Chris

Hey dudes!

This is the best image

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Well, I'm pretty sure most people are aware that the word "evolution" can be used in a much more casual sense, as in, "My understanding of language has evolved." But I think most people, including us in this podcast, also most of the time assume that when someone brings up the concept of "evolution," they are referring to it in a scientific sense. And I think your second to last paragraph agrees with our sentiment on the podcast already.

Gay Shepard Presents: "Your Buddy, Space Marine" or "The Capper" Video game news explodes, as two unrelated sentient robots -- one good, one evil, both out of control -- battle to the death for headline dominance. Amidst the wash of corporate power-plays, decapitations, and ASCII art, we also talk about the Indie Fund, and play some games. Games Discussed: Flotilla, StarCraft 2, BioShock 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Far Cry 2, Blitz II: The League, Gears of War, Mass Effect 3: Everything's Gay Dudes Everywhere - The Ballad of Gay Shepard (If You Want Him To Be Gay), The Capper

How awesome is MUNI these days? It blows my goddamn mind that MUNI employees had the gall to march through town the other week, airing their grievances, as MUNI is getting more expensive for less service, while they're the ones who are complaining their raises aren't BIG ENOUGH this year, as most private sector employees aren't getting any raises at all these days. I'M IRRITATED.

Like most of our "jokes," scoops doesn't mean anything. When Steve was first a guest on the podcast, I said something to the effect of, "So, do you have any hot scoops for us?" and somehow that caused Steve to be known as "hot scoops."

I'm saying it's not free for developers to port their games to Mac themselves.

Because they are entirely separate executables. Someone had to develop that separate version--that is, spend time and money on it. If it were really as easy as you're making it out to be, then why would it be such a big deal that this whole thing is happening?

Not just indie games--any games that don't use Steamworks and this new Steam Play feature. There's no way for Valve to just give away a publisher's games. Even if the publisher already has a Mac version of the game available, some other publisher might have the Mac publishing rights (this happens very frequently with outsourced Mac ports), or it might not be covered under the same digital distribution contract they used to publish the PC version on Steam, or whatever. I'm sure that Valve started working with as many publishers as possible to get that stuff sorted out long before they made the announcement, but there's nothing about any aspect of this system that means games outside of Valve's direct control will inherently have Mac versions on Steam that tie into existing purchases.

Ohhh

What does "LII" mean?

That was a better response (in that it was an actual response). Thanks. And yes it was inaccurate to nail it down to specific studios. My main point indeed had more to do with general evolution, and I was calling various examples (not particularly representative, as it turns out) to mind.

I don't know, I just like playing on the PC more. I never turn down games I want to play because of their platforms (except DSi which I still don't own), but in general at this point I'm pretty accustomed to playing games on my PC with a mouse and keyboard, so when I have the option, I go that route. I like launching nearly everything I play through one centralized location, which is Steam on the PC, even if it wasn't purchased through Steam. If I need a controller, I've got one (although I still play most games with m/k), I can output video from my PC either to a high-res monitor or an HDTV, I can comfortably run most games at high graphics levels--overall it's a pretty good all-bases-covered gaming solution, and I rarely feel the need to play multiplatform games on a console.

I've seen a couple people mention that to me, and it just doesn't make any sense from my perspective. Why would you waste time and money and development resources making heavily PC-centric games like Silent Hunter 5 and The Settlers and the Anno series and then saddle them with excessive DRM simply to give yourself a way to exit the market? If you've already decided you don't need that market, just exit it. Companies decide not to publish games on a particular platform all the time--just look at the Wii, and of course the PC in other cases. There's no need to construct an elaborate smoke and mirrors show. I have no doubt this is a genuine effort by Ubisoft; unfortunately, it's an extremely misguided one.

I assume (well, I hope) they'll continue on for at least one or two more games, then give it up. I suppose in a best case scenario they'll give up after Silent Hunter 5, but considering they seem to have delayed entire game launches to coincide with this launch, I suspect they'll try to give it a couple security revisions before they flush it all down the toilet. I really want to play Conviction on PC though, so I hope they sort this shit out.

Thanks for that useful comment. I'm by no means a student of animation so I wouldn't be at all surprised if I did have things out of order, but maybe it would help if you'd actually illuminate how? Are you disputing simple chronology, or the events described, what? Disney was, what, 1920s on? Then WB was roughly concurrent but seemed to peak later. And as far as I'm aware (and Wikipedia seems to agree), Saturday morning cartoons weren't really a thing until the 1960s or so. Edit: Oh okay, it was my "grasp." That's helpful.

Yeah, that's me sinking into the chair, and Jake facing away from the camera.

God I wonder who put that up. That was a few years ago, I would estimate 2006 (although possibly late 2005, since it's pre-DS Lite apparently). I'm pretty sure we were playing Mario Kart.

wtf

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It's too bad that, culturally, the more our society progresses, the more fucked up and creepy and weird our anthropomorphized animals get. In fairy tales and stuff, animal characters used to just be depicted as straight-up animals, even if they could talk. Once we got into the Walt Disney era, they started to become animated a bit more like humans when speaking and gesturing, but still fundamentally animal in their proportions and movement. Then into the Warner Bros. animation era they really started to move into more human territory, and by the time cheap Saturday morning cartoons came around, it had moved pretty heavily in that direction. The rise of anime bullshit just solidified the ruination. Now it's all dumb.

Welcome, fellow dude and musician!

Nope, all I was conveying is that it is indeed a coincidence, as I have never heard that song.

I know all the shortcuts. There are lots of things that are not as practical with a keyboard as with a mouse--sorting through a big list of files and moving them around, dealing with many email-related tasks especially when moving between non-adjacent messages, selecting text on a webpage, moving between text fields on a form with many fields, moving between tabs in a web browser when one of the tabs has Flash elements that steal cursor focus, going back and forward throughout web history many pages at a time rather than one at a time, doing most kinds of image manipulation, doing most kinds of audio manipulation, various aspects of using spreadsheets, saving images off of websites, browsing through search engine results, reading multi-page articles, attaching files to email, and a whole ton of things that rely on web applications with limited keyboard shortcut support. Some of those things are impossible with a keyboard; some of them are more time-consuming with a keyboard; and some of them might be fine to do with a keyboard but become more efficient to do with a mouse if they are already bookended by tasks that are faster or only possible with a mouse. Given the variety of tasks I do all day at work, I don't think it's possible to reduce my mouse usage much below its current level, particularly because so much of the web is not built for keyboard shortcuts, and my job is mainly composed of putting things on the web.