Merus

For Kohler's wife, the next time you see her: perhaps she would enjoy some of the DROD games. They are difficult, but excellently designed puzzle games. Full disclosure, I have credits on Journey to Rooted Hold and The City Beneath, which are the two I'd recommend alongside King Dugan's Dungeon, but people no less than Chuck Sommerville (Chip's Challenge) and Terry Cavanaugh have expressed it's one of their favourite puzzle games.

In the annals of excellent first posts, this is right up there.

I am reminded of how when you finish Earthbound, they remove all the enemies so you can go back to everywhere in the world, and there's a ton of different dialogue.

Malcolm's Dad versus Godzilla? I know who I'm betting on.

I remember enjoying Blast Corps but then never really thinking about it again.

So I mentioned Fallen London - the creators of that game announced they're working on something for BioWare. Given that BioWare is very much interested in branching narrative and Failbetter Games are frankly better at it, it's interesting, although there's basically nothing to say about it.

John Walker's capable of stringing words together like a pro, but whether or not he's likely to be right on a topic is a matter of chance. He has a habit of having strong opinions supported by not very much and using RPS as a soapbox for them, with his editorials as a particular highlight standing for something not particularly controversial that most of his audience is likely to support. He wrote the editorials on RPS's intention to point out social issues and on the absurd length of copyright terms (surely to be followed by a rousing stand against torturing kittens), and despite being a backer of Broken Age he's got his own opinions on how the development must be going.

Misandry, Ben, it's called misandry

Song for Hong Kong Mahjong final gong goes wrong! Man exposes long dong

More importantly: did you punch him in the nose?

Was surprised that RPS liked it, but then discovered that John Walker liked it and that explained everything.

That sounds like Nich Maragos' work.

In general, any JRPG where you have to grind is a bad JRPG. Some games require you to tackle a dungeon in multiple chunks, which is fine, but the systems should be designed so that you always have at least one goal available to tackle at any one time.

Her is the first movie I've walked out on. I probably should not have gone to see it; I recognise it was made with skill and care, but it is so incredibly awkward that it becomes painful to watch. If I had known beforehand, I probably would have skipped it.

I generally feel that it might be more fruitful to build gameplay systems that explicitly have a view of the world in them, that are shaped in a way that stories will fall out. Minecraft has the general shape of a story, in that you have a situation and a goal, and you go into the mines to get what you're looking for, something unexpected happens, and you come back out changed somewhat. If you could systematise learning a life lesson, it'd work even better. But I don't think that's possible. But that's kind of the reason why people want to tell stories in games, anyway: they want to impart some kind of meaning to the proceedings. You have to build an intention into the system for it to be there. Trying to make truths of the universe fall out of an algorithm is never going to happen; computer output can be unexpected, but never unconscious. I don't think there's anything wrong with the impulse to convey meaning, and meaning can be conveyed in different ways. But not conveying meaning at all, I think, will be a hard sell. One of the things I think the Stanley Parable mod does better than the final release is touch on that impulse, on the idea that developers feel like they should be capable of conveying meaning, as imperfect as their methods are.

Everybody is off the hook, I guess.

There's an option under 'more reply options' to turn off smilies whenever I start listing something, but honestly I'd be happy to see that smilie nuked from orbit because I don't think anyone uses it except for when making lists. The secret to FF4DS is that it's secretly not very good. The balance of the game was changed substantially mostly so that people who've already played 4 could have something harder. At this point I basically write off LoMas and Tower Defence, and basically any multiplayer shooter. Everyone is very excited about Titanfall for some reason, and I am quite sure I will never play it as intended because that will not involve playing it with friends and acting as if I'm in a marketing video, laughing, making bedroom eyes at a colleague and high-fiving whoever is closest; it will involve playing it with a bunch of strangers who will probably call me a faggot.

