Jake

I think the CastMedium guys are fans. They documented the cast pretty thoroughly when it was in production.

How private do people want this server? Do we still grant destruction access on a per account basis to keep newbs from vandalizing? It occurred to me that we could possibly keep the server more vibrant and full of users if we mentioned its existence... anywhere. On the homepage, Twitter feed, etc... but I don't know if that's what people actually want. It would be easy for instance to write up a blog, send out a tweet, drop a mention in a few of the bigger gaming podcast threads out there, even add the idlemc site to the navbar at the top of the homepage. I don't know if that's what people actually want, though. If people do want a little promotion, would that be a think people would want once the world is more stabilized, or when the world is more fresh? Do servers get totally trashed and clogged when the unwashed show up?

I had that 90% done about 3 years ago and was told it was not an immediate priority. A few months after that, someone accidentally paved over the code. So, maybe someday someone else will get to it. I know it sucks right now. Also I have hardly anything to do with the website anymore. Sometimes I miss it, but only a very little bit.

Agreed, I thought it was great. And also agreed that the break is the greatest invention in podcasting.

Eh that's marketing, splitting hairs, whatever. SMW is integrated into the Mario All Stars menu on that cart -- its not its own separate thing. You scroll SMB1, Lost Levels, SMB2, SMB3, SMW as if it was the original All-Stars cart, but with an extra game (... which is what it is !) Yoshi's Island should be included on all consoles and cartridges. Are there any that are good? They always seem to be ridiculous airbrush gold plated "STRAIGHT FROM THE ARCADE TO YOU" packs that I find incredibly offputting so I've never really investigated.

(Possibly the greatest Nintendo bundle ever made in my opinion. A SNES with a billion Mario games is pretty unstoppable.)

This is true: People from TTG talked to Tom Wilson's agent(s), and were told that he is not interested in doing BTTF related work. I don't know anything beyond that, but saying that we didn't try is false, since people did try and were shut down immediately.

I made the line to the winterwonderland area underground because I thought it was fun, but I had imagined that as minecarts got less sucky there would be a variety of above and underground lines. Also minecarts should clearly kill zombies. Also also, I am pro monstar. I'm also pro-expedition to find a new more interesting spawn, but a new world would also be fine.

Or in Minecraft parlance, an "ultra boost."

I didn't play a lot of games this year (SURPRISE!*) but of the games I did play, I really enjoyed Super Meat Boy (maybe the most well made indie platformer I've ever played. the mania and precision of great hardcore indie platformers with the pacing and structure of the most addictive casual and mobile games is an unstoppable combo), and Minecraft (I've helped build a working continental subway system, and a 4 or 5 story tall stone flaming "Congrats Nick" sign. Yes that's all it takes.), and BioShock 2 (specifically Minerva's Den which condensed down most of the things I liked about Bio2 into a short burst of good times). I watched Famous play a lot of Red Dead and that game looks sweet, but I've only played the first 10 minutes myself. I played further into StarCraft II than I would have expected but not as far as I wanted to, so its not on the list either. * Utilizing the tragically underused [soiler] tag.

Those games aren't all fucking winkey about it though. The series opens with a huge Sam and Max poster up on the wall, doesn't it? That's the opposite of a coy wink, it's a punch in the face, which is much preferred by me when it comes to this stuff. That's completely different from a horribly voiced, poorly translated character, in the middle of a taking-itself-slightly-too-seriously adventure, saying to himself "I wish i had a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle of it around now!" and then basically looking around expectantly for audience applause or something.

