Merus

Interesting how there are seven clear winners. What happens to the three that aren't taken to prototype stage, given that they've demonstrated they have a certain amount of public appeal? It is nice that the winners are reasonably diverse, although many are... similar... to games that have come before.

Yeah, I would have difficulty trusting the narrative freedom of the game based on there being sub-optimal builds on the guess-you'll-just-have-to-restart kind of level. As an example of a game I liked, Persona 4 has an "optimal" playthrough that requires you to follow a walkthrough, or you could just do the new game + option and talk to the people you didn't have time for last game. (It makes it clear early on that you're not expected to see everything first time through by putting dialogue options with enormous stat requirements in the first few conversations of the game.) I enjoyed that, after a brief hump where I had to decide to trust the game, and it all worked out for the best. What makes that game work is that if you're considering a sub-plot, because they're all character-based whether or not you like the character is a good indication of whether you'll enjoy that plot, and if a subplot's not working for you, you can leave it hanging without denying yourself the opportunity to pursue something else. Also the main plot's a murder mystery so you're going to get some intrigue no matter what.

So I played World of Warcraft for a while, so I know about the actual best escort mission in gaming. By the time the second expansion had come along, they'd basically given up on the idea of a guy walking slowly along a path and made the "escortee" someone who could fight a bit who followed you. But the best escort mission was completely different. It was given by a guy named Harrison Jones, and he escorted you. Specifically, he escorted you through a trap-infested ruin, where he did most of the fighting while you tried to kill one pissy little monster. He ran so much faster than you and had to keep waiting on you to keep up, and he would run into side rooms for treasure while you got attacked by monsters, and so long as you survived for long enough he'd run back and polish them off for you. And then he gave you a cut of the proceeds!

I think that's what bothers me about most Western RPGs; there always seems to be some optimal way of doing things or some scene or character you just can't miss, except you totally can because you made the choices you thought were best at the time. I would be far happier if I could be confident the best bits were on the critical path and I don't make every combat more tedious because I picked the wrong class. I think the only Western RPG I've trusted enough to put any time in has been Morrowind (and I guess Skyrim but I haven't done everything in Morrowind yet so I'm reluctant to buy it when I have a perfectly good Elder Scrolls game right there). I don't think Idle Thumbs has been very helpful here with their discussion about various BioWare RPGs and how certain classes are overwhelmingly better than others. But! I came here to talk about The Fool and His Money, which Jake mentioned. It's quite good! Although there's way too much anagramming. The games Jake mentioned, The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three, are on Cliff Johnson's website for free alongside a free Macintosh emulator that can run them.

I like how they've basically built a survey bot like you see in science-fiction. I don't know if everyone else has noticed yet but we live in the future. Flying cars and jetpacks turned out to be bad ideas, but still: we live in the future.

I would have thought you'd need something bigger than a thumb to run a game like Half-Life 3 no but seriously I love you man

I believe being at the launch of Nintendo products is his speciality. He's been there for a few now.

I'm not going down to Melbourne just for a meetup but I'll definitely meet some fellow Thumbs fan at PAX next year.

The loading pauses are a consequence of the Source/GoldSrc/Quake render path and file format. Source isn't capable of streaming model data from the hard disk like most modern engines are, and to do so would require a major rewrite of the engine and porting Valve's shaders and physics models over to it. I suspect that's why we're seeing Source 2 treated as a separate engine: while it's almost certainly going to share a lot of code it's technically a new renderer and it allows Valve to say it's a "new" engine to stave off those perennial complaints about the "aging" Source engine.

I am very much on the "you're in my house" side of the issue; it's basically impossible to build a good community without that community having some way to defend itself from malicious actors. Honestly I think the threat of overzealous moderators basically boils down to their comment thread sucking, and I find it very hard to get upset about something that's basically self-regulating.

No-one's put forward Torchlight yet? The Diablo II team half-reformed and made a new series. There's a Torchlight II floating around, haven't played it yet. The standout Telltale games are Sam And Max (Save The World, Beyond Time and Space and The Devil's Playhouse), Tales of Monkey island and The Walking Dead. Back to the Future is okay but might be too plodding. Sam & Max Save The World has a couple of dud episodes (which is why it's the only of Telltale's seasons to be six episodes, these days it looks like they just cut the bad one in pre-production).

