I suppose this is fair; I haven’t actually played the Forza games. My only experience is trying to play it when my roommate first got his Xbox One, and about 30 minutes into the unskippable cutscenes, endless tutorials, and complete lack of menu access to get to multiplayer mode (the thing we wanted to actually play)…

Lego: We want to put lego cars in your hyper-realistic car game
Forza: No
Lego: But we’ll give you <lots of money>!
Forza: N—-!
Forza Executives: Wait, how much money?
Lego: <lots of money>!
Forza: ...
Forza: ...
Forza: Okay fine.

Personally, I’m in favor of society and businesses adjusting to accomodate this mode of operation. A business with a hotline system that results in an unusual number for the recipient should train its staff on proper voicemail etiquette. Smaller businesses, or those with properly configured outgoing numbers, should…

I believe this is generally correct, however *most* modern games already have the proper materials in place, namely things like normal and displacement maps, but also things like specular, shininess, and other material data depending on the engine. Minecraft notably does not have any of this detail baked into its…

If I had to guess? Service agreements with carrier networks. I’m fuzzy on the details at this point, but when the original iPhone launched as an AT&T exclusive in the US, the carrier imposed all sorts of weird restrictions out of fear that the sudden surge of users and data would overburden their network.

From the store page, though this is easy to miss:

This one is almost unfair. It’s soooo cheesy, and yet I’ve listened to it three times today now. (I blame you for this.) They managed to find such a good lead singer that could take such silly lyrics and just *roll with it.* The resulting album is practically infested with earworms. I don’t even like the game that…

I could have gone my entire life without seeing that last image. The horror...
Dammit Bob.

As someone who is not a person of color, my initial read on the trailer was that they had nailed Barret, and I didn’t give it a second pass. That’s... unfortunate on my part, because once this article made me aware, the obviousness of the problem slapped me in the face. Thank you for bringing it up.

Heather, *you* are fantastic. You keep doing what you do and continue being clever and awesome. But I’m still going to star Michael’s post because honestly, I want whoever designed that awful Kinja popup which plagues the whole family of sites to get the message that we are no longer in the 90s, and have enough email…

I think it’s because the way you determine the “gender” of that word in Spanish depends on the subject. For singular subjects (latina, latino) it’s straightforward. For groups though, the default is masculine. All men = latinos. Men and women, or unknown: latinos. Exclusively women: latinas.

I work in a ticketing system day in and day out, and this advice is spot on! We do have a priority system that favors more critical issues (someone’s service cuts out entirely? techs are *on that* immediately) but generally we try to process the most latent tickets first and keep response times as quick as possible…

It totally is! The focus of the article is that Vimeo video, which is a lovely showcase of all the in-game animation that Josiah Haworth has done. You should check out the whole demo reel, it’s good stuff. :)

People always seem to be weirded out that I mostly prefer soundtracks, but this is a good answer as to why. They’re thematically consistent, interesting enough to tap my foot to, but not distracting enough to pull me out of whatever task I want to focus on. Recommended if anyone hasn’t tried it. :)

Do all the feature reviews have gigantic auto-playing video now? Hard pass, that caught me by surprise and blasted the audio to everyone in the room. Could it maybe not auto play?

I’ve beaten it on real NES hardware exactly once. The angel of fire at the end may kindly rot in hell. Though, the game gets one blessing: if you game over in the final temple, and ONLY in the final temple, you respawn at the entrance, and don’t have to map trek again. It’s the one bone the game’s weird lives system…

“What we’re trying to do is let them know that there is an enhanced experience in their market.”

Really, if they could just alter Zelda II’s game over to respawn you using the same logic as a regular death (and not AAAAALLLL the way back at the beginning of the *entire* world map) the game would be infinitely more playable without losing any of the otherwise satisfying difficulty.

To be fair to World of Light, the challenge matches aren’t for fighter unlocks, and so far all of the fighter unlocks have been basically free.

I’m trying to decide if Epic is brilliant, or incredibly foolish. Their launcher will gain a certain amount of popularity because it’ll by proxy bring in the Fortnite crowd, but when that craze inevitably dies down (and is replaced by whatever the new hot thing is), will their platform be able to survive on its own…