SiN

Hold three fingers down on the screen at once. I figured this out by randomly trying shit. You're welcome.

Funny how these always come from anonymous comments and/or twitter users who are pretty much anonymous.

Pretty sure I just saw Jake at SeaTac Airport...

It's not though. If I'm backing something in dollars I sign in through Amazon. If it's in pounds, I need to type out my CC details. Password, I remember. CC details, I do not. (I suppose you could save your CC details on Kickstarter, but I'd rather not) It isn't *that* inconvenient, but it has definitely led to me to procrastinate backing a few projects. I backed this KS a week into it, as opposed to day one or two.

I have an R4, which contains a homebrew DS game I wrote. (And some import games I couldn't find on Amazon. Oh, and Doom)

What about Major Minor's Majestic March? (I think that's what it's called. It's the rhythm game for the Wii by the Parappa guys)

Basically how I feel. I picked World's Apart as well, but I guess it is a bit cliche/corny. Broken Age looks right though. What I didn't like about the titles up for vote is that they don't evoke the same sense of intrigue/mystery that a title like Psychonauts or Grim Fandango did. Does World's Apart do that? Broken Age? I'm honestly not sure.

Exciting! What are you doing at grad school? I moved to Seattle for work so I might not be super useful, but I'll try anyway. Apartments: UW campus is in U-district, which tends to be where students live. It's a bit of a drive/bus trip to Seattle proper though. I've been there lets say a dozen or so times (for food, concerts) and well ... it seems like a place where students live. Rent is cheaper in U-district than it is Seattle proper. If you'd rather live in Seattle, I'm guessing it's a 20-30 minute commute to UW. You probably want to live in Capitol Hill. It's the happening part of town... the rent is higher than it should be as a result. Queen Anne is a great area too... quiet, heavily residential, but still close to downtown. Rent is pretty reasonable too. Oh, Fremont too. It's close to U-district, but a bit far from downtown. Places to avoid: Belltown is kinda expensive and too close to downtown, South Lake Union has a lot of new buildings popping up, but it's really under-developed. Uhhh, that's all I've got. Reply here or Private Message me if I've been useful and you've got more questions.

Reporting for duty! Yeah, two screen modes: mirroring, and second screen. The second screen doesn't *have* to be a video stream (although that is an option). It's just another screen you can render anything to. I'm positive this is the case with a wired connection, but I'm pretty sure it works over AirPlay as well. Two problems, though. 1) rendering a second screen on the same GPU is a lot of work, but more importantly 2) latency. There's a reason why the Wii U has crazy specialised tech for their streaming solution.

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)

Just guessing here: 1. As Nachimir pointed out, English reads from left-to-right 2. Screen coordinates go from the top-left to the bottom-right

I'm going to give the very boring computer science response to this one. The simple truth is that computers aren't sentient and simulations still needs to be written by human beings through some combination of research and preconceived notions, under limited time and processing constraints. A lot of the "hey, my Sims don't live at a fixed location" and "the pathfinding isn't perfect" issues can be attributed to processing constraints. The lack of transport options is *probably* not an elaborate conspiracy, but likely a cut feature due to time constraint. The taxation stuff falls somewhere in between, both being difficult to simulate and being a lower priority (and therefore cut) feature. (Worth noting that, if anything, Maxis tend to create fairly liberal simulations. For example, The Sims had gay/lesbian relationships since the first game) At some level, all simulations have built-in assumptions, have some level of "smoke and mirrors". These assumptions are interesting to examine because they reflect the people who created the simulation. But is it any surprise that a group of American developers would make America-centric assumptions on how cities work? Further, is it any surprise Sim City was designed as a Video game first, and simulation second?

I think Sega outsourced ACM, sure, but I doubt Gearbox would have the authority to make that call independently. The alternate explanation, that they outsourced it behind Sega's back, is crazy implausible. But yeah, definitely a "rumours of rumours of facts around the office" kinda thing.

The speech bubble is a bit much, but in theory I agree. White text (with a subtle black drop shadow) would stand out against the generally low-saturated game even without the speech bubble. The reason this won't fly is because the window was how it was done Back In The Day, so that's how it'll be done now. :/

Not really? I mean, yeah it's interesting, but this person is hardly a credible source. A tester at Sega wouldn't know too much more about the Publisher/Developer agreements & contracts than we do. A lot of what this person said is basically hearsay, and could be derived from what we've heard online anyway. Like the whole "Gearbox used this to fund Borderlands" thing ... anyone could come up with that theory, but it's full of holes. If you were Sega, would you pay up millions of dollars without ensuring the money got spent correctly? And after 6 years, don't you think they'd clue in? Just doesn't add up.

