Merus

I particularly like the point about how it's not hard to do your own promotion when your elevator pitch is a three second gif. It's not like Phil Fish is a man with extraordinary control over his message.

The video covers this pretty admirably. Only the stuff that fits into the media narrative of Phil Fish as egotistical blowhard with no time for the little people is newsworthy. Plenty of other developers have said the same kinds of things, but it's not news when they do it. Plenty of people on forums have said the same kinds of things and the same kind of way, but apparently Phil's problem is that he doesn't use the power that was thrust into his hands, that he is clearly uncomfortable with, and that he cannot give back without also ending his career. That video is highly recommended.

There's some Thing in the oven

Now, now, there's no evidence that brands are commutative. OnLive + Mad Catz does not necessarily equal Mad Catz + OnLive. Re: demos: the thing that's being missed here is that YouTube reviewers measurably drive sales, and the evidence from demos is that they actually depress sales. With a YouTube reviewer, developers can usually ensure that it'll be played by someone who's going to give it a fair shake to get enough material for their video. Most consumers won't. Edit: this is highly recommended viewing. It's an amazing dissection of media narratives and internet fame through the lens of Phil Fish.

I brought up the race thing because it's an element of Bad Boys and it highlights how little DICE really thought about this kind of stuff, but the more important bit to me is that in these kinds of movies the cowboy cops don't have the resources and there's a movie's worth of context building up to the final transgressive action sequence. Hardline's cutting right to it, so it feels like a baseline instead of a climax.

I think the problem here, Griddlelol, is that you feel bad for being in a privileged group, which is a perfectly understandable reaction. I've been there, man, it is a pretty upsetting thing to discover that society is arranged to fuck over the majority of people on your behalf without asking whether that would be what you want. The way women and non-Caucasian ethnic groups are treated is not your fault. It's systemic, which means that everyone, even the victims, carries it around with them to some extent. No-one gets out unscathed. What that means is there's no divide between goodies and baddies, with you stuck permanently on the shitty side, even though that's how it feels. There's three sides: the bigots, who try and smear this shit all over everything, the people who are still carrying it and haven't noticed, and the people who are trying to wash it off. So long as you're trying to wash it off yourself, and are willing to do a bit of hosing and give a signal boost to the most affected people now and then, you're doing all you need to. This became a coprophilic metaphor really quickly. Anyway, what's important is that you're aware and thinking of it. You'll screw up, it's inevitable, because you grew up in a culture that tried to train you to constantly screw up without even realising it, and no-one fully escapes it once it's gotten into their heads. The people who get angry about this stuff have screwed up plenty of times as well. I hope this helps with the problematic elements of the games you like as well; it's everywhere, and the best you can hope for is to acknowledge it.

imagine what it's like for the people who have to live it But yeah, I don't really care for Polygon either. I don't find their stuff particularly enlightening, I think they pretend they're not using the 4-point scale, and I find them a fairly poor source of news. Ben Kuchera's inflammatory opinion pieces don't help either.

I wonder what actually happens when you put a 'Mario 64 playground' type space in front of the kind of people they're trying to target with these tutorials. I'm sure I recall developers saying that some testers refuse to mash the buttons to see what they do, but I can't find it and therefore can't trust it.

Yeah, wow, that's a hot mess of a sentence. Let's try again: It would be Bad Boys the video game if they were black cowboy cops and not a white special response team with full support from their superiors, and the bad guys were just drug lords and not a bizarre paramilitary cell that is stooping to robbing banks.

It would be Bad Boys the video game if the cowboy cops were white and fully supported by their superiors, and the bad guys used military tactics. That is assuming that we're agreeing that Bad Boys doesn't have the same problems at smaller scale, which is possible. I haven't seen it recently either, but I'm reminded of how the 21 Jump Street movie had to deal with the TV show being a product of 80s-era drug paranoia. As our understanding of the world increases, we discover things that never seemed like they'd be problematic. I think it's also a problem that both Cine and I had pretty horrified reactions to this, and the response from Griddle among others was to dismiss those concerns as an overreaction without understanding where they're coming from, and whether they're rooted in cultures that are less blind to certain problems. It feels like an anime fan defending a harem show because it all makes sense in context and that girl's really 700 years old.

It sounds like the core of the game is discovery, and I guess they've decided that discovery is pointless if there's no difference between things that are new to you, and things that are new to everyone.

I'd bet they do, and I bet every developer who puts in tutorials that people complain just teach basic shooter conventions does as well. There might be a better solution than putting in an easily passed tutorial to check you've found the camera controls and the fire button, but it's definitely not 'pretend everyone who's played this game knows basic genre conventions'.

This is how I feel; sharing private emails is not on because it erodes the safety of that private communication, and safe conversation is vitally important. This isn't supposed to be safe communication; this is an interview.

I think you're actually in a good place; you're not leaving the team because you disagree with the vision or the team members, but because you're having personal issues that are interfering with your ability to work on the project to the standard you expect of yourself. Most team leads understand, or should understand, that sometimes people have to leave for personal reasons, and it's not a reflection on anyone when they choose to do so. I think if you make clear that you'd like to work with him again in the future after you've got everything sorted out, you won't burn any bridges. If he does react poorly, he's in the wrong here and maybe you dodged a bullet.

Hulu Plus does not operate outside the US; I've got a tunnelling solution that's good for a few videos but probably not a whole movie.

I think there's really only one good chapter-by-chapter dismantling of a novel, and that's Fred Clark's evisceration of Left Behind and its sequels. By stepping through, section by section, he highlights not just where the story is badly written, but explains the philosophy and theology behind it, and how that theology affects American political discourse. He calls them the World's Worst Books, and has spent several years going into detail about how that's not hyperbole. It turns out there is a lot to know about the minutiae behind the John Birch Society's insane rewriting of the Bible.

I know, but when you get right down to it having a fleet of prostitutes hunt you down and kill you in GTA doesn't really make you take NPCs particularly seriously, given that GTA already has a 'hunt you down and kill you' mechanic and failure there is pretty light. I gotta mention how insane the footage collection is, though. There is an absolute ton of perfect video from the games discussed in these episodes.

The thing I really like is that Rock Paper Shotgun turned it on and discovered that the game plays worse with the mods on. There's a great shot of the game with the graphics mod on where the street furniture is all inexplicably crisp and the other side of the street is blurry and indistinct, as if streetlights are important, and they're pointing out that there could easily be a man with a gun on the other side of the street shooting at you and you wouldn't be able to see them.

I had pretty big problems with this episode until the last 7 minutes where all my 'hang on, you forgot about's got answered in one fel swoop. All of the NPCs are objects, but dressing up scantily clad women as objects is particularly problematic, and it's not fixed just by having equal opportunity objectification because objectification is associated with a whole host of evil. Something that players do for kicks to see what happens?

Saw Edge of Tomorrow. It was okay, but my housemate was really bothered by some of the plot deficiencies and neither of us was really blown away by the action that occupied much of the plot.

I'm sorry to have upset you.

The more I hear about this, the more it sounds like Bungie made an MMOFPS. So you're saying there are public events and an instanced story mode?

On some level, we are always missing something. Each day we choose to forsake the unknown for the expected. There is a seat at a table of a family in Bhutan waiting for us, but it will not stay unfilled forever. Each day, another opportunity to earn 1000 reputation points with the Netherwings passes us by. We choose what opportunities we care about, and which we do not, from less information than we would have liked. I guess what I am saying is that I would have liked to see it.

By the Happy Home Village you should have a good idea of what makes Earthbound rad; you have no idea what could possibly be coming next, but it still feels like part of a whole.