Nachimir

"We're not sure what the mailbox peripheral is for, but the developers told us it will become apparent when we reach the final level" - IGN.com

It's a short-term/long-term difference Question: Why does it always seem to be the cutest girls who have the most fucked up issues? I ended things with that girl. In the end she had a deep seated reason as to why she'd been mistreating me so badly, which took the edge off my anger, but I don't particularly want to be involved with her now. I seem to have become deeply pragmatic about broken hearts. The foot or so of academic and pop-academic paper on my bookshelf about motivation/emotion/romantic love* has actually helped me a lot over the years in gaining awareness of how all of these feelings work, and how to work through them rather than staying limerent. *No, it's not John Gray or any other kind of self-help. Avoid that stuff like plague, it's just a bunch of secular hippie faiths ¬¬ Also, I entered a half marathon and am feeling super-motivated to go running, do weights and eat a better diet right now. I'm successfully putting on mass for the first time ever, and did a horrible 4 mile route of hill climbs last night, that I've done before, but shaved off 17 seconds per mile. I think after the half marathon, I'm going to start training for a full one.

Yeah, when it's less than a round of beers would cost, and supporting indie developers, and they're in the same community as me, then buying them is really a no brainer.

It not actually bad advice...

Gutted to have missed arsing around with the swings. What setup do you use for filming n0wak? I have a flip camera I'm thinking of putting on a tripod next week.

I was wrong, soz

There'll be a minimum level before a player can start it. I just think it's an interesting bifurcation: on the one hand you have the William Shatner/Mr. T etc. adverts roping new players, then you have things like this expansion aimed at old players, using trailers packed with things newbies aren't necessarily going to understand. As concepts go, "High fantasy disaster movie" simultaneously tickles my funny bone while making me wince Edit: Could an MMO run profitably for so long that a generational gap emerges in the players? If something like Cataclysm were a one way trip for a character, then an entire wedge of the players could take all their learned behaviour with them, while players going through the older bits of WoW would gradually invent new customs that might seem quite alien to old players when they catch up.

Vast changes affecting the entire world, mass migrations. While it's dressed up in high fantasy causes rather than industrialisation, it seems to be cribbing from more or less everything I ever read about climate change from Bruce Sterling, John Robb and Worldchanging. I'm intrigued, can anyone see it appealing to new players? The trailer seemed like it was entirely aimed at retaining players already familiar with WoW.

At risk of being buried up to the waist and pelted with rocks by WoW players, I think Cataclysm looks pretty fucking cheesy. It appears to be a climate change trope dressed up in glowy fantasy magic. I'm sick of seeing the same old things in these kind of trailers while listening to a narrator spout disjointed cliches about destiny, might, and the magic macguffin.

I'm not playing that! It has "additional writing" by Orson Scott Card ¬¬

I thought YHTBTR was a good joke, but that was it. It puzzles me slightly that, on the internet at least, essentially throwaway jokes can become almost hysterical movements with large numbers of people screaming "Oh my god it's GENIUS". If there's one overused word from this year that I'd demote, it's "genius" ¬¬

It's good enough that I bought this version of it. I think it has a better ending than Moon, and explores some similar themes with fewer cliches. I also don't think there are many science fiction authors that can go as deep into characters as this. (I didn't get on very well at all with Asimov's non-robot stories for that reason; the characters seemed like cardboard cutouts).

There used to be more! We are missing the very thumbs this forum is built on

My favorite thing this week was n0wak (I think) firing a rocket at an oncoming player during a race in Broker, causing the car to actually jump right over him and carry on. Also, carjacking Toblix on the Broker bridge for 1st place. The races are great, since they tend to split into whoever ends up in the top half after the first lap racing, and everyone else trying to cause as much mayhem as possible.

I design stuff, and think about design a lot. I'm aware of how lame, lazy and cynical metagaming design can be too. Still, when something has 30 or more gamerpoints attached to it, there's a bit of my reptile brain that goes "ooh!" nonetheless.