Finished my first play through. Disappointed overall. Not a bad game by any means, just mediocre. You can see Ron Gilbert's genius design somewhere in there, but for the most part it's unrealized potential. A few seemingly minor changes would have made a big difference overall. The iffy platforming didn't bother me too much, but the amount of traversal and back-tracking did. I wish the inventory was shared between the three characters. Not only would it make for less back-tracking, but the puzzles could potentially be more interesting. (The ol' use-an-object-you-had-to-pick-up-for-an-earlier-puzzle trick would work). I wish there was a little more dialogue... not "examine everything" dialogue, but our narrator (who is voiced and written really well) could definitely interject more often. As toblix mentioned, some dialogue or animation for wrong solutions would be great. There are bigger issues though: the aforementioned clunky platforming. The character-specific abilities don't play a big role at all. The story and characters seem interesting, but I felt the game never developed any of it. If you missed the cave paintings, most it would feel completely arbitrary. The opening narration seemed so promising, but I don't think it ended up delivering. Though it got frustrating, I did enjoy my play-through overall, but not enough to go back a second time.

Wasn't the bigger problem the latency between the SPU memory and RAM? So to execute any code on the SPU, you had to copy it from RAM into the (256k of) SPU memory over a slow bus, then it would run the code super-fast, but then the result had to be copied from the SPU back to RAM again? My sarcasm detector wasn't sure.

Feel free to call this bullshit, but I don't think either console connects with customers on an emotional level like Apple does. Related: this thread containing RROD stuff and Xbox being plastered with ads stuff. This is not how one builds good will and cultivates long-term customers. [edit] Actually feel the need to expand on this... I bought an iPad on day one, because I loved my iPhone 3GS, which I bought because my iPod touch (1st gen) felt like the future, which I bought because I loved my MacBook (2007), which I bought because I loved my iPod classic (5th gen), which I bought because the one guy I knew with a Mac (way back in 2004) managed to win me over. I bought a Wii on day one, because I loved my DS, which I bought (despite never owning a console before) because of the wide praise it earned with gamers and critics I trusted. I ended up buying a DS, DS lite, DSi and 3DS. I regret nothing. They're not all perfect (both my Apple and Nintendo tech have crapped out on me) but they hit much more than they missed. Good will is built over many years, and many products.

I'm willing to bet it's related to what I mentioned above: Tools & Documentation. Although Treasure is a weird case since they are Japanese. But still, the Xbox architecture is simpler to understand (and closer to the Naomi/DC architecture) than the PS3 is. I feel very much the same way. My Xbox went from "second best* console ever!" to basically "the Spelunky machine". However, it's worth noting what a freaking mess the PS3 UI is. Some how the design is both clean AND completely useless to navigate. The whole games tab is a mess. There are a million useless apps installed. The Settings menu is endless. PSN storefront some how got worse. Buying games still uses the weird download-the-demo-and-key mechanism half the time. I could go on... This, plus the messaging stuff JonCole said, has me worried. I mean, it doesn't really matter ... I'll get all three consoles eventually, but it's heartbreaking to see Sony hit so many high notes, but totally fail on the fundamentals. (* because DS, obviously)

I don't, but I think we've articulated our points well, and it's time to move on. So anyway, two things I wanted to bring up: The terraflop argument. As long as they're in the same ballpark (and they are) it's largely irrelevant IMO. Think about this gen, and where the console hardware was bottlenecked: Xbox: unable to guarantee a hard disk is present, low capacity discs PS3: slow disc drive, 256/256MB RAM split, high latency for memory copies between SPE and SPUs. None of those are CPU (or even GPU) bound. Terraflops is a nice number to throw around, but figuring out which console is more powerful from a practical POV is much more complicated. The PS3 real-time OS point. Worth noting that this has been Sony's play for the past two generations. Powerful, but esoteric, hardware. Here's the thing though: they always screw up Tools & Documentation. And that (any sane dev will tell you) is critical. I hope they work more closely with their American & European counterparts this time around. (Quick, kinda hilarious example: Carmack said that the PS3's GPU documentation was in English (from nVidia), then translated to Japanese (by Sony) and then translated back into English for Western developers!) To end on a positive note: I hadn't read that Eurogamer article yet. I'm happy to hear that Sony & Microsoft are putting real work into making smaller, cooler, less power-hungry consoles. I think that's a very important, but often overlooked, part of a console's specs.

