Xeneth

Did they ever back down from this and change it back to "Thief 4"? Gawd, what leetspeak fail... I work with a guy who now permanently pronounces the word "Thief" in everyday context as "Theeaf". It's caught on and is now spreading to other words like "Roh-ad" (Road).

Awesome update, this is an instant office prank classic, and shows off just how far a little web/admin know-how can take you!

This is an excellent point, actually- Pixel didn't translate the version most of us ended up playing on the PC... Though if anyone is of the opinion that the fanslation was in some way easier to understand or more compelling than the new one, I'd be very interested to see some comparative logic/analysis! Sometimes fans totally handle things with more TLC than companies. Kaizoku-Fansubs translation of the One Piece Anime is a good example that pops to mind. Awesome touches like deciding and explaining to the audience the logic behind leaving the word "Nakama" untranslated. "Friend" just wasn't cutting it, it's more like "Soul-bound True-Blue Comrade" so they did the work. Getting off my duff and checking if I have the Nintendo MoonDollars to get this today... EDIT: Hooray! Dear god what did they do to the music?! Had to change that shite first thing, as suggested. The new sprites look rather nice, but it's like they missed the point of the retro-evocative chiptunes entirely with the "voices" they chose. Right at the title theme, all the squareform "punchiness" was drained right out of it! Props for including the original sound and graphics, this is how ports/upgrades should be handled. I don't recall the sound EFFECTS being this obtrusive though... is the sound of weapon XP bouncing on the ground incredibly loud and annoying to anyone else? I guess that's one way to motivate the player to pick it the heck up... Feels great with the Classic Controller, I've still got it! Blew through the egg corridor, but I really should do something productive today...

I think it's a stark one bullet dead/not dead system, Grip. This sounds tense and extremely meta. Delicious! Probably won't be available to us rabble for quite a while though, right?

It's true, the horror stories are pretty neverending... I have not watched a single episode of The Tester and I find it unlikely that I ever will... It's redongculous. (recockulous? rewangculous?) From what I've seen, the "big brother" shenanigans they're going to put those fools through has little to do with video games, let alone quality assurance. As with all "reality" shows, the participants self-select for the most overblown, attention-whore-like qualities, (who else would want to be under that social microscope?) and the manufactured "drama" that they edit for/propagate is THE LAST thing you would want in a QA dept... Seriously, if your reaction to pressure is to cry or act out or something, you won't get far in this industry. As far as I know, Sony dismantled their first party QA departments here on the peninsula, so I'm not even sure where the winner(s) would be working. Maybe SOE? (Sony Online Entertainment) Like Penny-Arcade, I don't understand what they're competing for exactly. It's like a contest to become a Starbucks Barista- Pretty sure if you really wanted to do that you could submit a resume and not come off as a jerk or idiot. Entry level positions as prizes... Go figure.

I think that might be the most "obscure" one on the list, being released way at the end of the GBA lifecycle... Everyone was way more concerned with the DS at that point. DrillDozer was relegated to a similar fate.

Conf-Greh-Nade! Conf-Greh-Nade! Conf-Greh-Nade! /chant

Holy cow, I didn't know you COULD die in the tutorial, short of leaping off a cliff twice or accidentally blowing yourself up once it gives you bombs. How did it take you guys down, sounds like amusing death stories... Actually, it's been so long and I've gone so deep that I barely remember what the tutorial held, so don't listen to me, perhaps.

Hilarious! Do it! And show us what you get in reply! As for gamecrush itself, I don't even know what to make of it, really. I imagine encounters on the service to be as tepid as I imagine encounters over phone sex services being, having never partaken of such a thing.

