Jake

Oh thumbs, you wacky forum.

The Noby Noby Boy cover of the MetroCross song has been stuck in my head for the last 24 hours.

God bless that menu/mini-game and song. So happy. Didn't know it was a reference to Metro Cross, a game I'd never heard of or played.

What?

and/or hernia.

Haha Arts and Crafts style can suck it!!!!

Hi Ben, welcome to the forums!

Another week, another thingey on the thing. Enjoy! "The Sources' Duel" Confidential informants collide and megatons are dropped in this week's high-speed episode. We talk about gaming narrative as a pastiche of tone and suggestion, but you just want your damn cutscenes. Plus: Wired's Chris Kohler joins us to dismember your naked form with a samurai sword. Replayability: 3.7. Games discussed: Afro Samurai, Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, Assassin's Creed, Mirror's Edge, Full Throttle

Petaluma, CA seems like it was a good intentioned site until someone went and added that events update scroller thing on the front page. Other subpages are also occasionally destroyed by the passage of time. For a city's web page I'd give it a but you can see that unless it gets some love eventually it will slide down the slope into town. "tdown town" I call it.

The "new EA" is also bleeding money too. Maybe the economy is just horrible. Activision losing money makes me want to read up on this though.

Yes its amazing how, when the people who are paying you get into a mode where they are spitballing horrible ideas left and right, they seem to forget that they are spending money on every hour you take up doing those horrible stupid things. It's often an annoyingly one-way street, where it is near impossible to get time allocated to spend developing your own ideas to a presentable point, but time is an unlimited resource when it comes to polishing some turd.

Good use of Blingee there. That is a great site.

I think this is pretty much exactly right. I don't think that anyone sets out to make a dull advertisement, and that most people do respond more positively to well done and interesting advertising, but once it comes around to their own product, managers often become afraid of the risks you have to take to make something compelling, or they think that they have seen enough ads to know enough about how they're made to pull the right decision out of their hat/ass. Being risk averse and also simultaneously donning a weird veneer of boldness leading to weird snap decisions often results in complete horribleness.

I worked at local weeklies for a bit under three years, and I know exactly what you mean It being a few years ago for me, I mostly did real estate ads as opposed to cars, and also occasionally ads for the local Dairy Queen. I escaped that job for my current far more enjoyable job doing most of the graphic design at Telltale Games... which is not perfect by any means but is obviously a million times more enjoyable than days and days of yet another black and white picture of a hamburger or a tractor or a photo of a 90% built house onto which which I have to clone-tool in a fully grown lawn. That's not to say that more than a week goes by without someone asking to make the logo bigger, make the colors pop, add a hilariously off-putting starburst or call to action, or whatever, but I think that basically always comes with the territory of being an advertising/promotion-focused graphic designer, unless you're somehow in the position to only work on your own projects. That stuff is all obviously far more tolerable when you're working on a video game, though! Also, surely you've seen this.

Telltale designer Chuck Jordan always has good writeups on Lost and BSG. I don't always agree with his assessment but they're usually worth reading. Here's his for this week's BSG.

I'm curious to see if any of the last few episodes matter. I mean, if they had just stricken these episodes from the record, and Gaeta and Zarick had just never made another appearance during the run of the show except in crowd shots or whatever in a hypothetical series finale, would anyone have noticed? We've had all of this cool revolution military coup business, but now are we just back to where we were before the last two or three episodes, with Adama unequivocally in control and "unrest in the fleet" over siding with the Cylon rebels?

"This game just punched your mom." -IGN.com

A lot of ideal solutions "sound better" than a practical solution. I wish that I and all other game menu makers had infinite resources. Games would probably look and feel a lot better and have better flow all around. Sadly, game menus and user accessibility and flow through them has only recently started to get any attention, and still not as much as it should. Menus are often the first and last thing you interact with in a play session, so half-assing them seems dumb, but they're definitely not the core reason someone buys your game, so they often don't get the money or time they deserve. As for it being a "terrible place" for that, I don't follow. At least on the 360, it's basically just the logo of the game you're playing, over which the 360 draws a big blade or pop-up with the system UI for account management. Ideally it would obviously be nice to have custom built and scripted menu modes for any and all fringe states the game could be in, but it's not always achievable with the time and resources available. The problem with an "ideal" anything is that practically it often doesn't help anything. For instance, should an indie gamemaker spend time and money coding up a bunch of conditionals for their menus in case you stupidly decide to sign out of live in the middle of a game, or should they drop in the few lines of code which will just kick a signed-out account to the start screen, and devote more time to the rest of their game?

