Nachimir

Congrats n0wak, you too Speedy

I tried Quarriors out briefly on Sunday, it seemed good. The game I played ended pretty quickly, but I think that was because we had one experienced player teaching three completely new people. We're also all used to Dominion, so expected it to sprawl in a similar way. I got hold of Cyclades, and it's every bit as good as Robert Florence said. It looks a lot more intricate to play than it actually is, and the game hinges on three systems: Monsters, bidding on the gods, and player actions. They fit together beautifully, and set up some really tough decisions. The best thing is that it has all of its complexity without ever needing a load of arbitrary feeling and difficult to remember sub-rules to manage it. The cognitive load of playing is mainly in thinking about whether things will or won't happen, not whether you can or can't do something The god you really want on a given turn might be dealt to the end of the turn order, so it can become more important to bid on one you don't want just to take your turn ahead of another player. Sometimes you find yourself with your heart in your mouth over whether a plan is going to work, without ever feeling like you're going to be relentlessly bummed in the gob by random chance.

Yeah I have one joyful recommendation: 15 Storeys High just appeared on Netflix in the UK, and I hadn't heard of it before. It has Sean Lock in, is pretty weird, and I'm finding it very funny. In one episode, he buys canned

That *is* weird; I hadn't seen that trailer. (Watched the first few episodes of Caprica and didn't enjoy it much. With the BSG series, I know that ending might have worked for some, but I thought . I'm usually pretty insensitive over that kind of thing, too). The more I look at the new BSG trailer, that kind of editing for an established thing seems like pure nerd-bait, practically begging for someone to type a frame by frame analysis.

There seems to be a new BSG thing: A0ixAkA5bng Apparently, after Caprica but before the series. Best thing about it being a prequel: .

Well fuck this. The UK parliament have been pushing through an extremely controversial health care bill. Yesterday, its passage in the Lords was basically the last chance for it to be stopped, but it wasn't. There's an emergency debate on it today, but it's basically jumped every hurdle it needed to, without any of the objections to it really being answered. The National Health Service has an important and egalitarian institution for the past 65 years in the U.K. We've had publicly funded medical care for that time, and it's been brilliant. Not perfect, but brilliant. The few times I or people I know have hurt themselves or had medical conditions, they've been able to go to a hospital and not worry about insurance or bills. All funded by our taxes instead. The current UK government have just opened up the way to privatise all medical care. This has been done, despite: Evidence that countries with government funded health care have better health than those with private/insurer based medical care. No evidence presented in support of privatisation, just theory. Even the medical organisations they expected to suport the bill vehemently opposing it instead. The Information Commissioner ruling twice that the Government should publish a study they had done looking into the risks of privatisation and this bill. They've steadfastly refused. Private medical insurers refusing to treat pre-existing conditions, yet the way now being open for them to take over facilities and procedures to care for these conditions in future. It's completely unclear what's going to happen to a lot of people now, but at the moment they appear to be utterly fucked. This mind boggling list of the current government's vested interests in private healthcare providers, from campaign funding to directorships. It's been pushed ahead on the theory that competition will lead to improvements in services. There is no actual evidence for this, it's just conservative ideological theory. Forced through in the wake of several years in which the invisible hand has thoroughly pounded most people in the ass; years in which those responsible and who dogmatically espouse free market ideology have begged for the very kind of handouts they usually condemn as corruption of markets. Private Medical care here is good, but it's not an everyday thing for people and it can be expensive. The conservatives seem to think they're taking a horse to water and it won't drink, but when those private healthcare bodies are having to care for the whole population rather than a privileged minority of them, and they have to put into place scaling and efficiencies they don't have right now, it's not going to be the same at all, and very unlikely to end up any better than the NHS. This means that instead of going to A&E and getting tax funded emergency treatment, the future for people in the UK is also going to include being on the phone arguing with your insurer because "no you don't need that procedure hey why not just spend the rest of your life with a limp and pain instead?" Oh, the same government are also planning a tax cut for the rich and privatisation of major roads. They tried to sell all of our forests too, and stop the phone hacking thing from blowing up.

I'll put it in the life thread instead of this place of comedy. Unrelated:

May not mean anything to people not in the UK: Or much to those that are. (A sad thing happened, involving a bunch of powerful men ignoring everyone else and pushing through an enormously bad decision. The useless tosspot pictured above had a chance to stop it, but supported it instead. The news are not really reporting it, but the clocks here just went back 65 years)

Maybe, some really young kids have been naïve enough to be stopped by age gates. Like, three or four years old. Maybe also, one day they'll have something in place that enables them to know I wasn't actually born on the 1st of January 1900. I'd find it hilarious if marketing departments actually tried to gather stats from age gates ("Hey guys results from the first teaser are in and we totally need to tailor this game to 35 - 45 year olds").

Organise it together!

