gregbrown

I haven't tried it, but I bet you can actually upgrade in the middle of a round—which may help get through some of the tougher ones. But they also want to make it inconvenient unless you were just killed. You're right that if it's just going to happen at the end of rounds anyways, it doesn't make sense to not just make upgrades available everywhere.

It's more handy on bigger maps, especially if you're a Heavy who has to hustle back for upgrades or an Engineer who needs to reposition your stuff before the next wave.

You can get Twitch.tv notifications to an extent by signing up for an account there and loving Idle Thumbs (or favoriting or whatever they call it). They'll email you notification whenever a broadcast is starting. The iOS app also offers push-notifications to the same effect. For more advance warning, you might want to add the Idle Thumbs blog RSS feed: http://blog.idlethumbs.net/rss And of course, there's @idlethumbs, etc. They've been pretty good about blasting plenty of advanced notification for the last few livestreams.

I randomly stumbled on the original, cam-captured HL2 demo showcased behind closed-doors over a year before release. I remember being completely blown away by the technology at the time; it's hard to get a sense these days for how big of a leap forward it was, simply because a lot of the innovations are now universal assumptions for games.

Vimes, I think you're right about how our relationship in games with NPCs (and other players) is essentially predetermined by how we can interact with them. And like they were saying on Idle Thumbs, shooting people ironically is still shooting them in the end. I guess the challenge is to design a system of interaction with enough granularity and expressivity to enable richer relationships, to have similarly expressive systems pointed back at you, and to have clear and perceptible causality between the two.

Crichton wrote The Lost World so Spielberg could make a sequel. Ian Malcolm was killed off in the original book but survived and beloved in the film, so Crichton essentially writes Malcolm back to life for the sequel.

Those are fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing them!

A fun little toybox simulation of masses with gravity which, when big enough, collapse into a star that then supernovas when it gets too big.

Very fun times, even though I didn't make it past the fourth round. The sounds on the new mode are just awesome. Just needs shorter queues and a patch to fix the "parents calling in the middle of a match" bug.

Be sure to go back and read the beginning! There are a few out-of-order scenes there that don't make sense until you've read through to the end.

New The Master trailer that is my favorite yet: There's also a showing tonight in Chicago, which I just moved away from last month.

Ecuador just granted asylum. (NYT choses the weirdest stories for their breaking news push-notifications on iOS, like announcing that the opening ceremony was "very British pageantry" a few weeks ago) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/world/americas/ecuador-to-let-assange-stay-in-its-embassy.html?pagewanted=all

Horrifying Babel Rising fact: there's a $100 in-app purchase for the game on iOS.

Not out yet, sadly. Valve's release schedule sucks for those of us in Eastern time.

Yep, it looks like the consumables only allow you to earn items, and only cosmetic ones at that.

Instacast is another great one but again, no desktop app. I just end up listening to all podcasts through my iPhone, even when I'm sitting at my computer anyways.

I find it hard to care for a lot of the same reasons that I don't really care about 3D (or really, IMAX). I just don't see it as solving any of the big obstacles in games these days, any more than higher-resolution textures. Will it make immersive games more immersive? Absolutely, but I don't think the lack of VR goggles are what's holding people back there. Increased fidelity is only great to the the extent of what it's in service of.

Plus if you cross your eyes while listening, you can see a puffin pop out.

This is a really fantastic explanation. Such a weird project, and I wonder what they're going to do with it once they've added in all the original content.

Hilariously, Chris played this game and discussed why he would not make a very good astronaut in episode 60. Or a very good robot.

That comment about the phenomenology of motorcycle rides is why I loved jumping out of planes back when I was able to do it. You don't realize it in your daily life, but your eyes do the same thing as a camera when it comes to focus planes. Try holding your finger up, closing one eye, and looking at your finger, and then looking at something way behind it. See how it pops in and out of focus, above and beyond the simple binocular convergence that most of us think of? Skydiving is completely different because it's about the only activity where everything else is—to your eye—infinitely away. It's all in focus simultaneously, and the effect feels kind of hyperreal because everything's so sharp and you can see it all at once. It really feels like you're suspended over a giant painting and slowly floating into it. Absolutely astounding, and above and beyond the experience of simply flying in airplanes. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Haha, I forgot about that. There were a few DS games that were awkward to play in public like that, like yelling "Objection!" in Phoenix Wright.

Battlefield 1942 was a favorite voice-chat game of mine during big Shacknews battles, since so much of the game was the incidental comedy. Are there any games that use voice-chat in a really unconventional or pivotal manner? I can imagine a Mario Kart that does something hilarious like cartoonishly doppler-shift voices, but can't think of any game that actually tries anything like that.

Misread one of the posts earlier, and now I can't stop thinking about four-player QWOP gameplay.

Yeah, I'd agree that in-game rewards aren't necessarily the way to look at this. For me, achievements are often off-putting because they kind of rob your ownership of your choices, if that makes any sense. For me, a lot of times the crazy shit is so hilarious and entertaining because it seems unique and sometimes transgressive, even. Having an achievement pop up for it is the game slapping down that feeling, and pointing out that your actions were in some way expected.