Denial

I'm interested - although it has been in the pipeline for a good long while, now, so whether it will come out in 2012 I am not sure... Brian Mitsoda provided the writing for Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlnes, which was by some distance the best thing about that game. If he can turn that expertise into a dialogue-driven zombie group management/RPG thing, I am _so_ there.

That's very true - I guess it's just odd how on the nose the treatment is in The Next Karate Kid - every bad guy seems to have "PS is a rapist" tacked on to the end of their character sheet. It feels like the writers didn't notice the way it was stacking up in the narrative, because in each individual scene it seemed like a good way to make that particular bad guy more clearly a bad guy.

Because it was pelting it down with rain all day around here, I ended up staying in and writing a blog post about the whole Christoforo brouhaha. Well, that and watching The Karate Kid 3 and The Next Karate Kid - the one with Hilary Swank. Watching them back to back is like an object lesson in how TV writers differentiate between male and female protagonists. Ralph Macchio's Karate Kid's first challenge - the one where his karate is not strong enough to overcome the bad kid's karate - always has the stake that he will look bad in front of a girl he likes. Hilary Swank, on the other hand, is constantly threatened with molestation. Seriously, every time she gets into a fight situation before she masters karate, there's an implicit or explicit threat of sexual assault. It's frankly disquieting.

Yep, that was my point -it's mentioned earlier in this thread, as well.

The ivy-covered skyscrapers reminded me immediately of Enslaved - which was a really good game except for the game parts, IYSWIM. Hopefully Naughty Dog can round that out a bit...

Is anyone playing this? I am wondering whether to pick it up on the sale... but I really need at least some friends (who are terrible at FPSes) to make it work.

Definitely get the HUmble bundle - something else you might want to try, if you have a decent broadband connection, is OnLive - you can try demos without a subscription...

I first read Milk and Cheese and Hectic Planet in Deadline, which must be dating me... liked Dorkin's work ever since. His wife, Sarah Dyer, also does cool stuff - including working on Space Ghost. But agree w/ syntheticgerbil - his more sincere stuff about dealing with anxiety and depression is terrific.

Either Mario has found a giant tanooki, killed it and is wearing its skin... ...or he's a furry.

I played it at the Wild Rumpus - it is _awesome_. Although I didn't follow the musical cues at first, and got totally owned. And it turns out Alice from Shacknews was born to play Johann Sebastian Joust. But yes! If you get a chance to play it, definitely go for it, and likewise B.U.T.T.O.N, which was also made by the Copenhagen Games Collective.

I'm doing a psychotic, rage-crazy run-through at the moment, and I was (appropriately) furious that I couldn't

SWEET! I spent about 40 minutes talking to Greenawalt at GamesCom, or more precisely in the conference centre the day before GamesCom. That cat really likes cars. I mean, really.

Finally did the last couple of hundred yards of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Or D3us 3x, as it should be known. Bloody Hell, that's a game that gets a bit messy at the end. Still, a very good game. Although the way that NPCs would occasionally whistle the theme tune to the original Deus Ex meant that I got the immersion-breaking earworm: I'm Adam Jensen, and I've got a metal leg, Adam Jensen, and I've got a metal arm, Plus a metal leg, And a metal arm, And I'm sad because I couldn't keep my ex from harm Also, as a stealth-based non-lethal build the bosses were rather annoying -

Anyone going? Meeting up? Looking forward to anything in particular? (Yes, this is a terrible post. I can only apologise. Bit rushed.)

Hopefully I'll see you at the stand, Nachimir ... and I'm hoping to make the meetathon also, other Idle peeps. In most situations "I'm the very tall one with the wild hair who appears to have been dressed by his hipster mother" would be enough of a description, but at an RPS meetup I'm not sure it will be...

Trivia: "Children of Men" is a quote from Psalm 90: Short version: "Return, ye children of men" means "time to die, humans".

I'm sort of accidentally at GDC Europe - happened to be in Cologne, seemed like a giggle. Is anyone around? I can offer coffee and some really keen sausage stew. No, really. I love Germany so much.

I am playing this with people I don't know - I'm not sure I want to do it even with acquaintances, because you really seem to start hating and distrusting each other really quickly...

