Nachimir

I agree with Thunderpeel. I've come across a bunch of creative people in different sectors who talk about "audience education", and it's usually means "I'm fucking up but can't tell I'm doing it". Petulantly, it becomes "Noone understands me!". Reviews tend to be more of a checklist, but moving beyond that goes into the territory of criticism, something video games have historically lacked. Zero Punctuation is a start, likewise RPS, but most of the games press is still dominated by scores. They don't necessarily correlate to sales. Transformers was an execrable game, yet sold bucketloads. The problem is publishers using reviews to fuck developers (metacritic clauses are happening a lot now), which is kind of their business. Developers need to get better at business. It's not like there's going to be a shortage of work for hire now games are starting to outsell music a DVDs. There is no review system that will work properly or be without some exploitative hole. If reviews didn't have metrics, publishers might well make them, or if not they'll just find another way to screw developers. Ah, ok. I might have been fed that by an overly optimistic but nonetheless pissed off FRD developer. Not much of this kind of thing is on the record as far as anyone outside FRD and Ubi are concerned

I seriously hope that doesn't happen. Indie goodness, in the "fucking left of lieft-field" kind of way: www.auntiepixelante.com As far as I can tell she coined the terms demake and masocore

is art director for Double Fine. A design blog I sometimes read featured him today, linking to his flickr stream which is full of his art.

There's a world of difference between reviews and criticism. Both have a place. Reviews aren't the be all and end all; for instance Haze got 55 percent on metacritic, yet apparently sold well. Quite often things like this happen and developers get screwed out of royalties due to the publisher putting a metacritic clause in the contract (i.e. 80 pecent or above or you don't get anything beyond dev costs). This isn't metacritic's fault, Their aim is to be a useful consumer site, not a business tool for publishers. What's needed are developers who are clued up and experienced in contract negotiation, and they've been in pretty short supply here in the UK.

I doubt it. I can't see how or why they would go to the effort of finding people who perform this hack and ban them, as it's really not in the same ball park as mod chipping or game copying and has none of the same intent. It will still work with XBLA and everything in exactly the same way, it's just a way of making a cheaper 120GB drive look like an officially signed one so the 360 will talk to it. I'm going to do it; I'll let you know if I suddenly get banned from Live.

I am chagrined at a lack of time; I definitely have plans for this. Only got it the other night, and so far don't have much to say except it's cuter than a kitten with Down's syndrome

Thanks for the tip! I've been looking at bigger drives, but even on Ebay the bigger sizes are at stupid prices. I wasn't aware this was possible, and set to googling: Dabs have a drive that should work with the latest version of this for setting it up (Note, there are RST and LATS versions of that drive, and it's nigh impossible to tell which you'll get. 0.91 works with both apparently, but earlier versions are LATS only. I have no fecking idea what LATS and RST mean, but beware.) Hardware hacks ACTIVATE (Note: I see tags burgeoning. It was me who put the "technology is gay" tag in, and I meant no homophobia with it. It's a , and most of my gay friends use the word "gay" as a pejorative now and don't mind me doing it either. Still, I should have thought before tagging. Sorry )

Want

nachimir

I'm bracing myself for awful headline puns when I go through my RSS today. "Lively Flatlines"

Awesome, thank you. Some of it is also reminiscent of Makesnd Cassette.

There are more of them

HOLY BASTARD JESUS GOD TITTYFUCKING SHIT! :tup: I think I came while I was playing this tonight, but I was too busy gawping at the screen and steering to properly notice. Seriously though, some major, er, "flashbacks" going on while playing this ¬¬

Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of cunts.

Nachimir I'll get round to adding you all one evening soon.

So, the LGF is over and I can finally get Wipeout HD and sink some time into it... but only if I disable wireless security on my router () A few months ago we changed our wireless security to WPA, because WEP is donkey bollocks: unsecure, temperamental, and every time we tried to get anything new to connect to it, it was inevitably a massive hassle. WPA took anything we could throw at it, immediately. Wii, 360, DS, assorted cellphones, MacBooks running Leopard, desktop systems and laptops spanning ten years with assorted versions of windows and USB or internal wifi adapters. All fine, so we just assumed the fucking PS3 would work with it too, but no. It's like a frigid lover. Strategy chocolate without the strategy. It's like Sony have personally put a paedophile in my local swimming pool. Tech support amounts to "If WPA doesn't work, use something unsecure like WEP or MAC filtering" + +

Thanks for your input Norfolk and Cigol. It seems the PS3 just didn't like the netgear router at all. Since it's a creaky old thing this house has had for years and it frequently craps out, I bought us a Linksys WRT150N, which can be reflashed with DDWRT, Open-WRT, and even just using the vanilla firmware works absolutely fine with the PS3, 360, and it seems everything else except the DS (they only support WEP, but I never use it online anyway)

Themed background noises FTW! or they could be used as signs of disdain. "This game is so shit we're going to shout about it to each other on a building site". (Or constantly eat biscuits ).

Thanks for the link, I probably wouldn't have noticed for ages since I only rarely read boing boing now.

Spaff mentioned possibly recording the intros in the pub but the rest somewhere quiet. I like this idea, background audio could be used to give them some really nice pacing. You could do them from the beach when the weather's good (with a windbreak I suppose) Also, stands being dismantled isn't the best background noise, a pub would be much more aesthetically pleasing.

I bet someone reported it as a Shadow Of The Colossus infringer wrt sales, as that article points out it only had 4 days in October instead of 11. It will likely do just fine in nov/dec.

Hello there Zaarin, SignorSuperdouche and Mancide. SignorSuperdouche is a fine name

I doubt we'll ever know what the impact of piracy is on sales. Cases like World of Goo are much better anti-piracy fodder than, say, Spore or Bioshock, since downloading the work of a couple of guys working from coffee shops is a more emotive image than outraged executives. I'd probably be pissing mad if I were 2D Boy, but they seem to be handling it very graciously. I also think words like "theft" and "steal" are just confusing when applied to this; Bruce Everiss is clever, but a zealot when it comes to piracy. One thing he's correct on is that consoles act as an anti-piracy dongle, people I know who are more than capable of chipping are happy to pay cash for PSN games but pirate the fuck out of PC stuff. People tend to take the shortest rational egocentric route to what they want. The shortest rational route would be to get things by paying for them at a reasonable price (Not just money, but things like "not having a rootkit on your PC"). But "free" = egocentric route (In a bigger comment, I once asked Bruce if he was licensing the images of scantily clad women he often heads posts with, or was "stealing" them. Funnily enough that paragraph didn't make it through the moderation queue )

Plain Sight is excellent, and a 4/5 player LAN meant it was indeed the most popular game in the indie arcade. The design is really nicely executed; though the maps are pretty huge it's always quite easy to find people and see how juicy a target they are. Beatnik had to kick some guys off at one point because they were hogging the machines I've not played a deathmatch game that compulsive since I first played UT99, nearly a decade ago now

Woo, been looking forward to this I'm surprised at just how good that mic is, though you could now set out to collect as many interesting background noises as possible.