Denial

I don't know.. I think that's the case for experienced players, and certainly the beta is mainly going to go to people who have experience of Bungie games... but to make the finances work, they need to sell to a lot of people - and people with PlayStations won't have have had a chance to play a Bungie game since Oni...

"Well, Grace, I'm Nintendo, and I'll be your wait-ee this evening." Yeah, I can get on board with Dadtendo.

This feels like... by no means the biggest thing Nintendo is having to deal with right now.

Meanwhile, Sony and Ubisoft announced their full year results this week. Ubisoft's has been noted mainly for the blindingly obvious announcement of Far Cry 4, but was also a miss on guidance, although most of that can probably be attributed to the Watch Dogs sized hole in their holiday schedule. Sony's was good news for the Game division, which recorded a loss but saw strong sales of the PS4 offsetting a faster than expected drop in sales of the PS3, and some long-awaited traction for the Vita, I suspect driven by price drops, PS4 integration and Tearaway. The larger numbers, though, were kind of a car crash, with a billion-dollar loss, connected to a significant extent to various sinking anvils Sony is seeking to disconnect from its ankle, most obviously the PC business, which is proving expensive to run and expensive to sell, and the TV business, which is to be spun off as a wholly-owned subsidiary, but which has now not turned a profit for ten years...

My new Priest deck is made almost entirely of Taunt cards, buffs and heals, and one Lightwell, two Northshire Clerics and a Sunfury Protector. It turns out that without the corrective influence of people shouting abuse at me, I turn into a terrible troll.

Oh, and Kadokawa have bought From Software, or rather an 80% stake in From Software - which I imagine is the 80% that was held by Transcosmos. This seems to make sense - Transcosmos is one of those Neuromancery multi-channel IT and media companies that seem to sit somewhere between being corporations and holding companies, like Softbank. Kadokawa has been working to become more of a cohesive media group, and reorganised itself completely last year to be a single media corporation rather than a set of subsidiaries making video games, manga, anime and so on...

I have nothing useful to contribute, but frostbolt, two ice lances and a fireball with an archmage on the field and 4 health left is the equivalent of dropkicking someone in the face as they launch themselves off the top turnbuckle to finish you. Sometimes, it's good to be a mage.

I just got a mudhole stomped in me in much the same way. The Arena is a really clever way to get you to pay in the early stages, I think. You're not likely to pay $1.99 to go in to get stamped on, but you will need to learn how to use various characters to avoid getting stamped on. And most of the decks need specials to be effective. So you stick with mage, and get murdered in the Arena, or you diversify, and buy packs...

Yeah, the Federation Cruiser is... I'm not going to say "easy", because things can go south very quickly against the flagship if it gets a couple of lucky missile strikes in in the early going. But if you are set up to survive against it, you can cut through its first two builds with the artillery beam pretty comfortably... The mind control on the flagship makes for a really interesting change, in particular - up until then the primary purpose of mind control has been to disrupt enemies, at least in my use of it - specifically, I've enjoyed hacking the medbay, mind-controlling one enemy and then teleporting a boarding party over. And enemy mind control usually expires before your mind-controlled crewman can do much damage: I usually just put a Rock in the room with them and wait for them to punch themselves out, then take them both to the medbay. Whereas against the rebel flagship you really need mind control (or hacking) to counteract its mind control, because the consequences of not having a pilot for the time it takes for mind control to wear off can be totally disastrous.

Flak and hacking in particular are really interesting in the way they mess with the structure of the game - I think that a lot of the AE content is at least in part about flattening out the gap between optimizing for the journey and optimizing for the boss battle at the end.

(Starts to play.) (Some time later, looks up to find Earth is now a smoking ruin.) Huh.

The Crystal cruiser is rapidly becoming my Green Eye of the Little Yellow God, also. (The advanced content sucked me back in. Steam tells me I have played 300+ hours of FTL - although much of that was idling, I think/hope - but cannot remember any of the ships I unlocked. So, yeah.)

Offhand, I can think of Chris Barrett, Dave Dunn, Charlie Gough and Chris Butcher...

Something that always interests me about the Archie Bunker problem is that All in the Family was itself a remake of an earlier British sitcom called 'Till Death Us Do Part, which was written by Johnny Speight and had a working-class Londoner called Alf Garnett in the Archie Bunker role. Like Bunker, Garnett was prejudiced against pretty much everyone (although his daughter was dating an actual Communist, rather than a McGovernite Democrat, reflecting the greater diversity of European politics at the time, when the far right and the far left were still actively recruiting), and expressed the prejudice in a way Speight assumed everyone would understand was not intended to be admirable or praiseworthy. And, just like Norman Lear, the creator of All in the Family, Johnny Speight was shocked and appalled that people uncritically celebrated Alf Garnett's racism and sexism (and later homophobia) and saw him as a plain-speaking hero. So, by the time Norman Lear was writing All in the Family, he already had an example of exactly the Archie Bunker problem, while he was creating Archie Bunker. That's interesting to me. It's possible, of course, that he saw 'Till Death Us Do Part without knowing the context of its reception, or that he had more (misplaced) faith in the American audience...

