Thrik

We've just started a contest on my site to create a sweet-ass Quake 3 map, in celebration of the game's upcoming 15th anniversary. We've managed to get id Software, ZBrush, Hammerwatch, and CG Textures on board as sponsors and are offering some pretty great prizes for the development-minded among us. If you have any interest, get involved! It should be a lot of fun and it's been involving getting this all together. MapCore's Quake 3 15th Anniversary Contest Even if you don't wish to participate, any help with promoting this (even if it's just a like or retweet) would be much appreciated. One big goal of this is to breathe some life back into the Quake 3 community and give its die-hard fans some new stuff to play on.

Excellent call on the Alan Wake track. I really liked how that game in general. Surprised nobody's posted the Curse of Monkey Island number yet. It's even interactive! Edit: Noyb snuck it in at the end of his last post. Still, best ever.

Tech Radar goes with W1nd0ws. My god I hope that catches on.

Metal Gear Solid has had a good few original songs created specifically for the games. Snake Eater is particularly noteworthy for its (ridiculous) game-orientated lyrics.

This was the top result when I searched Google for 'Windows 10' which seems as good an overview as any: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29431412 Probably the biggest thing that stands out to me is multiple desktops. Christ, it's about time Windows got that seeing as Linux and OS X have been toting it for years and years.

Oh god that lightbulb ad is great. The small touches like the next scene expanding from his mouth at 1:40... amazing.

To be honest, most complaints that I've heard about how existing large social sites work largely stems from the fact that the sites are so fucking huge rather than their business model. I really don't think that how sites make money is as big as deal as some make out, and the whole you are the customer!!!!! thing being taken to the point of people saying an ad-supported product can't possibly not be corrupt seems ridiculous to me. In almost all cases it comes down to the ethics of the company; a large organisation that makes money on ads isn't inherently evil. If it were, our ad-driven western world would be in a much worse state. I'm still yet to see how Twitter is really bad, apart from its ability to handle abuse being imperfect which — again — I feel is more down to its unbelievable scale rather than its funding. To put it into perspective, even if only one in every 1000 tweets were flagged as abusive, that would still be 500,000 reports per day to deal with! Reddit is another example of a site becoming a victim of its own size. Trying to be principled when dealing such such obscene numbers of users and posts can't ever not lead to accusations of cherry picking or inconsistency. I mean, this is a real problem. How do you get on top of this kind of stuff? If Ello were to become even a hundredth as big as Twitter overnight, poof — it'd be a crumbling mess within hours. Ello is no better equipped to deal with the horror of free public speech than any other site, and how it's funded isn't going to make an ounce of difference once it's got thousands of ad bots, spammers, abusers, and general assholes signing up every minute. Similarly, if Twitter were to remove all ads overnight it'd still be what it is due to the god damn size of it.

The Sims 3 was excellent, I can't really think of anything to criticise it for apart from perhaps that it was a bit sluggish on my at-the-time powerful PC. I'm really surprised by some of those issues described above, especially the load times considering that The Sims 3 totally nailed the whole idea of being able to just pan out across an entire neighbourhood and dive into some random house at will. That was one of the coolest things about the game, that the whole village felt like a big, open place where you worked, hung out with neighbours, etc. If The Sims 4 has become more silo-like then that's bizarre.

I'm planning on getting an iPad for mostly non-gaming reasons, but I figured I'd check out what's on offer. What the fuck. Never before have I been presented with so many absolutely gorgeous-looking games that I love the sound of, yet are mercilessly soiled by gameplay that hinges upon some bullshit in-game currency that you have to pay real money for in order to play the game at a tolerable rate. I'd quite happily pay a good chunk of money to outright buy these games, but the proposition of forever being at the mercy of 'mega tokens', 'magic orbs', 'super tickets', or whatever the hell sickens me. Maybe it's just because I happen to love builder/simulation games and these are the most prime targets for this kind of nonsense? I'm seeing games that I dreamt of when I was younger like being able to build Jurassic Park and Springfield, but the borderline malicious implementation of payment mechanics repels me because I know that I'll always be wondering when the next bag of shit will come along that I have to pay for the removal of. It's really very disappointing!

I would say that Rare's home console catalogue was consistently excellent during the 90s. That was really a completely different company to the Rare that's existed in the 2000s and beyond, though. DKC:TF is stellar shit, for real.

I'm OK with advertising. The harsh reality is that Twitter (or anything remotely approaching it in scale) just couldn't exist without advertising. There's absolutely no way that Ello will ever be able to sustain itself without running ads, which is a glaring elephant in the room everyone seems content to ignore. Sure they could charge people for use of the service and/or run premium accounts, but that's virtually guaranteed to fail in terms of growing the user base. Other ways of raising funds are a pipe dream if the service ever gains real scale. I guess it all just seems quite futile to me. I mean, if moderation and control is that important to someone then why not just run a regular website where they have absolute control over what's posted and whether or not people are even capable of commenting? Host it in whatever country you like, even. With social networking you're either part of that open forum or you're not; it's like there's the expectation that Ello will somehow just figure out how to be what it fundamentally can't really be. This definitely seems like something that Twitter should address. Not that YouTube is a shining example, but its comments would be a lot worse without a universal ability to flag. I myself have flagged things on Twitter, and while I didn't really follow up on them it's pretty annoying to think that they'd just ignore it. I'd be interested to see where they said they do this and/or the community's response to it.

