Merus

So guys the Hottest 100 was yesterday. If you did not listen to the Hottest 100, then you clearly do not know any Australians. It is run by Triple J, who are a arm of the government charged with ensuring Australian teenagers and young adults have access to at least one decent radio station. The Hottest 100 is, at this point, the single largest music poll in the world, with 1.5 million votes every year. There are a lot of Australian artists (including the number one this year) but that basically means there's a bunch of music you haven't heard. It usually has a strong indie bent, and while it's as vulnerable to the trends as anything else made for youth, there's usually at least some musical merit. This year's votes tended towards the indie rock spectrum, although it's not as heavy on the Lorde as you would expect (and also she's a New Zealander), but there was a decent amount of rap, metal, and electronic. (And disco, thanks to Daft Punk.) Here is the and Spotify playlist.

I think Search and Loot would be way more entertaining if you had to spend a limited resource to even look. So you get to open either the cupboard or the barrel but you can't look at anything else. You would probably also have to build the game so that you didn't have to search through shit to find the resources you need to play, which would also be super. The Holy Trinity of combat classes is a holdover from the days of MUDs, which had no concept of spatial movement. It should not have survived to be brought into Everquest. It definitely shouldn't have survived to the modern day MMORPG. It very definitely should not have escaped the MMO basement and started turning up in other games that should know better. It's not even a good design! The damage dealers get to have all the fun of attacking, but to make sure it's not piss-easy you have to make 'hurting a monster' an incredibly complicated affair, because it's everyone else's job to ensure they never get into danger, The healer spends all their time making HP meters going up, and it's basically impossible to make that compelling. You could make buffs part of that, but then unless you make it 'choosing the right buff for the right circumstance' you're back at square one, and the problem with 'choosing the right buff for the right circumstance' is that it means that buffing someone is sometimes the wrong thing to do and that makes things very awkward indeed. Meanwhile, the tanks are the only ones actually fighting a boss, except that a tank's class design is based entirely around a score that they have to keep higher than the damage dealers, so basically everything the boss can do boils down to that score. Instead, you could just make normal enemies like everyone else does. I'm also kind of over backtracking which is a shame because I love Super Metroid. But then no-one does it anywhere near as well as Super Metroid. Having to keep track of all the areas in which I will, one day, be able to do something is a pain in the ass. Super Metroid handles it well I think chiefly because after the second area it drops a boomgate and you literally can't get back, so you end up forgetting everywhere you were 'supposed' to go. By the time you get back, you have all these exciting abilities and you can use them all at once. Parcelling them out one at a time makes it much more tedious. I'd also be happy to get rid of random drops forever, or, more specifically, needing to fight an indeterminate number of battles to get a thing to drop. We have the solution to this one already: let me turn the difficulty up to guarantee I get everything I need after one fight. I'm also totally happy to never be in another arena fight again.

How often, to the nearest dozen or so times, did you have to punch out a Nazi? But seriously dude it sounds like maybe talk to your boss's boss and maybe work something out?

Roald Dahl is a national treasure and yes I am aware that he is not from my nation but even so. Yeah, he wrote quite a few not-good books, but I think a lot of the fun of Dahl is that he is not afraid to be really cruel and nasty, and kids of the age to be reading Dahl are a little sick of the seedier sides of life being hidden away. In the US that appears to be handled via kid-friendly scary stories like Who's Afraid of the Dark, etc. but in Britain (and Australia) that's not usually the case. Dahl wrote some really twisted adult-oriented stuff, as well. So I'm trying to compile a reading list for 2014. I'd like to get some literature on there, but my tastes are not particularly well-developed, as I was poorly served by the local library growing up and stayed on the pulp maybe a little too long. I'd love some relatively accessible literature to broaden my palate (as a guide, I devoured Cryptonomicon, got most of the way through Yiddish Policeman's Union before losing interest, and couldn't stomach Infinite Jest) and some thought-provoking non-fiction, as my list is a little light on both.

