Nachimir

Ah, mystery solved! Thank you. Had that happen a couple of times, didn't realise it was to do with unplugging power.

Star Scrip. "Scrip" is the common English term for these kind of currencies.

The fire hazard is really minimal anyway, but I nonetheless obsessively switch things off at the wall if I'm going to be away for a week or more. I've been told that any charger or wall wart plugged in will be using a bit of power. This made no sense to me since I assumed that, say, a phone charger would only use power if a phone was connected to complete the circuit, but apparently not.

I will be there. Embarrassingly, I thought yesterday was Monday

"So extreme, they had to remove the vowels" - IGN.com

Hah It amuses me that the astronauts generally get on well, but their political/military masters don't, right down to the point of inflicting this kind of trivial punitive rubbish. Speaking of good headlines from the BBC: http://www.spaaace.com/cope/?p=97

Yeah, I don't use my existing one often enough to be excited about the DSi, and my lite is still in good condition too. The only way I'd upgrade is if they did something really interesting that utilises the camera.

Many people in the games industry laughed at both the Wii and the iPhone - "The fuck are Apple going to push into mobile gaming with the iphone" etc. I'm very sceptical of industry doubts now. Not that I'm swallowing everything OnLive are saying, but far too many people say "Fuck off" and "impossible" about things that subsequently happen.

Big belly laugh if they have any of the same backers or directors as Steorn. It's too soon to say the OnLive is a shitty investment vehicle designed to dupe people out of money, but it's possible.

Lovely. You seem to be finding it about as joyous as I did. I was pretty sceptical in Clint Hocking's talk the other day when he was talking about how they failed to build what they wanted and made something better partly by mistake. He talked about planning and execution phases coupled with the ability to improvise depending on what weapons you had. Initially it was envisioned as planning > execution, with carefully planned and well executed assaults allowing the player to take out lots of bad guys. What actually happened was that things were found to fuck with the player: he gets shot, ends up in the middle of fires, gets confused, cars break down, etc. Systems like the buddies were built in to enable the player to recover, turning it into a lot of quick plan > execute cycles, so quick that the player effectively has to improvise on the spot. He also said of this that the player should be nurtured and it has to feel like it's not punishing the player in order to work ¬¬ He talked about loadouts sensibly restricting the player to certain options and combinations, but I found the arbitrariness of what you could and couldn't carry together, coupled with the lack of transparency about it before you dropped diamonds on stuff, infuriating. I started making save games before buying something just because the game wasn't allowing me to tell if it would be a good decision or not. FC2 just doesn't suit me. I go for sidequests to build up wealth and experience in games, FC2 gives you a pittance for them. I plan carefully before doing anything in a game, FC2 tends to take whatever you planned and throw it out the window. I felt punished for my style of play throughout, yet at the same time insulted by the hand holding. In terms of mechanics, it feels like Stalker turned into something akin to a Disney ride.

Damn, was sat right by the sandwiches with a few guys from Monumental Games.

Achron was fantastic. Traveling through time is done by a resource, and the cost becomes more expensive and non-linear the further you move along the timeline from wherever you presently are. So small tactical tweaks are cheap, whereas major strategic rejigs are possible but very, very expensive. At one point he described an opponent losing a battle to him, then later researching nukes and sending them back into the past in order to win. He then went back further, did something different, and made sure the only units waiting for the nukes were the guy's own forces There was also a more complex game using 4D space. Actual 4D coordinates, rather than 3D with manipulatable time. Maps could be rotated to almost incomprehensibly alter things and move around objects. I heard programmers in the audience behind me muttering about complex things they would rather revise than play that thing.

Yeah, that was me. The phone network around Moscone is often flaky, I guess it doesn't like having this many people in a cell. Doesn't help that a bunch of the convention rooms are underground too. Call me this morning if you like, I'll be in 102 north for lunch around 1p.m. No cell reception there, but no queue for food either. Off to see game over/continue tonight as well: http://www.gr-sf.com/

Wow. I hope she never works again. Or perhaps gets hung from a lamp post.

Judging by the identical costumes they were the "angel" Baltar and Six seen by the flesh and blood ones 150,000 years ago. It really is a hobbled Deus Ex Machina. The robots didn't seem ominous at all to me, given that we've only seen cylon robots wage war and the ones in the closing scenes were shown doing everything but. I liked that they got to the earth they wanted to find, then mostly went separate ways. I think that showed a good understanding of people, rather than the hackneyed social ideals we like to assume of them and tend to shove into the end of stories.

