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I knew there were rumors of a Nintendo-Sony hybrid back then in the early 90's. It was going to be announced at a big con but never came to be.

Here's a 2012 article on the subject: http://kotaku.com/5876374/the-...

After a man went public about the emotional abuse and infidelity he had dealt with from his ex-girlfriend, it turned out that one of the men she had cheated with was a writer for Kotaku and had given her favorable coverage without disclosing their relationship.

Yoshi didn't claim there was a review.

"a writer for Kotaku [gave] her favorable coverage" So you are claiming that Yosho asserted there was coverage without a review, but Darinbob is wrong for assuming that coverage was a review.

I looked up Kotaku for what I could find, and I found a review http://kotaku.com/4-video-game... dated 4/19/13.

As an independent observer I'm fucked off with the media labelling me as sexist for being a gamer,

If that's what you take from it, you are dumb or obtuse. Those in the industry are sexist. The treatment of Zoe is proof of that. If the genders were (semi) swapped in all this, where a male game maker was supposedly sleeping with a female journalist, would he be crucified by the male gamers? Or would he be given a high-5 and congratulated on his score?

What's hilarious is that the "gamer community" were the ones to issue death and rape threats, then deny it, despite ironclad proof otherwise. The only ones hurting the male gaming community were male gamers.

Anita Sarkeesian started a kickstarter and got paid over a hundred thousand dollars for a series she not only has massively failed to deliver in years but which she was repeatedly caught plagiarizing material to make, to say nothing of her near constant and universal dishonesty which ranges from significant misrepresentation to total fabrication. She happened to draw the ire of trolls, which she highlighted through selective moderation, while conveniently ignoring the far greater amount of reasonable criticism... which she also termed "harassment".

Zoe Quinn is a perjurious domestic abuser responsible for a vicious lynch mob against a community of high suicide risk individuals based off of a pack of lies, attacked a feminist game jam because she wanted the money for herself, and was proven to have been given significant preferential treatment and publicity. If feminism was anything but a hypocritical hate movement then she'd be universally DESPISED by feminists for being the deplorable abuser she is, not held up as some kind of heroic martyr. The "there is no review" meme is just a semantics game, moving the goalposts from "publicity" to "review", to hide the very real favoritism she was shown:

Grayson did provide positive coverage for Zoe Quinn. He did not review her game but he still gave her positive coverage. They deny being in a sexual relationship at this point but, really? Not even considering the fact that they could just be lying, they were still good friends by this point. Still unethical.

Arnott did not give her an award. This was due to confusion on her Greenlight mentioning the Indiecade under ‘awards’. What is unethical was Quinn, while in a sexual relationship with Arnott, was given a preferential place in the Night Games convention. This was effectively free publicity. Because of the guy she was sleeping with.

Additionally, both Grayson and Arnott, two people who were in a sexual relationship with Quinn, were colluding with Quinn to push a singular narrative about the Pepsi Game Jam. This was extremely unethical.

Additionally, Zoe slept with her boss, Boggs. That’s just unethical for obvious reasons.

Zoe Quinn Corruption Outside of 5Guys

Zoe Quinn accused Wizardchan of harassing her. Wizardchan immediately debunks this. Zoe Quinn lied about harassment. Proof is found here: In all five parts, it's a long read.

Zoe Quinn spoke out against The Fine Young Capitalists in their promotion of women in video game development. Proof is found here: Two Parts.

A bunch of bullies did pick on a lot of people. And dox them. And get several fired. And mail people knives, syringes, and dead animals. And make several credible bomb threats forcing the police to evacuate the area.

The thing is the bullies are the people you're defending. The abusers, the con artists, the pedophiles, the racists... you and all of feminism had the chance of a lifetime to actually stand up and prove that feminism really is about equality and fighting sexism, racism, and bigotry. Instead you all proved once and for all what feminism really is underneath the propoganda.

Your claims get softer and softer the more facts we introduce: Here's the article you mention, give it a read.

  It's pretty clear than anyone covering that topic would have, by necessity, mentioned Quinn. There are a lot of names mentioned in that article because it's about a game jam reality tv show of which she was a participant. To not mention Quinn would have been an odd omission. As for any special treatment, look at how much coverage Quinn gets compared to everyone else, and if that's positive, negative or neutral in general and in relation to the many other people mentioned and quoted in the article. There's no reason to suspect she was granted any special treatment.

