Merus

It wouldn't be a Molyneux game if there was the germ of a great experience buried under the impossibility of actually making it work.

Microsleeps: the road safety campaign. The spokesperson is a well-known science entertainer here, like a Bill Nye or what have you. Apparently you have microsleeps overseas as well, just not a road safety campaign based on it. (Advertising agencies in Australia see PSA campaigns as an opportunity to show off.)

Has someone linked Duolingo in here yet? No? It's not a game, but it's a gamified language teacher website that's apparently not too bad if you can get past gamification.

I kind of feel one of the root problems with game criticism, or rather game reviews, is that everyone involved seems to have the idea that the purpose of a review is to basically be a product guide, and these days it's very rare indeed to find a game that's downright broken. Uninspired, derivative, sure, but some people really want more of a particular kind of game, and the game is fun enough (again, because everyone's pretty good at this these days), so you can't really say that it's failing, exactly. I think this came about because players really really really want a product guide because they are paying just an obscene amount of money for a product, so the attitude that this is Art and it should be judged on subjective standards in the context of the medium is useless to people whose chief concern is that $50-60 is really a lot of money to be risking on something that is not guaranteed Fun on a Bun. You can see the traditional product guide review approach having serious problems with downloadable games, where everything is at multiple price points and quantifying a game's properties is almost certainly a recipe for disaster; I also note most mobile review sites use a four-point scale that's a lot more honest.

I think it's useful to compare to, say, The Walking Dead; now, we know Robert Kirkman's definitely sexist (he's revealed as much in interviews) and has portrayed his female characters in a way that he thinks is consistent with reality. GoT also represents its characters in a way that the creators think is consistent with the reality of how people act, with the added complication that they're in a society that excuses deeply problematic behaviour and has rempant inequality. The attitudes towards women don't seem universal - the Northerners seem to be more equal, for instance - and even when there's clear misogyny going on, there are still plenty of female characters who are presented as capable, with their own unique personalities. I suspect that most of this comes from Martin, though; I think the structuring of the TV show and the uncomfortable sexposition in the early parts of the series is a more telling assumption. It's possible there's some more insidious assumptions going on I'm blind to.

I'd say that Mington's finally crazy, but then I noticed he's 6 posts away from 1000 and it's clear he's trying to make that milestone happen today.

Is Super Metroid the kind of thing you're talking about, where you find upgrades in the world that open new combat options and allow you to traverse new areas?

There's also a parade in Bioshock Infinite! The biggest issue with parades in games is that traditionally people don't interact with parades, so it's hard to know what that kind of interaction should look like. If it doesn't move, it's not really a parade, so you can't really stop the parade.

Mavis Beacon's a character, yeah. I think I worked it out around about the time I saw Mavis Beacon for Kids.

The Wii U's biggest problem is core audience credibility; the mainstream press outlets did not help when they reported the Wii U as being an accessory instead of a new console. Skipping the E3 press conference, where the core audience gets disappointed that they try and talk to everyone and the mainstream press outlets can't keep up, and instead running separate presentations focused on one specific audience, is not actually a bad move. (The blue ocean strategy that Nintendo have been employing is to disrupt a market with a new product that brings in a previously existing 'core' audience alongside a new 'expanded' audience. This is why a few years ago Nintendo straight-up told everyone Animal Crossing was for 'core' gamers, because it was on the Gamecube. When Nintendo say 'core', they're not trying to avoid saying 'hardcore' because it's a fucking stupid word, they have a specific meaning in mind. The idea is that the core audience gives the new product credibility, and the expanded audience gives the new product sales. The DS had both, the Wii had one, the Wii U has neither.) Actually the Wii U's biggest problem is that it's a pain-in-the-ass to do cross-platform stuff and Nintendo doesn't know how to build a developer ecosystem, so it's not like they're going to deliver what their audience are wanting anyway. (The ecosystem on the DS happened despite Nintendo, it appears; Game Boy developers treated with benign neglect apparently gradually built a little network that transfers over to the new system when it's released.) It seems very, very unlikely to me that Nintendo will address this, but not impossible.

