Twilo

Kotaku with scan from Edge Relive your memories of pointy corners of the NES, the clacky buttons of the Megadrive, the utter confusion of the N64! Cover them in jam and biscuit crumbs and it's like you've got a freaking time machine I approve.

Lloyrd George invented the Spinning Jenny, Crop Rotation and the smallpox vaccination. He led the storming of the Bastille and championed Church-State seperation in France. He introduced sale of government bonds to finance the Panama Canal and infamously had an affair with an American divorcée. He developed the invasion plan for the annexation of Schleswig and Holstein and fought in Rhodesia, the Crimea, two World Wars and brought an end to Russian Sovietism. He is the greatest man who has ever lived and the foundation of seven major and many more minor world religions. He is LLOYD GEORGE

This pretty much appears to be the case (hence "replicas").

What I meant was that the relationship between events and their credibility isn't one-way; even if it isn't established in an explicit way ("Grand Chicken Materializer" etc) the occurance of (by everyday standards) incredible events in a work of fiction has an effect on our perception of what is credible within that work. We need some good post-modern games.

Well, with the chicken example, if that happened a enough times (chickens materialising) in the game, it'd be established as just a part of the game world/story and would acquire a certain credibility. This is sort of thing you get in other media a fair bit, like the superhero ring in Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, or vampires in Buffy etc. Within the credibility budget framework considered, an isolated "incredible" incident would have a high cost, but a number of similar incidents would have a much lower cost together than any individual incident would alone; maybe even a net negative cost (as other "sorta" incredible events elsewhere would become more credible).

Games are rarely character-driven because video games are designed to be experiences; the player experiences a world or events. Were a game to be character-driven (regarding the PC), for example, then there would need to be a serious curtailing of freedoms regarding what you can do as a player with that character. I don't know if anyone is advocating on-the-rails games with regard to protagonist development (though Japanese RPGs tend to get away with it). A character-driven game would be much more focused on the NPC characters, or the ancillary PCs, while keeping the protagonist more undeveloped (and the player relatively free to act as they like). This is often a necessity for Western RPGs like Baldur's Gate or the Elder Scrolls games where the PC is made up on the day by the player and is an element which the designers can't predict or account for especially accurately in assigning behaviour to it.

The issue of freedom in games with the development of the player character is an interesting one; consider Gordon Freeman. Gordon has absolutely no discernable personality traits whatsoever, but because of the constraints of the Half Life games (which are extremely linear) he performs heroic actions: Gordon rescues friends from prisons, guides resistance attacks and saves-the-world-sorta more than once. Because Gordon is pretty much a non-person and doesn't impress his own personality on the game, it allows the player to consider his/herself to be the main character. Gordon didn't save the world, I did. Sorta.

Well with Video game characters (PCs really), there is the added dimension of whether the player is comfortable performing the character's actions. This has a bit in common with the likeability of a character but also encompasses things such as acting according to knowledge that the character doesn't have, or doing something that the character might justify but that the player wouldn't (moral issues etc.). This issue of comfort gets in the way of rich character development for protagonist characters. An interesting facet of the relationship between the PC and the player is how the character traits of the PC will "feed back" to the player, such as in GTA where the character is a criminal, so the player feels more comfortable performing criminal acts or Grim Fandango where the player doesn't (typically) mind rigging the roulette games (because Manny doesn't mind it either). This is rather like a reversal of the "blank slate" idea in that it is the character that influences the player's behaviour. I think if you go for that kind of a setup, you need to be careful not to push the character to any kind of an extreme. I think it probably works as long as the character can justify his/her own actions (even if the player wouldn't typically approve). In that regard, a blank slate character could "justify" any action performed by the player because there aren't many (or any) precepts regarding what the character would consider correct/acceptable behaviour. note just in case: I am not in any way talking about violent behaviour in real people being a consequence of video games etc. I'm talking about how players can become comfortable playing as a character which has behavioural traits or morals that don't correspond to their own

Well the "blank slate" kind of character serves a useful purpose in video games in that it doesn't present a barrier between the game world and the player. In a previous discussion about this, the idea of the protaganist performing actions other than that which the player might perform came up; the issue is that as a player, you are "acting out" the characters behaviour. Players are more comfortable playing a character which is, as much as possible, like themselves (Mary Sue style). An obvious technical issue here is that you cannot provide a protagonist who would behave as every possible player ever would in a given situation; the next best thing is a protagonist who has no behavioural baggage (i.e. a blank slate). A strong example of this is Knights of the Old Republic, in which the protagonist begins with no memories or behaviour trends, and evolves according to how the player acts. If a player uses the protagonist to act in an evil manner, you get an evil protagonist and vice versa. Amnesia as a plot device in this kind of case is sort of justified but it's certainly not required. As you continue playing KOTOR, and the story of your character comes to light, you discover

I don't think anyone associates "geek" with biting off chicken heads anymore.

I refute your assertion, jackass!

