sclpls

That would make for a great winter of wargaming episode.

Oh, they announced it. The finalists: Mnemonic Dear Leader Steed I am pleased with these results.

Have the votes been tallied yet?

Tom Chick's interview with Martin Wallace on Qt3 was really good!

That is excellent

Also make sure to add the tag "good"

I think the fact that Dong Nguyen is an independent Vietnamese developer who doesn't have the strongest command of the English language is an under-appreciated aspect of the discussion around Flappy Bird. I can't imagine a normal white, American dude who made an incredibly rough around the edges game that inexplicably got popular receiving the same amount of scrutiny from the internet. That and all the vitriol he has received strike me as having a really strong xenophobic element. Happily for me at least, all the independent game developers I follow on twitter seem really sympathetic to Nguyen. I suspect a lot of them have the self-awareness and humility to empathize with him. The serious problem was how the games media covered this, Kotaku being the worst agent out there (and from the comments I'm seeing here maybe Giant Bomb too), but there were a bunch of outlets that covered this in a really uncritical and thoughtless manner which I think probably stoked a lot of the internet outrage. So I think it's fitting in a way that this was discussed on the 10th anniversary of Idle Thumbs which was predicated on the promise of a new type of games journalism. I'm glad that your discussion of this was a lot more level headed!

Nice article from Leigh Alexander about the idioms for completing games: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/209900/Beating_games_around_the_world.php

Me too. Always baffled when people say they think it's a much better game than Spelunky.

Will Armstrong is ex-2K Marin, so that's a pretty good bet.

Love that Steve has already changed his twitter pic to cyber scoops!

Campo Santo is real now.

Quit: The Banner Saga. Gave the final boss a good 7 or 8 tries, the later half of those efforts bumping the difficulty down to easy, and decided to call it a day. At least I enjoyed the rest of my time with that game... pity I didn't get to find out how it ends.

I'm fine with no Headlander if it means we're more likely to see the 25th anniversary edition of Pettyland come to fruition.

Yeah, that episode was with Shawn Elliott, definitely! Waking Mars was briefly discussed as well.

I'm in a book club now with my favorite person to talk to about books, so that is rad! She lives in Austin so our book club will be happening over Skype or something... the first book we're doing is Swamplandia! I'm not far enough into it to have anything to say about it, but I figured I would post here anyway because a. I'm excited about being in a book club again, and b. I'm sure I'll be commenting about it soon enough.

Yes?

At the beginning of the video today Tim said he got a lot of comments from people that thought Headlander was "too weird" so I guess it must have had an uphill battle.

Aww man, I'm really bummed Buried Metropolis didn't make the cut!

There's a lot to agree with in this article. My favorite line: "good game design is frequently sacrificed in the name of making something more likely to make money. Players are not respected as people who want to have fun; they're treated as resources who need to be exploited." http://www.usgamer.net/articles/dungeon-keeper-a-symptom-of-a-wider-problem

Space Time Objects

Congrats on hitting the 250 mark!

Menudo does the trick for me, but I live in an area with excellent Mexican food... it's not a dish I would trust if you're in an area where Mexican food is sub-par.

Oh right haha, I accidentally selected stuff before I started to use the snip tool, then never unselected. This very important detail needs to be recorded for posterity.

This exchange was good.