(With certain exceptions, of course, re "any reason or no reason" - if you terminate someone for raising a discrimination complaint, for example - and if you terminate someone very shortly after they have raised a discrimination complaint, even if you insist it is without cause, you might want to talk to your lawyers. And some collective bargaining agreements protect workers in labor unions, but that's next-level labor law stuff...)

Absolutely - you can terminate someone for any reason or no reason in Washington state, unless there's a contract prohibiting that - in which case you'd need to fire them "for cause", or persuade them to leave or accept a buy-out or other settlement. Uncontracted workers are usually terminated without cause, for ease of administration, I think. But "with cause" would mean something very different... (Contrast that with e.g. West and Zampella at Infinity Ward - they were contracted employees Activision terminated with cause, and the legal dispute between those parties was in large part about whether that cause was actually a just cause - whether they had done something that entitled Activision to fire them. The argument was basically "who violated the contract first?")

Because a lot of games journalists don't have much HR experience, so this might not be said, it's worth noting that "terminated without cause", which is what o'Donnell says, is not the same as "terminated without explanation" or "terminated unfairly". Washington state is not (yet) a right-to-work state, so if you terminate someone (outside certain situations) you need either to compensate them according to their contract/state law or demonstrate that you have "just cause". "Without cause" here is o'Donnell clarifying immediately that he wasn't terminated due to wrongdoing or poor performance, for example, but rather that he was terminated for a reason that doesn't legally count as "just cause". It's an assertion that he was a good employee, essentially.

Oh, wow! I have, or rather my father has, the original Dune boardgame somewhere. It is indeed absolutely beautiful, although something of a work for the ages to play... I've got Android Netrunner sitting on my kitchen table, but a) this is a busy time and b ) after reading Leigh A's account of her relationship with Netrunner, I'm not sure I dare to open the box...

I read it as a wild card search modifier - so, used to include a bunch of different possible interpretations of trans (-gender, -sexual) without getting caught up in discussing which is strictly applicable...

I'm thinking of Far Cry: Blood Dragon, where

I've been getting into The Last of Us' Factions mode lately, a little - it's interesting, and unforgiving, and I admire the decision not to have any zombies in it. However, I don't know anyone who is (still) playing it, and rando play has its disadvantages. I favour support/healing classes, and if the rest of the team split up and run off in different directions, to be slaughtered then there's limited opportunity to craft, gift and heal. Or, to be fair, to do anything else. Also, of course, nobody has microphones, because PS3, so it's hard to coordinate. So... is anyone playing LoU: Factions?

I'm currently _still_ slightly hooked on the iOS Injustice: Gods Among Us, which will maybe be replaced by the Arkham City game. It's basically a very beautiful screen-tapping game disguised as a beat-em-up with an energy mechanic and a collectable card system, which I had largely weened myself off until a one-day sale of the Red Son pack (containing the communist alternate-universe Superman, Wonder Woman and Solomon Grundy oh God kill me) meant that the pack had a lower cost than the sellback value of the three characters in it, which allowed me to go on an orgy of conspicuous consumption after a lengthy process of superhero arbitrage. Right now I'm also thinking about the alpha of Out There, by a French games company, Mi-Clos, which I played at Eurogamer Expo. It's a kind of combat-free FTL-meets-Captain-Blood, where instead of fighting aliens you jump from system to system trying to keep your levels of oxygen, hull strength and fuel up - if any of them drops to zero you lose - by mining planets, bartering with aliens and negotiating FTL-style multiple-choice random encounters, while also finding new technologies, gathering rare metals and crafting devices to make life slightly easier. From what I've played it's _incredibly_ hard - in part because the things that might smooth out the violence of the universe (or make sure you don't find you have followed a path of stars to a dead end, since doubling back is functionally impossible over more than a few star systems) have not yet gone in, and it is also currently quite repetitive, but there's definitely _something_ there... it feels lonely and sad and weird in a way that mobile games generally don't.

You would have to convert all the references to running in the in-game narrative to references to biking, but otherwise it should work fine... it isn't connected to a specific route or a specific speed... you just gather gear as you proceed through each episode.

I hope this does not affect the quality or delivery schedule of basically all the Threadless T-shirts I buy. (Seriously, though, this is pretty exciting.)

Yeah - I was getting VTM:B - although also in the sense of "huh. Those graphics look kind of like VTM:B". I somehow doubt it will feature Brian Mitsoda voicing an Elvis-impersonating ghoul. Maybe Deus Ex: Human Renfield-lution?