Chris

I'm sure a lot of it has to do with costs. To create nice cinematic sequences you essentially need people trained to do that, and as pre-rendered animation gets higher and higher quality, gamers expect more and more, so developers have to keep up. On the other hand, they're already keeping up with in-game graphics anyway, so it makes sense for them to work with what they're good at. Also, as a result of in-game graphics getting more advanced, the need to have pre-rendered scenes is diminishing.

Talk about sucky opinions.

I don't know; like Screwtape, I really enjoyed the Broken Sword one.

It makes me want to do stuff!

Yufster treats everything as LiveJournal.

The "getting beaten by a girl at video games" has in fact been so ludicrously overplayed by Hollywood and web comics and the like that to me it has completely lost any semblance of interest or surprise for me.

I picked up a copy of Further Grickle the other day (that's Grickle book two). It's done entirely by Graham Annable, and was mentioned alongside Hickee in the Double Fine Action News. Annable did animation for a bunch of LEC projects such as, if I recall correctly, CMI, The Dig, and everyone's favorite RTX: Red Rock. Anyway, the book is awesome. I'm really looking forward to picking up the first Grickle and now I'm even more excited about Hickee. I don't think my local shop carries it, but I should be able to pick it up when Comic-Con comes around in a few weeks.

And now it's my turn to be a nitpicky arse... You can't really cite dictionary.com as if it is a dictionary--it's not. It just references a bunch of other dictionaries. If you quite the "dictionary.com definition", people won't know which you mean because it generally provides a bunch. Just say "American Heritage" or "Mirriam-Webster" or whatever, since the website lists the source.

A year and a half?? Surely it was longer than that.

What Marek said. Hey, I'm lazy.

Ew.

Ok, but in that light I still don't retract my original statement. Also, yeah, better to just agree with Jayel on this one probably.

If that's the case, I suspect we had video games as art for quite some time.

He's talking about the Raz comics, not Scott's, which I guess sort of look a bit more 3d than Scott's...

I wonder about that too sometimes. I suspect that as designers they have a hand in scripting, but not things like engine programming. When I was at Double Fine (ha ha ha), I observed that Schafer was able to script things out (which I suspect he does for things like cutscenes) but I doubt he gets into the "real" programming too heavily; those skills probably fall out of use when developers (like Schafer, Meier, Wright) become designers/

WHAT?!?!

Moos: thanks for finding that news post. Now I REALLY need a copy of that book. likewise

I think that's all of the Raz ones, but speaking of guest comics on the DFAN, does anyone know anything about Nathan? His last name, whether he's ever had anything published in the underground scene? Scott is really active in the Bay Area underground scene so maybe Nathan is too, I don't know. I really really like his comics though so I want to see if I can find anything else out about him.

I'd be into it if you or Jake couild house me.

FOr sure. Randomly enough, I just played The Library on co-op the day before yesterday. And yeah, it was a blast. That level is indeed repetitive, but it really gets you on edge and gets the blood pumping. It'll be totally quiet, then out of nowhere a hojillion guys will bust out of the wall. You have to be in the mood for it, but if you are it's good.

Co-op co-op co-op

You're an idiot

Nobody here is bitter, of course!

That would be a pretty enormous stretch for the American market too. NES didn't come anywhere close to Sony's current market reach and Sony certainly doesn't have a machine in everyone's home.

But what about before PlayStation? Were video games just not popular in Europe? Who else but Nintendo would have been dominant in the late 80s and early 90s?