Can't agree more. Why go all out on the character art and then ruin the immersion with horrible animation. In my experience animations weighs far heavier than visual representation, so looks like they got it lobsided here. And what they get in return is a serious uncanny valley effect, no so much in terms of…

Interesting read. Seems mostly to pertain to the difference between latent and ink prints though, so a parallel between controlled conditions and "real world" examples. In the case of a taste or smell test in a controlled condition, you might expect it to quite possible.

There is something very poetic about the exponential release time increase of those games, and the name half life. Draws a very nice parallel to the decrease in mass that, however small it gets, will take a very very very long time indeed to disappear entirely, if ever it does so.

lol I can imagine...

My guess is due to the fact that there are certification windows. Their final version just went into certification, which means they can't change it. That takes an x amount of time, and then once it's released they can start certifications on updates, which will also take a certain amount of time.

He feeds that which he obsesses over, and in turn partly becomes it.

Reminds me of me and my father. I'd hide my gaming habits from him as much as I could, but the funny thing is my relationship with him actually fueled my escapist gaming habits for the most part. Vicious cycle if I ever saw one. Minority complex waiting to happen, just so you know.

The Atari Lynx game however was bloody freaking impossible. That damn bridge segment with the bikers, god I died there so many times.

I don't see people combining non-raytracing with raytracing, but yes it's very computationally heavy. The thing to remember you are no longer making approximations when you start raytracing, you're actually simulating what light does. Everything we have up to now, even the most elegant solutions, are plain hacks.

The whole idea behind raytracing tech is that it simplifies rendering. No more full screen post processing, no more shadow hacking, light volumes, etc. etc. All those complicated techniques that were created the last 20 years will instantly become obsolete once hardware becomes fast enough to do this real time.

I got Arkham City a while back on an earlier deal, but haven't really been drawn into it yet. The set of introductions just blew by really fast and I was like... wtf is going on, lol.

"I don't know if piracy of $4.99 games is a problem on Android tablets or not, but likely not a huge risk. Most consumers will pay if prices are reasonable; iTunes is proof of that."

On the topic of real vs. fictional science. If I try to think about what the Mass Effect does, that it could basically be making particles more/less susceptible to influence by the (or a) Higgs field.

That's an interesting take on that. It's fascinating to consider Gordon's being mute as a parallel to how crude our interface to virtual worlds are. It makes the virtual world somehow more real, by putting us in them as deficient members.

Yeh, the thing with the Charr is I think that they're more wolf/hyena like than cat. More ferocity than elegance, at least from what I've seen so far.

Resistance isn't futile! Spider-man is the future? Well I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener".

I was wondering about this and am really happy to see they've decided to put the last two races in the beta. Been wanting to try out the Sylvari. I doubt I'd like the Asura, but I'll try them as well anyway...

Indeed, that's the funny business with this view of games and puzzles. Puzzles are all about making choices, right up until you make the right one. The best puzzles furthermore make sure that you can't make that choice unless you do so intentionally, which is something Valve really tried to create in Portal. Their…

Agreed, I didn't mention much about the term interesting. But what choice a person finds interesting is wildly subjective at best, which makes it even more ambiguous. You could try and further specify this "quality" as something which leads to "meaningful impact".

Very reminiscent of Sid Meier's definition, which is pretty much the same: "A game is a series of interesting choices".