I_smell

This is a tangent from about 6 pages ago, but does anyone else think press conferrence bingo cards are a weak-ass granny joke? If you are ready to take a shot when they announce the ILLUMI-ROOM then you belong in A STRAIGHT-JACKET!!! WHAT PLANET AM I EVEN ON???

I'm sure that if this internet-check turns out to be faulty, or ruins the experience enough that it impacts sales, they'll course-correct. I can understand both sides of the company and the consumers being annoyed, cos the choice is either keep used games and piracy right where they are, or knee-cap a few million edge-cases. It's a bit of a catch-22. Free-to-play, iOS games, XBLA and PSN PlayStation Plus, Steam sales... I could plot out a pretty full year of games on £20 a month. I think skipping Far Cry 3 and playing Walking Dead instead still totally counts. That would be perfect!!! Oh also JonCole I don't really get much of a vibe from this thread of people being perplexed that there were no games. Closest thing is me saying "Why don't they split the Kinect off and sell that as a Windows TV?"

He absolutely does not know how to use Skype, or computers. Yeah I started a company over Skype with a guy from Holland a couple years ago. He's 1000% more business and marketing oriented than me, and so the first game was a success and we're starting an office and doing all this weird stuff like publishing and outsourcing and pitching to investors and bbuuuhhhhh! I'm currently doing art on one game, and writing up a design doc for another. Those are the things that go through me.

I move to Amsterdam next month to start my game dev office, In about the 20-30th of June. I've had my ups and downs about it, from feeling weird and empty that I don't miss anyone, to remembering that I actually do have a tonne of friends, to not being totally sure how I should feel about having access to all weed. Sitting up in my bed I actually just thought it might be a hard pill to swallow for my dad. He's seen me every day for the passed 20 years, and right on turning 50 it's gonna be no more son, and he'll live with my awful mum and sister for... well... Forever, lets just say. Of all the things I feel kind of shakey and unsure about, this suddenly strikes me as the most important. Even though me and my dad have basically nothing in common, we empathise a lot and are in a lot of ways the same guy. I'm pretty sure he feels the same way about how important this is, and I bet he thought about it in this light a lot sooner than I did.

It is kind of offensive to dress up customer-training as a fun treat, and I do think it's a bit shit. People are rounding up cards in this thread while the guy in that other thread is giving away the coupons at the end of the tunnel cos he doesn't want em....which has had no replies for the first 12 hour by the way, because these things are just here to exploit a weak, sad vulnerability and aren't actually fun or useful. When I see people getting excited about unlocking a paid Mystery Box in TF2, or high-fiving over getting an iPhone 5 day 1, I think it's ok to feel sad about that because those people got textbook-manipulated. I think stuff like this is designed for efficient function at literally every level.I'm not bleeding-heart enough to stomp my feet about everything from Fast & Furious to Carly Rae Jepsen, but when it comes to games it feels weird that the guys who were like "oh you stand up n shout McDonald's that's so dumb" are all over this just-as-transparent gamification thing.

Valve's digging it's heels into games as a service, more than as a product- supporting rolling releases with Steam Early Access, cosmetic add-ons for every game with Steam Workshop, Dota, Team Fortress, etc. They don't need people to buy one game a month any more, they need people to feel comfortable and confident in spending 50cents here and $3 there on a costume in TF2 the same way they buy a coffee every day. You make $3 purchases so much more often than you buy $30 games that your in-game TIME is revenue-per-hour now. It's not selling you on that one big sale any more, it's selling you on spending one more hour in-game, and building a more solid relationship with each service. That's why you have a bunch of unclaimed rewards and bars filling up over time now, it's so that you become invested in the service, absorb the idea that buying cards is worth it because of all the badges you'll get, and also that you'll check back more often to see if your level's ticked over today or if you have any prizes waiting. More frequent users spend more, veteran users spend more, free users become paying users once they become invested in the service (i.e. once they have a bunch of half-finished to-do lists and half-decks of cards), bar charts, scatter graphs, etc. I can totally waffle about this all day, and I get it if I sound like a conspiracy idiot, but this same game's been refined and refined and refined since even before you could buy Furni in Habbo Hotel. "What's the average daily revenue per user" and "how do we get people to sign in more often" was a question they were asking on Neopets in 2005, it's not a fun, benevolent minigame. Alright I am totally high-horsing like a buffoon at this point, I admit it.

I take it back, you guys are right, handing everyone an unfinished jigsaw and then selling the rest of it is purely about having fun, and I'm just an uptight square for not joining in.

I read this page thinking "I never really liked the IT Crowd cos it's kind of silly and cartoonish, but Father Ted: now that is a true comedy classic!!" .. ...I realise the grand error I've made, and will be giving IT Crowd another chance soon.

You could just only buy the things you like and completely ignore this corny marketing campaign. Yeah I know, it's crazy that there's a secret hidden option.