It's difficult when you're making a game like Prison Architect where you're simultaneously trying to have a point, when it comes to representing an image. I have had a game idea kicking around where you'd run essentially a Walmart, and essentially use every nasty trick in the book to make money ('Lower Prices. No Matter What.') When it came time to research the supply chain, with delightful sweatshop conditions, I ran into a problem: there's evidence that, despite sweatshops being objectively terrible, the individuals involved are still grateful. The exploitative conditions in developing nations are, from the point of view of the people of the developing nations, a massive step up over the existing conditions, particularly for women. Once the country starts to develop, the countries start passing laws to put an end to the exploitation - but by that point the countries have more to offer than merely being the cheapest. The most tragic conditions usually come from countries that don't have an infrastructure set up to spend capital wisely; an artisanal product that becomes a fad in a developed country, and the community rips itself apart during the gold rush, which does happen occasionally, but Walmart generally doesn't like surprises. So what happens when I depict the supply lines in this game? The traditional way to do these kinds of games is to allow you to see inside the minds of the agents, so are they going to be grateful for financial independence that doesn't involve prostitution? Do I present them as being aware of how much more they could be paid, despite it being unrealistic? How can I make the system the villain when the system's responding to competing pressures in a logical way? Doesn't this challenge the idea that companies like Walmart are a gross debasement of capitalism, when this sort of thing is what's usually claimed as capitalism's benefits? I kind of moved onto another idea that's not so difficult after that. (Which was an action adventure game about cult behaviour, so it's relative.)

Good games with random encounters usually try to ensure each encounter in an area serves as its own interesting battle, either introducing a new monster, or putting a combination of monsters in that require tactics different to fighting them alone. The fashion, these days, is to represent monsters on the map in some way, but there are games (chiefly the Etrian Odyssey series) that instead put a radar on screen that slowly transitions from green to red. When it's flashing red, an encounter is about to happen.

Told to me by an actual Irishman, and I remembered it a) because it's very silly and because it's one of the few Irish jokes I've heard where the punchline isn't 'Irish people are terrible'.

Two backpackers are in Ireland and they're out of beer money, so they go into a pub (where else) to apply, and get told they only want Irish residents because backpackers spend all their time drunk on the job. So the two backpackers sit down in another pub and come up with a plan. They'll pretend to be Irish! "I'll be Pat," one of them says, "and you be Mick. By the time they work out we're not Irish, we'll be indispensable!" So 'Pat' goes in for an interview, and sits down with the manager, who asks him his name. 'Pat' says, in a dodgy Irish accent, "Aah, me name's Pat." "You're a backpacker, aren't you," the manager says, "Sittin' down for an interview and callin' yourself Pat. You think we're potato-lovin' idiots, do you? I mean, you could have at least said your name was Pat-rick." So 'Pat' tells 'Mick' what happened, and 'Mick' goes to another pub for an interview. "What's your name, lad?" the manager says. "Aah, me name's Mickrick."

I can certainly see why people had problems with Legend of Korra Season 2! (I haven't finished the season, just watched the flashback episodes.)

I'm pretty sure there's a man and a lighthouse ergo it's the Bioshock universe

Like lawyers constantly say, you're able to trademark shared concepts like colours, because the law is attempting to work out exactly how you can give how a company presents itself to customers some legal weight without being completely ridiculous. It's easy to imagine that if someone made a dark coloured drink that came in a distinctive bottle shape with a red label with cursive, people would think that it was 'related' to Coca-Cola because it'd be trying to stay in keeping with that branding. When you have branding, you need something like trademark law to ensure that things don't immediately collapse - and people really like brands. Part of the problem here is that King is sending cease and desist letters when they don't own the trademark, and they're not going to get the trademark because it's too broad. They probably will get 'Saga' because that is actually part of their public appearance, but it really should be 'Saga when used as a noun adjunct postfix' because that's actually how they use it. So, say, Bejewelled Saga would be clearly biting on their use of Saga, but Saga Frontier and The Banner Saga would not and are not.

