Nachimir

I've had an iphone correct something to "sexing" instead of "sending" in a message to an almost complete stranger. Luckily, it wasn't followed by the word "you".

This is one of the things said by the head of Wolfire in his follow up about people pirating the Humble Indie Bundle. Basically, the piracy still isn't bothering him.

I also agree with this. Nokia's N-Gage booth at GDC a few years ago looked pathetic with, basically, lycra-clad blonde and brunette stick insects trying to reel people in. I still see a lot of games journalists, developers and so on having photos taken with them though; it works to pull some people in to the booth :/

It downsized, IIRC due to shenanigans at the ESA and some major publishers not bothering with it. There were also rebranding things occurring with it being called E For All, and they also had a booth babe ban one year. It all got very confused, but apparently was back to its old self last year, and I'm thinking will be all the more so now GDC is trying to distance itself from big consumer facing announcements from platform holders, publishers and well known developers. Back to being a balls kneeing robot

Point and shoot? I'm quite sceptical of this. I've not found simulated analog sticks on the iphone any fun at all.

You only need the end part of the URL between the youtube tags: lk59imFr6yI lk59imFr6yI Lordy! :/ This guy is an animator for Uber Entertainment, and he really does have some sweet moves: hpcYa1IeSAw Doing acrobatics and assorted stuff helps him to be a better character animator. He also posts his outtakes

The shoe full of meat was a nice/gross touch. The warhammer video took me straight back to games of G.U.R.P.S. where I had a character with one, and had to make endless rolls to try and free it from things while other people attacked. Really practical weapons, picks are ¬¬ Nonetheless, my girlfriend would totally want all of these if I showed them to her. No joke.

via Terry Cavanagh on twitter: tM8DFqHOc6Y

This will probably only be funny to anyone who designs stuff. Ferrari's F1 steering wheels are an absolute nightmare of design, practically made to encourage mistakes at high speeds. T6HFvF-QfTo They're designed in conjunction with the drivers. Here's how a process like that works: Company goes to customers and asks what they want. Focus groups of customers say what they want. Design team/management puts customer desires above insight of designers. Product gets released. Customers: "Hey, this thing sucks!" (Pretty much what happened to Unreal Tournament 2003) However, modify the process so you're making it for one particular customer at great expense, and the urge to save face and pressure of cognitive dissonance practically guarantee noone will back down. The steering wheel shown even has a drink button. As one blog put it, "This is what happens when Homer Simpson designs a car".

DO IT NOW. It *really* won't take that long

I thought the run speed in Fallout 3 was pretty fast, enough to not make exploring a bore. Overall, for brown wasteland the map was designed with quite a bit of variance differentiating areas. I tended to explore new ones on foot, slowly checking out any new locations that showed on the compass, and then using fast travel between places I knew already. Occasionally, if it looked like there were big gaps in the map between places I'd explored, I'd strike out on foot to see if any new ones showed up. Finding every single location like this alongside completing it filled about 80 hours If anything it was the combat that got repetitive: Wait for creature to get close, enter VATS, do headshots. Repeat.

I played BSG once and have frineds that have played it a lot. It seems far more of a BSG storytelling engine than a strategy game, which is okay, but buyer beware I picked up Through The Desert a few weeks back. It looks incredibly complex when you see the amount of pieces that go down during a game, but it actually has a straightforward ruleset and the board is quite simple to read at any point (Like a lot of boardgames, not suitable for colour blind people though). It's basically a route building game, but you're not locked to preset routes like in Ticket To Ride. I also got Infinite City, which is a tile laying game about an art deco, futuristic city, and involves a *lot* of fucking with each other. Most of the rules are printed on the tiles and followed as you played them, which makes it pretty easy to pick up. The design isn't perfect, as the tiles have tiny fonts, which coupled with viewing angles mean some players can struggle to read them. Some tiles are also a bit ambiguous, but it's generally not difficult for players to reach an agreement on how to play them in a given game, and it is good fun. Sometimes you think you're building an unassailable position, then it gets dismantled in a few turns. It balances fairly well in that if one player is set upon by all of the others, then a clear leader will tend to emerge, so it's more advantageous to try and even the field than bully people. In terms of strategy and luck, Infinite City is basically somewhere between Carcassonne and Fluxx.

