Jake

"E for Everyone" would be an amazing name for it. Far less of a failure than the attempt at a "free for all" pun.

All the worst things about E3... TIMES A MILLION! It might be good though.

Serif fonts have the little ornaments on their corners. example care of google images Metronome looks to have really solid use of typography. Also the Metal Gear Solid games are pretty ... solid.

Nice! going a little further we get... Oh... I'm afraid the deflector shield will be quite operational when your friends arrive. Also, Oath, I enjoy that the lamp has earbuds.

I need GH2. Captain Assonance needs to exist.

If you're a condescending asshole to a clerk you're bound to get good service across the board. Good strategy.

I went to Jr. High with Alex Navarro. True story.

Well, because a team of people earn their paycheck from developing Geometry Wars. Someone else ripping off their game is hardly justification for not paying for it.

kill yourself

Whattt?? I asked Alex if it was specifically "Claude Eggerton Eggerton-Greene," as in "is his middle name the same as the first half of his hyphenated last name?!" and he said yes. Boo to that.

I believe his middle and last names are "Eggerton Eggerton-Greene"

One nice thing about living in America is that you can at least do tiny things to try and change the things you hate about it, instead of complaining about them on web forums. But I know what you mean, of course. ... Also er, I work at Telltale Games, doing web design and designing and planning various community features like that Sam & Max web comic generator thing and contests and such, and I also do some UI and graphic design work on the games, and am sneaking into doing some in-engine cutscene work ... all of which is collectively getting closer and closer to exactly the sort of job description I hoped I'd have if I ever got a job working in games.

Please I included a smiley in my post, I wasn't berating you or something, just sayin'!

You know Sam & Max Episode 2 was announced about 2 hours before you made that post?

sorry, for some reason the feedback address was moved to http://www.telltalegames.com/company/contactus And I was being snarky because you were being condescending.

Thanks for the advice.

Telltale's doing fine. The games are doing well and everyone is happy. In the past eight months, since right around the time the second Bone game came out, the company has gone from around 17 people to 30 and is still growing. Sam & Max episodes are coming out on schedule, and the first one has been very well reviewed (probably better reviewed than most people both at Telltale and in the general public were expecting). I haven't seen that many adventure gamers not buying the game because it's not 2D or because it's not traditional. If you set aside the 2D/3D issue, Telltale's Sam & Max games are more traditional than most any major remotely-mainstream commercial adventure game in a while. It's point and click, focused almost entirely on dialogue, inventory, and environment-manipulation puzzles, which isn't the case at all for Dreamfall, Fahrenheit, or even Broken Sword 3 or 4, all of which include combat, stealth, twitch-timing puzzles, and the occasional crazy gesture-based input. Compared to all the crazy stuff the designers of those games were trying to inject into the adventure game formula to make it more hip and up to date, Telltale's games are decidedly retro. When Sam & Max Freelance Police was announced by LucasArts in 2003 there were a lot of people still whining about 2D v 3D, but at least as far as I can tell, by the time Telltale got around to announcing their Sam & Max game in 2005, most adventure game fans who were remotely interested in Sam & Max to begin with had seen Fahrenheit, had possibly played Broken Sword 3, and were interested in Dreamfall, so a high profile adventure game being wholly 3D didn't seem so foreign. At least in my opinion. The thing that breaks my heart about die-hard adventure fans is their lust for puzzles overtaking their desire to meet interesting characters, explore new worlds, and take part in an interesting and atmospheric story. Back in the day I wrote a humongously long bloated thing about it in this thread on the Adventure Gamers forums (specific post in question: here). I always liked adventure games because they had characters and stories unlike any other in the entirety of gaming, but still offered challenges and interactivity that I couldn't get from a more passive medium like a book, comic, or film. The thing is, at least for the vocal uber-hardcore adventure gamers, after you play 80000 adventure games, the puzzle obstacles that used to seem challenging and rewarding start to become instinctual - a seasoned adventure gamer can just *solve* them... at least the ones that aren't totally inane and nonsensical. I think adventure gamers have sort of by and large become the extreme bondage and rape fetishists of the gaming world: The old stuff that used to bring them such joy doesn't do it for them anymore, but what they want now is just not at all healthy or appropriate. It's tough when you want to make a game full of jokes that tells an amusing story, when theres a voice constantly whispering in your ear (or yelling on your forum) to break out the hedge mazes, obscure levers, sliders and huge whirling metal gears and beat them to within an inch of their lives because that's what they like these days. Unhealthy, and my parents just wouldn't get it. Side note: The "Purist" forum signature disease isn't actually present on Adventure Gamers' forum. That forum group, compared to most dedicated AG communities, can on rare occasion be fairly progressive and non-retarded. You can find a bevvy of "Purist" sigs on the Just Adventure forum, and maybe some on GameBoomers, but I don't really know since I don't visit them that often. Name one privately held business - or even to narrow it down, one game company - which releases sales numbers. There aren't any, because it's a stupid thing to give out unless you have to because you have public shareholders. NPD data doesn't count - that comes from retailers, not publishers. Also "We sold a million copies!" doesn't count either - that's a press release celebrating a sales landmark, not routine releases of sales numbers. Would you want your competition tracking how well you're doing exactly? If you have numbers showing what your company is doing in any given month you could, for instance, inadvertently make people assume that you're going down the shitter, causing your fans and potential investors to lose faith in your company or the type of product you make, or maybe your numbers will show that your company doing amazingly well, causing more people to start competing with you or worse, flat out rip you off. It's just not a good idea. I know Telltale is in fairly close communications with their customers and their audience, but there is a line where you have to keep some stuff private.