I agree with this entirely. I work for a company that was founded on the coattails that the games in this thread ride, so I don't have a lot of room to talk about that I guess, but it does drive me crazy when adventure games try to live or die or somehow think they're showing their quality by feeding off of straight-up references to 20 years ago. The games they're referencing were good because they were amazingly original and had unique elements that stuck with you years after playing. The worst way to pay homage to that originality and the spirit of those great adventure games is by stuffing your game with nothing but allusions to something better than what you're making. When you fill all of your allotted time and space with straight up references to other things, you leave yourself no room to be original or clever. I guess I've been lucky in that regard -- in the bullet-dodged-technically-but-not-really sense -- since working on games which actually have the Monkey Island or Sam & Max brands attached has let the projects I've been involved in get "away with it" solely by those meta jokes and allusions being literally self referential instead of just referential, but my favorite parts of Telltale's games are the parts where they break away from those franchises' narrative or gameplay traditions and do something unique.

Big fat LOL to people at Telltale not knowing or caring about it. Things like that do not happen arbitrarily, especially when creating a video game. I wish that a magic accident fairy was responsible for the audio compression in release builds of Telltale games, but it is a deliberate choice. It's not an aspect of our games that I like, but it's also something I have no control over.

Hm that sucks. That doesn't look like the Strong Bad deck that should be in the patch. Bummer.

Both directions work for me!

The booster carts were there for me and it worked amazingly well. That was awesome!

I'm actually doing a little UI work on Back to the Future, but most of it was done by the guy who did the UI in BioShock 2. I'm cleaning up some last minute stuff. Then I'm on to who knows what. But I've been heads down on Poker Night, Puzzle Agent, and Sam & Max 305 the whole time people have been working on the Universal games.

I think in the full GameTrailers.tv episode there is some straight gameplay capture. Not sure, though! It's amazing how little I know about this game.

Would you have any interest in helping me accelleration/stops w/the Wonderland line? Or at least showing me the basics so I can keep working

Don Bluth's Warf Ace

Fair enough. I'm sure I notice his name far more when it's on a scathing, disappointed piece, and notice the name of the outlet more on a positive one. Not on purpose, but probably unfortunately how my mind works if I'm not super attentive.

Congrats, guys Dan!

I have nothing to do with the poker AI but I'll be trying to fix whatever else I can in the update we're putting out. I'm glad John Walker has such high personal standards, but man do I wish he would acknowledge that in addition to high standards he has very narrow and very specific personal tastes, and he reviews exclusively to them. He surely realized years ago that Telltale titles aren't to his taste, but he continues to pick up the reviews for TTG titles, only to take huge bombastic shits on them, spilling pages and pages of ink to say "I don't like it, I was disappointed." I know its his job, and I don't fault him for it, but if I was him I would have probably just stopped writing about Telltale titles by now, and saved myself the ulcer. Correct. The cards' draw order is based on a random seed value generated at the start of the hand -- the digital equivalent of shuffling the deck -- so the cards that you see were fated the moment you clicked the "deal" button. We're even burning a card between the flop, turn, river like you're supposed to do, which means nothing really other than tryin to be gratuitously accurate. I think that our programmer even populated the textures of the burned cards (which are only ever really seen face down, off to the side of the community cards), so you could conceivably see them if you used one of those 3D ripping programs that grabs whenever is being drawn to screen and lets you open it in 3DS Max.

Yeah it just makes the NPCs make smarter decisions. The NPC AI has two axes -- skill, and aggression. If I'm not mistaken, Strong Bad is moderate-to-low skill, high aggression, the Heavy is moderate-to-high skill, very low aggression so he plays conservatively, Tycho is high skill low aggression, and Max's values more or less swing wildly as he plays. People claim this shit is rigged, and I don't get it. What motivation do we have to make it rigged? We went out of our way to make sure the character AI only makes decisions based on what cards it has, what's on the table, and how others have bet. The deck isn't stacked, and the different AI players don't have the ability to peek. With a game where there's no money at stake and the game is surely more fun if there's no cheating, why in the hell would we make it work that way? People really confuse me when they make that assumption. I lied. The Telltale copy does not include Steam achievements. That said, buying it from Telltale gives you a complimentary Steam copy. Visit www.telltalegames.com/tf2unlocks while logged into the TTG site, and assuming you bought Poker Night from us, it'll give you a Steam product key to unlock your copy in Steam.