It's pretty obvious to everyone that she wasn't exchanging sex for press coverage. You can believe that if you want, it's not impossible, but there is absolutely no evidence to support it. How do you justify this belief?

As for the rape by her own definition:

Still absurd nonsense, lacking any grounding in fact.

alternate link
http://kotaku.com/guy-builds-c...

Tom's videos on CS subjects are really good too. Check his youtube channel!

I was amused the error page on the actual site has no emoji at all on it.

alternate link
http://kotaku.com/guy-builds-c...

Tom's videos on CS subjects are really good too. Check his youtube channel!

I've often wondered what happens to people like this after the fact.

For example, recall Aaron Barr, the guy running HB Gary and who claimed he could "out" the Anonymous members by dubious correlation of social media accounts.

Or that guy Paul Christoforo who threw down with Penny Arcade founder Mike Krahulik (and got fired, banned from PAX, and his marketing company's client dropped them).

Do these people find jobs somewhere on this planet? Does Kevin Mitnick's security firm have a lot of customers?

The Ashley Madison guy - that's 'gotta be an awkward interview, you know.

"Why did you leave your previous place of employment?"

Ugh, lost the link - here.

You gamers are dead to them. They said so.

From a Kotaku article:

Dani Berry is survived by her three children, who now operate a company which trades under the name Ozark Softscape (Berry’s old development studio), and which manages her IP and "digital legacy".

Not the same, but maybe we could get an interview with them?

This. It's so frustrating to see how much money gets invested into AAA games and how badly the production process goes. A typical top tier game costs $50 mil. to produce (that's excluding marketing costs).

Let's consider that number for a moment: $50 million amounts to 500 man years at $100 000 per year. A new AAA game is almost exclusively just an iteration in a series so the work that has to be done is:

  - an update of an existing engine with some 5 - 10 new major features

  - a bunch of new art work (probably the largest amount of work)

  - some 5 hours worth of single player game - simplistic level design, basic scripted events, simple cut scenes

  - a dozen multiplayer maps

  - some minimal voice acting (maybe 1,5 hours of audio in total) and cheap soundtrack

  - testing

Now if the PM does not manage to finish the above work with the budget without resorting to slave labor then you need to fire him/her and get a better one

PC devs are notoriously lazy and incompetent by console-dev standards and prone to underestimate console audiences.

Some of the games are made by the same studios. Some quick googling shows launch day patches for both consoles and titles. Witcher 3 day one patch, Halo Collection 20gb launch day patch. Evolve, GTAV the same thing... so this reeks of a No True Scotsman falacy with "good developers", as if the developers run the show. It's a business that's all about cranking titles out as fast as possible while papering over with hype. Just for the record what are some developers that you consider good? Constraints: They can't develop for the PC and can't have any launch day patches.

There are these things called external music players like WMP, itunes, Winamp, etc etc. And also things like Spotify. Sure you'd miss out on whatever intros to songs, public service announcements, and news whatever Three Dog/Mr. Vegas analog in F4 will do, but you could have all the music you want.

Or perhaps they can just allow players to play their files through the game? "Oh you like music? Just turn on your radio!" This was a feature request, not a half baked community suggestion request to be answered by someone's mom.

That's a lot of revenue per month Blizzard has chosen not to receive.

Well, there are two points to consider about this:

1) The ban was not permanent, but was only six months. This is a departure from their previous botting bans and will put expiration near the end of the year, which lines up with a potential patch / expansion release.

2) As others have mentioned, getting banned does not prevent you from creating a new account and buying the game again. That's an instant ~$70 for Blizzard, equivalent to a player subscribing for about 4.5 months.

3) Botting had gotten very bad in some places. A lot of customers were complaining about them turning a blind eye to it and they really needed to do something.

Finally, the primary botting software that was targeted was HonorBuddy which is mostly used for player-vs-player activities. Given how much people have complained about the current state of PvP it's not surprising they went after it in an attempt to improve things. As a bonus, the developer of HonorBuddy has said he will be discontinuing development of the software due to the ban wave.

In northeast Indiana, Super NES games typically went for $60 new, and PlayStation games were $50 because the disc was cheaper to replicate. Those who stuck with Nintendo saw a price cut between the Nintendo 64 ($60-$70) and the GameCube ($50) and then another price hike with the Wii U ($60). If you're looking for reliable sources to add to (say) a Wikipedia article, you can put something like super nes game msrp into a search engine and find things like "Why 1990s SNES Games Were so Damn Expensive" by Luke Plunkett.

