Merus

He has a very big one that stretches across his face, so the animation needs more frames in it for it to look good. At that point, it's probably easier to just give him a polygonal mouth; he already clashes with the world as a big orange demon, so it hopefully won't look jarring compared to the skeletons.

I think it's worth remembering that the video game industry is bigger than both the movie industry and the music industry at this point. It should be held to mainstream standards because it's a lot, lot, lot bigger and more influential than people give it credit for. For instance, lots of people are making fun of Ubisoft for deciding that Assassin's Creed Unity didn't have any female assassins in the story mode because it'd be double the work, despite all the female assassins in the multiplayer and in Liberation, and Ubisoft apparently finding time to insert like three different kinds of minigames and a spidertank but not a woman. Meanwhile Hyrule Warriors showed off playable Zelda and Impa and Midna, thereby having more playable women in one game than Microsoft had in their entire press conference.

I suspect that part of it is that Sony's current business development team are unusually invested in building personal relationships with developers. I wouldn't be surprised if they did Grim Fandango only because Tim Schafer is involved.

This is a fair point; while I'm not exactly blown away by some of the back half, especially after the sprawling Rubacava, I can't imagine any new content won't make the game feel like Grim Fandango with some dodgy bits glued on to cover up some of the flaws.

Retro, I think, are one of the best, if not the best, art-driven development studios in the industry. Their artists come up with these gorgeous locations and set pieces, but they don't compromise on how they play and they don't let the art development overwhelm the production like in many other studios. It helps that, while they're art-driven, their technical and game design chops are rock solid.

I hope that they keep the 2D animation on the skeletons, but give Glottis an actual mouth. I felt the tech broke down with Glottis. Also I hope that they maybe fill in a little in the back half of the game where it feels like they ran out of money.

This is weird because I felt like Minecraft got the balance exactly right. Your goal is basically to survive the night, and to do that you have to basically get your crafting going and find the nearest cave to get coal for torches, but there's no way to explore that cave before the sun goes down. So you get your tools together, then go into the cave with your torches and you see what you find, and as you come back out you start making more and more space for your stuff, and eventually decide that this time you're going to build this thing right and oops there goes 12 hours.

They open the trailer with 'Namaste'. I think that's all we really need to say about cultural appropriation today!

Thankfully, this is an ad. The robot was taught to do this by humans that wanted to make a science joke.

No, I mean, I get that, but it blows my mind that they've even worked out how to procedurally generate fauna. Flora I can understand, geology I can see they've put a ton of effort into, but making animals that have procedural animation and consistent behaviours blows my mind. I mean, let's be fair here, there's no way it's as amazing and expansive as we allow ourselves to believe because there's a long history of games promising the world, but still.

I think my prediction's pretty secure so far, though, if a Grim Fandango HD remake is the biggest unexpected announcement. Though it baffles me that No Man's Sky is made by a 4-man team. How exactly are they managing to have a bunch of different fauna?

I enjoyed working for salary because I meant I didn't have to do timesheets, and I didn't have to justify whether the amount of hours I worked were worth paying for.

I have a lot of fondness for it, but if pressed I'd probably put Super Metroid as the 'greatest' game. I think calling Metroid Prime the Citizen Kane of video games might have been the beginning of the end for that particular comparison.

What I want from Pushmo/Pullblox is the ability to skip to an actual hard puzzle. I got bored pretty quickly.

I would additionally argue that usually the choice isn't between adult and young adult books, it's between young adult books and nothing. I guess we're not going to talk about what I brought this up to talk about? Darn.

I don't think that case is really any better than the headline, and I think the responses I linked to do a reasonable job of arguing against it. But it's an illustrative example of a blanket dismissal, so it's a bit off-topic, and I'm happy to take that conversation elsewhere. Like I said, there's a difference between knowing something's not for you, and assuming something's not for you. Wouldn't want to imply that having standards is bad! I think this is fair, and it's true that Watch Dogs is a particularly poor hill to be having this fight on because it's nothing special, but I feel like the issue with worth discussing even if it's brought up by a game that doesn't deserve it.

