Henroid

That's pretty much what it'll boil down to. Look at what happened with Zynga.

Even if it was Take-Two's decision to close Irrational Games if they were going to lose Levine, Levine was in a position to know that was coming. And he still followed through.

Someone at GAF is suggesting that Levine is being a willing fall-guy, that Take-Two wanted to get rid of the studio but made Levine do it. That's a little tinfoil hatty, but not enough to be entirely ridiculous.

Well now I get the meaning behind "Irrational Games" as a name. If Ken Levine was getting bored why didn't he just leave the company in someone else's hands? He just put a lot of people out of work.

So two things. First, uh, Ken Levine decided he was bored and is shutting down Irrational Games. Rather than just leave, he decided to fire everyone too. http://www.irrationalgames.com/ Second, King is announcing an IPO. They make one mobile app and decide to have stock. THIS SEEMS LIKE A GOOD IDEA.

Why not just go with "Tachikoma" or something so we can have a ghost and cyborg reference all in one?

By the way, thank you guys for describing what Flappy Bird is in great detail (as a game). I don't have a mobile so I can't check what this game is myself, and nobody on the internet is willing to describe it. I mean beyond the "it's a Mario ripoff" jargon just because there's green pipes.

The Flappy Bird drama is infuriating to me regarding one angle, but on the actual guy and the game itself: It isn't a new scenario. People flood app stores every day with something, and once in a while something dumb just takes root. It happens and will continue to happen regardless of product quality. That people are outraged over this baffles me. I've never done well for myself financially in life. When I hear about what kind of revenue this guy was bringing in, sure I get jealous, but even I can set that aside pretty easily. The angle that has me upset is that the internet has demonstrated once again how fucking ridiculous it can be over the most trite shit. I didn't even know there were conspiracy theories regarding this guy somehow gaming some rating system or whatever. But all the effort going toward trashing this guy and his product just makes me want to shake people violently while yelling, "It's a fucking video game!" Do you know how much better our world would be if people channeled all this effort into their jobs or aiding the unfortnate, etc? But no, this is the thing people get up to - an app one dude made. The most disgusting thing is hte people saying he should just "deal with it" regarding the threats and hate he's getting just because he's rich now. People I know that would agree with the sentiment that "money doesn't buy happiness" suddenly turned around to say the guy getting 50k a day makes it okay that he's getting this abuse. Another argument I saw presented was that he should just stop using Twitter. Which is an absurd notion for game developers to do, because working social media can really help your game in various ways. Ultimately everyone needs to just shut the fuck up over a non-event. And I'm disappointed that we still have prominent voices in video games media taking the "mobile apps aren't games" thing forward, especially into this incident.

I can't remember which episode it was mentioned on regarding A Link Between Worlds' music, but I've been hearing some of it today and damn, Nintendo deserves praise for how they're handling it. In a time where big latin chorus and orchestra bullshit and metal are expected, they go very minimalist. And it works. Some examples:

I'm seven minutes into this but I agree with Chris - Congrats Nick.

The Far Cry 2 discussion had me thinking about my experience with the game. Prior to Idle Thumbs I knew of Far Cry 2 in one way - by name. That's it! I knew nothing about its plot or setting or any mechanics / systems involved. I didn't get into the game just because the game was claimed to be good though. There were enough specifics mentioned over various podcasts that I had an idea of what to expect. So this episode freaked me out because it made me realize I was 'robbed' of having my own view or framing of what the game is. Which would have run into the danger of me dismissing the game as crap. But then I thought on it more. When I first played FC2 I thought I was finished with the tutorial sooner than it actually was. I was frustrated as hell that a lot of side things weren't showing up that I'd heard about. I drove around the map exploring every marked location and such, but there was no Phaedrus, nothing. Knowing those things were supposed to be there though made me perform whatever linear progression mission I had left to do before everything opened up to that free-for-all. If I hadn't known about any of that, I probably wouldn't have given the game much of a shot. I think this is something I've at least done for other people, where they played a game from one perspective, didn't like it, but I convinced them to consider it in a new light and they changed their mind. It's probably happened to me too. I just can't think of any specific examples right now.

Holy smokes, this was like the best episode of Idle Thumbs ever. Like not for funny shit, just the discussions on each topic. So good. Still trying to form my thoughts before I spout my useless opinions but good job you guys.

Vigo the Carpathian Jake the Carpathian Video Games the Carpathian VG the Carpathian Hmmm. Doesn't have the same ring to it.

You know what's funny about this color text thing? It annoyed me too. Until I started playing the La Mulana remake. Now I love it because fuuuuuuuuck this game is a pain.

So the news is still breaking, but the company that made The Secret World - Funcom - is being poked by the Norweigin government. And when I say poked, I mean investigated for lying about financial information, and the company has been delisted from the stock market. That's the official news. Unofficial news via hearsay on Twitter includes government vans rolling up to the premises and loading up their stuff.

This may be less of a mechanic to retire and more of a "use better judgment when executing" thing.

My view on MS is starting to change too because of this - look how much effort they're putting into locking developers or series into exclusivity. On the one hand, video game players care about video games. On the other, it almost looks like MS doesn't have any confidence in their hardware or services.

They also got the guy from Epic that was in charge of GoW. All in all, huge win for Epic. GoW couldn't have been cheap, and I doubt MS is going to be able to flare up GoW's appeal. As far as I know that series was on a downward spin for excitement / appeal. I'm sure the first game will do as well as the series has so far, but after that people just aren't going to care.

Yeah they're being very Tim Langdell about things.

I asked a friend of mine to weigh in on this, and he pointed out that if King's trademark claim(s) were challenged in court, they would only have to prove that product or brand confusion can happen. So it's not as simple as "that's a common word, how ridiculous." Our legal system is totally fucked.

I don't know how much traction this thread can get for content, but I hope there's more than I am aware of. Maybe I just want to use it as a vehicle for something awesome I just saw. The premise though is to post media (preferably videos or photos (or other images like graphs maybe, if it works out that way)) that capture the spirit or style of video game content - no parodies or purposely-driven recreations. Just happenstance. Let me demonstrate with this example. If anyone follows current events, there's some shit going down in the Ukraine. Which means there are photographs and videos of said shit. So this showed up on Twitter: "Shrouded in smoke and tear gas, pro-European protester wears a gas mask during the violence in Kiev today (Reuters)" A friend of mine commented of this photo, "Get out of here Stalker."

I said it on Twitter and it's worth saying here, but Day Z is an example of why libertarians are full of shit.

Leigh Alexander wrote a thing people should read: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/207402/Diversity_Lounge_PAX_has_a_lot_of_work_to_do.php

Doublepostin' to share more info on that - there's still going to be a PS4 version of Minecraft, and Majong is working on allowing save files to be transferable between the PS3/PS4 and 360/XB1.

So far I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt with their intentions on this, but having it be a corralled area or room does reinforce the sentiment that these people get segreted or ghetto treatment. Or "free speech zone" treatment. There's no escaping that. But my biggest fear is people just bombshelling criticism with a "shut up, we know what's good for you" sentiment. I've seen it getting close to that. If it's someone attached to the operation of PAX, it'll just completely destroy any and all intent of good.