That is not main problem. Main problems are that players won't pay extra for better AI so managers decide to save on AI. Players only say that they want challenging AI yet expect to beat it every time.
Its easy to make strategy where AI reigns supreme. It would be focused on micromanagement ideally with complex resource system.
For 4X there is simple AI strategy that would incredibly piss players: Borg diplomacy. At first turn all AI players do distributed roll of dice to select borg player. Every other bot transfers all his resources to borg or makes everything for borg to win. This improves winning chances of each invidiual bot. So we could focus on games 1x1.
Also there is unbeatable starcraft AI since 2010 http://kotaku.com/5667280/you-...
You could also try C-evo where AI doesn't cheat but its bit old.
Also main human advantage is in combat. Without that it turns into building race that is easier to optimize.
As you mentioned Civ 5 main problem is that AI is terrible. It shouldn't be too hard add mods so you will rarely wins. Just take highly formulaic strategies from forums and have Etiopian AI doing regilious/cultural ICS, babylonian science victory, greek diplomatic... you can't block them all.

Nowadays, it's very likely someone using somewhat broken English on the internet simply doesn't speak it as a primary language. The way I figure it, I'm pretty sure their command of my language is a heck of a lot more impressive than my command of theirs. If I'm conversing with someone and they apologize for their poor English, I'll often pull out this quip to reassure them that not everyone is so shallow as to nitpick about stuff like that.

Sure, we all laughed at "all your base are belong to us", but there's a difference between chuckling at some examples of Engrish versus some sort of language snobbery. I suppose the Japanese or Chinese version of those sorts of jokes are when Westerners get kanji tattoos that don't quite mean what they thought. I think it's fine as long as it doesn't get mean-spirited or personal.

Very clever of Linux to make a very obvious dig at the recent feminist hijacking attempts made by the SJW community that is vague enough to keep from disrupting business, but clear enough to be caught by those of us in the know.

Well played, indeed.

Who'd have thought. The gamepolitics.com link is Slashdotted.

It isn't; I had trouble with it even before I posted it (but I thought it was just me).

http://www.gamepolitics.com/20...

On September 16, 2012 GamePolitics published a story about Brad Wardell and Stardock Systems entitled " Report: Stardock Sued Former Marketing Manager After She Sued CEO for Sexual Harassment ." In that report we echoed a false narrative that Stardocks lawsuit against former marketing manager Alexandra Miseta was filed in retaliation for her filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against Stardock CEO Brad Wardell and his company in late 2010.

After reaching out to Wardell, I have come to the conclusion that I fell short in my reporting on this story and felt compelled to set the record straight. I have also seen proof from Wardell that legal actions were in motion long before Stardock filed its lawsuit against Miseta in the Summer of 2012. It should be noted at this point that Wardell could not have shown me this proof in September of 2012 because of ongoing litigation.

According to that new evidence (an invoice I have seen from the American Arbitration Association dated June 29, 2011 - Case #54-160-00009-11 02 CHFL-C) Stardock founder and CEO Brad Wardell, his attorney Paul P. Asker, former Stardock Marketing Manger Alexandra Miseta and/or her legal representative, were involved in ongoing arbitration. While we do not know the exact start or end date of those arbitration proceedings, two things become pretty clear: the lawsuit filed by Stardock (alleging that Miseta "deleted, destroyed, and/or stole promotional materials, analytics data, and trade show information" vital to the launch of Elemental: War of Magic) after the court denied the companys motion to dismiss Misetas sexual harassment case on July 13, 2012 was a change in venue of sorts - going from arbitration to a full blown court case.

Ultimately both lawsuits were settled out of court, culminating in a letter of apology written by Miseta.

The other thing I want to emphasize here is that, because Wardell was in litigation with Miseta on two different fronts, there was no way he would have made a public comment to the media... but he was never given a fair chance to do so by us or the many other news outlets reporting on the story.

Whether someone is willing to comment on litigation while it is active is irrelevant; it is our job to give those that are the subject of tough stories like this one a reasonable amount of time to respond.

