RubixsQube

I can't help but think that all of this stuff leading up to the actual game launch is going to make the game so completely and utterly baffling for new players that eventually the game will just be like Martha's Vinyard in space, with the mega-rich flying around in their space yachts tipping their space hats at each other. I also think that a downside to our new world of slowly squeezed-out content (alphas and betas and on and on) means that it becomes very hard to get a toe-hold into the game because it's hard to judge when a game is complete enough to deserve your amount of money. I'm someone who really doesn't get a thrill out of alpha/beta releases personally, and so if I were to want to get into a Star Citizen, right now it's not worth 30 - 40 dollars (look, a virtual ship! Simplistic but pretty dogfighting with bots!). It potentially will be in the future, but when will that be? I think that this does benefit the developer (potentially?), but it makes the casual consumer pretty confused.

Here's the polygon article about the shovelknight streetpass and miiverse stuff. Essentially, for the 3DS, you can challenge your streetpass buddies to a "blind face-off," where you record a five second clip in an arena area, and then these get matched up with theirs, and the winner is decided, netting them gold. Then you can watch the little battle, and tweak your strategy. Like a more complicated rock-paper-scissors. I don't know if I live in a large enough city to find a lot of other Shovel Knight-ers. I played an hour or so, and it's quite well done. The control is tight, the 3D is exactly what I was hoping for, there are secrets everywhere, and while I died a few times in some cheap ways, the checkpoint system is really great. Effectively, you can destroy the checkpoints for more gold, which means you backtrack farther if you die. Also, when you die, you lose gold which you can collect if you restart at the checkpoint and head exactly to the spot where you died to collect it (Dark Souls style). Neat.

I bought the 3DS version since I am so much more likely to play and complete this because it's portable. Now I have to hope that I can take advantage of some of the streetpass features. I'd love it if I could have gotten it also for the WiiU, but that's not how Nintendo rolls. I am SO EXCITED to play this game, it is a mixture of everything I want in a video game.

Watching the Dune miniseries feels so hollow. It's as if a really clever robot wrote and cast and directed it. "Here are scenes from that book you like! Look, their eyes are blue!" While the David Lynch version takes some liberties, it feels like the people behind the film cared a little about the source material, and wanted to make it their own. I think that we live in a society where everyone wants to rush to take every written property and throw it on the screen. Look, it's that thing you like! With actors! Edit: Also, I once thumbed through the Dune Encyclopedia in a used bookstore, and I should have bought it. I'll have to go and find a copy now. Thanks for the recommendation!

That's a kind of weird comparison to make, since I assume that these levels being shown here are presumably earlier in the game, and the early Yoshi's Island levels were also far more straightforward. I also hope that Nintendo ramps up the level complexity though, and if things like Super Mario 3D Land/World are any indication, they're capable of making complex, difficult games. I hope that Nintendo doesn't aim these yarn games at a more introductory crowd; I am reading that Yoshi's New Island, while a little harder near the end, was too simple for the adult audience who craves a proper sequel to Yoshi's Island.

Oh, Dune. What a good topic! I'm glad to read everyone's neat, informed opinions about something I hold so dear. Idle Thumbs has the best readers. I read and re-read and re-re-read Dune for years, knowing that there were sequels, and knowing that there was no way that the story could continue in any way that would make me as happy as Dune does. In graduate school, a colleague told me I should give them a chance, and it is true, they kind of peter out and move away from what I liked so much about the first book. See, I like my science fiction real hard. Dune is a book that ties in the mysticism and softer aspects with a real elegant narrative about desert ecology and religious jihad, and then the sequels are about...well, they're just bonkers. And for some people, that's what they want! I did not. But Dune still exists. The world building that's done is light, and never for its own sake. I remember watching a making-of documentary about Star Wars, and George Lucas said that sometimes, because it takes a lot of work, science fiction films will spend a lot of time showing off their scenery unnecessarily. I feel the same about science fiction novels, and Dune, while it is jam packed with a dense universe of intrigue and capitalism and spice-fueled interstellar travel, that never feels like something that you have to wade through in order to find the human component. How can you not read the early scene with Paul, the Reverend Mother, and the gom jabbar (the high-handed enemy!) and feel the tension and the pain and the fear? And in that scene we see the power and mysticism of the Bene Gesserit better than any staid description. "You dare suggest a duke's son is an animal?" "Let us say I suggest you may be human."

I started to read the sequels a few years ago, and the books have super diminishing returns. I think that it would be fantastic for high school students to read something like Starship Troopers and then Old Man's War, especially if they're in the year of high school where they take American history. I also think something like The Left Hand of Darkness would be an excellent high school book, providing that parents don't hear that a school is making kids read something with BIZARRE SEXUALITY.

When Chris mentioned Dune for like, five seconds in the podcast I realized that this is exactly what I want in every science fiction video game: I want Dune. I want real science, combined with a light dusting of mysticism. I don't want moon wizards. I want religious fervor stretched tightly against a backdrop of political and human drama. I want space travel to feel like what it actually is: difficult and mysterious. I want houses and intrigue and the uninterrupted flow of spice. I try to re-read Dune once a year, and each time I open it up it just feels so right, and it's absurd that more game designers haven't ripped it off wholesale. Chris, perhaps you have heard this from other people who are far more influential on your life than I am, but re-read Dune. Make it an Idle Book Club selection. I have one million things I could say about that incredible, perfect piece of fiction.

The WiiU is the thing that gets the most play out of any video game system around my house, between my housemates using it to play Mario Kart or Wii Party U or Game and Wario and me frustratedly making my way through Rayman Legends or Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze. The system has had a lot of unnecessary negativity surrounding it, as if people were willing to, without doing any actual research and without playing the damn thing, just accept some BS narrative created about it. I'm glad to see that WiiU discussion isn't anathema anymore. There are reasons to buy and play a WiiU, especially if you are someone with real physical human friends.

This is me dressed in a lab coat at a dance recently. You guys do not need to deal with it, actually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9YjLsuUTZE I don't know if there isn't a more apt description of how I feel sometimes than this video

Splatoon looked fantastic. There's from the (fantastic, diverse) Nintendo treehouse coverage that shows the game being played, and I want to highlight the fact that one point the margin of victory for a team is 0.1%. With random people playing at E3. In my head, the best competitive games have a unique idea done well, where skill is rewarded, but it's not required that you have to spend hours and hours and hours before you can be competitive, and it looks like, if Nintendo juggles this well, it could be a real winner. Providing it ever comes out, and providing that their online matchmaking isn't miserable.

Tim Cahill's goal yesterday was marvelous, and it was a pity that they played so well but weren't able to defeat the mighty onslaught that is the Netherlands this year. I've been really happy with this Cup, especially after the referees kind of settled down after making a series of important early goofs.

It's Erin McGathy, her fiancé, who she talks about throughout, is Dan Harmon, the creator of Community and Rick and Morty. To be slightly vain (this is plug your shit after all), he talks about me at around minute 31 of this episode of Harmontown. It was really fun to record the podcast with her!

It's got to be natural, where you are asked to figure it out in situations where you can fail, and the punishment is very, very light. I love how, for all of it's weird controller tricks, the Zelda series has taken some control away from the player, I think that Ocarina of Time introduced the "run towards the edge and we'll jump for you" mechanic, and by putting the first jumps in Kokiri Village in a way where the player would just fall in some water, they encouraged the player to try. Super Mario 64 allowed you to play around outside the castle for a while with minimal consequences, learning jump timings. Just backing off from pop-up tutorial boxes is a key first step. I think that, in video games, you learn by doing, not by reading, and the hardest part is just finding what is necessary to teach and what you can assume. I think that with the Idle Thumbs crowd, a lot of this is super duper obvious.

Ha! Pretty great!

I'm skeptical about using ALBW as a template for 3D Zelda games, and I think that I do agree with lobotomy's point about retro games being buoyed by nostalgia. They were simpler games, overall, and you tended to stick with a game and learn it's nuances because you had no other choice. I wonder what type of games testing Nintendo runs - do they ask people who've never played a game to playtest the game? How often do the playtesters and designers actually play the start of a Zelda game? Whenever I encounter something tedious in a game I'm playing, I always wonder who it's for, and why was it left in. Are there people hired specifically to try to edit this sort of thing out? There should be. Listen to me naively spout nonsense about game programming!

The writing is indeed a little awkward, but I tried my own hand at re-doing the lines presented in the kotaku video:

Sometimes, I think it must be hard to be Modern Nintendo, since you've got to deal with the fact that you have such a broad range in ages you have to appeal to. I don't need my hand held in a game, but I also know that if I were to pick up Skyward Sword right now I'd probably have forgotten a lot of the weird controls. But, there are younger fans who played with their parents and they probably needed the giant overlay. I am hoping that Nintendo learns from their own past - early Nintendo did a great job of walking people through how to control their games in a natural way, without repetitive tutorials. In Super Mario Bros 1, you learn to jump and run naturally in level 1-1. There are ways to incorporate the how-to-play portion of the game into the gameplay without it feeling like an hours-long tutorial. Maybe even give us an option from the outset: "have you played a Zelda game before?" to determine how much "this is how you swing a sword! This is what a rupee is!" bullshit they present.

Peter Dinklage's voice acting in this game is horrible. Every time I hear grating video game voice acting, I wonder what the fuck the people in charge of hiring and recording voice actors are thinking. You can't walk ten feet in Los Angeles without running into one hundred capable people who would love to provide a voice in a video game. And I guarantee they'd sound far, far better than whatever weirdos are hired by modern game developers. It's like, "well, if we can't get Nolan North, let's just go and find someone who's currently trending on twitter or else that guy yelling in the alley about the government!"

I was listening to this podcast as I went grocery shopping this evening, and there were two important things that happened: 1) When Chris described getting into his Star Citizen spaceship, and not being able to actually fly the thing, the mere thought of Chris, all suited up and sitting in this overly complicated ship cockpit, with a confused grumpy look on his face as he flipped switches made me laugh so, so loud in the grocery store. Just pulling on the stick, flipping some switches, pushing on foot pedals in this super fancy spaceship. So funny. Then I went back to shopping and he described how he had to get a helmet to fly the ship, and then I imagined him getting excited and racing out of the ship to the other side of the hangar, putting on his helmet, and proudly re-entering the spaceship only to find that he still couldn't fly it. Star Citizen, ladies and germs. This is why I'm hopeful for Enemy Starfighter. 2) I had to stop listening to the podcast because Hall and Oates came on the grocery store music system, and sorry, Thumbs, but that song is a jam. So I was the loudly laughing dancing guy in the rural New Hampshire grocery store

As a scientist / astronomer, I've had to really work on fighting my urge to hate this "fetishization of science." I do understand that it is really glossing over the most vital parts of science in favor of looking at pretty pictures and passing around 1 - 2 sigma detections as being hard conclusions. This is bad. But! I am glad that we are looking at science in a positive light at all. I spend a lot of my time talking to people about science in museums and planetariums, and those I Fucking Love Science people are passionate, and patient, and love to have their assumptions challenged. They're not always like this, but often they're the ones who would put preference on going to a natural history museum or an air-and-space museum instead of other things. And I want people like that. I want people to know that science is a thing that people, real people, are doing, and trying, and failing, and making progress at. It's not a mystic art (similar to what Gormongous said), but rather a fun tool we have to understand the universe around us. That's a pretty important personal goal. And it's why I just launched a website dedicated to trying to do this for astronomy, and I'm working like mad in the evenings and on weekends to try to get things out there for people to see.

There may be aliens who do indeed wish to communicate using subspace/ansible technology outside our understanding, but that brings with it a lot of assumptions as well. I'm just proposing that the simplest possible way of alien communication: light, might be the way that they would attempt to talk with us.

What do you mean by "white noise"? When we send signals into space, it's most important that we differentiate our signals from completely random signals, or from astronomical sources, using math, generally. At the same time, when we look out in space, we can pretty much account for the majority of the light we see as coming from astronomical sources (I know that there are many individual examples of unknown sources, but these are rare). It wouldn't make sense for a civilization to use light emitted at a wavelength where stars emit a huge amount of light, generally you'd want to use the wavelength where your background is low (the radio offers a good example of that). And Bjorn, I'd have to believe that we'd blast them for as long as we could. The discovery of alien life on a nearby planet would be the GREATEST SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF ALL TIME. It wouldn't be crazy for a Paul Allen type to buy a radio emitter capable of beaming signals to this alien planet for hundreds of years. We have the money to be able to do this, easily. And he wouldn't be the only one. And, as we get better telescopes and understand the planet better, that would only increase our desire to communicate. I don't know if that's the likely limiting factor here.