Thrik

LoveFILM winds me up a bit because you can only cancel via the phone. I hate companies that do that because my laziness usually results in me paying for many more months than I should. When I did summon up the energy to bother, they offered me six free months and then I fell straight back into the same trap. True story: I've had a LoveFILM account that I've paid for but not used in about 1.5 years. I am a dick.

Yeah I never do that, I always say 'game' whether I'm referring to an arcade experience or something like Journey. Of course I'm not even entirely sure what this crazy argument is about and am just interjecting a few more waves into the sea.

As far as I'm concerned, if it's interactive then it's gameplay — for I am playing a game. I guess you could describe many games, apps, or gadgets as toys or even 'interactive experiences' rather than games. But you know what? I'd just feel a bit silly doing that in casual conversation.

Haha!

Haha. The bed caption works superbly.

Never seen it, but I really enjoyed The Darjeeling Limited so I conclude I must like The Life Aquatic too.

What the hell.

Hahaha, HappyBob. Absolutely splendid.

LOL.

What a splendid thread. May you keep it updated for the rest of your life.

I'm pretty sure you can't play most 360 games online without it, which is presumably why 90% of people buy it right there. I don't really do any console multiplayer, but obviously a ginormous amount of people do.

Just interviewed one of the principal Black Mesa: Source level designers, as part of a general effort to generate more original content through my community rather than it just being a forum. There're a lot of devs on the forum so it's really exciting to be finally putting some of those links to good use. Interview with Jean-Paul Jarreau, Black Mesa level designer If anyone wants to be really awesome, retweet this: https://twitter.com/mapcore/status/260849967697125376 Just noticed the pink dancing smilie is gone.

I hadn't played any scary games for years prior to trying Dead Space, and within an hour there was so much shit spewing out of my ass that I put it down and never played it again. Up to a certain point I enjoy it, for example the Half-Life games are pretty much a master class in terms of how to build a game that can scare you without it completely dominating the experience.

My girlfriend gave Ass Creed 2 a try recently after I'd been telling her for months how good it is. Then one of the first fucking missions where you race your brother to the top of the church completely bugs out and she's left racing nobody because the brother is just stood at the starting position doing nothing. After she spent some frustrating time trying to figure out why she couldn't end the mission and then had to restart from a checkpoint it'd completely taken the flow and wonder out of the new game experience and she never touched it again. Also the DRM stuff sounds ridiculous. PC DRM maddens me in general, but we all know the 'only the legitimate buyer suffers' thing so yeah.

Went to the UK's biggest zoo (AFAIK) last week, took a crazy amount of photos but the red pandas (also known as the firefox) were the highlight — holy shit these things are cute and hilarious to watch. These dudes were pretty awesome too:

Here you go: http://www.readability.com/ Clearly it can be used on a PC, but it's at its best on a phone or tablet because it just makes the reading experience very smooth. You can add links to it manually, but it's at its best when used with an interoperating app (MobileRSS and Flipboard are my choices, the former uses Google Reader's API and the latter basically finds and elegantly shows the kind of things you might like to read and is a good app in its own right) so you can just go through your feeds and chuck content into it for later enjoyment. My old way of working was to go through my RSS feeds post by post, reading them as I went along. This just took up so much time and I always felt totally overwhelmed because I got through hardly anything during each session. The whole 'whiz through and sort them into read/reject piles' workflow is just so much better for me.

Interestingly, taking my general internet reading habits away from my computer entirely has largely vanquished this problem for me. I used to keep tabs on an enormous number of shit through Google Reader and some bookmarks, and just wasted so much time reading stuff it was kind of stupid and I felt like I'd wasted my time in the end. So now, I only check my feeds when I otherwise have nothing to do (public transport, shitting, etc). And even better, I use an app called Readability where you can toss the stuff you actually want to read later — so I basically dive through my RSS feed and anything I think I'll want to read in detail I'll just throw into the reading list. Then when I have time I'll read it, knowing it's not going anywhere. I read through from oldest to newest, although naturally I never reach the end. I've found through doing this I'm less obsessive about making sure I've seen everything on every site I follow. In fact, more often than not I just rely on my 'RSS' app (Flipboard)'s top picks alongside a few choice sites I absolutely must follow. After at least a year of this I've realised that a lot of the shit I follow I just don't care that much about, and now it's been so long since I kept an eye on them the compulsion to not miss anything has subsided completely.

I think the way inventory was handled in general in Grim Fandango did wonders for its gameplay. I loved how even when you did have to combine items, it was done in-world rather than in an abstracted interface like in EMI. It all felt so right.

Grim Fandango went to fairly amusing lengths to keep the inventory within the realms of believability, for example making you drag around a gigantic axe during a later puzzle, and of course the whole protracting scythe thing.

If you think that's bad, check out where the star of this mind-numbing advert shown on UK television all the time gets her shit from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZH6kslt30Y

Some games completely take the piss regarding how much your character can carry, so I guess an infinite bag is the only way to get around it. I find it somewhat refreshing when games like Uncharted and Max Payne 3 come along where the inventory is kept low and the characters clearly stash their stuff about their person — even though you can't actually use it, it's cool seeing that the key to Shambala is physically there all along for example. Of course, you've got games like Monkey Island which were openly taking the piss out of this trope way back in the industry's early days.

The way trailers are announced nowadays is amusing, but I am looking forward to seeing more of Infinite as my mind still really hasn't figured out what it truly is and whether or not it wants to play it.

You guys are really making me want to forget I played and hated the demo, and give it another go.

I would say that the 'Unreal Engine' look was pretty much produced through excessive contrast, seen in games ranging from BioShock to Enslaved to Gears of War. Fortunately developers have managed to veer away from that now. As for the scaling thing, I would say that's born from technical limitations as Jake described. Until this generation console games in particular had very low-resolution textures, so you literally couldn't put in much fine detail — there weren't enough pixels. Even with this generation, textures are relatively small in comparison to what PCs can handle, thus most games have artwork produced with consoles in mind and again ultra-fine detail is avoided. The next generation is when we'll likely see much more in the way of nuanced detail, because for the first time consoles will be capable of rendering truly high-resolution textures. When you play something like Crysis or Battlefield on a beefy PC with texture detail pushed way up, you realise just how lacking the current consoles are in this respect with their comparatively blurry and undetailed surfaces. Plus there is of course an art direction side to this story, so even once the ceiling is lifted off texture detail next generation we'll still probably find developers exaggerating details out of habit for a while.