vogon

"it requires a non-portable JNI extension" doesn't prevent something from being either cross-platform or compile-once-run-anywhere, as long as all of the implementations are binary-compatible, and technologies like Java Web Start let you push the libraries you depend upon just-in-time. XNA is no more or less cross-platform than Java 3D or JOGL -- its reference implementation targets DirectX on Windows, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone, but there's nothing to stop people from independently reimplementing it.

how quickly we forget the wonderful piece of computer engineering that is Java 3D! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_3D

to be fair, I'd imagine that if Minecraft had the per-shard traffic of an MMO it would be a clusterfuck, with the entire world getting mined to bedrock and filled back up with TNT crates within the first day after the server went up.

yeah, that's about the long and short of it. it frustrates me as a creative tool because it's not a very good creative tool, and it doesn't particularly compel me to play it as a game. (especially since I bought it and originally tried it out before creepers were even in.)

personally, I'd almost rather play in Creative mode. you can still build works in Creative mode which are constrained as if you were in Adventure mode, and you're not as constrained in your avatar's point-of-view. where the restrictions inherent to a medium interfere with me out of happenstance rather than because the statement I'm trying to make is particularly difficult, I always find that really frustrating -- rather than subjecting myself to those restrictions by choice, I'd usually rather work in a freer medium to make more audacious things. (that said, returning to where we started in a weird, circuitous way, I have idle plans kicking around to build an old microcomputer out of relays, because it would be fun to have a computer that makes clacking noises and takes multiple seconds to answer simple problems.) yeah; a lot of Minecraft's value as a thing is in the network effect of having multiple creators working in the same space. I get that. but when I enter a world full of stuff that's already been created, I get overwhelmed with that initial "whoa, there's a lot of stuff here; this universe is far bigger than just my avatar" feeling. I know that for some people, this is a fun and exciting challenge, a new frontier to explore; but for me, when I'm already operating at a disadvantage because I'm bogged down with trying to get a footing in a new and unfamiliar world that's imposing restrictions on me that are making it hard to do and to create things I know I could do otherwise, it turns me off rather than firing me up. maybe it's just a reflection of a deeper, more ingrained risk-averseness or strength of will or something.

yeah, I get where you're coming from, and I think I'd get something out of experiencing a place the same way. but when I build things I don't necessarily want to design based on where they can be experienced best as places, is the core difference; I want to build them where I can most effectively translate them from thought into an actual thing. if that makes any sense.

he worked on other stuff, but not as a sole programmer: definitely. I'm charged up enough after Molyjam that I'm going to try and jam something for Ludum Dare 23 as well. I think Minecraft was different. it was an iteration -- a deep, elaborate iteration, to be sure -- on building blocks, that combined enough mechanics and "room to play" that it could be as "mechanically rich", in a manner of speaking, as Lego and imagination, with the ease-of-sharing of bits on a wire. there have been a lot of trading games over the history of commercial gaming (Exile being the elephant in this particular room), but I don't think what people were aching for was an open world you had to pay continually for access to, and developing assembly language for an in-game computer that's thirty years out-of-date. but I could be wrong, and by next year we might all be posting on the Idle Forums through virtual index cards pinned to a corkboard in a coffee shop on Betelgeuse IV. it'll definitely be crazy, yeah. to me, it's that Minecraft feels like an oddly restrictive medium to build anything in. the code I want to write isn't conducive to circuits made out of redstone and torches -- I'd much rather just use C# and a text editor. I'm not super ingenious as an architect or sculptor, but the things I want to build, I'd much rather just use Maya or SketchUp. I hate to compare Minecraft to FarmVille, but Ian Bogost's rant about "shit crayons" applies for me here. it's a space for creativity, but that's just because humans are creative -- Minecraft doesn't enable any of that, beyond perhaps giving people game-mechanical prompts to guide the creative impulses they wouldn't be able to focus otherwise. and, on the flip side, it's not a super-compelling game in the sense of "a thing you can play through" to me (and wasn't really a game at all for a long time.) I can understand why people like it, but meh.

Angry Birds was Rovio's 52nd game. (see: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-22/-angry-birds-space-edition-skips-windows-phone-in-blow-to-nokia.html among a billion other sources) Notch made probably a billion other things before Minecraft. in fact, I think if there's one thing that separates the modern gaming ecosystem from the '90s, it's that you can afford to release 50 unappreciated games before striking it rich. you can do shit in your spare time and as long as it's got a coherent theme and some attention to detail (or even if it doesn't), someone will want to play it. that said, 0x10c sounds completely unplayable from what's been announced so far, and that's coming from someone who's a professional computer programmer. (but I also don't like Minecraft that much, either.)

(and also in IE9.) also, best thing ever! might actually be legitimately useful to learn ten-key skills, weirdly enough!

yes. very yes. that game blew me away (and not in an ign.com way.) as demoed, it was super unbalanced in favor of the breakout guy, but I could see it being legitimately full-game interesting if they rebalanced it.

sf-er here. the games I was most impressed with were: art direction: crowscare (http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=153) gameplay: the blatantly insane Octopi Everything (http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=223) gameplay: Nebulous Hero (http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=163) story: coo. (http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=177) guts: Secret Dad, which was written by two non-programmer artists after their programming staff flaked on them (http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=253) and I put code into "Demon" Door, the game with arcade-style door gameplay and luscious 480p visuals so intense it broke the projector and mildly wrecked our demo. http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=257

yeah. Rovio is trying to be the next PopCap, but they've out-PopCapped PopCap, because they found that casual games act like toys -- you can make a billion different variations and people will scoop them up if they're cheap enough individually. Zynga is... I'm not sure what Zynga's trying to be. it sometimes feels like they're just trying to make the world's most abstruse order form for Facebook Credits.

