SpiderMonkey

Yeah I'm gonna pass on someone openly dismantling press freedom and the country's election system, as something that would be an improvement on what we've got.

I guess I could've been more specific: This sort of person is the one I want to spit on. The few that are shitting on the many.

How do the controls compare for you? I bought the GCN version earlier in the year, but only got round to my second major chunk of play last week. What surprised me was that Eurogamer marked the Wii version down to 6 or 7 because of bad controls ... and yet, the Gamecube controls are pretty damn clunky in their own right.

One day, three editorials. Each one of them makes me so deeply sad. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/opinion/22sun3.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/opinion/22sun1.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/opinion/22sun2.html What the hell happened. I visited California when I was 16 and was so thrilled by it that I aspired to live there when I grew up. Now I want to find the people in these editorials and spit on them. (Sorry for emo-blog-ness.)

We don't seem to have an E3 thread yet, so I'm going to fire one off ... The COD4 gameplay demonstration looked awesome. 4 shots fired in 3 or 4 minutes, and yet it was the most interesting thing I've seen so far. The surprise in the first 30 seconds of the video is especially delightful. Small things well executed, rather than a penis comparison of who can render the best explosions. I was pleasantly surprised. Halo 3 video looked very self-indulgent. Seemed like it would really wet your pants if you were a fan, but didn't seem to make any effort to reach out to anyone who didn't already love the series. Killzone 2 looks really generic and awful. I don't understand why every journalist is fellating it right now. I guess it's the whole "hype = traffic to our websites = better business for us" thing or something. Grey cities, Omaha beach derived landing sequence (MoHAA did this in *2002*, guys), terrible writing (the obligatory "banter on transport into battlezone" sequence) and a montage of generic gun shooting enemy-enemy dying sequences. They hit their graphics target by putting everything in corridors or huge smoke clouds, which is way different from what the pre-render offered. Maybe I have FPS fatigue, but I struggled to see anything unique or worth getting excited about. WiiFit looks like it will be a massive hit, I'll be interested to see just how sophisticated the balance pad really is. I'm upset there was no Pikmin on display. Mario Kart instead? Not really something I can get excited about. Metroid Prime was described as "the biggest and only FPS blockbuster this year"? Uh, no, it's really struggling to attract a buzz in the same way MP2 did, and I think Halo 3 and HL2:E2 might have a thing or two to say about being an FPS blockbuster. Looking forward to video of Mario Galaxy.

And today ... No more 60GB PlayStation 3 in US after July, says Reeves So at the end of the month, the price cut disappears and it goes back to $599. Fucking wow, the monkeys really are at the wheel.

The design looked like the biblical description of the Ark, to me?

I think each console maker does an accurate job of reflecting their personality in their console's flaws. Microsoft is not a hardware company, hence hardware failures the first time they design something themselves. Sony is not a software company, hence falling short on PSN vs XBL. Nintendo is not a technology company, hence choosing to be non-competitive on technology. Interestingly, the one that's currently doing the best is the one that acknowledged their weakness upfront.

You can buy a 60Gb for $499, but only this month. The better thing is still $599.

There was an interesting quote I read from a CoD4 interview where one of the team said that as a studio, they enjoy picking big battles with other developers, they look for places where the big guns are playing and aim to out-do them. I guess the blatant Stalker lift comes from that thinking. S'alright by me, it's better than copying some other guy's space station. Gametrailers.com all the way.

Wow, I loved Wind Waker's style, despite the hate it saw. It's so great to see it again and know it isn't dead. It was such fun, even just mindlessly sailing around. Totally bought.

What the fuck. No one does this at my UK dev studio. If someone did, I can't imagine it would happen again. What the fuck. (We do have one loo that doesn't flush with enough strength so there is a resident brown turtle who pops up a few times a month though.)

The obsession with celebrity is the media's best tool in instilling political apathy and ignorance. I don't really buy the "it's market-driven news, and that's what the market wants" argument. I don't imagine civil unrest (though if you read enough semi-conspiracy news stories, you get the impression that US politicians are already working to protect against that eventuality, with the flexibility of terrorist legislation, building big detention camps, passing laws to allow use of the military internally, etc). But I do imagine a serious collapse in any kind of power or influence. A lot of people in Western countries seem to think that would be a good thing, but it worries me what will happen when China or India or Russia are calling the shots. They are hardly going to be as friendly to Europe/Canada/etc as the US is now, even if it seems like the US regards them with contempt.

