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New people: Read this, say hi.

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I'm a long-time lurker who's finally decided to post!

Woo! :getmecoat

I'm not worried, I got observers !

and hi ;P

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Since my initial "hello" was pretty weak, I felt the urge to introduce myself properly.

I'm a 38 year old Production Artist living in Austin, Texas.

I'm here because of the podcast, naturally - meaning I came in search of intelligent discussion and fart jokes.

I'm married, and my wife and I are in a punk rock band called the Hex Dispensers. She's not a gamer by any means (outside of Wii fit, Wii bowling, or iPhone word games), but very tolerant of my ridiculous obsession with this bullshit.

My gamer type is most definitely the escapist/explorer, and I'm drawn first and foremost to games with compelling visual design. I lean towards dark sci-fi/fantasy, but anything with an interesting aesthetic style will grab my interest. To a small degree, I'll put up with repetitive or broken gameplay just to see the next environments or creature designs if they really excite me. That said, a little bit of challenge is nice - but I've no patience for extreme difficulty. Also - in general, I prefer killing monsters/mutants/zombies/robots to killing real people, but it really depends on the game. I've been gaming since the Atari 2600, but kind of skipped the NES era (aside from a couple PC games on a roomates machine), and became a hardcore enthusiast around the end of the SNES/Genesis era and haven't let up since. I own all the current systems (360, PS3, Wii, PSP, DS, iPhone, PC) - because I'm so fucking picky about what I play I don't want to miss anything that looks good.

My current backlog/in progress list: Fallout 3 (I wish I could quit you!), Valkyria Chronicles, Titan Quest, Folklore, MadWorld, Freedom Force, the Last Express, Dawn of War, Zeno Clash (if I could just get past the first area without puking), Silent Hill Homecoming, World of Goo, Soul Calibur 4 and some iPhone games (mostly Peggle, Edge, iDracula, and Zenonia).

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Howdy!

I'm a programmer at Firaxis Games. I've been listening to the podcast for a while now, and after approximately 4398567435 forum jokes, I decided I should see what's up in here.

I tend to play mostly RPGs, Strategy games, and brawlers, with the occasional racer. I've made a new years resolution this year to stop sucking at platformers, so I've been forcing myself to beat as many as I can lately. I really love ridiculous or silly games, I'm a little tired of games taking themselves too seriously lately. Stuff like Ninja Blade, Bayonetta, and The Maw is amusing me greatly these days.

I play most games hot seat co-op with my girlfriend. I usually kill things, she likes to do puzzles, mini games, and platforming. She's better at arcade-y stuff, I'm better at strategy.

Currently:

Just finished inFAMOUS, Forza Motorsport 3, Fable II, XMen Origins: Wolverine

Working on Valkyria Chronicles, Prince of Persia, Ninja Blade

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Since my initial "hello" was pretty weak, I felt the urge to introduce myself properly.

I'm a 38 year old Production Artist living in Austin, Texas.

Cool, I live in Houston... working on Health games...

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Cool, I live in Houston... working on Health games...

Just to complete the Tejano trifecta, I live in San Antonio and do web design in a design firm. While I graduated with a painting degree and figured I'd be doing a lot of artsy fartsy stuff, I turned out to be a rare designer with programming aptitude and code cleanliness, so I end up doing more programming than design. :hmph:

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Cool, I live in Houston... working on Health games...

Cool! How's the humidity treating you?

Just to complete the Tejano trifecta, I live in San Antonio and do web design in a design firm. While I graduated with a painting degree and figured I'd be doing a lot of artsy fartsy stuff, I turned out to be a rare designer with programming aptitude and code cleanliness, so I end up doing more programming than design. :hmph:

There's a couple interactive guys at my agency have strong chops in both disciplines - but yeah, you're a rare creature for sure.

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I'm a programmer at Firaxis Games.

The games you make are rad. Good job. Announce a new one.

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Just to complete the Tejano trifecta, I live in San Antonio and do web design in a design firm. While I graduated with a painting degree and figured I'd be doing a lot of artsy fartsy stuff, I turned out to be a rare designer with programming aptitude and code cleanliness, so I end up doing more programming than design. :hmph:

Well when you make your own company and have others do the programming work, can I work for you?

Cool! How's the humidity treating you?

Agh, you know, terrible. I'm trying to get enough good portfolio work to make a transition to an Austin video game company at the moment, so hopefully I can deal with less humidty up there.

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Agh, you know, terrible. I'm trying to get enough good portfolio work to make a transition to an Austin video game company at the moment, so hopefully I can deal with less humidty up there.

Good luck with that! Austin is kind of turning into Dallas w/ all the Condos & high-end mixed use complexes etc..., but it's still a great place to live.

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Good luck with that! Austin is kind of turning into Dallas w/ all the Condos & high-end mixed use complexes etc..., but it's still a great place to live.

Yeah I've noticed. I'm really aiming to live outside of Austin and commute inward. I have somewhere to stay in San Marcos for the initial move, but getting a job somewhere in Austin is the most important part and makes me feel really apprehensive and afraid. ;(

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After listening for the entire time, I decided to register.

Glad to finally be here.

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I'm a programmer at Firaxis Games.

Hey, cool. I got Civ Rev a while back and it did a great job of easing me into the whole Civilization thing (something I'd always been interested in, but a little intimidated by). I still anticipate having some struggle in wrapping my head around the PC counterparts, but I was enthused enough buy Civ 4 a little while back and will at some point sit down and apply my strategy-impaired brain to it.

