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 hate proofreading, also "most every" is still correct grammar, even if it's a bit archaic, ha!

 

Edit- Also, Elderscrolls can and occasionally is contracted to one word as a commonly accepted slang, and downhill is just a contraction of down hill, and so if the contraction is correct then the non contraction is also correct. 3/4 victory is mine! :devil:

This was not a competition, just honest feedback. No need to get defensive about it. I guess I misunderstood your intent when posting that link.

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I'm pretty sure Pony wasn't being too serious, guys, hence the smiley.

 

However, Osmo makes a valid point, Pony; as you can see, it's easy for people to get distracted from or even ignore your message because of bad grammar, typos etc. So even if you hate proofreading, it's definitely worth the ten minutes to do it yourself or the little longer to get a friend to do it for you.

 

Even taking into account that it's an informal blog and that certain grammar, for example hyphenation, can be a matter of opinion (although I think you should 'fess up to Elderscrolls, I can't find a single instance of that which isn't a hash-tag or URL!), there are a fair few errors which pulled me out of the article:

 

"indy" - can apparently be used instead of indie but just isn't, plus you use "indie" later on.

"peoples" - should be "people's"

"believin" - I'm guessing this is a typo and not supposed to be "believin'"!

"their increasing" - should be "they're"

"Games cost too much. And/Or. Just aren't fun enough." - perhaps this is informal emphasis but brought me to a halt.

"adressed" - should be "addressed"

"uttery" - "utterly"

"just a few years seem" - should be "just a few years ago seem"

"consoles in business models" - should probably be "consoles and business models"

 

Hope I don't come across as bashing you with this, Pony, I just wanted to make the point that a five minute read-through and clean-up would make your post and hence your argument feel a lot less rushed to some readers.

 

Aside from that, a very interesting post!

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I'm going to post some things I wrote. Please tell me they're awful and criticize as much as possible so I'm justified in never writing anything again. I hate everything I do.

 

http://www.monopodcast.com/2013/02/25/sugar-cubes-are-generally-quite-sugary/ too bullet-pointy and explainy?

http://www.monopodcast.com/2013/03/03/i-am-absolutely-not-an-architect/ not enough explainy and bullet-pointy?

 

ugh i hate me

 

I wrote these a while ago, as evidenced by the dates on the posts, but, well, whatever. I want to know what people hate about them, so my list can grow hopefully exponentially.

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I'd agree with your assessment of the Prison Architect Screenshot Scroll - the bulletpoint list at the end might actually make for quite a good opening hook if it were placed at the top of the piece. Then selected screenshots (along with a little extra supplementary explanation) would serve to illustrate the various SCENARIOS OF CALAMITY teased at the outset.

 

Something about the link for first one made me think about the most sugary of all drinks, sugar cubes dissolved in warm water, and wonder whether the experience of playing Bittersweet Cube Factory would be enhanced or worsened by the consumption of said drink throughout. That's not much help to you, sorry.

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Your review of Sugar Cubes is pretty rough. There's a lot of scattered facts, but not enough context or critical thought. I left the review without much understanding of the game. Harsh nitpicks below:

  • You might want to link to the specific game page in addition to the developer's site.
  • I have no idea what "flipped" means in terms of mechanics. Does a tile turn from solid to empty air and back? Is every level a front side and a not immediately visible back side? Do the tiles rotate in the plane of the game field? Does this lead to trial and error gameplay? What happens when the player returns to an already flipped tile? "Flipped" alone doesn't describe the mechanic enough for me to picture what the game's about. Do the standard platformer elements interact in any way with this central mechanic in different ways than other games? Is there a puzzle or level you thought stood out?
  • "The developer, Turtle Cream, is of Korean origin. That’s cool! The game won IGF China in 2010! I’m learning things!" Why is the focus is on your personal reaction? Is it cool because the gaming press doesn't talk about Korean games often? Because you don't have much experience with art from that part of the world? Does their background influence the game's art style or design?
  • "17 levels and a boss per world" - ambiguous wording. Are there 17 levels total or 17 per world? Hard to tell, since I don't have a sense of how long a level is.
  • The furry joke sticks out, doesn't match the tone of the rest of the piece.
  • If you mention you skipped the cutscenes, you should probably say why you did. Voice acting? Bad writing? Low expectations? You don't believe narrative is important for games in this genre? That paragraph doesn't say much of anything, feels like you only mention the story in passing because you're following an implicit checklist for what you think game reviews should cover.
  • If the boss is a surprise, is it worth ruining that for potential players? How can you be sure its presence is justified or not if you admittedly skipped most of the cutscenes?
  • What makes the boss grotesque? Animation? Sound design? Attack patterns? He doesn't look that bad in the screenshots.
  • Why won't the game tax my brain? Is it a consequence of the game's puzzle mechanics or are they poorly used in the level design? It's not  a valid assumption that all puzzle platformer fans like an emphasis of twitch skills over thinking skills.