*applause* This is the finest response I've ever seen to a metacritic clause

Source. It's weird. Age gates are like a political token that allows the ESRB and industry to say "Hey, look at us, we're responsible" to the anti-games lobby, parents groups etc. They fool no-one though.

He's been a massive, self-serving dickhead and his career should burn for it. What bugs me most is that a lot of gadget fans now think "He lied, so everything is fine. Nothing is wrong with the companies that make my lovely, shiny precioussses". Much of our stuff is still made in really bad working conditions. He told stories and dressed them up as journalism. That doesn't mean the truth is the diametric opposite of everything he said.

There is also the much wider problem of score inflation in video game reviewing: Anything below 70% is assumed to be bad rather than average. Metacritic clauses are a humongous problem for development studios. On one hand, studio heads are idiots to sign them, and their business development people should be planning for a worst case in which they don't get any royalties and have other work lined up already. On the other though, that's not at all easy. Studios don't go down for lack of trying. When you have 100 - 250 salaries to pay and a publisher can get studios queueing outside the door, you might just have to sign. The industry is full of people who get attention heaped on them, saying "Keep your IP", and "Take risks! Do your own thing!", but sometimes, a studio has two months of money left and Barbie Racing is the only offer on the table. Studios could always do with better negotiators, but it's also a bigger social problem: A small number of studios willing to sign instead of negotiate a metacritic clause out can make it more difficult for the rest to refuse too.

It's about assisted suicide and Dignitas rather than dementia specifically. He visits the house in Switzerland after getting to know a man named Peter, who has motor neurone disease and is planning to take his own life. Terry spends some of his last moments with him, and the program shows Peters death. Even though you know it's his long thought out decision and really what he wants, it's very distressing to watch.

Phew! We love you Subbes. I've seen the Pratchett documentary, and it's one of the most difficult things I've watched. The memory of it still floors me.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/new-neogeo-x-handheld-console-confirmed/092838 1. £500?! 2. The list of games with it reads like a list of the most generic games ever made, except one: Art of Fighting Baseball Stars Cyber Lip Fatal Fury Fatal Fury Special Football Frenzy King of the Monsters Last Resort League Bowling Magician Lord Metal Slug Mutation Nation Nam 1975 Samurai Shodown Sengoku Super Sidekicks The King of Fighters ‘94 The Ultimate 11 Top Players Golf World Heroes I really hope that's not a typo.

Yeah, it doesn't really bother me either. It's about million times less cynical than some (some!) of pitches I've seen in games and digital interactive bollocks. Ellwood's page is hilarious. I was discussing it with some friends yesterday, and we particularly liked "I am an idea man", from his bio, and this rambling about transport: Underwater horses, and sports cars:

Actually, I hope it is a typo. It could be: Cyber Lisp In a dystopian near future city, a software bug gives you a speech defect so severe that you must spend the whole game devising non-verbal ways to converse with NPCs and progress through dialogue trees. Or, Cyber Lippy: You are the world's sassiest cyborg. Or Cyber Limp. All of them crackle with potential in my imagination. But seriously, it is an old Neo Geo game: http://www.neogeoforlife.com/forum/game_discussion/cyber_lip/cyber_lip_flyer.jpg Someone is launching a handheld with a bunch of retro games, for £500. That's quite a jump from £40 retro compendium systems you plug into your TV. At least we know it's not organised crime this time, but how will it be any less disastrous than Gizmondo?

(Source)

Is it a Collectors Digital Edition? Maybe it has pictures of Mass Effect keyrings with it or something.

Oh, video games. k9_ITa5T6zc

Pretty amazing. So: There's all this money out there ready to be poured into game projects. They're not close to the budgets of big console games, but they're much bigger than most indie projects. The total figures of backers are also (significant) fractions of the total sales figure for a really successful indie project. The people who are doing really well at this are taking some established brand, reputation or nostalgia into it rather than launching cold (hat tip: Kingz). Will there always be a ready supply of that, or if not, how well do you think this kind of funding would work? Will there be a Kickstarter?Also, Crowdsourced Hardcore Tactical Shooter seems to have stalled a bit. Edit: He might be setting 200K as a realistic production budget, but that doesn't necessarily align with a realistic fundraising goal. The further over the goal a project gets, the more value a gamer is going to perceive for their fifteen bucks, which could become a really hairy problem.

I think there's a point where someone who did great things simply recedes into being a good designer. Not as extreme as Joseph Heller never writing anything as good as his first book, but similar. The nature of not always being able to exceed yourself should be okay, but instead, the expectation laid on them becomes like an investment bubble.

Yeah, I was surprised at how fast it went up. I don't know why, their video is a little ropey and I had my doubts, but they seem to care so much and know what they're doing that I chipped in. I think seeing so many other people fund it so fast gave me confidence. Kickstarter is becoming an interesting model for diversity in games beyond typical starve/pitch/contract work/spare time indie development.