Cool stuff and quite an accomplishment, though it's not something you could actually build in survival mode since it uses command blocks.

How is Black Mesa unfinished? It's released, done. You can download and play through the whole thing right now.

Yeah it kinda *is* pretty standard because, being revolutionary for its time, it *set* many of the standards that FPS games are based on. It's also old enough that it doesn't adhere to many of the standards of later FPS games which many people are used to by now. If you've played up to at least "blast pit" and it's…

Weren't they supposedly working on the Xen levels to be released as a standalone, though? I didn't love those levels but I found them kind of interesting and I guess I didn't hate them as much as most people. Would have been interested to play the mod team's interpretations of those areas.

I doubt that I'll ever play through the commercial version whenever it's released, but I'll probably at least buy it as thank you for the amazing free version they've already put out there.

It's been a while since I've played the original, so it's hard to go point for point and compare them, but everything in Black Mesa: Source *feels* true to the spirit of the original. The source port is graphically far superior, of course, and has all the fun physics of the Source engine, so in my mind it's a suitable…

There's a fan-made (ok yes the whole game is fan-made but you know what I mean) alternate version of Surface Tension which I recommend for anyone who hasn't already played through the whole campaign, or is considering re-playing it:

Then Kotaku, etc, should harshly criticize any company which fires its own employees after they receive backlash for posting inflammatory tweets.

That would be great, except politicians never make statements that they can't dodge around, and even when they *d0* make concrete statements, there is always a much larger diversity of opinions out there, so even the most inflammatory statements will have a large number of supporters. This is because politics is all…

He screwed up. He got mauled by the Internet. He changed. Really, he took his most famous advice to heart. He dealt with it, and he dealt with it well.

Under communism, arcades are shut down by the government. Under capitalism, they are shut down by the free market. Either way no arcades for anyone.

I think I just want more games where you don't play as a person, but you interact with a human-oriented world. That's why this game looks interesting to me, and it's one of the reasons I was interested in games like Deadly Creatures, Katamari Damashi, and Mister Mosquito back in the day.

How explicit does a goal have to be for it to qualify as a goal? You kind of wave off the whole "kill the dragon" goal in Minecraft as not being sufficiently connected to the larger systems in place, but reaching the dragon and killing it requires that you gather the necessary resources and perform a certain degree of…

Wow, this has been a great series of posts and I think you've done a great job articulating something which I've been feeling but am unable to put into words.

QUOTE | "Crunch time, duct tape, and the force all have something similar—they each have a light side and a dark side."—Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment on whether crunch time is necessary in game development.

Agreed. If I click on it, and we comment on it, does that mean they're winning, though?

I'm not saying that the movies are bad, but doing something like splitting a relatively short children's book into three epic films, while adding material pulled from other books, is exactly the kind of thing that people like Bill Watterson would be rightly concerned about. Do you really think that if Tolkein were…

Um, how is the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, let alone the Hobbit "trilogy" an example of either of the 2 key things you just mentioned? Point #1 is impossible since Tolkien was dead when they made the movies, and point #2 is self-evidently not the case either, since in both movies they added new characters, changed key…

Maybe I don't understand how Xbox Minecraft works. Is there not a way to allow people you know to play alongside you without also opening the game up to any random person? Why would you run into trolling idiots if you were only playing with people on your friends list?

It *is* too much to ask. There's something called a friends list. Use it. The entire world does not need to be a wholesome and safe space for your children. Do you let your kid play Chat Roulette? You shouldn't. Likewise playing Xbox live with random strangers.