Frenetic Pony

Tonight I was taking my dog for a walk at a local park. Driving there, since it was night time and I didn't feel like jogging the mile and a half there just to let her off the leash. I let her out, it's a dark parking lot right at the edge of the city, before all the hills and vineyards start. She immediately finds something interesting, it's a shape I can't really make out as my eyes haven't adjusted from the road yet. I hear cluck cluckle and think "oh wtf?" Sure enough, probably from small farm just over the hill, there's a chicken. The problem here is, my dog is half border collie. She loves to herd things. She immediately starts barking and nipping at the poor chicken, which starts cluckling all around the gravel parking lot while its friend looks on in horror at the dog that simply won't stop harassing it. My dog, Ginger, thinks its all magnificent fun and even as I demand of her in as deep a voice as I can muster to COME NOW she refuses, chasing the chicken around with woofs and nipping at it; her goal, if any, is unclear but the process being entirely enjoyable. Finally I go to drag her over by the collar, but despite being nine she's zipping all around chicken, which is running around in circles trying to get away, and I'm chasing her all around try to grab ahold of her. After several minutes of this I manage to grab her and drag her away from the parking lot, far enough away that she ignores the chickens and seems content to go on a walk. It's at this moment I notice that I have my hand on the climbing hook I use as a key ring. A key ring that feels oddly light. I have a habit of playing with things with my hands. I look down, and sure enough the keys aren't there. At some point while chasing my dog who's chasing the chicken I reached into my pocket, grabbed the climbing hook, subconciously pressed down, and released the keys somewhere onto the parking lot. Well, I don't just want to go deal with the chickens again, I don't even have a leash to tie my dog up while I search for the keys. I take her for a walk, no one's coming to the park relatively late at night to find a random set of keys in the parking lot, assume that they belong to the car in the parking lot, and then make off with said car. I just hope the chickens are gone when I get back. A half hour later I jog down to the parking lot, Ginger following close behind. Initially it seems the chickens are gone. Then I spot two small, dark shapes huddled against each other... Fortunately, for whatever reason, they don't seem that interesting now to Ginger, who goes around smelling for things and leaves them alone. This leaves me free to search for my keys. In the dark, with some not too close streetlights for illumination, in a parking lot able to fit upwards of a dozen cars, that's made of large gravel an old key ring could easily blend into. Twenty minutes of scraping the ground later, and there's nothing. I have a set of keys back at home. A mile and a half of suburbia away. I have a crazy dog with me that will happily bolt after any cat she sees for the sheer thrill of the chase without a moments notice, and no leash to hold her back. But there's nothing for it. I put my head down and jog the entire way home, yelling at Ginger for her to stick close by to minimize and chasing of cats across the street. I drove home using the extra set of keys. I couldn't find the ones I lost even with a flashlight. I've replaced the batteries and the flashlight is much brighter now. Maybe I'll got out and try again tonight. Maybe I'll wait till morning.

Well... Lol has what, 2 new actual game modes now? Dota 2 has 0. Other LOMA's let you switch out abilities for characters, but DOTA doesn't. I'd just like variety, something new to try. But all I've seen from Dota when I was playing it, and what I know now, is that it's always just a new hero once in a while maybe and a new throw away game mode. I'm sure the uberfans with no lives love to rant and rave about the balance changes, or whatever. But that's not an actual change so far as I'm concerned.

You know, I'm done with this game, but would come back gladly while waiting for Titanfall, in almost a month : ( , to launch "For Realzies". But Valve doesn't change shit about the game, and that's boring. I want new items, new actual items I can buy in the game proper so I can find new builds for characters I like. I want them to put out new actual game modes like Lol does so I can switch up how I play. I want them to include power customization so I can swap out ults or other powers like Lol does or HOTS is going to do. But they don't. Every few months its just "Here's this fun throaway game mode for a week or two." And if you're lucky there might be a new once every few months, which may or may not change the game at all depending on if anyone actually uses them or if their good or etc. Icefrog seems too conservative to change anything for real, and no my spare time will be spent looking for other games to play while I await Titanfall.

Direct evidence! Well, ces't la vie. Was willing, and trying, to give the benefit of the doubt. But $200 million for Bioshock Infinite? I could see $40 million, a fifth of that. But 200? Geeze. At least it supports my hypothesis that the infinite cycle of "it's done when it's done" and "repeatedly prototype and change everything" isn't a good way for a huge triple A studio to work on a game. I remember reading about Deus Ex: Human Revolution's development. Apparently it had a relatively small budget and short development time for what it was, and they managed that by saying "Ok, this is the game were going to build" and then going out to build that and only that. I get that you have to make sure ideas actually work and being adaptive is good. But games have both nigh unlimited potential for ideas and yet have to be built in a reality where they actually ship in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe if you're making Nidhogg, by yourself, you can take years to make a small little game. A hundred+ person team can't do that though.