Part of it is selfishness, obviously, but I'd still quibble with the idea that executive meddling is always a bad thing. Executives in charge of cartoons in the early 90s basically forced creators to find places for female characters, and while the process ruined some shows (Pinky and the Brain being an excellent example) it also forced creators to start thinking about their female audience instead of defaulting every character to male. During the same period, Jeffrey Katzenberg got a bit of a reputation at Disney for coming in and meddling with the animator's work - he famously nearly had Aladdin shut down, and pushed Lion King down a completely different path. Thing was? He was absolutely right. Aladdin v1 had a mother character whose only job was to make Aladdin feel bad, while Lion King v1 was a confused mess until Katzenberg remarked how much he liked the Hamlet elements. The problem with executive meddling is when the creatives and the executives aren't seeing eye-to-eye and the executives force their way by threatening to shut the production down. (And even then sometimes it's well intentioned - Fox executives correctly deduced that Firefly's pilot wasn't going to endear the series to a wide audience and asked Whedon to write a second pilot that'd be more sticky, and Whedon dropped the ball by leaving all his character development in the first pilot.) That's basically impossible with crowdfunding. Yes, the fans "are involved in the creative process" but legally the only thing they're entitled to is the Kickstarter rewards. The creatives set what kind of feedback they want - Revolution Software didn't really get much feedback for Broken Sword 5 at all, while Our Darker Purpose got their backers involved from the very beginning. Which ties back into my earlier point: if you have a strong vision for what your work is about, then it's hard for feedback to blow you offcourse. Hyper Light Drifter is a great example because it has a very clear identity and that identity was part of the pitch. Ignoring feedback because it's against the vision will endear that team to their backers, because what they want most of all is a game that embodies the identity they paid for.

I love SIM cards chiefly because the idea that you buy a phone and then you have to stick with that one mobile phone provider or get a new phone makes me irrationally angry. Mobile providers cannot fuck me over too badly because I can just go somewhere else. I also worked technical support for a phone company, but this was in the days of feature phones. So many people managed to activate line 2 accidentally. I liked those calls. They were quick.

I think it's disingenuous to claim that a fear of new ideas is only something that's a problem for open developers. Most of the early Kickstarter games traded very heavily on old names trying to make old games because the appeal there was easy to sell, but well before that, people were using Kickstarter to make things that were very new and not what the usual talent was 'known' for. My favourite example is Numanera, a roleplaying game by the best-known developer of D&D 3rd edition, and it was pitched as a weird science fantasy storytelling game with no miniatures and very light combat. You're starting to see people take Kickstarter as a funding tool more seriously and post important things like prototypes, budgets and schedules so that you have the ability to see what is cool about a more unusual project, and that it's achievable. The Broken Age lumberjack example is particularly poor because he was brought back because backers went 'aww, I liked the lumberjack'. Because backers are not an amorphous blob, and people will complain when you do something and then a different but equally loud group will complain when you reverse it. If you are listening to backers, you need to filter out feedback you get, just like every other creative ever has had to do. Which is why I think this is all a little bit bullshit: there is no creator ever paid for their work who hasn't had to sift through feedback and decide what's worth listening to and what comes from people who don't get it. If you do not do that, you will create something crappy and compromised, and you deserve everything you get. I think a better example is Guild Wars 2, which launched attempting to do something very different with MMORPGs and push the envelope a little bit (like Walker claims The Old Republic did). I think it succeeded, reviewers got as far as the heart events and decided they were basically the same thing as what had been done before. They've asked their official forums - the forums! - to participate in a collaborative development thing. It's gone from everyone bitching about their pet problems to a focused, useful discussion, because GW2 has a very clear idea of its design principles and they took the time to teach their players how to give realistic and useful feedback, so that now there's a bunch of players that jump in and discipline others who walk in and give obnoxious and blinkered feedback.

Yeah, between this and Broken Age I've muted his articles on my RSS feed. He can come out of the box when he stops being a twat.

Eating clocks is really time consuming.

...SMT IV's out in Europe I'm pretty sure. I can buy it. It's a pain in the arse, but unlike basically every other console Nintendo often releases things in Europe and Australia well before the US. Americans had to kick up a fuss to get Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story, and I just walked in a store and bought them months before. Same with Bravely Default, which is not yet out in America.

I should point out here that I have dysthymia, so I'm reasonably sure wanting to throw it all in is the depression talking. But I thought the thought process was worth sharing, which is why it's in Life (and writing it out does help me challenge that thought pattern, so again sorry for using the board for therapy but it still helped). Also I'm pretty sure this is at least part brought on by finding out that apparently thinking twerking is ridiculous is racist. I'm literally going 'if mocking twerking is wrong, I don't wanna be right'. I have been working on swapping out my ableist descriptions ('retard', 'crazy', etc.) with 'fuckwit', which gets the point across (probably a little better, actually). As a kid I deliberately retrained myself to say 'no worries' instead of 'no problem' so I'd sound more Australian, but man.

