Oh, there are subtitles; the logs are read aloud to provide dramatic worldbuilding so you can hear the circumstances they were in while making the log.

In fact, they were text first and made into a talkie because of publisher interference demanding a floppy disk version be made first.

Lol, maturity!
BG2 is a teen power fantasy. I couldn't describe it in any other way.
At least one of the letters forming my name is the same of some you can find in Adolf Hitler. Should I change my name? -.-'

Didn't you change your name for a spell recently?

Yes. I think my current one sucks, but the new one didn't last long because it sucked even more.

Is there any news on the new ports of the old Avernums? Afaik it's still impossible to play them on modern 64-bit machines without huge workarounds like emulating Windows 3.1.

yep more mature than the average lulu game stories
arent those were remastered already?

for better?
remasters makes little sense imho
if they are updating the game they should make it better while at it

I don't think Jeff really does the "go back and upgrade the 10 year old code" thing.

Which is why instead he made the new Avernums.

(Sides, they run just fine in Wine.) As for the old Exile titles, they're free now. Which I think speaks to the lengths he's willing to go to support thme. At least Blades is open source.

The GOG versions, both old and new, always worked for me on an W10P 64-bit system. I just downloaded Avernum 1 (the old version) and tested it with Win 11 Pro 64-bit. It runs perfectly fine, scales to fullscreen in low-res 640x480 and best of all it doesn't even need particular compatibilitty settings. That being said, if you get or got the GOG version, both the old as well as the new ports should work as well, without having to tinker around with your system or having to install Win 3.1 into an virtual machine environment.

I agree with the general sentiment of Jeff's list.

Obviously anything can be nitpicked to oblivion when someone really feels like demonstrating their lack of reading comprehension.

In this day and age, I don't think most people are even able to tell a good story from a bad one. Just look at what the most popular movies and TV shows are these days.

If the average consumers were eager to experience a great story, the would follow creators and not franchises.

Jeff is especially right about AAAs and I'd extend that observation beyond games. It's virtually impossible to make something truly great under corporate rule these days. Too many focus groups, too much obligatory pandering to X and Y demographics.

If you write a great script today and try to sell it to a big movie company, the first things they'll look for is 'female protagonist', 'gay supporting character', 'ethnic character in a positive role', etc. Good story telling just doesn't work like that.

Another thing scripts are forced to have these days is a constant recap of what just happened. Every two or three scenes, a character has to describe in dialogue what happened in the last 20 minutes of the story. That's how they cater audiences with extremely low attention spans.

Most great movies, books and comics would not be as good if they went through this kind of process.

And before the resident Albert Einstein cosplayers start calling me names, my favorite directors are Spike Lee and Wong Kar-Wai. I'm all for stories with black people, gay people, all kinds of people. What I do not like is the exploitation of minorities.

With video games it's even worse because the bar is set so low. Jeff hit the bullseye in the first truth ('when people say a videogame has a good story, they mean that it has a story').

For example, a lot of people come out the Mass Effect games saying those have great stories. Which they really don't if you think about it. They have a story with great presentation and some (limited) interactivity and that's enough for some people to be convinced that the story is good.

This is a very good point, and a very good way to summarize what I was trying to say.
The "formula of success" could also be "do what you want, you will always find an audience", but unfortunately, this audience will not necessarily mean success, as seen with works of art that attract very small audiences, or any type of work that failed in its time, and was rediscovered long after it could do any good to its original creator, for example.

I agree with your idea of an "overlap" of tastes. I would say that there is not the slightest form of reason in what governs the tastes of an individual myself, but I understand what you mean.

Also I find it pretty interesting that I do not feel the same way about the Deus Ex series, what interests me with your first example is how two different people can have two different views about the exact same thing. I loved Deus Ex too, but the context is different for me. I discovered the game long after it was released, and bought it here, alongside its sequel, which I knew was not as appreciated as was the original. When I first played Invisible War, I expected a game so horrible that I liked it, not seeing its flaws as being as unforgivable as I had been led to believe they were. To me, it was not a perfect game in the slightest, but I appreciated it anyway.
However, I do not like the ones that came after. In my opinion, they feel and look so different than the two developed by Ion Storm, that I cannot even connect them to the title "Deus Ex". To me, it is like if they happened to have a similar title, but were unrelated to that series. Even taken as independent games, I do not like them. I find them too easy and predictable, even on the highest difficulty.

About your second example, I obviously cannot relate. I am a man, so I do not ride horses, I eat them. Furthermore, I need women to be at least busty and mostly naked to be able to appreciate a game. As for men, it is common knowledge that they have to look like walking fridges with beards to be respectable.
Sorry for all of this. That is what I call "humor", and the sad part is that I find myself funny. Just know I was not serious.
The thing is, I agree with you on this matter, though. Not the horseback riding part, although I do like horses, but about the mostly naked women and the solid-block-of-ore-like men. With the exception of humorous games, I need at least a slight degree of realism to be able to immerse myself in a story. If I'm facing something in a game that makes me stop believing in the overall consistency of the world it is set in, I find it hard to play it to the end.

I think I have nothing more to add to this topic now, not without derailing too much anyway. Furthermore, it would be a shame, as your conclusion, which I highlighted above, was really good.

It doesn't help that most popular comic book movies are based on edgy tripe like Dark Night Rises; an elseworlds story by Frank Miller or ASBAR, where Batman calls Robin a hard R word and tells him to eat rats. I feel like the first time I encountered this effect was watching Steven Universe. Except due to the way the show works, it doesn't quite land the messages they want to tell, like "Forgive space nazis". That's sort of the Shonen/Weekly Anime problem. Translating a weekly manga into an animated format that probably doesn't actually have enough content to carry it for the full timeslots... I'm pretty sure most people liked Mass Effect because you could bang Tali and toaster head. There's probably a lot of scenes people would roll their eyes at like the Nightmare scenes; wondering why those weren't dropped to the cutting room. Even creators can pull out swampy drek. JK Rowling retroactively crapping on Harry Potter, Tom Clancy's Americana Paranoia Wank, Stephanie Meyer; the Mormon wonder bread...etc. And the times Stephen King wasn't sober.

Wow, it's been a while since I've seen someone get that much wrong in a single sentence :D Was that intentional?

I liked Mass Effect (mostly the first one) and I ignored all romance/sex. I'm the Captain here, I'm gonna be proffessional about it.

I have the same issue with your post that I had with Jeff Vogel's article - it sounds more like a rant than a presentation of facts. You just make general claims based on observations about things you are critical of. I don't disagree that this way of writing stories would be bad and that some scripts are guilty of what you describe, but to say that big movie companies are looking for this and scripts are forced to have that nowadays etc. just sounds like a massive exaggeration without proof to me. Or do you work in the movie industry? Did you have your script rejected by several companies already due to these reasons? There seem to be a lot of movies who still manage to bypass this perceived dictate of "female protagonist", "gay supporting character", "ethnic character i a positive role" etc. (or were you talking about specific streaming companies? ;P But even then.).

I guess we'd first have to define what "story" actually means here. The Mass Effect games definitely don't have great plots. And I think I've never heard anyone praise the games for those. Especially ME2's plot is a jumbled mess. and ME3's ending was hated on by many. I'm not even sure I've heard anyone say they have "great stories". But the series has more in-depth story-telling than most other videogames; what people like is the sum of plot, side stories, world building, characters, dialogues, choices that is greater than the parts. Anyway, it's always easier to say what someone deems NOT good, I'd be much more interested in hearing if Jeff Vogel or you think there *are* good stories in videogames that gamers can't tell from the bad ones, and if so, which games would that be?