deanb

The notion crossing their minds wasn't presented as an excuse, but a criticism. Same sex relationships in sim games and games where you get to play as a character of choosing isn't exactly a new concept. NoA should have seen it coming. Also if this "controversy" does turn them off making a future Tomodachi Life (and not sales numbers) then all the more shame on Nintendo.

It wasn't until late that I was all "oh shit I didn't get any photos". Ah well. Saboteur This one we quite liked and I think I'll be getting a copy for myself. It's a bluff style game, you're a group of dwarves trying to reach a vein of gold ore. Except there's a group of saboteurs amongst you trying to ruin the dig. Unlike most bluff games the saboteurs don't know each other. You lay out cards building your tunnels to reach the ore cards on the other side of the table, there's 3 ore cards; one gold and two coal. Saboteurs would aim to divert you towards the wrong card, wasting time and cards(when you reach the end of the deck without hitting gold, they win), while playing broken equipment cards on you (and you on saboteurs) to stop people playing tunnel cards. We found the game does heavily favour the dwarves a fair bit, especially as there's a "map" card that lets you peek at an ore card and see what it is. If a saboteur points you towards coal by saying it's gold, and another person checks and it's actually coal it's a bit easier to spot the saboteurs. But all in all a rather quick game to set-up and play, small storage space and up to 10 players, which is currently a big thing looking for in a game (the ice-breaker types) Ultimate One Night Werewolf I may have posted about this before, or at least tweeted it. This has been a recent popular hit, I think a big part being it's relatively quick to get people up to speed on it given most folks have played Werewolves of Thingy Hollow. It's also much faster to play since it's "one night" and it's also on a timer. Game is much the same as regular Werewolf. There's werewolves and villagers of various abilities, you take turns to do actions in the night then in the morning you've got to decide who the werewolf is (only need to kill one, all games have 2 werewolves). With minor complication there's a suicidal tanner, and a werewolf minion. They'll try and get killed instead of the werewolves. There's a large amount of bluff involved in convincing people who you are and are not, and various player elements trying to confuse the whole thing. I found it best when I was the werewolf to claim I was the werewolf. It's a tactic that works well...twice. After that claim you're a werewolf when you're the tanner/minion. I was playing as a lone wolf once which I managed to also win, I think got a robber killed. I was quite pleased with myself on that one. Oh yeah, a nice part of this from normal werewolf is everyone joins in, there's no narrator. There's a free companion app that narrates the whole night, with creepy night time sound effects (which helps mask the sounds of swapping cards and raising thumbs and such). Which is another element I think people enjoy it for, since normal werewolf someone is out of the game in order to narrate, and also the app has a timer which speeds things along. Means a game only lasts like 4-5 minutes (depends on player count). When I first played it I wasn't overly keen, but it's certainly grown on me. It replaced the usual 1am wrap-up game of Avalon so it definitely won over many others (the most impressive one being the guy who owns Avalon/runs the board game day). Though during course of play there was "hmmm, One Night Avalon?" Oh yeah I also played Alien Frontiers (which I went from winning early game, which means nothing, to losing most of mid-game, then in one turn I went from last to first and got the "end game" condition.), and Carcasonne. Which was my first time against people (I've got the app), and I won by a fair margin. It's a good quick game (my housemate played with us on that, and turns out she'd played it previously with boyfriend and others with expansions and hadn't enjoyed it. But sounded like it was a mix of the expansion, first time playing, and one of the other players.)

Bearing in mind the "we'll look into it for a sequel" stuff came only after days of really badly given messages from NoA about how it's meant to be a "whimsical alternate world" and such. Given Nintendo sell to a global audience you'd think they'd take into account the heavy drive over the past few years for same-sex marriages. I'd hope NoA would have raised a flag on the whole bit of the game only allowing same-sex marriages, but given it's their PR we're getting on the topic I've a feeling that it never even registered. On the patching front, if the issue can be patched out as a bug, it can more than likely be patched back in. It's backwards to be saying in their final message there's no way to patch the game, when the thing that triggered everything off was them patching the game. I think it's a bit stupid to insist that all games come to represent all walks of life, it's nigh impossibility (especially given there's always going to be some group not included) and when making a game it's likely one of the last things on your mind alongside pretty much all other elements of story and character development. In fact the less you have the better. However Nintendo have really stumbled in their messaging over the whole thing, showing once again they're pretty far behind the times. Though this is the same NoA that heavily edited Japanese games in the NES/SNES era to make everything "playful and whimsy", so it's pretty par for the course I guess. @FDS: Maybe try not to prove Alex's point and reinforcing any perceptions he may have by being substantially less confrontational assholeish about it? Blasting out a "You make me sick, check your privilege" straight of off the bat is being exactly like the extremist types you're talking about.

