Merus

I will be sure to, but it's quite a lot bigger at this point. The assault touched a very raw nerve, particularly because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and drunken violence has been an ongoing story. It's still in the news. Mum and Dad are holding a third press conference today. We've seen a tweet from the Prime Minister expressing her relief that my brother's woken up. It's very bizarre, but also comforting that what feels like all of Sydney is behind us.

It sounds like my brother's going to be moved to the normal wards today, he's recovered very quickly. It's become a big story here, we had a press conference yesterday. It sounds like the people responsible are turning themselves in after seeing them plastered all over the news last night.

He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, from what his friends said. No provocation. There's plenty of CCTV footage so hopefully I'll get to see it.

The Google Nexus is a fine phone from what I understand. The Galaxy 4 has a very nice screen but might have problems with shelf-life. You will find that constant internet access is a game-changer. Be aware that your usage will change once you realise you can look up anything you're wondering about while you're out, like whether these "free-range" eggs in the supermarket are actually ethical or just slightly less barbaric than caged eggs. I have an iPhone mostly because I'm happy with defaults a lot of the time and the App Store is somewhat better for games than Android. The more open platform also means there's a lot more incompatibility, and the Apple luxury tax means developers find it easier to get money out of people on iOS. It sounds like you have different priorities, so I think Android's a good choice for you. There are Real Games on mobile devices; Cave and Square Enix have released their back catalogue, for instance, so you can have FF Tactics or a proper bullet-hell shooter on your phone if you'd like. The proportion of substantial games on mobile devices is slim, mostly they're endless runners, action puzzle games and microtransaction nonsense.

My brother's in the hospital in critical condition. He was assaulted last night and hit his head really badly when he fell unconscious. There is damage to the brain. He's going to live, but at this point we don't know whether the damage will be permanent. We'll know by the end of the week. He's responding to stimuli, so that's good. The police are taking the matter very seriously and are going through CCTV footage. We've been interviewed by the media (everyone should have the opportunity to witness the artifice of TV first-hand).

Unity uses C# as a scripting language, most people making games in C++ use it for writing the engine. It's more common to use a mix of languages - a very common one is C++ for the engine and Lua for the scripting and gameplay. The reason for this is that C++ is very efficient but it is also a pain in the ass. You've likely also heard people using C# to make xbox games - XNA was a library intended for use with C#. What you should do is use a language you're comfortable with. There are very few 'wrong' answers, at least for hobbyist developers - Naughty Dog used to write games in Perl, which is madness. As you become more proficient with programming, your productivity goes up by orders of magnitude, so don't be afraid to learn new languages and don't feel like you have to learn the "right" language the first time. You'll catch back up. Hobby projects where you're just messing around are great because you'll feel no pressure to cut your losses when, like all programmers do at some point, you inevitably write yourself into a corner and the game stops working and you have no idea how to fix it. By the way, take a look at source control utilities. Mercurial and Git (via GitHub) are popular and free, and if you're diligent about saving changes to them, they allow you to undo large chunks of development and put it back to a state where it was working. You can also split off new branches to dick around with something, and merge it back into the old version if it turns out it was a good idea.

As I think I alluded to, answering 'what is Gaming's Citizen Kane' has been played out for so long that we've got only a couple of recent examples of people asking it earnestly (here's someone having a go earlier this month, the infamous Metroid Prime answer, Rock Paper Shotgun inexplicably taking it seriously, and a (third-party summary of a) review of The Last Of Us that makes the claim). Mostly you have people saying the question's a dumb one (and then they answer it anyway). As far as I know, people generally don't dig much further. I think Europeans are much more likely to take the question on their merits because it sounds like a counter-intuitive poser that might bring something interesting to light, given they're unlikely to notice the connection to Siskel & Ebert.

first paragraph!

So I wrote this thing on Gaming's Citizen Kane that I'm sort of proud of: http://floodcontrol.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/rosebuds-and-gamings-citizen-kane/

Yeah, I don't think it's supposed to be a this-causes-that, but more of a 'hey it's a lot less attractive when you remember that things everyone agrees are terrible look a lot like this supposedly harmless thing'.

Yeah, and honestly this kind of thing probably would end up being "life-changing" in the sense that getting your first job is "life-changing". It is an unusual position that will almost certainly inform the dude's outlook on life. I think anyone familiar with Molyneux was expecting it to be a lot more shit than it was, and I don't know how anyone came to the belief that any game developer anywhere was going to be able to offer a transcendent, mind-blowing anything as a prize for winning their game, instead of immediately releasing said transcendent experience for everyone to purchase. Edit: I apparently have a problem with forgetting what my sentence is about half-way through.

with things that we've never seen before in a video game although we've seen things very much like them in quite a lot of video games

I was expecting it to be either money or some lame attempt at summarising the mysteries of the universe in a five minute video so I'm honestly surprised.

