Forbin

I'm even more confused

If a system of mechanics and goals is somehow inartistic, I wonder what Ebert would say about Train. ... As to JamesM and many other people's comments about why should people care if they believe art is subjective. I have posted this a few times on reddit (maybe even on here), but I think that people are upset because of Ebert's influence. You can dismiss his posts as his opinion, and claim he has a right to one, no matter how weak an uninformed it is. But it's hard to dismiss the fact that he's using his platform to publicly degrade the video game industry and it's professionals. It's bad enough that we have Arnold Schwarzenegger bringing a bill to the Supreme Court trying to ban violent video game sales to minors, we don't need any more uninformed disdain towards video games. The FTC found that M-rated video games are the hardest thing for a minor to buy without a parent, the law is completely unnecessary. Yet the Californian government believes that it should (like porn) lose it's first amendment rights and be legally regulated. We don't need any more people in the world disrespecting video games as a medium. We don't need people to have their prejudices solidified by a respected film critic. So when you read through the comments left by the Ebert legion on his blog, you get upset. Regardless of your feelings of someones rights to their own opinion, or free speech. You get upset that someone with such influence is making a public scene when it's clear he doesn't have any appreciation or understanding about what he's talking. A friend of the family was over at my mom's place having tea one day. It turns out her son works as a designer at BioWare, so I was interested and asked her what he worked on. After a long discussion about his history in the industry, she admitted that for a long time she didn't tell people that her son worked on video games. She was ashamed. He had a job at one of the best companies in the country, making award winning games, earning a good living and raising a family. But she was still ashamed. So that is why I care about what Ebert thinks, even though I think art is highly subjective. And that's why I think he should shut up when he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Honestly, I loved the first special edition. I'm just glad it existed.

http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/704273/Infinity-Ward-Employee-Group-Files-Lawsuit-Against-Activision-Over-Unpaid-Royalties-Alleges-Devs-Held-Hostage.html I was wondering when this was coming. You can't hold past bonuses hostage to keep them loyal.

I predict Call of Duty:Black Ops by Treyarch still sells twice as much as whatever Respawn's first game does. And it will also beat the new Medal of Honor game.

It was a big enough risk putting the first one out. Now that they know there's a market for it, they can put more effort into it.

I just wasted 10 minutes trying to find out an anagram for that :/

Think they won't let you cancel if you've used the key. Someone mentioned that on another forum. Either way, I don't imagine they'll require the discs in the drive as it's secured by battle.net. All the content gets dumped on your drive in MPQ files anyways.

I know a few people in their mid twenties that have made comments about games causing violence.

Garnett touched on something on this weeks Weekend Confirmed that I think is an interesting part of this discussion. There's an assumption that games are treated as something juvenile, because the people representing the government and media aren't the ones that grew up with them. And that in a few generations, there will be acceptance because they don't understand. But there seems to be a lot of people of our generation that have grown out of gaming and share the same narrow viewpoint as their parents. I know a lot of people that have simply run out of time to play games, and that's understandable. But a few of my friends who consider the whole thing something for children. They say things you'd only expect 60-year-old newscasters to say. Honestly, I don't think it's a given that games will become accepted. The people that seem interested in going into government and journalism don't seem to be the people that give a shit.

Great now I'm picturing first contact with an alien race that has taken the form of BigDog's assuming they are the dominant race.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/04/23/scoggins-erasers-mystery-deepens-as-telltale-delivers-erasers-i/ classic.

I would create a new tool in the toolbox that is enabled on screens with commentary. Then when you click it, show an overlay of places to click to start commentary on those items.

I just wish somebody would do it. Day[9] isn't even my preferred caster. There's potential for so much more than what's out there today.

ugh, that forum bugs me. The barrier to entry is so high, and the people are just the same dregs of the internet that populate other communities.

new screens: http://www.joystiq.com/photos/monkey-island-2-special-edition-lechucks-revenge-4-22-2010/2919564/#2919566 I do feel that it's got the 2D equivalent of a bloom effect. But honestly, I'm just happy they're doing this.

aw shit, now we have to wear glasses just to play?

Yeah I realized this forum actually has a great deal of google juice. I know there are a few journalists covering the event, so I want to give it a few days before reposting. I've still got it saved.

