DanJW

Heh, yeah, people must be getting sick of cliffhanger endings. For Kratos though, I don't think there will ever be an ending. He's one of those characters that will keep fighting for eternity. I mean how many times has he died now? Enough times. Even if he did end up in the depths of the river Lethe you can bet he'd be found smashing Charon's skull in with an oar, even if he didn't remember why.

I like what you said. Yeah, I agree with Nachimir. The exciting philosophies in game design are there, but I see them as general trends, untied to any particular generation of technology. Each hardware generation is, let's be frank, nothing more than a step up in magnitude of processing and rendering power (Wii has successfully bucked the trend somewhat, but it's step is there, only smaller in that direction. It makes up for it in a step up in controller processing power). So yes the extra power may help realise some ideas, but those ideas are not intrinsically part of the hardware generation. Anyone that says it is, does so for marketing reasons. "This years's theme is physics/social networks/crowd AI/the letter Z and the number $60/whatever". Just spin. For instance, something niggles at me when people call Crysis 'Next Gen'. It's because PC gaming doesn't have generations as such. It has much smaller incremental improvements as everyone upgrades or splashes out on a new PC. If you like you can say that a new generation starts around about when the processor speed doubles, but it's just an arbitrary choice. And that's it - all hardware generations are abitrary. Even the console ones, although they are chosen by the iteration of consoles which naturally coincide to compete with each other ("Next-gen starts when we say so"... HAH!). In the long term, developments in game design span generations, not concide with them. I can garuntee that the trends that are begun in this generation will not get anywhere near their potential until the next one, in 2011 or whatever. Here's an interesting thing: human minds hate analogue. We put numbers on dials. We crave threasholds. When does a ball of foetal cells become a living human? Is it now? now? now? We can't grasp one thing fading into another, and label some points on the curve as more important than other points. Luckily, curves do their own thing even without our labels.

Here is my review of The Simpsons Movie: It's The Simpsons.

Were the terror teds reversible? edit: ah, found this to remind me. Not reversible, but still a good selection of gothic horror archetypes

It makes no sense! Both the bunnies are identical! I would praise it's ingenuity if the second head was, like, a cat or something. But it seems a lot of effort for some flowery decorations. This reminds me slightly of the werebears! They were great. I fully endorse childrens toys that introduce them to the miracle of lyncanthropy.

coolcakes!

Also in that photo on the far left: A guy I used to work with, and a guy I used to do stand-up with and only found out he was also in the game industry when I bumped into him at the gi.biz party. Also a cute asian girl who I think I met once.

Cool! I've just accepted your invite. I too went ahead and created a Thumbs Facebook group. 16 members already! Although worryingly there seem to be one or two members who do not hail from Thumbs. I suspect I may have some cyberstalkers

I'll raise you with this:

Coo', coo'.

Yufster is the guardian and paragon of truth Careful Nappi, I think by discussing the Maddie case you might have upset her.... Seriously though, hundreds of African children die excruciating deaths every day, but one middle class white girl encounters some peril and the world hangs in the balance It's just one kid. Her parents can always make another one.* *this was a sarcastic statement. Mostly.

If only you played proper games that have a competitive mode that I could beat you at Yufster, I would do so. I shall just have to settle for pissing on your kitten next time I come to visit. ?

Heh, I was thinking of setting up a Facebook group for thumbs, since I was recently sucked into that (fear my graffitti!) Steam seems to have used my existing ID to sign in to community, which is fine by me. Now that I've set up my profile though, there doesn't seem much else to do. What do I do with it?

This actually has me pretty stoked. I'm all up for some post-apocalyptic road-warrior goodness from iD. Between this and Fallout 3, 2009 should be a rad-tastic year.

It happens to us sometimes. How long has this been going on for? It's possible he's feelign a bit down and doesn't want to go outside right now. Or he could just really, really like Madden. In which case the kindest thing to do would be to introduce him to some better games, or just shoot him.

I'd expect to see a browser based matching service as well, to make the whole 'find a game to join' process more user friendly. Even on consoles I think that's something that occasional gamers find scary.

FFS Yufster, it doesn't upset me, it just bores me to death, because you've been using the whole "paedophiles! lol!" thing for years now. Can you say "stuck record"? Anyway, if you think you have an intelligent comment to Toblix' opinion, then go ahead. You also failed to respond to BooJaka's question.

Paedometer. For measuring how many children

Yeah, we find it funny over here, since "ped" is greek for "foot", so it sounds to us like americans are often up in arms about foot fetishists.

Ah but wrestle, I'm not talking about innovative gameplay, I'm talking about refined gameplay. id have got very good at FPS mechanics; they tweak them constantly to get the feel they want for the game. If they can refine driving mechanics the same way, I think it will turn out well (and judging by Willits descriptions in the Eurogamer interview, that is exactly what they are doing).

Well Jo, in a true lucid dream you have a complete control, so there would be no danger of a monster turning up if you didn't want it to. I have a lot of those "half-lucid" dreams like you though... where I become aware for a few seconds, just long enough to screw everything up.

No, this is mere boredom. I've had two or three lucid dreams. They're great fun. I was having dinner with my parents and one of their friends recently and the friend claimed to have had a lucid dream because "it was like I was actually there". I don't think she knew what the term meant, but it's always difficult to show your parents' friends up as morons in polite company

Interesting. In other news, Yufster's (and Spaff's) obsession with peadophiles is becoming tedious. Can you please come up with a new joke now? Brass Eye quotes are still welcome though

Ahh, but Nintendo seek simplicity for ergonomic reasons, whereas from the above discussion it seems Carmack and id seem to seek simplicity for reasons of elegance.