The style of politics that won Bush two elections is also the style of politics that keeps him in power despite all the bullshit. That style is to instill complete and absolute apathy in everyone except your core supporters. It's a fucking brilliant way of hacking democracy, tbh, even if it is totally immoral.

I liked the timer. I can see why others didn't. I thought it did a great job of hiding the edges of the world. Without it, it would've been immersion-destroyingly obvious that you were just exploring a bunch of levels, but with it, it just about felt like you were exploring different parts of a planet's surface. There was always that mystique of what's 'just around the corner', to use a juicy cliché. (I haven't played the second one yet, so it's possible they achieved this feeling without it.) (As an added thought, I'd love to know how many people were caught out by the timer and had it ruin their game, versus how many people just didn't like feeling rushed. I would bet heavily on the latter.)

The storytelling is what is so worthy of praise. It's so tightly integrated into everything, right down to the placement of doorways to guarantee particular views as you enter particular areas. It's one of few games to genuinely show how you could tell a story in something approaching a natural language for games, rather than resorting to ripping off cinema constantly.

In terms of looking forward, I'm prepared to give Brown time of day, and I also have a reasonable patience for Cameron. I expect though that I'm about to get a whole lot more selfish about who gets my political support, rather than looking at things in a wider picture. So much of what's gone on under Blair has really fucked over the generation of people 18-26 today - university fees and the utter insanity of the housing market (from a first-time buyer perspective) to name just two. I'm gonna be paying close attention to what attitude they take to these problems, because it's the first time a politician has had and will have a genuine impact on my day to day, year to year life.

Has anyone here read anything of Italo Calvino's books? I read "If on a winter's night a traveller" and it is now one of my favourite books. I'm really keen to read some more, but don't really know where to start. Any suggestions from the audience?

I just dug up the Amazon page and found this line in a review: That's fucking awesome, it makes me grin. Gonna order it now. Will check out the other guy in the future too. Thanks.

The market does a reasonable job of regulating this on the PC. I don't see how it would be different on a console. The thing to remember is that Nintendo still has control over the "shelf space" (which incidentally is *the* challenge for broadscale digital distribution, if it is to become something other than just another retailer). They can set whatever parameters they like with that. There might be 23 Bejeweled clones on WiiWare, as I'm sure there are on PC, but you need never know about it.

It's the lack of any shame or humility that most bugs me about Blair. There was a piece in the Guardian last week discussing the political exits of other prime ministers who'd made catastrophic foreign policy fuckups, leading to hundreds of deaths. They all left in disgrace and spent the rest of their days humbled by the burden of their mistakes. As the article observed, Blair gets a farewell tour and leaves like some kind of hero at a moment of his choosing. It's borderline disgusting.

I don't think Nintendo have any business dictating to people what they do and don't develop. Contrast this with the general grumbling that the XBLA process is long-winded and conservative, and it's really hard to call their strategy "last-gen". The last-gen Nintendo is the one that makes demands about content and pisses off third-parties by being excessively controlling. I'm also not sure you can compare the XNA license stuff with what's on offer here? Surely if you wanted to go XBLA, you would need an ESRB rating, and until such time, you are limited to whoever also has a subscription. Still, I'd hope they open it up in the same way Microsoft has.

It's not just bad business, it's plain bad design. You can engage a player much more at eye-level, with real characters staring you in the face, than you ever could at some technical-limitation-caused sky-high isometric perspective. It's really tedious hearing the purists bitch on about this. It's like people thinking that to make an adventure game, you need a verb system, an inventory, and a pointer to scan the screen with. It's just ... wrong.

The voice-acting / dialogue was cringeworthy when I saw it being played for a couple of minutes earlier today.

They'd have to uninvent the fourth game for me to have any interest. I don't imagine it ever happening though. LucasArts haven't been interested in making that kind of game since Grim Fandango.