This is incorrect; the problem with outing has nothing to do with the act itself, but in how that information spreads and gets used in a culture that, in part, sees people crossing gender categories as sick deviants. For transgender people, their privacy can be literally a matter of life and death. Watch Dogs is feigning progressivism by having transgender people in their game, and then uniquely make them victims of the protagonist just by existing in the game; the fact that your argument is, essentially, that it's meaningless suggests their either you really didn't follow Watch Dogs' examination of privacy or (the more likely option) that there's nothing there to follow. THAT SAID I've changed my mind on the value of dismissal, because there's been a pretty big example recently of someone ignorantly dismissing an entire category of work with a lot of value. This Slate article argues that adults should be embarrassed for reading young adult fiction because it's clearly terrible, and is being justifiably reamed for being full of shit. On my Twitter feed, the only person who presented this article uncritically was Chris. I'm not accusing Chris or anyone on the podcast of being closed-minded snobs, of course, nor am I saying that Chris actually endorsed the article, but I think it's easy to fall into wilful ignorance when you think you're being discerning, and I think wilful ignorance is a very dangerous thing to feed. It puts the SRIV discussion into a new and slightly worrying light, which took the form of guests telling the Thumbs how interesting it is and how much they think the Thumbs would enjoy it, and the Thumbs, Chris especially, being skeptical because they didn't think it'd work and the last one had a dildo bat. And then it turns out that they didn't think it worked, just like they said. I wouldn't enjoy the Thumbs becoming old farts in their 30s, railing against strawmen. There is a very big difference between dismissing something because you've seen enough to know it's bad, or can infer that it's bad by the arguments of its supporters, and dismissing something that you've heard is bad from people whose job it is to have easily digestible opinions. (To make the subtext here text: I'd feel worse about saying that Watch Dogs didn't work, given that I haven't played it and haven't seen enough of it to come to an independently informed opinion, if the guy defending it in this thread wasn't doing such a good job of making his opinion untrustworthy. I might be wrong but I'm not going to be the most wrong.)

Looks like it's all over, the guy gave himself up.

I think there's value in discussing why something you're never going to play repels you. That is almost certainly going to rely on third-hand knowledge. There are enough games with terrible elements to them that you can't go into every game with an open mind and an open heart, so it's unrealistic to say that people 'should' play a particular game before having an opinion on it. If Saints Row, for instance, wanted adults with standards to play it, they probably shouldn't have been so keen on the dick jokes. Regarding Watch Dogs specifically, though, the ctOS system is outing trans people simply by displaying that information to the player. David Gallant (I Get This Call Every Day creator) got into an argument with the writer of Watch Dogs where the writer dismissed Gallant's claims that this was in itself traumatic, and seemed pretty dismissive that there was a problem with how trans people were portrayed in Watch Dogs at all. (Not surprising considering that it's also pretty sexist.) We know from reviews that Watch Dogs is a privacy-themed open world game rather than a game that actually meaningfully examines the implications of invasions of privacy. The deepest it goes is outing trans people, and that only reads as invasive to trans people and those who know them. Given the content of the podcast, it's not surprising the Thumbs would dismiss it, as it's not mechanically interesting, and it's not thematically interesting.

No, I meant that there's lots of shootings that occur in America that don't make the news that would make the news if they happened in other countries where mad gunmen are rarer.

I used to go to Talking Time until it got snarky and unpleasant, and then I came here! and act snarky and unpleasant and I don't know why

Already happened (but the trick is that Canada is going to treat this as weird and upsetting but this kind of stuff doesn't always make the news in America.)

I really like the 99 Problems clip, just because of the timing of the music.

Yeah, I think I agree; it's a pretty game but there's not a lot going on.

I liked both games? I distinctly remember being wowed by the vistas and level design in Tomb Raider, anyway.