Yes, he could of, and if he was making a press release he surely would have worded it differently.

That'd be so easy if only everybody wanted to hear the same thing.

It's more meaningful than 'Microsoft does not comment on rumors or speculation,' that's for sure.

That doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me - virtually nobody ever hand animates at 24 fps, the best old Disney stuff is 18, and most animation is at 12 or 16. I've seen some awesome stuff at 4, even - this anime is rotoscoped at 8fps. Anyway - nobody is animating at a frame rate high enough to trick the eye…

Do you want flawed human beings or vague, guarded, sterile corporate memos? We can't just welcome the dialog when it's telling us what we want to hear - snarky tweets included. Isn't that the real issue here anyway? He gave it to us straight and unfiltered, Microsoft fired him for not putting the exact same…

Right? For all the complaining about how tight-lipped devs and publishers are and how they won't create a meaningful dialog with their customers, the minute someone says something we don't want to hear, we lynch them.

I think it's probably a mistake to bank on those details carrying over to the next gen - we don't know that the Xbox won't have a free tier (seems likely if it's always-on) or that PS4 will have a free tier (considering their success with PSN+).

Sorry! I work on this stuff in a solitary bubble and never get to talk about it and was just so stoked to see a rotoscoping discussion on Kotaku!

I'd like to also contribute that 'just tracing' as a dismissive term is really missing the point - it's not tracing somebody else's art and passing it off as your own (the root of tracing as being dishonest or 'cheating'), it's using live video you (or your crew) have directed and filmed specifically for this purpose.…

Well, that, and nothing gets me off more than embracing things 'traditional' people despise! But, let's be honest, many, many traditional animators have used rotoscoping heavily - the Superman cartoons from the 30s are gorgeous, they use rotoscoping in Snow White and Fantasia, and Bakshi proved you could do huge scale…

Certainly - for me, though, that's the appeal: the meshing of the fantastic and hyper-real with the constraints of familiar real-world physicality. There's something surprising about drawing it on trust - the way fabric moves, for example - that resists the inclination to animate what you think it looks like with what…

I've done a lot of rotoscoping, and there's tons of traditional animation involved in doing it, at least when it's hand-drawn.

I probably love Kill Em All the most - it's so punk-influenced and raw! - but it's it's not really representative of the Metallica sound. As far as that goes, despite it's historically thin production, I agree - And Justice... has pretty much all my favorites on it!

Maybe people under 30 don't know this, or can't believe it, but there was a time when Metallica was completely dangerous and badass. Then you had Bob Rock, Napster, Some Kind of Monster and the rest, and it's all become very dilute. But, damn, were those first 4 albums visceral and transgressive at the time.

The people of North Korea have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, from their government feigning tension with us - any means to an open dialog with them would benefit the world.

I can't imagine that's too much of a threat - MS is doing this specifically to make more money for the devs and publishers that ultimately drive their system sales, right? If EA, Ubisoft and Activision didn't want them to do this, it wouldn't be happening. Dark Souls (and Dragon's Dogma)'s approaches to online…

But...

This episode was bursting at the seams with major connecting themes - the interaction of truth and trust (Sansa & Queen of Thorns, Theon & torturer, Robb & Karstark, Brienne & Jaime, Bran & Jojen, Tyrion & Shae), the forms of female power and nurturing (Cersei, Brienne, Catelyn, Queen of Thornes, Maergery), and the…

I thought it was great - I love the ones than manage to stay fairly faithful to the original and still manage to weave a few strong themes throughout the episode. This is the season I think most book readers have been most psyched for, and so far it's been nailing the tone I was hoping for after last season's…

I, personally, don't freak out about that. I would just do something else - it's not like I haven't survived Xbox Live or internet outages before! Life is one long series of minor inconveniences, it's ok with me if occasionally those are gaming-related.