Forbin

On a "grass is always greener" note: I've spent years in the traditional computer engineering world and would give my left nut to work on games. Every time someone bitches about the hardships of game development they run off a list of things I have had to do in the financial sector. But at the end of the 12-hour day, all I have to show for my work is that I made some rich people even richer by making some poor employees redundant. Sure it sucks working the weekend, and it sucks not having stability at your job. But this isn't just par for the games industry, it's par for the industry as a whole. And when you're working at a company that does not put out a technological product, it's more likely you're working for idiots with no concept of what you do or vision of what they want. There are only 3 paths for the traditional programmer in the financial and tech world. You can either stew away at an unappreciated essential role that involves maintaining applications only you know how (or why) they function; you can be promoted up to manage said projects into a role completely unrelated to your years of training and expertise. Or finally you can become a contract worker and rob everyone blind while you get paid for your overtime and are compensated for the unstable job opportunity with high hourly rates. At least after your crunch periods you have something positive to show the world. The last project I worked on for my last employer was a tax engine that would let the richest companies in the world find loopholes in state tax laws and save them billions of dollars on insurance.

I think everyone is missing the point. Wolfire made a blog a week or so before the bundle went live, talking about how people are motivated to pirate for reasons beyond the monetary. They talked about how every customer that stole could not be equated to one that would have bought a copy, and suggested there were other reasons that people pirate. The bundle went live, they noticed some piracy, and he posted a followup basically confirming that even when presented with the ability to pay a penny, people still stole. And then he restated why people would do so. Reading between the lines, I feel like he knew he was going to be writing this post well before the bundle went live. He wanted to highlight that it's possible to respond to piracy without burning your real customers.

Was this the interview? http://www.joystiq.com/2010/05/10/puzzle-agents-art-and-inspirations-investigated-in-first-develo/ Definitely looking like my kind of game.

Batman and Monkey Island above all others.

That has a lot to do with the fact that Republic Commando and Force Unleashed are pretty much the only games they did in house. To avoid confusion, I'm basically talking about what Jim Ward did to LucasArts.

My problem was that I had to either make things extremely static, or invest more time in C++. The Python hooks they added weren't quite enough to get the basic game play mechanics working. I wasn't even sure how to interface with their C++ API, and never got around to seeing where to grab the source. It just rapidly became apparent that I was jamming a square peg in a round hole, and I would have spent a lot less time creating a game from scratch.

Kotor was before the LucasArts meltdown, and Tales was prettymuch after. If you're talking about my comment on outsourcing, I don't mean to imply that LA doesn't license it's properties well. They've always done a lot of work with other studios. But the problem is a few years ago they abandoned doing any work themselves. After TFU, they just shut down.Recently it seems like they were turning that around, but with the departures of these executives I hope they don't turtle up again. Lucas should be making games.

Since it's Hex-based, I should probably restart my Catan mod Hopefully they'll have better python hooks in the SDK, but probably not.

Some guy (presumably a LucasArts employee) on another site posted that this is actually a good move for the company. The implication is that his vision wasn't a problem, but he was too novice and tried to micro-manage. Forcing teams to adhere to layers of process they weren't comfortable with. However it's happening at a financial time of the year, so this could have been a board decision. Hopefully they'll continue to trend back to the old ways instead of flip-flopping again. LucasArts needs to develop in house, contracting out their IP is the worst thing the company has ever done.

http://weburbanist.com/2010/05/05/how-skynet-really-starts-pics/ I feel we've made a mistake letting Japan handle our robot relations. Giant baby is giant terror.

Gamestop's online pre-ordering is only 24 hours before you get a beta key.

I just had an image of the future big dog slipping and auto-correcting it's balance with people inside. Worst ride ever.

I'd love a fallout sunset that included oil like rainbow effects in the sky.

This just in, idle thumbs is TellTale's target market.

The pre-order bonus doesn't apply to the monkey island bundle? What's the monkey island bundle :?

I wonder if people realize that the VATS/HUD in Fallout3 is customizable (even in the console versions). That "brown hud" could be pretty much any colour. They'd be smart to release screenshots with the default green just to silence critics like this.

http://www.telltalegames.com/store/secretofmonkeyisland Damn, now it's prettymuch half price and you get SE 1 as well.

You should just blast what's already recorded.

The Super Mario theme is just a D Major scale.

At this point all I want to know about this game is it's release date. I was sold at Ron Gilbert.

That FFA was nuts. The commentator grows on you, and other than dropping the n-bomb once I liked it. So many stupid mistakes near the end. I don't know why yellow didn't clear out blue's refinery when he had a chance. Or why Blue didn't just lift off his bases and float them out to the protoss base.

As an ATVI stock holder I got a proxy vote card asking me to vote on re-instating executives and giving Kotick a raise with way more stock options. I chose to vote against all of the above. Not sure if enough shares lie in the hands of people like me to make a difference, but screw them.

Yeah, but not in that sense. You want "backlash".

The articles need to be edited down to half their length. This just highlights how amazing The Onion is.