toblix

So ... about the collectibles. Am I going to be missing three secret chests at the end of the game, without any information about where to go look (other than which part of the city I should look around in)?

Just started this last night. What the hell is this lady wearing?!

A thing that always strikes me as weird with Apple's presentation is the wildly varying amount of attention the various changes and new features are given, often completely unrelated to its actual importance. This latest one wasn't the best example, maybe, but they'll spend half as much time describing their new microprocessor as they do the ability to drag an email recipient from the CC field to the TO field or create a lame fake movie trailer in iMovie (and the crowd goes wild). They won't mention at all that they moved the headphone jack on the new iPhone to the other side of the phone, but they'll mention more than once that the iTunes 90 second song preview will continue to play even if you navigate away from the album page. Also, the little movies they keep showing of new stores opening makes me want to puke all over everyone. Basically, I have extremely conflicting opinions of Apple.

I think that the next iPhone will be shorter again is extremely unrealistic. I wonder what the reason for the change is, though. They said, of course, that the new screen was designed to fit the human hand, which, like many of Apple's statements, implies they were doing it wrong before, but it could be anything from just reacting to the competition (Bigger Screen™ or 16:9 for that authentic portable cinema experience) to being able to give the internals a bigger footprint. Anyway, as always I'm impressed by their hardware and disappointed by their software. They make this beautiful, sleek piece of technology and then put more of their increasingly terrible apps and UI decisions on it.

Shredder'd.

HEY ASSHOLES IT'S «XEN».

Oh, that's a good sign. Didn't they show this new app that looked like a leather credit card holder thing at the last keynote, though? Or am I confusing that with something else or my imagination?

I just read a rumour that the next iOS will have a skeuomorphic paper-shredder that shreds virtual tickets and passes. If this comes to pass, I ... I ...

Today I finished watching the 85th and final episode of the Dark Souls playthrough. Though pathetic, it's a great – and the only – way for me to get to see the whole game. I'm very impressed by the audacity of the design, and equally impressed that so many players have actually powered through and completed the game, especially the first ones, who had to find out everything themselves and couldn't just look it up. The lack of hand-holding and the amount of weird stuff you just have to find out through experimentation and chance is astounding. After having watched most of the game being played (I'm sure there were a couple of areas, enemies and bosses he didn't get to) I still find the regular enemy combat far more interesting than the boss fights. I failed at explaining this earlier, but it has to do with regular combat feeling real, with enemies of more or less similar sizes doing actual attacking, blocking, parrying and dodging with animation that looks and sounds natural and authentic. With the larger bosses, there's more of the video-gamy disconnect where a huge model will spend ten seconds doing its Overly Complicated Special Attack animation, all the while the player can keep stabbing and cutting it without any reaction whatsoever.

Oh shit, I meant to redact my statement about it being the Castle Crashers people, but forgot. I meant Shank. Apparently everyone is loving this, which means I'm in for ONE HELL OF A RIDE when I get back to it. Currently too busy with Sleeping Dogs, which keeps impressing me with how quickly it gets me from the desktop to Hong Kong.

Like what?

Yeah, it's weird that I don't get wind of each and every new video game Kickstarter project that pops up. Is there a thing I can subscribe to?

Oh my fucking God, I loved Wings on the Amiga! edit: Wow, it's fun to be reminded of how sweet Wings was, but looking at this project, I'm not surprised they're not getting 350 thousand dollars. Also, I prefer old men in my kickstarter videos.

Aww yeah!

This seems like a sweet game thing. They're doing a live stream of it here.

Great episode! The apologetic preamble really made for a positive surprise. Also, the Far Cry Instincts reference was great, since it's the one discussion that, when I heard it, made me laugh for real, rather than just on the inside. I've never been to anything like this, but I imagine a room filled with a lot of people, many of which know each other from the forum, but since we're using code names and hilarious pictures nobody recognizes anyone, and even the people we heard ask questions are really people from the forums but it's sort of embarrassing to say «Hi, my name is Pete, but I'm ic€money0O7 on the forums!»

All of you should just shut the fjord socialism.

I may be a cynical Charlie, but I think it's pretty naïve to expect a company like Ubisoft to, even faced with tremendous blunders, do anything but try to frame it like everything's going according to plan. I was surprised they went as far as that "unfortunate comment" comment. I've been trying to work out if Anno 2070 has been patched to remove the always-on DRM thing, but I haven't been able to find anything, so I assume this only applies to future releases.

I'm very conflicted about the ebook vs digital book CONFLICT. Thinking about it makes me face all these aspects of my personality that I loathe, and it makes me feel everything from too materialist to thoughtless, unreflective and unprincipled. I can't even start forming a proper opinion because I call into question my own arguments for both sides. Do I really appreciate a nice, weighty hardback book, or a first edition or whatever, or am I just being pretentious or Luddite? Do I really care about the environmental benefit of not having to produce and transport heavy books, or do I just love technological gadgets? Do I really care about whether I own the book or just a license to read it according to the whim of some ever-changing terms of agreement? I start transferring my opinions onto other aspects of my life to double-check and verify them, and then I discover my whole existence is a shameful mess of conflicting statements, shallow reasoning, laziness and egoism. I bought a Kindle and it's great for outdoors reading, but when I'm inside I prefer reading on my iPad.

No problem. It's not a state secret or anything, and a trivial connection to make – still, shivers run down my proverbial spine whenever I read my name on the internet. It's irrational, but there you go. Oh, and yeah, I'm quite happy with it, though it sometimes causes web page layout issues.

I hope brkl edits that post before Google sees it. Sincerely, Lachlan

I know of Kotaku, and that it's part of Gawker. I haven't visited it much, but I have this impression that they write about video games and hentai figurines. Is this just my mind inserting hentai figurines where they don't belong, or is video games only one of several topics Kotaku covers?

He should do an AmA introduce himself!

Can't look me up if you don't know my name!