You said "I hope it's obvious that I was talking about the past". I'm talking about the past. It's *obviously* no sense to release a BR add-on in 2012, but I don't think it made financial sense in 2008 either. Fair enough. I think they tried and failed. It's a sunk cost, not something they were trying to salvage. Again, I don't think we disagree here, but you frame this as MS vs. Blu-ray. I don't think it's that. I think it's a "MS needs movies & TV shows" plan not a "MS needs to crush BR" plan. Actually, I'm curious now, do you feel the same way about Apple? After all, they've gone and done more-or-less the same thing (didn't support Blu-"bag of hurt"-Ray on their MacBooks, used iTunes for movies & TV) sans the HD-DVD part. I'm not sure why you think BR was *such* a big deal to customers. If anything, MS were more worried about iTunes, as customers are increasingly moving online. Just money again. Making their own format would be expensive. HD-DVD doesn't have the economies of scale benefits that BR has now. Basically what Niyeaux said. As for the "reluctant" part, I guess we'll find out. Like you said they can brand it however they want, or they can at least disable Blu-ray videos on Durango. If that's the case (there's a BR drive but you can't watch movies) I would agree with your characterization. But I don't think they see BR as a threat to their business model.

So when you opened with: You really meant to add "That's a rhetorical question guys, it's because hardware is low margin, and their long-term strategy was online"? I, uhhh, think we see eye to eye on this one, but we characterize it differently: Microsoft's online strategy wasn't some kind of power-move. It wasn't them "wanting the format to die, so they could try and muscle in on its replacement", or "pig-headedly refuse to adopt the industry standard, using whatever leverage they could to try and kill it". They just saw where the industry was heading, thought it wasn't profitable for them, and went another way. Ignoring Blu-ray was just apathy. But I guess some would see that as two sides of the same coin. Oh, I also mentioned this, regarding why they're introducing Blu-ray now: I definitely think Blu-ray for Durango is more about high capacity. Movies are just a bonus.

Indeed, we are coming dangerously close to an agreement. Jon's first paragraph seem to ring true. (thanks for that! ) I guess this is where I see things differently. Online *is* their long term strategy. They ditch the low margin hardware, low margin physical discs, and replace it with high margin annual subscriptions and online purchases. Their service works on a much larger variety of devices (smartphones, tablets, etc) and therefore has the potential to reach a much larger audience. And unlike games, streaming movies is by-and-large a solved problem (it's also a much easier problem) that many customers are already comfortable doing, and that number is growing. So the long term outlook for digital is bigger audiences, bigger margins, and an alignment with Microsoft's "three screens" strategy. Sounds pretty good to me. Sony is top dog in Blu-ray and is scrambling to develop its digital distribution (SEN). Apple is top dog in digital distribution and seems to be in no hurry whatsoever to support Blu-ray or any physical format at all. I think the facts speak for themselves.

By ... doing nothing? Did Microsoft's actions reflect this at all? If they wanted to muscle in, they would have done something. I don't think Microsoft's grand plan was to leave money on the table in the hope that Blu-ray would ... I don't even know, wither and die independently, despite having all the studios backing? I just don't think this makes sense is all. Ah, the good ol' "Steve Balmer is a crazy fellow" argument. As above, I don't think Microsoft's actions reflected this. Why were their actions short sighted? If anything, it was really forward-looking. MS went big on services, an area with *much* bigger margins, and ditched the typically low-margin hardware side of things. And Blu-ray drives would have been very low-margin. Back then, the Blu-ray drive was actually the most expensive component in the PS3. Comparatively, an MPEG2 DAC and an embedded CPU (the bits that you argue they would leverage from the Xbox) are fairly cheap.

See: cost-benefit analysis. Obviously that would take lost sales into consideration. For example: "Hey, we seem to be losing sales to Nintendo over motion controls, lets invent Kinect!" Again, I'll stand by what I said earlier: As it's been mentioned, none of us really know what's going on, but "it wasn't a commercially or strategically practical" makes a lot of sense. Unless you have a better explanation?