Marek

Yep Cain is confirmed to be in it.

Did you guys see the finale?

So I guess if everyone had lots of time and money, the poll's average would be around 8 or 9?

I voted 8. My personal situation is that I have a Wii, 360 and DS, and on occasion I still play on the PC (Civ 4, Sam & Max). I'm just about done with Oblivion on 360 now. Still have a whole bunch of Gears left to play. Love casually playing Geometry Wars, Assault Heroes and Lumines on the 360. Still playing Ouendan on the DS. Wii is seeing less use at the moment pending more (non-launch) games. Gonna pick up Hotel Dusk soon (couldn't find a copy when I was in the US ). Looking forward to Mass Effect and Guitar Hero on 360, amongst others. Also looking forward to Cooking Mama on the Wii (yes, really) and a whole bunch of Wii stuff in the long-term. Might pick up SSX Blur, not sure yet. In any case there's a high base level of quality in the industry right now, and an amazing variety in types of games / platforms / production values. If you voted very low it's a strange time to be unexcited by gaming. (I know it depends on many personal factors.)

Sorry! I wanted the poll to show who voted and the only way to do that was to make a new one.

For the record, I'm pretty fucking excited.

Oh lame, you can't see who voted. I may have to try this again

Black 360 is for all the Comic Book Guys masturbating to their "awesome gaming set-up" pics with 40 inch screens and leather chairs they posted to NeoGAF. Whatever. Maybe it will pave the way to a core or premium price cut. Also this whole thing is racist. Blacks are better than whites? Elite even? What the... I'm OFFENDED!!!

Both. I just wrote a paragraph trying to explain myself but failed. Maybe a picture will help. So the white area is all the stuff that's already been done, right. And the black area is the Big Unknown. The red X is your starting position. Many designers think you have to plant a big red X firmly in the dark regions of the never-been-done-before. They go like 'ok fuck yes let's do something super innovative' and want to sort of parachute themselves somewhere into that big dark space, but then they frequently end up getting lost and making something super derivative after all. A much more sensible journey is to start with stuff you know and then gradually explore outwards. You have a better sense of where to go because you know what was made before and why it was made that way. Originality and innovation are often thought of as these Big Things, but really they are a bunch of little things combined, and they are rarely a complete departure from conventions, they just sort of start there and explore a little bit further. OK I have no idea what I'm talking about. Time to go to bed.

Originality is so overrated and misunderstood. Just make the game. Don't try to plan everything ahead. It sounds like it could be fun.

I think that's only because he has a blog and he's pretty well known at AdventureGamers.com, a community with some Thumbs overlap. E.g. Tim Schafer is often called Tim around here while Michel Ancel would be Ancel. TLJ episodes are likely to be DRM-ed in a Steam-like way. TLJ MMO is only said to be a possibility at this point. Makes sense for Funcom. They're making way more profit with their online properties than with Dreamfall, which showed up on bittorrent instantly. I believe their piracy concerns are genuine.

That's just Alexey Pajitnov and his hilarious Russian antics.

Don't underestimate the problems with piracy on the PC. People always say "it can't be that bad" but it actually is that bad. PC developers lose a shit-ton of sales through piracy. It's not the reason everyone's doing MMOs though. It's that there was one rather succesful one (WoW) and now publishers and investors all want a piece of the pie. There were a lot of VCs walking around GDC looking to invest in anything that has MMO, WoW, Second Life, Web 2.0, YouTube or MySpace in its outline. It's a sad reality that investors rarely check if the product would actually be good. I know of at least one case where investors put millions into a project without even glancing at the design document or team credentials because 'they had a good feeling about it'.

So you still have to boot up the game seperately, which is exactly what I wrote. It's not like Xbox Live where it's immediately staring you in the face when you power up the console. Meaning you won't immediately see if there's anything new to check out, and the entire concept depends on people actually deciding to go into the world. Which means that world has to be pretty good, or else people won't automatically go there. Read what I wrote: "chat is limited for those without a keyboard". Constructing phrases out of pre-selected words or using the software keyboard is pretty much shit. So yeah, a USB keyboard or headset are pretty much required to chat decently, but how many people will bother? It's another barrier to entry. Just log into Resistance: Fall of Man multiplayer and see how many people are voicechatting. Not many, because you need a separate BlueTooth mic that needs to be synched with the console. Also few people will attach a keyboard to a console. That doesn't invalidate the Home concept at all, but it's definitely a weak point compared to PC-based stuff like Second Life. Errr, the presentation showed the avatar walking into a cinema, then walking into the correct screening room and then watching a trailer there (a screen inside a screen?!). If you're going to make shortcuts for that process, you might as well not make a 3D world and just have a menu system with browsable movie clips. But we'll see.(There's a bunch of good things to say for Home too. Just clarifying these 3 points.)

LittleBigPlanet was completely amazing. It got a long applause at the end. The SecondLife esque thing was a good presentation for Sony, and shows they're doing interesting stuff, but I don't think it's going to work at all for various reasons (you have to boot it up like it's a seperate game, chat is limited for those without a keyboard, and the whole 3D world is a super awkward interface for doing simple things like watch a video clip).

Braid was at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions last year and blew my brains out. It's really awesome. Jonathan Blow is a respected indie dev who organizes the Indie Games Jam (google it) and the Experimental Gameplay Sessions at GDC.

Tim presented part of the GDC awards. He was really funny. I believe the whole thing will be up on GameSpot today.

Well you are right in that GDC does want to be the exclusive owner of all the audio and video content (which they can later publish in their podcasts and on GDCTV). So you can't just publish full recordings. I think you're allowed to only show like 5 minutes of footage per session, at least that's what the rule used to be. Photos are entirely verboten in some workshops and round-tables, I think to keep participation somewhat anonymous. Transcribing or blogging a session is always cool though.

Erm GDC can't keep people from live blogging. There is wifi everywhere. But it's basically the two keynotes that are worth live blogging anyway. Lectures might be transcribed by people but no one is going to bother posting live updates. 1UP has a bazillion people here. I believe 1UP's Luke Smith and Shane Bettenhausen are going to do some kind of simultanious co-op live blogging of the keynotes. Not sure what that means.

You guys were given the wrong impression. I'm at GDC right now and I can tell you there's nothing at all to worry about. GDC may have taken over a little bit of the business side of E3 (developers meeting publishers) but definitely not the press/retail side. There's a few more press events than usual perhaps, but nothing that should cause any alarm.

WTF?! A mysterious person clearly had too much time on his hands.

Yeah episode 14 was drab. I was hoping they'd go in the direction of Helo just being paranoid and needing a break, but that sadly didn't happen. However I am generally upbeat about the second half of the season so far. BSG is finally demonstrating (again since season 1?) an ability to do standalone episodes that are actually good and don't require any Cylons. Taking a Break From All Your Worries was amazing, this week's Dirty Hands was great, and A Day in the Life was good (despite a really drab B-plot involving Cally and the chief, saved only by the sickbay scenes at the end which had some good acting). I think the season has been pretty much solid except for the 100% on-the-nose overdrive exposition-fest that was Torn. I still hate that episode. Also their designs and concepts for the Basestar were mostly a failure. Let's forget that ever happened.

<whoops this should have been posted in the BSG thread>

I'm level 15, about 50 hours in. I have 65k of moneys (I probably have 100k total if I sold all the crap I've stored in places). I own the house in Anvil so I don't really want to buy any other houses. I have the fastest horse in the game. My equip is top of the line (all from loot). Is there any way I can use those 65k's?

Happy birthday!