SpiderMonkey

Ah okay, fair enough. I think what you are coming back to is that you need moderators. You need people there to make the call on quality. If comments add so much value to your website, pay someone to moderate it. If they don't, turn them off. If you're stuck in the middle ground, where your comments are wildly popular but not enough to spend money on, why not channel some of those commenters' enthusiasm and the low value they place on their freetime, by entrusting them with moderating for free. Moderators are still a status system, but one that isn't so elitist and pretentious.

I couldn't get that video to work, nor could I find it on YouTube, but I presume this Eurogamer version is the same thing. It does look a lot more interesting than previous concepts sounded. The whole "be the bully" thing seemed a bit flat and childish, but the "beat the bullies" angle, which seems to be a significant shift, seems much more promising. Watching the video reminds me that the next-gen can't come soon enough, though. Holy wonky characters with dodgy animation, batman.

This is getting really stupid. You seem to be verging on interviewing prospective commenters. Systems which are gated prior to entry are arrogant and only select for people who have an overinflated sense of their self-worth. Since when did commenting on a website get to be worth so much that you had to go through an application process? And this is exactly the kind of 2.0 thing I detest - rather than looking to what has historically worked and going from there, you're just plucking concepts out of thin air as if this is the first time the problem has been tackled and as if there have never been any successful solutions. The stuff that works are systems that filter after commenting has taken place, rather than before it. Be ruthless about trimming useless comments, but don't delete them - flag them as offtopic, hide them, but give people the option of showing them. Reward good comments by making them more prominent. Support some kind of threading or hierarchy to allow conversations to have more structure, both for participants and for people who are considering joining in. Oh snap, I just described Shacknews and several other perfectly well functioning message boards.

How very similar to my click pattern. Have you read any Eurogamer-sister-site gamesindustry.biz recently? They appear to have kicked their Feature section into high gear in recent weeks. There's been some good stuff, e.g. Mr. Consolevania on games TV.

Gaming blogs are a very curious species to me, because blogs in the main have a very curious, modernist anti-historical attitude where what they are doing is entirely unique and amazing and new and, well, 2.0. "Fuck the MSM" and all that. But when it comes to gaming, the things they are doing have been done since the invention of the internet - Gamespy's Planet sites are/were nothing if not a blog network, 4+ years before anyone even thought to invent the word blog. So the gaming blogs are 1.5 at best, but really more like 1.1, which makes it very difficult for me to swallow their cocky "We're so goddamn new and revolutionary" attitude. (To their credit, though, at least Joystiq and Kotaku are aware of the wider game-website ecosystem. I've been to some gaming blogs attached to some blog networks where they seem entirely unaware that there were such things as games websites before their precious blog networks showed up.) The tricksy commenting systems that these guys have invented is all part of this 2.0-ness. If they act all elitist, then they can quietly ignore the words in the actual comments and pretend that they aren't every bit as bad as the message boards that are so 1.0. Of course it helps with spam, but given the number of different approaches there are to spam prevention/maintenance, the decision to go with this one seems strongly founded in this cult of self-importance that exists among bloggers and their readers. While I'm getting my morning rant in, I'll also agree with Jake. It can be amusing to go somewhere where people are prepared to go "LOLSONYTARDS" when a stupid story comes along, rather than cleanly reporting it, but other than that they are very much poor journalists and poor bloggers. Pay someone for quantity and not quality, and all you get is this constant surface-level inspection of the situation. "Here's a link, and here's my kneejerk reaction to it! Now let's move on to the next hour's story!" I'd hate it if blogs ever became a replacement for real news, like so many of them aspire to. Even a tabloid has editors and quality standards.

My rough stab would be this: I can normally run any Source game at 1280x 4x 4x HDR. I'm very tolerant of low framerates - I'm happy with a 30 that skips to 20 every so often - I'm not a hardcore FPS guy who needs 60+ all the damn time. Playing around with the settings to better answer your question, the performance isn't as bad as my first impressions, but it has forced me down a res to 1024x (but still with all the trimmings). This isn't that much of a problem, except that the game doesn't appear to support resolutions below 1024x. Presumably because that's what the inventory screen is setup to support. So if you need to drop the res and you're already at 1024x, you might be out of luck (or of course, you could just drop some of the many quality settings - Source is a remarkably flexible engine if you're prepared to have it look like ass). In terms of downloading the demo, I'm quite a fan of Fileplanet's Download Manager application (installs via ActiveX on IE if you let it). It lets you pause downloads whenever you want, which is obviously very important when you've got a 6-8 hour download ahead of you.

God this thing took forever to download, and god, it punishes my computer like no Source engine game before it, but still ... I can't describe it precisely, but this demo has exactly the same "omgawesome" feeling about it that the System Shock 2 and Deus Ex demos did for me. Even if I've already seen it in the videos, the big cave environment is also gobsmackingly beautiful.

Guys! You're doing it wrong! Video game journalism isn't dumbed down enough! http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=13362&page=1

I dunno if you say that because you felt I implied I thought Gillen was an ass. I quite like his writing (though its self-consciousness sometimes grates), and was just laughing at the in-joke gone wrong.