As President Harry S. Truman was fond of saying, "the buck stops here." I take full responsibility for the articles that continued this narrative (whether I wrote them or not) because as the managing editor I encouraged our writers to write them and approved them for publication. And while I did reach out to Wardell prior to publishing our story, he deserved more than a few hours to respond to those accusations.

At the end of the day I let our readers down and did a disservice to all involved. For that I offer my sincerest apologies. On a personal note, I want to publicly thank Brad Wardell for taking the time to show me proof and to accept my apology. I only wish I had been able to see that proof sooner.

As an aside, I was compelled to revisit this topic after the

It wasn't bullshit. Nathan Grayson's affair with a developer was confirmed by his own editor. Yet amazingly, people still think that influential games journalists having affairs with vulnerable young game developers isn't something we should be discussing.

#Gamergate has confirmed one thing with absolute certainty. Game developers are the Dickensian working class of the games industry, pervasively exploited, silenced and downtrodden by corrupt publishers and game journalists. The silence from developers throughout all of this is screaming.

Seriously, name me one serious game that is not either a rouge type game, a FPS, or CinC game on steroids. Maybe this one http://kotaku.com/worlds-first...

Most game makers are recycling the same crap over and over again. Go on a quest, kill the monsters, create an army, manage resources etc. That's about it.

Boring......

That's a lot of popular websites, sure, but how many of these websites are commonly used in China? How many of these websites even have a Chinese version? After all, not everybody speaks English.

LinkedIn has entered the Chinese market, but it's not as well-known as local sites such as 51job, Pokemon games still aren't available in Chinese, and wordpress.org is only of interest to people who self-host blogs (wordpress.com has been blocked for a couple of years). The rest, few have even heard of.

China has its own web ecosystem, so blocking these websites has only minimal impact to the typical user. It would be developers and expats who will bear the most impact.

That's just deflection. Grayson still wrote about Depression Quest and Zoe Quinn with no disclosure of the conflict of interest. That's a lack of journalistic ethics. It would never be allowed for example at the New York Times or any other respectable newspaper. The article is still up, it's right here: http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indi...

For comparison, let me quote to you from the New York Times Ethical Journalism handbook, which all journalists must follow in order to remain employed there:
"Clearly, romantic involvement with a news source would foster
an appearance of partiality. Therefore staff members who develop
close relationships with people who might figure in coverage they
provide, edit, package or supervise must disclose those relationships
to the standards editor, the associate managing editor for news
administration or the deputy editorial page editor." (p. 9)

Did Grayson do anything comparable? No. And why would he? Kotaku has no comparable ethical standards!

Are you kidding? They couldn't even figure out how to get female characters to work.

Where was the conflict of interest? The guy mentioned her in a couple of articles before they even had a relationship.

http://kotaku.com/in-recent-da...

Sorry, no. Their relationship existed prior to that as he is mentioned in the games credits ... he was listed as a beta tester. You've been told now; now are you still going to go around saying "The relationship only started after"? Cause if you do, that will be total, bald-faced lies - the very thing you are accusing other people of doing.

The end result could have been very different.

What end result? She got a tiny bit of publicity along with a lot of other indie devs. Oh the humanity!

Do you normally assume that a potential conflict of interest (in anything) will end up being a non-issue, or do you acknowledge that it raises some red flags and more often than not leads to abuses?

Where was the conflict of interest? The guy mentioned her in a couple of articles before they even had a relationship.

http://kotaku.com/in-recent-da...

On March 31, Nathan published the only Kotaku article he's written involving Zoe Quinn. It was about Game Jam, a failed reality show that Zoe and other developers were upset about being on. At the time, Nathan and Zoe were professional acquaintances. He quoted blog posts written by Zoe and others involved in the show. Shortly after that, in early April, Nathan and Zoe began a romantic relationship. He has not written about her since. Nathan never reviewed Zoe Quinn's game Depression Quest, let alone gave it a favorable review.

Emphasis added.

The fact that you GamerGaters can't even stop lying about the situation with Quinn is why no one believes that your cause is about anything more than harassing women.

The journalist did mention her game. It wasn't a review but was definite positive exposure for a game that would not have gotten if they were not close friends.

According to Wikipedia, with a bunch of cites so I assume it's verified:

While Grayson had written an article about the failed GAME_JAM web reality show that Quinn participated in[23] and Kotaku had also mentioned her game,[24] both occurred before the relationship began.[20][8]

References are:

• [23] http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indi...
• [24] http://kotaku.com/depression-q...
• [20] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/...
• [8] http://kotaku.com/in-recent-da...