I occasionally thought that might be the case while playing New SMB, but then I went back and revisited Yoshi's Island on the SNES and realized that really 2D Mario can still feel totally fresh and unique, but New SMB really banks very heavily on nostalgia. It's a great game, and I enjoyed the hell out of it and its 2D Mario platforming action, but it's nowhere near as unique feeling as SMB 3 or Yoshi's Island.

Hey that's nice. All old games combined. Needs more centipede (or maybe there is one and I didn't get that far).

Actually, Kotaku contains no examples of bad journalism because Kotaku contains no journalism to speak of. (for the record, most all of thumbs != journalism either) Barfing out an opinion about something you read elsewhere onto your website without bothering to actually fact check anything, cite sources, or correct your stories when people point out that you posted something inaccurate = a diary, not a news source. There is such a thing as journalism that contains a strong voice, an attitude, a message, a sense of humor, even an opionion, but that's not what Kotaku is doing.They're like Randy Newman in that one episode of Family Guy, just singing about whatever he sees. That's not reporting the news or being a journalist, it's just being a writer who happens to hold the value of their own random opinions in perhaps too high regard. I personally think Kotaku is entertaining in that they sometimes include links to fun distractions and little cheezy cultural bits that they've found online - an amusing distraction from work - but that's it. What bothers me is that so many people seem to read Kotaku and Joystiq as news when really they're just outlets for random dudes to pompously spew out random garbage describing what their eyes happen to be looking at at any given moment, without bothering to let those images stop by their brain first.* * Kyle Orland's posts on Joystiq usually break this rule, but he's one exception.

Marek update your avatar.

The server had a massive hard disk failure. They apparently recovered most of the data and are working on rebuilding the server.

Agreed 100%. I wrote about Mario Galaxy for Shack as part of their E3 coverage and at the time and I was really surprised by how traditional it was. I wasn't sure what to make of that - I was expecting to sit down and be presented with some whole new crazy way to control Mario, and was really thrown when it was "just" a proper-feeling sequel to Mario 64 with some nuanced controls added by the Wii remote. At this point it's all settled down a bit in my brain and, yeah, I'm super excited, for pretty much exactly the reasons Jason posted above.

I wish I had time to write more Distract Yourselfs (selves? whatever) Maybe eventually. In the meantime, I have been wasting time with Armadillo Run and (hee) Plasma Pong (though it is ridiculous and probably won't hold my interest for long at all)