Chris

Well, they still have to accommodate for everything--there are two possible choices, and the game has account for both of them. They could have made it be always heads or always tails, but they didn't. They still made the possibility of either outcome, it's just up to the game and not the player to determine which. So my best guess is still that they just wanted to enforce variety within the player base as a whole. Jake: I think that reading would make more sense if there were other moments in the game like this, but it doesn't seem like there are. (The rest of the moments where Booker does his own thing are just standard cutsceney bits, whereas this scene has direct analogues throughout the game that are player-driven.) If that was indeed the intention, it seems like a really soft way to make the point to me. But hey who knows. (I don't!)

They don't always need to know why exactly the choice was made by each individual player, merely that a trend exists. And it is often the case that by examining that trend, a design decision can be made that alters it in a direction that is perceived by the developers as improving the game.

That isn't quite what I meant--I just mean, if they noticed that everyone was always picking heads, or if players ended up picking it significantly more than have the time, they might have wanted to force more variety for the sake of player discussion or something like that. Also, I very much doubt they did specific testing "for" that moment; that isn't what I mean. But I'm sure they tested the opening Columbia level a LOT, and that moment is part of it. Whether or not they were explicitly testing that coin toss, the moment still occurs every time you play through that part of the game. Again, this is all speculative.

It's possible that in playtesting they determined people were overwhelming making one choice rather than the other and they wanted to make that impossible. That is a total guess; I have absolutely no idea what the motivation was, it's just the kind of thing that sometimes happens in testing. But those scenes weren't in the game when I was at IG so I don't know for sure.

Just finished Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. It's quite short, under 200 pages; I read it in two days. A really heartbreaking and wonderful work. It prompted a whole lot of deep reflection in me about certain incidents in my life, and about the way in which we arrange and bring to bear our memories. Highly recommended.

I could be wrong, but as I recall, my comments about Dragon Age II were, I think, specifically in response to Sean asking which one is generally better, presumably because he has played neither and wanted to know which would be more worth his time. It's not that I don't think there's anything good about Dragon Age II, just that if I were going to compare it to the first game, it suffers enormously in comparison for me.

Even relative to this game's own predecessor? BioShock was definitely a game whose story and themes were discussed for quite a while following its release; by contrast it's only been a week since Infinite came out.

(Just to clarify in case anyone actually isn't sure: Yes, the game will be voice acted.)

It's not a matter of "recognizing" them, really--they were simply added after I left, as was a ton of other stuff. As I noted on the cast (I think), the main structure and plot events and systems were all there, but the details changed hugely. Those characters may end up being hugely important thematically, but purely from a production standpoint they're pretty minor compared to the larger structural elements.

Farttttttttttttt

I definitely didn't. Booker just decided tails for me. The baseball, brooch, etc., I was able to pick myself.

It actually started as a prototype from one of our amazing gameplay programmers, Patrick, after DF gave him clearance to use some of his work time to fool around with new game ideas. Then we ended up in contact with the Leap people and they loved it, so we greenlit it as a full project.

I agree it would have been nice to have a designer of the game on, but learning about that water rule is quite surprising to me. It seems extremely silly that it's actually apparently strictly more desirable to build your water facilities essentially on top of a sewage dump rather than in an area that the game's data visualization is clearly showing as an abundant source of clean water. What a weird design choice.

The main chords are A - F - Dm - E. That's really all you need for the bulk of the track.

Just due to timing concerns, I'd rather give my blessing to someone else's accurate tablature than tab it out myself. But I will provide this helpful hit: Almost everything I record on guitar is tuned down a whole step. Not drop-D tuning or anything non-standard; just every string down a whole step lower than usual, so it's DAFCBD rather than EBGDAE. This is to accomodate my woefully low vocal range. It seems to have tripped people up in the past with various tracks of mine.

I've played a fair amount of it and I enjoy it, but I prefer Anno 1404/Dawn of Discovery, simply because it's so much more beautiful. The game itself is essentially identical, without the little online community bits that 2070 has, which are nice but not particularly crucial.

The music in Civ V really is wonderful.

You should email that post to questions@idlethumbs.net!

Yes, I think you're right, and I never meant to imply otherwise. I was including any cash, stocks, (or assets I guess) as "payment."

By "money" I didn't mean to suggest they were each handed a check for $38m. If that's how you interpreted my post, you were reading into it. But they were obviously paid. Regardless of how much money--either as cash or stock--each of them made it is entirely possible for one person to have managed that wealth significantly better than the other, especially if the split wasn't even.

Okay, great. I'm aware of how stock sales work. I have no idea why you're explaining this, but let's just assume Ron Gilbert has some money somewhere.

Sure. Let's say "wealth" or "spoils" then, rather than money specifically.

Yep, I'll be hanging out at the joint DF/Capy booth.

We've started to get privately voiced frustrations about this thread, and the level of animosity that has developed is pretty apparent and a bummer anyway. Before it gets to the point where we have a full page of internet forum analysis for every minute of the video, let's just go ahead and close it down. Sorry folks.

I use Chrome to access this forum on two different computers and haven't had any problems, luckily.