So it does appear to be demonstrably exposure for a game unrelated to the relationship between Grayson and Quinn.

The journalist did mention her game. It wasn't a review but was definite positive exposure for a game that would not have gotten if they were not close friends.

According to Wikipedia, with a bunch of cites so I assume it's verified:

While Grayson had written an article about the failed GAME_JAM web reality show that Quinn participated in[23] and Kotaku had also mentioned her game,[24] both occurred before the relationship began.[20][8]

References are:

• [23] http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indi...
• [24] http://kotaku.com/depression-q...
• [20] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/...
• [8] http://kotaku.com/in-recent-da...

So it does appear to be demonstrably exposure for a game unrelated to the relationship between Grayson and Quinn.

The journalist did mention her game. It wasn't a review but was definite positive exposure for a game that would not have gotten if they were not close friends.

According to Wikipedia, with a bunch of cites so I assume it's verified:

While Grayson had written an article about the failed GAME_JAM web reality show that Quinn participated in[23] and Kotaku had also mentioned her game,[24] both occurred before the relationship began.[20][8]

References are:

• [23] http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indi...
• [24] http://kotaku.com/depression-q...
• [20] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/...
• [8] http://kotaku.com/in-recent-da...

So it does appear to be demonstrably exposure for a game unrelated to the relationship between Grayson and Quinn.

Here are the facts:

Zoe Quinn had a boyfriend. They had a pretty rough relationship apparently. They broke up. He was angry and felt like she didn't live up to the ideals she claimed to represent, so he wanted to make sure as many people as possible saw her as a hypocrite like he did. So he posted a long diatribe in which he accused her of cheating on him several times. He named 3 specific people that she slept with while he thought they were exclusive. One was her boss (not a journalist). One was a sound designer (not a journalist). And one was a writer for Rockpapershotgun and Kotaku (by the time he posted this, just Kotaku). And two other unnamed persons.

Only the one game journalist is of interest here. However, if you look at the dates the boyfriend supplied (in order to establish that she slept with them while he thought they were exclusive), and the dates of the articles published by the journalist, all of the articles he wrote that mentioned Zoe Quinn were a month or more before their affair. Not only that, but none of those articles were any more glowing or supportive than other articles covering the same subjects. One was a list of 50 Steam Greenlight games for that week on Rockpapershotgun. Looking at the article, Depression Quest is literally the only one I'd heart of on that list, and at this time it had been getting a lot of buzz in game jam and indie game circles for a while already. So naturally he gave it the top spot *because it was the most noteworthy game*. The second article he wrote was about a reality show/game jam that had gone bad in which Zoe was involved. Except like 20 other sites also covered the same incident because it was a pretty huge blow-up in the game jam and indie game scene at the time. And Zoe Quinn wasn't even the most prominent person in the article because at the time she was contractually prohibited from talking about the show (other people on the show had refused to sign the contract with the embargo on publicly speaking about it, and were able to legally freely talk about it, so obviously got way more attention in news stories about it).

After the time of the supposed affair, he never wrote another article about her or even mentioning her or Depression Quest again for either Kotaku or Rockpapershotgun. The supposed affair occurred in "May or June." The game jam reality show incident occurred in March. The article about Steam Greenlight games occurred in January.

So the entire supposed breach of journalistic integrity literally never even happened.

What, do you mean the time that Kotaku completely denied that Nathan wrote anything for Kotaku involving Zoe Quinn while he was going out with her: "He quoted blog posts written by Zoe and others involved in the show. Shortly after that, in early April, Nathan and Zoe began a romantic relationship. He has not written about her since. Nathan never reviewed Zoe Quinn's game Depression Quest, let alone gave it a favorable review."

Is that the evidence you're working with here?

The link to nerd-dom is that the guy who jumped the fence was dressed in pokemon garb.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

I see the words "objectivity", "mpartiality", and "fairness" all included as part of the second paragraph as common parts of established journalistic codes. I'm pretty sure when you have had a sexual relationship those are going to be very difficult things to maintain when speaking about that person or their work. I wouldn't actually expect anyone to say in their article "We shagged and they were awful in the sack, but the video game was pretty great." I would instead expect the journalist to either state that they had a more than professional relationship with that person, or most likely just abstain from writing about them or their game. He should have told his Editor that he had a non-professional relationship with her and had someone else write any articles regarding her or her work, or including plugs for her work.