There's an incredibly practical reason for Press Start screens, at least on some consoles. That doesn't make Press Start screens any less annoying (they are dumb, and I also loathe them on PC titles... especially when I have to ship a game with one *), but there are some places where they have some tangible benefits. I don't know if the "press start" screens are required for certification purposes, but they do serve a function on game consoles which have account systems -- they're a great place to deposit players if you, for instance, sign out of your Xbox Live account mid-game. If all of your menu systems in-game are contingent on the player having an account -- for instance, if all of the save/load screens are for saves tied to your gamertag, if the achievements and leaderboards are tied to your gamertag, etc -- it's far far easier and more clean to just drop the player on a separate, simple screen outside of all of that if they sign out. The other option is to create alternate states for all of your menus which only enable offline functionality, have messages all over the place about how you can't save while logged out, can't access leaderboards, etc. On the Wii, the Press Start screen is often there to make sure the player has the controller oriented the right way -- in a game where you hold the remote in "pointer" mode, it will often ask you to press A+B, an easy thing to do when your thumb and index finger are on the top and bottom of the remote, as they are in pointer mode. If you're intended to hold it in "classic" NES-controller-style mode, the game will often ask you to press 1 or 2, as that's where your right thumb is. The rationale behind the Wii one is definitely more suspect -- I am never excited by games which sort of assume you're dumb -- but I have really appreciated the presence of the Press Start screen when building out the different menu states for Wallace & Gromit on XBLA. * Strong Bad for PC has the "Press A" screen from the Wii, though it says "click here," which is kind of hilarious to me in how sort of console-port it feels. Oh well. The team liked the art from that screen so they requested it not be cut from the PC version. I won that one with Wallace & Gromit, though, which will ship without the extraneous step of a Press Start screen on the PC release.

Rodi I think this might be another case of you wanting a very specific thing, and then holding that fact against anything that isn't what you were looking for ahead of time. You often seem disappointed that something doesn't match up with "the version you would have made" or "the version they should have made" or "what it should be," which you carry around in your head the moment you hear about a concept. I do the same thing to a degree, but from reading your reactions to things on Thumb, I think sometimes that your own imagined version of what someone else's work should be clouds your appreciation for what someone else's work is. I think it's also why you sometimes come across as self-important sounding to me -- it often appears to me that you're claiming that your own purely-hypothetical version of something is always superior to whatever real world achievement you're comparing it against. Again, I do it as well, and I imagine everyone does -- it's fun and often invigorating to look at a piece of work and ask yourself how you'd improve it, or what you would have done -- but I've found it can be easy to take that a step too far, where you end up closing your mind to some great things, because you've confused your own ideas as the best ones, or in and of themselves as great guidelines or rules.

Haha burn. I imagine that's only the case because Nick doesn't talk enough to reveal his true form. Also a burn.

Am I allowed to think that that rules? I love coming across people who make the shit that nobody actually thinks about someone actually making.

"I'll Kill the Last Alien" We're back, sans guest for the first time in a while, with a fairly PC-centric episode (completely by chance). Enjoy! Kaz Hirai says you'll truly appreciate the complexity of this podcast in about nine and a half years. Nick Breckon says you're a baby who likes baby games. And a cheat, too, I bet. Games discussed: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (Beta), StarCraft II, Mirror's Edge, Bit.Trip Beat, Crysis: Warhead, Assassin's Creed

Your day would be perfect with the addition of some sort of grinning, farting orangutan running off with your camera or 360, and possibly someone getting hit in the balls with something.

Spoiler: This quickly turned into a side-rant that is unrelated to your post, so don't take it personally. I know you were probably not being serious, but it reminded me of a stupid thing, so I went off. Just so you know. I think that Michael Land is already doing fine for himself. Also, why would he get the patent? Not only was he not the sole developer of the system, he did it for pay while employed at LucasArts. I doubt he was ever under the delusion that he would own that technology, and hopefully he was also never under the delusion that he was the only person responsible for making it happen. Just because his name is on it among the list of developers, and just because he was also the lead composer on Monkey Island 2 doesn't mean that it was wholly his creation. He probably had a very large role in its conception and implementation, but I don't think that makes it "his." I'm fine with giving people creative credit where credit is due (and Michael Land is due a lot of credit for the creation and execution of iMuse), but even more than in film, it seems like gamers are extremely eager to credit and call out sole creative voices on projects they like. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened as a reaction to the game industry's tendency to not ever call out or namecheck creative leads at all, but the flipside of just saying "iMuse is by Michael Land" or whatever, is also maybe not the best. It deifies people in gratuitous weird ways. At the farthest end of that spectrum, you get the 90s PC Gamer "Game Gods" cover issue, and at the other extreme you get the industry standard of absolutely no recognition. I know people like calling out the contributions of names they know (and I know that I am harping gratuitously on what was an offhand remark which wasn't intended to be taken this way) but in gamer culture it sometimes goes to such an extreme that it breaks with how things actually get conceived and made.