It's only 9 seconds.

Did you not watch the sub plot of the film and the credits? Lab assistant dude gets infected with the same virus that makes the apes super smart. Turns out it's pretty lethal in humans. He ends up passing it to Franco's neighbour(the one that Caesar attacked), drops dead, then the end shows the neighbour isn't just a wife-beater wearing guy: Hence the new trailer mentions the virus being made in a lab and not the fault of the apes (Which in a confused and dying populace it might be like "huh, humans dying, apes getting smart. Apes caused this!")

Looks good. RotPotA was a surprisingly great film, so I'm totally up for some more damn dirty apes.

Considering the other week was meant to be "destiny info dump week", I didn't see much beyond the first days video of "yeah this still looks like Borderlands", so their hyping must be pretty weaksauce. A single COD trailer came out, and I saw that shit pop up on BBC. (and both are Activision, they have same Marketing dept)

Figured since Marvel has one that DC should have one too (as is Warner/DC line of thinking) So Gotham trailer is out. It could be interesting since it seems to be mostly focused on pre-Batman and the whole origins/childhoods of the rogues gallery. My only beef would be that; 1. Ben McKenzie just doesn't give much of a James Gordon kind of look to him. 2. Could they just have not had the Waynes die and like he'll look in the case, not find much and that's it beyond a few references on TVs in backgrounds about Wayne Industries. It's sort of meant to be Batman without Batman, but Gordon seems to be pretty chummy with Bruce (a child who gives his full name).

And yet no one is highlighting the first line says exactly where the $500million figure goes: Mystery solved. Probably around $100million on the game development*, maybe $50million on initial infrastructure (but likely not that much, and certainly not 10 years worth. No games company plans 10 years ahead, certainly not Activision Hero), and then around $200-300million+ in promoting it, which about matches the usual run for stuff like COD and such, and then some extra on top for DLC and what not. Might be some in the signing of Bungie that's accounted into the cost for Destiny but not a direct part of the cost of the game. Though it is quite the head scratcher, they'd have to sell a pretty large amount of units, for a brand new IP from a studio that's only major claim to fame is Halo, a game potentially not played by any of the PS4 owners that the game will have to also appeal to. It's also in limbo on the whole PC side of it, which PC could help bring up the rear with the long tail, but obviously not if they just stick with consoles. $500million is a lot. And I honestly don't think Kotick is lying or fudging numbers. Given they're a publicly traded company it's not in his best interest to make out a brand new IP aimed at primarily consoles is maybe going to put Activision half a billion in the hole. Especially when WoW is declining and COD is plateauing. It's a pretty fucking big gamble. *Though that's GTA/MMO development costs and this is nowhere near looking like like those types of games, and certainly not got the development time of it either.

T'was on sale on HIB*. It better be mediocre Ethan! *Shadowrun is also cheap there too if you missed it on Steam over the weekend (though my Steambook feed suggests very few missed it)

So with Archer finished, I followed the crowd and decided to give Bob's Burgers a shot. I'm quite enjoying it. Just got a bunch on my phone watching in spare time. For the most part H. Jon Benjamin is using the exact same voice as he uses for Sterling, but there's only a few times where a phrase has been uttered and it's been distractingly archer-esque. I'm quite liking the characters, and so far despite being mostly set in just the burger restaurant it's been more varied with the storylines than I expected.

It's cheap and there's a bank holiday monday I'm looking to fill in (and I've been a good boy with completing games lately)

http://dust514.com/news/blog/2014/05/introducing-project-legion/ DUST 514 looking to come to PC. Though seems to be less a "porting DUST 514" to PC, and more of a slightly different game. "DUST 514 II" I guess. I dunno, it's always new and interesting with CCP.

Like the guy who runs from imaginary zombies would know what's real and what's not!

Yeah I understood what FDS meant, but that's only because I'm already aware of the RSS app that comes with an uber generic name that can mean different things in different contexts.

So I've known about this for a while(not sure if it's common or uncommon knowledge in UK mind), hadn't known of there being any actually footage discussing it. It was brought up in a Reddit thread, this video got linked, figured I'd share.