You see, that's the interesting thing about this story: everyone assumes that he wrote about her games at some point while they were together. But he didn't. As far as I've been able to discover, he last mentioned one of her games in an article he wrote in January (link). He also mentioned her on a personal level, but didn't discuss any of her games, in an article he wrote in March (link). Yet according to her ex's account, he only started sleeping with her in May. So what exactly is unethical here?

Well, here's the other side..

zoe's then-boyfriend's account
http://thezoepost.wordpress.co...

wizardchan's experience with zoe
http://imgur.com/a/4VOcx

the birth of 4chan's 'vivian james' and zoe's attack on the fine young capitalists
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/...

david jaffe vs kotaku
http://kotaku.com/5883107/does...
https://soundcloud.com/ben-kuc...

anita sarkeesian is not a gamer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

anita sarkeesian misrepresents the subject material. 'thunderf00t's analysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This is an issue of journalistic integrity and quite possibly attempts at reculturing a community to conform to specific political values. The charge of 'misogyny' is just an attempt to muddy the waters and/or poison the well of any would-be critics.

http://www.videogamessuck.com/... http://kotaku.com/death-threat... http://kotaku.com/5904367/anot... http://www.develop-online.net/... I'm sure all of you Social Justice Whiteknights modded 5:Insightful want to line up to support these men who received similar threats and insults, right? I would link donation pages, but unfortunately those people are busy making their living making video games instead of being professional victims, so there are no pages. Somehow, women are the only people who can be victims in this industry—I wonder if it's your internalized misogyny that makes that the case. Women are always victims, because they are weak and vulnerable to men, who have "power" am I right? "Poor women, they will never get a break" is an EXTREMELY misogynistic statement, and it's what the majority of the upvoted comments are stating. I hope the disgusting irony does not escape you. Where's Roberta Williams' donation page? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.videogamessuck.com/... http://kotaku.com/death-threat... http://kotaku.com/5904367/anot... http://www.develop-online.net/... I'm sure all of you Social Justice Whiteknights modded 5:Insightful want to line up to support these men who received similar threats and insults, right? I would link donation pages, but unfortunately those people are busy making their living making video games instead of being professional victims, so there are no pages. Somehow, women are the only people who can be victims in this industry—I wonder if it's your internalized misogyny that makes that the case. Women are always victims, because they are weak and vulnerable to men, who have "power" am I right? "Poor women, they will never get a break" is an EXTREMELY misogynistic statement, and it's what the majority of the upvoted comments are stating. I hope the disgusting irony does not escape you. Where's Roberta Williams' donation page? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Gamers also lack the PR money to respond" "because gamers are an easier and more lucrative target" Which is it?

I'll assume you aren't being deliberately obtuse and explain it seriously.

There's gamer the CREATOR and there's gamer the CONSUMER.

The first statement is more about the creators. Game devs may not be all poor, but they aren't that rich either. Most of the money they make goes back into development, or just not having to lay off your devs. Being in the games industry isn't all sunshine and rainbows and fire flowers.

The second statement is more about consumers. Consumers have money to spend, but they aren't the companies making the games. The most a consumer can do for PR is to keep buying games from the companies they like, which hardly does anything to alleviate the accusations about games and gamers.

I mean, if I accuse Pepsi of being bad and Pepsi drinkers are bad people, you going to buy a Pepsi isn't going to do much to change my mind about Pepsi, and in fact, you've just put yourself on my list of bad people.

Are we just trying to make reference to Robin Williams all week?

This is just yet another sign that the military saw the movie 'Toys' ... as if the whole drone program wasn't an obvious enough sign:

http://kotaku.com/5891256/wtpt...

> Can anyone really tell much above 30 fps?

Oh please. There is a MAJOR difference between gaming at 30 Hz, 60 Hz, and 120 Hz. I play most of my games at 60 Hz and can tell _instantly_ when a game drops to 30 Hz.

This is NOT limited to games.

OWE my eyes @ 24 fps !

Silky smooth @ 60 fps !

If you don't have a 120 Hz monitor and haven't tried LightBoost then you really don't even know what the hell you are talking about saying "30 fps is 'good enough'."

Some game devs are completely ignorant of the importance of 60 Hz.
* http://kotaku.com/5393106/inso...