Oh god I had repressed memories of playing through that game... UGH. In addition to all the crap that I pretty much agree with, let me just add the TERRIBLE and buggy sound design! You're platforming through sweeping majestic ruins while listening to vaguely Arabian ambiance, when suddenly some enemies spawn and the music shifts to some fucking chugga jigga wugga butt rock sounding shite OH MY GOD RAGE!!! ZpmeosZH3ZI The best was when the combat exit triggers would fail and you'd be forced to majestically platform through the next section to terrible generic rock music... I never did play Two Thrones or the Reboot, and I think they have WW to thank for that. Wonder what the re-reboot is going to be like? Wow, I totally missed that, thanks! It's good to see him owning up to it, but I have to wonder how much of that is the developer community getting on his case... Ah, well. An apology is an apology. I'll definitely try to keep an eye on The Witness dev. blog.

The company I'm at now is not into the pranking, but I've certainly worked in environments where leaving your workstation unlocked was basically taboo and you'd get "punished" for it nine times out of ten. I don't think any of the ones I've been a part of were particularly epic, but... Post-It or tape over the optics under the mouse. High result-to-effort ratio. The classic terrible desktop swapout of course, but the best version of that was when IT did it to a guy remotely while he was sitting at his desk! There was a cell phone charger that was really weird, it was designed to house the entire cord inside the AC converter somehow, so it resembled a mouse... The one-two punch was switching the coffee addicts brew out for decaf and replacing the mouse on the same morning... Turning the display on monitors upside-down. As I recall there was a shortcut in Windows XP that made doing this very simple, but I can't seem to repro. it right now. There was a bad tester that we were pretty sure was sleeping out in his car and using the bathrooms to take spit baths in the morning. He was always sort of socially creepy and tended to touch people at weird times, etc. Letting him go was a nerve wracking experience for my lead, who started to get really elaborate heartfelt stalker emails from the guy afterwards... which were of course actually sent by HIS boss! Someone called in sick and it was all too obviously to play the latest WoW expansion or some shite... The rest of us did OT that night, and every single item in or on his desk got wrapped up into a giant office katamari using the cords and supplies from his workstation. I wish we had taken a picture of it.

Totally agree! Lookit Sombre show off his SC2 beta shortcut... Visually talking up the classics with his SS2, and taking care not to cut off TOO much of the Diablo 2 logo with that game window- Just enough that it's recognizable, so cute! *snerk* Sorry, can't keep a straight face And thanks for the reassuring words about lengthy posts Groucho, I was indeed being rather self-conscious about that habit, as it's landed me in hot water on forums before. Good to hear this place is different, and in my recent efforts to lurk less and contribute more, everything I've seen backs you up on that. That said, I'm aware of the holes in my posting style, and I still want to strive to pack more content into smaller spaces. I also want to ask more questions in relation to the multiple statements and opinions I'm flinging every which way!

Um, I'm playing! Super late to the party... Never played DotA, or Heroes of Newerth, but I do own a copy of Demigod. I'm not very good at this sort of game at all yet, but I'm learning. It's much more strategic than I thought it would be, and I seem to be swinging wildly back and forth between exultant "I'm getting better!" moments and being pasted like the newb I am. Still not really comfortable in the genre, but liking it better than traditional RTS, where I have multitasking and micro issues up the wazoo. Turns out only being responsible for, (at the most) two units helps a lot. I probably like the DoW2 campaigns for the same reason. I have yet to spend a single red cent on the game, but I'm becoming tempted as I gain appreciation for the balance and effort Riot appears to be putting into improving the core mechanics of the subgenre they essentially spawned. Everything in the game, (save for cosmetic alternate skins) can be purchased through diligently playing for points, which I found pretty surprising. I guess people are impatient enough that they're doing alright on the sale of completely optional RMT points that would make the process of leveling up or purchasing characters faster. I agree that the Adobe AIR/game client mash-up feels a little janky, and I'm not the biggest fan of the Blizzard-inspired art style, but this is definitely the kind of game I play for the mechanics as opposed to the aesthetics... It makes sense that it look somewhat like Warcraft 3 from a marketing perspective, they ARE trying to essentially capture that same player base/community they created and take a shot at monetizing it. BOY do they ever need to finish polishing that second, smaller map for ranked play, though. Smaller, quicker games would change things up a lot, even though the wealth of characters and the team dynamics stay fresh enough to keep me coming back for now.

