Red Dead Redemption succeeds where other Rockstar games fail: it has heart. The shooting and riding and card games all build to a singular point with a powerful thesis.

I absolutely want him to get picked by Philly in some draft-day shuffle, and then become the next Jimmer Fredette.

I think what many noticed was that key scenes in ME: Andromeda had better facial animations than others, and also that the cherry-picked examples by critics led to a pretty well overblown impression that they hadn’t put any effort into the animations whatsoever. Again, we’re talking about a script that probably has…

There are still some sounds that facial animators (or rather, the tools they tend to have at their disposal in game projects) have a tough time making look natural. I’m thinking “w” sounds tend to look quite awkward across the board, because they can’t (or don’t) purse the lips correctly.

That’s some impressive facial animation. How I hoped other AAA games (coff coff mass effect coff coff) could have this kind of production value...

By your own admission you don’t play the game, and yet you think you have the standing to lecture others about how “kills are kills” in thr context of Overwatch. No one who thinks with any amount of seriousness about Overwatch strategy agrees with that proposition. And I’m sorry, but “get good” is not an adequate…

No, it isn’t an upgrade. They’ve been able to “overcrank” for ages, which is how slow motion is done on film. The reason why directors stay away from HFR is because it almost always makes your movie look like a cheap BBC drama from the 70s. You see more detail, which means you see the “seams” in the production that…

The same argument was initially made about 1080p. It came down to exposing enough of the market to the difference.

Well another problem is how to relate the supposedly transformative experience of VR to non-VR users. There are early-adopter types who are willing to take the dive, but that’s not a recipe for mass market success. You can show somebody a video game or a movie or text from a book quite easily without having the actual…

Agreed. I also think that it has to offer genre-shaping experiences beyond “Ooh, how immersive!” in order to generate the kind of success that allows it to sustain several different platforms. Consumer 3D was a failure for the simple reason that people have to want to put on those glasses. They need a reason to do it.…

Stopped reading after “I don’t play Overwatch.”

Way to completely ignore everything else I wrote.

Is just completely false. You’re ignoring the cost of creating the bits in the first place. They didn’t just take a box of bits and toss them around and make that for sale.

I care because I want the people who make the things I like to be successful, so they’ll make more things that I’ll like.

I agree about fractured markets, but Jesus, if having to sign up for Origin is more of a pain than having to trek out to a physical game retail location (which you might not even have near where you live) then I don’t really know what to say to that. I used to pirate games because I couldn’t be bothered to wait days…

Full disclosure, I’m not a pirate. I pay for the convenience of not having to download the few games I play from sketchy torrents and applying sketchy patches which create an even buggier game than the legitimate one.

I mean, I don’t actually care about piracy. The problem is the publisher’s to deal with, not mine, and I’ll never really understand people who waste their time and effort pushing the anti-piracy case even though they have no stake in the matter. But at the same time, I absolutely get where this guy is coming from with…

It’s more a case of Bethesda wanting consumers to have less information about their products before purchasing them, capitalizing as much as possible on pre-orders and other forms of hype-based decision-making by gamers. I don’t blame them for taking this route, but that doesn’t keep it from looking pretty sleazy. And…

I understand the reasoning. The problem you face with that kind of means-testing is the same faced by ACA insurance subsidization and any other means-tested program, which is that they exacerbate social animosity. Rich people don’t want to pay poor people’s ways. People who only just fail to qualify based on their…

Only the Republicans are out to gut social programs and go to sleep wanking over Atlas Shrugged. Now Reagan did push the Democrats uncomfortably far to the right so that they largely stopped talking about expanding the Great Society initiatives in the 90s, but that seems to be a blip in history now its becoming clear…