Salacious Snake

I liked the discussion of the Diablo 3 kerfuffle. It's super weird how it's treated as such "bad form" for people in the industry to be at all critical of games. It made me wonder about a few possible reasons for this sorry state of affairs. 1. People at all levels of game development have the misfortune of being pulled into the PR side of things at one time or another. I've been given demos by people who should have been tinkering away in a code dungeon, not dealing with the media. As an outsider, it looks to me like far too many people in the industry have been exposed to some kind of training, either through experience or actual training, with regard to selling games, rather than concentrating on making them. As someone with a little experience in the media, I also think it's "our" fault for creating an environment in which people expect nothing but softball questions and a platform for promotion. It's not actually that hard to get interesting and less rosy responses from people if you ask decent questions. The interviewee tends to find it refreshing after regurgitating the PR spiel all the time. 2. When it comes to talking shit about the competition, there is a fear of burning bridges. Job security in the games industry is not great, and even if you're a pretty big deal at your current studio, you may be looking for anyone who will take you as soon as your current project is complete and everyone is cut loose. 3. This may be a bit of stretch, but the industry is periodically assailed from without, which promotes a degree of solidarity within. When Jack Thompson said games were the Devil, the people making games said, "No, all games are always awesome." It was very rare to see someone (at least publicly) say, "You know, maybe we should cool it with the procedural brain matter generation." 4. People in our age group (I'm lumping myself in with the Thumbs crew) and younger have a hard time dealing with criticism and failure and general negativity, because we're a bunch of big, dumb fucking babies. I think this is the real answer.

I'm enjoying it more than I expected. It's crashing quite a bit, which really takes me back to turn of the century PC games.

Haunting! Also, fuck you, Ganon.

I liked that game in theory, but the finished product wasn't very fun. It had a lot of cool ideas.

I actually find this game to be more frustrating than QWOP or GIRP. In those, failure is imminent when you fuck up, and you just start over. In CLOP, you can get stuck in a rut where you're not moving forward, nor are you hitting a failure state, and that's way more stressful to me than simply eating it and restarting.

Dude is obsessed with drawing sexy animal women, but he did work on the Jazz Jackrabbit series which was pretty sweet.

For a second I thought you guys were talking about an EA-branded Tomahawk cruise missile.

If you're into that sort of thing, you also may want to keep an eye on Icarus Proudbottom: Starship Captain. http://www.icarusproudbottom.com There isn't much info about it, but I don't think it's going to be so much about running around the ship to get stuff done. I think it's more inspired by Star Trek: Bridge Commander. But hey, I'm excited about anything that involves people hanging out on the bridge of a starship.

Oh wow, Downcast is good! One minor feature has improved my listening experience quite a lot: Remote Media Skip. Now I have a way to scan around within a podcast (like to back up if I missed something or skip over some music, not that I'd skip Chris's sweet tunes) while I'm in the car. I previously had no way to do that, because the iPod kit in my car is a bit of a kludge. Thanks, Doug! I'm glad I saved you over Carly.

I'm always tempted by these games, because they look impressive, but I can't play them. They've become so ridiculously complex through the years! I want something that looks like Madden but plays like Blitz or Tecmo Bowl. Or Mutant League football. I actually quite miss fantastical/science-fictiony action sports games. Speedball, Hyperblade, Super Baseball 2020… that was a great genre.

I love that! I was playing something recently where that happened and I found myself using the keyboard and mouse for certain parts of the game, and the pad for others. I don't remember what it was. Sleeping Dogs looks fairly interesting. I'm not sure if I'm in the mood for an open world crime bonanza, but if the itch strikes, I'll know how to scratch it. It's nice to see that it isn't a total wash after all that development time.

Those are fun pictures! Nice dog face.

I will play this eventually. I am kind of a fighting game nut (I'm terrible at them, but I love them anyway, and have a pretty huge collection). I'm also currently playing Persona 3 Portable, and loving the hell out of it. It's the first JRPG that I've been sucked into. I plan on continuing on with Persona 4 Golden, which I will follow with P4A. I liked Guilty Gear X; it was crazy fun. The first time I saw it was at Chinatown Fair in NYC, and it made a strong impression. I'm glad to hear this is good, because I was probably going to play it even if it sucked!

