Whether they do or not, the fact that the narrative is being shaped by Evan Narcisse, formerly of these pastures, gives me a huge amount of hope that the game is going to say something or, perhaps, let our experience speak to us, which has always been the communicative power unique to games.

After experiencing the jet engine shortly after hooking up my PS4 for the first time years ago, I discovered a solution that has mostly worked since. Don’t put it anywhere with restricted airflow (ie in some sort of tv cabinet/stand), as it makes it harder for the heat to escape, raising the ambient temp, causing the…

Don’t be too sad. Tim is now raking it in on Patreon, and recently put out his most baroque video about Final Fantasy VII yet on Youtube, so there is some justice in the world. And the other writers have new perches elsewhere as well (and while we’re on the subject of writers once of this pasture, Evan Narcisse is…

The glamorising effect of smoking in movies and tv has been the subject of a lot of research at this point, all of which point to strong effects on people resuming, continuing and — worst — starting to smoke. Some of which could previously have been inferred from the tobacco industry’s historical practise of under-the-…

There are more people working from home because of COVID-19, which likely means the security policies they would normally employ with builds have been loosened, whether that’s for QA, third party services, etc in order to meet the new shipping date.

That was my slightly mangled point — I think the thing AC took from TW3 was its broad RPG framework, well-written & cutscened side quests with actual choices (vs the increasingly dreadful fetch-quest while someone talks at you model of Unity) and an overall narrative that branched depending on choices you made (plus a…

I really hope they nail the settlement building. Even in something as small as the Witcher 3's arduous statue-building quest, there’s a deep reward in seeing the landscape permanently altered by your decisions. Mostly because (in the Witcher 3, at least) it reflects an overall design decision that your choices should…

It sounds like it’s going to be woven into the narrative and the choices, which can be really nice in an RPG, as it might create a more profound sense that your actions are shaping the world.

Lots more details in this Eurogamer piece:

The nicest thing about Toby is that it’s make it easy to store and retrieve groups of tabs you might not need for a while. Normal chrome use tends to result in you siloing related tabs off in a window, or perhaps now in a tab group, where Chrome’s RAM-hunger continues unabated. With Toby, they’re simply stored as…

It seems like it’s still in the testing phase. You need to enable it in chrome://flags (search for groups and then change from ‘default’ to ‘enabled’)

I’m always slightly in awe of the journalists that manage to combine knowing their beat inside and out with the genuine perceptiveness that’s required to understand what isn’t being covered but should be, and how that fits into a larger picture. When I think back on the work you’ve done on crunch & working conditions a…

Indie-devs should learn from the Avengers and start thinking about those Switch hit crossovers:

Ooh! Thank you, what a nice surprise :) Though, if I’m honest, Jordak’s Beatles crosswalk (the shadow!) was the one I’d have gone for.

Increpare’s mini games are one of the very best things on the internet. If you didn’t check it out last year, Gestalt_OS is a wonderful thing:

I can exclusively reveal that Kraft Foods were forced to kill off Mr. Peanut after he struck an exclusive deal with Naughty Dog to star in their next franchise as a globe-trotting treasure hunter.

The particular rule that’s relevant here is that directors have a higher bar to meet when it comes to displacing the credit of a prior writer, which has produced this sort of situation in the past (see: Up In The Air, where Jason Reitman ended up sharing credit with Sheldon Turner despite starting over)

Single-player games are one & done financial transactions, where you pay your $50 bucks or whatever and get a game to play. Multiplayer games give rise to new & potentially repeated transactions, whether the slightly sleazy pay-to-win mechanics or things like season passes that keep the sleaze inside the skinner box…

This is an EXCELLENT DIGITAL VIDEO SERIES, Tim Rogers, formerly critic at Kotaku dot com, now fledgling shellwalla with the fingers of a bandy-legged foal. If you make more of these videos I will watch them all. Your failures will inspire me, as they should anyone who jumps with a metaphorical shell into the winds…

I got in on the alpha a ways back and have played countless hours of it since then. It’s hard to overstate how much there is to do in the game, and how replayable it is.