J.E. Sawyer

The fundamentals of graphic art and writing haven't changed much with the advent of computer gaming, but the ability of artists to actually display their work as intended in a computer gaming medium has improved drastically. That is, technology has limited the ability to display graphic art much more than it has limited the ability to display writing.

Much like deathclaws, trolls ignore armor.

I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the Xbox 360 "achievement unlocked" pop-up is an inherent part of Xbox 360 achievements/a TCR requirement.

Short answer: pretty much all games get it wrong IMO. I'll write up the long answer later.

Fallout: New Vegas will feature graphics, sound, and even musical sounds. Enjoy.

This is only a secret to dumbos who spend less than 15 minutes learning about the game.

Any substantive information about the game will have to wait for Bethesda, but the project is going well and has been a lot of fun so far.

Pretty well thx.

I'm enjoying the game so far, but the combat is either mind-numbingly easy (counters against 90% of all opponents) or infuriatingly hard (brutes). Switching between low and high profile always feels "mushy", and I often wind up being sucker punched because Ezio isn't in combat/ready to block.

So clear that it's one of the most controversial clauses in the constitution, a clause that defines scope of power without defining the terms being used and was written a century before automobiles, a century and a half before the interstate highway system, and about two centuries before widespread use of the internet. If this clause were clear, cases involving it would not repeatedly be brought before SCOTUS. The conflict between the lack of clear definition and intent in "interstate commerce" and the general proscription of the Tenth Amendment is a pretty obvious explanation for why this happens. SCOTUS let the legislature define "interstate commerce" from the New Deal until Rehnquist, and Rehnquist's SCOTUS generally shot the legislature's definitions down. Judicial fiat works both ways. But when you've got Antonin Scalia concurring with the majority ruling of Gonzales v. Raich, upholding the power of the federal government to bust Californians for possession of medical marijuana (legal in California), it's obviously not a simple matter to arbitrate with the clause's text as written. Today's principal dissent objects that, by permitting Congress to regulate activities necessary to effective interstate regulation, the Court reduces Lopez and Morrison to "little more than a drafting guide." Post, at 5 (opinion of O'Connor, J.). I think that criticism unjustified. Unlike the power to regulate activities that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce, the power to enact laws enabling effective regulation of interstate commerce can only be exercised in conjunction with congressional regulation of an interstate market, and it extends only to those measures necessary to make the interstate regulation effective. As Lopez itself states, and the Court affirms today, Congress may regulate noneconomic intrastate activities only where the failure to do so "could ... undercut" its regulation of interstate commerce. See Lopez, supra, at 561; ante, at 15, 21, 22. This is not a power that threatens to obliterate the line between "what is truly national and what is truly local." Lopez, supra, at 567-568. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getc...54#concurrence1 It's not "expansion" of the powers that should be defined by constitutional amendment, but further definition, period. I don't debate that the government has used the Commerce Clause to exert a lot of power; what I reject is your suggestion that the Commerce Clause has clear and inherent limitations as written. Luckily, this case (Gonzales v. Raich) brings us back to California again. I will be interested to see if anything ever becomes of efforts to legalize and tax marijuana. There are an enormous number of dispensaries in California (especially in Los Angeles -- there are almost 1,000).

Yeah, it sounds like two broad statements that are in conflict with each other and need to be arbitrated. That's what SCOTUS did, just as SCOTUS ruled against the state (well, D.C.) and for individual constitutional rights when it overturned the D.C. handgun ban. If these were self-evident implications, SCOTUS wouldn't be called upon to arbitrate them. I think people lose sight of the fact that these cases are escalated up through lower courts before they reach SCOTUS. Judicial activist commandos didn't halo jump into District of Kansas courts to "make up" Brown v. Board of Education (for example). It is really bewildering that people refer to this state as "socialist" when it is one of the few states (unfortunately) with ballot initiatives. Californians are really in love with directly voting for enormously expensive projects but they really hate voting for anything to fund them. That requires a simple majority. Then the state legislature is left to pass budgets to support all of these enormously expensive projects but need a 2/3rd majority. Even in THE HEART OF COMMUNIST CALIFORNIA, that ain't happening. I'm neutral on Gov. Schwarzenegger overall. He's actually consistently tried to do everything he's said he would do -- namely, cut spending, freeze automatic budget increases, find new sources of revenue without raising taxes. Pretty consistently, voters and unions have screamed at him and shot down his initiatives the entire way. People love the idea of spending being cut unless it's something they (or their friends/relatives) actually use. We have a lot of really bad, broken systems in place, and I don't think the people or legislature can realistically get rid of them unless there's a constitutional convention. The sad thing is that people still, against all reason, support the 2/3rd majority budget ratification. It's mind-boggling.

