No I mean the creator couldn’t speak english very well (Listen to the audio commentary). He can write and understand it fine.
Agreed, Dear Esther was great because while it didn’t have heavy fighting, it had exploration, great narrated story, and atmosphere, which is something few games now a days do well I feel. Sure it wasn’t heavy on the gameplay, but it was relaxing, creative, original, different, and, as I said, had a lot of atmosphere which, in my opinion, allows the boring, cliche, and repetitive gameplay perfect reason to go take a vacation.
My biggest problem with Dear Esther is that I couldn’t figure out where to go. I got lost and wandered around for sometime before getting bored and noclipping. There were a few neat sights, but there wasn’t any contrast between one rocky wall formation and another leaving me with no idea where to go.
Yeah, it’s like starting to live in another country, where locals speak in a language you don’t know.
Sad to say, I was very positive towards it from the very beginning.
Uhm mate…have u ever heard about the “Pause” button? It’s on your keyboard and it works at the 90% of the games 
just like in minerva…I know cause I used it!
He does have a point that you shouldn’t be forced to choose between breaking the flow of the game just to get the plot. If you’re able to go back and read it again, then it’s a bit more excusable, but Minerva didn’t. Not that the plot was worth reading to begin with.
I disagree, I thought Adam Foster’s writing (going back before Minerva to Someplace Else) was always worth reading.
You may think it’s overrated, but the 10’s of thousands of us who played it think it’s a great mod.
Of course, Tamerain might think it’s shit, but Tam- erm, Hollow-WTF will think it’s the best mod ever.
I mean, he is that desperate for acceptance from people he’ll never meet.
You’re saying his writing is good before Minerva, are you agreeing with me or what?
I played Dystopia and it just wasn’t my thing. I loved going into the internet tron style but in the end I just sucked to much and there weren’t any servers back then.
There aren’t that many then, and there isn’t now. Dystopia is overrated, and under lit.
Hope you’ve seen this.
Dear Esther’s maps are being completely remade by a Robert Briscoe (who I believe worked on Mirror’s Edge or something). So that won’t be a problem for much longer.
While the maps may be higher poly, the texturing and lighting is where the real improvements need to be in order to make it easier to follow.
Aside from that, I don’t really see why the mod needs to be remade at all. But I’m not complaining.
In a comment in one of the pics near the botton he says that the lighting & skybox is placeholder. I hope that turns out alright, I liked the first version of it.
BTT: Mistake of Pythagoras (MoP), was a cool mod, but didnt actualy put anything ‘new’ in. Everything was stock HL2 and from what I can tell, the big block enemies are just brushes. But I could be wrong.
I said I’d always found his writing good, before and including Minerva.
Oh, this looks like a good place to bitch about one of my favorite mods to hate.
Radiator 1-2: Polaris and Handle with Care
This game was perhaps the freshest takes I’ve seen on an FPS. Polaris was excellent, though slightly marred by the fact that I felt absolutely no connection to any of the characters, yet I was given the impression that the section was supposed to have some sort of emotional impact.
The Handle with Care section is the part that bugs me the most though, but I’m going to have to go into spoilers to explain it:[COLOR=‘Black’]
The fundamental premise of HwC seems to be that you are tasked with repressing troubled memories inside your head during a marriage counseling session in order for your relationship with your gay lover to survive.
The first issue I had was that a male specific name was used for the main character. There are a number of gender neutral names (like Lee/Leigh, Casey, Kim, Parker, Alex/Alyx, etc) that would have allowed the gender to be interpreted by the player; either playing as a girl in a straight relationship or as a guy in a gay relationship. I have nothing against any person for being homosexual, but at the same time I have no interest in supporting homosexuality as a lifestyle. As a result, this issue made it pretty much impossible to immerse myself in the character I was supposed to be playing as.
That is only a minor issue compared to the flawed foundation on which the entire HwC section is based. In order to “win” you have to repress memories by moving boxes to shelves where they are sealed off. If you break any of these boxes, it results in an outburst during the counseling session, and if repeated often enough, results in the relationship ending.
There is no possible way that a person could have a healthy relationship that requires repressing memories. A healthy relationship is based on communication, and only a complete quack in the field of relation counseling would think otherwise, yet throughout the entire game you are praised by the counselor for repression and chastised for any outbursts. I was left doubting and rejecting the entire premise of both the game setting and game play involved.
Ultimately Radiator:Handle with Care shows itself as being highly polished with unique and well implemented metaphorical gameplay mechanics that could have been truly thought provoking , but since the metaphor upon which the gameplay is based is erroneous, the gameplay goes from being intuitive to counter intuitive.
To be honest, the only thing that people seem to complain about Radiotor:HwC is the gay relationship part. Honestly if people are that petty that they won’t play a game just because you’re supposed to be in a gay relationship, then that’s just childish. And this whole thing bowt “Oh I can’t empathise with it” is rubbish. You can empathise with Gordon Freeman can’t you? After all, he’s a 27 year old physicist who fights aliens and can bring down an oppresive society just by himself. So why are people unable to empathise with the characters in HwC? I really don’t understand how you can let prejudices get in the way of gameplay.
Well, I took it as there is no clear “winning” in the game. You can intrepet the endings as you please. There is no emphasis on the repressed memories ending being the “correct” ending.
Empathizing? Who said anything about that shit? I said IMMERSION; the act of being able to get INTO the role.
Gordon Freeman is a completely hollow shell. There is NOTHING to empathize WITH. The object is to be able to INSERT yourself into that role. You don’t become Gordon Freeman, HE becomes YOU. This is very important for FPS since the gameplay style thrusts you into that role automatically.
In Radiator, a very major life decision of the main character is strictly defined from the very beginning. That can be prohibitive to immersion no matter what the particular life decision is.
When the game mechanics and story elements are working at cross purposes, that means something is wrong, either with the story being told, or the game mechanics.
I actually clarified my point better on the Radiator Thread but I’ll quote the excerpt from my post that addresses your issue.