Henroid

There's a fine line to walk when being aggressive (in life in general, but for now I'm talking about as a member of the press) and hostile. I'm still reading through the interview, but Walker definitely crossed over into hostility a couple times. The first was the opening question, and the second was the question regarding the Linux stretch goal. He shouldn't have said, "That was pretty shitty of you."

Meanwhile, But literally just before that,

Well that quote specifically is Molyneux saying that he gave in to desperation, but he has the ability to reflect back on it.

So I didn't know that Peter Molyneux responded to what's going on. Sadly, it wasn't much of one, because his response is, "If people are mad at me then I won't talk to the press." He's kind of being a child about this, which lead to me saying this elsewhere: "People likened Peter Molyneux to a child for his imagination. Now we can do it cuz of the temper tantrum he's throwing when he's in trouble." I mean, am I wrong?

Did the infant die from its injuries from that? I had read about the news as it was breaking and the baby was taken in to the hospital in critical condition, but I never heard anything as a followup to whether or not s/he lived. That infuriates me more about this shit.

Part of the problem is that over the last decade+, the United States has been militarizing its police forces. Some of it was in response to situations like the Los Angeles bank robbery where two dudes showed up in body armor from head to two, casually walking along and taking shots from the cops repeatedly. That was crazy, and from my position a little extra fire power for the cops is warranted. But then most of it is in response to "oh no brown peop- I mean terrorism!" The mayor of Oakland, CA in particular is a massively huge jackass about militarizing the police. She just brazenly goes, "Yep, it's what I want because citizens suck when they protest." Protest. Not riot. Protest. God I hate her. ... Okay sorry for the digression. Anyway, because cops have all this equipment now, there's a thing they face where if the equipment isn't put to use, it sets up a very compelling precedent to have it taken away. So the police have gotten hyper aggressive in utilizing assault gear and teams so that they can have it in paperwork as being necessary. The unfortunate thing is that the mishaps of these all-too-frequent raids don't get as much publicity. Otherwise the federal level government would put on harsh penalties to make cops think twice about when they conduct these things. It's not like in the movies anymore where the cops roll up in regular cars and set up a perimeter. Instead, they stealthily surround your house, then burst down the door and have their fingers on the trigger.

So hot on the heels of Sega announcing their plans to shrink up as a business and focus on PC / mobile development only, Sonic Boom's opening sales performance has come out. It's bad news. The game sold just 490k copies, and is the worst performing game in the series to date. There's people talking about killing off the franchise, but that's ridiculous. People aren't sick of Sonic. They're sick of Sega's inability to handle franchises. Look at what they did to Phantasy Star, Shining Force, and Valkyria Chronicles for example.

The shock value the show goes for also takes away from the realities of what's going on. The end result is people thinking video games and any issues that arise from the industry are a joke.

Going back to the SWATting thing, the only thing that's going to curb that kinda bullshit is if steep punishments are levied (reckless endangerment of human life, see OJ Simpson's trial from just a few years ago) and those punishments / sentencings are highly publicized. The capture rate of the people doing it also has to be really high. Like if every instance of SWATting results in "we got the person who did it," people will knock it off for the most part.

As far as negative outlook on Bethesda goes, the only thing I'm aware of is the terrible engine they use for their premiere titles like The Elder Scrolls. Can't say I've seen anything super terrible said of them aside from that, beyond people getting sad about id Software going into their fold.

I didn't know Destiny had that element of discovery to it. Lack of guidance in video games is such a tricky thing to do. World of Warcraft being an example of putting a game entirely on-rails is a great one. I mean, there was certainly a lot of value in Blizzard stream-lining the process of leveling as they have, where you go from town to town picking up any and all quests you're qualified for, doing them as a group in a single location, and repeating. But they removed the element of discovering content from the game by doing that. When the latest expansion was on its way, Blizzard wanted to give people a reason to go out in the world. In practice it's kinda just fallen on its face and hasn't made any difference at all. The bosses they added that spawn anywhere in the new content are just typical world-raids from the original game (which aren't all that appealing or rewarding). And since they spawn in one of several locations, people just scout and report back to the community, and timers are kept, etc. Discovering content in MMOs is a weird thing to implement because the genre (bad word use, I know) is driven on progression of character strength. Doing anything aside from that is technically a waste of time. But now that I think about it, the Destiny discussion isn't that enlightening. Every MMO I've played has people asking where to find x or how to do y, and Destiny having that to it just means it falls in step with the rest. Maybe I'm misunderstanding a detail or don't have full context.

is Molyneux trying to pretend the whole "consumer" and "business" thing doesn't exist in video games? This is really bad for crowdfunding, because this dude is pretty high-profile if you're a video game enthusiast that learns names in the industry. For him to let a KS crash and burn (essentially) feeds the arguments of crowdfunding being a terrible thing. I know Molyneux had an existing habit of speaking about things to make them seem grand, but even if he didn't fulfill those things he at least put out playable, 'finished' products.

Call me crazy but Big Publisher™ isn't 100% bad for the industry.

Bethesda has announced that they're going to have a press event at E3 this year, I'm assuming in the same fashion that EA, Ubi, and Activision do. Everyone else though is clamoring for it to be a Fallout 4 announcement. I don't doubt that may be included, but a press event doesn't get organized for just one game. Really, Bethesda has been growing in the industry and this is just a statement of the playing field they're on now as a business.

We could only hope more outlets decide to leave Metacritic and drop review scores.

Part of 'gaming culture' involves being hostile toward paying for shit, and since Scientology revolves around financial investment... Then again who fucking knows. Nazi sympathizers have been welcome allies to Gamergate.

I have a hard time picking a favorite between Super and Prime. They offer totally different experiences though, so maybe they can both be my favorite. Definitely agreed on Prime being better with immersion. That was more or less what it seems to have been built on. The Space Pirates are tremendous in that game. All I know is I busted my ass to be able to speedrun both because that's what games eventually devolve into, and the Metroid games are probably the easiest (as far as skillset goes).

Get to Norfair. Did you fight Crocomire? The red mini-boss with many eyes? The Grappling Beam is beyond it. The Gravity Suit is from the Wrecked Ship, accessed on the surface. Necessary for traversing Maridia. You'll have to fight the Phantoon boss. These are pretty vague instructions just to be clear. If you want room-by-room instruction I could write that out.

You don't remember all the politics in the Legend of Zelda? It makes total sense! Maybe they're assuming that Link is like Tyrion.

I saw this pop up on Steam and my first thought was "Grow Gone Home." If it's getting recommends here I'll end up checking it out.

Re-writes of scripts is actually the norm. Never in Hollywood history has there been a script submission accepted as-is.

Is the delay on sales meant to be a strike against people who are trying to make a living on digital goods sales?

Eh? Maybe I misheard Sean then.

So I haven't loaded DotA 2 since my computer broke during the International last year. I reinstalled it and all, and I looked at patch notes regarding balance changes, but didn't pay attention to any other changes. I had no idea that the item drop system was taken out. That is bizarre. That game continues to grow on the competitive level, but as a product it seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot.