Jake

What? I don't want to speak for Steve here, but I don't think that Steve came on the podcast to air dirty laundry. That's obviously an issue that both the employees and the company have decided is a private matter. And, Steve didn't work for Irrational, so he would not just be airing dirty laundry, but it would be second-hand gossip? That seems like a suspicious request! That said, glad you're liking the show! And Steve will definitely be back, (unless he hates us now for not asking him to tell the public The Truth ).

After reading this I am wondering that myself. (You set yourself up, here, sorry man. I hereby prescribe you: Your own medicine.) Also, I recommend YouTube Comment Snob. Possibly the best Firefox plugin ever. It hides YouTube comments which contain too many spelling mistakes, no capital letters or punctuation, gratuitous capital letters or punctuation, gratuitous profanity, etc. It doesn't censor against unnecessarily verbose pretentious wanking, unfortunately, but it does get rid of 99% of the useless garbage in YouTube comments. Edit: Oops! I apparently didn't read the whole thread (can't fathom why), and missed that Nappi already linked to the comment snob. Sorry for the repeat information.

I'm pretty sure Marek had his neck shortened for his portrait, but it grew back.

miffy495 is Alex Ashby

You are, as is everyone else. Just put down the pipe and snifter for gods sake. This was meant as a joke, not as a way of life on the boards.

You're such a self-righteous pompous prick. Christ.

The credit in the game is "British Advisor is Alex Ashby," in proper reference to his former career as Stunts, but it got incorrectly paraphrased in the manual.

Vintage bump! www.twitter.com/ja2ke

iMuse is cool, and elements of it are patented, but the audio tools in XNA/XACT, and the popular middlware FMod (featured hugely in the opening splash screen to LittleBigPlanet, but used by hundreds of developers) allow for complex realtime mixing, filtering, randomization, pitch shifting (for instance to make everfootstep ever play at the same rate and tone so you never hear the exact same footstep twice), iMuse style interactive loop markers and transitions to segue music from space to space, 3D positioning including occlusion detection to make sounds' reverb and mix properties change if they suddenly find themselves behind a wall, and a whole bunch more. It takes a lot more implementation time and uses more system memory than most developers are willing to spare for "just the sound," but the technology is all there right now in various places. I wish more people paid attention to it, because I think good audio helps games more than it gets credit for. Good sound doesn't sell a game like a good screenshot (or a good trailer with great sound done by an outside mixing house) does, though, so I imagine it's a very hard fight to get time and money invested in improving audio quality. I'm sure this difficulty is compounded by fewer and fewer studios having their own in-house audio team to fight for such improvements. At LucasArts in the '90s, they had all of their sound designers and composers in-house, and to my understanding, some of them were also programmers to varying degrees of proficiency. That is a rare combination -- having the staff in-house to be able to promote and fight for a better audio solution, and to have that department also within itself contain the resources necessary to program in the new audio functionality. Most game studios seem to have neither of those things -- most sound and music work is outsourced or done through a partner company, and most music programming and implementation is either middleware, or coded in at its barest level early in the project and then declared good enough, while that programmer goes on to something else.

Either way, you referred to it as a "flOw rip-off." It's a pretty bold jump to expect people to read that as "the interpretation being inspiring to the creators of the original project." Anyway, whatever! Spore!

Wait. wasn't flOw announced after (and, if I remember correctly, inspired by) Will Wright's original GDC demo of Spore a couple years back?

Secret fact: Gillen's New Games Journalism piece was one of the many original sources of inspiration the whole staff was kicking around on the pre-launch staff forum when we were starting the site in 2004. We then thankfully forgot that we were at all referencing that piece as well as anything else we were pointing at excitedly at the time, as it allowed the concepts to blend and mutate into their own thing, hopefully free of any overly direct lines pointing at any one particular site or article. That said, we forgot so much that we'd all read that article, that when NGJ became some sort of thing for a while, with those top ten articles, and UKR trying to beat it to death, we somehow managed to avoid the whole conversation entirely. I was surprised at the time that nobody pointed to thumb as a site which practiced some elements of NGJ either as an example of a bunch of wankey assholes (eg UKR who managed to not notice that we had all sorts of un-scored reporter-centric stories describing the experiences of playing in a virtual world, or whatever), or as a positive example of anything written with those concepts in mind, but hey. I guess it means that either we somehow fortunately dodged a bunch of retarded crap, or nobody was reading the site. Most likely both.

