vogon

the idea goes that even if its design is basically done, a great game design will still be great next year after it's released. to some extent, it seems like an awards show which gives you an appreciable amount of funding is mildly doomed to be busted in some ways. either you get people sending in the same game multiple times, or you screw over anyone who sends in their game and gets to the finals when they do work after the award that would've won it the prize, or you can't reward people with funding until their game is finished. it might work better if the monetary award (which could be given to deserving, unreleased games) was completely decoupled from the industry awards show (which could only be given to games with wide public release.)

guys, let's not lose sight of the important thing here. curved. roads.

guys can we come to the agreement that: 1) gamers are total douchebags 2) phil fish can apparently also be a total douchebag, if only because he's a thin-skinned braggart at heart 3) none of this makes fez a worse game or one worthy of less acclaim

~ the vogon award for "hottest scoops of GDC 2012 day 1" ~ it turns out that Portal 2 had an unused co-op campaign revolving around the co-op bots recovering human artifacts from old Aperture. human artifacts which include a parody of a certain comic strip drawn by one Anthony Clark (nedroid), of Beartato fame. and apparently the game as shipped contains unused GLaDOS voice work for it:

here's the original giant bombcast clip:

heck yeah, pc gamer bros. (I've owned an Xbox 360 for about... four years, and my gamer score is < 5,000.)

they've always been made and they've always been popular, but nowadays it's almost possible to be someone who's fully conversant in video games and not play any Japanese-made games at all; in December 2011, the only Japanese games on the NPD top 10 were Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land, and the year-long chart was all-Western: http://www.1up.com/news/modern-warfare-3-december-annual-11-npd-charts. fifteen or twenty years ago, Nintendo and Sega were the only games in town, and you were eventually going to play some first-party games. that's not necessarily the case any more.

yeah. I also think that a lot of Japanese developers are making moves which work OK for the Japanese market and people who are way into their games, but not for the Western masses -- witness all of the crap that Capcom has gotten for their business practices around MvC3, Street Fighter IV, and Street Fighter X Tekken. to some extent I think Japan's making the same games which it's always made, it's just that Western audiences aren't as reliant upon Japan for building their games any more.

they can just announce shit whenever. I think the announcements start in earnest on Wednesday when the expo floor opens.

they weren't particularly wizard-centric until they started the meme "I'm a wizard, and that looks fucked up" on a podcast. when Jake (I think) called them out on their wizard meme on Twitter, they started mad wizard beef with the Thumbs.

I'm a San Franciscan and a pretty recent thumb -- my first episode was IT1 episode 45, a couple of episodes before the scoops on F. Nick's disappearance were dropped -- and have only slightly lurked the forums until now, but I decided that with the Kickstarter rolling through town, I should start an account. so hey.