Thinking about it. My guess now is that Levine wanted to go indie a while ago, like after (or even before) Infinite finally shipped. They've probably spent the last year trying to suss out whether someone else could take over as Irrational's studio head, and after a year of failing finally called it quits. It's too easy to get all collective thought and blame Levine with zero evidence. Too easy to speculate and assume a corporation like Take-Two is just evil minded and hasn't thought things out the best they can. I hope we'll get the full story, if only because it's potentially interesting. But I'm not going to start pointing fingers just because its fun. People do that to much, and it can ruin others lives who are guilty of nothing.

Oh I can see that. Frankly I'm glad for a lot of this, I like most "indie" games more than triple A these days. But Bioshock Infinite's lack of a huge profit probably stems from it's 6 year development cycle. If they could cut two to three years off that they could get a fairly profitable game. To me a large part of the problem is game development hasn't gotten off the "experiment a lot, prototype, prototype..." etc. phase. That can be great for a smaller game, where there's less to prototype so it doesn't take as long or as many people. But if you've got a studio of a hundred people working on a huge game, well that's a ton of money to pay people for not being sure of what you're doing. Not that I'm saying I know of a better way, but that just scaling that way up in terms of people and resources isn't effective. EG: All that time spent on not making a multiplayer in Infinite. Deciding to put Elizabeth in but then realizing they don't know how to do an AI companion. The other thing I can see is the ridiculous things these budgets are spent on. Crysis is still a great looking game and cost a bit less than $20 million to make. "Next gen" games don't look terribly better, and yet take longer and double or more the budget to make somehow. The ridiculous amount of perceived competition in "triple A" games needs to stop. No you don't need 500 little cut scenes to tell an effective story. No you don't need all your characters mo-capped with ultra detailed facial animation. No you don't need 500 scripted events to make your game feel like a Michael Bay movie. EG: Battlefield does not need a single player campaign to sell, at all. Games can look great and do more without spending more money. Evolve is an awesome looking game from a relatively small studio that I'm looking forward to a lot. Cutting costs is definitely possible, but no Triple A studio seems interested in it, at least not until they suddenly fold. Which is what may or may not have happened to Irrational. Maybe one day we'll get the story, because with a world beating fiscal year it's not like Take Two is hurting for cash immediately or being pressured by investors. Something must've just collapsed or finally broken.

4+ million copies is a lot. But so is 6 years. I doubt it lost money, but probably isn't the most profitable thing in the world. I would say that shutting down the studio entirely seems abrupt. Splitting Ken's new small team off from the studio proper might've been a better move, if it were effective to do. A more focused game development by a proven studio isn't something to sneer at. Maybe they just couldn't make it work.

Oh I can accept defeat, I just get pissed off at the impossibility of winning. I actually like when its really difficult, just by incident. Sitting there an optimizing until I get it right in a bad scenario is great. Being presented with literally no way to win at all, that just feels bad. I'm also replaying The Witcher 2 with the "Full Combat Rebalance" mod. While it makes the Quen mod into not a cheat, I'm not sure if The Witcher 3 will be terribly deep in its combat if its like this. Run up to an enemy, hit, run away, repeat adnauseum. It's still a great story though, and since I never quite beat it the first outing I'll make sure to do it this time to carry a save over to 3.

I played Atom Zombie Smasher And I'd really like it if it didn't give you totally unwinnable scenarios. "Here, have some snipers (long range but very slow), mines (decent enough but limited), and fucking road blocks (road blocks) to kill 200 zombies in 30 seconds. Yaaaayy... fuck you game. I get that it's randomly generated, but at least on a level 4 outbreak you'd think at least the roadblocks would be disabled.

No worries, didn't get Thirty Flights either. It's some sort of philosophical deconstruction of game and story mech- you know what I don't even know what the fuck I'm saying. Which is probably why it wasn't for me, even though I liked other odd/no objectives/deliberately offbeat games like Jazzpunk and Dear Esther.

My life is boring as shit recently. So boring I fucked up the camping reservations for Yosemite, and will now have to wait a month to go in July when its hot and much less chance of being able to go rafting, or wait until 10 days beforehand, grab a cancelled reservation, and hope I get the reservation for a time I have to tell my friends I will get it for. All because I forgot late at night, because every night is the same routine, and I'm bored to death of it. I'm still trying to get my movie sold, still have no idea where I'm at with that. I'm writing a novel, I'm going to write a crappy generic pop song just to see if I can make it a hit, or rather just for "teh lulz" at least. But none of that seems to be making a difference, today's SMBC really hit home for me: If there's anything I miss from being a kid, it's how much new stuff there was to find and discover. I keep trying as an adult, but its just a lot harder now. Stupid boring adult life.