We do hope to have guests. We'll see!

Yeah, at least from my memories/experiences of the time, the "console war" during the Genesis/NES era was Sega repeatedly Pepsi-challenging Nintendo in ad after ad, basically into an empty void. People bought a Genesis or they bought an NES, or if you were an only child, you might have had both, and that was pretty much it. I don't think it was really until maybe the "Genesis version of Mortal Kombat has blood, Super Nintendo version doesn't!" playground scandal that anything really came to a head. This might not have been the situation in the UK/Europe, though, where the MegaDrive actually gained a sizable foothold over the NES, if I remember correctly? I remember pointing out to my Genesis-owning friend that his blood-laden version's graphics looked like shit compared to the SNES, and the music sounded like someone sat on a Casio keyboard, and I remember him actually looking sort of forlorn for a second and saying "you're right."

In reality, not everyone has done everything! Heaven forbid we have someone on the podcast who grew up a PC gamer. Heaven forbid we have someone on the podcast who has already played GOW2 and shared an opinion. I think pointing out that while the original Playstation brought a lot of gaming into the mainstream, its culture also introduced a lot of the Hollywood-infused bullshit into modern AAA titles, is a pretty fair bit of blame to lay on it. Also yeah, I never played Blade Runner. What of it? I don't quite see where you're going with this... That said, glad you seemed to enjoy it regardless of whatever that point you were making is. I dont think that eBay guy will be back this week, but I hope you continue to listen anyway.

No you're just unobservant. Scroll a bit. In the real site of course the forums will be linked higher up.

I hope you're found dead with my feces in your mouth. Just rot.

Is it supposed to be Sweet Child O' Mine?

Man that blows. Sorry you were all lamed upon.

this rules. forgot how awesome thumb smilies are

Somewhere in California, just months before E3 2004, this existed: Consider yourselves lucky this didn't happen to you.

Great article, Duncan. That is spot on in its depressing...ness and also its optimism. Also "congrats" on getting linked on the front page of Kotaku with your Powerpoint thing! heh.

And God saw that it was good God Hand: a game that provides a number of opportunities to create word plays on religious references. Also a great punk game.

Also, if you had a time machine, and showed Mario Galaxy to yourself from say 15 years ago, that person would probably have just as much trouble with Galaxy as they do with, say, SMB3. I used to think that SMB3 was this disaster area of impossibility, but if I play it now I can cruise through most of the games no problem. Towards the end things get a bit tough, but Mario Galaxy isn't a walk in the park once you start getting up to the 90+ stars.

I really liked that in Half-Life 1, sometimes scientists would run up to you and tell you something important, but you could (intentionally or accidentally) crowbar them in the face and they'd just fall to the ground dead, leaving you to figure it out. If they ever needed a scientist to open a locked door, there was usually one on the opposite side to do it, so you could kill the guy on your side if you wanted. It was kind of a bummer to find that in the later games Valve fell so in love with every single "good guy" speaking NPC that you weren't allowed to kill them. It was such a shock when, late in HL1, I was listening to a scientist impart some plot to me, and then I accidentally clicked the mouse and unloaded a shotgun right in his face, dropping him instantly. It was just disappointing when, in HL2 (and most every game of that style since), when I mouse over someone remotely plot-relevant, my character -- who I can make jump off a cliff or smack himself into a crushing vice or automated flamethrower whenever I want -- lowers his gun and won't let me interact. It's obviously a somewhat necessary solution to what would otherwise be, at least at first glance in my mind, an epic problem, but it's still always disappointing. You know that nearly everyone who plays these games tries to fire off a round or two at those NPCs.