I'm not sure it justifies its own thread, but it seems, as ever, Kieron Gillen is stepping up to the challenge of improving Video game journalism. This time, it's that essential opening paragraph that is feeling his innovative wrath. Actually scratch that, the only thing I really have to say is LOLWTF?

It's one of those things where it seems utterly stupid to try and argue it as absolutely one way or the other. Some stuff is in Monkey Island because it was in the PotC ride, some stuff is in both MI and PotC because they are obvious things to do when you've got pirates in the carribbean, and some of the stuff is in PotC because, like Thrik said, it's almost impossible for the guys planning the film to not be aware of Monkey Island. All creative works build on the foundations laid down by the works that preceded them.

The way I recall it, Nintendo launched this 'we r not kiddy' campaign a year after launch. They still fucked up at launch - purple as the main console colour, no games with even the slightest 'mature' style, etc. It wasn't until it was hurting the Cube that they started doing something about the kiddy perception, pushing out Metroid Prime (whose art style got a lot more 'gritty' during its development) and pushing 'platinum' as the new main colour for the console.

Isn't that kind of the definition of a good pitcher? Pitcher. Ahem.

Trauma Center sponsored Green Wing and therefore cannot be in any way terrible.

What's most curious about this idea is that it isn't even taking a page out of Ron Gilbert's book. It's taking a page out of Ubisoft's book, since it's exactly what they successfully did with PoP:SoT. They had a serious winter of discontent that year. From what I recall, all their Christmas titles flopped - XIII, BG&E, PoP. I guess some executive somewhere had to decide, if they could only make one sequel, which franchise would be the best bet. I think they probably made the right choice. It's not just that it doesn't make any sense. It's one of those names that someone might randomly make up if they were looking to take the piss out of endless badly named games. The only thing it's lacking is a colon and a subtitle. It doesn't say anything about the game and when I first heard it, I expected it was some generic fantasy game about orcs and elves.

I'm gonna raise my hand at this point ... There have been numerous occasions where I've been in Game weighing up whether today will be the day that I hand over my crisp ten pound note to play this "I should play this someday" game. And that pig on the back of the box has played a serious, genuine role in making me put the box back on the shelf. Every time. I find him/it incredibly disturbing.

Oh sorry, this is probably going to come out rudely, but I don't mean it to: I have read OMM extensively, but have never (knowingly) read any of his game reviews for 'mainstream' sites.

Perhaps it's an oversimplification, but I always got the impression that a lot of people bought a Gamecube simply to play Nintendo's first-party titles, and that a large part of the reason it "failed" overall was because those games outshone anything else, and caused third-party games to be ignored. Wouldn't BG&E have just wilted in the radiance of Zelda/whatever?

Any links/any that stick out in your memory?

I dunno, I think I mean a different kind of "complex". I can pitch most strategy games, most RPGs and Eve Online in one sentence. I can't pitch Psychonauts in one sentence. At least not in a way that really gets to the heart of the game. Same goes for BG&E, this guy seems to be saying (haven't played the game yet, please don't ban me. )

It's the usual "game has no one-line sales pitch" argument, right? Seems common to explanations of why critically successful games get abysmal sales. Always an explanation, but no one ever offers a solution. Why is it only games that struggle to sell their more complex products, I wonder? Or is that just a perception on my part?

Eh? No, I mean things like not having cars disappear as soon as you turn around, having pedestrians that do more than just walk on a loop and shout at you if you get in the way of their pathfinding, having crowds of people that behave like crowds. There's 3 things off the top of my head. I'm sure there are plenty of less immediately obvious improvements too.

In a sense it's to be expected that they would drum up this quantity of noise. The people who are listening right now are early adopters, and early adopters tend to be more easily sold on specifications and other geek-fetish aspects, than on more practical terms. It's not really exceptional for them to do this, I think it's just more exceptional that such a huge portion of the internet has sat up and taken notice.

Heh, on the basis of your creative turn of phrase, I will concede that I was a bit out of place saying "90%", but apart from that, I'm absolutely certain I'm right that the phenomenon exists and is widespread. There's a whole breed of gamer on the internet that is used to the concept that numbers = fun, that tech specs = quality, because that's what countless hardware sites have taught them. "If you have an amazing graphics card, your PC game will be more fun" is a message that has been beaten into them again and again. Microsoft made a serious effort to court these guys with the Xbox, buying up PC game franchises and developers and putting out "Xbox = best tech specs" statements wherever it could, and they were successful. Now that console gaming has eclipsed PC gaming in terms of quantity of attention, these guys that used to sit around going "yeah well my GeForce > your Radeon because it has 24 pixel shader units!" do the same thing to consoles instead.

There were those rumours a while back that they were going to give up on a new console and instead release a series of peripherals. It seemed bizarre at the time, but it seems to have a twang of truth to it with hindsight. I don't know about the technology, but the economics of it would be a bigger barrier to doing this, right? It's hard to imagine a new controller punching the same weight at retail as a whole new console, however cool the games were. Especially after the Gamecube's near-complete software sales collapse. 0.2% of the market in the last figures I read? (I forget which region.)