Dewar

The rumor is, not as long as the PS3, but certainly not excellent either.

Once the loading screen sticks at "initializing" it pretty much just stays there, but disconnecting and reconnecting a few times finally got me in at about 12:45 eastern. The game was solid past that, besides a wierd bug that crashed my Windows Audio Service. There were some minor changes from the beta, the main noticable one being that the three initial titan loadouts are each on a different chassis, giving you access to all three by level 6. Edit: I should mention that I was expecting more customization options in the release than there was in the Beta, but it doesn't seem like there's a ton of additional options. I guess I'm spoiled by BF4, but I like it when there are a ton of different weapons and perks.

Are you getting a particular message, or does the game just stop responding?

I guess there's a lot of voice acting then.

I went through Gamefly (20% discount) and I'm about in the same boat. Thankfully, I can get up in the morning, start the download, and be reasonably sure it will be done by the time I get home. Edit: Nevermind, they apparently released the code today. Yay!

Interesting, Amazon hasn't updated to show the new PC release date or any SKUs for the PC version at all besides download code. Edit: At least the Dark Souls 2 website has some updated info, but is only showing the download version as well. I guess there won't be a PC box. Not surprising I guess.

Yeah, that doesn't seem like the best article. It interrupts the timeline several times to tell general "studio culture" type stories, so it's difficult to read it as an acual time line. All in all, it sounds like any other AAA studio. Fun at times, troubled at times. Some people liked the environment, others didn't. Some people liked Ken, others didn't. Meh.

Beat 2-3 and 3-3 offline and took care of their white world tendency events. That leaves me with just 4-2, 4-3, 5-2, 5-3, 1-3, and 1-4.

He's the victim of one questionably worded press release.

Well this already got accepted, so I imagine it would still be available on Early Access even if Greenlight were to close tomorrow.

Except that birth rates in developed countries are going down. Japan has a negative birth rate and the USA reached an all time low last year. Sure, we're going to have some problems as China and India are still on the upward swing but it sounds like, at a certain technological level, we all get too selfish to have kids Edit: Actually, looking at Google graphs, it looks like China and India are on the down slope as well.

It doesn't surprise me that my school was 20 years behind. I find it funny that developed countries are now complaining about population not rising fast enough while I have internalized those early teachings about how having children is bad and we're all going to starve to death from overpopulation.

I imagine most big budget productions (movie or game) start with cool ideas like that but someone up the chain puts a hold on the more edgy stuff in the name of mass popularity. Given the amount of money these games have to make to break even, it's probably a good idea.

Ah yes, I just read a bit further. He mentions in a couple of spots having a Paypal option for late backers, I suppose Greenlight is going to kinda fill that gap now.

Man, I forgot to back this. But 30k? That seems low to effectively make a game like this.

It will probably be something like the Dragon Tail sword in Dark Souls 1. Good at first but bad scaling makes it worthless toward the middle of the game. Hmm, I wonder if there will be a boxed PC copy. The art book seems like a cool coffee table book. Edit: But then again, I should just get that huge $30 art book.

On another note, does anybody my age (early 30s) remember being in school and being taught how population growth was going to destroy the world, two-child policy, etc? I'm wondering if maybe I either imagined it (has been known to happen) or my school district was just messed up (very likely) or if this was an actual thing.

There was a Lion King video game? I mean there's a game for every movie, but one that was memorable enough to mention in a musical years later?

6 weeks isn't too bad I guess. The better frame rate will be worth it.

Not that I'm a huge Spelunky fan myself (I play the daily occasionally, made it to the ice caves exactly once) but I think you underestimate how much planning and awareness helps you. There is certainly a certain level of manual dexterity required to play effectively, but much of the game is built around risk reduction. Not putting yourself into a position where you need to make split second twitch reactions is much more important than making those reactions when you do end up in that situation.

Also, Batman doesn't give a shit about Gotham, he just wants to go be a playboy in tropical paradise.

I ended up just creating a bunch of initialization functions and just calling the proper one based on planet name. I'm not sure it's the best solution, but it'll work for now while I study up on C# some more. Now to add an actual trading ship that you can move around and it will be come an actual "game." It'll be easy and boring, but at least it'll be something. Edit: Which actually brings me to another question. I want to basically have an idle animation that has your little space ship orbitting the planet. The easy way to do this from a visual perspective would be to have a version of the ship as child object under each planet, that way I can just rotate the planet + ship combo or plot a circular path for the ship with the parent object as the port of origin. The problem with that is I'd effectively have five (or hundreds later on when I add more planets) of child ship objects so a seperate container will be needed to hold the various ship stats (cargo held, damage, etc.) I guess there's nothing stopping me from creating an invisible object out there somehwere to hold all that, but I don't know if that's the best way or not.

So tempted by EDF. Maybe I can dig up my old dying 360 and coax it into working long enough for my wife and I to play together.

Dark Souls and Titanfal occupy two very different but equally important parts of my gaming life. The solitary, stay inside all day and vegitate side versus the play with my friends online and kick ass side. Unfortunately, my friends loose intrest pretty quickly, so I pretty much have to be there playing multiplayer day one to get the best out of it, while Dark Souls can slide a bit. I'd love to be there during the discovery process but I'm not sure if I'd really be able to contribute all that much. Plus, it would be really difficult to decide what stuff I want to discover on my own and what stuff I want to discover with the rest of the community. Really, the biggest thing is that I don't want to take the crazy framerate hits like you would get on the 360. I don't care to count pixels, but bad framerates can get you killed.