Merus

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Merus

  1. Posted

    Australia is still embarrassingly far behind, but the next round of trying to push through changes to the Marriage Act has commenced. The blocker is, like so many things, Tony Abbott, who insists on his party keeping opposition to same-sex marriage as a policy. This is at least the third round.

     

    Interestingly, it looks like the pressure is getting to Abbott, who is making noises about how he believes the vote should be owned by 'Parliament' and 'not by any particular party'.

     

    Currently, if all MPs were allowed a free vote, it'd probably pass.

  3. Posted

    One of my minor problems is that I treat picky eaters as children, and become pretty condescending to them. Not people who have specific dietary requirements, or celiacs or what have you, they usually have thought about what they eat and why. I mean people who have chosen never to expand their palate beyond the crumbed, processed shit that you ate as a child because sometimes your parents just wanted a break from owning children for an evening.

  4. Posted

    If you know someone's subscribed to the block list, you can always check their account. For instance, if you're worried about being on the GG blocklist, @randi_ebooks is subscribed to it.

     

    Thing is, though, it's not really your business who's blocking you. Blocking is for other people to curate their twitter feeds.

  5. Posted

    I feel like the second you let the player control Max, you're stuck in this world where Max has a ton of agency and that agency is just Being a Bad Ass All Day Long.

     

    Yeah, you're probably right - like, a lot of the tone of Mad Max is that he adamantly refuses to get involved in other people's problems, and the movies are very clever about how they show him being trapped into helping. You'd have to balance it like a survival game, except you also have obligations as a resource. Of course, you can't kill Mad Max, but survival games are all about killing the player so that the player knows that death is never far away.

     

    (Wait, what if instead of Max dying, he fainted, and turned up in a settlement where there were People there who Needed His Help, so 'obligations' became a death mechanic as well.)

     

    Still, there's other problems - the Ozploitation tone's definitely not there (the names in that trailer are absolutely not silly enough, and the 'awesome' stuff needs to cross the line twice a little more). It's going to be a problem if Borderlands out-crazies Mad Max.

  6. Posted

    I got Diddy's Kong Quest as a kid but I missed the wordplay in Tails' full name. In 8-year-old me's defence, that wordplay isn't going to be a phrase a non-American hears often.

  7. Posted

    Beyond Thunderdome is notable because I think it's got the best example of a post-apocalyptic patois I think I've seen. The airplane kids sound really weird, but they're mostly understandable, and their language and mythology have subtext that the audience can pick up, but not so easily that it sounds stupid. (It helps that they're kids, and there are aspects of their mythology that they openly admit has a meaning they don't understand.)

     

    Like, it's not a good film, and it was clear Miller needed to move on from Mad Max by this movie, but it has its moments.

  8. Posted

    yyyyyyyyeah there wasn't a lot about this I liked

     

    there wasn't a lot about the Darksiders storyline I liked, either, but I'm willing to look past that if the rest of it is really good

     

    but it's probably too late for Miller to swoop in and give them some pointers on how to wrench the tone in the right direction

  9. Posted

    Amy Hennig wrote and directed the Uncharted series. You've also got Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver.

     

    Jade Raymond directed the first Assassin's Creed. I like the first one, it's got some good moments to it so long as you play it episodically.

  11. Posted

    Yeah, I've never seen one of his "classic" bits, and every time I see a bit that's supposed to be good, it's ruined by how much wind-up and pausing for the audience to applaud and it just kills the pacing for me.

  12. Posted

    My point here is that it's not going to start being 99% of the population - it's going to be, like, 20%. 20% of people are permanently unemployed. The 80% of people who aren't won't see the fabric of society ripping apart, necessarily, because they're doing well and so are a lot of their peers. And the 20% won't have the money to move to another country, or form their own.

  14. Posted

    Also, another thought. Let's say you guys are right and 99% of us get totally fucked over. Um, can't we all just go form our own non-robotic economy?

     

    When manufacturing jobs collapsed as automation became easier, most people did not move to developing countries to chase jobs.

  15. Posted

    Well that's just like your opinion man.

     

    I disagree. I think having collectibles is a great way to encourage a player to explore a space where they might otherwise see no point in doing so. One of my favorite parts of GTA games is going through and getting 100% of collectibles. So many cool areas and things that I never would have come across if it weren't for some kind of collectible to lead me there. If you're talking solely about a corridor in a non-open world game then sure. Collectibles don't really add much in most cases. But for open world games I think they are better for having them.