I think I'm right on the cusp of not giving a shit about having an opinion. It's probably a bad mood, because it looks like it rests on the premise 'change is impossible' which tends to crop up when I'm in a bad mood, but I'll bet plenty of other people came to the same conclusion. Culturally regressive attitudes about race, sex and disability are so ingrained that it's basically impossible for me to not demean someone less privileged than I. Even then, there are problems we don't even recognise as being problems, in the same way that 50 years ago no-one knew it was possible to be ableist. If I'm basically guaranteed to do harm to someone, and I'm basically guaranteed to become an old bigot, then why should I spend a whole bunch of effort trying to avoid, in vain, doing harm to those more vulnerable than I? It's going to happen anyway. The best I can do is to not deliberately go out of my way to be a dick and make an insincere apology afterwards.

What's interesting is that Animal Crossing used to be really bad at this and it's interesting to see how they've improved, and what they did specifically to make the villagers more interesting. Things like how they'll notice you and come up to you, how they have relationships with other villagers, the errands that they get you to run, very little of that existed in the first game.

If you have a Christmas in July party, this is also an excellent dessert for that.

A friend of mine asked me for my ice cream Christmas pudding recipe (the combination of Christmas in summer and a Christmassy ice cream dessert is a winning combination). I thought it was worth sharing. As you can see, it’s very loose; so long as you don’t make it impossible for the dessert to freeze, it’ll probably turn out pretty good. All measurements are in metric because imperial is terrible. You need: * 2 days * about 3 cups of dried fruit and nuts, as ’the filling' (I use a packet of diced mixed fruit, a packet of glade cherries, sliced, and a packet of roasted, roughly chopped macadamias - use whatever you prefer, you can even use chocolate here if you want. Don’t let The Man tell you what to put in your ice cream Christmas pudding) * 2 litres of vanilla ice-cream (low fat or regular) * 2 tablespoons of brandy or rum (I use brandy) * 300mL thickened cream (low fat or regular) * about 1/2 teaspoon of both cinnamon and mixed spices (to taste, but this makes it taste Christmassy) * a hero till the end of the night * a bowl for the fruit * a large bowl that you’ll use for freezing (or divide it up into individual servings before freezing) * also have an electric beater on hand Day 1 Put the fruit into your bowl, then pour the brandy on top. Cover, and leave to soak for at least 8 hours. The amount of brandy you put will probably feel inadequate. This is fine. It’ll get soaked up. Do not make the mistake of putting brandy directly into the ice-cream like I did the first time I tried it. It won’t freeze and you’ll feel terrible. Grapple with the ennui of your inadequate amount of brandy. Brandy can also be used for grappling with ennui. Drink responsibly. Day 2 Roast any nuts you’re using - macadamias can be roasted in the oven at around 120˚C for about 40 minutes or until they’re brown. Put down baking paper and spread them out (it’s okay if they’re not all one layer but don’t get carried away with your macadamia tower). Make sure you keep poking them around so they roast evenly. Let them cool. Soften the ice-cream, and place it in your large bowl. Fold the fruit, nuts, and anything else you’re using for filling into the ice-cream. Add the cream, cinnamon and mixed spices. Mix well. If the ice-cream hasn’t quite melted and still has air bubbles, put it straight into the freezer. If you’re like me, and the ice-cream has gotten runny, use the electric beater on a low to medium setting (read: as fast as possible without the mixture going everywhere) to aerate it, then put it in the freezer. (This, hopefully, prevents the ice-cream from getting that icy-pole texture. I haven’t actually tested this.) Day 3 Serve. Some people put a layer of melted chocolate on top, but I prefer to have the fruit filling on display and also I couldn’t be arsed with the chocolate.

I used to feel bad for Nick then had the creeping realisation that he might be a bit of a jerk?

It is a fair point that Kojima has handled gay and lesbian characters better than most Japanese media generally does. Certainly, but Kojima's stated that there is a 'reason' the character is wearing skimpy clothing instead of appropriate battle attire. If that reason is 'she is transgender', then the portrayal of the character is basically guaranteed to be reductive. There's one in one of the Ace Attorney games. It's problematic, to say the least.

I thought I needed a sequence of actions. I wonder if they toyed at all with having multiple solutions? They could have then tried making them a little more complex, so that players had to work for it a bit but could conceivably make a little progress every time through.