Yeah, it was a dead time of day, and there's no reason for someone to be that far up the platform. It's weird over there.

The trailer made me feel warm and fuzzy. Looks nifty.

One of these days, I'll finish HL 2. It really drags at points.

I remember feeling an obligation as a dork to read it, but I never did. I have read some of Robert Anton Wilson's pseudoscientific non-fiction crap; it's stupid as hell.

I hope it takes a Philip K Dickian turn with your character questioning her own memories, and being unable to differentiate between reality and fantasy by the end. It's kind of an obvious storytelling thing now, but games haven't played around with that much, have they?

Sweet floppy disks! I'm into it.

I like it when Valve is super blunt in its public communication. I used to be on their press list, and I'd get emails from Doug Lombardi which were always super concise and direct, as opposed to the painfully drawn out and poorly-written press releases of most game companies. Were that email account still active I'd be refreshing waiting for an email like this: Subject: Half-Life 3 Announcement Body: We'll be showing Half-Life 3 at gamescom. Contact so-and-so to schedule an appointment to see it. Fuck ARGs and all other sorts of "viral marketing." Let's hope they don't do that.

That cat is great. I want to touch its face. Here is a cat: Here is a cat on my lap: Here is a train platform: Here is the interior of the bar car. State pride, yo: And since this message board revolves around games, here's a die:

Eclipse Phase is interesting. I think I have all the printed books, but never got around to playing it. The setting is a bit of a mish-mash with some cool hooks, and the books are pretty. The system didn't grab me, but you never really know how it's going to work until you play. If you like the sound of Eclipse Phase, check out Transhuman Space if you haven't already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhuman_Space http://www.sjgames.com/transhuman/ It's well-written, and it's well-thought-out speculative fiction. It's more grounded in reality than Eclipse Phase, but still offers an intimidatingly broad palette for an RPG. It's hard to know where to start with these games in terms of coming up with a reasonable party and a motivation for them to go on adventures! Transhuman Space was made to work with GURPS 3rd Edition, but there's a PDF called Changing Times which updates it to 4th if you prefer.

Doing it with a 2012 computer as opposed to a 90s computer makes for a pretty huge difference in the experience. The whole thing is pretty silly, but I've had some interesting VR experiences in more recent times… I think there's something to it. Farting around in Datura with Sony's shitty HMD was nifty. In practice, I think it gets in the way of playing games that require reflexes and fine control, but it feels cool to relax in a place that's not real for a few minutes. I don't know if that's enough to sustain a market for such a thing, but I would definitely enjoy playing something like Minecraft with it. Also, just for the hell of it, I'd like to try it with Amnesia (to scare myself) and Magic Carpet (to make myself throw up). edit: I just remembered that Penumbra (precursor to Amnesia) supports the Novint Falcon haptic controller thing (which I have, so take my opinions on games-related i/o devices with a grain of fucking stupid). Pairing that with the Rift would be incredible.

I didn't expect anything this bottom-scrapingly lame from Valve. Wow! I recently expressed my surprise elsewhere at how lazy the character design is from a visual and conceptual standpoint. It was pointed out that there's a practical reason for it, because they want Dota players to immediately know what to expect from the characters in the middle of a battle without having to learn a new set of heroes. But really, that's not a good enough excuse for this stuff. Blizzard character barks are pretty ridiculous, and they can be annoying, but at least there's some wit involved. When I get a new Blizzard game I like to click on everyone a bunch of times to see what goofy shit they're going to say. Based on what I'm seeing on the Dota 2 wiki, Valve isn't even trying, so why bother with all the voice acting? The characters could just emit some kind of "blip" to let you know that your command was received. I'm sure it's a different team altogether, but I can't stop saying to myself, "This is the studio that made Portal."

I wonder when the surprise will go away. Every time a new episode pops up in the feed I'm like, "Oh, shit! New Idle Thumbs!"