Merus

It's a Martin Luther King Jr. topic? Well, I guess here is a letter from a Birmingham jail that I'd strongly encourage you to read if you have not already.

Is this one of those companies where part of their brand identity is putting silly things on the packets? If so, double thumbs up.

An acquaintance of mine is convinced that this character is going to end up transgender, which will be handled about as subtly and thoughtfully as Japanese media usually handles GLBT issues.

I have not the funds to donate to this but I'm delighted by all of this.

I didn't find it particularly convincing. Steam sales also allow people who don't have a lot of disposable income to be able to afford games without pirating them, which is healthy for the industry. It's a somewhat democratising force, because the games that seem to win most in Steam Sales are indie games, that have a problem with exposure more than anything else. (Between this and the Castle Doctrine nonsense, I'm getting this weird feeling that Rohrer lives in a bubble.) I think it's valuable to keep in mind the power of your closest fans. I worked on a game that had the unusual business model of having a free 'demo' that contained all of the tools for authoring custom levels, and made a central repository where they could be shared freely; what we found was that younger fans, and cash-strapped fans, leaped onto this 'free' material, and became part of the community through their levels. When they had disposable income, often they chose to buy the 'full' game as a sign of appreciation for all the fun they'd already had.

Nick, with Kotick and Allard behind him, each with a hand on each shoulder. Giant plaque says 'Robert A. Kotick and J Allard'.

They want 'objective reviews' but are labouring under the misapprehension that their own opinions are objective.

I had a few glitches where things were well to the right of where they should have been, most worryingly the result of the final puzzle on Vella's side sinking into the ocean half off-screen while the disturbed water was correctly centred. I started with Shay's half, went to the point where it became clear Vella's half was important, did Vella's half until I got bored in Shellmound, then finished Shay's half, then Vella's. It was on the easy side, but I think I would have gotten frustrated if the puzzles were harder, given how little hinting was going on. I don't particularly relish staring at the screen, trying to work out what on the screen is the piece of the puzzle I did not realise was a piece. I'm far more willing to be patient with systemic puzzle games like Braid or DROD because I can be assured that I have all the tools necessary to solve the puzzle, I just have to work out how to apply them.

I think people are only starting to realise how deficient Nintendo has historically been in this area - not one of their consoles has had state of the art tools or middleware. The GBA line is the exception, mostly because the few developers working on it rolled their own and started selling it to others, and the GBA/DS/3DS has stayed consistent enough. This wasn't so much of a problem until the PS2 era - Sony wasn't much better, but they were better and more responsive to developers, and their first party developers would share code - but expectations changed when Microsoft came in. Tools are Microsoft's bread and butter. Visual Studio was the gold standard for a decade (and still is excellent), and the Xbox worked with it. No-one rated Microsoft initially, but when it became clear that they were in it for the long haul, they were sticking around, and that they'd go hard for middleware vendors like Epic, getting things working first on the 360 became an attractive option, because it was usually less work. Nintendo's hardware design is usually pretty good, but many developers increasingly want to insulate themselves from understanding the hardware.

Oh, actual conspiracies exist. My mum ran across one, it's not that hard for two groups to say 'we'll scratch your back and you scratch ours', and then you have a conspiracy. But conspiracies where everyone is in on it are fucking ridiculous. You can usually tell when you have found an actual conspiracy because everyone starts getting really sketchy and avoiding the subject because they're so surprised that anyone noticed.

I feel like if they're going to take ideas from the Gamecube controller they should be getting on those sweet, sweet kidney buttons. Those four identically-shaped buttons at the bottom of the controller are going to be a pain to hit if you ever have to swap between them and the circle pad.

Considering the whole idea of this thing is to get out of the local maxima of familiar buttons, I'm a bit disappointed. They look as awkwardly shoved on as the Gamecube's D-pad and C-stick. Valve actually invented a text input method for game controllers that's a little like semaphore: a held joystick input and a button press gets you a letter.

The Dark Forces review titles are a thing of beauty. STAR WARS: DARK FORCES IV: JEDI KNIGHT III: JEDI OUTCAST II: JEDI ACADEMY Edit: it turns out writing objective reviews is somewhat difficult! I have three-quarters of the Minecraft review done, including some jokes (I am making hay out of the primary interaction being punching landscape features, and Minecraft is especially suited to listing things and having those lists mean nothing). I am trying to decide if listing the game modes should be done in the second or third paragraphs, because it flows better in the second paragraph after I mention that there are four game modes, but most of the existing reviews avoid that kind of detail in paragraph 2.

joke your head (the scores are completely subjective, don't tell anyone)

I think the most instructive thing through this entire process is how poorly the enthusiast press has handled semi-public development. Basically every bit of news throughout this project has been leaked by some press person or another that thought they were entitled to post it (without any of the context).