The best bit about the SSX dynamic music stuff is that it's mostly licensed stuff; they split the track, set up loops so that it'd go the length of the race and end just as the race is, and they drop the bass and the volume when you hit a big ramp so you really feel like you're high above the race. It's masterful stuff. Rez has not been mentioned yet, its dynamic music is its one gimmick and sister it makes it work. I can't remember what game it was, but one game had its animations set up so that they'd hit on the beats of the backing track.

I think you and I played very different Halos 1 and 3. The Halo 1 I remember involved walking through the same room for an hour, punctuated by all-too-brief set pieces outside. And then! Two levels later you do it all again, except backwards.

Apparently the reason why LucasArts never did anything as elaborate as the Woodtick theme again was because no-one at the time noticed or cared about the dynamic music. Which is a little disappointing, but then I don't remember ever noticing the tune changing either.

I bought Bioshock Infinite via retail so I'm not entirely sure the retail market for PC games is 'destroyed'. It was never particularly healthy to begin with, and plenty of people would prefer not to tie up their internet for a day downloading a new release.

I think a lot of media types have been starting at the Humble Bundle with surprise and alarm because the Humble Bundle basically did this and removed the 'well it's Radiohead' excuse from the equation. It looks like charity involvement helps.

I think the idea is that the selling point is "this is the new Xbox" and "here is the thing you are currently doing with the Xbox, now better". It also is a somewhat flippant argument, there is no shortage of boxes you can put in front of your TV to manage your entertainment options. We have a Raspberry Pi with XBMC installed, which at $15 or so is a good deal cheaper than most of the other options.

This is a little tangential to the current state of the thread, but I think the discussion around games as a product and games as a service clarified something that's been rattling around in my head for a while: specifically, that if you have a product someone will be happy to forcibly convert it to a service with or without your consent. For games, this is essentially what piracy is: an all-you-can-eat buffet for the low price of $0, excluding internet access charges. There are ways to do this well. I was involved with a game that decided to try and sell a sequel on an open-source code base which they couldn't reclose, so they came up with the novel idea of charging for the campaign content and leaving the editor fully unlocked. What we found is that lots of kids would download the demo, download user-created levels (we had invested in that infrastructure early), and would stick around in the community, building their own levels and wanting to save up for months if necessary to buy the campaign and see how everything was "officially" introduced. It couldn't be sold as a product, so we cobbled a service out of it that worked for everyone.

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There's been some interesting thoughts coming out of this whole shemozzle: * RPS pointing out recently that we don't actually own a goddamn thing any more. I know I've felt this keenly with Steam, particularly since I've started using two computers and Steam freaks out every time I switch and denies me access to everything. It has shattered my illusions of Steam being an entirely helpful piece of software that can accomodate reasonable needs. * The argument that turned up on the Wider Internets that for the past couple of years most Americans were using Netflix on the 360 anyway, so they build all this media stuff in to show how they're making the way you use the Xbox now even better, and now suddenly no-one wants any of that. Also also Nintendo can do what they like, the Wii U will still be a great bit of kit that's a pain to develop for due to lack of good development software.

I'm expecting that very few of the announced features will work outside the US.

I did get the impression that Team Ninja did the best job they could; this was just after Itagaki left and they wanted to try and put their own stamp on things. I figured there was a chance Samus wouldn't be quite so sexualised because that's what everyone expected from Team Ninja. A friend of mine put forward the entirely convincing theory that I'm just going to quote here: And then it happened anyway! But then the Smash Bros. series is pretty gross about Samus as well. Anyway, Super Metroid! It's great. It was certainly formative for me; I played a lot of adventure games as a kid, but the games I found really interesting were the ones that used the rules of the game to conduct a conversation with the player, and Super Metroid was one of the first of those I played.

Their achievement system is kind of garbage, though. The whole idea of achievements are to act as social markers of competency, but they're basically individual attaboys that other players can't really see and frequently have nothing to do with competency. People use the system for all sorts of things, but Steam makes it kind of difficult to use achievements for anything other than aggregate tracking and a positive feedback system, and honestly neither of those really deserve their own universal player-focused interface. And I say this as someone who really likes achievements.