I mistakenly did discourse for a few seconds before I came to my senses.

Sad to say the new Deathstalker was a bit of a miss. Lots of Mexico filter ("piss filter") that detracts from the look. Back to back with Frankie Freako it looks like they've given up on having any sort of plot and are just doing "check out how dumb this is" which....eh.

There's a huge difference between a Star Wars kid going viral and people making fun of him, vs someone like Stancil who is just constantly obnoxious, seeks out negative attention effectively as his job, then gets angry when the people give him what he most craves.

jmargaris.substack.com/p/how-not-to... Used examples / case studies to look at various traps teams can fall into when they collect and respond to feedback from (not on-site) playtests. Including Marathon's alpha testing, Overland's paid "First Access" and Valve's Artifact. (And Star Wars Galaxies)

Underrated trick in game programming: leave notes to help the people who come after you, including your future self who will have no idea what's going on, look at your code and say "this is weird and bad I bet I can fix this, what was a I thinking!" then break everything.

Henry Cavill is in Hellraiser: Hellworld! (Terrible movie, even by Hellraiser late sequel standards!) Dax and Garak both have major roles in Hellraiser films (3 and 1)

I really should have finished "When Keeping it Rogue Goes Wrong" in June of last year. Now it feels redundant since everyone and their brother is complaining about pick 3 screens, too much meta-progression, etc.

The X-Files was way better than the X-Files revival though!

I don't watch a ton of TV - I would have trouble listing the best 15 TV shows of all time without including Monsters (1988) and having everyone laugh at me. I would definitely include the 90s Outer Limits.

"Great news boys and ghouls - Tales from the Crypt is now screaming on Shudder / AMC+"

I recently did some research on porn games and a huge number of them are you find a sassy free-spirited woman and turn her into a broken tamed sex slave who does anything you want and has no personality beyond obsequiousness. That is what some people want, and what some people view as peak human.

AI people claim that AI is conscious as a marketing gimmick but then the marketing works better on themselves than anyone else.

Making it get dark when you go underwater is surprisingly hard. I had it mostly working for years but I'm trying to go from "mostly working" to "actually working."

Interesting to see a lot of people (anecdotally) saying they're getting tired of Roguelike pick 3 mechanics. I have a draft of "When Keeping it Rogue Goes Wrong" (I tried my best!) that I was working on a while ago. Whenever I see a game pop up 3 tiles of choices I often check out, it feels rote.

I posted this totally unaware that there's a "let's bring back smoking!" think piece going around. (This Cenobite was a smoker as a human and that's why she has a messed up throat as a Cenobite. Her character doesn't make sense if you cut the smoking)

I'm wary of "what is his plan?" but I will withhold judgement. That said, it looks like they aren't going to have the female cenobite smoke, which is so typical of our current age. Game where guts are violently ripped out but no smoking!

PRE-RELEASE GTA 6 COVERAGE: The entire global economy rests on this revolutionary piece of art POST RELEASE GTA 6 COVERAGE: Here's where you can find the most early-game Orbs

How many bugs have I introduced by changing some code to help diagnose a bug then not changing it back? Also finding Debug.Print("This should never happen") two years later.

Same

"Zion in The Matrix is just another layer of Matrix designed to keep malcontents happy" is the most bottom-right corner one I can think of.

An obvious contradiction here between "your favorite games were built using [new in the past couple years] AI" and all the news about how people aren't playing new games. GTA5 was built using Google's GenAI suite? "Most modern games are doing this" isn't a flex. (Setting aside if it's true)

There's a 900 page ResetEra thread about people being offended by sexualization in games. At one point someone brought up a trailer for Hades 2 that starts with the character topless and everyone was like "that's different it's not sexualized at all!" People are real weird about this stuff!

If there was any justice in this world this would be getting thousands of likes!

Miles O'Brien would hate this.

Complicated topic but I feel like a lot of well-meaning liberals want to feel good about appreciating diversity, but how that shakes out in practice is that they only have use for certain voices when they deliver the expected and narrow "socially conscious" commentary

The thing that's wild about these guys is that you expect their life story to be "an unhinged leftist stalked me for years and systematically destroyed my life" but it's actually "I found 'latinx' real annoying"

The games media being perpetually sad about studio closures, layoffs, etc, strikes me as mostly fake. I think there are like ~10 people who genuinely care, with a bunch more covering that beat because it's a trend, who don't care much beyond a vague "it's bad when bad things happen I guess."