17 minutes of gameplay: I honestly can't tell how proscribed, or unproscribed, the gameplay is from this clip. If it's true that you can only get past this gate by going through the jewelers then... ehhhh. I hope the mask thing is at least a sideobjective. But otherwise this seems... I like how directional the sound is, even if a lot of incidental things that should be making sound aren't there (lightning without thunder? An industrial fan that's totally silent... etc.) I even like how it looks. I wasn't really a fan of Dishonored's pasty lack of detail, and I usually enjoy painterlay stuff. And I really like how first person it is, how you can look around while still picking a lock and etc. But the dialogue is just awful, Garret's constant talking to himself comes off slightly psychopathy, the music is utterly inappropriate at the end, the abrupt and short cutoff of every light is weird to look at. And since it was a perfect run through I've no idea how the game's AI is other than they can notice that the fire went out, but not that the jewels that they were ogling a minute ago are now gone. I've been down on this game a lot, and that's probably because I really, really want a good game LIKE this, just like I really wanted to enjoy stealthing through Dishonored more than I did. But I'm just not sure it's happening, and really don't want to reward a developer or publisher for dishing out the PR and a coat of paint of a game I might like, without actually delivering the game itself. Will wait for reviews from reliable sources like Rockpapershotgun

This is pretty much what I keep seeing and hearing. People just want to get down on this because its associated with Call of Duty in some way. But frankly, I hope I get into the beta because this sounds like the most fun multiplayer FPS out there since TF2. Just because I don't play TF2 or Left 4 Dead anymore, and because I haven't enjoyed a Call of Duty since 4 (played that quite a bit) or a Halo multiplayer since 2 (also quite a bit) doesn't mean I suddenly don't like multiplayer shooters. I'm just waiting for something I haven't actually played for over a hundred hours yet, and this sounds like the ticket.

Ok, that was hilarious to watch. Thanks to all the guys on this thread, everyone that donated to this ridiculous fucking thing, the Thumbs guys for streaming it, et. al. Made a good night for watching this all unfold.

Edit - Claimed (I think I did it right...)

"You can not park here! Move your car, you have thirty seconds to comply." *Guns click out

I thought the second episode was slightly disappointing compared to the first... I also got annoyed that it feels like there isn't much of a failure state. The "investigation" of the motel room feels rather silly and perfunctory, and

Ooooh, oooooh! It's like an abstract version of a 3D gif. I love those things!

The thing I've learned about the internet is never to conflate the opinions "it" spouses. Remember, the internet is not one thing, it is over a billion people with differing opinions. One group will have contrary opinions to the other. Also, at a penny a day per person you would need only 5 million players a day. Not unfathomable at all.

Wow. So upside down. Much neck. Such stretch.

Horrible Bosses is really quite funny. Then again with Jason Bateman, Jason Sudekis, and Charlie Day as the main cast I don't know what else I should've expected. I just wish Colin Farrel hadn't died in the first one, because there's a sequel coming and even though he was on for only 5 minutes in the first he was the funniest god damned thing in it. I demand of him to be in more comedies! I haven't seen someone just nail comedic timing like that since Jim Carrey was in his prime. Speaking of Horrible Bosses, the director Seth Gordon is now on the Uncharted Movie. I'm glad that idiot drip that was initially on it left, "Family of treasure hunters prot-" you don't even know what the game is motherfucker! At least Seth Gordon actually plays games. I'd just like to nominate Bruce Cambell for the role of Sully.

There will be only one weapon, a grenade which can only roll down hills. This will please Campo Santo employee Clint Hawking, whom they have secretly hired away from Valve and will only be revealed in the end credits ala Kevin Spacey in Se7en.

Nope, still hate it. Still would ruin my first playthrough because I know "Oh hey morality meter, good ending bad ending." Because that's what games do, and I get the good ending in games whenever that happens, because that's what I do. Good and evil are just vague human created concepts anyway. Imagine how awful The Last of Us would have been if it had a morality meter. Better sneak through to get the "good" ending! When the entire point of the game's end is that morality is a gray area and maybe Joel does or does not do a good thing, but that he does it because of what's happened to him in the past and who he is as a person.

Good news everyone! You'll now be able to feel the sensation your robot hand feels as it strangles you to death when the "Intelligent Earth Species 2.0" upgrade hits: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/bionics/sensitive-prosthetic-hand-gets-a-grip

You're assuming that by 2030 robots won't make the rest of us "redundant" as well.