     

    In GTA, there's usually far fewer collectibles than there are interesting places to hide them, which changes the experience a bit. If your expectation is that you can't count on there being anything down here, but there might be, you're hitting a sweet spot when it comes to collectibles where the extrinsic motivation can't overwhelm the intrinsic motivation because the rewards are too infrequent.

     

    (Of course, GTA has the problem where as you pick up collectibles, the last collectibles become exponentially harder to find, as you're essentially scouring the entire city for a handful of items.)

  16. Posted

    There's nothing wrong with collection being the primary mechanic rather than survival

     

    You know, I'd argue this point (and have!) - collection is an excellent way to spice up linear tracks, but if one of the chief pleasures of your game is exploration, collection has the unfortunate habit of cheapening the exploration. An interesting corridor with a mediocre reward in a game with collectibles is less entertaining than that same corridor in a different game where collectibles aren't used to guide the player. It's an intrinsic/extrinsic reward problem.

  17. Posted

    The part of the "Singularity" that I am most interested in isn't that far off. Robots are getting cheaper and better, 3D printing is getting cheaper and better, autonomous cars are getting better and legalized in more states. A huge number of jobs will be eliminated by these advances. It seems very likely that all truck drivers, taxi drivers, etc will get replaced by robots (humans are the cause of 90% of auto accidents). Fast food workers could be easily replaced with robots once their prices drop enough. Take these jobs and add all the jobs that even a basic AI could do, clerical work, data entry etc and we could end up with 80%-99% unemployment. The only solution to this would be to

     

    a) A guaranteed basic income for all people.

     

    or preferably

     

    B) elimination of the money economy, then we all live in star trek.

    C) Massive inequality

  20. Posted

    It's starting to open up a bit more now, and I think I've worked out why neither of us have been enjoying it: it's the bass. My housemate is an audiophile, so he has an excellent sound system, and the bass in the game is absolutely overwhelming when you've got a soundsystem that reproduces bass flawlessly.

  21. Posted

    Banjo-Kazooie takes the Mario 64 formula and completely misunderstands what made it work, basically. Jiggys are just lying out in the open, instead of being the focus and direction of the level as the stars are. The 5 collectible animals that give you a jiggy smack of having more places to hide things than things to hide. The decision to make each level have a static number of collectibles, and then tie that to unlocking the world map, and then setting the total required to something like 95% of the available notes, means that the game is guaranteed to have you running around a level you've already completed, looking for the one passage you didn't take. You've also got ability gating mostly to pad the game out, because it's not like the game really needs it or does anything with it in the way that, say, Super Metroid does.

     

    Also I'm not thrilled that this isn't an indie Kickstarter so much as a satellite Kickstarter. The devs are in orbit around a publisher, so they're not really independent, but getting fans to pay to prove a point means the publisher gets to outsource its risk.

  22. Posted

    I am reminded of William Gibson's maxim that the future is already here, it just hasn't been evenly distributed yet.

     

    I like to keep that in mind when thinking about singularity-style technology - I won't live in a world where I have this stuff, I'll live in a world where the 1% have this stuff and I don't, and that is absolutely terrifying to me.

  23. Posted

    I remember a story from when I went to university the first time. At the college I was living, we had a friend who was from America, and I came down to the dining hall to see her being comforted by a bunch of our mutual friends. From the conversation in progress, it became clear that she'd gone out to spend some time with real Australians, and had come to the conclusion that Australians deeply loathed Americans. It was incredibly awkward to try and convince her that 1) we didn't hate her, she was safe here and she hadn't agreed to spend a year surrounded by people who hated her because of where she was born while 2) agreeing with all the things she'd been told about why Americans were terrible. So I've been here before.

     

    Like, the tone of both responses was supposed to be a little flippant - people were talking about how they missed various topics of discussion that had actually happened, so I chimed in with something that clearly never happened, and then when someone had a serious dismissive response to that I tried to be more obviously absurd (or at least I think the idea that using the metric system is the hallmark of civilisation is pretty absurd), but I appreciate that it might be a running theme. Partly it's force of habit - for most of my internetting, I'm usually either the only Australian member, or the Australian member who posts the most frequently, and so I tend to lean into it and be The Australian Guy - and partly because, from my perspective, making fun of America and American exceptionalism feels like punching up.

     

    I don't know if I have a resolution to this.

  25. Posted

    I have developed a loathing for enterprise Java, which I suspect is tied more to the enterprise aspect than the Java aspect, but I got a thing up and running so bully for me.