Agonizing over Akamai
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There are few business predictions I'd make with cast-iron guarantees, but this one qualifies: The amount of information and content bouncing around the Internet will grow dramatically in the future.
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Tycho:  You might want to see this, or you might not:  I know that Gabriel has sworn off all exposure to the game, which may also be your policy.  Even so, this is the first time they've shown the distaff side of the character creator, so maybe you'll rescind your earlier mandate.  A video with a similar theme popped up over at 1up as well, and it does things a little differently:  I don't like its look at the character creator as well, but the cut they have of the intro is far superior.  If you watched the other one, you're in for a penny, in for a pound:  you should check it out.    There's a lot of other content out today as well  at GameTrailers - but the whole thing is a minefield of spoilers so I'll understand if you hold back.  The intro itself (from the 1up cut) is perfectly executed.  Understand that I am almost the optimal audience for this sort of game, but even so.  I see a lot of game content, and you need to dig pretty deep to generate actual wonder.      I was excited to learn that they got Jack Wall in to do the soundtrack - he's worked with BioWare before, but he also did the soundtrack for Myst IV: Revelations - one of my all-time favorites.    (CW)TB
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Irritation awaits in the PlayStation 3 game due to glitches and lameness that shouldn't have made it to market. In Game|Life.
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Tycho:  Turbulence surrounding the compulsory installation of the PS3's Devil May Cry 4, a procedure which is epic in length, was eventually answered by the scuttling drones of the official Capcom Blog.  Their response, only loosely interpreted, is that complaining about it is dumb - and if you complain about it, then you are dumb.
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Tycho: Gabe had to watch the other Gabe today, so we made the comic a day in advance. It's about the guy who wrote that ridiculous Mass Effect article. We decided to put it up a day early because, just as we predicted in the strip, he's taken a swipe at gamers. The young man quoted in his piece did not represent our community well, but locking horns with a professional liar would bring out the worst in anyone. (CW)TB
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Tycho:  Having played collectible card games since the original printing of Magic - taking my dishwasher's tips across the street to Dragon Tails to secure boosters for the coveted Arabian Nights - seeing Gabriel take up the pastime has warmed (but not thawed) my black heart.  It's always a portion of myself I've bridled in his presence, kept hidden, suppressed may be the word.  To have him take it up so freely makes me wonder which perversion of mine he'll take up next.    When he started talking about his "Firestarter" deck, whose dancing fires were stoked by a mysterious device known as "The Holon Engine," I began to worry.  The dangers of Netdecking are fairly substantial when it comes to friendly play, a corrosive force that turns friendly pick-up games into ostentatious displays of wealth on par with rap videos.  If you're playing in a competitive venue, building on prior art and making loads of precision purchases is probably your only recourse.  But if you're just playing at lunch, let me be clear:  you are consorting with devils.    I took time over the weekend to hit the level cap in Call of Duty 4, and then just to be sure that I understood what was going on I played for several more hours.  I'm not the most skilled player you will encounter, with a roughly equal number of kills and deaths, but I prefer to think of my work in an assassinative context - the removal of key players at key moments.  Please let me have this.  In the absence of the game's deeply integrated progression scheme, Infinity Ward would merely have created one of the best shooters available today.  It would have staunch proponents, and they would be right to praise it.  Is there a substance within cream that can rise to the top of itself?  This substance has been discovered.  As a distillation of the Infantry FPS, this is right down to it.  This is brutal, unrepentant, bathtub fucking hooch.  It is tight and smooth, it is lethal.  Unrelenting in its intensity, your first rounds - indeed, your first few levels - will be spent without the succor of CoD4's rich rewards for continued play.  But you'll see them on the killcam, every time you go down:  this one has increased health, of course that would help.  This one does more damage.  This one, after he's killed, pulls his sidearm and takes a few final shots.  This one's shots retain more of their damage after they pass through a wall.        You earn these for leveling up, with the experience you gain for every kill, for every round.  You also earn experience for Challenges, which are (collectively) "awesome things that you did."  I completed X-Ray challenges last night for killing people behind walls, which dished up bonus XP - this is displayed with exultant audio and video cues at the very moment of success.  Killing while crouched, killing while prone, taking down an enemy helicopter, this is all gravy.  There are challenges specific to your weapon, as well:  for kills and headshots with that firearm, you travel down an upgrade path unique to that weapon that reveals sights, camouflage patterns, and other tools to customize your equipment.    Watching videos of multiplayer play online, you'll get the impression that it looks better than it does.  It looks fantastic, don't get me wrong, but it's not completely photorealistic.  What it does have is an extremely reliable framerate and excellent level design, so that during the experience of play these fantastic visuals are transmuted into something sublime.  Here's what I mean:  if a friend is over, and they are watching you play, they'll be able to detect flaws here and there.  Level geometry isn't especially fanciful, and blown paper or leaves look a little strange.  But for the player, movement is just right, player models are just right, and the environments are right so that moment to moment everything gels.      As I said on Friday, to bring this thing into the house of Halo is pretty ballsy - but it'll carve out its proper due.  On the Playstation 3, what force could stand against it?  I have a high opinion of Haze, but I've never played it - that's based mostly on my gut.  Call of Duty 4 will fall hard on that system, like shrieking artillery.