Second that His comics are also amazing. I'd seen a few some years back, but was absolutely sold by a strip that appered in an issue of Too Much Coffee Man showing a man at an outdoor cafe mooning shyly over a woman sat nearby, then getting insanely jealous when her boyfriend turns up. Graham is remarkably capable of expression with such simple characters :tup: Pearoasts: YZ-bQ_9SyqI mkUZFV8g0YE L6RSD8m_QOQ

Shame about the bat, but glad it didn't hit your visor or knock you off

I quite liked the difficulty curve on it, though for some reason the escort missions never got to me (they usually do). The last mission was insane, IIRC, suddenly spiking to a

That's horrific This is lovely despite some really annoying editing: v4JbPLItex4

I'll echo a lot of that. Overall I enjoyed it, though after tracking down every serpent using that map before the last battle, I felt it was long enough. If I'd rushed through, maybe that wouldn't have been the case, but the 3rd person RTS setup for battles just seemed deeply strange and ineffective to me. Maybe they'd have been able to tune it up a lot more if Activision weren't tying up senior Double Fine people with a lawsuit for most of the later stages of development.

This may be it. Activision have built Modern Warfare up as such a brand that subsequent titles will probably sell bucketloads anyway. They're a publisher, so they may well now look at MW's strength in terms of branding and marketing rather than game design. Also, management shuffling at Activision. Not exactly someone getting it in the neck, but still.

A sociopathic sense of entitlement.

It's not music, but really intersting in the context of music and games: Dance DJs and musicians that currently have the goal of making people cry on the dancefloor. It's an excellent and funny post, and the implication that people are asking "Yes but can dance music make you cry?" is quite horrific. I wonder if, like moral backlashes, this is another existential phase types of media go through. Did people used to ask "Yes, but can a novel make you cry?"

Fraps on Windows, Snapz on OS X. It's election time here in the UK, and the press have gone extra-super-mental and vicious for this one in the face of their own decline. Someone made this to take the piss out of the Conservative leader, which isn't a new idea, but is probably the best I've seen: EKFTtYx2OHc

Yeah, don't feel bad about it. It's business, and they failed to get you work for a long time, so I don't think you should feel like you owe them.

I can understand why a gadget blog might do it, but the stupidity of what they did to get page views is staggering. John Gruber is a good source on a lot of stuff around this story, in particular this piece on Gizmodo claiming "we didn't know it was stolen" and the minimal effort made to return it. Gizmodo also put up a short post saying that leaving it in a bar was a drunken mistake anyone could have made and it would be a shame if the engineer responsible got so undeservedly sacked for it. Which was almost gracious, after, you know, buying a stolen phone, leaking the chaps identity, dissecting the phone, and publishing its innards to rake in page views.

I'd love to see a copy too, Miffy. I used to believe in free-will, funnily enough when I was at my most bound by an ideological system*. Determinism has come to seem a much more reasonable idea, but I see it as insanely complex determinism. The number of scales from subatomic through cellular to cosmic is itself bewildering, let alone the number of interactions going on in them at any given time. A major event may determine something almost entirely, but little things also build up to become big over time, i.e. my emotional responses from second to second all contribute to my general temperament and personality over a span of years. It's led me to think that every little thing matters, because they all contribute to a gestalt. That belief has become an influencing factor in my choices, even if I didn't really choose to believe it. I didn't even study anything related at university though, all I've fed into this are introspection, drunken and non-drunken conversations and bits of philosophy and fiction * I believe that at the time, free-will was not just something nice to believe in, but that believing in it was an actual counter-reaction to being controlled and existing within a really poisonous self-isolating community.

I used to love it, and again, only played it on PS1. I suspect time might not have been kind to it.