Yes, still simple and binary, and possibly a fuckton of extra content for developers to create. The closest I think I've seen to it would be the factions in Stalker, who still feel shallow and just there as a resource for the player to exploit. I actually really liked that Stalker selected one of the 5 bad endings depending on your behaviour during the game, without once highlighting the choices you were making. Of course, hidden behind that it had a choice between two endings with more closure ¬¬

What might lead to some pleasing ambiguity is being regarded differently by different groups of AI. I think every reputation system I've seen has been a universal value. Being the hero of one group could or should make you the degenerate, violent racist scourge of another. I disliked that no matter how evil I became in Fable, bandits were still enemies. I think it'd be at least a little more interesting if entire ecosystems and societies were pitched along those lines. When attempting story, it'd probably still just lead to double playthroughs, but imagine an alternate evil story to Fable, spent in the North plotting to invade and sack Albion. Rather than just playing the same story with some horns and smoke

Matthew Kumar form Gamasutra did a really good rant at Develop last month. He sketched out a horrible situation: You're young, you live on a shitty housing estate, unemployed, surrounded by poverty, no prospects or hope, and your girlfriend is pregnant. Now hands up, who aborts the baby? He pointed at a guy in the front row with his hand up and screamed "YOU LOSE 1000 KARMA POINTS, BECAUSE I"M A RIGHT WING GAME DEVELOPER AND YOU'VE PISSED ME OFF! Now who else was going to abort the baby?". Hands go back up. "YOU! You GAIN 1000 karma points, because THAT BABY IS HITLER!" That's the gist, though he carried on for about 4 minutes about how crap moral choices in games are, and all they mean is that people play the thing twice.

Metroid-vania, an IGN-worthy portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania

UKR unrelenting in their hatred of the PS3: http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2009/08/the-most-obvious-joke-in-the-world/

This Schulze and Webb talk is also a good one on the subject of learning: http://schulzeandwebb.com/2009/scope/slides/ (specifically this last part) In a nutshell, it's: "experts spend tens of thousands of hours getting as good as they are with a given subject, and if you have similar ambitions that can be a depressing thing to regard. However, if you spend just a hundred hours on something, you'll be quite good at it. So pick something and get to it." I've been using daytum to track my hours spent on about 7 things.

That's a brilliant idea I sometimes write, but only when I think I have something really worth writing about, which is about once every couple of years. I was writing a book about human motivation once, but that was stupidly ambitious and I need to wait a long time before I'll be ready to go back to it, if ever. I also used to take a lot of photographs, and got told by various photographers and lecturers that I was good, but I think that was far more to do with my love of experimenting and eye for oddities than actual photographic skill. When this photo, by far the best I've ever taken, happened by accident, something switched in my unconscious and it's now kind of "Fuck it. That was the peak" Nowadays, I make stuff, and am devoting time to learning to code, Rubik's cubes (which may seem useless, but there's a lot to them and a dozen or so people have asked me to teach them in the past few months), contact juggling, electronics, and 3D modeling. I suck at all of them, so that's why I'm practicing them. I like this Robert A. Heinlein quote: I used to be a mod maker for Black Cat Games, but haven't really touched UnrealEd in years except to teach it. I miss it, but I get frustrated with just how locked down to verbs engines are. I don't want to make game about shooting stuff, there are more than enough of them.

Yes, because of what they might be used for, patent illustrations typically have to be incredibly literal and accurate. Illustrators make careers out of it. Patent illustrations have more roots in technical drawing than anything else, which might be why people tend to look hilariously bad in them. The Sony one above reminds me of a medieval cathedral window - not because of a similarity in style, but because scale and positions of objects are neglected to show their relationships more clearly, much as stained glass was designed to show religious iconography and characters more clearly.

It's changed to Robespierre now, and counted down from 6 to 5 (there are faint numbers in the backgrounds, I didn't notice them until tilting a laptop screen). Only 5 days to disappointment!

I was talking about musicals, not your dislike of most anime Quite. There are ones I like a lot, but they haven't converted me into a fan of musicals in general; they were just enough to stop me dismissing them out of hand.