I think the best companion in pretty much any game is the horse from Shadow of Collossus. It felt like the most natural independant animal, and never spun around on a pivot, or blended to a new animation too quickly, or revealed that it was just a polygonal Video game asset. Can't really think of anything that really does feel like a pet, but then that's because I only ever see my dog when I'm sitting around the house doing nothing, and not many games are about that. They're usually about going out and doing something active. Actually my Xbox dashboard avatar felt the most like a pet, back when I used to pay attention to it. Kind of a dumb, smiley companion who waves at me whenever I turn my Xbox on, and sometimes I'd spend half an hour messing about with it before switching to an actual game.

"Hey here's the Steam box, it's backwards-compatible back to 1999 and you already have a hundred games on it. Also all of our highest production games for the passed 10 years are free. Whether you wanna play GTA 5 or Papers Please: it is here, and it's cheaper than anywhere else."

Call of Duty: aG-G-G-G-GHOOOOOOOOSST!

Call me crazy but I think they should've announced a WINDOWS TV that's just a Kinect with an ethernet plug. Then packed it in with the new Xbox. The Apple TV's got all the hottest latest Breaking Bad and Mad Men, it's $99, it's SO friendly for none-tech people... it'd never sell if it came in the box with a damn Xbox controller. My parents don't wanna play Call of Duty, so why would they pay $300 more for this fucking powerhouse PC? The stuff they showed was basically of no interest to people like me, because people like me aren't watching Cable TV any more. I think if they really wanted to be the all-in-one entertainment hub, they should've dropped the name "Xbox". Or dropped that expensive 8GB of RAM. If you're buying an Xbox to download music and watch basketball- there are cheaper, smaller and more effective machines out there already built specifically for you.

Wow, five billion transistors. What a crazy world we live in!

When I went to America I was actually flabergasted that I was sittin around spreading JELLY on a fucking waffle. I thought they just called jam jelly, but no, it's fucking honest-to-god jelly!! Furthermore I was eating a dessert for breakfast, but one step at a time: spreading jelly with a knife was an illuminating experience.

I just cannot believe my fucking eyes.

I've powered up my grand misinformation experiment again in time for the new Xbox and E3. I'm doing news now, but I can't shake the feeling that this twist on the first idea is coming off as completely shit and unfunny. I'm still filtering in my backlog of secrets alongside this stuff, and I still think that's all really good. I just woke up the other day and I guess a couple "I miss this!" tweets and being followed by Jeff from GiantBomb (without me advertising!) was enough to get me to jump back on it. Maybe I should've planned it out more first, I dunno. Gonna update through E3 with bizarro-world news updates.

Can't believe nobody's said Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes yet, considering it was a thumbnail for one of the casts. I've never played a Might & Magic game before, and I've never played a game like this before. It's basically you have a random pile of units, and 3 moves each turn. If you can match 3 in a row vertically, they unite, and are set to attack 3 turns from now! You have to smash through the opponent's base. But here's the thing: If you match 3 in a row HORIZONTALLY, they form a defensive wall that will soak up damage. If you set up 2 offensive strikes to attack on the same turn they do bonus damage, and if you stack two walls above each other they fuse to form a stronger defensive wall! Different units have varying strengths, like higher defense or faster charge time. There are special units with unique abilities, special commanders with unique CO powers they build up over time, and special items to find and equip to give each commander further unique abillities!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The controls are basically just re-arranging your units to match 3 in a row, but I can't stop playing this. I assume this was already a well-defined genre and I'm just late to the party, but I'm downright impressed that they boiled down this Advance Wars tactics stuff to something so basic, and kept it so compelling. Oh also there's a tonne of anime characters chatting to each other between matches, but it's never that long. I think it's $3. Worth it, I've played this for days and I think I'm halfway through. If you're a big strategy tactics person though: bare in mind that I am not.

What's that game about getting jews onto the train to Auschwitz? They've mentioned it on Thumbs like 3 times. Also Papers Please and Cart Life are emulating very real, current-day, down-to-earth jobs in an enlightening way. It's not word-for-word real events, but I think it's worth talking about in an essay. I'd say talking about how Medal of Honour uses real events and real weapons, then also has regenerating shields, could be a good 1,000 words worth of conversation. Also talking about those EA-sponsored tomahawks in the great quest for authenticity, and why that's straight-up crazy.

I also found it totally hilarious and was on-board the first time I saw it, but after a while I couldn't deny that the designer's intention of laffs were second priority to his intention of it being total wank-bait. EDIT- I am not talking about Zangief in this post.

Nice try brainiacs, but I noticed you DIDN'T show it flying back OFF the wall

A great cookie recipe.

Thanks for mentioning Heroes of Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes like 8 episodes ago. I downloaded it and I can't stop playing this game. I didn't know this was a thing people were doing, it's a cool idea.

Bleurgh, I hate it. Websites used to do this corny stuff like 5 years ago, it's treating your audience like a bunch of idiot kids. "if I get one more reward in TF2, I can craft a new reward that might drop a reward in Steam! Which is good, cos I need one more Steam reward to craft a reward, and that has a random chance of being a coupon! gimme a break, I wasn't born yesterday Free-to-play design's been around long enough, now, that I'm just lookin straight through this "Trading Cards" aesthetic and seeing an incline in average revenue per user and user retention rates. I figured this shit out at Famrville, we all did!

Is it just me or was that guy's spoon too big? Anyway