Marek

Whoa! Did not know that! Also thanks for linking to Prologue. I absolutely love their work and hadn't seen some of their recent stuff.

My horse is pretty high, but then again you don't want to know what we feed them in Holland. CHING BOOM CRASH. Nachimir, I commend you for trying to steer this thread back on topic. I'm totally not helping you with this post, though.

I'd definitely read that. He's got very interesting things to say about game design, especially considering that he comes from a very different film background. At least, I remember really liking his interview in the book Game Design: Theory & Practice.

Okay, all that stuff you guys are saying about NLP sounds really fucking lame. I kinda got that dodgy vibe a lot from the actual NLP stuff out there and probably avoided it for that reason. However it would be awesome if just some of the basic techniques could be extracted and repackaged as some kind of Brain Training-esque exercise program, without all the other BS weighing it down, seeing how simple they are and how much they are based on common sense. Anyway, I might be sidetracking this thread.

Jake, you've talked before about what you think about the forums -- that it has a tendency to turn into pretentiousness, e.g. people only appreciating a certain specific style of games (such as the artsy and indie ones) or being dismissive of things for no good reason, or generally waving their pipe around. And I generally agree with you. I mean, with the sort of sarcastic tone that is prevalent here there's always a fine line between 'ha ha we're just joking around' and 'check it out, actually being pretentious now under this veil of sarcasm', and sometimes that line gets crossed or confused. I think foregoing the pretentiousness (fake or otherwise) more often would be healthy for this forum. HOWEVER, I'm not sure if posts such as the above help the situation at all. I mean, it's firstly not always clear what you mean, and it also derails threads, but it also actually make you look like the problem. You can't fight fire with fire. Even though I agree with you, maybe it's time to get off the high horse and just lead by example? I dunno.

Absolutely great interview. Loved it. And it's cool that Jordan Mechner left a comment.

You can get it on iTunes by going to Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast > and then pasting the RSS URL into it. But we'll get an iTunes button as well.

I've listened to half that podcast and the way the guy describes it makes it sound pretty dodgy. I've never studied NLP closely so there might be an iceberg of shit that I'm not aware of (I suspect there is). I'll say this from experience though: some excellent techniques have come from NLP that, while being pseudoscience, can be really super helpful. Personally I have used techniques like reframing, anchoring, etc. and various other mental exercises in the past and they've helped me set better long-term goals, communicate better (for instance, in presentations), reassess certain assumptions I've had, or help see failures as victories.

Oh no, not another mass account suicide spree. Second time this week! 1 days since last accident 0 days since last accident.

That could still refer to a prostitute, you know that right?

You have no idea how cheap those things are. Legalisation brings costs down, you know. But maybe I'll do the hilarious thing of getting a used copy at the same place I traded it in. Maybe I'll get my old copy back. It would be like fate.

I was going to join in but then I forgot I had traded back GTA IV. Regrets...

Dudes, sometimes it's better not to know things. Trust me on this one! However, I agree that Yufster should join the podcast sometime. Signor: I'm just saying, threesomes are great. Anything less seems like a step down.

Hahaha that's an awesome story.

I'll check this out! Some of the guests sound amazing. I mean... an NLP practitioner talking about games? Potentially very very interesting!

P.S. I forgot to say, I wasn't just being facetious on the podcast about this stuff being hard. It seems easy to just chat about games and record it but in the back of your mind you're constantly wondering if what you're saying is at all interesting. So it's always nice to see when people listened to it and left a comment!

Some disagreement exists between me and Spaff on the ideal number of people. Personally I think 3 people gives the best kind of dynamic but I also like to experiment. Oh, and thanks!

What would help here, I think, is using smilies sometimes so that people know what you really mean. Cause if I flip back to page 1, Zaarin's posts stick out as having an unpleasant near-trollish sort of tone. Maybe it depends on how you read it, but there aren't many pointers for me on how to read it, so maybe you can help me out with that. What followed was maybe a gangrape but I guess that shows that multiple people took your posts in a certain way Zaarin. This isn't about being forced to like Guitar Hero. It just seemed you didn't know quite what GH's gameplay is/isn't and also your earlier posts came across as potentially having a lot of dismissive attitude. So yeah just telling you my angle on this, and I hope it's just a case of miscommunication.

That's not really the point. Your description of Guitar Hero is just so far off the mark that you clearly have no idea what the game is like, so to dismiss it entirely based on your incorrect mental image of what it is, and then kind of throw your arms up and say "what's the big deal with these pretend musicians?!", is pretty lame. It's fine if something doesn't appeal to you, and if that's the case you probably shouldn't buy it, but that's not the same as scoffing at something you apparently know very little about it. Anyway, it's fine... just.... you know.

It's a FAAAAAAAKEEEEEEEEE!!!!! x 1000.

It grows so fucking fast they have to trim it all the time. Sometimes they even have to trim it in half. That's what I've heard anyway. What's NC Soft?

It was blatantly clear to me the first time I saw it that it was a commercially made ad. It would have been 100x better if they'd made that clear though. No need in trying to fake anything. A cool ad that admits it's an ad is still a cool ad and you'll still want to send it along to your friends. For proof see that Warioland ad they had on YouTube recently.

This is such an important issue that I decided to write an editorial about it . http://www.idlethumbs.net/display.php?id=75 Might be fun to read.

Rusalka is the world's foremost independent Peter Molyneux expert. Don't even think she's joking.

I like the interface a lot. The coverflow-esque stuff is great because scrolling through huge text lists one by one when looking for new games or whatever was such a huge pain. The new interface already enticed me to download a demo and download an XBLA trial that I had overlooked before. This whole thing is, in theory, great. I just wish it would stop giving me all these error messages when opening a new info tab thingie.