I hope this results in the long-awaited Angry Birds Space / Shattered Horizon crossover we've all been asking for. that said, this seems like it could be cool. glad to hear Futuremark Game Studio is getting picked up by a studio with momentum behind them.

LoLlin' yeah, I understand that. it's not necessarily that I don't understand the interface, either, it's that I can't employ it effectively in combat; I imagine that the tutorial will eventually help newbies iron that stuff out, but it would be nice if one of the bot settings was totally goddamn braindead so I could figure out effective unit movement and power and item usage before getting my butt kicked by Internet dudes.

this has been my experience. I've played a bit of LoL (I don't really care for competitive VGs, so mostly 5 v bots) and a lot of Diablo 2 and Torchlight, but no WC3 or DotA or HoN. I'm used to smallish UIs and player characters which move with no inertia. In Dota 2, I'll activate powers which just don't go off because they need targeting when I don't expect them to. I click on bits of the UI because the rectangle through which the map is visible is so small. out of courtesy I'm trying to not join human games until I can at least reliably control my character, and in my best game with me+4 bots against 5 bots, I went 1K-7D with 2 assists. (I've played about 4 or 5 other games, in all of which I've gotten shut out.) this game is remarkably frustrating to get into in its current state. which is a shame, because I find things like the shop interface way more approachable than the shop interface of LoL, and the UI generally is snazzier and more well-designed. but for now I think I'm going to have to put it down until it ships.

http://www.amazon.com/Gamewright-317-Forbidden-Island/dp/B003D7F4YY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332391086&sr=8-1 if you don't have Forbidden Island, buy Forbidden Island. it's like Pandemic but simpler, faster, better-scaling, and more kid-friendly. it's one of my favorite games of all time, ever.

since Dominion was mentioned, I feel a compulsion to mention two alternatives to Dominion: 1) Quarriors. it's a deck-building game with one key twist: it substitutes dice for cards. this substitution makes the game less predictable -- you buy dice instead of cards, and every turn has a chance of being either really great, really terrible, or somewhere in between; and quicker to play through -- no more shuffling! the biggest drawback of Quarriors is probably the complexity of the lifecycle of dice, which can be "active" or "ready" or "used", and is a bit of a bear to keep track of without a playmat or something. 2) Ascension: something something of the Godslayer. it's quicker to set up than Dominion and more action-y. however, it is significantly more fragile to bad shuffling, somewhat streakier, and has a demon-summoning/demon-fighting theme that might not work great for kids. edit: my local game shop plays this game under the more hostile name "no, fuck you." it's basically the best board game ever to spectate. also, a couple of unrelated recommendations. (NB: I am predisposed to cooperative/competitive games where the goal of the game is trying to be the biggest possible backstabbing asshole while still acting like you're helpful.) Tobago. it's like Clue collided with a bidding game like Ra or a couple of the phases of Power Grid. the core mechanic is tracking down hidden treasure on a hex map (hexes!) and trying to turn the clues you played into the largest possible shares of the treasures within, without getting cursed. the sense of schadenfreude you get when you get out of the money right before a curse is basically the best thing ever, and planting clues to make people run all over the island while you quietly plot to sneak over to another treasure is amazing. The D&D board games (The Secret of Drizzt, The Wrath of Ashardalon). they're pretty expensive and super complicated to set up, but make an excellent gateway drug to RPGs for people who don't play RPGs. also, if you already own Pandemic: Pandemic: On the Brink, in the Bioterrorist mode. basically, it's standard Pandemic, except one player takes turns between every turn and moves around the map planting cubes of a fifth color. where normal Pandemic is a game of triage and time-management, Bioterrorist Pandemic is a game of subterfuge and seeing through subterfuge, and it feels way fresher to be fighting a human opponent in addition to a mechanical opponent.

acting in my duty as chief internet officer of the internet, llc, and speaking on behalf of the internet, yes. they spent the first eleven minutes of their podcast this week messing around with the sound boards and cough buttons in their new podcast studio. I'm sure they're already loading up the terrible outer-space stock graphics.

it is your duty as a video games journalist to hit up patrick klepek for the hottest scoops on all of their new royalty-free music and video compositing hardware at the molyjam the internet demands it

as I see it, the best likely outcome is that Giant Bomb will continue to exist in its current form but get more advertising money and a larger community. the worst likely outcome is that Giant Bomb becomes the next Gamespot, Gerstmanngate II: Hardly Gerstin' occurs, and everyone fucks off to join gamebomb.ru.

yeah, and I don't think the Peter Molydeux phenomenon is hateful or anything. it's just that Peter Molyneux's public pronouncements always take the form of "imagine if [an ordinary game mechanic] could [some ridiculously overblown claim]." "this dog/objective marker will teach you how to love." "the AI in this game will be so sophisticated, it'll be on the cover of scientific journals around the world." to some extent, he seems like the last major game designer of the generation with no PR grooming.

I'm going to this game jam. Boost and Video Games are going to this game jam. shouldn't you (points at the internet) be going to this game jam?

yeah. presumably it means "your installer says 'yo, you can't install this shit on Windows NT 3.51'" as opposed to "the app crashes at some random time."

I think I found the appropriate passage in the Windows 95/Windows NT certification doc: (section 7.4) source: http://www.empowermentzone.com/winlogo.txt Windows NT 3.51 didn't ship with DirectX, so the rationale behind having it gracefully fail seems clear enough -- but I'd imagine that if a game shipped with non-DirectX fallbacks as well (since those existed in the early days of Windows gaming) it would make significantly less sense to obey the letter of the law.

https://twitter.com/#!/pmolyneux/status/179255966548758528 guys. the most important thing to happen to video games this decade.