Nice! Good to know I'm not the only Nintendo music memory freak... I failed to get , as I have sadly played neither...

Did we really not already have a spelunky thread?! I find that hard to believe... And yet I can't find it, so huzzah I suppose. This is one of my favorite games of all time, and it introduced me to the gameMaker software I'm currently trying to wrap my head around. I've played an obscene amount of Spelunky, and yet I have only completed it once. I love how challenging it is, in that way where every death feels like it's squarely my fault. The controls give me the power to run and jump and act just fast enough to feel powerful in a platforming sense, while being more than enough to get me into trouble over and over again... I can't count the number of times I've told myself to slow the hell down and be more careful, but the self-admonishment usually only lasts as long as my next attempt, if that. What a heady mix of empowerment and vulnerability the protagonist affords the player! It's amazingly deep, and there are still loads of things I have yet to discover the true purpose of. The graphical presentation awoke the gamer child in me, and the only sources of knowledge about the games systems I possess is gleaned from a combination of trial and error and conversations with a coworker who is similarly inclined. I wouldn't have it any other way. There's something primal about how "olde skool" games like this force me to learn organically through interaction... When it comes to more "hand-holdy" experiences, I don't tend to have problems with allowing the internet to just tell me how a thing works, I suppose because the game tended to do that anyway from the start. What's one more "tutorial" from an outside source, eh? I've dilligently stopped playing since learning that it's coming out for XBLA, though. I want to support Derek Yu and I look forward to new secrets and tweaks in addition to crazy achievements and such. I'm glad I already play Spelunky on a game pad! So, to work a little give-and-take into this textWall, has anyone else felt terrible about using the damsels as weapons? I felt a little better about doing it the first time one inadvertently got me killed by running around like a chicken with her head cut off, but it still bugs me at times. They're SO EFFECTIVE though, that I can't seem to stop using them as trap bait and anti snake/spider projectiles! They have so many more HP than I tend to have, dang it.

CastMedium sounds really cool actually, I should check that out when I'm jonesing for some commentary. I work in the quality assurance department of a company that makes video games. Like most people in my profession, I have unrealized dreams of being more closely linked to the actual development side of things, but lack a lot of skills and motivational drive to do much about it on most days... If/when I conquer that and a game emerges from my brain hole onto the internets, you can be sure that this forum will hear about it! Now, back to procrastinating...

I lawled! I feel like a gamer cliche now that it's all over the news, but I really WAS going to get a DSiXL, (I have huge hands!) and now I'm probably just going to stick with my DSlite until more details about this new one emerge... With slightly better timing you'd make more money over here, Nintendo! Consumers have already proven their willingness to buy a new, slightly improved iteration of the DS EVERY YEAR god damn it... you might as well milk it properly by playing things closer to the vest.

Yeah, this is a struggle for me, in case you couldn't already tell! I try to inject constructive elements into it where I can, but I can't lie, I'm a very judgmental and overly-analytical person by nature. For what it's worth, while IMMERSED in Braid itself, most of what I said above hadn't even crystallized. I was in video game heaven, the introspective thing tends to happen in retrospect. Blow is very vocal in the community, so it's hard for me to put a finger on WHICH talk he was being dismissive of the Sands of Time design in, but I did find this article, which might shed some light... As stated before, I don't disagree so much as I find the tone and choice of words to be presumptuous and dismissive. Genius level humans are notorious for being challenging to interface with on various levels *shrug*.

