vimes

Also the frenco-spanish Mr Collieu looks quite awesome.

I truly appreciate that Miyamoto and others are highlighting the struggles that every game maker is necessarily confronted to. I do because they are the only one putting game making in perspective - maybe not for the consumer but for other developers. What's interesting in the discourse of the senior japanese staff (Miyamoto, Awata and, in a very different way, Mizuguchi) is that they seem to consider game making a craft, in which you can only improve by assessing the risk of every innovation against your own experience in the field. It contrasts with the power trip most occidental developers are into. At each technical or game advances, everybody claim they could do the same in half the time : there is no acknowledgment of the real difficulties that exists in coming up with a game design, its implementation as well as the technical features to carry it through. And thus, most fail on core mechanisms of the genre they tackle. I'm generalizing a lot , but I'm always amazed that the most vocal developers seem to perfectly fit this description.

Ohohoh, I also forgot : The Three Robbers and, of course, the jewel of kid's book, THe Jolly postman which had real letters, postcards and all kinds of shit inside.

It never fails, Don't you forget about me always summons this precise image in my mind

Edit - I should learn to fucking scroll once in my life. BTW, OssK it's available at the Fnac des Halles if you're in Paris. I'ts indeed called the Magicien des Couleurs and It was also part of my childhood. When looking in a FNAC (Ossk will know what I mean) for a book for my 2 year-and-some old niece, I discovered they republished it as well as a bunch of other cult childhood like "Petit Bleu et petit Jaune" and In the Night Kitchen from Sendak (which, by the way, is my third favorite kid book ever.. should we make a list ?)

So, if I understand this right, education is decided state by state ? On a related note, if anyone can enlighten me while staying simple in his/her explanation : how do the US define what is of the responsibility of the federal government and what is handled by each state individually ?

kTOcsf2nR1o

You're thinking about Metronome.

I'm not really sure how the US education system got to the point where the manual differs from one school to another, it simply escapes me how a government can leteach school handle the very resource they work with. In France - until some point in university - everybody get the same books which are bought by the government (even in the private school, I think); and, surprisingly from a country that loves to argue about everything, it never was presented like an issue. Otherwise, digitization of study material seemed awesome to me since I discovered the free online course of MIT and the google scholars. You're not crazy, this is definitely going to happen. And sooner that anyone expect : as we speak, the french government is putting together the system that's kinda going to do this for internet access:eek:

Anyone played the final version ? I dragged myself over the first two hours of gameplay and it really seems that they missed the point Spiderman 2 on Xbox made; most sequences being constructed like this : appear from a tunnel, swing into a corridor toward a building while evading mines and opponents, kill the opponents inside the building, swing your way to a a relay station, kill everybody there, hack the station to create an escape route and then swing to the next tunnel in which you disappear. Like Spiderman2 the controls and camera are very good - after you get used to the weird swinging control scheme - but the game is surprisingly limited not only horizontally, but vertically. Forget about climbing on the highest rooftop m everything is made out of radiation below the ground and above a low altitude. Also, they've got the most terrible depth of field effect ever and a pathetic synopsis.

I love this game; I completed it in three runs and it feels like I could keep on going for hours. What I admire most is that, contrary to what it seems, it's not 1 gameplay idea used to its most, but 20 or 30 awesome gameplay ideas explored just the right amount of depth. I can't find anything that would improve the experience without changing it radically, so it turned out to be one of those games that just succeed perfectly at what they want to do. Go 2DBoy, go!

Wowowo. 10 years ? Let's remember how not-so-good the reputation of Valve was between the time they announced HL² and when they began to talk about the new TF2 : the multiple port of CS (notably Condition Zero) were considered by most very bad, Steam was a steaming -ahah- piece of shit for quite a while, they were mocked for the leaking of HL² sources, they kept on delaying for 1 year episodic content ... basically most core gamers I know didn't believe they could deliver on time and with the promised content. Everybody should see the tremendous effort that went into the communication and quality improvement in the past 2 years and congratulate them for that but, really, Valve got up in everybody expectations when they unveiled the new TF2; not before.

Mmm, when was that ?