People clowned on him but I think the Journey to Savage Planet guy was onto something when he complained that games press will write tons of sad pieces about a studio closing after their newest game flops without ever having previously mentioned the game.

Happy to see "press all the buttons" mentioned early. Incredible how many people don't do this. One of my strongly held idiosyncratic beliefs is that the games industry has done a lot of harm by actively teaching players NOT to just press all the buttons!

Reposting this because I was hoping people would get mad about this and nobody did!

This is a great example of the (built-in by design!) flaws of CPI. If the average TV today costs $500 then according to this an average TV in 2000 cost $25,000. Did an average TV in the year 2000 cost $25,000? Does that sound even remotely plausible?

Going to be real here: I've played a lot of Marathon and the story / lore comes off as totally inert to me. Very clearly the work of a team writing codex entries on the side, with basically zero effort put into integration or solving problems with multiplayer storytelling.

Marvel's "Ultimates" line was supposed to be a jumping-on point for new readers - sold at convenience stores while ditching the complex continuity. Then the stories were like "what if Captain America was racist?" and were mostly twists on existing continuity - so meaningless to non-fans.

What makes "good art" is the recognition that someone did something remarkable. This looks pretty neat even today - if you're familiar with contemporary games this is a real achievement. Part of why AI art isn't impressive - *making* the AI might be impressive but the output isn't an achievement.

Moon Patrol was the first game to do real parallax scrolling (according to wikipedia) and it also did foot IK!

A lot of "juice it" advice amounts to "make it boppy" but some games shouldn't be boppy!

I think one of the strengths of Souls games that people don't talk about much is the lack of this sort of thing, in the character animations and especially in the UI. It has basically no "juice" as defined by all those mid-2010s best practices, and is better for it.

I constantly use this as an example of bad conventional wisdom and the result of being unwilling to sweat the details. After Catwoman and Elektra this was a common refrain but that's two movies and both of them were bad! It doesn't speak to any broader trend.

I'm convinced that there isn't a single "social media economist" on any site who understands how CPI works. CPI is designed to underreport inflation. Any stat you create that hinges on CPI will look rosier than reality.

When I first saw this I thought the guy on the left was holding a gun and the plan was to shoot the scaffolding down. (Great plan I approve)

People are being real weird about Crimson Desert. They seem to have decided that it's a lovable underdog story and are going hard on "the gaming press is conspiring to kill this game for daring to dream!" Maybe some people just thought it was mid and it's not that deep.

Fighting game tutorials are a good example of something that's become industry standard despite being terrible. The Invincible Vs one starts with "press forward to walk forward" then like 5 minutes later is explaining the 4th possible way to tag in a character

DO NOT let Ian Bogost see this!

Are there good resources or standard practices for running open betas and other feedback-gathering events that *aren't* playtest sessions? There's a lot of info available on how to run good playtest sessions but very little I can find on how to run a good open beta weekend.

People like to point out that there's a Deep Space 9 episode where Rom forms a union, but people rarely mention why: He wanted sick leave because he almost killed himself by jerking off too much Kinda puts unions in a different light now hmmm.....?

My whole life is a lie! TBH "I can't lose" makes more sense as it's trying to get you to spend more money to continue. But it sounds like "I can't move" and the character does a little animation where they struggle to get up. Jury is still out!

The problem with "he's an edgelord but hey he's a leftist edgelord with the right priorities!" is that in all likelihood once elected it will turn out he was LARPing to win an election and has predictably conservative edgelord priorities.

Tip of my tongue reddit group: "Can anyone help me find this 1970s movie about an alien picking off the crew of a spaceship? May have had a one-word title." "I pasted your question into ChatGPT and it says the movie is Life (2017) - no need to thank me!"

Grok what did she mean by this?

As someone who isn't invested in the games Fallout season 2 felt like a ton of references and setup and not much else. Season 1 was a pretty good TV show that was also Fallout. Season 2 felt much more "for the fans" without pesky anchors like "storytelling."