 

 

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Haha. I love that you took me seriously. Seriously! To be honest, I think the Sugar Cube one is horrific, and I'm glad you agree. I really hate it. I have no idea why I even posted it. I wrote it in an attempt to get me to write things more, and, well, bleh. That said, there are a few things I'd like to at least partially respond to or justify!

 

Linking to game: good idea. Dunno why I didn't think of it.

Explaining the flip mechanics: yeah, definitely. That was a horrible decision to leave it so vague.

Personal reaction: I dunno, I kind of prefer to focus on my personal reaction, rather than describe a thing objectively? 

Ambiguous wording: I don't think it's ambiguous, but I guess I wrote it so that makes sense. There are five worlds (as said), with seventeen levels and a single boss per world. Level length is something I should definitely have mentioned.

Furry joke: Yeah that was dumb. I enjoy dumb jokes, but it shouldn't be in there.

Cutscenes: Honestly didn't think it was important to explain! I just didn't care about the cutscenes, I guess. I think I watched one, and just gave up, without caring about why. Maybe it would've been better to not mention them. I definitely wasn't trying to follow some checklist, but that it comes off like I did is exactly why I hate it.

Boss surprise: I don't believe the setting or characters in this game are worth worrying about spoiling.

Grotesque: Look at it! That nose. Grotesque! It wasn't a knock or anything. It was kind of a loving acknowledgment of the art for the dude.

Game not taxing brain: 'Cause it's not that hard. Didn't think it was necessary to explain. Again, I see your point.

Assuming puzzle platformer fans like twitch: What. I didn't say that? "It won't tax your brain enough, but it may tax your reflexes enough to make up for it." I may have used "it" for two different things in that sentence, but there's only one thing that made sense in context. U:

 

I actually really appreciate your feedback. It makes me want to get better, again. :D

 

I hope you at least liked the Prison Architect one, more. I much prefer that style, where it's more of a playthrough-in-text-form than an arbitrary review.

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GOOD NEWS EVERYONE

quoth impromptugames.com

That’s right – in an extremely exciting turn of events, our new game InFlux has been selected to be exhibited at PAX Australia in July as part of the Australian Indie Showcase (AIS)! You can check out the full lineup for the AIS over here.
 
What this means is we’ll be at PAX Aus showing off InFlux in our very own booth space thing. You’ll be able to rock up and play the game for yourself, and commune with the developers, and all that good stuff. I’ll also be on a panel along with the rest of the developers selected for the AIS. The game will hopefully by released by then, and you can come by and tell us what you think. We’ve never done anything like this before, but we’re gonna do our best. Many thanks to the folks at Penny-Arcade and their Australian associates for giving us the opportunity.
 
In the meantime, don’t forget to go vote for InFlux on Greenlight!
 
Thanks everyone!

 

plug'd

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I podcast a lot alongside friends of mine, perhaps most of interest to Thumbs fans would be conversations with Jim Crawford of Frog Fractions fame and Richard Hofmeier, the extremely humble gentleman behind Cart Life. I'm also part of a more conventional podcast where we discuss games we've been playing and recent industry news called Top Down Perspective. That's been going on for over two years now so I like to think we've gotten okay at doing that.

 

I understand listening to a new podcast is a pretty big time investment, but any feedback would be appreciated. 

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I'm pretty sure I've plugged my podcast here before, but for Mother's Day I recorded a commentary track for Friday the 13th with my mom (a wonderful 55 year old Catholic woman who has not seen a horror movie since she was 15 years old) and I am very proud of the result. Obviously, since it's a commentary track, you have to own Friday the 13th to get the full effect, but I thought I'd plug it here anyway. Listening to me try to explain the rules of slasher movies without saying the word "sex" in front of my mom is pretty damned cute, if I do say so myself.

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I ran Bit of Alright for the second time last Friday, and it went really well. The venue was a motherfucking converted fishing trawler, moored amidst the skyscrapers at Canary Wharf. Here are photos. Someone ran a session titled "Jam Game Jam: A Game Jam With Jam", which probably makes no sense to Americans because you call it jelly.

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that looks like a fucking awesome event, Snuggles seems like my favorite game and apparently from the pictures there was another one involving the red pointery thing, the goal of which was getting guys to grope each others' butts.  So that's a strong contender.

 

In America we call Grape jelly and everything else jam.  It's grape jelly, strawberry jam, marmalade jam, etc, in fact I didn't realize the two are basically synonyms for a very long time.

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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.

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Nope, I love the new stuff. It is definitely funny and not-shit. Keep it up.

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In America we call Grape jelly and everything else jam.

 

I would just like to add that this person does not speak for all Americans. Early in my life my siblings and cousins developed the theory that jelly is made of pigs, and jam is made of real fruit. This is the theory that holds my field.

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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.

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Another blog post: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JohnathonSwift/20130521/192728/Microsofts_big_data_driven_misstep.php This time on how and why Microsoft screwed up their Xbox One reveal as a marketing thing. Tl;Dr: A $400 box that you can Skype chat and watch TV on is ridiculously, stupidly expensive. A $400 box that plays great new games, and that can also happen to let you watch TV and skype chat on if you want, seems pretty cool.

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I agree that they should've made a competitor to the Apple TV or the Roku box, and had that be their much more affordable, mainstream push. These features are good, and I'm sure my friends and family who don't like games would love this stuff, but I'm the only person with any brand affinity to "X Box", and this does nothing for me!

 

On a seperate note, I'm slowly figuring out that Headlines of Gaming is funnier if you chisel the body text all the way down, and focus the weight onto the headline. "Mirror's Edge To Make Light Return?" and "EA Rolls Dice, Gets A 2, Loses Faith?" is funny enough, and to string you along with mini-jokes after that is just polishing that smile down and down into a straight line- if there ever was one.

So I'm gonna transition it from a couple paragraphs to a couple sentences.

 

I feel like I've learned this lesson somewhere before, so maybe that's what was bugging me in the back of my mind.

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This is genuinely super nerve-wracking for me, and I don't know why.

 

So most of you know that I do this interviews podcast thing called Buried in the Credits. While I was at GDC, I was fortunate enough to speak with some freaking awesome people (Nels Anderson, Steve Gaynor, to name a few that you guys will have heard of) but there were a couple that were set up by a PR agency. Now: three interviews were set up, and the first was OK - I could tell they wanted to simply pitch me their game, but I feel like I pulled it around to make it an interesting BitC addition. The second was a total trainwreck. I was sat down, forced to watch 30m of a video game whilst having the guy give me his spiel, and was also accompanied by another *journalist* whose first question - I shit you not - was 'When will this game be released?'

 

So I wasn't too sure about the final interview, to say the least. I was tempted to put it off, but something stayed my hand.

 

The final interview was with Brian Kwek and Ian Gregory of Witching Hour Studios and - quite simply - I think it's one of the greatest episodes available yet. That isn't to detract from previous shows - I can't even begin to express how awed I am that some people I think are really goddamn cool *wanted* to be on my show, and I think I got some great coverage from them, but these two guys simply blew me away.

 

Both are intelligent, witty, charismatic, and absolutely devoted to the idea of making good video games. They epitomise what I think GDC *was* for me, and I think the reason I fear people's reaction so much is because I feel like it's the most real, the most honest episode for me. It shows me as I am - for better or worse - and if people don't like it, then I think maybe I'm not supposed to keep doing the show.

 

I don't know, the episode is available here - http://buriedinthecredits.com/2013/05/24/episode-15-brian-kwek-ian-gregory-witching-hour-studios-paint-me-like-one-of-your-french-girls/ - if you do like it, please let me know. It would mean the world to me. You can also review it on iTunes etc if you like. 

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I'm sure a lot of you have probably seen this whole kerfuffle about the XBO's used game system, and in particular Ben Kuchera's silly article in support of prohibiting used games sales across the board. I wrote a response to it that I think turned out really well. Check it out if you feel so inclined.

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Oh, I so agree. When I read that bit in the PAR article, I was rolling my eyes. I've heard the same bullshit about prices going down spoken tentatively for years. Guess what - it never goes down. The only actual, economic thing that I've seen to work out for the consumer in a big way are the regular Steam sales, which is an entirely different beast. But don't come with the 'when it becomes cheaper to produce, the savings will go to you!' flim-flam again. It's never gone that way.

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Wel, it did with CDs, as I recall. I remember games costing $70. Then PS1 came out and suddenly they weren't $70 anymore.

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I don't know, the episode is available here - http://buriedinthecredits.com/2013/05/24/episode-15-brian-kwek-ian-gregory-witching-hour-studios-paint-me-like-one-of-your-french-girls/ - if you do like it, please let me know. It would mean the world to me. You can also review it on iTunes etc if you like. 

THIS WAS A GREAT CAST!!

 

Everybody's super interesting, I DIDN'T KNOW SINGAPOREAN WAS A WORD, nevermind fucking anthropogonogal, but I was engaged the whole time because you guys all were. It was fun and unique and everyone was switched on, I could listen to this all the damn time.

 

List of boilerplate questions at the end: don't need em!

EDIT- Alright the fact that it launched into talking about Coupling and blues and everyone's favourite comedian has actually won me over on that.

If "Uncovering the hidden treasures of the gaming industry" is the dumb tagline objective of this project, then thumbs up, cos that's exactly what that was; and ontop of that it was human and natural and fun to listen to.

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