It makes us look sort of dense as an industry at times... I think mature adults of both genders understand that the kind of physical attractiveness that has MEANING requires that not EVERYTHING be revealed. Imagination is a powerful thing, and if I can see a HINT of the actual shapeliness, my brain will automatically fill in the rest, usually with more fidelity and sex appeal than the actual "painted on" revealing outfits generate. It's a waste, now that I think of it, because it deadens the impact of anything sexy a character COULD do later on. If a female warrior spends the entire game properly armored, imagine the how titillating it'll seem by comparison when she shows up at the ball wearing the low cut dress! Game art needs to imitate life more in this regard; In the real world, which types of girls show TONS of cleavage ALL THE TIME? Mmm hmm. Real women know how and when to apply eye candy strategically, so why don't most games? I almost feel like marketing has no idea how my brain actually works, but then again, perhaps mine is a strange brain that represents a small enough demographic to explain the denseness. *shrug* Here's one for ya: I love how the complete reliance on the sex to sell it even applies to the COPY. Really? A guy who plays the game and the SomethingAwful forums are the least biased and trustworthy sources you could find, eh? Also, the copy implies that they released a class-based Online RPG with abilities, but prior to a recent patch, all classes had the SAME abilities? The title of the game itself is gibberish that I forget if I look away from the image for more than two seconds... And the icing on the cake is the flash animation- There's snow falling on her for some reason, and you see that weird grey streak across her leg? That's a SHINE ANIMATION. The kind you'd see on a bejeweled game piece or the title of the game in other flash ads. Yes, her left leg, and ONLY her left leg... is bling bling shiny. WTF.

Yeeaah, I remember... pretty funny, but very likely a coincidence. I remember being really surprised that anyone actually "found" that, but I shouldn't be. This is the internet! Here's a fun little quiz! http://www.sporcle.com/games/BluePikmin/mario_medley ...I don't know if I should be proud or embarrassed that I got all but two of them right away on my very first try... Such a Nintenwhore. *sigh*

They've already covered the basics for yeh, but just to drive a couple of points home: http://www.boingboing.net/features/morerock.html I'm in a very similar situation, and the lure to do something really innovative and complex is so strong because we make the kind of games we want to play. Retreading design ideas so that a concept can come to fruition has it's own danger, in that if a project doesn't excite you, you won't finish it. I think the trick is to find ONE crazy element or "hook" to focus on that holds your interest enough to get a head of steam going on it... and then couch it in easily created/familiar territory that won't take forever to complete. One well-explored mechanic can be equivalent to a shit ton of just about everything else that makes up a game. Also, don't think that your game has to have x amount of polish or it's not done/real... A LOT of the best games of the last decade were first released as what amounted to little tech demos or proof of concepts that ended up being gateways to obtaining support in the form of funds, publishers, like-minded teammates, you name it. If it's fun/entertaining, not much else matters at first.

WHAT?! Kool Aid Balrog... Man, you've got drywall all over you now, why would I want to take a shower with you? (Cause the character design was originally based on a bar of soap? Eh? EH?! ...sorry) Thanks for the tip about the sound, will do as soon as I snag it.

Bummed about not being in attendance, but wanted to keep the thread bounced high and encourage East Coast Thumbs to hook up (In a platonic way). If a bunch of people show up with musical instruments at least you'll know who to blame...

I'm a fellow convert! I can't vouch for the awesomeness of their headsets or keyboards, but I can say with some confidence that and mouse you get from Razer is a quality piece of precision pointing peripheral that will last a long time... I hate sounding like an ad too, but experience bears it out- Razer mice just work for me.

I played the crap out of Chime while listening to this episode, so it was cool to hear your take on it while it was being played. I too was consumed by Lumines and Meteos... I find that I'm actually better at those type of games when I'm not really focused on the action. Some of my craziest combos in Tetris Attack/Puzzle League have been made while debating the meaning of life or some crap with someone sitting behind me. Thanks for the new high scores! Wow, what an angry Wikipedia finish! Reminds me of a comment that a friend had about the 'cast now that Breedon is sealed inside the Reader Mail vault, that the 'cast has a little more snark and edge now that Steve is settling into his dynamic with Jake. Can't say I disagree, but I'm kind of into the saucyCast, so roll with it! Jake "Silence" Rodkin?! I dunno... "Video Games" is pretty memorable.