A purely conjectural generalisation not being true blew your mind? :/ Keita Takahashi, who devised Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, doesn't even drink let alone screw around with more potent substances. Game designers aren't stereotypes, furthermore the stereotype of substance enabled creativity is more often than not total bullshit. As Charlie Brooker pointed out in a recent episode of Screenwipe, to suppose that the people who make interesting work do it because of LSD or weed is quite an insult to their actual ability, especially if you've spent any time around stoners or people who take a lot of anything regularly. I'm unbothered by people who do take drugs, but to pretend or assume it has some higher purpose than tickling endocrine systems is rubbish.

No. Any company in early stages of public work is desperate to look as good as possible, so that big list of supporters that OnLive has is most likely about using names for credibility to get investment from others.

Anyone looking at the IGF pavilion, I recommend Osmos. Played it yesterday and it's beautiful, calm, and you can tell they've spent time polishing the fuck out of it and making sure everything feels just right. It has a really eloquent mechanic based around offloading mass to gain momentum.

Thanks Thrik. I have a feeling they're looking for large amounts of investment at the moment, and the list of publishers they have "backing" them are probably doing so in a very hands off, wait and see kind of way. I wouldn't even be surprised if a few of them were unhappy to see their names on the list.

I don't know why, but I can't feel that way about it. Sure, the angels thing is really cheesy, but Starbuck disappearing was a good dramatic moment, and the lack of explanation of "god" or whatever is probably a fairly sensible decision. The existence of that higher power creates all kind of plot holes regardless of how powerful or involved it is. The prophecy, etc. always seemed ridiculous to me and I never expected a reasonable explanation for it. Maybe I just have a much higher tolerance for ambiguity, but I probably would have of hated if they'd peeled back the curtain and gone: "Look, here's what's god in our world! There it is! We're showing it to you!".

I was thinking about this and the BBC iplayer today, which runs fast enough in HD if you have the bandwidth (Not sure what type of HD it is). Last summer I also briefly got to play with a prototype that transcodes raw video then streams it on the fly. As in, select show from database, select video format from drop down, start watching stream. That was running over a university broadband connection, though not in HD. This wasn't some crappy faked up thing with a few videos either, it had years worth of TV shoved into it. I don't know. We can manage network latency in multiplayer games right now. If the video can be compressed, sent and decompressed fast enough I don't see why OnLive would be impossible. Probably laggy in new ways and unreliable depending on your connection, contention ratio, time of day, etc., but possible.

I know, it's bedlam. I keep getting all these conflicting invites in the evening and it's difficult to get to everything and talk to everyone. Apart from a coincidental lunch meet with Marek and Remo, and briefly bumping into Lawrence and Duncan while feeling ludicrously jet lagged and stupid, I've not actually managed to see Thumbs people much. I started trying to call people yesterday, but casting of the pod trumped everything. Maybe we could meet tomorrow or Friday. My number: +44 7976 216 029

But it's such a fuzzy line, and that's why I picked an example as stupid as Haze. How small does a publisher have to be before it's small enough? Don't get me wrong, I think Simon did a good job of sticking up for Pixel Junk: Eden, but troubled terminology makes the entry criteria quite subjective, so gripes like the ones voiced by Phil Fish are going to keep happening and getting traction. They should have an indie games rant next year, with speaking criteria that let regular game developers rant too, then follow up with an indie games rant rant.

That's interesting, but that situations like this should absolutely not be formatted into popular entertainment is exactly the reason I despise Big Brother. Not ok. Friends and I will usually pull people up for using terms like "paki" and call them out as pond life if they really mean it. Sure. Which got dragged through the press to make bunch of people truck loads of money. I don't find class war a very convincing justification for using racial slurs or bullying. One distasteful thing is not an excuse for another, and our insecurities do not justify that kind of thing despite being a heavy influence on motivation. While there is still an amazingly divided legacy class system in British culture, class war is also sometimes used as a simplistic way of encapsulating much more complex and interesting things, or a more justifiable way of saying to someone "You just don't understand", which personally I think is horse shit. It's very sad that Jade Goody died of cancer at 27 with two kids. Also completely unrelated to what happened between her and Shilpa Shetty. I just don't get how anyone can be even slightly exposed to the press' treatment of it without feeling generally sullied. Sure, there are problems in society. How does any of this shit help?

I wish I'd got to that. "Indie" is a really broken term. It was applied to a lot of UK music in the 90's, originally as a word to describe music from small independent record labels, but eventually became synonymous with a certain genre of guitar/britpop music. That emerged onto huge record labels and was still called indie. Technically, anyone not owned by a large publisher is indie. Going by the IGF rules, it appears Free Radical could have entered haze. They were an independent developer, and so are Crytek. The terminology is fundamentally awry, but where can the IGF go to get it right? "Art games" excludes anyone who isn't trying to make a statement, "free games" is just as arbitrary and lets all kinds of crap in to boot.