Thankfully some game devs DO understand the importance of 60 Hz.
* http://www.gamespot.com/articl...

Please go read up on Temporal Anti-Aliasing if you don't understand why movies can get away with built in Motion Blur.

Actually.... this

http://kotaku.com/they-took-an...

I wonder how long it will be until Google, Microsoft, and Apple are also all producing TV shows.

Microsoft produces (or, at the very least, distributes) The Guild .

But you didn't get ripped off and thats not what happened.

Did the original kick starters get what they paid for? (Dev units I expect?) If so, how did they get ripped off?

It's not what they're saying.

But some others agrees with you, namelly Nicholas Negroponte.

Let's see what time has to say about it.

Kickstarter is not an investment website, its a donation website. Not really sure how they got ripped off other than you don't like Facebook (me either!)

Yes and no. People does donate with something in mind. And they want this state of mind enforced.

You don't donate money to homeless if they're going to buy booze, do you? Most of us don't donate money to them even if we're sure they're going to buy food. Why?

With Kickstart it's the same thing. The guys can be right under the Law, but they have to face the public opinion about the matter. Kickstarters are feeling ripped off, and since they were the very simple reason Oculus managed to get a 2 Billion USD company, it's God Damned Good to spend a good fraction of this money trying to explain themselves - and perhaps, giving something interesting back to these guys.

Bad P/R can be good just to politicians.

uh, the kickstarters didn't buy stock, they donated money. they got exactly what they payed for.

It's not what they're saying.

This is not a mom/dat CC issue but goes quite a bit further.

I will try to demonstrate this on a particular piece of shite brought to us from the people we love to loathe.
Enter Heroes of Dragon Age. This thing is a deck-building game. Think Hearthstone but the game plays your matches for you. In that respect I would consider it nothing more than an elaborate animated screensaver rather than a game. In HoDA the rarest cards pretty much guarantee your wins. You could grind for months and get lucky and get a couple of them. Or you could cough up monies to buy gems. 99 bucks buy you roughly 20 card draws, 18 of which will not be useful in any way shape or form(+/- statistical variance, but bear with me). You could play matches to earn gold to buy the packs which cost gold but your chance to get anything useful from those is so low that people who get lucky immediately start a forum post about that which in turn will become quite lively. Grinding for gold is a possibility but for one snag. You are limited to 6 PvE and 6PvP matches every two hours. Unless of course you pay gems to play more. So far so bad. The PvE campaign is designed in such a way that you will need the best cards after about an hour of play time. You will encounter multiple major brick walls.

This is one of the freemium offenders I know. I've been grinding as a free player since Christmas since it is a nice diversion which doesn't require a lot of thought or interaction. But I do have to say one thing about this: It smacks of gambling. In fact it is an elaborate variation of a slot machine. And I can see how a gambling addict could sink hundreds if not thousands of dollars into such a thing. And it seems to be completely unregulated.

OTOH if I gave you 99 bucks to spend on games and you headed over to the nearest Steam sale you would get so many games that you wouldn't emerge until next year if you completed them all. No value for a lot of money driven by addiction. Children are the easiest prey for this but certainly not the most lucrative.

So if you compare prices for gems with Steam sales you would think that these are not hardcore gamers. Wrong. Surprisingly so:
http://kotaku.com/who-are-the-...
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...

We are way, WAY beyond "you morons, stop buying gems!". At this point we are in need of regulation Nevada-style. In the meantime suing Google and Apple is the easiest way to apply some pressure but it sure as hell is not enough.

I would imagine you weren't totally shocked that EA is one of the worst offenders in that particular arena...

I was thinking the same thing; we should collaborate, make our own game that's nothing but microtransactions...

It's a good thought, but EA would sue you for stealing their business model.

Functional languages, for instance, rule out entire classes of bugs present in imperative languages. People complain that they're hard to understand. Maybe. I argue that they're hard to understand if you're the kind of person who does not care about whether your program is correct or not.

Actually, I think the resolution to this old argument is simple: FP as a subsystem of standard procedural and OO programming.

FP alone is useless because interactive programming is often nothing more than a string of side-effects bound together by code. However, there is no imaginable program of non-trivial size that does not contain sub-tasks that fall under the definition of a mathematical function. By coding the distinction between a procedure and a function (FP style) into the language, you could eliminate many of the most troublesome bugs in a single stroke: the "oh-god-which-procedure-is-changing-this-effing-value" bugs.

