Sonic introduced a fundamentally different philosophy towards game design. Mario is an incredibly mechanical game that managed to reverse engineer some charm into itself. The controls are tight. The level design is precise. The "rules" of winning and losing are clearly spelled out, and the fun comes purely from…

They should have kept her role limited to fainting and getting kidnapped so we can be social justice warriors on her behalf!

I want my ELF COPS trilogy.

It's really frustrating that they didn't use the touchpad on the PS4, too. That's exactly what it's designed for but apparently they want identical experiences on PS4 and XBONE.

1) Better/more useful gestures. Point/Wave/Sit/Dance is way to bare and in the beta at least, I didn't hear anyone using voice chat. If they added tagging, more gestures, and accompanying pre-recorded phrases, it would allow actual communication.

The lore is pathetic right now, but I'm hoping its due to last minute rewrites. If you look in the companion app, the grimoire cards are about 80% placeholder, and what's there is super vague.

Let's break it down:

Yeah I think it's more of a happy accident that they chose to put a PR spin on. They chose to lock the framerate at 30fps because they wanted a certain level of graphic fidelity, and conveniently it did happen to make the game look more film-like. But I feel like that whole debate ends up just being semantics since no…

Either way it boils down to an artistic choice. If they wanted to nerf the graphics and get 60fps, they would have done that. No one was forcing their hand one way or the other. They chose to go with a lower framerate and more expensive rendering, to achieve the look they wanted.

I like the shape language that's going on, and the functionality of the pouches is nice. The sillohuette is pretty indistinct though; he's got the "potato people" problem that Gears of War's designs have. And the actual mechanical properties of the suit don't make much sense. It's not really armored in places you'd…

You know what movie showed Godzilla a lot? The 1997 one. So clearly, that's the best.

In the original script for Alien, all the characters were written as androgynous. Then they were cast as either men or women. And Ripley became one of the most prominant female action heroes ever. I'm not much of a writer but it seems the first way to go wrong in writing a female character, is to write a female…

It's not fake outrage - people are telling developers what they want. And Ubisoft was probably not expecting people to be this passionate about it. Now they know. And next time they're cutting corners and they have to choose between female characters and some other feature, they will hopefully make a different…

If you want to make it perfect then there are subtle differences that you'd want to capture in a lot of different movements. But if you're crunched for time, there's only a few animations that would have to be gender-specific. Of course it wouldn't be perfect and as an animator you'd know it could be better, but you'd…

As it happens, I'm working on a game in which we are retroactively adding playable female characters so I can tell you from firsthand experience that it's bullshit. You really only need to change a couple animations like walking/running. Fighting and jumping around are not things that you normally see a human doing so…

They would really only need feminine versions of a few animations, not every single one. Just replacing the running and walking animations would be enough to sell it. Even if her climbing and fighting animations were a bit more masculine, those aren't actions you'd normally see humans doing so it wouldn't trigger as…

What these guys wear to the studio on an ordinary work day is totally fine. But if you know you're going up in front of a bunch of people and representing your entire production team, you don't want to be dressing like you're still in high school. That just reflects badly on everyone you're representing. The…

The problem is, khaki cargo shorts have not been trendy since like 2002.

Did you go to the graveyard? Don't go there.

I played a good 10-12 hours of the beta and even with all the glitches and pre-launch quirks it was still a really fun game. It looks old-school with the top-down view but that's rather deceptive as it's actually a very inventive game with new ideas; especially the way dialogue and elemental magic is handled. I think…