Supreme court arbitrates in your favor = defenders of the constitution. Supreme court arbitrates against your desires = judicial activists. The Commerce Clause is a single, simple sentence with broad implications as written. I'm not sure how you can read, "To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;" and come away thinking that there's some sort of hidden subtext implying limitations.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...CA2008Prop8.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...ounty,_2008.svg

Where did you ever get this idea? Like many states, California contributes more in federal taxes than it receives in return. Coincidentally, in the report I linked, Iowa received $1.10 in federal funding for every $1 it contributed in federal taxes. Sorry you won't be part of the union anymore. Perhaps you can move to NOBLE WISCONSIN, recipient of $0.86 per $1 contributed.

Here's my high level thought on California's sorry condition: many things have contributed to the current state of the state. I do not think any/many of these bad things will be corrected unless the state fails abjectly. My hope (though certainly not my belief) is that citizens will soberly consider the myriad structural problems in the state's legislative operation instead of spending a few years blaming specific politicians and political parties, accomplishing nothing. Personally, I would like to see ballot initiatives disappear, state legislative budget ratification shifted to a simple majority, state pensions overhauled, state prisons overhauled, and property taxes restructured -- basically a lot of things that might have made sense/seemed like good ideas way back when, but generally cause a lot of grief today. I doubt much of that will change. If not, oh well -- I'd be happy to go back to Wisconsin. As long as no one messes with places like Yosemite, Death Valley, Sequoia, Joshua Tree, etc., the best parts of California will be fine. It is really terrible, but let's also put this in perspective: in 2001, California was the world's 5th largest economy (by GSP/GDP), ahead of France. It's still in the top 10 and has a GSP of over $1.5 trillion, and is still about 13% of the United States' GDP. Nevada isn't exactly 2009's economic powerhouse. They -- specifically Las Vegas -- were hit badly by the downturn in the housing market. I rode through Nevada in June and the outskirts of the city around 215 were mile after mile of empty housing complexes, many of them half-finished shells. The state's also projecting a large budget shortfall in 2010 -- 30% of their projected 2009 funding. http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/document...4_20090408.html I hope OC and most inland counties like San Francisco values. Maybe all of the San Diego expatriates who moved to Austin will move back after the Red Curtain falls on Texas.

In what way? I hope you don't mean financially, as a lot of "blue states" often contribute more federal money than they receive. As the most relevant example, California generally receives less per capita than it pays per capita. http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/cffr-08.pdf http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html West Virginia and New Mexico are notable "blue" exceptions. Of course, NM and WV are ranked 37th/36th in population as opposed to California, which is 1st by a large margin. There are also several high-population "red" states, like Texas, that federally give more than they receive per capita. I don't think either "side" is holding the others back. Of course this also assumes that you can clearly divide red/blue, which you can't. My home state, Wisconsin, had a Republican governor for a long, long time -- but continued to send Democrat representatives to Congress and vote for Democrat presidential candidates. Texas has had an enormous number of Democrat governors -- of most notable recent interest, Ann Richards. You'd be better off trying to split urban/rural, but even that doesn't make much sense.

They are busy making Naked Man Dog Killing Simulator 2.

I'm glad anyone can take something away from this. Often discussion about mechanics revolve around specific examples in games. Over time a lot of these specific examples have fallen into patterns that I've found useful. Still, I find it hard to articulate the underlying principles without examples.

I think it really depends on the nature of the difficulty. There's difficulty that people find challenging/satisfying and difficulty that people haphazard/frustrating. Fallout 1 is a pretty easy game, but when you die in the late game, it's usually because of x3 damage armor-piercing critical hits. They are haphazard, cannot be planned for (outside of simply avoiding being hit), and are frustrating.

