ThunderPeel2001

Phaedrus' Street Crew
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    8780

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by ThunderPeel2001

  1. Posted

    Well X-Com just got unlocked as a preorder bonus on Steam. Damn those clever bastards. I'm fighting with every last fiber of my free will left to not preorder this game.

     

    You liar! It's not unlocked yet. Boo! :(

  2. Posted

    A bit off-topic, but there seems to be a lot of game developers who post in this thread, so I figured I'd mention it here: are there any 2D sprite artists amongst you thumbs? I'm writing a game, and I need someone who can do top-down 2D art for it. It's a bit of a Hotline Miami-esque affair, gameplay-wise, but with a more somber aesthetic set in the Vietnam War. It's got some cool plot twists, and (spoilers) it's going to end up being a bit of a social commentary on PTSD and the way America treats its veterans.

    If anyone wants to help out (or knows someone who would), I'd love to get a team together and get this thing made. For now, I'm just working on a design document, narrative/dialogue, some level design, and a friend of mine is on-board to make music for it. The objective would be to release it as a PC game, maybe run it through Greenlight.

     

    Does it turn out that the whole thing is just in your protagonist's mind, and he's actually been shooting civilians and police in the USA?

  4. Posted

    It's worth noting that Gilbert didn't work at all for a 10 year period.

    From the wikipedia:

    Total Annihilation (1997), producer

    Penny Arcade Adventures, story and design consultant, Hothead Games (2008)

    Tales of Monkey Island (2009–2010), "Visiting Professor of Monkeyology", Telltale Games

    DeathSpank (2010), design, Hothead Games

    (and the middle two hardly count as steady, or well paying, gigs)

    I figured he didn't really have to work, but wanted to after the Humongous buy-out. (That said, I had no idea they sold for that much!) It doesn't seem like Gilbert lives a particularly extravagant lifestyle, so I imagine $38 million, even after taxes, would last quite a while.

    Thinking about this now, there's a decade of silence followed by his return to game development. I wonder if there's an interesting story in there? (Or just a lot of WoW)

     

    It certainly feels like there's an interesting story there. I've never heard him discuss what happened with Shelley Day, for example (I wonder if they were together or just business partners?). 

     

    You could well be right, but I seriously doubt they sold their company for $76m in CASH -- usually stocks and shares are part of the deal. It's also interesting that almost everyone from HE left shortly after the acquisition -- which indicates that they weren't bought for the team, but for the properties (otherwise they would have been locked in).

     

    It's even stranger that they were free to make a company that directly competed with HE. Again, usually the acquirer will insist on a clause of the sale being that they can't do that for a set period of time.

     

    The whole thing smells like an interesting story to me!

  5. Posted

    I don't know, but people who have made tons of money very frequently run into extreme financial problems because of their own mismanagement. The money from the sale had to go somewhere, and where else would it have gone besides to those who owned the company?

     

    It's likely to be far more complicated than that. I'd be amazed if they got all that in actual cash, and nothing in shares.

  8. Posted

    All the posts since my one are regressive crap.

    You know, it's quite the opposite. The thread has massively died down since you made your post -- So although nobody is directly responding to it, I think people may have read it and taken it on board.

  9. Posted

    I don't understand how you can argue that Ms. Sarkeesian's video is not about sexism.

    Me either. I guess that's why I didn't do it.

     

    But of course Ms. Sarkeesian's video is not serious academic work, nor is it intended to be. And her video is openly coming from a particular point of view: a feminist point of view.

    What are you basing this on? Her previous videos are now part of some university's curriculum, including law schools. Also, this is completely besides the point.

     

    E: I mean I guess it doesn't really matter, I just find this whole "subjectivity is forbidden in academia" very strange. Academic writers frequently express points of view, make value judgments, suggest future courses of action, and so on.

    *sigh* No academic work contains subjective views. They may make arguments based on presented evidence, but that's not the same as declaring something as "crap".

    You seem to be deliberately ignoring everything I'm saying just so you can try and make your point stick, or drag this conversation into other territories. I said everything that needed to be said here, and I don't think I can make my point any clearer, so we should probably just move along.

    If you still don't understand my point, and wish to discuss things further, PM me.

  12. Posted

    Besides, there's a good chance the EA representative would have: A. regardless of having any idea how it actually works denied it all B. gone "no comment" or not commented because they don't have a position for this yet.

     

    That's a really bad excuse for not picking up the phone!

     

    I guess the difference with internet news is that they don't need the whole story before it goes to print: They can just quickly publish an update once somebody else finds out how EA responds.

  13. Posted

    As far as I'm aware, Ron made a LOT of money in the sale of Humongous Entertainment. He's doing fine. I'm saying that not officially as a DF employee, because obviously we have no direct insight into his finances, just as someone who has been generally aware of his movements over the years.

     

    Hmm. I'm not sure about that. Humongous Entertainment was sold to GT Interactive for $76 million, yes, but Gilbert's co-founder, Shelley Day, was later jailed for trying to fraudulently get a loan for $1.5 million. (If she'd actually gotten $38 million from the sale of HE, I think she probably just would have used her own money :-/ ) Did Ron ever talk about that stuff?

  14. Posted

     don't agree. No one is taking sides on Metal Gear Solid or Dead Space qua games. Anita is definitely taking sides on whether or not sexism is good or bad, and there's nothing wrong with that. 

