Forbin

I had a good run going, then thought too much about it and fell. After that, I haven't been able to get off the starting line without doing the splits.

I'm sure we'll see that on the ides of March.

I think there's something called an Audio pass, that they charge hundreds of dollars for. GDC is expensive Another reason I wish media would cover it instead of the crap they could hear any other week. Gamasutra seems to be doing a good job.

Right, but nobody's talking about the cake. And some developers are stuck doing demos all day instead of attending panels.I just want to hear what discussion on the panels, not latest from the PR drip feed.

So Giant Bomb posted the whole thing in their Bombcast feed, and Jeff started off by saying it was a bit crowded. It was mostly alright, and definitely better when less people were talking. But it's disappointing to hear everyone talk about how GDC is being commercialized and then proceed on to take part in it. Personally I want GDC coverage, I want to hear stories from the panels and the floor, not about 10 seconds of embargo'd batman footage. Personally if I heard that my appointment tomorrow was going to be the exact same thing I saw last week, I'd cancel it and attend a panel. Take a break from the endless PR churn, and tell us something interesting about how games are made.

This has bugged me forever too. It's not just that the tagline is bad, there are a ton of terrible tag lines. But they put it all over their marketing like it was pure gold.

You could use the google feed api to consume your entire blog RSS, and filter out the items that you consider news, by tagging them (or labeling in blogger) as "news". You just need to check the value of category tags. If you're not comfortable with that much javascript work, you can do the filtering with a Yahoo Pipe, and it can filter out all the news posts. Unless you don't want your news posts showing up on your blog.

Yeah, and apparently she was possibly worse the year before that. Whenever Paul Barnett sounds like the most calm reasonable guy in the room, you know you're in a train wreck. I think the problem was she didn't realize what people were listening for and treated it as a party night with her friends. Patrick at least realized that everyone was talking over each other and that it might sound like shit for the audience. Again I think it's the hosts responsibility to restrict the number of mic's given out. Have a constant rotation going on, the 1up Yours pool podcasts were able to squeeze in a ton of guests without feeling crowded.

I've spent forever trying to work out how to join games with my friend recently. Apparently I could never see his game on the list, and I could never join his game by entering by IP. He had mixed success attempting to join my games, and even once found it on the list. Then, I was like "hey this thing was built with steamworks, why don't I just invite you from my friends list". So far it's worked 100% of the time. I think it's pretty clear what the critical path for the developers and QA team was. Anybody up for some co-op this weekend?

Yeah when I first saw footage of the game it gave me a headache, but it was mostly because of the fake film pattern and flashing. I wish they'd just spent some more time on accessibility to polish out those annoyances, because it really prevented me from getting into it.

lol, this forum's got serious Google juice I'm not surprised.

I mostly blame Gerstmann. They've got to rein in these giant event podcasts, and limit who's on mic. If someone's already been on in another segment, just don't put them back on if you're bringing in new guests. It just becomes a clown car, and either people are bored, and not able to talk, or they're obnoxious.That cast should have been Brad, Jeff, and thumbs.

right. you have a blog, and it already has an RSS feed.

Patrick Klepek really Leigh Alexandered that thumb's appearance. It's always great to hear games journalists speculate on the game developer's job market, talking over a table full of people who work on games.

If you want to grab the blogger feed: http://snooglebumexists.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss And here's the google js library: http://code.google.com/apis/feed/

If you have an RSS feed you have in mind to consume, then there's a simple google js file that will help load the content into any plain HTML file. It gets around the cross-site scripting restriction by embedding the XML file as a script tag. Do you have a new feed in mind to consume? Or were you looking at creating your own news/blog? If you want to do your own, then I'd look into tumblr.

Oh regarding the wizard swarm, I had a lot of luck just hitting 5x(RQ) ice AOE. You need to kill those guys at about the same time because they keep rezing each other. Also if you fire arcane + anything beams you have a chance of crossing the streams with one of the opponent casters and really messing things up. And in general, when surrounded shield+rock* AOE gives you great protection. Those wizards will end up killing themselves most of the time if you're shielded up.

I still haven't dropped the M60 playing through the Adventure. It's a good weapon, and makes me wish they included more ranged medieval weapons. They work on the annoying little swarm enemies, without having to spam ice or rocks. This game is essentially an environment pallet swap (some of those assets probably exist in the marsh) and a helmet for the player. The game will still play the exact same way probably. Which is good. I look forward to the story, and getting another major version release of the code. It gives the company the ability to focus on development milestones that they normally wouldn't build for in just support mode. Some of which may be baselined into the main game, such as proper save support, PVP and networking updates.

Think I'm going to start doing more Civ 5 with podcasts.

It doesn't redeem itself narrative-wise. I still loved the game for it's driving. The dialogue and plot were embarrassing.

People have hacked the game to enable PvP: http://www.youtube.com/user/KrietoR999 Arrowhead says they'll have a proper PvP mode in the future, and will shortly release a patch that allows VAC to be disabled so the modders can continue without fear of getting banned.

I don't understand. Everything I've seen about this game has said that the console version will be actioned up but the PC version should play the same as the first game. Why would you download the console demo then assume the PC game is doomed? If you're the type of player that likes that style of RPG, you shouldn't be touching your console with a 10-foot clown pole. If you're building up a case to skip the game for other reasons, then give it a pass by all means. But if you're legitimately interested in Dragonage then you owe it to yourself to try the PC demo at least before dismissing DA2.

I'm up for a game any day this week. If someone's looking for a partner just find me on Steam via the thumbs community.

The game was written with XNA i believe, so an xbox port would be highly likely.