MrHoatzin

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by MrHoatzin

  1. Posted

    Why do you have a framed picture of your back in the room? That's just weird man.

    Not only is that a framed picture of my back, it also UPDATES IN REAL TIME!! Pretty epic technology. No moving parts! Uses no energy to run!

    I hope your phone has a front-facing camera, otherwise you just blew my mind.

    I had to flip the phone really fast while it was taking the picture to get the flipside of the phone in the shot.

    It has two cameras: a crappy one for video chat and a better one for photographin' all serious-like.

  5. Posted

    I just now got to actually listening to the last few podcasts.

    You dudes mentioned at some point how US is pro-active in its spreading of culture. I recently learned that the Marshal Plan contained a clause stipulating that countries receiving support must open their film markets to a certain percentage of US movies. And here I was thinking that we all spoke English because it was a simple language and stuff.

  11. Posted

    It's hard to miss that a lot of what they're doing is hypemongering—but I'm choosing to assume (because I am a starry-eyed optimist) the true audience for the hype are VC firms that they would go to with all this nice press and buzz and pitch the project for the REAL money that they're looking for.

  12. Posted

    Well, ok! But isn't this how open source projects are done? Put out a v1 and then iterate and improve upon it with user/community feedback? And speaking of it being a pirate's wet dream, I think their goal of building an effective curated marketplace should be enough of a deterrent against the kinds of piracy that actually hurt bottom lines.

    I dunno guys! I still think this is not as horrible an idea as some people demand it be. From where I'm sitting it can go either way. And all it takes at this point for it to succeed is good branding and outreach. If they fail on the followthrough, they failed, sucks to be everyone who believed in this thing. People need to be making things for standardized open platforms, and I hope these guys are not out to fleece everyone as that would retard grass-roots open gaming by many years.

  13. Posted

    But they are asking for so little money—unless everyone in that demo vid was a hired actor/stock footage—the work that has already gone into this probably eclipses the kickstarter many times over. I could see how the Kickstarter could be their attempt to gauge the public's interest or a way to get out the word about their product. The game they're playing is so big that I doubt it is the money that they're really after here. The Kickstarter campaign is just free press with a cherry on top. If however they disappear tomorrow and the console never sees the light of day, then we'll know what exactly their game was.

  18. Posted

    I need an incentive to go on. I've played the first couple of levels and so far there is a lot of hacking and slashing, some strategy and tactics, and a lot of super sacharine art. I don't have problem with any asset individually or the style in general—stuff is super gorgeous, no argument—it is when they're all put in a pile together that it gets busy and kindof focusless. Does the art get more coherent as one goes on?

    Also I take it there is a story that is worth hanging out for? Hmmmm.

  20. Posted

    I hadn't actually read the PA Kickstarter until after I posted… it is like they're crassly poking fun at Kickstarter itself. The tone is atrocious and insulting as fuck, but I don't disagree with their goal/approach otherwise. Maybe we need a different kind of marketplace to allow the grimy masses to just directly support cool people to avoid soiling Kickstarter with this sort of controversy.

  21. Posted

    I think I am the only person in the world who thinks this is an awesome use of Kickstarter. This is how support of culture should work.

    I was actually thinking about doing something like this myself. I am slowly building a fancy new web comic creation+publishing+hosting platform. I was going to make a v0 alpha, release it and then Kickstart further development and support. Now I am not so sure.

  22. Posted

    Hardcodre indeed.

    Ah, poop.

    By "casual hardcore console gaming public" I mean people who patronize the other console dynasties, but wouldn't be opposed to jumping ship. I say casual hardcore because someone who is truly hardcore is likely to want his Madden every year and looking exactly the same as the last Madden—or Warmen of Warhonorvalorduty 2012—or whatever it is those people play. These dudes are not easy to sway at a point before big publishers are on board (to bring their tried-and-true xtreme stupid along)—and the big publishers are not going to be on board until they have no other choice (due to the symbiotic relationships with big console manufacturers). Since I think it unlikely that Ouya can compete with consoles directly with just the indie market and its developeriat in its pocket, something else has to turn its way. Maybe I am wrong and there are hefty publishers out there that would like to fuck over the old school console makers by embracing this thing. It would have to be someone in the third or fourth place, with nothing to lose and a lot to gain by having an early adoption bonus.

    And by "do something important better than the other guys", I mean insert something new and exciting and must-have into their service/promise, something that the big guys are failing to deliver. It could be that happy developers and easy development is all it needs at this point. There is not much candy that is being offered to the consumers tho.

  23. Posted

    I'm with Nachimir on this one. I dunno why people fixate on the PLAY PHONE GAMES ON YOUR TV when this thing looks to be pretty powerful on its own. The big console makers are getting stogy and boring. Dealing with them from either side of the market is a chore. Something needs to light the fire under them. This goes especially for MS & Sony. I have no doubt that execs at both of them are pointing a finger and laughing at Ouya, as stupid and intransigent as they are.

    All it takes is a relatively small marketshare not going to a monopoly/cartel for interesting things to happen. MS failed to strangle the internet when there was 10% of people using the olden open source Mozilla. I guess a case can be made that the PC is the true alternative to consoles and that Ouya will be competing directly with the PC not the consoles. I guess we'll have to see what the ultimate cross-section of the audience of this machine ends up being. If they can appeal to a more casual hardcodre console gaming public, and they do somehting important better than the other guys, this can end up being pretty huge.

  25. Posted

    This bit here makes the case as to why this form of game is an interesting and valid medium of expression:

    One game people have brought up' date=' which I thought was interesting, is The Last Express. Our game isn’t going to have any people in it – spoilers!- you’re not going to come around a corner and find a dude. Exploring an abandoned place is the core of the experience. And so Last Express had this whole clockwork world, real time progression thing in it, and that’s not relevant to us, but I did really love the fact that the entire game took place on a few train cars, and you could go into one compartment and turn all around and fold down the bed and find something that was hidden in there when it got folded up, and open up the luggage and see what was inside.

    What’s interesting to me is just scale. I feel like the scale of interactivity in most games is really coarse. It’s like, the scale of interactivity is basically human-sized or larger – you can shoot bullets at that other human-sized thing and kill it or not. In GTA, I loved some of the stuff they did that brought the interactivity down to hand scale in GTA4, but it was also really really, really secondary. The GTA experience was like ‘I’m a big human-shaped agent of chaos and I can get into a car and I’m an even bigger, car-shaped agent of chaos, and I cause havoc on a large scale, and in GTA4 they added the thing where you could go round and pick up any physics object off the ground, so you just pick up coffee cups and throw them at people, which is hilarious, but it obviously wasn’t what that game was built around.

    I feel like, especially in a first person context, it’s really interesting for me to think about…in our lives, you’re going round, you’re looking at your desk right now, you could pick up and examine and move around any of the bits and bobs on your desk, and they’re actually really relevant to your understanding of this place. Our interest is taking the scale of the experience down to the smallest bit of granularity that’s actually relevant to understanding this place and being able to explore it. And so the Last Express thing, you can fold down the luggage rack and open the luggage and examine what’s in the pocket of the luggage, and then open up the wallet, see what’s inside the wallet… That is really cool to me, and I think it was ahead of its time in that regard.[/quote']

    This is from the second part of the interview with RPS where the dude throws random game titles at Steve to compare to Gone Home—apologetically—horrified by his own crass journalistic methods.