Get used to one member of the party effectively carrying the rest in damage. You will find jobs that have little to no combat proficiency, and having someone pull double duty gives you room to take advantage of those jobs. Two-handed weapons are amazing - shields are useful, but (pretty much) double damage is more so. I had a Thief with a bow and a Knight with Two-handed and they wrecked face for most of Chapter One until the thief started needing 400 JP to unlock a new ability.

I tend to accuse people who buy into conspiracy theories of being gullible. You're so desperate to dismiss authority that you'll take the word of some dude on the internet with no evidence that everyone else doesn't have access to? Like, there are actual things those in charge are lying about and you're going to care about 'we didn't fly planes into the World Trade Centre'? How gullible do you have to be to believe e.g. that there's someone in charge of the world, and that they're effective enough to not get caught but not effective enough to actually organise shit?

I've seen research that suggests that making text harder to read forces readers to concentrate to read it, and they recall it better. Orthogonal storytelling is sort of the default; the reason why there's so much effort into resonant gameplay storytelling is chiefly because it's so hard and rare, and therefore more valuable. Stride and Prejudice sounds like a fairly extreme example of the idea that, to a game, things like collision areas are important to gameplay but how they appear is isn't quite so much, so you might as well make it interesting. The recent Ubi Art Rayman games like to theme long levels as a journey from one place to another, but of course if you don't realise that's what they're doing it seems a little arbitrary.

Sounds more like a release candidate, to be honest. It's way too late to be taking feedback for anything except for high-priority fixes and quick wins. I'm fine with this, but I wouldn't have minded having a version that was a little earlier where we could have given content feedback.

Not in the early game - you're going to be finding jobs throughout the game, the JP required curve is much steeper than the JP earned curve, and some of those jobs end up being pretty useful. Apparently the amount of JP available goes up much later on, and there's a later (much later) Freelancer ability that boosts JP, but in general the idea is that you're constantly resetting the party to try and gain access to new abilities. Part of building a good party is understanding which jobs have good synergies - for instance, black mages can cast white mage spells fairly effectively, but merchants can cast black mage spells much better than white mage spells. It's no great tragedy if you have to train up a job on multiple party members, and if you've really screwed the pooch Abilink gets you least the first couple of levels in a job for free.

So YOU'RE the one who posted the backer preview publically.

I'm in Chapter 2; it's real slow going, but it starts getting more difficult mid-way through Chapter 1 and it starts getting hard to fit all the jobs into your party (which makes a huge difference because you start hampering your combat effectiveness to make sure your JP isn't going to waste). I also found that there's a bonus for killing every enemy with the same attack, which keeps the regular fights more interesting.

I think there's a very big difference between presenting players with a choice and allowing players to have an effect. It's legitimate - in some cases, exciting - to provide players with a choice that misleads players into thinking their actions have an influence for artistic intent. JRPGs have been doing this since they began: you can't tell the princess 'No', which means, eventually, you have to choose to say 'Yes'. That choice, as manipulative as it is, is still a choice freely made. Shadow of the Colossus and Prince of Persia 2006 both make hay out of players choosing to do something very unwise because that's the only option available to them - while The Stanley Parable makes fun of the idea that quitting the game counts as a choice, it also points out that on some level every 'choice' made in a game is a manipulation to some extent. And players do feel, particularly in Shadow of the Colossus, that they freely made an awful choice. So I reject the idea that it's important for players to have an influence on the plot to be using the medium to full effect. I would suggest there's a much more important property: the player controls the pacing. In the West, using cutscenes to advance the plot is frowned upon because it puts the pacing out of the player's hands. Open-world games and RPGs in particular allow players to explore the world, uncovering little details that would slow down the story in other mediums, but can be presented in games because the player dictates the pace. In Gone Home, Katie's movements, where she is in the house, determines the pacing of the story. This can be very subtle, indeed - even something as simple as asking the player to acknowledge text gives players some control over the pace, although usually IF needs a little more going on to justify being IF as opposed to a short story.

Most of Australia's benefit schemes (as well as our tax system) are constructed to avoid this as much as possible. If you get a part-time job, you tell the government how much you earned and they will give you a portion of your unemployment payment, and if you get short-term work there's a certain amount you can earn before your payment's affected. Our income tax is similar to the US, with bands where you pay higher tax as your income rises, but the bands are defined as the maximum revenue from the lower bands plus a percentage of any income earned over the lower threshold of the band. So if you earned $85,000, your income tax is $17547 (which is how much the government would get if your income was exactly $80000) plus 37% of $5000. This gets complex to calculate, which is why payroll automatically takes a slice of your income, and the tax office provides a program that does your tax return for you. I'm sure it's similar in other parts of the world.

Congratulations! I understand being a writer in Hollywood is not as rosy as you maybe think but that might just be because you want it badly enough, which is an excellent sign. Have you shown your script to other screenwriters?