Merus

I basically agree with Helen Berents here:

Mington's quiz is too easy:

I also think that Twitter is on the way out; I think you'd be getting on board the MySpace train just before Facebook opens up to non-college students.

I ain't ever seen a jacket with back pockets.

Oh man, Sunless Sea talk finally happened! It's fun seeing how people who aren't familiar with the Fallen London setting interpret the weirder corners of it.

I like how we're all assuming everyone wears pants with pockets.

That's weird because I thought it was interesting how well they disguised the fact that all the paths were leading in the same direction by fencing off the sides and having them rapidly separate in elevation. There's a fair amount to infer if you go looking for it. The pacing's clearly very deliberate, and there were places where you had to watch where you stepped. I'm sure it felt annoying at the time, but we've had a glut of games more interested in exploring a space than giving players a lot of interaction. Where I'm ambivalent is whether the story is actually any good, and whether the world they've built hangs together with the story, and whether it's not just the portrait of a pathologically selfish man, in which case fuck 'im.

Willful ignorance about important stuff goes hand-in-hand with willful ignorance about trivial stuff. Or, at least, that's what Ricky Gervais has built a comedy career around.

Finally got around to Dear Esther. Well. I think it's certainly an effective piece of art, but I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it.

Particularly irritating: the ability for me to say 'I already own this on another service', or, hell, 'not buying this but you've got the right idea, Steam'.

...that is, in fact, a botnet company desperately trying to stay relevant.

Yeah, I wouldn't have trolled the guy had I thought he had any intention of engaging in a serious argument - I even gave him an opportunity when he started to complain about it. I spent some time in the thread for IT #173, engaging with people who looked like they were willing to engage, and dismissing/trolling people who weren't.

Funny thing about the Disney Vault: they tried just releasing everything on DVD, and sales went way down. They started the Disney Vault again for DVDs, and sales went back up. They have a strong financial incentive to make the transaction more complicated.

Apparently TotalBiscuit thinks codes of ethics just magically appear in the air. I enjoy how he needs instructions to act ethically in a new situation when the whole point of codes of ethics is that you're supposed to infer from the specific examples how they might apply outside of the limited situations they discuss.

Now I'm fascinated to know what Titan was supposed to be. I guess both Blizzard and the MMO market have shifted enough that making a follow-up MMO isn't necessarily what they want to do. Edit: someone at Massively is willing to talk; apparently it was a lot like Destiny, and while reworking to try not to step on Bungie's toes, they discovered it wasn't fun enough to continue.

The DS remake was fuckin' weird because it was balanced towards experienced players. It honestly kinda ruins it. FFIV had some dodgy elements but it's a breezy enough time in the original. Not in the remake.

I understand he has a Situation Room. Maybe he's done his service, and he decided he wanted another, more comfortable job, where he could display the same level of awareness and sensitivity required for space marining.

I would happy with just having a coherent throughline, but I'm not even getting that.

18 sounds like either 19 is striking me as

Not pulling your weight there, Greenland.

FFX was very explicitly turn-based; each move had a certain cooldown, after which that character would immediately have another move. You could swap characters out with a very small delay, and certain characters' weapons had built-in advantages against certain enemy types. You were shown the turn order for the next thirty moves or so in the top right corner, including when enemies would get a go. The idea is that you could manipulate your party and the enemy party to try and prevent the enemy from ever attacking, which by the end boiled down to using Auto-Haste and dealing as much damage as possible. Future games returned to the series staple, ATB, where players take turns based on a meter that fills up, but enemies act on a regular schedule.

I might regret saying this (as if that has stopped me before!) but I don't think those tweets flatter either of you. Honestly I've flirted with unfollowing you a couple of times, Cine, because you're absolutely uncompromising on race in a way that I find really confronting, and while I understand it's because I'm less aware of my racial biases than, say, sexism, it feels like you'd attack me just as soon as the openly racist dickbags you're currently angry at. Becoming socially aware is a process of growth which takes time, and it often feels like you, and many people like you, get really impatient with people not far enough along that process, encouraging them to run backwards away from what they perceive as a state where people become always angry at everything. It's understandable, no-one has that much patience, but that doesn't mean it's not real. From Mike's perspective, it seems like he's trying to see the good in his customer base, because if #gamergate is at all representative of his audience, and he doesn't want to make things for fuckwits, then he'll need to get a new job. It's certainly the thought I've had over the last couple of years weeks - why should anyone make video games if you're making them for gamers?

Can anyone explain why games critics seem to be pathologically unwilling to present their arguments in the form of a series of paragraphs logically linked together that build towards a thesis? Whether it's putting big dividers every three paragraphs, or flipping between two thoughts, or numbering the paragraphs, or presenting their thoughts in five acts for no goddamn reason, it is incredibly pretentious. It seems like everyone does it mostly because Jenn Frank and Jerry Holkins did it, but 1) both were explicitly expressing an unwillingness to fully engage with the situation they were in, and so the fractured structure developed the thesis 2) Jenn Frank was rambling a bit so it's probably not the best place to look for a style tip and 3) it was still pretentious even when they had a good reason to do it.

I remember going to Disneyland because my parents decided that, since we were in the area, they might as well take us to Disneyland and Universal Studios. 'The area' was Canada. This would have been 1992, back when it wasn't safe to go to Knotts Berry Farm and kids would throw smoke bombs on the freeway. It was a very good thing we got a shuttle bus from the airport because we were all freaking out. I remember we managed to go to nearly every ride in Disneyland in a day. We started early, so we explored Main Street USA before the park proper opened and discovered Main Street USA mostly sucked, and then went straight for the back of the park, stopping for nothing. Oh, all those other people peeled off to the first cool thing they saw, but we hustled hard to the very back, and then for some reason got on It's A Small World. We found a rollercoaster in the newly opened ToonTown, then started moving forward, hitting the big queues around about lunchtime. We never went on Star Tours or Space Mountain because Mum had developed vertigo and so flashing lights were right out, but we managed to go on everything we wanted to. I think the most we waited was for the Jungle Tour, about 45 minutes - once the queues started getting too long, we went for lunch, then started on all the rides people had already been on, Pirates of the Caribbean and the like. (Dad discovered that imagineers were fond of drops in the dark, and that he was not, and we thought it was hilarious when he'd shout out 'you bastards!' in a very Australian accent whenever they did it.)