Bjorn

Thanks, I knew there was a classic JRPG that did that, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was. It would be nice if more games did this. Though given the generally pessimistic view that people have over completion rates, it's probably hard to justify the extra content. Adding in a few dozen text lines to Earthbound is one thing, but recording another 30-60 minutes of dialogue for a big RPG is probably another.

I have friends who are heavily involved in sci-fi professionally. It's almost a constant battle to get a great sci-fi/speculative fiction books recognized as such when they hit the mainstream. The weird thing is that sci-fi cinema and television is incredibly highly regarded. We don't condemn it as being a "genre" cinema and try to pretend that 2001 or Alien aren't sci-fi.

There's really not that fine of a line between flirting, expressing interest and being sexually harassing. You can easily do the first two without the third being involved. Unless you're trying to describe sexually charged banter, which is something that you earn the privilege of engaging in with another person. It doesn't come by default.

That was a crazy evening, after the game we drove downtown just to oggle the crowd and feel all the good vibes. One of the coolest things I've ever witnessed.

One solution is to not let the player go on a power trip, keep things balanced throughout the game. Bad solutions (Oblivion) have done it by scaling all enemies to the player's level. Good solutions (the Souls games) let players feel a lot more powerful, while continuing to throw increasingly challenging enemies at them. Since you revisit old areas in those games, you get the satisfaction of crushing things that once killed you, but know that out there somewhere is your next death at the next monster.

That's amazing. I was sure the dog story was just made up, until I googled it. Also, I just spent 40+ minutes reading a company newsletter. Y'all did good (well, Duncan did good, and you did good by having him do it).

I thought Garden City was a real city growing up, and Wichita was a thriving metropolis! We didn't travel much. Well, we went to Houston a few times to see family, but Houston is just sprawl, it's like someone stitched a hundred boring cities together haphazardly. I really hope ESPN's forecasted bracket changes a bunch over the next couple of weeks. As it stands now, the Shockers, KU and K-State are all expected to be in the same 16, which will blow if that's how it shakes out. I want a shot at two Kansas teams in the Final Four.

They refined a lot of the rough edges going to Dark Souls (which is a funny thing to say about that game). A casual glance, and they look like they could be the same game. But the details and systems are quite different, and give it a different feel. I had forgot how comforting I found regular bonfires. The rarity of the teleporter points in DeS is a lot more unnerving. I had forgot how brutal half health is. The hit detection feels a lot different. Short weapons feel shorter. Weapons seem to collide with the environment a bit more.

I used to really like RPS, and even some of Walker's pieces. But as time goes on, I'm becoming less and less enchanted with the entire site, in part due to Walker, and in part due to...other things. Things that are probably entirely too far off topic for this thread. Unless someone really wants to hear me bitch about RPS, if anyone thinks that's more interesting than Thief. Meh, continue on with Thief discussions. It's a shame the overall impression is that it's simply an average game. I was hoping for more.

It's terrible, but I can't help but picture him as some sort of creepy living kewpie doll. ESPN had a great article last year about the crazy psychology behind hating a particular kind of player like Craft.

Probably not, there were going to be mounting costs to trying to secure that trademark, as more and more interest was drawn to it (and we don't even know if Hasbro had done anything quietly in the background). Ultimately their legal team probably realized that there was a very slim chance of securing it, and drawing out the process was only going to cost them more in legal fees and bad PR.

I fired up Demon's Souls last night, as I'm really jonesing for DkS2 to be out. I only played DeS once, and kind of cheesed through it with a Royal mage. Think I'm going to opt for a Meat Cleaver balanced build this time so I can play around with a variety of weapons, since it takes both Dex and Str to use effectively. Maybe I'm out of practice, but this is feeling a lot harder than DkS. I ended up dying 3 times getting to the first boss. Of course, I've run through the opening of DkS at least 10 times now, and can sail through it with any starting loadout with my eyes closed. Not sure how far I'll go, but I am digging being back in Boletaria. And this absolutely confirms I'm going to buy DkS2 on the PS3 on release. No way I'm waiting for the PC release to drop.

Totally reasonable, most "gaming" peripherals make me want to puke. One of the reasons I like the G9x is it's rather subdued compared to a lot of gaming products. Unfortunately it looks like Logitech has given up on that design.

Even with other people, and the chaos, I also haven't been able to enjoy Monaco. I want to like it. I want to like it very much. On paper, it does so much right. But I've tried it a half dozen times or so, and am ready to be done playing within 10 minutes or so.

:tup: :tup: "Final gong after Hong Kong Mahjong tourney goes wrong"

I think I still have one of those in the bottom of a drawer somewhere. I may have to go looking. I know it's super discolored from many years of good service. I couldn't bring myself to throw it away when I finally replaced it.

