alanschu

One person's bonus is another person's penalty. I don't necessarily agree with that perspective, but I do recognize it.

We have different criteria in what can illicit pride in us then. I'm not sure why it would make you proud, but to each his or her own. I have decided to not buy games from companies in the past, but consider it more of a "non-event" that I don't really think twice about. On the other hand, I just self-taught myself programmable shaders in OpenGL last week. That made me feel proud. You might not care any less if you were to accomplish that. I consider thumping one's chest because you don't do an obvious thing (i.e. don't buy things that you think are poor) to be a rather low bar. On the other hand, it's probably pretty easy for you to feel proud of yourself, so I guess there is that. To me, it'd be like feeling proud because I don't buy fast food, or feeling proud because I don't buy low quality clothing. The only way I can see it bringing out pride is if someone had a compulsion to purchase the games. In the sense that they were a slave to their own purchasing habits, and after buying several bad games you feel a sense of pride in no longer being a slave to your purchasing habits, which were compelling you to purchase poor games.

I am pretty sure the only surgery that existed in Life and Death was the appendectomy haha. The rest of the game was mostly just about properly diagnosing appendicitis, and doing the appropriate action in the cases where appendicitis is probably not the case.

Congrats on reaching your goal!

If you define "boss fight" as "some sort of conflict resolution" then I'd agree. If you define boss fight as "some sort of combat within the game that is against a unique foe" then I disagree. Games like the Fallouts (original 2, and New Vegas, at the very least) as well as Planescape Torment have excellent resolutions because the combat can be entirely skipped. In fact, the actual combat aspect of those boss fights are actually quite lame. If a game has an interesting narrative, all it needs is "resolution of the conflict," and that need not be some combat sequence against a final foe. Deus Ex doesn't have a boss fight at all, and IMO is one of the greatest games ever made.

If you feel strongly enough, I'd encourage you to just skip out on the game altogether.

at -26c, I'd guess it's probably better to have 15 guys in there!

Currently building a raytracer.

Huh! F is still very much a grade at the University of Alberta. Though They seem to just skip on the D- and go from D straight to F!

A grade shift would be incremental, ie C+ to C or B-, as a full letter shift is a 15% change of mark either way. And having said that I'd have to grade my grading pretty poorly as well; E is reserved for Did Not Sit, so a +/- margin of error cannot apply on a D- grading. Eh, I just assumed the standard convention of "skip E and go directly to F."

Who are these Bear Pit guys?

I always just found it interesting since people, in the wake of ME3 and all the movements that spawned out of it, were so diligently reporting on any sort of share price drop, and I always wondered what they thought that that actually meant. Especially all the statements about how it was like a noose wrapped around our necks and the like, and how it was reflective of their various movements having an effect. I came away pretty convinced that people actually had no real clue what exactly the stock market really measures and what who is really affected by changes in the share price and all. But I guess it let them think that they were sending a message or something and it validated some sense of skoodenfroody, which is what some people were looking for (even if they didn't really understand why they were feeling schadenfreude). EDIT: Hah! I didn't even notice the selective scaling! Do you consider a one grade level shift to be a D, or a C-?

Why exactly?

Fair, if that's the way you wish to go. A big reason why I continue to be obstinate in not pirating (I haven't been an active pirate for 13 years regardless, though my rationalization for doing so is fluid), is that somebody somewhere (and I have no clue as to who) goes "look at those piracy numbers. We should find a way to combat that. What sort of DRM solution can we come up with?" People are so quick to point out that big publishers lack context when they just look at number of downloads (and I'd agree with this criticism). But it doesn't do anything to help dissuade the impetus for someone to think that piracy is an issue. Game publishers love their money, and in a super idealized world where piracy doesn't exist, they don't institute DRM because it's a waste of time and money (at least for piracy concerns. I recognize that used game sales is another ball of wax). I don't consider piracy good for the industry, but ultimately people do it and come up with their reasons for doing so, some better than others. While I'm not a fan of piracy, though, I'm increasingly becoming less a supporter of DRM since working in the industry. But JMO. Someone somewhere thinks it's worth the time and investment, and I have zero visibility into the justifications and only have my own experiences and hunches to go on.

You're right, it does require you to open it. Good thing it's digital though, because if it was some OTHER packaged good, you'd either need to bite the bullet and open it (devaluing it) or pick up a non-collectors version to play. Again, if a pirated option didn't exist, what would one do in order to preserve the value of the collector's edition? In this case it's just the collector being lucky that a pirated option does exist. Other collector's edition owners that are unaware have to shamefully devalue their collector's edition in order to experience the game. Or buy a regular copy on top of it.

So many kobolds indeed. Thanks for reminding me of the horrors...

That depends on many circumstances. If the light takes 15 seconds, probably so, since I'd be braking/stopping anyway. If I'm waiting for 2-3 minutes I'll assume it's stuck and go. If one doesn't have the patience to wait for even 20 seconds or something, or see a deserted road as as an excuse to auto-ignore all traffic signs, well, no, I'm not like that. I'm similar in that way. You can argue "Why don't you run it? It's not like there's anything bad that is going to happen." By the same token, it's not like anything bad will happen if I just wait out the light. Saving the 30 seconds is of such marginal benefit to me. But then, I stuck with the 4x CD Burner when other people had 24x CD Burners, because a 10-15 minute burning of a CD wasn't enough of an inconvenience to me to do so.

