Merus

So am I right in thinking that Idle Thumbs 200 is going to be during GDC week? Look at all the people who are going to be in town for GDC just in time for a very special episode of Idle Thumbs Try and get Wil Wright on the show It's okay if the show is 5 hours to fit everyone in

Man, people don't like Canberra even when they name an Animal Crossing villager after it Haaaaaarsh

I think we have a new frontrunner in the Why Did I Ever Think This Was A Good Idea contest - I think a lot of us could tell from the start that Yogventures wasn't going to end well.

Yeah, there's a clear difference between riffing and just making the same joke again.

They wouldn't be having this problem if they'd hired Maddy Myers

Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze is pretty good. It gets a lot of points for being ridiculously thorough in the art, with lots of little touches they didn't have to do but did. Also it's balls-hard in places.

People largely don't think Psychonauts is a bad game despite it nearly sinking Majesco.

Moreover, review scores aren't used particularly well by most game publications, you're asking people to judge an experience that is largely personal to them, and you're treating individual writers for a publication as being representative of the tastes of the publication as a whole. Movie review aggregators largely work because they're comparing apples to apples - most publications only have one movie reviewer, they all more or less saw the same movie, and they all more or less agree that what they call a 3-star film is a solidly competent film. Danielle Riendeau and Justin McElroy will have very different takes on the same game, and this does not matter to Metacritic. Two reviewers will have wildly different experiences based on their choices, and often those experiences don't match what players will have because the review process is to a deadline before the general public have access to it. Most publications have their own ideas on what their scores mean - at one publication, a 5 is a solidly competent game, while at another, a 5 is a game that's broken. The number that Metacritic arrives at is solidly misleading, thanks to the old maxim of garbage in, garbage out.

Lord help me, I realised I had a Gex pitch. I'm not going to make it, because I don't have the time, skill or inclination to make a Gex game to the standard expected of the market, but the idea of Gex as a TV version of Thursday Next, hopping through TV show realities and bringing parts of them with him, might actually be interesting in 2015.

I don't know if I'd prioritise Soren's comfort over the comfort of the people Wardell's been harassing and the people Gamergate have been driving out of their home. Soren might be in a difficult situation, but if he makes a good game that sells poorly, people will assume it didn't sell because of the boycott. He'll be fine.

He won't get to see how the last episode of Parks & Rec is received.

Office is kind of a special case - Word and Excel reached feature complete status years ago. There's really nothing more they can add or take away from it* that will actually improve it, but they have to justify a new version every few years because it's Microsoft's most consistent revenue stream. *If they make it simpler, someone will refuse to upgrade and they shrink the revenue stream. Microsoft have know for a while now that most people only use about 10% of the features, which seems like a slam dunk for simplification except that which 10% is different for everyone.

I remember reading a breathless article back in 2006 in Gamasutra about this great new way of organising game development called agile development. Elsewhere in the tech industry, agile development would not have been news. I've harboured a suspicion ever since that game developers, as people who mostly never come from software development, are years behind the times and totally inexperienced when it comes to scoping and shipping a software product. On the other hand, most software developers can get away with shipping incremental product upgrades and almost never have to build an entirely new experience from scratch, which is why I tend not to spread that suspicion very far. The people that I've seen that are getting very defensive about angry questions on why Godus is so late remind me of that suspicion again.

actual answer: Ken Levine was the creative lead on Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite, as well as the studio head of Irrational Games. He is a man with some influence, and as some of the creative choices in Bioshock Infinite proved, not a man given to understanding the realities other people have to face.

Feelin' pretty good about my life choices right now

The hell I can't (My Steam wishlist is forty titles long, I have over a hundred games I own but haven't played - haven't even played - and Vanishing of Ethan Carver got positive but not enthusiastic reviews. I'm not so much never buying that game as putting a whole bunch of things ahead of it, except that I'm honest enough to say that it probably means I'm never buying that game.)

I'm guessing not because it sounds like Chris has got other things on? In the lead-up to the debut of the current theme, Chris mentioned he was working on it several times, so I'd imagine it's way too late to have something done for Idle Thumbs 200.

That's been going on for a while now, it's always been this weird way for Squeenix to have the crowdfunding cake while also eating it - but on the other hand at least Squeenix are actually airing out their IP instead of letting it rot in a cupboard somewhere, and at least it means that they get to judge for themselves if a new take on any of these franchises is actually going to be worth the effort.

Check out the Tabletop Roleplaying thread and maybe you can find other people to get a game going!

I'm not going back to an anime avatar and you can't make me, Zeus

Boy, now I am glad I didn't buy Vanishing of Ethan Carter, that is pretty bad.

Looks like it's too late but this is a great idea. ...I'm starting to think I shouldn't have taken up that investment opportunity you convinced me to take up last year. No wonder I'm broke.

I think that's also the writing - her reveal is also where her goals change (or get changed), and so she stops being so antagonistic. Her relationship with you is the only one that really matters; I think the game would have benefited immensely from Midna having someone to talk to.

I might still be convinced to buy The Vanishing of Ethan Carter depending on how much in the tank that developer was. I find it pretty self-serving that a former WoW dev doesn't want the enthusiast press to tell on him. That game fucking killed people, straight up, particularly in the early days before they started adding badges.