I disagree with the assertion that we even need sophisticated natural language AI to have a game mostly about dialog and social interplay. Most of our games about guns don't model the internal mechanisms of guns; so long as you're getting output that acts convincing enough, it's enough to build gameplay on. The best example here is Cleverbot, which is not a particularly sophisticated AI system but is significantly more convincing than most genuine AIs. All Cleverbot does is parrot back replies it's received at some point, with weightings based on what's just been said. This is why Cleverbot can keep up a duet for long enough that it can surprise you by subverting it. Different approaches with limitations that are acceptable in games will come along eventually. For instance, procedural map generation is lightyears better now than it used to be.

Let's all buy Lee a cake.

Well, the only evidence we've got in both cases are the articles themselves. The insinuation is that we can't be sure it's true, and it's possible that McMillen made the stories up, which is why they sound so similar. I guess I'm suspicious because I'm not used to actual journalism regarding games instead of what we usually call "games journalism". (This is how conspiracy theories start.) You can see me backing off that statement when I realised that while we didn't get any independent confirmation of the Team Bondi story, we didn't get any denial either, and it was well-known in the Australian industry that Team Bondi had a high staff turnover, which is almost never a good sign for a company. That in itself is usually grounds for a story, and if it is just made up from whole cloth, it makes a lot more sense than Team Bondi having difficulty finding appropriate talent in Australia and Silicon Knights being a misunderstood company with a run of bad luck. Don't get me wrong; I'm 99% sure they're both quality pieces of actual journalism. But I'm still going to be skeptical because it doesn't hurt any.

I am most intrigued by your offer of SSX. I am not worried about you murdering me in my sleep because I am surrounded by spiders at all times.

I'm going to buy Andrew McMillen a drink when I meet him. He does good work. (Presumably.) Although it does worry me a bit that this is very similar to the article on Team Bondi he wrote. One hopes it's just because it's the same root problem, and honestly something's not right at studios with such high turnover.

Eh, I don't think this is an entirely fair comparison. Certainly the original question is vague - "special" compared to what, and any reasonable standard of what would be considered an unusual amount of dipshittery would not separate the US from other countries that have had strong religious influence, like Egypt. Islam is a special case in particular because the wealthiest and most powerful Muslims in recent decades have been the oil-producing countries, who were on the outer reaches of the much more moderate Ottoman Empire. We also need to keep in mind that many of the region's attempts to move closer to secularism were thwarted by chiefly European, and later American, forces uncomfortable with sharing power. On the other hand, if the question's trying to ask whether the US has a greater share of crazy, vocal, ignorant religious chauvinists compared to the countries it sees as its peers, then yes, absolutely. I'm Australian. We have a couple of terrible religious people here, like Fred Nile, but they're not a major faction and they're not politically powerful. We do have a significant anti gay-marriage lobby, which is interesting considering the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras here in Sydney every year, but we're also set up differently politically - there's a federal marriage act, and no significant pressure for states to conduct their own affairs differently. Still, somewhat disappointing. I suspect the big issue is not so much that there's more of them but that they're more extreme. To my mind there's a couple of reasons to this of which I can speculate on with varying amounts of authority. It seems like America's very culturally diverse, much more so than its peers - Australia is surprisingly culturally homogenous, with state identity mostly used to mock Queenslanders or Tasmanians for being hicks, and while the UK is much more diverse, London is such a big influence on the national character that that diversity doesn't seem expressed nearly as strongly. In America it seems like it's much more diverse, which means that some of those cultural influences coming in from the coasts don't make it very far, while influences from the centre don't really reach the coasts. The other factor is the evangelical belief system is basically hardwired to drive its adherents slowly insane. I'm given to understand (I'm not Christian, but I've toyed with the idea of a story with an evangelical lead so I've done some research) the reasoning goes something like this: evangelicals are, for the same reasons most people get involved with belief systems, quite concerned about the afterlife, and specifically if their friends and family and people they admire are going to have a good one. The problem is the Bible is (probably intentionally) very vague about what exactly is required for someone to qualify to get into heaven; it feels basically arbitrary, and that is a poor thing to feel one needs to build their life around. So they decided as a community to solve it, by reading as closely as possible to try and get as clear a picture as they could of what the criteria is and where the cutoff points are so that blind Freddy can work out whether something is Good or Evil. The Bible is, to put it lightly, not intended to be read closely, and certainly is not a good guide for more modern dilemmas). This gives rise to the idea of coded messages in the Bible, of reading the Bible literally and treating it as inerrant, and trusting anyone who claims they "know" how to interpret the Bible into a checklist of what does and does not get you into heaven. In order to keep people in the fold and not have them reject the entire memetic package as bullshit, they've been forced to build out their own little subculture with its own media so that one never needs to constantly compare their beliefs with reality. Disconnection from reality has several well-known side-effects. I think this probably could have happened anywhere; while America's self-image of rugged self-reliance and keeping oneself to oneself contributed, it's also the most successful country explicitly founded on principles of modernism, which suggests pre-modern belief structures should have had a harder time establishing themselves. Edit: fuck this is the YouTube thread isn't it.