I can't speak to the G500s, but I love my G9x, which looks similar to the G500s. Of course I don't actually use it for gaming much, I use it on my work machine. It's crazy comfy and I use all the extra buttons and macro abilities to speed up my work.

Part of that is trading cards. Unfortunately they have probably broken the value in deriving any real information from Steam achievements for games that have them. I have a bunch of games from bundles and sales that I have started and let run in the background to harvest their cards, but never started an actual game of. And I have more that I messed around with for a few minutes, getting the first achievement, but then alt-tabbed into the background to go back to what I was doing. Over time, the review feature is probably doing the same thing, where you have to at least have launched the game to leave a review. Probably doesn't skew it as much as cards, but I'm sure it happens.

I'm reading the rules on Wikipedia to traditional Mahjong right now, of which I'm completely ignorant. I know it's probably being unfamiliar with the proper terms, but I love the descriptions of play. This is the best:

Fuck. That blows. Ramis wrote, directed or starred in what are most of my all time favorite comedies. Going to have to watch Groundhog Day this week.

OMG, we're just talking in an infinite loop aren't we? Like we're just one of many, one of many worlds where the same pattern is repeated over and over again. "There's always a forum, there's always a man, there's always a game."

There's been an element of the argument around achievements and game length that's been bugging me. I agree overall that more games would be better if they were shorter. I love short games that can be finished in a single sitting, or in just a few evenings of light play. But it feels disingenuous to compare completion rates between movies and games. The comparison is almost always made to movies about how few people finish games. Why is that the comparison? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to compare games to TV shows or mini-series? What percentage of people watch part of a TV show, but never finish it? Even shows with narrative arcs, like Game of Thrones or Walking Dead? If you're comparing it to books, what percentage of people never finish a series of books that's 3-10 books long? TV is also a better comparison for the argument around replayability. How many people actually rewatch the entirety of a TV show? Probably a tiny percentage of the overall viewership. But, people are probably far more likely to rewatch particular episodes. Perhaps there is a lesson there for developers. Unlock the entirety of the game after completion (or even from the beginning). Let people jump in and play any part of the game they want, without having to cultivate their own save games to do so. It's an odd thing about games. If I just want to read the first and last chapters of a murder mystery, I can (and have met people who do). If I want to just watch the final season of a TV show, I can do that. But if you want to play the end of a game, fuck you, you're playing the entire thing.

And it may be high. I don't know! But at heart, I'm a skeptic of everything. I'm skeptical of Levine's letter and Take 2's silence, and I'm skeptical of the criticism of Levine. I will point out to these stats though. The average US employee only stays at a job a little over 3 1/2 years. So based on national averages, a company might be expected to go through a number of employees equaling almost 200 percent of its workforce in 7 years (slightly longer than BI's development). The tech sector, including gaming companies, has an even higher turn. They can potentially replace a number of employees equal to their entire staff every single year, at the far end of the scale. Based on those stats, if Irrational had around 150 employees, in order to stand out, they would have been needing to hire around 150 people a year in order to be at the far extreme of churn in their industry. It seems like if there were 600-1000 former employees out there, the odds of having a couple of whistleblowers willing to go public would be higher.

This has become a bit of a mantra in this thread as the most emblematic sign that Levine was a failure, but high turnover is the norm in the gaming industry, and retention is the exception. Because so much focus has been put on it, and because some of the former employees are better known to us than other companies (thanks to the connections the Thumbs have to Irrational), this might be a case of confirmation bias leading people to believe that the turnover was exceptional simply because we know more about it. Was their turnover rate significantly different than the industry norm? Was it significantly different than other Take 2 owned studios? Was it significantly different than other publisher owned AAA studios? Was the churn during BI significantly different than the churn at other studios that have had a 5-6 year development cycle for a game? I tend to agree that the company probably had some serious culture problems, and that some of that was related to Levine. But this thread (perhaps unintentionally) makes it feel like there was something unique or different about the culture and atmosphere at Irrational. Rather, if you turn the microscope on any gaming company (like Kotaku did here), you start to see the same pattern of complaints emerge. It feels a bit odd to dogpile on a single individual for what may well be the collective sins of the industry. And part of the reason for that dogpile is that Levine has made himself a target by being more public than a lot of studio heads. Between being more accessible to interviews and the podcast run, he made himself more visible, and on the Internet, visibility means target. If Levine would have kept a super low profile over the last 10 years, would this discussion be happening? I don't think he should be immune from criticism, but it just feels that in the wake of all this that the criticism has lacked context and scope.