Merus

Oh man, guys, I'd love to know about some iOS games... ...okay, I'll come back later.

So apparently someone was very upset about Fez 2 being cancelled on 4chan and took a screenshot of the cancellation twitter post, with a 'delete' option visible.

There was a brief moment when he started where he was actually constructing arguments instead of blowing minor flaws out of proportion. I asked a friend who'd gotten some internet fame for mocking reviews about this once, actually, and he put it in context for me: when you start out deservedly mocking the things you hate, and you get a little audience from it, you start to feel a pressure to try and top the spectacle, to deliver more of what the audience wants (or at least what you perceive as what they want). If you give into that pressure, what your reaction to a work is starts drawing from previous reactions, and not the work itself. The work itself becomes mostly irrelevant except as a launching point for a comedy skit about someone who gets angry at inconsequential shit.

Yeah, I don't think people realise how important the voice director is to making the voice acting sound anywhere near-decent. An indie game I worked on happened to have one, and our voices turned out pretty good for a low-budget indie game with community theatre actors. I was secretly pleased we had much better performances than Baten Kaitos, which was the last game I'd played with voice acting at the time.

I'm still not entirely sure what Phil's reputation for being an asshole is based on. He's short with idiots? He said something unkind about Japanese developers? Inafune said much the same thing and no-one hounds him on Twitter for it. I can't think of anything he's said that is uniquely assholeish. Is this something in Indie Game: The Movie or something?

...I don't understand where you're going with that analogy. Is this about warranties? Are you saying a used car is going to be in perfect working order? I was trying to express that even if I'm not taken in by manipulative tactics I'd prefer to deal with someone who doesn't try them. Incidentally, if a game doesn't work for you on Steam you're SOL. Or if it crashes 40 minutes in like one game I have does. I have had difficulty reconciling Valve as good guys with the frequent stories of people having their Steam account suspended for no reason and not being able to get it back until it makes Kotaku, the creepy manipulative summer sale achievements (and now trading cards, with their random reward schedules to make them as Skinner-boxy as possible), the insertion of a no-class-action clause in the subscriber agreement, the fact that they have a subscriber agreement specifically so they're technically not a store and thus don't have to provide standard consumer protections like refunds of broken goods, Greenlight, the firing of Jeri Ellsworth, the Valve employee handbook filtered through this lens and the idea that if I put 150 of the finest minds in entertainment in a building and gave them nigh-unlimited resources for ten years I'd probably hope for more than a couple of pretty great games, albeit ones where most of the core ideas came from elsewhere. So I don't! I assume they're just like every other company and suddenly they make me pretty uncomfortable. Gabe, though, Gabe is great. I like Gabe a lot, he is clearly a ferociously smart man! But Valve is not Gabe, and if Gabe left Valve and started a new company I'd like that new company a whole lot I'd bet. (I strongly disagree with the idea that they're transparent about their objectives - why say they were going big into hardware and then fire their hardware team? also whur is hl3 u guys) Honestly I think the problem is that Valve like to get quantified data of everything and they have determined that this is effective without anyone going 'yes but is it ethical'. But listen I understand that no-one else finds my bile about Valve particularly entertaining so I'm happy to let it rest.

So what, it's being offensive for offensiveness' sake? I think that being offended is a perfectly reasonable reaction in that case. Moreover, I think it's reasonable for people to have different tolerances for differing potentially offensive things, and to be harder on some things that are particular issues for gaming than others, particularly if it's how games present women given that kids getting into gaming is nearly entirely 50/50 between genders these days, thanks to the ubiquity of computers and the expectation at school that every student is comfortable with a computer. Turns out that if you put a computer in front of a kid, pretty much everyone will try and make it play a game, and the gaming industry is really bad at retaining these customers. It is no coincidence that feminism became an important topic in the mainstream gaming media a few years after affordable education laptops for children (and for internet browsing) started to become a thing. Also I think it's pretty obvious Suda51 has sold out at this point.

Followup on A/B and its timing on spinning itself off: one of its consistent revenue streams is WoW subs, but investors have been getting skittish about the decline there. The figure I've seen bandied about is below 7 million and A/B won't be profitable enough to handle the music stopping on CoD. WoW's now at 7.7 million. I'm curious to see if investors start issuing 'sell' orders as a result.

Let me explain by way of analogy: I may well be able to get quite a cheap, good quality used car from a dodgy-looking used car salesman, but there'll always be that voice in the back of my mind saying that I simply haven't worked out how I'm getting screwed yet.

Oh, that reminds me: I don't think Microsoft is getting enough credit for allowing devs to use their own console as a dev kit. That's the first genuinely smart thing I've heard about the X1 - sure, it won't have the extra ram dev kits usually have for debug tools, but it gets rid of a big bottleneck. Of course, the big bottleneck with Microsoft is cert and access to the store, and I doubt they're going to make that smoother.

I find myself buying fewer and fewer games during the Steam sales specifically because on top of my mostly negative view of Valve these days, I find the sales themselves a little sleazy. Here's 25% off! Except at some point we're going to drop the price even further for a small amount of time, so get ready to feel like a sucker! And we're going to give you random collectibles for spending money that do nothing but get you points that also don't matter, but you have to get them all and you have to spend more money to do it! I feel like they're no longer even trying to hide being manipulative any more. I basically restrict myself to my pre-existing wishlist, and even then I only end up buying a couple of things. Honestly if I found something that handled updates and kept the game list as attractive and manageable, I'd liberate as much as I could and ditch Steam in a heartbeat. Thanks to Greenlight, most things are in multiple storefronts these days.

