pkirkner

It sounds like all you need is a registrar with domain forwarding, not any sort of hosting. You should be able to do that with just about any registrar at minimal cost. I use hover for that purpose, and it's really easy. Yup, I used them for years and switching to hover was an absolute breath of fresh air.

I spent a few minutes flying around in free flight and was impressed by how nice things looked, even on my older system. I'll have to try out the combat some time this weekend. Have you seen the manual? It's really well done, especially for an alpha.

I'm also feeling the pressure. My first two cracks are the talon-ed frog: And the Crocodile Chalice: Still have some work to do.

I backed this thing at the "get a copy of the final game" tier with no alpha or beta access and everything I've seen since has been encouraging. I've particularly enjoyed the dev diary videos. A 5-10 minute video every two or three months is basically perfect for me to keep track of how development is coming along. I appreciate when developers offer more detailed stuff to backers, like the Massive Chalice teamstreams and Star Citizen's weekly show (the reality show is a bit much for my tastes), but I just don't have time to watch much of it. It seems like that sort of community engagement is also available from the Elite: Dangerous team, but I'm glad they also have been consistent about catering to folks with my level of commitment and interest with more bite-size updates. I hope that's something that other developers incorporate into their crowd-funding campaigns going forward.

I've recently started listening to the Isometric podcast and really enjoy it. It has four hosts: a games journalist, a game developer, a psychotherapist, and a father of 3. It can get a bit Boston-centric from time-to-time, but it's off to a great start over the first three episodes.

I say this in all seriousness. There is a huge opportunity right now for someone to become the Bill James of Dota. The stats I see quoted during esports matches are the type of things you saw in US professional sports telecasts during the 70's and 80's. "This lord is 4-1 when picked in tournament play by that team since the last patch" is great for filling air time by giving commentators something to banter about, but it's a statistically insignificant sample. How has that lord performed across all tournaments since the last patch? How has it performed in ranked matches above a certain MMR since the last patch? How has this five lord combo performed in those settings since the last patch? Dotabuff does a good job of compiling raw statistical data, but it does very little to contextualize it. Datdota is doing some interesting things, but the analysis is in the very early stages. If the prize purses for esports continue to rise it's only a matter of time before some pro team brings a statistician on board to do a deeper analysis and find ways to exploit that knowledge in tournament play. I look forward to it.

Here's the launch trailer:

Saturday works fine for me.

There's one group that's been set up so far, but is sounds like there's enough interest for at least one more.

I'm probably not representative of many consumers, but the inclusion of a bunch of premium preorder DLC tends to cause me to wait for the GOTY edition at $30 that generally includes most of that content (often along with a "season's" worth of post-release DLC) instead of buying what has the appearance of being an incomplete game at release for $60.

I think the best bet is to ask in the idlethumbs in-game chat channel when one of the guild officers are on. There's also a thread in Multiplayer Networking, but I think you'll probably have more luck with the in-game chat.

Yeah, I played it at last year's PAX East and was completely sold on the game. I love how they handle the time manipulation stuff. It played like a blend of Bastion and an old isometric tactical RPG (Fallout 1/2, Jagged Alliance, etc.), except with just one character and streamlined to the gills. I can't wait to play the final release.

I wonder how much putting on the actual event costs, and how much of that is covered by ticket and concession sales. It can't be cheap to rent out the Key Arena, outfit it for a live-streamed gaming event, and fly in people in from all over the world. Sure, count me in.

Big Huge Games actually survived after the 38 Studios collapse for about another year. Epic acquired them and renamed them Epic Baltimore, then shut them down about a year later. As for Reckoning, I played it on PS3 shortly after its release and enjoyed it for what it was. I remember also being impressed with the combat mechanics. I had planned to finish the game on my last naval deployment, but ran into an issue which prevented me from loading my (single player) save games without the game polling back to some server to verify that I owned the preorder DLC items associated with the saves, so I never ended up finishing it.

They've now opened up pre-orders. $20 for the game, $30 for a bundle of the game and the soundtrack.

Heroes of the Storm, the Blizzard Lords Management game currently in alpha testing. Earlier in development it was called Blizzard All-Stars, since it draws its Lords from the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo (but sadly not the Lost Vikings, Rock n' Roll Racing, or Blackthorne) games. It was also called Blizzard DOTA even further back, before the trademark settlement with Valve that cleared up who owned the rights to the Dota name.

They had a pretty big presence at PAX East this year, as they did last year. I'd imagine that took a big chunk of the advertising budget for such a small dev, and it seems to have gotten them a lot of good press.

Regarding FTL "early access" during the kickstarter campaign, they had a free time-limited demo up on OnLive. Like Nick, that demo is what sold me on the kickstarter.

I think this is it:

Episode Three came out out today. I played through it tonight and continue to enjoy what Telltale is delivering with this.

Great episode. I do have one request, though. A web page (or forum thread) with the current sponsors would be really handy for remembering things like whether I'm supposed to use a code when ordering savory peas from Nature Box. Yikes, I had not. The last I had heard of him was the Gallagher Too dispute.

Scoops posted this one to twitter today:

Certainly not. Have you heard this recent pop hit?

RF Jamming isn't some exotic technology that requires a bunch of secretive DARPA research to perfect. It's over 70 years old, easily accomplished, and easily detected. Also, anecdotally, it seems that the US military and law enforcement agencies are becoming increasingly dependent upon those same commercial wireless communications networks and would be loathe to interfere with them lest they cripple their own ability to communicate. I recently left the US Navy where radio silence means communicating by semaphore and morse code (flashing lights). Trust me, it's a colossal pain in the ass. Cops not being able to look anything up on their patrol car laptops or use their cell phones wouldn't be quite as inconvenienced, but they wouldn't be thrilled about it either. In other words, I'm betting the problem was the same sort of mundane configuration error, hardware failure, or loose cable that all of us run into from time to time, not a test of part of Google's robot police state initiative.

If you're buying beer for any sort of large social gathering, you're buying a lot of beer that has to appeal to a broad range of tastes. Who wouldn't buy the cheap stuff that basically everyone can tolerate? That's what I always do, although I'll often sprinkle in a bit of the slightly pricier stuff (especially this on summer days).