Merus

My fear with all these things is that the lesson taken will not be "we should totally do these themes properly next time" but instead will be "let's just do mechanics and not do themes". I would be sad if people gave up on trying to make games be about something specific rather than just "you're a dude in the wilderness and you can do these things, go" all the time. It does not excuse dropping the ball on themes, but it tempers my criticism somewhat.

Doesn't This American Life go every week, while RadioLab goes every month, though?

Pretty early on, the game has two big fights in rooms explicitly representing the Boxer Rebellion and Wounded Knee, which you have only gone into because the game has told you you have to kill some expendable enemies to advance. I don't think it's avoiding the commentary as much as you think it is. I also think it's going to take some time for people to get used to the idea of reading narrative into mechanical choices without the game being really obvious about them. (People still think Braid's about nuclear bombs.) I know I'm assuming they're there and I haven't worked them out yet, but I might well be wrong!

Puzzle Pirates has a surprisingly interesting economic system despite being based on money spiders. Goods are produced by trading posts on islands (and what is produced is determined by whether or not it appears on the island, which means island owners end up having to bulldoze some of their goods as they make room for player buildings) and are sold to the highest bidder using buy orders. They then have to be physically (virtually) shipped to another island to be sold in a populated island's market, and the boat can be attacked and looted along the way. On populated islands, you have shoppes with buy orders to buy goods and transform them into other goods or equipment, using labour hours that players provide. So you can support this complicated, co-dependent crafting chain, much more sophisticated than EVE normally gets, without many of the problems that co-dependent crafting systems usually have thanks to the robust economy tools.

I was playing on normal, but I found the firemen would often blow themselves up in a panic when flung into the air with Bronco. It felt enough like there was A Trick to each enemy, and the constraints on your arsenal meant you had to abandon somewhat effective tricks (like Possession on Patriots) because you couldn't afford the less effective ones. It also felt like the heavy hitters were placed to encourage you to borrow their weapons for cleanup - you get a Fireman and a Patriot, and the Fireman's volley gun helps you clean up the Patriot, while the Patriot's crank gun clears up a roomful of enemies. BioShock's combat appears to be built around the concept of improvisation, but I'm blanking on a game that manages to do improvisational combat well, or at least better. I don't think Halo fits, even though I played it that way.

I thought it was because it was obvious it was going to land on heads given then they hadn't had a single toss that landed on tails. The point of the scene is not to ask you to choose heads or tails, and I imagine they thought people were reading too much into the choice.

Or you're in a robber-baron company town, jesus I could forgive a lot of sins in that map just because company towns are terrible and I was glad we went there.

I had a lot of trouble with the handymen; the siren was kind of tedious to fight but not especially difficult, but that's probably because I kept taking her summons down so she didn't attack. Didn't have a lot of problem with rocket guys and patriots by the end. Pretty disappointed to see completion achievements for each difficulty level. What is the point of providing difficulty levels to match the players' skill, experience and temperament if there's only one that actually 'counts'?

I bounced right off The Bugle last time I listened to it, but I'll try the other two. The Bugle appears to have a new logo, perhaps other things have changed in the few years since I last tried it.

I am wavering on RadioLab, as it really feels like a science program for people who don't like science very much. Might try Dr. Karl again and see if it clicks this time. I'd love a recommendation for a good comedy podcast; my tastes for audio tend more towards British humour than American, particularly absurdist humour and wordplay.

Smart money says it's an incredibly elaborate joke. Getting Australia to actually rate it is an amazing touch.

Perhaps you could explore a humorous but dangerous underground facility staffed entirely by robots. You'd go through doors and solve puzzles. We could call it Door!

Remember that Irrational have been very open about how they're willing to present it as a combatty shooter to mislead uninformed consumers into giving it a try. In an ideal world, Bioshock could be open about what it is and sell itself on its merits, but we do not live in that world: we live in a world where a significant portion of the consumer base treats Call of Duty multiplayer as the gold standard to which all else must aspire. Irrational have taken a gamble - another gamble, as they did the same for Bioshock 1 - that the consumer who wants something with some thought and character interaction is an informed consumer, and so would probably know that's on offer even if they see advertising that doesn't specifically mention it.