I'm just accepting the responsibility of not taking care of my stuff. I don't just buy it on a whim, and I highly doubt I'd buy it at full price. But if I want to play the game, and the cost of my stupidity is affordable (i.e. some cheap price on Steam or something), I just pick it up again. Usually with the advantages of the game now being digital and a lot more difficult for me to lose (but open to Steam going offline for good and me not being available to play it). If I don't consider it worth my money to pick it up, I'll just play something else.

There's always the level of "it's not a physical good" which always makes it easier to justify. For myself, however, I would look at it as "What would I have to do if piracy wasn't an option?" Now you could argue that a CD-Key wouldn't exist if piracy didn't exist. I have, in fact, repurchased games where I have lost things like CD-Keys, mostly because it is my own fault for losing it. It's another reason why I'm a big fan of digital distribution (and also another reason why I am more diligent in tracking my CD keys of the odd boxed game I get).

Silent Storm was awesome, right up until panzerkleins.... haha.

I guess Double Fine Adventure serves as a counterpoint, though I'm curious if people contributed to that with the hopes that they could get Schafer to turn it into Psychonauts 2? Actually, I'm curious how much money the project would have received had it been Psychonauts 2? I think even as more adventurous projects get funded (assuming crowd funding continues to be successful), the big money earners will still be the sequels and the like. And as much as we may all want to believe the indie guys are doing it all for the love of the craft, I think it's simplistic to ignore the financial motivations for how projects are chosen. I agree trust is important, but I think the game being delivered contributes to that trust, in that there's the trust that someone needs that they actually WANT the game. Torment 2 by a different name? Well how do I know I will want to play it!? /jaded

JA2 is one of my all time faves for sure. But similar to the Master of Magic one, simply aspiring to be a game in that vein isn't necessarily enough. I'm also the curmudgeon that wants to see more new stuff, rather than just remakes or existing IP/name leverage. I know it's in many ways a semantic thing, but that's just the way it is for me. It's also a shortcoming, I feel, of crowd funding. Ask any fan what type of game that they want, and I'd say probably 99/100 they draw comparisons to existing games that they like, and how they want more of that. Not that I think that that is a fault of the fans... it's just something that I am noticing more and more (it probably always was. I'm just noticing it more now). I think my expectations for Kickstarter a year ago may have been somewhat replaced, because I didn't fully realize that in order to get fans to contribute to something, you need to gain their interest level and the best way to do that it seems is to go "Remember that awesome game experience you once had? We want to do something just like that" as opposed to "I know you want us to create an experience you feel familiar with, but we have some interesting ideas we'd like to try!" Would it even be possible for Obsidian or inXile to get close to the money they received if they went out with an idea that was not really comparable to much else out there? It makes me empathize with developers a bit more, as I find these are the same restrictions that get faced even when approaching publishers.

I still find myself hesitant due to lack of full understanding of the teams and the people involved. I mean, I'm pretty much "blind all in" for Obsidian, though inXile at least had enough recognition that I had better assurances that a quality project would be released. The Kickstarter scene is still rather fresh, and given some of the changes that have occurred in some projects (some of which I think are still perfectly justified), I still find I need to have a lot of trust in the developer to actually deliver, even though I'm only one of those "epic preorder" kind of guys (i.e. around $20). I'll have to watch the videos over lunch!

Ehhhh, it is to report bugs. It's just many people (especially in a public beta) don't. For most, beta is nothing more than "ooo I get to play the game early!" If the game is rough around the edges, many people just tolerate it, or go "eh, not ready" and move on. Some of the more egregious issues will get filed (because if there's something widespread that prevents people from playing, people go "Hey I can't play!"). By hooking up telemetry, the development team is able to glean a lot about the way people play the game and so forth. Heat maps can exist to show where people are spending their time, where (and how) they are dying, and so forth. In that sense, if you have well thought out telemetry, you can get a lot of information from the people that are simply playing your beta, even if they don't report very much. It's easy to get all jacked and go "oh yeah I want to help make this game awesome." But it's actually a non-trivial amount of work, and some bug reports such as "This is broken" are so close to meaningless that it's another situation where the developers need to hook in so much extra to help make sense of that issue. Things like player location, which direction the camera is looking in, current plot state, etc. etc. to help make context. Is it something weird or random, or can we see that it's something specific and consistent across multiple playthroughs. For instance, on DA2 there was a weird shader bug that would occur on the PS3 (and only the PS3) that was causing us issues with passing certification. We were able to get it to consistently crash in one location, but looking closer at the bug sentry auto filer we had set up, we were able to discern that there was one thing specific in the background that had a chance of having bad data. so that one small thing could be anywhere on the screen and have it happen, and we were slowly able to isolate the potential entities, which then lead to a programmer investigating the potential culprits and finding the issue.

Effective beta testing is mostly making sure you have absurd amounts of telemetry hooked up, since you can pretty much count on the percentage of participants actually reporting meaningful issues to be very, very small.