SpiderMonkey

Of course they created Steam out of self-interest. But if you look at their history of how they have used it in conjunction with other developers, it's clear that they are interested in using it to help other independent developers as well as themselves. They helped out the Ragdoll Kung Fu guys, they helped out Red Orchestra when they couldn't find any other publisher and were about to go under, they give 100% profit to Source licensees using Steam and a lot of the decisions in Steam revolve around helping out their customers as much as helping themselves. To go back to my original point, I don't see this same "help other developers" attitude present in what Triton offers. They are on the bandwagon to earn a buck.

False. The primary objective of a publicly traded business is to make money - that is required by law. A privately held business is welcome to pursue whatever objectives they wish, so long as they remain profitable (and legal) while doing so. Just because I can (they're not precisely relevant), here's the Remoid refuting someone making pretty much the same assertion, except about their games instead of Steam, and here is an article about Craigslist discussing how, as a privately held business, they are choosing to put other objectives ahead of their bottom line. EDIT: And anyway, this isn't about making money or not making money, it's about who is the priority in the money making - the guy who made the digital distribution software, or the guy who made the product it's distributing.

Call me when he writes an appraisal that sounds less like a press release for Triton. He's right to call Kotick on his statement - what planet has that guy been on since Nov 2004? - but call me when he puts down the pom-poms and stops throwing around the "it's next-gen!" vague-isms. I know he's a marketing man, but I thought blogs were supposed to be about opinionating, not sales pitches.

Steam: Primary objective: Help the developers. Secondary objective: Make money. Triton: Primary objective: Make money. Secondary objective: Help the developers. I didn't say Valve weren't looking to make money. I simply said it wasn't their main objective. Read more closely next time?

From what I can tell, Triton is a "me too" Steam-style thing. The major difference appears to be that the main objective is to make money from digital distribution as a retailer, rather than to empower and free developers from retailers. So I can't say I'm particularly interested in it.

I thought that was just me, not that they were particularly intrusive or anything. And as others have said, the game's performance is very pleasant. Your computer should be very comfortable with it, Thrik.

I'm not sure how he got as far into his job as he did before coming to this grand realisation. Surely if game development is a team effort, it naturally follows that you as an individual will not have full creative control and that some of the other people will make decisions you disagree with. And that is basically what he has described throughout his article, just with added "it was The Suits what shitted things up" clichés. As he points out, every other industry works this way - you take someone else's money and make something for them according to their desires. But he fails to observe that every other industry has evolved to manage and work within that reality with maturity rather than childish cynicism.

Hey I just caught this little news snippet over on Eurogamer: http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=65446 Ubisoft are remaking The Settlers II. I never really figured what it was, but there was something really magical about that game that meant I lost countless hours to it, until I sadly lost the CD. They seemed to strike a winning formula with II and then were just left fixing what wasn't broken in later sequels, which was a shame. A return to the classic makes me very excited. You too?

Colour me really forgetful then - I went back to MI2 last year after a break of god-knows-how-long and could only remember the outline of the story and barely a quarter of the puzzles. I think I'm much more fluent on MI1 though, since I've replayed that one a lot more over the years. If you don't find either of those Stan ones funny, then no, you probably won't like it. It's not the kind of place you can browse, because like any bastion of internet humour, it's mostly full of people beating the funny out of a joke by endless repetition, but I find the ones that make it to other message boards tend to be worth a smile at least.

My new favourite piece of Colbert: http://youtube.com/watch?v=veIU0Jwu54w

Yeah I laughed my head off and then was left wanting to buy Hitman too. Perverse.

Ernest Adams writing about credibility. Oh the irony. Edit: This comment is probably a bit trollish. To be more specific, I find the "singing comedians do both because they aren't good enough singers or good enough comedians to do one exclusively" statement to apply to Ernest Adams. His attempts to bring together academia and practical game development seem to end up stripping out/grossly diluting the interesting academic content, while struggling to provide anything of any practical use.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo </vader> The split screen multiplayer was one of my favourite parts too. Seeing how many of my brother's guardhouses (/whatever they were) I could capture before he noticed it was him I was attacking and not one of the AIs we were supposed to be coop-ing against.

I get the message now that Sony is trying to change the rules, but I just don't see how their new model works for anyone but themselves. Game consoles are platforms. They support an ecology of developers and publishers. In a time when the costs of game development continue to grow, the single best way to offset those growing costs is to sell more copies. To sell more copies, a platform needs to either increase its install base, or increase its tie ratio. But I don't understand how, under any realistic laws of economics, either of these things can happen when the price of the console is now twice what it was previously and the price of the games has also increased. Sure, Sony won't suffer from a PS3 at $600, but it seems like a sure-fire way to kill the ecology. Fewer people will own the console, fewer people will buy the games, and the publishers will be getting less money back for greater development costs. How do Sony think can that sustain itself? Publishers will just leave and go to rival platforms. And at that point, the "the winner is the person with the best games" rule comes in for the killer blow, surely. It just seems like they haven't thought this through at all.

No offense intended, but I think you have pushed this discussion into pedantry now.

You'd have to define "multimedia PC" a bit more precisely for me to be able to answer that. "Multimedia PC" to me is a PC with a CDrom drive from back in the days when everyone thought CDroms (and not the Internet, as it actually turned out) was going to be the PC's killer app. Cheap alternative to a Media Center-esque PC? I'm not really sure about cheap, probably more same-price, but sure, I'd go with that.

