seasleepy

Those tweets at most seem to be "evidence" that she didn't like the way they were running their jam. Saying you accidentally killed a website after linking to it means 'lol their website fell over from the traffic' not 'lol I got someone to use leet skillz and arrange a DDOS'.

Cliffy B actually talked about it a year and change ago back around when the Kickstarter happened. (He and Tim Schafer had a short twitter convo about it around when I was checking out Tim's twitter feed to see what exactly was going on.)

I got linked to the origin of "mansplain" recently and it's basically exactly what Gormongous mentioned -- a column by an author who kept going to parties where men who didn't know who she was would argue that she didn't really understand a topic and then recommend her own book (having not read it) to her. It gets used poorly often enough but that's understandable since most of the times it is getting used, people are somewhat angry or upset or tired, which are all situations where people aren't at their best.

Jake's comment about robots and buttons gave me this amazing flash of the robot future where using a finger to push a button or an optical sensor to interpret a screen or sitting in chairs or whatever is their version of skeuomorphism. (And then all of the robots in favor of it are immediately deleted and replaced by those that are able to handle the new direct interfaces.)

Whatever the percentage is out of, there's a pretty steep falloff of starters:finishers across all sorts of games. A few examples from stuff out of my Steam: Bastion: first achievement: 76.5% ending achievement: 31.7% (41% of those that got the first achievement got a final one) Binding of Isaac: first 63.0% ending achievement: 26.0% (41% of starters finished the game) Borderlands: first: 64.1% ending: 21.0% (32% of starters finished the game) Borderlands 2: first: 75.9% ending: 29.6% (39% of starters finished the game) Botanicula: first: 75% ending: 24.1% (32% of starters finished the game) Braid: first: 79.5% ending: 22.9% (29% of starters finished the game) Lego LOTR: first: 79.1% ending: 22.5% (28% of starters finished the game) Puzzle Agent 2: first: 79.6% ending: 48.0% (60% of starters finished the game) Saints Row IV: first: 61.5% ending: 19.4% (32% of starters finished the game) Saints Row 3: first 73.5% ending: 35.6% (48% of starters finished the game) Scribblenauts Unlimited: first: 69.9% ending: 13.5% (19% of starters finished the game) Sleeping Dogs: first: 76.6% ending: 34.6% (45% of starters finished the game) Skyrim: first: 88.2% ending: 32.3% (37% of starters finished the game) Thomas Was Alone: first: 87.9% ending: 27.9% (32% of starters finished the game) First achievement was the one with the highest percentage (story-based or no), ending was the story ending achievement (or sum of the achievements if there was more than one). (I couldn't really find a good 50% achievement for most of these -- the ones that were obvious showed a less steep dropoff eg halfway on Scribblenauts was 26% which gives a 52% halfway:finisher, Botanicula was 38.9% for a 65% halfway:finisher, etc.)

But this was his personal twitter (@PHIL_FISH), not his professional one (@Polytron). I don't get why he needs to stop expressing opinions on the internet just because he's a game developer. It may very well be better for Fish personally in the long run to remove himself from a situation where people could easily lob vitriol at him and then tut-tut about the resulting explosion, and it may very well be better for him professionally to not be as public as he has been, but I find it distressing how many people are pleased about the latter and unconcerned about the former (not anyone here really, thankfully).

To some extent, the "progression through failure" mechanic is present in Dwarf Fortress as an option -- when you lose a fortress, the world state is not reset. So in subsequent games, when choosing a location for your fort, you can choose to reclaim your old fortress. The items you had in your previous fortress will still be there, which can provide a significant boost to a new fortress. But you also may have to fight off whatever murdered you previously, so if there is a goblin army waiting for you, it might be better to go play a different fortress for a while and then hopefully they will be dead or gone later.

I played it on Steam -- it works fine. You just use the mouse. I think it fits well thematically on a tablet, but there's not really anything you lose by playing it on PC as far as I could tell.

It's really weird to me how very under-the-radar Little Inferno has been (at least in my corners of the internet). I got it over the Christmas break and really enjoyed it and then there was nobody to talk to about it and I was sad. So I was happy to hear you guys explain the history of video games in the cast this week!