Merus

Because it's really fucking hard to have an economy where: the player has to choose what to buy the player can't buy end-game upgrades for a while high-level upgrades feel reasonably priced from the mid-game perspective (i.e. not grindy) prices make some kind of comparative sense Most games that manage it are fantasy games where the game world makes so little sense that you kind of gloss over the fact that a jar of glass costs a month's worth of food, or there's a bunch of things to spend currency on that don't really have any real-world analogue (such as spending souls on 'character levels' in Dark Souls).

I suspect Daphne is undergoing the same transformation that Betty and Veronica went through: 'female' is not sufficient characterisation in 2015, and that's basically all Daphne had.

Going to get well out in front of the rush. Anyway, wow, what a year, huh? Hard year, definitely, but a big one, and it definitely feels like we're finally getting out from under the 2010s. Man, remember Facebook? How did that kick on for so long.

Ninety-Three:

The Guild Wars franchise also relied heavily on cloud computing. The first game ran, essentially, entirely instanced except for towns. The second game uses a more elaborate version of the same concept to essentially eliminate shards, except in its gigantic battleground mode where it's basically an account flag. Players in a region can play what WoW calls "cross-server", but it also means that come patch day, they run two different versions of each map until players patch, and the patches are delivered through cloud-based CDNs (thus avoiding the port forwarding that WoW players have to do). Running on a CDN means that the developers only have to pay for the tech to get the patch files out to hundreds of thousands of players on patch day, not on every day. The first game is on automated maintenance and runs so cheaply that NCSoft have allowed it to survive indefinitely; the second game has had probably 6 hours of downtime over its three years of life.

I'd draw a comparison between this and, say, the Kotaku article on the collapse of Silicon Knights, which is fairly similar as a mostly one-sided article about bad behaviour at a studio surviving mostly on goodwill from the playerbase.

Heh, I checked out on Pacman 256 pretty early on. I thought it was half-baked - there were some good ideas in there that just didn't matter enough, and it only took about half an hour to get the sense that it had shown me pretty much all it had to offer. Crossy Road had a similar problem, but there at least it was saved by the character and scenery changes, which gave it a little boost of novelty.

I'm irritated by the assertion that it's a good thing when the readers of an article are to come to their own conclusions. The journalist almost always has more information than the readers.

My housemate had minor quibbles - there's a couple of big scientific problems with the film that you kind of gloss over because it's the premise, and most of the little things are more 'astronauts/NASA wouldn't do that' rather than 'physics wouldn't do that'. Most of the time, though, what underlies those critiques is the idea that Hollywood's happy to use science as grist for the mill but they don't give a shit about the science, or the scientists, except for how they can be used. The Martian clearly does care about the people they're portraying and what they do. It's like how few nerds are really willing to nitpick the MCU: they changed so much shit, but the people involved clearly care about getting what's important right.

I rapidly became wary of this conversation because I've learnt most adults have very strong opinions on pedagogy and very few of them have any kind of training in pedagogy. It's one of the more accessible places the Dunning-Kruger effect rears its head: because most adults in developed countries went to school, we know a little about the teaching process, which makes us think we know a lot more than we do. Myself included! I constantly have to suppress the urge to assume that just because they gave us formulas in exams that this is the best way to go about teaching physics.

To me it feels like they're going to support the 'legacy' local libraries, and introduce a new product that does cloud computing physics, based on the reaction the Crackdown 3 preview got.

You probably won't see the expansion content for a while but overlevelled players get scaled down and I'm always up for visiting jumping puzzles and cool secrets (and come the expansion, playing level 30 content for silver doubloons for a shiny hammer). There are plenty of cool things very low level players can do. Half the world bosses are in starter zones, most of the mini-dungeons are reachable... Honestly half your time's probably going to be spent working out how your character works with the new systems.

I feel like these daily topical news shows generally require a couple of weeks to really see where they're ending up.

My circles seem convinced that the creators are either pranksters absolutely committed to their art to the point of talking about the implementation, or they're incredibly clueless in a way that's totally believable for Silicon Valley. Either way, there's no real audience for this outside of idiots.

In high school science tests, we were provided with lists of formulas, because why memorise that shit when what they care about is whether or not you can predict exactly what happens when a bowling ball falls off a shelf. Same with history: we wrote an essay. More than a few subjects involved writing essays under exam conditions, and I was never very good at it. Also, that episode of the West Wing about the various map projections always seemed strange to me, because we learn about map projections in geography and it never occurred to me that teachers wouldn't teach people that maps are imperfect 2D representations of a 3D object.

Popehat's a group blog and most of the really terrible shit is posted by Clark. Ken White's reasonable, although as a foreigner I can't really take his stance on free speech, even though I understand, as a First Amendment lawyer when he's not writing pseudonymously, why he'd have that stance. But yeah. Black-and-white thinking generally doesn't lead to the moral clarity people hope it does.

From what I remember, you can't immediately start the game and then break into a bank, but if you start the game planning on a bank heist I seem to recall it doesn't take more than a few jobs. From what I remember your rating automatically jumps several levels when you do that, so you can start doing harder jobs quicker.

My favourite version of this used to be Vin Diesel having a long-standing love of tabletop roleplaying games, particularly D&D, until I found out Ronda Rousey moderated a Pokemon forum and will derail interviews to talk about Pokemon.

I have a lot of fondness for Alundra because of how oppressive it feels, and how cleverly it disguises its structure. It's a fairly happy looking game about the residents of a small village being killed off one by one by their own nightmares.

I'm tempted, but honestly don't know if I'd get anything from WildStar that I can't get from Guild Wars 2 (whose expansion launches in a few weeks) and The Secret World (an MMO where I struggle through the meh combat to get to the great storytelling). Housing? I hear WildStar's housing system is pretty great.

So Rick and Morty is better than I expected it to be. I basically expected it to be a sci-fi version of Ow! My Balls, where you're enjoying watching someone suffer, but the show's willing to undercut its own nihilism enough that I can enjoy the bizarre concepts without getting repelled.

I am only just realising why it is that Uplink allows you to hank a bank, transfer a ridiculous amount of money into your accounts, and skip all the progression. If you can do it, you don't need the progression to ease you in.

I cannot stop playing Twenty. It's delicious, especially because for me it feels like it hits that sweet spot where strategy definitely helps but it needs to be able to handle the randomness of the board. (It's funny that I think I like every game that derives from Threes more than Threes itself.)

Let's be honest here, we've known Derek Smart is a fuckwit for decades. This isn't a new thing.

HL3 is not going to be a VR game