Salacious Snake

I'm ambivalent, but I think Bulletstorm is a terrific name for a game.

This shit rules the school.

I don't think anyone fully cleared this up for you, so I wanted to pop in and help. If someone wishes to identify as female, then you use the feminine pronoun. If Anna wishes to be or be thought of as a woman, then she is a she, and that's that. Her bodily appearance doesn't enter into it. It's pretty rude to go against this, though I can sorta see the confusion if you haven't dealt with/thought about transgender issues much.

"People will die." -John Carmack That was a great interview. I could listen to him talk all day, the dude is too damn smart.

It was fun hearing about the birth of Quakecon. The sense of community that grew up around Quake was crazy.

One workaround for the logo explosion that you'll see employed sometimes is to have a transparent outer sleeve which contains all the obligatory graphics and can be removed prior to enshrining the box on your mantlepiece.

I like the idea of turning on a Wii as an act of defiance.

Yeah, this whole thing was dumb as shit. Situations like this make me wish I could look into the mind of another person to see just what the hell he's thinking.

All the Roger Dean covers for Psygnosis games are wonderful. http://www.stanford.edu/group/htgg/cgi-bin/drupal/?q=node/435

Getting half my wisdom teeth out was one of the most fun experiences of my life. They had me on gas and an intravenous drip of a benzodiazepine (like valium, xanax, etc.). I wish I could go through every day of my life like that.

Oh, I don't mean to underplay the significance of the performance issue. Significant sacrifices must be made to keep thing running smoothly when you're doing stereoscopy. I've just seen a lot of people make the assumption that it'll cut your performance in half, (which at a glance makes sense intuitively), while in practice it's not quite that bad. Killzone 3 has noticeably lower fidelity in 3D mode than in standard 2D in order to keep things running nicely.

There is a performance hit, but you don't need twice the framerate. That's a common misconception. For a system with shutter glasses, you want about twice the usual refresh rate on the monitor, but that doesn't mean Quake needs to be running at 120 fps or whatever. I've been playing games in 3D on the PC for years (via shutters, a dual LCD head-mounted display and a monitor that uses polarization) and console games before that (SegaScope 3D, Virtual Boy). I think it's neat, but I never recommend it to others, because it's a pain in the ass and probably not worth the effort if you're not crazy like me. 3D gaming with the PS3 is relatively painless in terms of setup, but we'll see how the game support goes. I've played Motorstorm Apocalpyse, Tron Evolution, Gran Turismo 5 and Killzone 3 in 3D, and they were all pretty nifty. Crosstalk (each eye seeing things that are supposed to be reserved for the other) is still a problem with shutters, and I think a lot of people are going to be really turned off by that. All in all, I don't think this shit's ready for primetime, but certain parties are trying to force it. If you're getting a new TV anyway, you may as well get one that does 3D, since that's becoming standard (and doesn't really add to the cost), and get a pair of glasses so you can see what the hubbub is about. It's neat, but it's not going to revolutionize your game experience. The 3DS is going to be awesome as fuck though.

I just want to know how this fits into the larger SB fiction, if at all. It's 2 years later, and it looks like technology has regressed by about 130 years (except for the part where there are bipedal tanks). The previous games were on the other side of the world, so maybe the USA has just been backward and shitty all along? I fear this will be Steel Battalion in name only. Also, I am the worst kind of dork.

If the timing works out, I will definitely join.

Well, this thread is only 4 pages, so it should be pretty easy to find it if it's in here.

Yeah, leaving out the multiplayer altogether is a good option too. But hey, why not also have the Metro 2033 hat thing? It's not appealing to people like us (if I may be forgiven a broad and probably incorrect generalization), but that sort of shit has been very successful in general. As someone who reviews games, I've done a lot of grumbling when loading up a multiplayer mode and trying to find the one other person on Earth playing it for the sake of completeness, when I know it's tacked on for no reason. I think for those cases I'd rather get the themed headgear. You're right though, that this phenomenon is in decline. For a while there, every goddamn game under the sun had to have a deathmatch mode, even if it didn't fit the rest of the game at all.

That's exactly the point of what Forbin is talking about. And in terms of who pays for it, in the case of the PS Home example, it would be Sony. They have a pretty vested interest in adding value to to PlayStation 3 games, which this would do in sort of a weird way. Obviously, the games that are built to have their own interesting multiplayer modes would keep on doing that, but those that barely tweak a basic deathmatch scenario could simply not bother. edit: I think this idea is mainly aimed at the games that add a throwaway multiplayer mode that generally sucks and nobody cares about, but they only create because they want the bullet point. Like the Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena multiplayer. Having a generic shooter where you could unlock a Riddick model would have been a better value than the junk they included with that game, and there would be more than 3 people playing it, since it wouldn't just be a portion of the audience who bought that one game.

Clearly, the answer lies in PlayStation Home. OK, I know that sounds like a dismissive joke answer, but I'm sure if you posed this idea to Cade Peterson (one of the guys on the Home team) he'd get super excited. He's also just a generally excitable guy. They are integrating more actiony game stuff into Home (like the Sodium games) and they're all about unlocking things from the games that you play. It's actually weird how many current games unlock things in Home that you'd never know about, because nobody really promotes it or makes a bullet point out of it.

I just pre-ordered this last night; it kinda snuck up on me too. I totally feel what Irishjohn was saying with the analogy to Apple. Halo is generally not all that original, but it's just ridiculously well-crafted. Bungie and Blizzard are similar in that they'll take sort of conventional design concepts and polish the hell out of them. Of course, I don't want to minimize the advances that the series has made. Halo was the first console shooter that didn't control like shit. Smart developers have used the same acceleration curves that Bungie came up with, and it still feels great. Also, the game was designed around the controls, so the movement speed, physics and weapon characteristics all mesh together in a way that you don't find with less well-tuned games. Halo 2 brought online play with consoles to a new level of flexibility and manageability with the party system. I know there are a lot of die-hard pc gamers on this forum who would probably rather have a Quakespy-style server browser any day, but I think the party system was a brilliant piece of engineering that solved a very real problem. Halo 3 had Forge and the awesome replay editor. You only need to look at Youtube to see what great additions those were. The setting and plot generally do nothing for me, but you can't have everything. I'll keep playing just for the sheer quality of the overall experience. I skipped Odious Tea... should I go back and play it at some point?

Yeah, I ordered a copy of Weinhändler.

I was not impressed by my time with Duke Nukem Forever. I hope they release the trailer that they showed, because it was awesome in a very dumb way. I hope the final product is more Duke Nukem 3D and less generic 2010 FPS.

I'm about 15 minutes into the first Bioshock. Maybe I'll get there eventually!

If people buy it it'll go on for a long time. I met Jamin Brophy-Warren recently and the man has big ideas for the future. There are tons of issue concepts floating around, along with the desire to branch out into more styles of article.

Yeah, it's a great magazine.

I'd be up for a get-together. I'm currently in a plane over Montana or some shit. For nighttime activities, Saturday is the only night where i'm currently free of obligation, but don't plan around me, because I'm likely to bail for an industry event. Things have been popping up. It's hard to plan things like this, because everyone tends to have a million things going on. After the panel seems like a reasonably organic time to do stuff, though a lot of us will probably be fleeing seattle around then.