Well at least in this little nook of little Ireland, we take "gamer" to regard players of the table-top/pen&paper sort of games. "Coder" I don't mind, in that it's an informal name for something that has a formal title (like "hacker"). "Scripter" is different, and even though the difference between a programming language and a scripting language is largely conceptual, I don't think you would expect someone referred to as a "scripter" to knock out an OS microkernel or something. It's worth noting that not everybody plays video games (seriously, you guys), and "gamers" is a lot easier on the tongue than "people who play video games" or most anything else. "Games for gamers" etc is just marketroid speak and you shouldn't read so much into it.

If Linux will be on the PS3 it's mostly due to EU taxation laws.

The kind of indie games that work out are those that don't deal with a whole lot of 3D graphics (it's hard to compete with the big studios on that front) or are mods for games where most of the engine work is already done. The indie games that do well generally do so because of great gameplay, often innovative or original ideas that are possible because the risk is much lower due to the smaller content overhead. Infinity is off to a pretty bad start when it comes to being a success or not as it's entering (or it will do in 4 of 5 years time if it's ever done) a saturated market with an Eve-style game. It has a heavy focus on graphics and mmo elements; both of which are already well-handled by big studios with big content generation teams. In that sense, it's more useful as a technical demo the programmer might use to get a job somewhere else.

Putting aside the market forces for a minute, you might also consider that a development studio for the average title these days is pushing well above the 50-person count. Compare this to the other entertainment/culture fields where innovation and experimentation are much more common (literature, visual art, music etc) and we notice that, for the most part, groups or teams range between one and fiveish (with exceptions). This drives much of the stagnation we are critical of in the games industry today and it does it in a few ways. A couple: -Technology advances greatly increase the amount of work that goes into content generation (modelling, art, mapping etc). This is the market's own fault for pushing 3d rendering technology so much in the past 10 years (and is still happening with Microsoft and Sony's new consoles). Having more and more people working on increasingly (comparatively) small parts of a project has the consequence of the team members making compromises in design etc. in order to get everyone working together in a halfway productive manner. There is less room for flair or innovation when it "breaks" the work the rest of the team has produced hitherto for a title. -Games are expensive these days, and take a long time to produce (technology again). It's not practical to try out an idea over a 6-month development period to see if it's viable when you need to write paychecks for 50 people for that time and end up scrapping the work. A lot of people like to make comparisons between Hollywood and the games industry (I don't like to, but I am about to do so anyway) and there's definitely more of a commonality than with literature/music/etc. Hollywood movies are made with extremely large production teams. Time and costs are enormous and the output is generally stale, boring and formulaic because they can't afford for it not to be. There are examples of movies that are critical successes but perform poorly at the box-office; studios can't afford to make too many of that sort of movie. The same goes for big studio games. I'm sure every one of those Police Academy movies made a profit (just as the 3 or 4 EA Madden games we get each year do) Contrast that to the independent (or pseudo-indie) film scene where smaller teams take bigger risks because the budget is much smaller. Nowadays it's possible to produce higher quality films on smaller budgets thanks to advances in technology which make it easier (cheaper) to perform digital manipulations or save on photofilm costs. This is the opposite to what happens in games; costs go up as the technology demands harder work in order to match up to the hardware. This makes small-team games very difficult to produce to big-studio standards as the cost:time ratio is a pain. The DS or PSP are nice places to look for innovative games because the nature of the hardware means that content creation isn't anywhere near as steep an obstacle as it is for the average PC or living-room console game these days. rant-esque

What about considering it to be a cheap alternative to a multimedia PC? That makes a bit more sense.

Profumo di fungo

Yeah, I think they were flavoured with pork fat or something.

This predates the tv show by year or two. IIRC, a lot of the UK Sonic universe (especially the first 3/4 years of Sonic the Comic) takes after Tony Takoushi's sorta-official Sonic the Hedgehog book from around 1991. The American stuff (the original awful cartoon and the Archie comics) takes after a 1-2 page comic strip promoting the original game that turned up in one of the Disney magazines around the same time, this had the chili-dogs and cola stuff. Chili-dogs turn up in some early STCs as a result of a bit of cross-pollination but I don't think they ever followed it through.

Well it's certainly do-able in a steam style setup to rent games (like, say, a 5 day licence for HL2 for $5 or whatever), the difference being that Blockbuster or whatever doesn't get in on it. For developers, that would be a good thing. Blockbuster can go screw themselves. As for reselling, it's not a major leap to allow transfer of licenses for games (many EULAs and similar agreements provide licence transfer rights to the party) and that is really down to what the retailer is willing to allow. Maybe if valve had a "secure license transfer" setup where, for example, a user might pay $23 into steam, valve takes $3 of that and gives the other user $20 of store credit. That's a pretty decent business model right there.

Hee, I remember those! Sonic the Hedgehog pickled onion crisps too.. Actually the gel might be in an ad in one of my Sonic the Comics somewhere..

That's like €175 man, slap on 15 bucks delivery and you have an import dream. Sweet like crazy.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/24/rumor-sony-to-disable-used-ps3-games-sony-nope/

We got this fundamentalist catholic newspaper through the letterbox at our house a few weeks ago and there was a personal ad in one of the back pages had the following: