James

I should credit Lu with discovering that little animation gem.

I'm glad you didn't mind me crashing your session. I'd actually just come out of a previous session where I was about to kill THE WIZARD, but my connection momentarily failed, so I thought I'd make replaying that portion a bit more fun by doing so with someone else. And it was fun. It seems pretty good so far. I guess I wasn't anticipating quite how like an instanced MMO it would be, but the important difference is that I find the minute-to-minute gameplay satisfying and fun, rather than only playing to chase some goal on the meta level, which I tire of quickly.

I don't remember ever having a strong sense of someone being a hero to me, but there are definitely people I respected a lot. I used to kind of idolize John Peel, but I later read some quotes that revealed some troubling attitudes to women earlier in his career, so that soured things somewhat. I guess I admire artists that produce things I like and who seem also to be nice people. I wouldn't call it heroism, really. Just people I respect. It's probably a failing of mine that I'm not more inspired by people who achieve truly great things.

No photo, but I've already worn mine to work, because I am a professional person to be taken very seriously.

I like to imagine Rxanadu is the person in his or her avatar and is completely freaking out about this.

Hover also offer free WHOIS privacy on TLDs that allow it (which isn't all of them, disappointingly). I have no idea about bill leniency, though. As for pointing it to Blogger or whatever, I'm pretty sure any decent registrar will give you all the necessary CNAME etc. access.

Amazing!

Sounds familiar! Yeah, I've certainly been guilty of sexist bullshit just like everyone else, but, unless my memory is deceiving me, I've never ascribed my frustrations to some failing in women (perhaps because I didn't have the confidence to open myself to rejection in the first place; i.e., I didn't make any serious attempts at a relationship until university). Before that it was mainly a lot of self-pity and self-loathing and I guess a certain amount of fishing for compliments. I feel quite embarrassed about that, but I hope I'm not deluding myself when I say I never blamed my frustrations on women.

I wonder how angry he'd be if they met all his other demands, but didn't quite match the specific granularity requested for each graphics option. "I can't play this, it only has six options for exponential height fog!"

God dammit, what the fuck is wrong with us? How can people be this wilfully stupid?

I imagine he thinks that making it look more like the kind of legalese you get in EULAs will somehow make it more convincing. Or it could just be a facet of his psychosis. EDIT: It looks like he's been misusing apostrophes and obsessing over game engine minutia for at least a couple of years: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/232284387557924865 I mean, it's the exact same phrase he uses in his big list of demands: "to it's full potential". I wonder if it's very stressful to be this poor guy, sweating so hard over all these details that are completely out of his control.

WE'VE ALREADY HAD THAT ONE DIBS, GOD

Sant! Eller jag är dum. Alla språk är svårt Min mor är svenska, och mitt första namn är Per, men jag bor i England och när jag var ung jag ville inte lära mig svenska (eller något). The problem with trying to use what little Swedish I've learnt is that I feel very uncertain and self-conscious about whether it's right. I have to resist the urge to continually ask for validation. The other problem is that I'm not very good. Still, I'm enjoying it.

I'm also in the dual-monitors-at-work-only club! Here's a view of mainly them and not really much of my desk:

Javik was from a DLC mission that was generally available (i.e. not restricted to special editions), but you're right, his insight was a weirdly important thing to relegate to DLC. You could make the argument that a player with Javik available could still fail to take him on the missions with his additional dialogue (I didn't always take him because I wanted to bring characters I had history with in the previous games), so it was already designed in a way that allows the player to easily miss that material, but failing to include him in the core game is a further barrier on top of that, and a significant one. I wonder how well that worked for EA. Did all those reviewers talking about what a strange exclusion it was drive people away, or push them towards the extra purchase? Or did they get it but feel bitter about it? Who knows?!