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Pssst. Jedi wannabes. You might wanna jump ship. A sci-fi force more powerful than Lucas' is coming soon - not to a theater, but to an Xbox 360 near you.
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Not interested in Ellison's cold embrace
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Tycho:  It's floating around now, out there on the Wub, and it calls to you.  Or maybe it does, I don't actually know.  In any case, it can be got from 3D Downloads, the Fileplanets, GamersHell, or WorthDownloading.  Download it from mulltiple sites simultaneously for a naughty thrill.  God only knows how this would run on my Vista rig at home, but it's a Vista rig, so you can probably guess.  (CW)TB
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Tycho:  I've been au Canada at Hothead since Monday, making a final pass on the entire script and writing new stuff for things we managed to fit into the first ep.  After two days of this process, I feel as though my brain has been dragging a plough through a stubborn field.  Like every other part of this adventure, it's been profoundly educational.  I enjoy it, but there is a constant electrical hum in my skull that I assume is the byproduct of creating a universe in real time.
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Simply declare your undying devotion to the console of your choice and behave completely irrationally on the message boards. Commentary by Lore Sj&#246;berg.
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Tycho:  We still think about Eye of Judgment quite a bit - sometimes I will sit in silence and think about it, or think about it while I lay dormant in my charge casket.  I think about placing cards carefully on its luxurious cloth mat, smirking as distant foes are gnawed by my lizard proxies.  We are overjoyed (joymax!) that they stuck with the new concept, the card thing, as opposed to the brutally sardonic original.    I don't like constantly being pushed to pre-order things, but there is also a point (it would be easy to graph) where I'm not willing to let fate's whimsical machinery determine what I play.  So during a recent mall run I put down some money on whatever I could remember at the time - unscientifically, it was Metroid, Stranglehold, Halo, Stuntman, and Mass Effect.  This doesn't account for everything between now and November, certainly, but it kind of felt like a quiz show and I was intimidated.  Then I remembered Eye of Judgement and its manifold pleasures, endeavoring to append it, listwise.  It was at this point that "John" told us that both the game and the Playstation Eye peripheral had been cancelled.    At this assertion Gabriel stood up straight and still, like a meerkat.    "No, it wasn't," said he, quietly.  A cold quiet, like space.        When I am confronted with mere distortions of facts, I can typically slice through them to the beating truth.  But when a person says something that is flatly false, this is very disorienting for some reason and I am without my mind's full power.  Then the guy compounded things by saying they had very few preorders, and this was accompanied by a sneer, as though the number of preorders was some crucial consideration when assessing quality.  He actually thought it was funny that I wanted to buy it.    I wanted to ask him if he understood that a product not being available for preorder and a product not existing, or never being allowed to exist constituted profoundly different states, but these are the deep thoughts that occur to a person while they are tucking in at the food court and not when they are face to face with strange men at the EB.       When we returned from the store, almost as if on cue the product began to appear at online retailers - for sixty dollars.  Yes, that's correct.  The Playstation Eye peripheral plus the card game, for ten dollars more than a Sixaxis?  I won't say that I expected extortion, but I at least expected profit.  Assuming you have the Triple already in hand, they're making the Eye (and Eye of Judgment) an easy decision.    Let me take a moment to welcome PAX attendees to this year's celebration, even though it isn't especially useful to readers in Glasgow.  I hope the new venue is to your liking.   Be kind to each other, even to your defeated foes!  And be kind to your Enforcers, for they have toiled in your service.
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Tycho:  Heavenly Sword is, as you will soon discover, the very definition of a rental title.  Clocking in at somewhere between five and six hours (depending on your appetite for overwrought cinemas) it's a decent game saddled by impossible expectations.  It has silly ideas and grandeur in close proximity to one another.   It tries hard.  And it's not bad, by any means.  But it's not excellent, and perhaps unfairly it had this onus placed upon it.  I've said that Lair is not the Playstation 3, and nor is Heavenly Sword, but taken together one must come to the unmistakable conclusion that the Playstation 3 is a game console and not the supernatural artifact they have presented it as.  That however many processors and however many gigs of space are not especially relevant when put in the service of middling entertainment.    It has a decent combat system, and using this combat system you will progress from locked room to cramped, locked room until you come face to face with some jeering asshole.  You might kill them either because of the jeering or because you think that death might cull their interminable monologues.  There's a mean snake bitch and a pervert and an oaf.  Oh!  And en evil king.  The only thing running through my head during the lavish and no doubt expensive mo-capped cutscenes was that these kings and bitches and so forth should form a band.  It never seems to know if it wants to be a hilarious comic circus or a stark medieval saga.  Play it, and you'll know what I mean.     There are successes, though:  Kai, the mostly deranged sidekick, charms from the outset.  Her feral animations and nuanced delivery really make her stand out against this batch of also-rans.  Any object that can be thrown can also be thrown and then guided in slow motion, including corpses, which is something you must see to believe.  We didn't even have a target; we would just throw bodies so that they flew like Superman head-first into gongs.  This is something you can do for a half an hour - or more - without tiring of it.  This guided firing is called "Aftertouch," and it's about fifty percent of the game.  One wonders what the game's length would actually be if you didn't play half of it in slow-motion.        Some measure of your enjoyment will be bound up in whether or not you "buy" the story that they are telling.  I've heard it described as epic, when it's pretty rudimentary fantasy-by-numbers bullshit, so who knows.  It's all a matter of perspective:  are we judging it against only PS3 games?  If so, things are shaping up!  If you own more than one console - or a personal computer - your standards for grand storytelling were recently adjusted upward.
