Merus

It's really hard to tell with metal, but my natural biases towards assuming that everyone's just acting unintelligent until proven otherwise make me think the band are hamming it up. The bit where he slips, and then they start moshing except for the one guy behind the beat, and then they stop except for the same guy, and then they're throwing snowballs... Snowballs aren't metal.

Reason I think it's particularly interesting to watch is for that last couple of minutes, which I think is much more broadly applicable. Replace 'homophobic' with 'racist' or 'sexist' and the same kind of discussions happen.

I don't think it's entirely universal - I've heard of devs who rigorously prototype their games to ensure that they're fun before they start committing any resources to them. It's definitely not alpha, though - that's the point at which the game is first ready to be shown to outside people (and why, from a consumer perspective, alpha seems to run the gamut from 'basically nothing' to 'basically solid'). Beta is when you've gotten enough feedback from your alpha testers that you're ready to put it out to a cross-section of your actual customers, confident that you're not going to get the same feedback from them. In games, this has been co-opted by marketing to also mean a pre-release version with no substantial changes between the beta and release. Traditional development has the release candidate, which is a beta version that, if there are no major problems with it, will become the released version. I don't think I've ever heard game developers use 'release candidate'; vice versa, referring to a version as the 'gold' version doesn't occur in traditional development.

It's weird that the publisher of Conker's Bad Fur Day still has this kind of thing floating around.

I can; it would look a lot like the current world, in that a few people would be very interested in the new Nintendo system but the majority of people don't care.

Man, I'm assuming a lot of us are white here, and I don't really think we gotta lot of business deciding what is and isn't a stereotype used to demean and demonise African-Americans or whether African-Americans would respond to that as a reflection of them.

The more I think about the whole Flappy Bird thing (which continues to be fascinating because it exposed a really ugly vein that runs completely counter to the usual games industry narrative) the more I'm convinced Dong Nguyen being Vietnamese has a lot to do with it. I think it's got the same kind of virulent, ignorant anti-Asian rhetoric that I've seen from people raging about gold spammers in WoW - the idea that these poor Asian countries are ruining our games. Mattie Brice has a pretty good piece about this (and by 'pretty good' I explicitly mean 'it raised my hackles for no adequate reason' which suggests it's bringing up issues I'd rather not think about.)

Look for the person that changes from one pose to the next with no movement in between.

I don't think there's anything wrong with a vague idea of tone and possibly some incomplete gameplay mechanics, because the whole point of prototyping is to invent that stuff.

The thing that bothered me about Darksiders, particularly 2, is that it aped the Zelda formula but neglected the most important part of it: you get permanent upgrades from specific accomplishments, not from attrition. It's very rare that you can buy anything really tasty with rupees, because in Zelda you have to actually do things. In Darksiders, you have a bit of that but for the most part upgrades are from attrition, from enemies killed instead of insight and understanding. Still, some people prefer it when every fight means something, because they're not in it for the discovery.

So it's Predator: The Multiplayer Video Game.

The Flappy Jam kind of inspired me to try a vertical endless runner with a vaguely Metroidvania-ish upgrade system.

Yeah, I agree it's not yet at the point where a separate subforum would be beneficial.

I think basically every concept that was pitched and made it to the second round will sit in the backs of the creator's minds. People responded to this, they will remember, and maybe if I polish it up a little it'll be even better.

I've definitely heard more than a few comparisons between Jazzpunk and Airplane and other spoof movies as being basically a framework to hang jokes on. Actually, speaking of spoofs, here's this article about the people behind the [bLANK] Movie franchise that I found fascinating.

I always enjoy someone pressing the buttons of idiots, and just became aware of a great one: Katy Perry grew up as a fundamentalist Christian, and so would have grown up hearing several lectures about Satanic influences in popular music. Her 2014 Grammys performance, in which she worked hard to fit in as many as she possibly could: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSaxGesjybA

#hailremo? I was a little disappointed with Klepek's post because I anticipated a big blast in the direction of people who go 'that's just how the internet is' because I think those people are responsible for the problem. They're the ones who have normalised the idea of being an asshole on the internet, not the assholes themselves. They are the ones who should be saying something when others are assholes on the internet, and by avoiding that responsibility to set cultural standards, are the ones who allow bad behaviour to perpetuate.

Griddle insinuated that something happens in Chapter 5 that sours things immensely. I haven't reached there - I stopped playing around Chapter 2 because apparently I do that with every RPG and never noticed - but I wouldn't be surprised if a JRPG had a really strong opening and middle and then turns to shit at the end because that is my experience with FF13 and I'm still mightily pissed off about it. Like seriously it's been like four years and you can still get me ranting about the conclusion of that game at the slightest opportunity. I edited out the bit in this post where I just started complaining about it.

Currently listening thoughts: I don't think you really have to be ashamed about talking about Flappy Bird because it is basically the biggest thing that happened this week. It is a very sad situation, especially because it looks like it leaked to the mainstream press. Man, Nick seems very sure about what he would do in a stressful situation that he has never ever been in. I think I am with Jeff Vogel here in thinking that is bullshit. I did not get onto Flappy Bird before it was deleted, but it looks like the biggest difference is that it's basically impossible to get the bird to go straight? Is that right? When you tap it immediately arcs up then starts falling until you tap again? If so, that's an actual substantial change to things like that helicopter game everyone played at some point because unlike those games it's not possible to put the flappy bird into a static position. I basically think Terry Cavanaugh is the best because he played DROD and I think that if more people had played DROD the industry would be in a better place. I am disappointed how few people seem to notice how closely the Jazzpunk Thunderbirds trailer parodies the Thunderbirds intro.

No we mean where did he go between the livestream and recording the podcast

Someone pointed out that Dark Souls is tagged as 'Casual' and Gone Home is tagged as 'Not a game'. And then I realised what arseholes are probably tagging Depression Quest with and suddenly the last two posts in this thread are linked.

So where does the other side of that teleporter gate on the DICE stage come out?

I would imagine that if they get an email from the copyright holder, they can then claim plausible deniability. Someone actively lied to Wikimedia, as opposed to Wikimedia being taken in by a deception they didn't have time to research.