I could be mistaken but I seem to remember that it took a while for Psychonauts to be picked up by Ed Fries and at that point the development was pretty much in full throttle mode. So, I was more thinking about the intial cost of founding DF and the beginning of Psychonaut's production than the no-publisher gap. I do think it makes sense when missing a deadline results, from what Activision claims, in 8 millions more in addition to the first 15 invested I think it's rather rational for them to decide that the investment will outweight the possible benefits. Not that dropping Brutal Legend is a smart decision, but I think the business model or dev/publisher interaction must be pretty fucked up if a developer ends up asking for a 50% more investment half way through development.

Tim Schafer stated a while ago that, contrary to Psychonauts, Brutal Legend wasn't being made with his own money, so Sierra investing 15 millions dollars to kick BL's into full development is more than believable. I love Schafer's work and I would support the guy anytime, but it makes sense that if Sierra invested that much to get a certain release date and DoubleFine failed to deliver on the contract terms, they'd pull the plug on the development and ask for compensation. Most of the publishing deals I know of don't make the developer retains the right to the game content, name or code source; and it sucks, but Schafer's agent Seamus Blackley made a point of allowing Schafer's to retain the right to its universe; he even stated in Spector's interview that's pretty much all Schafer cares about ... so I don't think DF keeping the BL universe is a flaw of the contract at all.

Sorry if I came out as strong, but if there's something I hate more than backslash it is backslash's backslash.... and circular stuff like that concept, also.

Except you're wrong : there's a 10 minutes dev walkthrough (Part 1 and Part2) and three clips between 2 and 3 minutes of gameplay. So, no, most people don't just rant with no info to rant with.

I won't say I'll boycott the game because there's a pretty good chance I won't, but it surely makes Valve look like idiots and hyprocite. They've spent the last year or so saying to whoever wanted to listen that they considered games to be services that you expanded to gather new audience and they were also boasting about how successful TF2 was thanks to this strategy. By announcing L4D2 after such campaign, I think they're doing themselves a great disservice. The most disappointing thing is that L4D2 appears to be really slim on innovations and looks more like a skin of its prequel than something providing a richer or different game experience : the character's design is dull, the weapons are more or less new skin for the old one and the aesthetic is completely broken.

Goddamit, I just ordered it because getting the meh Wallace & Gromit and possibly ok Tales of MI for 35 bucks was a very good deal. Mnah, that should teach me not to be a cheap bastard and buying stuff for the wrong reasons. I hope my money help them upgrade their graphic engine.

I don't get it ... would I get a free episode or a whole free series if I preordered ?

He was awesome as a democrat campaign director going to the republican side in West Wing.

Are you, by any chance, participating in Dominance War IV ?

I also had this impulse, but didn't succumb to it; but I shall do so tonight : I loveloveLOVE the art design and it seems extremely polished in terms of control and camera ... stuff that's been completely neglected in the last games I played, no matter how good they were.

Anecdote : For a while, I had mistakenly put "jeu-vidéos" (that would be videos-game in english) on my blog's main banner and it used to drive one of the admin crazy. So much, in fact, that he redid the banner all by himself with a proper spelling and commited it while I wasn't looking. Aaah, the untapped power of angry vocabularists.

I must admit I decided to play Fable 2 for its art design, because I really found the areas (mostly Bowerstone) utterly gorgeous... and I wasn't disappointed on this aspect. But on the core gameplay and story frontw, there really wasn't anything worthy of praise : if you're unlucky, you'd discover quickly that the combat can be mindlessly getting cared of and after its first chapter, the storyline find its way to dullness. And yet, it doesn't really matter to me because Fable 2 world seemed an incredibly complete, coherent and believable one, which is something I hadn't felt in a while. In fact, it's only after completing the main quest (and its awesome last third thanks to the Perfect World segment and Stephen Fry) that I discovered that Fable 2 was a comfy game that I enjoyed going back to for two hours a week ... if only to explore new areas for the archeologist, complete the remaining side quests and check on my family as well as my real estate empire. It's might seems really ridiculous, but it feels like checking on a relative and finding what's new. My only grudge for the time being is that my daughter and wife aren't aging at all and remain happy no matter what. On a related note, I kept on thinking about Discworld during the game (similar aesthetic and tone) so from now on, I'll be waiting for a game in a seamless Ankh Morpock in the style of Bowerstone/Westcliff; with all the simulation of Fable2 dropped from it. I know it's pretty unlikely, but I can dream, can't I ?