*edit: never mind

My podcast migration was mostly through guest appearances and mentions. I had a hell of a commute so I built up a subscription list of stuff that wasn't all great. (v) = video (*) = I'd recommend to Thumbs (x) = bad, this was just white noise Early on I mostly just watched video podcasts (mostly Revision3): Tiki Bar TV(v) Diggnation(v) Totally Rad Show(v,*) Tekzilla(v) This week in Tech Then from Jeff Canata to the 1up network: 1up Yours CGW/GFW(*) other 1up casts(x) Then I started searching out more diverse podcasts as I was tired of "whatchabeenplaying" from so many angles: SModcast(*) - Kevin Smiths podcast. This video should give you an idea of what to expect You look nice today(*) This American Life Downloadable Content(*) - Penny Arcade's old podcast The 1up sale to UGO went down and I did some house cleaning on the mediocre podcasts in my list. I still listen to Geekbox(x) and try to catch any of the GFW crew's work whenever it exists, but other than that there's nothing really worth listening to from the rest of the guys. Shawn Elliott and Robert Ashtley in particular are worth listening to whenever they make an appearance. However Out of the Game was torture for me, 'cause I can't stand N'Gai Croal. I started looking for something to replace 1up Yours as a flagship vigi podcast: Gamers with Jobs - mostly good, hit and miss though Joystiq(*) - Good 3 man dynamic Bombcast Then I was referred to Idle Thumbs for it's final episode by Justin McElroy. By the time I finished listening to the back episodes I didn't have to wait long for the relaunch with "hot scoops". And recently the circle seemed complete when Jeff Canata of TRS, Garnett Lee and Brian Lahe of shack news started Weekend Confirmed(*). Garnett finally has a foil as the other hosts seem to not be pushed around as everyone post-Shane has been. I'm trying to rid myself of mindless gaming podcasts, but without them I wouldn't have found my way to some of my favourite podcasts. There's only so many times you can hear someone repeat the same news you read 3 days ago on reddit.

The above robot face singing trolololo Now someone needs to take that video and edit it together with the big dog video. Possibly with webcam paintball attachement

Streamlining and contextual button presses have certainly trivialized the learning curve of a game. An episode of the Irrational Behaviour has a good segment on this, where Ken Levine talks about how Grand Theft Auto 3 opened his eyes to minimalistic key bindings. Basically saying that if he had been responsible for that game he'd have made car-jacking a multi-button operation, where the player isn't interested in something like that for such a common operation. They just want to hit 'A' to approach the car, open it's door, pull out it's driver, climb in and close the door while driving off. A lot of the PC crowd seem to think this kind of thing is a purely a result of mapping input to a limited controller, but there's an element of good design as well. For example, old battlefield game's used to have control's like [9] to open a parachute, where Bad Company simply binds the parachute command to the jump command and judges whether it should deploy based on if the player is falling and if the distance will harm them if they don't deploy. They've also taken a complex communication rose UI and put the majority of it's functionality along with other commands into a contextual 'q' key. Mass Effect 2 was one of my favourite PC games in a long time, and it was streamlined like crazy.

I don't have issues with "flop" "turn "river" or "blind" either, but those videos do a service in poker coverage. I'm not complaining that they don't explain these terms, but that a well produced show would benefit from them. I'm also not expecting anybody to do it on their own, or on a weekly basis. But a weekly or monthly highlights show made by a few contributors would be great. If such a show existed, would you not watch?

That's where I think the problem is. Streaming is the easiest and the hardest thing to do as a broadcaster. It's easy, because you don't have to edit. It's hard because you have to do something constantly or it's a huge snore-fest. The content these guys are putting out there, would almost always be better if it were edited.This applies to podcasts too. I'm sure fans of Thumbs will notice things are a lot more entertaining when the hosts aren't constantly worrying about breaking the broadcast or being boring. Post-processes allows you to clean up your mistakes and salvage gems. It's a skill, and takes a bit of time unless you're really good at it, but IMO it's worth it. I'd rather listen to a 20 minute podcast edited to increase quality than a 1:45 minute rant. Live streaming serves a purpose when you're doing two things: capturing a live event that people would like to get up to the minute coverage on, or interacting with the audience. What I believe is that people grossly over-estimate the value of real-time audience interaction. Look at a show like CO-OP, the show became unwatchable when it went to it's live format. Or consider the awkwardness of any Q&A panel at any convention you've ever seen. Can you have the best of both worlds? An edited show with high-quality pre-compressed video, and an active chat/twitter interaction? Yeah I believe so, I'm not sure if any of these sites really support it though. Imagine uploading an edited HD video to a site like youtube or *stream, and then setting a publish time so the show can commence at a predetermined time. Then the author could be active in the channel activity while the show is in progress, and even host a post-video Q&A real time with the channel. (btw star-stream would be an amazing name if that site doesn't already exist) I think StarCraft coverage could be extremely popular even in the mainstream, if a bit of editing was done. Look at the televised poker boom in the past decade. It started as heavily edited tournaments, condensed into a narrative showing the people behind the game, and constantly educated the audience with scripted asides. Think about splicing in a little clip once and a while about simple jargon terms like "rush" "x pool/'racks/expansion" "micro/macro" into the start of a replay while nothing much is happening.

TF2 followed up with an unbelievable amount of post-release content online that trumps any manual Valve has ever released. I like a quality back-story manual as much as anybody, but I'd rather have the on-going updates on tf2.com's blog in it's staid.