YES

I'm pretty sure the lower half of that Watch Dogs table is all physical real-world tat. "Aiden Pearce's iconic cap" refers to something that goes on the actual player's actual physical real-world head. The important artistic decisions regarding the protagonist's headwear remain intact. What this item actually offers is a way for purchasers to publicly declare how much they were willing to pay for the game. Even if it had been an in-game item, I wouldn't share Chris' disappointment. Sure, it theoretically limits the importance of the decisions the character designers are making, but no more than any game with user-selectable costumes. In the more recent Assassin's Creed games you unlock various outfits throughout the game, and can choose at pretty much any time what your character should be wearing. This is would just be that plus a cynical business tactic (indeed, I imagine there were some edition-exclusive costumes in AC). It's implicitly understood that the default outfit is the canonical one, but you can choose to spend all of AC3 in your sailor outfit, if you choose. I guess the difference in Watch Dogs' case would be that it's specifically his "iconic" cap, and therefore the canonical choice, but still, I think the point is that it a lot of games the character design isn't really exercising the kind of control Chris is talking about (a possibility that he acknowledges, to be fair). Historically I've been quite susceptible to these kind of tactics, at least when it comes to in-game content: I'd look at the whole selection of available material, and consider anything less than that as "missing out". I'd think of it as a subtractive thing. I think this is how a lot of people think, and it's what this ploy preys on. But really these sorts of things are in almost all instances additive. I don't think any developer or publisher would deliberately risk restricting anything that would have any real bearing on review scores to a non-standard edition. I think it is like bonus tracks for an album: you might enjoy the additional content, but it's just additional stuff thrown on top of an already complete thing. Perhaps that's obvious, but it's still something I have to remind myself of whenever I'm presented with any of these stupid edition catalogues. Even if it's weapons you can use throughout, theoretically changing the nature of the whole game, it's never something the game actually needed in the first place. (I have no evidence for this other than personal experience.) Incidentally, I know publishers sometimes pull dumb stunts when posting stuff to journalists (was it a Bulletstorm promo that got packaged in a bunch of meat?), but so they send reviewers fancy editions in the hope that they'll review that? Even if so, I'd hope any reviewer worth her or his salt would differentiate the core content from any add-on nonsense. I just had a thought: do you think a preponderance of options might be in part an attempt to ease customers towards more expensive editions: "if you spend £5 extra you can give your character a sweet trenchcoat, and once you're there it's just another £5 for the double-barrelled shotgun, and a mere £5 beyond that there's a bonus mission, and now that you've come this far you might as well throw in another £30 for an artwork and a figurine you won't know what to do with". Obviously that doesn't account for region or retailer exclusives. Perhaps it's nonsense. I am not a marketer. I guess something I can agree with is that all this stuff does quite clearly indicate that the publisher is thinking of the game as a product more than art or a creative endeavour or whatever. That should come as a surprise to no-one, but I suppose it can be a problem in the way it shapes public perception. Not that I think Watch Dogs is going to be a strong artistic statement, but in general it'd be nice if we were more inclined to approach games as deliberately a designed whole rather than the rightly maligned collection of bullet points.

I'm pretty sure our robotic annihilators will be coded entirely in brainfuck.

Someone at work got me one of those things as a kind of joke. All the bananas I have at work are separate (as in not in bunches), so perhaps a headset stand would be a better use for it. Pretty inspired!

Welcome, all. Veckodag, I'm learning Swedish at the moment. Does your name mean "weekday"? Välkomna!

Yes.

There are at least three cheat codes: video​game νideogame videogame

Oh shit, you're right. Christ. I approve of the sideways second monitor, anyway. I have an irrational fondness for those. Also, kudos on the classy sink area.

This is probably not the place for this, but Campo Santo doesn't have a forum, so I'll ask here: I would like to get some stuff from the Campo Santo store. I live in the UK so I would like to keep shipping costs to a minimum. I would like a T-shirt or two, but I would also like the poster once it's available. Is there any risk of the T-shirts going out of stock before the poster goes on sale?