pkirkner

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Posts posted by pkirkner

  1. Posted

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

     

    Season 3 kicked off on FX Wednesday night with a wonderfully suspenseful episode called “EST Men.” So Joe, showrunner Joel Fields, and script coordinator Molly Nussbaum sat down on one of their Brooklyn soundstages to talk us through their writing and research process. Over the coming weeks, we’ll talk with some of the show’s actors, prop and set designers, musicians, craftspeople (including those who design all those great disguises), and the other artists who together make The Americans.
    We’ll be releasing new podcasts every week, a few hours after each TV episode finishes airing on FX.

  5. Posted

    If you want to get into the big panels, such as Gearbox or Giantbomb, you'll have to show up several hours in advance and be prepared to wait in line.  They usually fill capacity fairly quickly and the Enforcers will start turning people away.

     

    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. 

  7. Posted

    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.

  9. Posted

    Sidenote: I'm quite curious how the Intercept got these interviews. It's...convenient. As a new publication, the biggest thing it needs is for people to know it exists. And securing extended interviews with two people who wouldn't talk to the biggest podcast in history is a massive coup. And weird. Each of these men likely had a dozen outlets or more reach out to them, but they chose a relatively unknown publication to talk with.

     

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

  10. Posted

    I want to remember the name of the platformer I used to play on a shitty IBM-PC back in the late 80s/early 90s where iirc you control a little pink square with a face navigating single screen levels with all the platforms made up of similar small squares on plain backgrounds, only a step up from ASCII graphics. It was kind of a Super MeatBoy predecessor and I think it was called Jumping Jason or something like that.

     

    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?

     

  11. Posted

    Wow, those Star Citizen figures are horrifying. I would love to know how the studio reacted internally to them. Speaking personally, I'd be demotivated to the point of being unsure I wanted to work on the game any more. That is totally a personal reaction, I'm sure to some people this wouldn't affect their feelings about it at all but there must be some people who took the results badly and are trying to process it.

     

    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.

  13. Posted

    There's something really unsettling about the way "geek culture" fetishizes violence and war. The classic example that comes to mind for me is That One Store In The Mall That Sells Fantasy Knives, but I feel like the modern iteration that popped up in the wake of stuff like Call of Duty is way worse: "ironic" tactical and military gear.

     

    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:

     

    “It’s something mechanical; it’s modular in fashion,” is how Jay Duncan, VP of Sales at Daniel Defense, begins when asked to describe the appeal of the AR-15. “Because it’s so modular you can build the firearm the way that you want it, and it can be like nobody else’s firearm. It’s about personalization.”

     

    As an early employee of one of the fastest-growing high-end AR-15 makers, Duncan has the perfect perch from which to observe the black rifle’s transition in shooting circles from a scary military oddity to the hottest item in the gun store. He — and everyone else I talked to — credit the gun’s flexibility for the surge in interest.

     

    Users can change calibers by swapping out barrels, bolts, and magazines; they can add and remove accessories like Trijicon optics, Surefire flashlights, or Crimson Trace laser sights; they can swap out the rail system on the gun’s fore-end to accommodate more or fewer accessories; they can change grip styles and stock sizes to tailor the gun to fit their own body; they can even theme the gun with special paints and decals (zombie apocalypse themes are popular, but I’ve also seen Hello Kitty). And they can do all of this by either ordering new parts and accessories from online or local shops, or by taking parts from different guns in their collection and mixing and matching them to produce something completely new.

     

    “I always tease that it’s like Legos for grown men,” Duncan elaborates, “because there’s plenty of guys that get one, two, six ARs. And they’re constantly tinkering with them — changing barrel lengths, changing optics, putting different sights on them. It’s the same reason that a guy gets into remote-controlled cars or fly tying. Because it’s a fun hobby, and it’s a distraction from reality sometimes.”

     

  14. Posted

    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.

     

    I've not once been able to do anything- literally. I launch it, and I'm met with an atrociously low-rez screen saying I cannot log in(so I guess it can't duplicate my login? why are developers so averse to error messages ugh), and an OK button I can't interact with because I have neither mouse or controller control. So I've gotta hard-kill the program.

     

    Deleting the "LoginData.json" file in client folder fixed this for me.

  23. Posted

    Hell, even on the AAA FPS side, general critical consensus seems to be that the latest Call of Duty is the best in years, and Wolfenstein: The New Order is pretty fantastic if you want something that's, y'know, not Call of Duty.

     

    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.

  24. Posted

    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.

  25. Posted

    80 Days - I just had to mention this somewhere. While I liked this game quite a bit, my wife has played through 8 times. It has crazy good writing and I hope that the author goes on to write more games like this, even if she has to go to another game studio to express herself.

     

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