Nachimir

Indeed. The Oliver Twins are through and through good guys. They're approachable and good to deal with personally, and I know a lot of people who've worked at Blitz, who all say it's a great place to work. In contrast to the "drain developers, shut down studio when zero cash is left" approach many studio bosses seem to have, they consistently keep about 250 people employed, and their emphasis is on company stability rather than grabbing headlines or selling the studio. In terms of being part of a pitch, I think their budget is too high compared to the amount of nostalgia people have for Dizzy, and the originals just a bit too far back to have an enormous audience. It'd make me a little sad to see them not succeed with this.

GameCity tried, and failed, to find William Tang. The closest we got was finding out he apparently lives in Melbourne, but it seems he's had nothing to do with the games industry since Horace. Kickstarter will be the vehicle for his glorious return. There is also this, which seems largely done and close to it's modest goal: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/409406442/spuds-quest

⌐___¬ Life is okay at the moment. Freelance work supports me for roughly half the year, and I have a small business that brings in money the rest of the time, while also giving me opportunities to learn and practice a load of technical and business stuff I didn't have the opportunity to before. If I can make it pay more, I might even get to go snowboarding this winter.

¬~¬

Pointed out by Lewie Proctor: Dishonored for PC, £11.99 at GameFly. If you want to use the discount code, it asks for them on the page after payment details.

They've done licensed games for years now. A lot of them were poor games, due to being rushed out for Hollywood studio schedules. Of all the big studios, they're a pretty strange and insular one; I once got an event speaker from them, but he could only speak on condition that we list him without a company name and he didn't tell anyone he worked for Eurocom. Again, something I'd heard they were being more progressive about this year.

Eurocom making about 200 or so redundancies today (That's an estimate, last time I heard they employed about 250 people). I know several people who work there, and it's a shit sandwich. I'm hearing (edit) that Activision really had them over a barrel with the last game, it's fucked them, and today's situation is worse than reported. If they don't survive this, I'll always remember them as the company whose HR department once told me "We don't think it's appropriate for our developers to socialise with people from other companies" (Being nicer: That was about four years ago, and I heard they'd been changing a lot in that respect). The only big studio left in my region is now Crytek UK, and perhaps Outso.

On OS X, Alt+L. Windows: Dunno, sorry ¬¬ Edit: Apparently, activate numlock, then Alt+170. Alt+169 should give you shifty eyes looking the other way ⌐⌐

Six unreleased, annoyingly named, Tron-related Daft Punk tracks: http://soundcloud.com/daftpunkofficial

I have no idea what version I read, but I enjoyed it very much. Interesting, though I guess appropriate, that they chose one of the film locations for the cover.

Holy crap ys, I hope that goes perfectly.

I've been struggling massively with motivation all the way through November, for similar reasons I think. I usually find going for a walk somewhere nice and looking for beauty helps my mind accept the change of season, but haven't taken time to do it yet.

Excellently awful taxidermy: It's like they turned it into the opposite of a fox.

MCV accidentally this tweet: http://pool.cream.org/pics/choad.jpg When I saw them bring out the "We're a trade publication!" defense, my first thought was that if I were a retailer, I would never trust such an obviously flimsy piece. Paid for or not, there is is absolutely nothing useful to a trade or consumer audience in that kind of marketing puff. It's worth remembering that the job of many modern publications is to sell an audience to advertisers. I think that gets especially weird with videogames, due to friendships between journalists and publishers.

Also, they run the GMAs. Technically, the headline was true: Some critics were delighted. The blatant, obvious lack of any research going into the piece was stupefying though. Uncomfortable for MCV, because it implies they're either in Square-Enix' pocket, or that they're incompetent and lazy enough to write a story like that and let it slip through the editorial net. More horrific games press related things are going to keep happening. The entire chunk of it based around behaviour like Doritosgate doesn't really know what to do, and in the interim seem to be resorting to furious denial. Resorting to "Pssh, it's just Twitter!" is going to stop working really fast.

Original headline: "Critics delighted with Agent 47's return in Hitman: Absolution". Article with subsequent chain of edits: http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/critics-delighted-with-agent-47-s-return-in-hitman-absolution/0106621 (also posted by toblix in the thread for the game). It was hilarious both before and after the edits. Before them, John Walker drew a bunch of attention to it on Twitter, and now they're linking every bad review except RPS. Kieron Gillen: "It's almost as if they hold a grudge from John publicly humiliating them."

Not comical, and has a bizarrely super-militaristic bit in it, but a lot of this footage is absolutely incredible:

Oof, subbes I always get thirty days terms or less from clients before commencing. It's only usually the really the big clients like MS that won't go below sixty.

Me too! We are now Santasm bros

Oh god damn Rodi got there first.

I have five litres of scrumpy that I had no real chance to drink in the six weeks of work from Eurogamer to GameCity. It now smells like piss and is fearsomely alcoholic; I'm scared to open it.

I'm probably too far away to make getting a bottle of your mead economical, but thanks for writing such an informative post. A few people at the hackspace here are making beer and cider already; I'm partial to mead and might give it a go next year.

The instant I saw this image, I thought "Jack Nicholson, The Rock, Bruce Willis".

I agree, and my reading is that Hotline Miami is about the player, not the player character. The game didn't have an effect on me anywhere near as severe as on TurboPub, but listening to the soundtrack on my phone in a large, horrendously busy, and especially tacky department store a few days later was… unpleasant, and made me feel mean. It amplified my usual feelings of "fuck this place".

Lazlow was a DJ and writer before he appeared in GTA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazlow_Jones Quite a few of the radio stations are DJed by famous/sort-of-famous people. For instance, IV had Karl Lagerfield, Juliette Lewis, and Iggy Pop among others.