At work, I am often directly involved in an aspect of game design that not all designers really deal with: system and content tuning. This is the process by which system rules and content are adjusted to produce a specific effect for the player. E.g. you want the player to feel like he/she really gains a great advantage when he/she gets the raccoon tail in Super Mario Brothers 3, so you space out the frequency of raccoon tail powerups and you make sure that the raccoon tail's flight powers allow access to useful/valuable areas. RPGs are often difficult to tune for a few reasons: * There are a lot of statistics * Many of the statics are derived/connected to other statistics * There are subsystems that govern access to various abilities (e.g. class systems, racial abilities, etc.) that create a player desire for egalitarianism/balance between those subsystems This won't all be coherent, but I'd like to write down a few basic rules that I have developed over time. * Avoid allowing a base value to be modified by more than three inputs. That is, if you have a base damage value for something, you should ideally allow it to be affected by no more than three things. The fewer inputs you allow to modify a value, the more significant the effects of those inputs are. Additionally, the range is generally more constrained and predictable for a player. In turn, this makes tuning content easier. E.g. how long you can hold your breath underwater. It's affected by your Constitution score, your Swim skill, and your Breathing Bonuses (a catch-all of non-stacking bonuses specifically for holding breath). As long as you know the max Constitution score, max Swim skill, and the highest Breathing Bonus, you know exactly how long a character can hold his or her breath underwater at any given point in the game. Because you only have three inputs to worry about, it's easy to track everything that goes into this system. Player attempts to min-max the system are limited to those three categories, which means that non-min-maxers can still be "competitive". Now let's say you decide to expand this system. You allow all Breathing Bonuses to stack. A player can have a Breathing Bonus from up to three different perks and Breathing Bonuses on any/all equipment he or she can wear, up to eight "slots" worth. Even if the values used on these perks and pieces of equipment were relatively minor, the spectrum of minimum and maximum have increased dramatically. It becomes more difficult to predict where a character will be on this scale at any given point in the game, and the min-maxer has an extreme advantage over the casual player, making content tuning difficult. * From a single value, avoid deriving multiple values in different subsystems. When you do this, you have created a complex balancing problem for yourself. The classic example of this is the ability score system in pretty much all editions of (Advanced) Dungeons & Dragons. Ability scores affect skills, the use of class abilities (e.g. a paladin's lay on hands), and various class-neutral statistics (hit point bonus from Con, AC bonus from Dex). Every time you adjust one of these skills, abilities, or statistics, you affect the value of the stat that has an input into them. Logically, any time you adjust inputs into the value from which these other values are derived, you affect the expected range of the derived values. The fewer things a single value affects, the easier balance will be for you. * Do not create drawbacks that are "opt-out" for the player if it still gives some benefit to the player. I.e. do not allow the player to take what is ostensibly a "drawback" that gives them a bonus to a skill pool, or some other sort of gameplay bonus, unless that drawback is very difficult/impossible to avoid. When people want to specialize a character in something, they already know what they want to do. What they don't want to do is pretty much everything but that activity. "You gain +4 to damage with broadswords but -20 to damage with wooden dowels and light maces," contains an effectively worthless drawback. The only way the drawback would ever arise in gameplay would be through some asinine heavy-handedness on the part of the game designer -- for which the player will almost assuredly resent you. A more even-handed drawback would be, "You gain +4 to damage with broadswords but attack 20% more slowly when using them." The benefit and the drawback are both realized within the same activity. The player cannot reap the benefit without suffering the penalty. * When making trade-offs between items/skills/abilities, those trade offs must actually feel different in application or the player's choice isn't very important. For example, in the above case of +4 to damage with a 20% lower attack rate, there should be situations in which more damage per hit = better and situations in which faster attack rate = better. For example, if an armor system is threshold based (subtracts a flat damage value), doing more damage per shot always means that damage has a greater chance of getting through armor. In this case, the +4 bonus is better when used against opponents with armor. Against opponents with high health and no armor, raw DPS matters more than damage per shot. In such cases, having a 20% faster attack rate may be better if it outweighs the DPS value of the +4 in the overall equation. * Show the player what he or she is getting, even if they don't necessarily understand how the underlying math works out. When players invest in something, they have an expectation that what they are increasing is affecting something. Make sure that this is happening, and happening consistently. If you have some sort of weird logarithmic adjustments going on behind the scene without informing the player, the player does not know what he or she is getting. In a case where you have a system where all points on a scale cost a fixed value to buy, each point should advance the derived values by an equal amount (a linear increase) -- or the player should be informed about how things are actually being increased on your wacky scale. Okay that's enough for now.

I don't have any problem with DA DLC, but how it's presented is pretty bad. I think the way F3 (as a pretty obvious comparison) handled it is less irritating. That is, in F3, there's no presence or hint of the extra content if you haven't purchased it. Once you install it, the indicator pops up in game.

I think I've left the Torchlight own zone. It's not that it got bad, but the balance did get out of whack near the end of the game. The random drop system gets pretty nutty (i.e. extremely random) once you start getting into the 20s. After I found items that gave me enough bonus to knockback, magic, critical hit/damage, and mana, there wasn't much reason to trade up. I'm still mostly using gear that I picked up 8-10 levels ago. :/

In Broken Steel, I killed all but a handful (maybe six) of enemies from stealth with no more than two strikes from Stabhappy. I never fought Ghoul Reavers, but Hellfire Troopers went down in two shots.

Is it because you're not getting a physical copy? You can download content purchased on Steam on any computer where you have an account. If every computer you owned were annihilated by a freak bolt of lightning, you could get a new computer, log on to Steam, and re-download pretty much everything you had ever purchased.

Yeah, the dungeons are randomly generated. The music composer is the dude from the original Diablo.