I definitely agree that a line is needed somewhere, but I think that figuring out where and how to establish such a line is a challenge when dealing with the combination of such huge-scale services and human nature. I suspect that Twitter is trying but struggling, especially when so many entities use it as a medium of vocalising their valid but controversial opinions (politics, net neutrality, that kind of thing) where heavy-handedness will go down like a lead balloon. I mean, I'm sure that there are ways Twitter could improve matters, but how exactly? If the issue is random threats and stuff, how could Ello ever stop that from happening without introducing moderation before any and all posts are exposed to recipients? If the moderation will occur after the fact, how is that governed? Do we just have a bunch of people who deal with reports? What guidelines do they use — are you blocked for saying you think feminism is a crock of rubbish? How would that scale up to broader volumes of users? Does Twitter not moderate flagged content using pretty reasonable-sounding guidelines anyway, and it's because of its volume of users that it's ineffective? I suppose that with Ello being so small, at least for a while it'll enjoy being a peaceful nirvana of like-minded fellows. Alas I remember a time when Twitter was like that too, except it was all developer geeks. Popularity destroys all.

Since when is government affiliation a measure of whether or not the entity is capable of restricting people's right to express themselves? I get that perhaps there are very specific lawful interpretations of what things like 'free speech' and 'censorship' mean, but as far the conceptual interpretation goes it seems pretty unsavoury to me that they're suppressing people's ability to discuss what they wish to discuss — in this case, because of a hash tag they chose to use? Is the next step blocking contributions from anyone who doesn't align to specific beliefs and movements? I guess I'm just having difficulty seeing a genuine pro of using this service. Perhaps I don't use Twitter enough to see what's fundamentally wrong with it.

So Ello is what, Twitter with more censorship/control? Really not seeing the appeal personally. Even if the vitriolic shit that's been posted on Twitter is patently wrong, restricting freedom of speech is nonetheless something I cannot abide by. How do you solve some of what's been happening on Twitter? I don't know, but I don't think this is the right approach.

Hahaha, oh god Metal Gear...

Yeah, I don't think that many people have been buying Ground Zeroes. I know a lot of MGS fans who haven't touched it. I would assume that once the full game comes out (and presumably provides broader context for whatever the hell happens in Ground Zeroes) there'll be more of a reaction from press and players alike. I haven't played it so I can't comment. I mean that Skullface thing certainly sounds bad but I can't say that I know what it's referring to and whether or not the severity is being exaggerated. If it really is that bad I think it's a safe bet that there'll be some serious criticism coming MGS5's way.

Went and checked out the iPhone 6 today, I have to say the iPhone 6 Plus is definitely too big unless you have huge hands. I literally couldn't get my thumb within a couple of centimetres of the top of the screen, it's pretty much a dealbreaker for one-hand users.

Entertaining article about Snake's climbing technique in MGS5: http://kotaku.com/why-snake-is-the-best-climber-in-video-game-history-1636633722 I do enjoy the level of detail put into these games. Great memories of being told endless facts about jungle fauna in MGS3.

Isn't it more that Kojima is just generally a bit of a perv rather than him being sexist? We are talking about a series where you played for a portion of the game like this: Also, did anyone notice that the woman in the trailer is essentially wearing Vamp's gear from MGS2? He too is a character who has consistently been depicted in quite a provocatively sexual way, incidentally. It probably wasn't wise to do something this prominent, especially during a few years where tolerance for titillation and female flesh in games is at an all-time low. It's kind of set up a situation where unless the game really lives up to what Kojima said below and creates a worthwhile narrative around her appearance (not just some in-universe technological reason but an actual story thread), there's going to be a lot of avoidable criticism. I read a suggestion somewhere that her character was caught up in a fire (possibly the same one we saw Snake in during an earlier trailer which left him looking like a mess), resulting in her being horrendously scarred and mutilated including the destruction of her vocal cords — and her appearance is itself a result of the shape-shifting camouflage. Or maybe Kojima just wanted some hot cleavage. We'll find out soon enough I guess.

This gameplay looks absolutely excellent. I'm also really loving the fact that we're getting to take Big Boss back to the jungle, a la my favourite Metal Gear Solid game to date (MGS3). I just can't wait to be let loose with the gameplay mechanics in such a huge world, although because I'm only watching snippets of this video it remains a mystery to me how the traditionally linear narratives of MGS games will work with this kind of environment. Here's a cutscene: I think I'm going to go on a media blackout for this now because I'm sufficiently sold. I also saw a rumour that there might be a late-2014 release coming on this, although that seems potentially far-fetched.

Yeah, better watch the quality of that water. Don't want those succulent rods feeding on rancid juice.

Continued:

Was given some sponge cakes at work and asked to use my imagination for cake Wednesday.

I've been properly gagging for some classic sim action, something brought on by that Tiny Tower fiasco — just seeing the classics like Sim City, Sim Tower, Theme Park, etc got me drooling about the idea of a new one. I was randomly seeing what Introversion are up to these days and saw they put this trailer out a few months ago: ZX_DnZ_uMQg Now prison simulation isn't exactly what I was thinking, but I have to say I'm pretty excited about this! Apart from The Sims the people in these types of games have generally been quite thick in my experience, so it'd be awesome if they put some really fantastic AI into this. A prison has all sorts of things going on and they are basically entire communities so there's a lot for Introversion to work with — just depends how in-depth they go. It's not due out for like a year so it's far from complete, but it's already looking hot to me. I really like the graphical style, very reminiscent of the classics but it's clearly running with some kind of 3D engine due to the advanced lighting going on. It all looks very smooth to play, too. A classic look without the classic clunkiness, then. More reading here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/30/hands-on-with-prison-architect/ http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/prison-architect-preview/