Ugh, no. Here is why "I've got this great idea" is frowned up on: 99% of the work in making something good is in the execution, not in the idea. This is only something you learn once you actually try and turn an idea into a reality. Developers don't frown upon the "I've got a great idea" newbies because they think ideas are bad. They are just the same - they have dozens of their own ideas. Why don't you see more of those ideas filtering through to finished products? Because not every "good idea" turns into a "good reality". Because it's expensive to spend time sorting through the list of ideas to find the good ones. Every bad idea you develop to reality and then have to throw away, because it isn't as fun as it sounded when you put it down on paper, is money and time wasted. Back in the day when David Braben was writing Frontier, the costs of finding out whether an idea was good or bad was a couple of days of one programmer's time. These days, it's more a matter of a team of 5 people working for 3 months to build a good prototype. That's really expensive. It's a lot cheaper to load up the "genre defining/leading title", play it for half an hour and then decide that you're going to do your game the same way. I'd love as much as the next guy to see more fresh ideas filtering through to the retail shelf, but you have to work within economic realities (ask questions like "how can I figure out the quality of an idea more cheaply") rather than just insulting any and all game developers working in the industry today, by suggesting they are creatively bankrupt. This again is economic reality. There is viable money to be made by exploiting existing markets (e.g. people who like action movies) and there is viable money to be made by expanding markets. Some companies will do the former, others will do the latter. This will never stop being true and isn't specific to any one industry. Within any given industry, a balance needs to be maintained, because there is only so much "more of the same" that consumers will tolerate. There are self-correcting failsafes that ensure this happens: when the consumers stop buying because there is too much "more of the same", that "more of the same" will cease to become as profitable and so more companies will switch to a "new markets" approach. Witness that in the past two years, both Nintendo and EA have noticeably shifted in this direction.

No, I think he's wrong. 1) On the specifics of Rockstar: He's actually the guy guilty of not doing enough research. http://www.designmuseum.org/design/index.php?id=67 (this is an excellent interview btw) and http://dukenukem.typepad.com/game_matters/2006/03/killing_a_brand.html Rockstar is a Take2 sub-label. The guys who set it up have been very specific about building a very targeted brand and development style. They are about games as cultural objects, a blend of music, film and gaming. GTA and Manhunt represent Rockstar not because some journo hasn't figured out that Rockstar has more than one dev studio, but because these are the games that best capture this approach. The other studios' stuff comes across, regrettably, as "tried but failed", so ends up left by the wayside. Take2 already has a sports label. So yes this is a surprise, not because "it's not GTA" but because of the argument that "this doesn't fit in with our pre-existing perceptions of the Rockstar brand". If the blog-dude had said that it wasn't a surprise because this Table Tennis game fitted naturally into Rockstar's brand, and had presented a convincing argument to that effect, he'd have a valid point. But he didn't. 2) I was going to rage about the lazy cliché of "weren't things so much more innovative in the 90s", but I think I'll come back later when I have my thoughts in clearer order on that point.

Some quotes from the Nihilanth: Just like the Vortigaunts and other enemies, the Nihilanth is shackled (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nihilanth.jpg). The whole "Combine already on the scene" thing makes more sense to me, given that, than the "Nihilanth running the show" angle. What I recall from various snippets of info spread through interviews is that they wanted there to be a bigger figure behind the scenes of the events of HL1, but until they started on HL2, they hadn't really pinned down any specifics.

Those guys' taste in games confuses me a lot of the time. They break out the pom-poms for something as bland as Sin Episodes, but then heap on the bitching about something as awesome as more Half-Life.

The keyboard/mouse plugin thing and the "connect it to a PC monitor" stuff is still crap. It's a game console. It goes under my TV and I sit on my sofa 5 feet away. A distance of 5 feet is not a practical distance to be doing a lot of text heavy work. It is a distance well suited to visual images. Talking about how you can plug a computer monitor in is so ridiculous. Really, what am I going to do, set up a desk next to my TV for when I want to use the PS3 for its PC-esque functions? Unplug the PS3 and take it to a desk and plug it into a computer monitor there? How is that a practical and reasonable usage pattern? It's not. It's half-assed. If you want to get text to work in a living room setting, you are talking about buying a 40" HDTV for several thousand dollars. And once you've done that, how is a PS3 a cheap alternative to a PC?

I see nothing in what Phil Harrison that talks about "killing" the PC. That's just lazy editorialising by a shitty blog. Also especially lazy is taking his quote out of its context. He said that quote in answer to a question about whether he was bothered by Microsoft's Live Anywhere. Hence him saying "we don't need the PC". I also happen to think he's/Sony is largely wrong. A TV screen is fundamentally different from a computer screen. A controller is fundamentally different from a keyboard. If a TV screen and a controller was better suited to the kinds of tasks you do on a computer, we'd all have been using TV screens and controllers for the past 10 years already. Obviously most of the digital entertainment stuff is better done on a TV screen, but all this talk about web browsers and writing emails and creating blogs, competing with MySpace is going to end up being watered-down, half-assed and a waste of development resources.

"Debagging", then. I debagged a guy in school at the encouragement of a few others, in the common room where dozens of us were watching TV. Unfortunately I got hold of his boxers as well as his trousers. He was pissed. Then the guys who'd egged me into it disowned any responsibility. :/

Re: Miffy's spoiler

I must be a slow FPS player. I don't really understand how people are clocking in these playtimes of 3 hours. I think I came in at more like 5 hours and I don't get how I could really play it faster. What a great game though. I'm not sure I'm in the mood to dissect it yet, but anyone on the fence should definitely buy it. Does not disappoint, well worth the measly change I paid for it.