Roderick

Apparently, the release date is a cool March 31st. Of the year of our Thumb 2014. So close already!

Heart warming speech from Ellen Page!

Starship Damrey is a fun, short sci-fi 'weird' tale with a strong Outer Limits vibe. For three bucks an easy pick! Liberation Maiden is an excellent arcade game, didn't care a whole deal for Aeroporter and haven't played the rest.

That actually helps! I love scaleable / removable interface!

Couldn't be fresher (unless you saw this yesterday, in which case: you must be a wizard!) - the latest gameplay footage. My body is ready.

Absolutely. Another crazy things about AoW3 is that it came about because Notch wanted and financed it. That is pretty mindblowing.

"Deep Malaria-based Gameplay" is the best tag.

My god. What is the point of building a beautiful world if you're going to obscure it for 50% with heinous interface and a dozen numbers popping up everywhere? Literally half the time you can't even see the enemy. Sorry to hate on this based on this single video, but come on. (And that's before the continuous high-pitched yelping of characters that fills the audio.)

We Dutch indeed say «uitgespeeld», which correlates to «finished», but translates directly as «played out». The meaning here is rather that we go «out» of the experience of playing the game (or reading a book, where we also say «uit»).

Oh shit!

Thanks for posting the Dice talk, AsianMan.

Well, it certainly looks rainy out in NL right now, so you won't have to wait long. Are you there because you're interested in this sort of public space architecture and design?

We should have rigged the box with a little speaker that, as it was opened, sang a Thumb-sung chorus of "I'd love to take you on a slow boat to China". Next time!

"Wrongo" Chris Remo

Having missed the launch excitement, I have for months effectively lost any appetite for GTAV. Should the multiplayer be any good (read: it works on PC), and a budding weekly scene arise on the Thumb, I'll probably buy it for that alone.

Wait, I don't understand, which character is that from Star Trek: The Next Generation, as per your oeuvre? (Congrats!)

Oh man, oh man.

I think it's all too easy to lump two distinct things together here: an activity that you (greatly) enjoy as a hobby, and a driving passion within that makes you feel everything else is just wasting time. For the former, absolutely, the necessity of doing it might hurt it. For the latter, I doubt it. Another thing that makes it more complicated is (false) expectations. Playing a game is absolutely not the same as making a game - not even a guarantee you'll remotely enjoy the experience. But when your passion, as is mine, is writing, then there's only the blurriest of lines between hobby and work. Almost to the point where to me, there's little distinction. But lest we get into some ridiculous argument, I don't think there's much disagreement between us in the first place. My fierceness on the topic comes from a place of anger at the thought of people settling for something that's not their passion based on (in my opinion) not altogether convincing views.

Few days old, but just read it: RPS's hands-on with ESO. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/07/hands-on-the-first-few-hours-of-elder-scrolls-online/ They pretty much gut the thing as a derivative work that neither hits the high tones of the series, nor manages to do anything remarkable with the (over-saturated) genre. Shame, because in terms of atmosphere I'd probably like it, but its MMO trappings restrict exactly the sort of wild adventuring and game-unscrewing action (stealing your gear, abusing systems) that makes Elder Scrolls such a delightfully tantalizing world.

In my youth I heard the same advice (it's old advice, really) that Entriech posts above, and over the years I've come to appreciate it as absolutely not true. If you have a passion for something, doing it for work won't burn it out, but only deepen it more and more over time. Great pursuits have a endless depth and appreciation to be gained from mastering them. Of course, it's not easy, it's never easy, nothing ever is. Conversely, if you choose a job that'll earn you a better or more stable income but that you don't really like, that has its benefits too, but for me it doesn't work. It's a ticket to depression and burn-out. If you have no alternative, sure, take the job. But for fuck's sake, don't withhold yourself from doing the thing that you love out of some delusional maxim that's based around fear for losing your hobby or making your life as convenient as possible. life is not about convenience and minimizing pain, it's about living it to the fullest; sometimes it hurts, but what you get back is infinity more valuable.

I WAS BEHIND ALL OF THAT #twitterchillers

Nice, congrats still!

Nothing. There is indeed no master list. That's my point; that it's all a bunch of baloney; the whole concept of gender is made-up, a social construct, a cultural product. In that sense, I would argue it is wrong to gender the color pink, because gender has nothing to do with a color, not inherently. We should stop talking about gender in terms that we don't agree with, and that starts with not divvying up random aspects among perceived genders.

Luckily I had that exact experience on art school (here's an example why school can be really profitable!). I had a big game design assignment in a team and saw first-hand that designing a game is actually a huge amount of work, almost all of which on a granular level didn't actually appeal to me at all! The endless, endless toying with hundreds of variables to tease out a balanced experience; buried in design documents; tinkering away like some mad watchmaker. I then and there made the informed decision that I didn't want a career as a full-on game designer at all. It's important to get those experiences, because it's so easy to picture yourself as the guy who just 'dreams up the great game' and then has other people executing on it.