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Hey, cool. I got Civ Rev a while back and it did a great job of easing me into the whole Civilization thing (something I'd always been interested in, but a little intimidated by). I still anticipate having some struggle in wrapping my head around the PC counterparts, but I was enthused enough buy Civ 4 a little while back and will at some point sit down and apply my strategy-impaired brain to it.

Funny you should mention that. I had avoided Civ4 due to its complexity as well. Civ Rev is one of the reasons I came to Firaxis; I saw that they were working towards some really simple, fun-focused stuff, and talking to people during the interview echoed that. I did end up going back to Civ4 when I got a copy, it wasn't as hard to get into as I expected.

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All I've played so far is the tutorial, and I did fine at that; I'm just concerned about the volume of extra stuff that I can see but am not actually paying attention to.

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"All I've played so far is the tutorial, and I did fine at that. 9.45/10" - ign.com

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Funny you should mention that. I had avoided Civ4 due to its complexity as well. Civ Rev is one of the reasons I came to Firaxis; I saw that they were working towards some really simple, fun-focused stuff, and talking to people during the interview echoed that. I did end up going back to Civ4 when I got a copy, it wasn't as hard to get into as I expected.

Just don't forget about your longstanding PC dudes!

I really enjoyed Revolution, but I've also been playing Sid Meier games since Civilization (the original one) on the PC, which I played for years.

Also, though he certainly wouldn't know me by name, I've met Sid Meier a couple times and he's easily one of the smartest, most humble, down-to-earth guys in the games industry. I was able to chat with him a bit a couple years back, which was cool after more than 15 years of playing his games, and I was extremely impressed. I'm sure he must be a good guy to work for.

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Just don't forget about your longstanding PC dudes!

I really enjoyed Revolution, but I've also been playing Sid Meier games since Civilization (the original one) on the PC, which I played for years.

Also, though he certainly wouldn't know me by name, I've met Sid Meier a couple times and he's easily one of the smartest, most humble, down-to-earth guys in the games industry. I was able to chat with him a bit a couple years back, which was cool after more than 15 years of playing his games, and I was extremely impressed. I'm sure he must be a good guy to work for.

Sid's a blast to work with. He's just a normal guy, and prefers that we treat him as such, he just happens to have a brilliant intuition about what's fun. One of the other programmers here described him to me really well one time: "He's really good at knowing exactly what equation and number you need to model something in an interesting, if not entirely accurate way. Like 'hmmm, the number you need there is 17. 16 is too little, 18 is too much, definitely 17'".

As for PC games, I obviously can't say anything about what's in development. My personal opinion, though, is that it seems to be getting REALLY hard to be just a PC developer anymore. A few people do it (Gas Powered Games, Relic, Turbine, Blizzard, most of Valve), but it's really, really tough to grow at this point on the PC platform doing AAA budget games. I know some people like to blame piracy, but there's a solution to that (Steam/GFW DRM). I think Microsoft's schizo-girlfriend (I love you, I HATE YOU, Come here and cuddle, *STAB*) handling of GFW and gaming on the PC in general is a big part of the problem as well.

I don't want to see PC gaming die, because there are some things (like Civ, for instance) that just belong there. Also, I'm loving all the new indie games and interesting casual stuff that you can get on the PC.

I guess if we all use Steam or GFW (or both, which seems to be the trend), then piracy isn't a roadblock. I'm hoping to see more adoption of this. Unfortunately, if you use Steam, there's no publisher to bankroll your project from an advance on royalties, so you have to bring your own cash to the table. So then I guess your problem then lies in funding. I recall Chris Taylor saying he had to get outside funding (from like a film financier or something) to get Demigod out the door. I wonder if there will be more of this?

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"All I've played so far is the tutorial, and I did fine at that. 9.45/10" - ign.com

Hahahaha. Perhaps I should apply for a job there.

Microsoft's schizo-girlfriend (I love you, I HATE YOU, Come here and cuddle, *STAB*) handling of GFW and gaming on the PC in general

That's a great analogy.

I started to write something about the fate of PC gaming, but it was a bit depressing and I decided that I didn't really know what I was talking about anyway. In summary it was basically "I'm not sure if enough people can be bothered with it any more" (which goes for everyone: players, developers, publishers). Hopefully I'm wrong, but it seems easy to get dissuaded when there are (apparently) much simpler options out there. But hopefully I'm wrong.

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Hi guys,

I really enjoyed the podcast and figured I'd join to talk to some other people who also enjoy the podcast.

Oh, and I haven't been playing very much the last few months, I revisited Orange Box and played some more Team Fortress 2 that is pretty much it. I generally enjoy all game as long as I can find something interesting to hold onto, but I've been busy not playing games a lot recently.

What happened to the Idle Thumbs archive? I heard you guys talk about it in a podcast but I can't find it on the site...

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there are other people here you enjoyed the post cost!?

as for the archive, click this image on the website:

minipod_archive.png

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Ugh, you pronounce it "earl"?

I don't know what your post means!

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I don't know what your post means!

Your achievement contains the phrase "an URL," which suggests to me you pronounce URL as a word ("earl") rather than an acronym ("U-R-L"); pronouncing it the latter way would result in "a URL."

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