What about unsupervised 12-year-olds who speak mostly in homophobic slurs? Because I don't want them eating all my biscuits.

"Listen, can we move the Doritos packets closer to the middle of the shot?" "Actually, change of plan: we're going to have the packets of Doritos give the interview. Please email us the questions you were going to ask."

I enjoyed this trailer! I enjoyed the music! I noticed Ken Levine mentioned once they've had a devil of a time finding period-appropriate music that wasn't dire, and eventually decided they'd have Columbia skip forward a bit and have jazz and blues just starting in the 'colored sections' of the city, which would then cause a little bit of racial tension because it's extremely xenophobic as a city but they're just realising their culturally superior music is a bit shit. Who knows if that plot point's survived, I half-expect the entire game to have been rewritten at this point.

Can anyone explain what the appeal of Xbox Gold even is? I'm hesitant to play multiplayer because of the horror stories I've heard, and as an Australian many of the media features don't exist. And my housemate has a PS3, and many of what is available is fee-free on the PS3. Is it just Netflix?

I think it's probably not Firaxis' job to singlehandedly overcome widespread fallacies when estimating probability. Humanity is wired to distort probabilities, to overestimate the chances of something catastrophic happening and to underestimate the chances of something happening that we can prevent, as a survival mechanism. It's not purely a question of education.

Oh, hey, by the way: why is your game a puzzle game with a ball you're supposed to control instead of something a bit more actiony? Because it feels like it'd suit the imprecise, chaotic nature of the ball movement as a game where you're racing the clock, possibly through an abstract, wacky environment being chased by slimes and worms. Signed, Someone Who Really Wants A Modern Marble Madness P.S. I'll probably buy your game anyway, because I'm Australian

I always got the sense that Nintendo would leave the games industry altogether rather than release games on other's people's hardware. They only make games because they need something to run on their hardware; they see themselves as a company that makes surprising devices. I'm not sold on the WiiU - I've managed to get my hand on the GamePad and liked it enough. It's just that Nintendo's weakness has always been their inability to build a decent ecosystem on their platforms. Game Boy/GBA/DS developers built one themselves, particularly because the hardware stayed very similar, but the home consoles have never really had the kind of developer support that, say, Microsoft gives to their (AAA) developers. And that pales in comparison to the kind of support Apple gives their developers, although Apple has never really shown any understanding or aptitide for the games industry. One of the key reasons the Wii never got the support it could have is because the industry more or less standardised on a few key technologies, Unreal Engine, Scaleform, etc., which weren't available or were in a crippled form on the Wii. While there's a little more support for this stuff on the WiiU, I can't see Nintendo going out of its way to make sure it has the most attractive suite of middleware available when it doesn't even let third-party developers access Miis. And if it's too much of a pain to make a WiiU version, developers won't do it. I got burned by that one time too many, and now I know what to look for. So until I'm convinced Nintendo have got their act together, I'll save my money.

Goes on a little too long but the premise is excellent: