The trailer is like half CGI dust clouds. A lot of these superhero projects suffer from looking way too CGI but at least Spider Noir looks like CGI pastel New York (in the color version) and not CGI dust bowl.

It doesn't have a high price due to "everything", it has a high price due to specific decisions made by companies like - and including - Valve. Valve is not subject to market forces here, Valve is the market force.

Valve helped drive up the price of components so you should be a little mad! I would also note that AI, despite being the world's smartest man, somehow didn't predict the rise of component prices or come up with any mitigation strategy. Rare swing and a miss I guess!

The Argument is basically a giant advertorial for Waymo lol. It's supposed to be an argument for centrist liberalism but it's a great illustration of the hard limits of that approach. Their vision for the future United States is the exact United States of today but with more robot taxis, that's it!

Side note, I wrote about this topic in my seminal blog on Dark Souls. (Someone once called it "seminal" maybe!)

I'm going to be blunt: the idea that hitboxes, collision, etc, should exactly match graphics is one of the classic amateur thoughts. A common thought among people who don't have the experience (or don't do the thought experiments) to understand it's usually a bad idea for a variety of reasons.

I find it weird that people are eager to shift their role from doing creative work to fixing up the mistakes in the creative work done by AI - basically making yourself an intern on a one-person project.

Trying to figure out how to reconstruct the world position of a pixel with an oblique matrix. Find random @bgolus.bsky.social comment: "If that doesn’t work, try changing the true in the GetGPUProjectionMatrix() to false." It works...but I'm rendering into a rendered texture so it's wrong!

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 battle system is geared towards taking on bosses, where you do combos that combine into even bigger combos. So it either isn't applicable to most normal enemies or normal enemies have inflated HP so that you can use the intricacies of the battle system on them.

I'm surprised at how often I see a Steam game that looks middling but has an expensive-looking CGI or fully animated trailer. Like 90 seconds of cinematic hand drawn animation then the game is blocky sprites.

If I were in charge of Unreal Engine 6 my top priority would be games don't have traversal stutter unless they botch something, rather than all games have traversal stutter unless they carefully work around it.

In particular people who write "voicey" pseudo-progressive criticism get told that their work is "vital" essentially regardless of quality. Which means they don't improve. (And often eventually get let go because their work was actually disposable)

Should I become the 12th member of Kinda Funny? I have a thoughtful, analytical approach and a quirky, appealing screen presence. Sounds like a good fit, I'm seriously considering it.

Some thoughts: (short thread incoming) 1. Some of these steps seem fairly pointless and to exist because of mandates 2. The results look AI-slopified. The visualize the barn scene during a meteor shower seems like both 1 and 2 - obvious AI slop look and what did that accomplish?

There's a movie on Tubi that's the Hunger Games except it's a dance off.

I have been experimenting with Gen AI imagine creation a bit (on my local machine, no cloud, no commercial application) for research purposes and the more I mess with it the less I see how it would be useful in the way video game companies describe it to be useful for them.

One of these companies should produce a little 5-minute video of "here's how we're using AI see it's helpful and not problematic." I assume they don't because a) they're using it differently from how they're talking about it and b) they're scared that the video will reveal plagiarized art.

I know I'm supposed to be mad about the AI statements here but honestly I'm just as annoyed by "Experience Director." Can we stop doing the dotcom thing where everyone gets an invented job title like "chief technology guru"? Games don't need 4 different directors! streamable.com/yjq2u0

Unity's handling of directional light cookies might be the most baffling thing I've seen wrt Unity legacy rendering and that's really saying something. It renders the whole scene with a pointless black light, then a second time with the actual light (with cookies) being additive. What.

Microsoft being surprised by a component shortage that they helped cause is really something.

We need to keep investing in AI so that one day we can make it smart enough to answer the question "how do we lower RAM prices?"

Animation fidelity is effectively antagonistic to systems-driven programmatic gameplay. This is especially true in 3D and extends all the way back to Lara Croft jumping on an animation-synced delay vs Mario jumping when you press the button.

I guess I just don't understand why game websites do constant loud sighing about BDS then don't adhere to BDS, or talk every week about how AI is horrible then eagerly slurp up AI content. Is it just that social media rewards people for taking stances even when those stances clearly aren't real?

It's a shame that, as far as I'm aware of, there isn't really a good answer to this. Game Developer blogs seem basically dead and Critical Distance, which used to run a little of this stuff (actually quite a lot when it first started) doesn't anymore.

