Thrik

Could be he's just talking about regular old debit cards, though. The reason I specifically said VISA is because they're uniquely designed to work as VISA credit cards — the debit cards from the same bank before this came into effect several years ago didn't work unless the site specifically supported it. You get the same kind of protections with a VISA debit card as you do with a VISA credit card too, which is always nice to know.

Odd, I've never had problems with anything ever using my VISA debit, and that includes Amazon US. Maybe the UK ones are special.

Banks in the UK give you debit cards (so you can get money out ATMs) that can also be used as credit cards, as they're VISA debit cards — you just select 'VISA' when filling it all in. This not the case in the rest of Europe?

There's definitely a matter of terminology to consider here. In the past when I've heard the term 'scripted' to describe a game, it's typically to describe a game that has many scripted events and very little choice over how those unfold or indeed how you progress through the game at all. Or to put it another way, you could play the game 50 times and your experience would be more or less the same each time. A game that isn't like this would be something like Red Dead Redemption or Zelda, where you have much more choice over which order you do things in. Even those games are scripted to extent, as obviously you can't really have things happen in a game without a programmer specifically programming those things to happen — but if someone uses the term 'scripted' it's typically to describe the extreme of that, ie: a very linear game full of scripted events like Half-Life, Call of Duty, or Uncharted.

Tweet from Schafer:

Well, in games you earn your fame.

I suppose a nice thing to consider about Double Fine's project is that they already have pretty much everything required good to go, and the majority of the development time will presumably be pure production. They've already got an experienced team, a fantastic engine, and basically loads of hurdles that'd otherwise require a fair bit of money to overcome have been dealt with already. I'd imagine their indie games have given them a very effective pipeline too. Also, it just jumped up by like $25,000 since my last post. Where have all these people been hiding?!

Yeah, Steam version got a recent patch that doesn't appear to be available for original copies of the PC version. Meant to be some graphical enhancements too but I've not verified. http://www.psychonauts.com/

Yeah, that's great. I'm hoping someone like Notch will just drop by and throw $1m in for the sheer hell of it. Most over-produced adventure game ever! And almost at $600,000 now.

Someone just pointed out that Kickstarter actually takes a 5% cut, so don't let the fact they've hit their target put you off throwing more money at Double Fine! Empty your wallet, your savings, and your home!

nJMIE7s0n3M

Bloody hell, how have you gone this long without an Amazon account? It's the best place for buying just about anything, not least of which is games.

My money, take all of it. One particularly nice thing about this is that I assume they'll be using Double Fine's usual in-house tech, which is some pretty splendid shit and could make for one seriously pretty adventure game.

Wotta bastard.

A large part of Psychonauts' charm for me was the whole campground/asylum experience. I absolutely loved exploring those places, finding the hidden areas, etc — and the way the characters were doing an almost ridiculous amount of different things throughout the game was great. I think rather than see it done episodically, I'd prefer that the game be released as an in-depth overworld (albeit perhaps only part of it) with a bunch of brains and considerable amount of narrative so people can truly get sucked in rather than start getting into the game and find the episode is over and lose interest by the time the next one comes out (big problem with Telltale's games IMO, one that's resulted in me not finishing most of their series). Then, further brains and storyline can be added in a DLC-like manner. Like episodes, but with the first one being bigger rather than each having its own distinct version of the overworld, etc.

To be honest I don't think EA could have done much better than they did, it was a fairly excellent marketing campaign — an infinitely better effort than the laughable approach taken by Majesco. The real problem was that Brutal Legend wasn't that sellable and actually not as good as it could have been, so no marketing campaign could really have saved it. Of course this is a totally separate discussion.

Double Fine seems to have gotten quite good at producing wonderful things on small budgets, hopefully that experience will carry over into getting their big projects done in less insane amounts of time.

Sweet Jesus, you mean I might actually get to do something with Psychonauts.net again?! In short: very. Slightly longer answer: Minecraft was first available as an alpha for about €10, and later as a beta for about €15. Around the end of last year he reported that he's sold about 4,000,000 copies, meaning he's sitting on at least: €40,000,000 £33,000,000 $53,000,000 That calculation is made with the assumption that all sales were €10, whereas in reality many if not most of them were probably €15 — so you could very easily add another €10m or so onto that. Also these sales figures are from last year, and he has no real publishing costs to deal with. He's been splashing out a bit on extra developers and stuff but I think it's fair to say he's sitting on a pretty fuckin' big pile of cash. So, yeah. Pretty much the ultimate indie developer dream. But don't forget that Minecraft was literally a phenomenon, so it's certainly an unusual case.

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Best reference ever.

That looks like one of the most creative and insane things I've ever seen. It's certainly marketed at younger types, but what a creation! This should indeed definitely be marketed like a bastard because it's probably the best thing that's come out of the Kinect.

Interesting symbolism having a massive snake just above the cleavage too.

What's the word on Halo 4? Is it expected to be good even though Bungie has stepped out of the picture or what? Who's actually making it? I just remembered RollerCoaster Tycoon 3D is coming out this year. I can't believe that after almost a decade of anticipation the platform the next sequel is for is the 3DS. I'm not hating on the console, but holy shit do I want a RollerCoaster Tycoon game built on modern technology on my TV. All I can say is I hope it does well so they do a proper PC or PlayStation Move version.

Of the above list (because I'm oblivious to everything else) I have my eye on Far Cry 3, Hitman, and Grand Theft Auto 5. I'm also hoping for extensive Battlefield 3 DLC, and the Alan Wake mini-sequel looks quite attractive. Other than that I can't think of anything else I'm looking forward to.

Nah, but I am quite looking forward to this American Nightmare mini-sequel.