Merus

Intercept the packages before they arrive, then have people follow the Thumbs as they go to the Campo Santo office with the artwork so they pass each one several times.

US only, sadly.

I note that every time they've released health and lifestyle stuff - Wii Fit, the Pokéwalker, Play Coins - they've been pretty well received (the vitality sensor is an exception, but it wasn't released so nyeah). Much has been made of their engineering philosophy of withered technology, which is a great fit for that market segment. I mean, I like Nintendo and want them to do well, but I have to admit that what I want from them I'm not really ever going to get from them, and these days indies are filling in the gaps, if not quite as well.

Pedericini, I think, is one of about three or four game developers that I literally cannot imagine saying that games should not wrestle with important topics. Like, I can imagine Steve Gaynor saying that; I don't think he would, but I'm capable of imagining it. Pedericini - Molleindustria - saying it is literally inconceivable. His work is a living refutation of the argument.

In terms of non-fiction I'm happy for anything, I have some classic fiction on my list already but would be happy to entertain suggestions.

Nintendo have been highlighting important words since at least Ocarina of Time, as part of their ongoing effort to ensure you only need to pay as much attention to the plot and characters of video games as went into coming up with them.

I am super not surprised 64 that Nintendo thinks that health and lifestyle products are a natural evolution for the company, and I'm honestly a bit annoyed that I didn't see it coming myself. Nintendo see themselves as a hardware company, and their software makes their hardware more compelling. Health and lifestyle is a market segment that is completely moribund and unimaginative - the biggest thing that has happened in years is a GPS device you can put in your shoe - and Nintendo would do extremely well in a field where the technology is well understood and applied without any creativity whatsoever. Nintendo makes games because it was the best fit for their company culture, but this would give them a major new revenue stream and a way out of the games industry if they ever wanted it. I think they have too many people at Nintendo invested in the idea of Nintendo as a games company to ever fully pull out, though.

I'd think it was a bit weird if a public apology was directed to a specific individual. I'd probably consider that grandstanding, in the same way that I consider donating to charities as part of an apology grandstanding. Then again, I think it's fine to mention in the public apology that you've apologised to the person you hurt in private, and I don't think that's happened here. Patton Oswalt, probably. It's a great piece.

I am not an informed better because I can't really tell whether this game is still in the DIKU mold, and that's a major factor. Anyone who wants to play something like WoW will play WoW, or Rift, or TOR. It's basically guaranteed that people in chat are going to be talking about how much better WoW, GW2 and WildStar are and how terrible WoW, GW2 and WildStar are, so the unflattering comparisons will start almost immediately. What happens if it goes buy-to-play like TSW did?

Well, it's subtle. I think what people forget about Wheel of Time is that Jordan was a pulp writer. He rose to fame through his Conan stories. The most well-known fantasy tends not to be particularly subtle because one of the major markets for fantasy is bookish teenagers who have the time and inclination for epic fantasy doorstoppers, so the best-sellers are going to go to the easily digestible stuff. But Lev Grossman and Susanna Clarke are definitely writing fantasy, and they're certainly trying for something more substantial; literary writers are significantly less afraid, these days, of writing genre works. Even if you're writing pulp, though, you can at least take a shot - on the sci-fi side, I think John Scalzi does a decent job at writing pulpy sci-fi that makes a little time to address more complex emotions and ideas.

Over New Year's, my friends and I went up to a beautiful part of the world and stayed in a holiday house five minutes from the beach and ten minutes from three other beaches. Beautiful. One of the games we played was 'random reading', where we'd take a book from the shelf, turn to a random page, and then read a passage. We soon settled on an enormously turgid and pompous book called And Quiet Flows The Don - which, we discovered to our mortification on the last day, was a Nobel Prize winner and a classic of Russian literature. In our defence, it did work very well for random readings.

I'm interested in their psychological thriller, Logos. It promises to really push forward the narrative potential of games.

I hate that I'm using a full thread for this, but: I read a short story once about a money changer in a vaguely Victorian city, who is challenged by a bored noble to calculate the exchange rate for various currencies, including, in the end, the life of a man. The story had a lot of detail about the underlying concepts of currency exchange, and apparently it's a hallmark of the author. Can't for the life of me remember what it was called, or who wrote it. Does anyone recall a story like this? A quick Google search brings me no joy.

That's the one! Here's the story, for those interested: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cambist-and-lord-iron-a-fairy-tale-of-economics/

Chiefly aesthetic, because it feels like pure uncut McMillen id and I really don't like his id.

A portrait of Nick in the style of Joseph Ducreux would be delightful.

I backed it, but haven't really messed around with it much. There's less in the way of inventory, most of your upgrades come from level-up bonuses. I don't know how much this changes the formula but I've really barely played it and haven't played BoI at all because I find it repellent.

BI's looting was particularly egregious because they had Elizabeth feeding you items. They didn't even need a looting mechanic! Put the stuff you want players to get right out in the world, and have Elizabeth gather 'loot'.

Same Love does have an awful amount of Macklemore insisting that he's totally not gay you guys, he's straight, he's been loving girls since before pre-K. But then it's hard to know when he's fronting because he simultaneously fronts and gets real for a secon'. On the other hand 'making money' for Macklemore involves putting out rap songs about how cool it is to think the rights of gay and lesbian people are important and that homophobes are totally lame. The main event of Same Love is Mary Lambert's performance, where she sings about her girlfriend, and she makes money from that song too. He is a straight, white cis male rapper, he's probably never going to be a particularly great ally, but he can reach the sorts of places that more sophisticated messages will never get through, places where homophobia is still very much the norm. He does have a song that is in part about his privilege as a white guy, that the violence done to minorities is horrific and yet if he tries to get involved he's going to blunder around and make things worse. I don't know that singing your gay marriage anthem at the Grammys, and organising a mass wedding during the song, counts as helping, but it sure as shit makes a statement when it could have very easily been 'buy cheap clothing at thrift shops' or 'I don't need no stinking label'.

Epic made some pretty good video games. They make some of the most popular middleware in the world. This is true, I think; it's hard to know what they'll do with PCF and Chair, but they benefit from having first-party teams to dogfood the engine and make the flagship games for the engine. It's possible they might spin the companies off, so that they can focus on what they do best while not being shackled to a company that doesn't need them; they might just shut them down.

Where's Wally in audio format would be an interesting podcasting challenge.

Oh lord, it's not an implication.

Yeah, it seems fairly obvious they're not going to ship the headset with the need to plaster your wall with tracking codes.

I don't really understand this criticism; BioWare left lots of doctors in the lurch when they decide they were going to start making video games instead of medical programs, and it turned out they were better at making video games than they were at making medical programs. Epic is in the same position: they are better at making tools than they are at making video games.

Listen, can someone check to see if Source2 can stream assets from the hard drive because otherwise why did they rebuild their engine