Merus

This Kickstarter attempts to dig up what little is known about Polybius, the famous urban legend about an arcade game that made people sick. It's been getting good press, but that's not been translating into pledges.

I'm in a difficult situation, because I see them as "2 bad movies, 3 ok ones and 1 pretty good one" but I will never love Star Wars the way I love Indiana Jones, or Looper or Inception.

Don't talk about Batman with Patrick in the room, check.

I can't be the only one expecting Windows 10 to include a feature called Covenant. Some kind of robust permissions management.

I just thought he'd managed to buttonhole Cassandra Khaw, although she actually lives in Malaysia, Merus, they're different. I don't think I had a problem with the piece, really - it's by far not the only preview Polygon will be writing, it's a different perspective we don't get to see often (will people who are tired of Rock Band as a concept going to get anything out of the first fake plastic rock game released in years) and there actually is new information in the piece.

Austin Walker hit the ground running at Giant Bomb when he pointed out that there's a strong colonial flavour to the premise of XCOM 2. I'm sitting here thinking, 'yes, I guess I do expect XCOM 2 to touch on the experience of humans who have a technologically superior colonisation force take over their homeland and tell them it's for their own good'.

Yeah, I'm not convinced that the mobile VR experience is going to be comparable to the dedicated device experience. I think they're going to be positioned differently, and I don't know how they're going to handle input on mobile VR.

If, in fact, they ever finish it.

It's worth noting here that the Wii U Pro Controller has an incredibly long battery life, and it's a great controller besides. If you don't need the gamepad for a game, the Pro Controller is absolutely the way to go.

From what I remember, the test screenings that led to the reshoots were actually really positive. The reshoots were because, on the back of the test screening results, Miller asked for money to have another crack at a particular stunt, and Warner figured that they had a solid enough foundation.

I think that No Man's Sky has a chance of being more interesting than it promises simply because developers (and a good deal of this is down to Mojang's Minecraft) have worked out that random generation works if the environments are interesting enough and there's some game design on top of it that turns the RNG environments into a haystack. Minecraft uses the sun going down, which turns it from 'explore all these samey looking environments' to 'one of these fucking hills has coal, where's some goddamn coal'. No Man's Sky seems to be promising a resource management element, where you need resources to get to the centre and it gets more dangerous as you go. So I'd imagine there'd have to be some gameplay pressure to find the raw materials you need, and therefore to find a way to automatically locate them so you don't have to comb through every planet in the galaxy to collect the obtanium you need.

So what you're saying is that he plays

I understand the point of FizzBuzz is that it's largely a check to see if you can take a task and break it down into components. So I need to do this if this happens, and this if this happens, and I need to set that up so that it'll go through these. This is the fundamental programming skill, the ability to express what you want to happen as a series of smaller steps, but that's a way of thinking that needs to be learned.

I mean that there's very little I could say about Portal that hasn't already been said. You're not going to influence anyone's thoughts on Portal at this point, so if you're playing games to participate in the games subculture, you need to be playing 'fresh' games. I think part of it is that the games subculture has very little interest in revisiting and re-evaluating old games, either to discover that they're much more progressive than we thought, or that they were vastly overrated at the time.

Yes, but in practice people do not treat public/private as binary, and it's a mistake to assume that just because don't want their stuff to be private, that must mean that they intend their stuff to be widely consumed.

Okay, there is a reason why I tempered what we have already established to be strong views when we're talking about an actual parent trying to get an actual kid to do a thing. I was trying to share a thing I had heard in case you found it useful and that was it, and if you still want to give me guff about it then fine. I know that parenting is littered with people who think they know what everyone else should be doing.

But does it line up with Smells Like Teen Spirit

My friends and I did a room escape last night! It was called The Enigma Room, and we did one themed around going into someone's memories to find their most precious memory. It was really well put together - it was all completely automated, and they were able to do things like custom radio stations, holding poses and re-arranging pictures. We also (metaphorically) smashed it! It was a room that was apparently a little hard, with a success rate of about 20%, but we got out with 10 minutes to spare - or at least we would have, had we worked out the lock for the exit door was open.

Hey Azniac, I've been here too, so don't get discouraged when you start diving into the code and it's way too complex and you just don't get it. This will happen! It happens to everyone, which is why most good developers will get you started on something simple like commenting or tracking down a bug, so you can just read the codebase and try and understand how it works. For your impostor syndrome, remember that as much of a fraud as you might think you are, you're probably not Paula, and Paula got hired. So this is what an actual fraud looks like. For most developers I know, if you can nut out FizzBuzz you're good enough. (I realise that if you can't nut out FizzBuzz that this isn't going to be comfort to you, in which case I apologise and only hope that you decide to either work really really hard to catch up, or change careers.)

I'm still a little put out they got rid of the name Robotnik. It's so much better than Eggman. (One of the novelisations decided his pre-bad guy name should be Dr. Kintobor, one of the many reasons why I instinctively try to reverse unfamiliar words. Also Dr. Namgge totally doesn't work, another strike against Eggman.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_2pKNWthJ4

My favourite bit is when someone who posted an apology video to get unbanned then took down his apology video, Smedley went and rebanned him.

I was really pleased when I noticed that comparison - I think the feminism influences come partly from Anthony Burch doing the writing for a AAA game, and it being useful for Borderlands as a setting to have its own unique value system. But even little things like the over-the-top names are much closer to Mad Max than the licensed Mad Max game is - a Tiny Tina would fit right in with The Splendid Angharad, Aunty Entity and The Feral Kid. Fury Road goes further by making toxic masculinity the thing people are running from, and it looks like the game is drawing from the plot ideas Miller laid out when doing worldbuilding for Fury Road, so maybe it's just a bad trailer? I kind of doubt it, though.

I don't think it's negative so much as skepticism. Video games are expensive and many people don't have the money to buy all of them! Which means, from marketing material designed to obscure this fact, we must work out which games are actually good while they're in the zeitgeist. I mean, Portal is a fine game, but if I'm playing Portal in 2015 my opinions on it matter to literally no-one.

Okay, but I am stubborn enough to want to point out that your kids might be learning that sometimes if they throw a tantrum, they get to have whatever they want. The advice I've seen, and I don't know whether you've already tried this, is to agree they don't have to eat the macaroni, but that if they get hungry, they are presented with the macaroni again. So it's not "macaroni" or "food I want", it's "macaroni" or "no food". I'd be interested to find out from real-world experience a) how quickly your kids calm down when they find out they don't have to eat the macaroni, and sunglasses) how quickly they fold. Like, as a kid I didn't like pizza, so I'm at least somewhat sympathetic here.