If there's one thing 2K know how to do, it's AAA marketing. I have no doubt that the Bioshock Infinite marketing is turning up in front of people's eyeballs, just like every other big title they've released in the last three years or so.

Let's be fair, EA will never win gamers' hearts. They could do everything right and some fucker up the back will go 'I still remember what you did to Westwood'.

It looks like it's referencing Ned Kelly, a notorious Australian highwayman best known for trying to survive a police shootout by making some makeshift body armour and helmet out of a drum. It was not successful enough.

I note that the Truth from Fiction trailers have an eighth of the views of the more 'traditional' trailers. There was an article I read a couple of days ago about how difficult it is to playtest FPSs these days because there are a bunch of people out there whose expectations about FPSs begin and end with Call of Duty, and any deviations from that standard, in their eyes, is inferior. So I guess that's who they're marketing to at this point.

Whoa, not letting this shit go: there are physical differences between males and females, but they're close enough that weak men aren't as strong as strong women. But in terms of brain operation there's very negligible differences (men have heavier brains but that doesn't appear to do much for us), and studies of matriarchal and gender-equivalent cultures demonstrate that the vast majority of behaviours we ascribe to gender are cultural, not genetic. The culture-derived behaviour I particularly enjoy telling people about is the idea that men have a 'genetic' impulse to have as much sex as possible - not only is it not shared by non-patriarchal cultures, it wasn't even shared by the Greeks, who believed that women were insatiable sexpots and men dictated when sex happened. Genetically, men and women share the vast majority of our chromosomes. Men differ in only one chromosome (fun fact: all humans start off as biologically female until the Y chromosome kicks in, which is why we all have nipples). Any genuine differences between biological genders has to then express itself on the Y chromosome, which means that if any one non Y-chromosome carrier, anywhere, at any time, expresses it as well, then it can't be on the Y chromosome and therefore can't be something genetically exclusive to men, unless there's something unusual and special-case going on with the genetics. Anything that happens commonly with men but uncommonly with women is almost certainly cultural, not genetic.

I'm having this one problem: whenever I press the down arrow when I'm looking directly at the runes spelling out the way each of the Thumbs will die, I get these weird cuts on my left forearm. It's consistent, so I imagine it's reproducible, and it's only started happening since those runes appeared on the main page.

I will have to listen to that Econtalk podcast sometime. I'm not convinced that people really separate Valve, administrator of Steam and Valve, creator of video games, as much as people think, purely judging from Reddit, but I'm willing to concede it goes on enough that residual goodwill from Steam sales is not the only thing propping up their reputation. I think it's a good point that the designers leaving Valve are working on games very similar to the ones they made, and that from what we know of Valve it seems likely they floated the idea and no-one bit. I think we haven't seen Half-Life [2: Episode] 3 for the same reason. Yep. It's called post-purchase rationalisation, a specific version of choice-supportive bias. If we have the choice, we'd prefer to think our past decisions were wise ones.

Let's be fair, Merus might have posted 'great artists ship' but he swiped (edit: and mangled, apparently) that from Steve Jobs, another guy who did pretty great work but had a mystique that far outsized his influence. Also, you know they fired the guys who did the Meet the Team videos, right?