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Tycho:  There's a new Alternate Reality Game spinning up for Halo 3, God Damn them - God Damn them to hell.  I know perfectly well that I am being subjugated by a sophisticated marketing effort, that the best one can accomplish in these games is to get a real good look at the teeth before the mouth closes around you.  I type this even as the rabbit holes stand open in two other windows.  I don't presume to speak for the entire species, but there is something about secrets that does bit the mind.
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Tycho:  I'm aware of Spore, but it's not a game I look around for in an active mode.  Here is a preview of the game, for example, but I haven't read it so I don't know if it's good or not.  I'm especially disinclined to read previews in particular, because I think it's a game that is likely to preview well.  You aren't likely get past the novelty stage in am Official Press context - it's going to be pure discovery from beginning to end, wall to wall tendrils and eye stalks, ginning up hobbling quintapeds whose journey to the mailbox is difficult, if not impossible.  The incredible outpourings of support for the game are themselves incredible to me, but what they've done is try to create a product whose potential is as raw as possible.  We seem to value that ethereal quantity differently than most.
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Tycho:  Having already purchased two fifths of The Orange Box over the last few years, the level of value I have derived from it is "fantastic" but not "supernatural."  For Gabriel, who never finished the second Half-Life and never purchased the first episode, the aforementioned Box represents an intimidating and possibly even brutal level of content for one's holiday dollar.  It's hard enough trying to keep up with all the games that are coming out, but when you start putting more than one game on the disc the difficulty is compounded.   We're lucky, then, than the best thing on there can be completed in only a couple hours.     I've tried to make my rounds through the disc, but I kept coming back to Portal until I'd completed it.  I expect every part of this strange collection to be full of virtue, in the way that Valve's anomalous position in the games industry allows: self-funded development in their sky-high Bellevue commune until each product sings.  But Portal is strange, even for them.  Risky on every axis, we may now say that the "first person puzzle comedy" has now been proven out as a genre.  The gameplay is strong, but Portal's unique combination of hilarity and menace elevates it, resulting in a few perfect, indelible hours of gameplay.          My TeamFortress 2 experience so far on the console has been fairly uneven.  Coming from the PC beta, where I sometimes battled with stability concerns but the games played smooth, I'm now grappling with the reverse.  I love the play experience, as I've already expressed, and I'm rarely of the opinion that having more players automatically improves a game - so the differential between the PC and 360 platforms isn't as important to me as it might be to others.  No, the problem with TF2 on the 360 (and likely the PS3, as well) is that peer to peer hosting just ain't cutting it.  There are games that seem to manage it better, but with Vista PCs authenticating into the service now peer to peer games should be an option.  This needs fixed overnight.     I'll try to complete the second Episode over the weekend, interleaved with finishing the writing on my own game, which has become more difficult since completing Portal.  I'm starting to think that Precipice needs a greater concentration of synthesized ladies.      I would be abdicating my duty if I neglected to mention the EA thing, which is really the EA/BioWare/Pandemic thing.  I was under the impression that BioWare and Pandemic had merged precisely to give themselves leverage over monolithic publishers like Electronic Arts, but who knows.  The biggest fallout in the short term is that, beyond the first Mass Effect, a multiplatform release is almost certain.  Of course, I wholly endorse that kind of thing, but I imagine that Microsoft might hold a different opinion.  After spending years promoting the series, enduring delays, and now having spent months beating the shit out of it in test, it's fair to say that MS was investing in a larger trilogy - one that gamers would associate exclusively with their brand.
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I plead guilty to past transgressions. So, call me a hypocrite if you will. I don't care anymore. I refuse to get stuck in the past because the present and the near future is fun. Indulge if you will in recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images experienced as intrusive and distressing. The obsession with Microsoft in Open Software communities is excessive and unreasonable and a product of the mind. My only hope is that such thoughts, impulses, and, or images can be expunged by logic or reasoning, which is contrary to the notions in the psychiatric community. read more