pkirkner

Slate just started up a companion podcast for The Americans featuring folks involved in the production of the show.

He works for Breitbart. It's a site founded by and named after a thoroughly dishonest extreme right-wing troll. This is exactly the sort of thing that platform exists for.

This episode was great. I'm really curious to see how the Asian championship factors into the tournament landscape going forward. I assume the winner gets a de facto invite to the International, but I wonder if Valve will make that explicit.

The PAX lines twitter account really helps with this, as they'll be constantly sending out updates about how close to capacity a panel's line is. In the past, they generally wouldn't let you start queuing up for a panel until the previous panel in that conference room had started, so for something like the main Giantbomb panel show up around that time. Personally, I tended to skip the bigger panels and used the PAX lines twitter account to figure out which panels didn't require a wait so I could just show a few minutes before the start time. I happened on a lot of weird, interesting panels that way, like the one MIT's Lincoln lab gave on creating games to train and evaluate disaster response personnel.

In a bit of positive news, it looks like 8chan's domain name was revoked by their registrar.

I went from 2011-2014, but am going to give MAGFest a try this year instead for a number of reasons . My favorite three things at PAX East are the tabletop area (which is massive), the Indie Mega Booth, and the classic arcade free-play room, run by ACAM. Some pointers: Bring a refillable water bottle (which you can top off at the water fountains all over the place) and some travel-sized hand sanitizer. I also like to carry a bag I can toss them in along with free t-shirts and stuff. Learn the train route from your hotel to the convention center (BCEC). It's near the World Trade Center stop on the silver line. The food at the convention center sucks and is way over-priced, so bring snacks and take a break for lunch. Just hop the train (or walk, Boston is very walk-able) and go eat at any of Boston's awesome restaurants instead, for less. If you plan on going to panels, bring something to do in line. You'll be spending a ton of time standing / sitting around. Card and dice games are pretty standard, as are 3DS games. Folks are usually friendly and down to play stuff. Speaking of panels, if you want free stuff, Gearbox tends to be pretty generous. Last year, everyone at their panel got a pre-order code for the Borderlands pre-sequel. If you want to demo games on the show floor, you can show up before the show opens (8 AM? check the PAX East twitter feed the day before to be sure) and get in line in the queue room to try and beat the rush. If you're into rhythm games, Harmonix usually has a party either the night before or the first night of PAX. I've heard it's a good time. There are a number of useful PAX twitter accounts, especially @PAX_lines and @Official_PAX Bring a battery pack and charging cable for your phone. Three Moves Ahead, Gamers with Jobs, and Giantbomb typically record live episodes at the show. Giantbomb started a last year that's a good time. Gamers with Jobs community folks also set up a presence in the table top area every year and are fun to play board / role playing games with.

It's off-topic, but anyone who hasn't read Sacco's stuff really should. Safe Area Gorazde might be the best piece of war reporting I've ever read.

The initial interview came about from Jay's lawyer approaching the reporter.

It sounds like something that would have been done in CGA, since pink was used a ton before EGA came around and opened the palette up a bit. Maybe (John Romero's) Dangerous Dave?

Assuming it was the same survey I saw, it was a fan survey on reddit of about 3,000 people. The results were interesting, especially the table that cross-references the amount spent with annual income, but I'm not sure if they say more about the demographics of reddit or the demographics of Star Citizen backers, of which there are more than 700,000 at this point. I would love to see Cloud Imperium's internal data. Hopefully some of it is included in a GDC postmortem of this thing some day.

JP LeBreton has recently gone independent after being laid off from Doublefine and set up a Patreon to create an open source ASCII art game development tool as well as a yet-to-be-announced game.

Yeah, that's really apparent at the gun range. I get the exact same vibe from people with tricked-out AR-15's as I do from folks with tricked-out gaming PC's. Jon Stokes wrote a bit about it for Wired after Sandy Hook:

Yeah, I'm really not sure why they decided on calling this 1.0. It's still limited to folks who pledged for alpha access and like you said is really buggy. Deleting the "LoginData.json" file in client folder fixed this for me.

They also cut a new trailer, which is mostly made up of footage they've previously released.

You can gift any number of gems. You just can't put less than 1000 on the market. I had 14 leftover last night and was able to pass them along.

Louie and Last Week Tonight are my favorite shows still in production. For all-time, I'll go with The Twilight Zone for still holding up 50+ years later.

I picked up 2,000 gems for about $2. Between those and the gems I created from the chaff in my Steam inventory I had enough to pick up Escape Goat 1 & 2 and Fist Puncher employing the "make sure I'm in the top 3 before going to bed" strategy.

I'm really amazed at the demand for the holiday profile skins. They're only good for a month and cannot be resold, but are going for hundreds of dollars worth of gems.

So very good.

You're right. Titanfall (which I really enjoyed) and Destiny (from what I've heard) were also solid AAA FPS releases this year. I guess it was an off year for strategy games with Beyond Earth being somewhat underwhelming, but even in that genre Endless Legend was a really good game.

I think the only thing really lacking this year is the sort of game that can develop a consensus for game of the year. There were all sorts of great releases but they by and large have been servicing niche genres rather than the AAA FPS and open world stuff that had come to dominate the industry (and seems a bit stale this year outside of possibly Shadows of Mordor). Alien: Isolation seems like the most interesting horror game in years (at least in the AAA space), Elite: Dangerous is the most interesting space sim in years, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Divinity: Original Sin, and Shadowrun: Dragonfall seem like great RPGs, the first act of Broken Age and third act of Kentucky Route Zero were stand out adventure game experiences, there's been a whole host of great mobile games (80 days, Desert Golfing, Monument Valley, Revolution 60), Reaper of Souls seems to have reinvigorated Diablo, the Wii U seems to have really hit its stride, and it was a great year for local multiplayer (Sportsfriends, Towerfall: Ascension, and Nidhogg were awesome). As with most years, there were more awesome gaming experiences than I've had time to play which is all I can really ask for.

I'm looking forward to finding the islands she wrote for the Sunless Sea once it comes out of early access.