I'm a big believer that great artists ship. If you're constantly prototyping and you never actually finish a thing, get it out the door, see how people respond to it, and use that to inform your next thing, you are basically as much of a creative force as I am, with all these abandoned half-projects that never became A Thing That Exists. Their high profitability per employee comes from two things: Steam, which is absurdly profitable, and them convincing the community to do their work, which they get their 30% off. I want to touch on that more: Gabe Newell's publicly said that Valve's thing, if it has a thing, is finding resources that are under-utilised and seizing on them. TF2 is basically afloat due to Polycount's work, and yes some of those artists make quite a bit of money from that, but it feels like, if they're doing professional quality work, they could take that time they're spending making hats and make a real thing that they own 100% of and sell that. But I'm not seeing what value Valve adds as a developer being much different to, say, Rocksteady, or Crystal Dynamics, who make perfectly competent games that don't push any A4-sized envelopes but are executed very well indeed. Their writing is good, but so is Double Fine's, Irrational's and Rockstar's. Their animation is great, but so is Naughty Dog's. They treat their staff well, but so does any developer that came from an industry where they had actual project managers. Their gameplay loop is polished so smoothly that these days it runs the risk of being samey. Their engine can't stream assets (which is why they're rewriting it). My point is that, yeah, they're good, but they're not so much better than every other studio out there that they deserve to be deified the way they are. As for the culture that allows great ideas to bloom, how interesting it is that the designers of Counterstrike and Portal had to leave the company to work on their new thing. And Kim Swift left suspiciously soon after participating in a Experimental Gameplay panel on representing sex in games. They have all that Steam money, so they don't have to actually do anything other than sit in the middle and take their cut; is it any wonder that the only concrete plan that we've heard from them about their future work is to give everyone a game store so they can sit between everyone and take their 30% cut? Do they actually intend to make any games any more? You scoff, but think carefully: they don't have to make games to make money any more. Their business plan was to make money from games, not to make games, but because Doom was the biggest application on Windows. That business plan is now irrelevant. How many great ideas has Valve abandoned that could have changed the industry for the better had they been made by a company that was a little more hungry, that had to unify behind something they maybe don't believe in yet because it's either that or get new jobs? Do you think a hungry Valve would have let the Oculus Rift beat them to market? Do you think a hungry Valve would have been quite so proud of the physics-driven opening of Portal 2 if they had seen what Naughty Dog was doing with the collapsing buildings in Uncharted 2, a year and a half earlier? As for their management structure, how do they defend against office politics and unspoken power dynamics, or do they assume that they just don't exist, that people don't jostle for position, access and influence? Is there a grievance process? Is there a defence mechanism against bad actors? Against sexism and racism in the workplace? Or do they assume, like so many do, that culture without rules grows organically and cannot be attacked or subverted from within? Here's why people deify them, to my mind: a> those early Steam sales, with ridiculous bargains on indie games just as the weakness of XBLA as a platform was becoming obvious, and b> they haven't yet fucked up big. It's not to do with the quality of their games at all, which, yeah, are great, but plenty of other studios do great work too. It's to do with the fuzzy positive memories of that time when you spent way too much money on way too many games, and it was easier to transfer that onto the company that owns the service because they never gave you a reason to hate them. It's exactly the same impulse that drives the console wars - doubling down on buyer's remorse by telling yourself that no, you actually made an amazing choice. But Steam isn't that much more respectful of you than XBLA or PSN. The contract still lets them weasel out of a class action, and they can change the rules at any time, and it's either agree to it or lose access to anything DRM'd. They can say what they want, but it's how they behave that's the true measure of how they really are. And they behave just like everyone else.

One thing I've noticed - the writing is good, but the game isn't afraid to be subtle in the cutscenes. The early story scenes say only as much as necessary, and if nothing's necessary it won't say anything. I enjoyed how Mathias was handled in the cutscene where you meet him, as well; what you realise is spelled out much more baldly later, but I appreciate that the game let me work it out beforehand. (Admittedly I'm constantly looking for The Character That Betrays You when playing a Video game because there is always one). I'm not exactly invested in the storyline, which is a problem a quarter through it, but I don't resent it either. (Can't remember the last time I got invested in a AAA storyline; happens a lot on portable titles, and usually happens on retro titles mostly because that's why I'm playing them.) Not liking the QTEs, though. The approach where QTE success adds new animations is far more successful than the 'press X to not die' approach is. It's almost disappeared a quarter of the way through the game, though. I'll take Arkham Asylum with better character design. That will Work For Me. I'm also happy to see gear gating and interconnected environments come out of the metroidvania sub-genre and become part of the generic action adventure game formula.

I may have whinged about this before, but really think about Valve for a second: if you happened to get a hundred or so of the smartest people you could find in a room and let them work, do you think you'd do quite so little as Valve appears to do? But I think the thing that bothers me the most is that Valve don't really come up with their own games any more. They bought Team Fortress, Portal, Tag: The Power of Paint, Left 4 Dead and DOTA and basically polished them. They are far less impressive as a company when you realise that the vast majority of the company are basically superfluous.

After Sony saw The Witness, they just had to take it on.