh cycle) I don't find the difficulty (or should I say challenge?) of the game nearly as off putting as Walker does. Personally I found Pathologic much more frustrating, though that was mostly due to the combat which I found, to be perfectly honest tremendously obnoxious, annoying and unfair. The challenge of The Void is different, however, as you get the impression that you could have done any of a number of things differently in another play through to get to a different position. Also, the world itself makes no bones about the difficulty of your situation. In a lot of games, it seems like the protagonist gets high praise for simply existing, and their skills are lauded from the get go even when the player is left saying, but that was easy. That's not the case in The Void. You're constantly told that you're not supposed to be there, that you seem to be causing an unnatural reaction in the world and, most importantly that you are perilously close to failing at all times. With a warnings like those why wouldn't you expect to fail a great number of times?

Well, for what it's worth, here's my initial impressions on Tap-Repeatedly's forums, wherein I make dubious literary comparisons: http://tap-repeatedly.com/?page_id=3/wh ... mpressions

Nobody here is suggesting that the mechanics of The Void be dumbed down but having differently balanced, how much color is used for this/health etc, difficulty levels would be a very good thing. The challenge that you or I get from playing games like The Void is not the at the same level as that which someone who is newer to these games would experience. One of the reasons for skill levels is not just so people can complete the game easily but so that everyone can get a similar level of challenge. The struggle and challenge I experience on hard mode is comparable to that my wife, a fairly new gamer, experiences on easy mode.

This however was not my main point. Whether we like it or not most games are primarily adolescent male fantasies revolving around shooting or beating the crap out of people. Now of course the film industry also has it's fair share of space marines and giant robots but it's also large enough and with a wide appeal that there are hundreds of films being made a year by a very healthy art/foreign/intelligent film scene. So when a game with some artistic merit comes along I would like to be able to recommend it people who are usually fairly dismissive about games, or perhaps old-time gamers who are now jaded, have less time for due to life commitments, the medium but if it can only be played by hardened veterans then I can't do that. I want gaming to grow as an artistic medium but that's going to be quite difficult if the very games that push the envelope can not be experienced by the large portion of the potential audience who will appreciate their depth and ambition. As orator said it's win, win.

So I don't further derail the thread (I know, I know, I started it )


http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=340949

I couldn't imagine it was possible to miss the point of a game by so many kilimeters and yet I'm proven wrong:


http://adventuregamers.com/article/id,1089


Is she (I think) speaking about the same game we are all playing????

Strangely, it is not the first time I come upon sexist and political themes being pointed out by a reviewer, which were by no means prevalent ideas in the game. Always have been wondering, if they seem really that strong...