Gunpoint. Only took a couple hours. This is a nice touch: http://www.pentadact.com/category/conwaysblog/?K=13&U=24&C0=3&E1=2&C1=6&E2=3&C2=6&C3=3&C4=3&C5=2 Given you kind of end up with everything In one play through I'd say there's not much replayability beyond I think two points in the game where you can pick one of two paths. Certainly a pretty weird game on the story front. Odd that there's no Workshop support, strikes me as the kind of game that'd thrive from extra levels/campaigns given the main mechanic is pretty solid. Thumbs Up.

Pixel art is "programmer art", which a fair chunk of indie devs are for the most part just programmers with an idea.

Played a couple new board games this week. Only got pictures of one of them cos I'm a dunce, so bonus Civ board game photo instead. (not my pic, hence being small) Among The Stars The aim of the game is to build a space station and earn the most points at the end. It's tile based game, so you get such rooms as "Alien Bazaar" "Command Centre" "Docking Bay" "Restaurant" etc. Tiles come in a variety of colours depending on purpose (military is red, utility blue, trade in yellow, entertainment purple). You all go around a point track, with certain tiles scoring either immediately, or end game bonuses (or both), so in my case I was pretty far behind through most of the game but at the end I shot forward around 45 points (one loop of track is 50) and mostly caught up to everyone else. What I really like about it is that at the start of each year/round (there's four) you draw up 6 tiles and pick one to play, pay your fee, then pass the hand on to the player to the left/right (it switches each year) to do the next turn of play until all 6 are gone. So you might have something decent you want to play, but would require some other cards played first. Got to hope that's not played by someone along the way. Alien Frontiers This one took a while(~2.5hrs), but it was first time for any of us playing it (though not the first time it was played, much to the owners annoyance). Certainly quite a different game from most I've played and felt much more tac tactical than most. Also while it was a bit of a dicking over game with a clear winner, we couldn't help but help other players with cool actions they could take each turn. Action Shot that's a bit less fuzzy. Basic aim is to build and deploy colonies on a planet, once a player has all their colonies down the points are totted up and winner declared. You start with 3 ships, represented by dice. You roll your dice and depending on your roll depends what you can do. Basic is to buy solar power or begin building a colony, since it has no requirements. But others, such as buying extra ships (up to max of 6 ships/dice in play) requires two-of-a-kind, doing a raid on another player takes a flush of three dice. You can also buy alien tech cards which gives various boons (such as cheaper ship cost, ability to re-roll dice, remove player ships from orbiting platforms, shield from raids or just get an extra victory point). Those largely change how each player can play the game, those and building ships early definitely a massive boost at the start. I think we all rather enjoyed it (though one lad left on final round to play Werewolf), but with pretty much the main annoyance being a single players turn could take 2-5 minutes to work out how to play their dice, it got bigger and bigger an issue as we all got to the cap of 6 dice (7 for one guy since he colonised the "relic ship"). Owner has some faction pack expansions, but since it was first time playing it was decided to go with base game. Oh yeah, the planet areas are all named after Sci-Fi writers, such as Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. Bonus Civ game picture (I didn't play, it lasted so long even the Firefly players were like "oh shit, they're still going?")

Oh yeah forgot ot add, one thing that got me was that the state supreme court had issued a stay of execution until the source of the drugs could be ascertained. Until the governor forced through the execution. Now that it fucked up who has issued a stay of execution on the second execution and started and investigation into the fuck up? The governor.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/30/oklahoma-execution-botched-clayton-lockett So this has been doing the rounds a fair bit today. It's the second case I'm aware of where after European nations have refused to ship lethal drugs to USA anymore that states have taken it into their own hands, mixed a bunch of shit together and found you can't just mix random shit together and expect someone to die when you inject it in them. Took nearly 45 minutes for the guy to die and the blinds were put down mid way though. Guardian, and others, speculate it might spark some more discussion on role of Death penalty in modern america. Though given some of comments I've seen it almost seems like folks would prefer if death row inmates were killed in this fashion.

Microsoft has a shit app store, shit tablet sales, fuck all phone sales (unless you count their Android revenue) and no PMP. Apple however is doing gang busters on all of those. What is interesting is the profit, which MS is doing quite well on. Though once they make Office and upgrade the number on the box by a year (or add "365" on the end and make it a sub) is practically pure profit. Of course the super interesting one is Amazon, an amazingly large company that's expanding at a pretty consistent rate in revenue and markets and has produced the same amount of profit in all it's years.