I am in no way concerned about Microsoft's furious backpedalling because it demonstrates that they realised their hubris before a product release for the first time in several years. Microsoft has A Problem with being honest about itself, which people whose opinions I trust suggest is a result of their performance review system, specifically that it grades on a curve. I was surprised Activision Blizzard was not already its own company, although I'm hoping it doesn't backfire on them. Investors are nervous that Activision's strategy is basically musical chairs - create a mega-property, run it into the ground, by which point they'll have a new mega-property. Every time the music stops on one chair, they're assuming they'll have another chair to move to. For some properties, like Guitar Hero - the failure of Retro/Grade suggests that Activision's belief that rhythm games were a fad was probably the right call - this makes sense, but investors are going to be wondering where Activision would be if they'd pursued a more conventional strategy of trying to keep your IP valuable instead of deliberately strip-mining it - although I think that's what Blizzard is doing except they're being tainted by association. And the worst time to be spinning your company out into its own thing is when investors are wondering whether or not you're even going to be around in five years. They've noticed the shine's come off WoW, as competitors have finally realised that you can't compete with WoW by making WoW but with less content and most of the same problems. They've noticed the Call of Duty revenue slowing down, and they've realised that Activision doesn't have revenue streams so much as revenue wells.

Pushmo (or as it's called here, Pullblox) irritates me. It's way too easy, and you have to unlock each level one. by. one. I perform a couple of pulls on autopilot, solve the 'puzzle', and everyone cheers as if it wasn't something that a child could and did do just before some brat came along and pressed the reset button while they were at the top. Just let me unlock all the puzzles, Pullblox! Let me do some hard ones, and I'll come back and do the tedious ones later. Or unlock them in waves and get me to solve half of them or something! The only ones you let me skip are the ones that I don't get immediately, and they're the ones I want to do!

Oh man, I totally don't remember that because I would always just switch to the TV channel to see what was on and then switch back a couple of minutes later. I have nostalgia for a lot of things I realise were bullshit, but I fear the day when Wind Waker sailing is one of them. They did try to give you things to do while sailing, but those little minigames aren't interesting enough to sustain the wait until you start playing the game you're there for again.

It would be weird if I was Claire, even though I actually was at PAX. So I'm pretty sure I'm not Claire. Ten bucks Claire's a lurker.

Yeah, the puzzle stuff is really underdone, there's only one or two puzzles that felt anywhere close to interesting (there are puzzles on the critical path, but the vast majority are in the optional tombs). But I think the one thing they do better than I think everyone else is make environments that feel like there isn't one intended path. Certainly it's not open world, there's always one and only one destination at any one time, but there were quite a few moments I felt was getting ahead of where the game was intending for me to go. Some parts are clearly one-way corridors, and others like the beach feel a little like they just plopped some assets down on a height map and called it done, but places like the shantytown managed to feel both intentional and undesigned, and that's a hell of a trick.

I also got a 3DS thanks to people going on about Animal Crossing. Thankfully, Sydney's not bad for StreetPass. PAX will be even better, but Sydney's pretty good.

I find it difficult to play Layton games because I assume they're trying to marry a Sherlock Holmes sort of character to a puzzle-filled story, and I want that. But unfortunately what almost always ends up happening instead is that the plot says "no, no, it's impossible to converse with the dead, in reality it's someone using extremely focused sound waves that are in practice also impossible" and treats that as a very clever reveal instead of a cheap trick. (This probably doesn't need clarifying, but that wasn't a spoiler.) I am looking forward to PLvsAA because the writer of Ace Attorney is apparently handling the plot, and he is significantly better at writing mystery plots than whoever writes the Layton games. Many of them are equally improbable, but they're fair to the audience. In part this is because they had to clue them well enough that the players could work out the mystery, and at the appropriate time, but Ghost Trick, by the same writer, still kept it together without that handicap. So PLvsAA sounds like the kind of thing I've been wanting from the Layton series since it began.

I feel like there is not enough appreciation for the amazing work that Justin Bailey, Double Fine's VP of Product Development, does, and also his name you guys

I do like the Today's Gaming Drama tumblr. Although honestly I think it's a bit bullshit that a company of apparent professionals can't allocate their resources effectively when they've known they had scoping problems for six months now. I don't know how you get into a position where you have to cut 75% of the content without some real incompetence going on somewhere in the project management, and based on the documentary videos I think that has to be laid at Tim's feet. I think it's really unfair on the other teams in Double Fine that income from the company that they could have used is going to fund something that should have been fully funded had Tim been more realistic about what his team was able to achieve with the time and resources they had. But I mean they were upfront from the beginning that this was a distinct probability, so I'm not feeling ripped off or anything, and I knew going in that Double Fine had a reputation for not quite being able to finish their games. I wanted the documentaries, I got documentaries, this is the deal that was promised.

We would have heard about how the Xbox One was for developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, <gasp> developers, developers, developers, developers!

I knew those fucking Alaskans hated the environment.

Oh shit you're teaching gifted kids? Good luck, hope you're trained, they are weird and at least one of them will likely be a prig.

My brother is out of the brain rehab unit! Apparently he passed all the tests, which is unheard of. There are no specialists for him to see or anything. We have no idea whether or not anything will be wrong, but on the other hand none of the obvious stuff is wrong so yay

It has Chris Pratt in it and he is a very funny man so I am hoping that some of that will come through. But yeah, I'm expecting it to be a sausage fest.