Merus

Ooh, national release in Australia! Convenient.

So Nimona's ending soon, which reminded me of other great finished works in webcomics, specifically Narbonic and Digger. Do either hold up, or were they just good for the time, when people didn't really expect webcomics to do more than make tech support or video game jokes?

I haven't even seen the tower or the hell area, I keep dying in the forest.

Packing it in for NaissanceE. NaissanceE does some fascinating things - it's I think the only game I've played where I've explored an alien environment that felt genuinely alien, that there was an inner logic to it that was ungraspable. It's got two tricks it uses for this: lots of regularly spaced, repeating geometry interspersed with very irregular geometry, and an impressive disregard for putting the most effort where players will see it, with great detail spent on buildings the player only ever sees from the other side of an abyss, and massive environments tucked into corners that players don't need to visit. I'm constantly on edge, unsettled and unsure, because I've managed to jump to this ledge and there's clearly a puzzle there but this corridor goes into a room which goes into a corridor that goes into a massive room. I also really like the run mechanic - you need to press a button to breath every five seconds or so, which is just enough thought that it's inconvenient to just run everywhere, while not being too much work that it's inconvenient to run at all. (Also of note: the first recognisably human thing you find is a strip club. Video games.) Anyway, I'm done with it because in the back half it starts squandering what it does well for an extended jumping puzzle in a ventilation shaft, and then an abstract area that's supposed to represent 'madness' for some reason, and YouTube suggests that abstraction sticks around. I think I got most of what it had to offer, and it was two-thirds unique and fascinating which is more than most games. (★★☆) I'm pretty sick of Rogue Legacy but it occurs to me that maybe the reason I keep dying so much is that I need to stop investing in new classes and start investing in health.

One thing I wish more people knew is that your ability to express ideas is a skill. If I had a deep, universal truth that would revolutionise the world, I know it would take me a very long time to work out how to express it in a way that didn't make me sound like I ran a blog written in Comic Sans.

So Season 2 of Guild Wars 2 has started - essentially, it's an expansion, but it's free only for current players and they aren't telling people what's in it until each bit comes out. GW2's art style really loves sweeping vistas and ridiculous draw distances, and it's helped by an art style that tries to make a virtue out of having visible brushstrokes: The first new area that's opened up is called Dry Top, and it's a desert area that has frequent sandstorms blow in. I love this little town, optimistically called Prosperity, but as of the most recent release, it looks a little less, uh, not-covered-in-evil-vines.

Hey tegan, I might have asked you this before, but what's with all those shapes underneath the types?

Weird, because the biography unlock system felt like it was forcing me to use different options, and that subtle nudge was a revelation to me. I ended up dropping the dash move almost entirely by the end.

I know, right? I want it on 3DS because it feels like it fits best on 3DS and I love the concept of the Street Pass mode, but it's still not out outside of America because they started localisation too late. We speka de Eenglish

Cucumber Quest is wavering over the drop line, for me. The art is gorgeous, but the pacing is pretty bad, and there was a period of about two weeks where I could swear the comic was being written while on drugs. Paranatural, another comic that has gorgeous art and shitty pacing, has spent twice as many pages on this one storyline as it's spent on any of its other storylines, because it's clearly up to the point where the author's decided they need to do WORLD-BUILDING and they have to fill in all the WORLD-BUILDING and if it keeps trying to set up future storylines instead of focusing on the one it's supposed to be doing I'll drop it as well.

If I was going to hazard at a guess, I'd say it'd have something to do with Transistor's build creation being the star attraction and the story and characters essentially just being flavour. Yasawas strikes me as a person who really, really enjoys strong characters and storytelling, and isn't particularly excited by games that give you all these options go ahead and pick some!

You're losing me here. Can you give me an example of what you mean?

It was an iPhone 5. Already reported stolen, blocked, lost mode, all that, phone was turned off 15 minutes after it disappeared which is not what happens when it's fallen out of your pocket. I can't afford a replacement.

Well, some fucker lifted my phone.

This reminds me that one of these days I'm going to have to try out the 'logical extreme' version of arguing against aggressively anti-evidence people (specifically, that you take their delusions, run with them, building it up to be more and more extreme, until they finally start getting uncomfortable and start pushing back).

No, you are correct, in the second one he has a shitty beard. I don't like how well-lit that underground bunker is, though. Look at us complaining about this fanart.

Ah, I'm a shit. I shouldn't assume she's American. I like to use forum arguments to test out theories I'm not sure about, but I've written articles in the past which are more like me trying to get everything I've learnt about a subject onto the page.

I think the only thing a creator has to do is fulfil the backer rewards, or at least make a good faith effort. It's what's so worrying about the 'get the game!' reward tiers because you're promising people that the game will actually be made. Giving people TUG with Yogventures assets instead will probably cover them, particularly because of all the Minecraft clones I've seen TUG looks the most like it's going to be a worthy extension of the core idea. I think, if you're running a game Kickstarter, you should promise that you'll either release the game or open-source the assets created when the project is abandoned, just to remind people that the project might be abandoned and actually evaluate whether or not the creators can do what they promise.

The dev log seems a little sparse for a game coming out in six months. I don't know how they're really going - they did show at E3, which is positive, but whether or not day-to-day development is going well, I can't really tell.

It's odd: he's quite prolific, with a dozen books to his name, but I can imagine he'd be an acquired taste because he's Australian, so can't do book tours in America as easily, and writes fantasy that doesn't really invite you to share in the fantasy. Most fantasy has an undercurrent of 'go with these protagonists on an adventure!' whereas Irvine's stuff is more 'join the protagonists as they experience the most traumatic year of their life'. I appreciate how different it feels, and how much his protagonists feel like ordinary people who are vastly out of their depth.

Yeah, I kind of looked at Yogventures and went 'there is no way that this will be what they want from it, at best it'll be a shitty Minecraft clone' but it'll be interesting to see if that translates to a permanent loss of popularity for the two Yogscast people who lent their credibility to it. Very early on, I decided that I'd only back Kickstarters where it seemed like the creators had a good handle on the difficulties they'd face bringing their creation to market. I've backed a few unknowns and I'm pretty pleased with the results so far, although I'm getting increasingly worried about Hyper Light Drifter (but then I didn't put down much for that). I did back Lori and Corey Cole, which I think was probably a mistake, it's clear they got out of the game business a long time ago and have had major difficulties adjusting. (Idle Thumbs still haven't done all the custom backer songs they promised.) In general I took the attitude that I had to be judicious with my Kickstarter money and I could always buy the game when it was done and turned out well, give them a little boost after the project finished.

Yeah, the vast majority of people I see having success on Patreon are people who have obvious talent and quality and are still not making ends meet, to the point where that's what I see it as being for: here is a way to make a job for yourself when it's clear that someone should have hired you already. I strongly suspect that Emily Gera votes Republican - there seems to be an undercurrent here that the world is fair more often than it's not, and so all those people on Patreon are clearly less deserving than people who were good enough to get hired, and maybe instead of being paid they should work on their craft. This is repellent to those who believe the world is fundamentally unfair more often than it's fair, and thus can believe that there are plenty of people who should have jobs that don't, while people who do have jobs aren't as good.

Earthbound is not for everyone, but it is well worth finding out if it is for you.

So I've finished the first run-through.

I heard that Ingress was kind of a mess, actually; it's a PvP MMO with reinforcing feedback mechanisms.