     

    Here's an analogy. Say someone made a video about the history slavery. If part way through the video, that person said that slavery was oppressive and racist, that would be a subjective opinion about slavery. But that subjective opinion is totally unobjectionable. And the fact the person expressed a subjective point of view on slavery would not lessen or undermine their factual account of the history of slavery. 

     

    Anita's comment was about Double Dragon Neon and it's portrayal of women. It was not about sexism.

     

    Secondly, your analogy is very vague. If the video was meant as entertainment, then it's fine to have subjective opinion. If it's attempting to be a serious academic work, then it's completely inappropriate. I personally see serious academic works as being more important than mere entertainment (you may disagree with me on that), so it pained me when Anita fell into a realm that wouldn't even be acceptable for an article on Wikipedia.

     

    Also: Sorry Ben :(

  15. Posted

    Clayton is a senior designer at Microsoft! I think he's got a pretty sweet setup where he has a really stable (probably much better paying than DF could ever be) day job, while getting to do his indie-scale stuff on his own time with Ron.

     

    What about Ron? The guy seems to bounce around from company to company. Things ended badly at Hothead. Now he's leaving DF. The Cave was an awesome game -- I hope it finds an audience eventually. And I hope Ron has some financial stability...?

  16. Posted

    I think this thread went on for so long and got so awful at points because it has the feminism thing tied into it, which is one of those subjects that people seem to need to WIN rather than discuss (cf. the Feminism thread). When the second thread comes round, I think it'll go a lot nicer if everyone gets out of that mindset and stops insulting or trying to shut down other people's opinions. Disagreeing with others' arguments is fine, but calling them absurd or garbage isn't very constructive, and telling someone why they have their opinion is rather presumptuous and rude. Also, saying that a certain aspect shouldn't be discussed or that things are being over-discussed seems counter-intuitive on a discussion forum. Finally, it would be sage to remember that we have at least one troll floating around and if someone's particularly winding you up, that may be exactly what you're aiming for.

     

    Of course, I won't say that the way people have been discussing things has been "wrong", because that would make me a giant hypocrite. This is merely my opinion, and one I've been itching to say through most of this thread but couldn't find the place for. It's not an exaggeration to say that I've been very disappointed with people on both sides of this thread at times, but a lot of good discussion has come out of it as well so I'm looking forward to the second thread!

     

    Some good points here, I think.

  18. Posted

    There's no need to defend MGS or Dead Space because no one's attacking them. It's about tropes, and identifying them. Nobody's taking sides, not even Anita in her video.

     

    Apart from her single subjective comment -- sorry! I know everyone's tired of that, it's just you highlighted why it's important that she remains objective.

  23. Posted

    I think I preferred Rare Exports to Troll Hunter -- but maybe I should watch them again. Troll Hunter bored me in ways that I don't remember Rare Exports doing.

     

    Arbitrage was pretty run-of-the-mill, but it was also definitely "quite good". I quite liked the ending.

     

    Also, I'll say it again, but everyone should just go out and watch Searching for Sugarman -- and try to know as little about it as possible before going in. It's a great feel-good documentary.

  24. Posted

    It's amazing how much people basically "learn how to have sex" from porn at this point. By which I mean, learn what you're "supposed to do," not how it works medically or practically. I wonder what the percentage of kids who saw porn online before they had their first sex ed class is at this point? The number has to be high, and it's weird. There are many distressing reddit threads with examples too small and dumb to be made up for karma. We live in a messed up time. The end.

     

    I've been saying for about 10 years now that there should be porn FOR teenagers. I.e. Normal, every day, healthy porn -- showing sex as it's enjoyed by most people, most of the time, especially those new to it -- and not "I'm going slap you in the face, and call you a whore while shoving my dick up your ass" porn.

     

    Instead of trying to hide porn from them, we should have porn made especially for them: Want to watch porn? Here, you're allowed to watch THIS.

     

    I think Europe does a much better job at dealing with these sorts of things that we (the UK) and the US do -- Their teen magazines have full page photos of naked readers (in their teens) talking about their bodies in frank and honest terms. That seems a lot healthier to me than being ashamed of it -- but the whole explosion of the internet has only complicated things.

     

    I can only hope that teens today just see crazy porn on the net, and don't let it affect them. Unfortunately a friend of mine told me how he stumbled across his older brother's porn collection -- really messed up porn collection -- (this was pre-internet) and how he felt it had messed him up as an adult. *sigh*

  25. Posted

    I can't speak for Jake here or anyone else, just myself, but the reason I find this thread so incredibly frustrating and therefore kind of terrible is the fact that virtually no one has denied that female representation in games is a problem--I think we all agree on that--but a lot of people seem to have a hard time accepting the objective facts in this video (leaving off the 'regressive crap' comment, I think the video factually demonstrates that there are a lot of women who are written as damsels in video games) for kind of nitpick-y reasons like 'well x character in y game wasn't a damsel this one time, etc...' If you're honest about wanting to understand the issue, then you should try and just listen and not come up with excuses for why something doesn't count or how this one example invalidates the entire argument.

     

    Ignoring any of the analysis, comments, or opinions that Sarkeesian expressed in the video, I hope we all at least agree with her statement that there are clearly a lot of female characters written as damsels and that it is part of a larger problem of how women are represented in media.

     

    I certainly agree with that, and I think the video did a fine job of conclusively illustrating that point.