Imagine being on the team that was trying to make Gears run great on PS5, then you get invited to a meeting and told the game isn't releasing on PS5 because MS is trying to please 100 Twitter "influencers."

Big Media doesn't want you to read this!

I genuinely don't understand why some leftists like Platner so much. It seems like they really like Trump's vibe and want "the Trump of the left", or they fetishize "blue collar workers" such that they'll go gaga over a guy who seems like he smells like BBQ or something.

The problem here is not just that the language is anachronistic. To a frost giant warrior armor is not some novel concept. It doesn't make sense to even have the thought. It's anachronistic in that it's "what if a redditor was in God of War?"

Bari Weiss rose to fame by claiming she was "cancelled" at the NYT for being outspoken and controversial yet brave, when she actually just quit. Here she is firing someone because he actually *was* outspoken.

I used this in an old Gamasutra / Gamedeveloper post that I can't update, but I did update the substack reprint version to credit the artist.

Ask and you shall receive. jmargaris.substack.com/p/whats-wron... What's wrong with writing on Mixtape, featuring: How weak criticism robs us of time and offers little in return Baudrillard's hyperreality What does "ostensibly" mean? Critics repeating other critics

A few months ago Valve put out a statement saying they don't allow gambling sponsorships for their tournaments. The last DOTA2 tournament was sponsored by PolyMarket and the newest pro team is from "1 win", a betting site. Wild how boldly they just fibbed about this.

"‘Escape From New York’: Zack Snyder to Direct Reimagining of John Carpenter’s Dystopian Classic!" What a terrible day to have eyes.

Here's a cool graphic version. jmargaris.substack.com/p/whats-wron...

Ask and you shall receive. jmargaris.substack.com/p/whats-wron... What's wrong with writing on Mixtape, featuring: How weak criticism robs us of time and offers little in return Baudrillard's hyperreality What does "ostensibly" mean? Critics repeating other critics

Update: I accidentally dialed the mean up to a 13 but eventually managed to get it down to a 5 or so. Coming soon: 8000 words on how someone didn't use "ostensibly" correctly. (And some other topics as well....)

They should make an Austin Powers game.

My only use of AI using the Edge read aloud feature to proofread. Which turned "IGN’s Simon Cardy gave it a 10/10" into "IGN's Simon Cardy gave it a October 10th." Hmm. Kinda more helpful if it just reads aloud what's actually written!

Wild. Sometimes when I hover over movies in these apps instead of playing a trailer they'll play a random clip that seems algorithmically chosen, like it's a horror movie but the clip is a guy talking while looking in the fridge for 30 seconds. Enticing!

When you're right you're right!

All the people who have spent 15 years wailing about how Hideo Kojima is a no-good auteur must be thrilled that instead of making personal decisions and being invested in every detail he's just prompting AI. Thank you, Hideo, for seeing the light and helping to usher in a brighter future.

I'm working on this piece about Mixtape discourse and game criticism and what I'm realizing is that games discourse has stopped growing up with me. It grew up with me from EGM to Next Generation to Kill Screen to Waypoint but got stuck in 2016. Bogost doing more Bogost is a perfect example.

Personally I liked the Polygon house style where the first paragraph was always like: "In the myth of Icarus, Icarus flew too close to the sun on his waxen wings..." and then weaved it into the review text later with "similarly, in Icarusan fashion, Mario can fall into holes."

All the outlets that smoothly transition from how Microsoft is bad and BDS good to how great the steering feels in Forza Horizon are insulting the intelligence of their audience. It's one thing to decide you don't care about BDS. Feigning caring is another thing entirely.

I finished initial writing now the hardest part: turning the "mean" dial down from 10 to 6

A while ago the New Yorker (?) ran a piece like "which artist should we cancel next? Degas? It's Degas right? He really enjoyed painting ladies" and like...what the fuck are you talking about he's been dead for 100 years! He's not getting your money when you go to a museum.

I found a great use for AI. A guy was arguing with me and told me I should paste his argument into AI and it would agree with him. I did and it pointed out he was wrong in all the same ways I had pointed out. Then I posted a screencap of the AI response and he stopped responding. AI rules!

its_happenging.jpg I've read four different Mixtape pieces all fixated on "but when does it take place?" and like...do these guys all hang out on the same Discord? Because I don't know how so many people independently decide that this is the single most important aspect of the game.

Fun fact: The Thing got a razzie nomination for worst score.