My point here is that you have no point, and are covering for that by telling other people they shouldn't make points either, that it's in bad taste. I am happy to waste no more time on whether or not I'm allowed to have the conversation currently in progress. Anyway, I have a new chewtoy: I have also been in a situation like this. I didn't blame my boss for being laid off, because it was clear that the problem did not lay with him. The money ran out, and sacrifices had to be made. The difference is we made good products that didn't spend six years in development and weren't fatally compromised when they released. I reject your insinuation that a) people being laid off is a force of nature instead of an intentional act performed by a human being, that having negative opinions on what happened is in bad taste, and c) that snark on a public forum is as objectionable as hundreds of people losing their jobs, and not a way for the relatively powerless to cope with a tragedy for people they hoped would be more successful. This is smarm; characteristically, you spend several paragraphs basically saying, 'guys, this is entirely mysterious, so everyone shut up and look sad'. This helps no-one, and we will learn nothing. And in trying to deploy shame to bolster your argument, you make a fatal mistake: Said as much in the DFA forums when Broken Age was split. They dropped the ball (and I've teased them about it), but fulfillment is a full-time job. They're not professional fulfillers and it's unreasonable to expect amateurs to be as good at it as, say, Fangamer. Oh man you're new, I yell about how terrible Valve is all the time, everyone else here is sick of it. In general, it's not a good idea to make arguments to a crowd that suggest hypocrisy without actually demonstrating it, because you'll inevitably make it to someone who happens to have been consistent the whole time. And then we get false equivalencies: Not even comparable; games developers playing their product is research and development. Ken Levine interviewing other creators will probably result in insights he can use. If he's interviewing hacks, though, what's he learning? Still, it's the kind of thing that becomes more important after the fact. If someone had told me before Binfinite's release that it was going to be mediocre because Ken Levine interviewed Zack Snyder, I'd have called them a dipshit, so while it's a false equivalency it was still not a particularly good comparison. I take the point. Nevertheless, we're still entitled - and able - to draw conclusions about Irrational based on what we know publically: We know for a fact that Irrational suffered from massive turnover, well above the industry average, and high turnover almost always means that there's a problem with a business (whether it's with the industry or with the management). We know that the game took six years to develop, and that protracted development period is in part due to Ken Levine's creative process, as in pre-release interviews he said as much, characterising it as iteration. We do not have good reasons for why these things happened, but we can be sure that Irrational during Bioshock: Infinite's development was dysfunctional, and it's not unreasonable for the buck to stop with the man in charge. We can infer more. We know in detail what happened with Team Bondi and Silicon Knights, other studios that had high turnover and were late with their games, and in both of those cases the problem was a 'creative visionary' who was a poor manager and terrible person. We do not usually see this sort of evidence because it suits the game industry to ensure it cannot be seen - which in turn implies that it's endemic. We see from the finished game that it has major creative problems - although it contains much of merit, it is a compromised product. However, it is not especially buggy and has a consistent art style, which suggests a level of co-ordination that in turns suggests relatively good management of the individual disciplines by the leads. This in turns suggests the problems with the game lie either with the creative team, or the co-ordination between the creative team and the leads for the various disciplines. If the creative team is at fault, Levine has misrepresented himself to the public and to his publishers; if the co-ordination was poor, Levine is a bad manager. This isn't a great argument because delivering a creative work under budget is a skill. There is a broad swathe of creative professionals whose chief asset is that they're able to deliver pretty good work, under budget. The hypothetical boss here begging the parent company for money wouldn't be in this mess if they had developed the skill that lets them budget appropriately - and by all accounts Take Two generally does not force a greenlighted game to rapidly change scope, unless a game has very clearly gone off the rails (again, drawing from the expose on Team Bondi and post-release discussion about what went wrong at 2K Marin). While developers frequently have to deal with meddlesome publishers, part of Take Two's success has been rooted in them not doing that, so it's unlikely to be the case here.

Spoiler'd for those of you at work, or who don't care to explain why you're looking at this.

I don't think it's that weird, really; often sexism (and other forms of punching down at the marginalised) is more to do with bad writing than the writer being a bigot. The writer thoughtlessly regurgitates stereotypes instead of working to capture something more true, and many of those stereotypes are rooted in marginalisation. Games generally don't attract good writers because the money's not that great and it's not fundamental to the process. A game can get by without a writer, but it can't really get by without a programmer, and if you don't have an artist that severely constrains what you can do.

Little disappointed (though not overly surprised) that Planet Money might be editorially compromised: one of the producers and hosts, Adam Davidson, routinely flouts conflict of interest rules, and Planet Money's chief sponsor lobbied against the Consumer Finance Protection Act. He also hosted an interview with Elizabeth Warren in which he attacked her on specious grounds. Apparently it's also part of a pattern at NPR and PBS of taking money from organisations that expect to be able to dictate editorial content, most notoriously with PBS's series on the pension 'crisis'. I probably should have been more careful with their 'counter-intuitive' reporting on the clothing factories of Bangladesh.

Delighted to see a) the quick identification of smarm in that response and the ruthless undercutting by everyone else. You guys! This is basically the 'you can't criticize a movie until you've made a movie' argument and that is a shitty argument. (It is also smarmy, not snarky; it is trying to shut down responses, instead of inciting them.) Levine is paid a great deal of money to manage the livelihood of a large number of people, and it's perfectly reasonable to expect that he should be able to meet the standard he presents himself as meeting; if he couldn't meet that standard, he should have vacated his position for someone who could. Look at the Irrational Interviews, with such luminary creatives as Zack Snyder. The signs were there that he wasn't as capable and thoughtful as we were told. It's offensive that someone would come along and misdirect from the damage done to hundreds of people's careers because Ken Levine was full of shit by claiming that we are not entitled to our opinions after all, although you sure as shit think you're entitled to yours. The reason you can't articulate your actual opinions is because when they're stated in plain language they're clearly bullshit. Go on. Prove me wrong.

I played through Rayman Origins as Rayman, but I spent quite a long time with Rayman Legends playing as the spy princess. The game has a spy princess. How could I not choose to play as the spy princess.

There's a similar saying in Mexico where the kettle is explicitly described as sooty.