Is anyone else on UK1? The server thing is kind of bad - specifically, it means that FS is currently more hostile to no-barriers two-person play than Laser Squad Nemesis was. Of course, LSN got around this by _emailing your whole turn_, which was also not ideal...

Steady on! He may not have covered himself in glory, here, but there's no reason to suggest that he has a sexually transmitted disease.

Anyone who has yet to play this game, PLAY THIS GAME. For serious.

I liked the demo a lot, although it flashed a warning light, because the thing that struck me as most affecting - the byplay between the main character and his wife - was the part that was least sustainable - at some point, possibly the end of the tutorial, the wife would have to be killed, or she'd have to have a lot of dialogue written for her, which feels like it would be a distraction from the open-world gameplay. Moment of unintentional hilarity during the demo when I dutifully went to the wardrobe, found the sheet, tore it up to bandage her wound, got painkillers from the bathroom to give to her, and then picked up a pillow and used it on her, assuming the system would put it under her head to help her sleep. Instead, I watched with horror as my character smothered his wife to death. I mean, thanks for the option, guys, but a little warning next time?

For Gearbox and 2K, I mean. Sales won't be hurt by negative reviews the way they might be for an FPS without the same brand. Like Pirates of the Caribbean 4: you've probably made up your mind about whether you're going to watch it before the reviews come out.

According to the article Wired did when it looked like it was stone dead in 2009, the way the workflow went was that a task would be assigned and continue with feedback from lower-level management over the course of about until it was advanced enough to go to higher-level management, at which point the whole thing was shot down and they had to go back and start from scratch. That may or may not be accurate, but it might explain why Gearbox might have inherited whatever hadn't yet been scratched at the moment the lights went off... the rumour at the time was that it was near to gold in May 2009, but I think that with the benefit of hindsight that possibly wasn't the case. So, what ElMuerte said, basically. The perfect is not only the enemy of the good but might actually shank the good in the exercise yard. The upside is that DNF is probably to some extent critic-proof - a lot of people will buy it out of curiosity, or because the marketing appeals to them, and when it drops in price even more people will buy it out of curiosity. And Gearbox now have the license, and when things settle down can credibly say "we did the best we could with this impossible job - making a game that was true to the spirit of a 90s shareware game, but also had the mechanics of a AAA FPS, and that would justify over a decade of waiting, on a schedule that let let us save the IP and the careers of the Triptych developers. Psychologically, we all - developers, reviewers and players - needed to get past Duke Nukem Forever, and we think that once the furor has died down a lot of people will see more of the good in the game and maybe rethink their position. But hang onto your hats - Duke Nukem 5 is going to be where the real new age of Duke Nukem begins. Coming Holiday 2013." Obviously, they could have Claptrap say it and swear more, but that's probably what I'd do, anyway.

According to the article Wired did when it looked like it was stone dead in May 2009, the way the workflow went was that a developer or level designer would be assigned a task, start work, then pull other people in if they got good feedback from lower-level management over the course of about until it was advanced enough to go to higher-level management, at which point the whole thing was shot down and they had to go back and start from scratch. That may or may not be accurate, but it might explain why Gearbox might have inherited whatever hadn't yet been canned at the moment the lights went off... the rumour at the time was that it was near to gold in May 2009, but I think that with the benefit of hindsight that probably wasn't the case. So, what ElMuerte said, basically. The perfect is not only the enemy of the good but might actually shank the good in the exercise yard. The upside is that DNF is probably to some extent critic-proof - a lot of people will buy it out of curiosity, or because the marketing appeals to them, and when it drops in price even more people will buy it out of curiosity. And Gearbox now have the license, and when things settle down can credibly say "we did the best we could with this impossible job - making a game that was true to the spirit of a 90s shareware game, but also had the mechanics of a AAA FPS, and that would justify over a decade of waiting, on a schedule that let let us save the IP and the careers of the Triptych developers. Psychologically, we all - developers, reviewers and players - needed to get past Duke Nukem Forever, and we think that once the furor has died down a lot of people will see more of the good in the game and maybe rethink their position. But hang onto your hats - Duke Nukem 5 is going to be where the real new age of Duke Nukem begins. Coming Holiday 2013." Obviously, they'll have Claptrap say it and it will be swearier, but that's probably what I'd do, anyway.