SiN

Yeah, beyond the single (static) shot of Jade, I'm not sure there's anything that points to BG&E. It looks cool, but it seems unlikely that Ancel & Co would ditch the world they created in favour of real-life India.

Oh yeah, totally. I'm just saying that *I* don't want to. So when I see, "PREORDER NOW EARLY BETA ACCESS!!!!" I just think, "nope, I'm not your free beta tester" and move on. Others are free to see things differently.

Excited! @synth, different game. Double Fine Adventure Game is not Ron Gilbert's New Adventure Game . Totally agree!* I'd rather leave the devs to it (I funded their project because I trust them!) and get a surprising new game when it's done. I do like to read about its development after I'm done with the game, though. (* See also: paid betas. You want me to file bug reports for your game, AND pay you for it? Shouldn't that work the other way around?!)

I'm not positive because (obviously) I haven't made a rip-off a game, but as an iOS dev I can make a pretty good guess. Your iOS dev account (tied to an e-mail address) gets banned. Your annual subscription ($100) goes along with it. But here's the kicker: Apple pays devs every month. I'm pretty sure if your game has been pulled, you don't actually see any of that money. So all these scam apps seem like a waste of time, because I doubt very many of them see any pay-out in the end. Perhaps if an app goes unnoticed for a month or two, they'd get paid (Apple can't really revoke a money transfer after the fact). Hopefully, Apple would withhold funds if an app is under investigation. (that said, it can work both ways. I bet Mobigames a.k.a. the EDGE guys had their money withheld because of a certain troll) I get the feeling it doesn't really pay off for the dev. Of course, it's in Apple's best interests to ensure that it doesn't pay off for the devs. As with most things App Store related, it'll get better in time.

I don't understand how everybody winning is a dickish move. :/

what is a kickstarter? i've never heard of this thing.

I'm pretty sure Amanita didn't go, "hey, how do we best screw over our customers who pre-ordered?" and then did this. I'm preeeeetty sure they put the pre-order thing up because they needed the damn money at the time, and then this Humble Bundle thing came up well after that. So what could Amanita have done? To pass up on the HIB would have been an incredibly foolish thing to do. To refund all the pre-orders would screw GOG over. By doing nothing, everyone comes out alright: the pre-order customers got their game at a price they felt was fair. The HIB customers get some awesome games. And the pre-order folks really want the whole bundle, they can just buy it at a very reasonable price. But best of all, Amanita make a tonne of cash, which means we get more awesome games from them. The only real fault I see is that Amanita definitely should have given GOG a heads up the day before. Other than that I think they did The Right Thing given what must have been a pretty complicated situation. I'm going to buy the bundle over the weekend for $20 and split the cash 70/30 between Amanita and Vectorpark.

Not quite. The thing is, good programmers ship. If you expect everything, from design to implementation, to be perfect (or even close), you'll never ship. This code can be a bit messy, but we'll ship three weeks earlier. This isn't optimized, but eh, it's not on a critical path, so it's not worth the time. This code is a mess, but structuring it too rigidly will leave little room for experimentation. And so on. So there's a compromise that every developer needs to make. We all do it differently, some better than others, but for the most part if a developer ships, that earns my respect. As Erkki pointed out above, "the perfectionist guy" is the one everyone perceives to the be the bestest developer, but their work is worthless because it never ships. Except Carmack, of course. That man is aces at everything.

Seriously, this is every developer ever. Only difference is Notch seems to be pretty open about all this stuff. edit: Seriously, this is every developer ever. Only difference is Notch seems to be pretty open about all this stuff.

Seriously though, this is just so bizarre and surreal that I can't help but love it. I realise that I am part of the problem.

GOTY

Yep, that's the one. Mine was a hand-me-down from relatives. I was too young to play on it that much, but I vividly remember that awful Activision tooth brush game, and also my mum was a total badass at Defender! We got a knock-off NES many years later (1994, I believe) called the Pegasus. I did a google search on a whim, and lo and behold, I found this: I don't actually remember what it looks like, but that looks close enough! Reading up, it seems they were big in Poland, but I was living in Dubai at the time. I played the shit out of that thing. After that came a series of PCs, starting with a 33MHz 486 (4 MB RAM, 20MB HDD). Over a decade later I bought a DS, which opened the floodgates to buying every current-gen handheld & home console.

The best Rhythm Heaven minigame of all time has been found: Pack it in Nintendo, there's no way you're topping this one. (edit: spoiler tagged, JUST in case)

Neither of them. Why would they? I think there's this idea that Rovio and Zynga are smaller or less legitimate version of EA/Activision. Or maybe that they aspire to be them. The reality is that their direction is *very* different from that of EA/Acti, and that they wouldn't stand to gain much from such a buyout.

No, red! No, start a poll on the backers board!

Best ending: "Say bye, Lilly Bean" "byyyyyyyye" HEART MELTED.

Ha, this is hilarious! And yeah, resizing the window to hide the chat audience helps. Haha, Tim is yoyo-ing. [edit] Tim: "Hey, don't step on Lilly Bean" awwwwwwwww <33333

Great to see this getting backed. Fargo went about this the right way, yes, it happened reaction to DFA, but it's also well done and thought out in it's own right. Unfortunately though, no backing from me. I really liked his interview on RPS, but it's fairly obvious that Wasteland 2 is a "for the fans" game. Which is a shame, because I'd love to see them expand the audience without sacrificing depth. RPGs (90s and otherwise) just just feel mechanically clunky to me. Still though, I hope it turns out well!

Guys, I just upped my pledge... uhhh shit, that's $500 now. I'm trying not to think this through too hard, but between DFA, a shiny new iPad, and a mini-vacation, this month's credit card bill is not going to be pretty. (I should point out though, that I can totally afford this, and am not doing anything silly like going into debt or anything!) But hey: woohoo, DOUBLE FIIIIIIIINE! Art book! WOO!

I see your herp derp, and raise you: http://stevenf.com/pages/shutup.css.html

Hilarious! Anyone notice the whiteboard in the first picture: "MORE ORPHANS = CHEAPER". Love the Manny Calavera shot too!

I'm loving Waking Mars! It's the first iOS game which I feel rivals DS/PSP games (significant because, as some of you might recall, I'm rather obsessed with handheld games), and heck, even "proper" console games. The controls are unwieldy at times, but I reckon that would be the case on any handheld. The mechanics, on the other hand, are golden! The seed planting is simple, yeah, but watching the ecosystem grow and exploiting is so interesting. It's like this weird action game/management sim mash up that really shouldn't work, but somehow it does. The atmosphere, setting, narrative, etc is great too. Also worth noting: the ethnic diversity of the characters. [edit] also Erkki, mechanically it's nothing like Capsized, it's far more novel. I can see the similarities in the setting, but I honestly think Waking Mars pulls it off better.

Fact: Jetpacks are never, ever A Bad Thing.

Agreed. And yeah, agreed. The one point I want to reiterate before laying this issue to rest is that we really got the short end of the stick here. Two years ago we got an click-bait article called "Spore Developer Calls Wii a Piece of Shit", when we really could have had an insightful article on Chris Hecker's thoughts on how "Computation Power is Not Orthogonal to Gameplay" A few days ago we got a click-bait article called "Japanese dev mocked 'your games suck'", but what I'm *really* interested in is "Phil Fish and Jon Blow discuss frustrations with modern Japanese games." These click-bait articles are great for publishers, but we get nothing insightful out of them, and they encourage developers to stay "on message" as opposed to talking freely. That totally sucks.

SO FREAKING COOL! http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/08/the-new-simcity-in-video-form-flaming-houses-and-all/