I did finish it, it's reasonably short once you've got the basic gist of it. I enjoyed the later sections where the places to look aren't marked and you have to get a sense of where to stand by examining the mass of polygons and working out where they'd likely line up. I think maybe it's too obtuse for its own good? There's no real puzzle involved in room navigation, for instance, and it just obscures the core mechanics. I wasn't fond of the distortion room either, given that it doesn't actually have much meaning and is kind of unpleasant to navigate. I think the bootup at the start is also pretty obtuse; you'd get the same thematic content just by writing status lines on the screen and you wouldn't turn away people who haven't used a command line recently. I can imagine this being pretty interesting on a larger scale.

I've done some cryptics with my housemate occasionally; there's a setter in Australia that usually takes the Friday slot who likes to play weird games. One memorable crossword had all the across clues be movie titles that were one letter too long, except for one: FOOTLOOSE. (The puzzle did point out that there was a theme and which one was the intact member, but still.)

My favourite part about the 2-storey bike video is how it's mostly made up of footage demonstrating why riding a 2-storey bike is a really bad idea. Also, yet another Xbox app not available in Australia. Awesome.

I can think of a ton of games that were sequels to games that didn't sell well but the creators were too attached to let go. It's nonsense to assume that a game that doesn't sell well for whatever reason is kicked to the curb.

I think I got a really good episode of Comedy Bang Bang because the most recent episodes have involved the host and a guest interviewing some character and being dreadfully amused by their own cleverness. MBMBAM is still working for me, though.

I tried this in an art gallery once and didn't get very far, though I'm willing to accept that I wasn't concentrating properly due to the environment and the promise of JS Joust later. Edit: this version has a room at the start that introduces the basic mechanic, making it a lottttttttt more decipherable.

I think if we're getting into alternative voice tracks, we're getting into Abridged Series territory, specifically Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series, which re-edits and re-voices the series to make it a good deal shorter and much more deliberately silly. Series.

The only thing I can remember that's anything along these lines was a serious game about a family in a third world nation, and you had to plan their day to try and pull them out of poverty. Can't remember the name of the game, though.

Once I noticed there were a couple of elevations going on, and the upper ones had gunners, I had better luck. No-one really paid attention to you unless they had to and you got a steady supply of chain guns.

There was a project update recently, but other than the videos around the launch trailer, nothing.

What's incredible to me is that even a decade ago, making your own game was something you could totally do. Game Maker was a thing! You could make proper games in it! And if you could program, so much the better. Cave Story was made that way. I think AAA development is going to thin out - there's been this uncomfortable jump between indie games for which the most you can ask is about $20, and AAA titles at $60. A game like Darksiders 2 would have done quite well at a price point in between those two; it was substantial but not an event. It seems like digital distribution is mainstream enough that you could probably get that to actually work now; I think that now we're at a place where you can do pretty great looking stuff so long as you're willing to lock the camera off, the gap between how AAA looks and indie is going to diminish enough that there might be genuine value for a mid-size studio to offer. I do wish people would stop referring to it as a 'crash', the Big Video Game Crash only happened in America, and only on game consoles. PCs were fine, Europe was fine, games were fine.The games industry is built on novelty and perpetual renewal. It's really quite the trick, when you think about it, but it means that a 'crash', where everyone goes down at once, is almost completely unlikely to happen unless the customers disappear, and that seems unlikely.

This was the problem unions were supposed to fix. But yeah, that's why I never went into the games industry as a young man - I fancied having a life, and worked out I could get paid a lot more money programming anything else and making games in my spare time. And then did not do that for a decade. But still! It was a sound plan.

The thing that bugs me is that they're hearing a song from 1979 in 1912, on the other side of feminism. Hell, they haven't even had flappers yet. Wouldn't it be sort of weird for them? I mean, it can be easily rationalised away, but still. Kind of bugs me.

Nope, it was famously obscure for the time which makes it borderline impenetrable today. The jungle is novel, if contrived, but it turns into Generic Sci-Fi City pretty quick. And there's a Deadly Game Show, I'm told. The animation's still pretty good, though.

Bounced right off The Bugle again but both Comedy Bang Bang and My Brother, My Brother and Me are working for me, so thanks for that.