Consider the Kotaku article The Exceptional Beauty of Doom 3's Source Code -- one of the things the author comments on is the conventions used by iD Software to denote whether a procedure's argument is input, output, or both; and even that they almost never use a both-ways variable -- it should be either input or output, not both, for the sake of clarity and debugging. A heck of a lot of what goes on inside the Doom 3 engine is nothing more than churning through 3D vectors: that's maths, so that's a prime candidate for functional programming. Inputs and outputs would then be rigidly enforced at the software level, and no two-way variables would be allowed. The most complex parts of the code would be eliminated from the most complex debugging tasks.

And to think, all these benefits from adding a single keyword, function or deffn....

free-to-play hasn't spread to the consoles

I would say they are spreading slower. Dusk 514, DC Universe Online come to mind. I wager it's the same way how FPSes showed up on PCs first before consoles. After all, hardware wise, a console is a lesser PC.

As said, I see MMOs with subscriptions as the precursor to F2P, and those do exist on consoles, even if as part of a multiplatform (PC + console) release (FF11, FF14, the former was also released on the PS2)

A cooperative platformer or a fighting game is unlikely to be made F2P

Oh, they are trying. And the idea of Mario to F2P has been toyed with.

Oh, if we go back to the PC side, MUGEN has been a free (as in beer, not in speech though) engine for fighting games for a while now.

Besides, I apologize for being unclear. By "free engine" I meant that the engine is free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation. This means end users have the legal right and capability to 0. run the engine for any purpose, including use with self-created mission packs, 1. mod the engine, 2. provide copies of the engine to other people, and 3. provide copies of the mods to other people.

Fair enough. I do think what I said still applies though. See below.

If someone's game sucks, and the game's engine is free software, someone can create an entirely new game on top of it, possibly in a different genre entirely. Modders call this practice a "total conversion".

My point is that somebody had to pay for development, be it the map pack or the game engine. Whether you open source your game engine or not, the business has to pay for its development.

So a free engine, pay for map packs business model has a higher risk, since if the map pack fails to sell, you can't make money from the engine. A proprietary engine could be licensed out, or even sold as an asset should your company had to be liquidated.

This also explains why in F2P games the "map packs" (general game play) are designed to have more chances at extracting money out of the player, and the move towards DLC. As game engines become less profitable, people have to squeeze more out of map packs.

Now, id is pretty cool in that they release their older code. Really, people could go and make games using an open Doom 3 engine, and some do, just not big studios.

Which brings me to the following question. I think to answer your question "why major game devs don't offer more open engines", we also have to ask: why do major game devs license proprietary engines over using the free ones available? Free ones are available (which indies and smaller shops use), so why?

Personally, I think it's because proprietary engines actually do provide a competitive advantage for your game. All else equal, my generic FPS will outsell your generic FPS if my engine is prettier than yours. And I don't want you to know the secrets (code) to how I made my engine prettier.

http://www.candywarehouse.com/...

http://kotaku.com/candy-box-th...

http://www.igt.com/us-en/games...

http://www.geocaching.com/geoc...

I am sure there are more. Probably many more.

The point is that if I could find them in under 5 minutes, so could Candy Crush or the trademark office.

Invalid on its face.

The fact that a vocal segment of the gaming community believes that the best way to play games are using tools designed to drive spreadsheets and word processors means that maybe the common wisdom isn't so wise.

You shouldn't be so quick to dismiss KB+M as an input apparatus (especially without offering an explanation other than some silly jab about spreadsheets). KB+M is objectively better for several types of games, including real time strategy and, arguably, first person shooters (there's always this old rumor; true or not, history seems to support KB+M superiority in FPS). And while there are some console MMORPGs, I can't imagine a controller would be a better input method than KB+M for them. Now there are games where controllers are probably better (platformers, action games, fighting games), but that doesn't make your dig against KB+M fair. It's the better solution for a lot of games and the fact that some people prefer it does not make those people "less wise."

Real-Time Face Substitution Will Hide You In The Scariest Way Possible

http://kotaku.com/real-time-face-substitution-will-hide-you-in-the-scarie-1496953478

"Audun Mathias Ãygard's creative experiment uses real-time facial recognition to hide your face in a webcam feed with different masks."

http://auduno.github.io/clmtrackr/examples/facesubstitution.html