Worth Reading: 02/22/13

Depression Quest. Whew. That's a lot to chew on. Thanks for sharing.

That bold font is mostly indecipherable. Please consider using different formatting.

I am not sure if it depends on screen resolution, but I get the feeling that nobody on the staff looks at these articles after they are written. The bold font is immediately noticeable.

Wow Riot looks cool.

To quote I-Don't-Remember-Who from 8-4 Play, it was great to have all those people complain about the lack of a box. Now we know exactly who to ignore. Thanks for revealing yourselves, non-gamers!

Yeah, it's...pretty bad.

I thought that x-ray picture was a vinyl album cover at first

Good one, Scoops.

You guys need to work on that bold font. It is basically unreadable in the website's darker color scheme. I know you guys wanted white to be the lead design, but yeesh.

The NYT article is baffling. I can only assume these are all people used to gaping at a new iPad or iPhone and writing essays about the huge implications of a screen that's a little bigger or smaller than the last one.

I'm also confused by the Gameological article that seems to be arguing against... technological progress? I don't get how you don't get this.

Fuck that Gameological article, the man is being impossible.

Hey a console manufacturer is being a console manufacturer, i'm gonna get angry about that right after I shake my fist at the sun rising.

Also gotta make sure I heap praise on a notable indie developer, flip the bird at developers that talk about polygons and then completely ignore Media Molecule.

Professional Quake III is insane.

I'd like to think you showed Ryan that Mario Bros. 3 endgame. That was pretty awesome.

I didn't hate the Gameological article. I think it's just a cynical view of something we always see. I like John Teti, and sort of agree with him, though my reaction to it is basically that Justin McElroy Verge show reaction.

EDIT: Also, yeah the kerning on that bold font is rough.

I completely agree, although sometimes I feel like even the bomb crew is a little disconnected from their audience.

Also seconding the complaints on the bold/offset font. Not sure why, but it reads like it was put through a bad fax machine. It's blurry as hell.

@patrickklepek

I'm in the same boat as you with the Media Molecule. I'm an animator/director by trade and what I saw there is something I could sink my teeth into even more than Little Big Planet 2. I'm predicting this to be an evolution of what they did with that and allow people to create their models on top of choreographing their own stories, and maybe open up the creation tools to make even more types of games, and with any hope maybe they'll let us adjust the physics so that we can tone down the floatiness that LBP had. I am so stoked for this system now!

Umm, so does the quoted text look as shit to everyone else? What's going on?

The problem for me is that when you write as cynical a piece as Teti did, not bothering to bring up any positives (because you know if he wanted to he could), then it's difficult for me to listen to you. He did have legitimate points, but they were unfortunately bogged down by obnoxious cynicism that is simply there to hate.

@dunchad said:

Umm, so does the quoted text look as shit to everyone else? What's going on?

Me too. It needs to be reworked.

Yeah I agree it's really hard to keep reading when people are endlessly negative.

It's awesome you picked up on that Twine game, "What's in a Name?". I played it a few months ago and it's good to see it's being noticed beyond the 'bi-osphere'. :)

I wouldnt put too much stock in that BuzzFeed article. You can tell its well thought out criticism when it has a link to "The 12 Most Horrifying Parts of Having Bangs"

Same here. They are super difficult to read on my end.

Also, the writer of Far Cry 3 sounds like a jerk.

But the GB crew was actually pretty positive about the PS4, which was in line with most gaming fans, and it was mostly the tech press that was negative while the gaming press came away positive. It seemed like the GB crew during Unprofessional Fridays was a little more uneasy? (can't think of another word) about the next Xbox and the direction it's headed.

And to me, the internet press is just becoming like a lot of its own audience which is negative and cynical. So to hear people actually being excited about the PS4 is an encouraging sight.

The bold text is a lot easier to read on the white theme

@oppressivestink: Awesome.

I didn't get humble from the PS4 reveal. It felt like a lot of promises, much like the PS3.

Ugh, Depression Quest hit a little too close to home on my thought processes and daily life for comfort. It ended up really upsetting me because I played the game as if it were really me and not what I would WANT to do, and I ended up as depressed as you can get and completely alone.

Holy shit, depression quest. The rest of worth reading was great as always, but many of my friends and family deal with issues like this and it is so spot on... damn.

I have to go play Saints Row now.

I loved first person Mario. Castle Mammon, on the other hand, will feature in some upcoming nightmares.

I read the Teti rant yesterday and thought very poorly of it: most of his arguments were ridiculous and the piece isn't near half as clever as he (Teti) thinks it is.

I always enjoy Worth Reading, but the bolded quote font is making me gloss over what appears to be interesting quotes. I've no idea what they say, as I can only read maybe a quarter of the blocks of white.

Anywho! Glad to see you're getting better, Patrick, and I'll be looking forward to seeing you more on the site again.

that tweet is pretty good. I swear games would be a hundred times better if there was some sort of resident psychologist in a development team. In playing a game, you learn to play it. But first there needs to be some motivation to play it and keep playing it! In this way I feel like having a psychological perspective can help to build better games. It also helps if players are more aware of their own psychology when playing games. xD

That bold font needs to go. Even increasing the font size on the browser doesn't help.

Awesome stuff as always PK.

Awesome work, Patrick.

It's like trying to read a headlight

Wow that NYT article reminded me why I don't follow any gaming/tech press on twitter outside of the GB crew. Just awful. What a bunch of morons.

I don't think your summary of the Far Cry 3 story is accurate. I'm not saying it's not a jumbled mess and above criticism.

Jason is clearly being used every step of the way by the natives and Citra. He doesn't come in and save the day necessarily, more like drops in their lap with a dumb look on his face and gets fed what he wants to hear.

Citra sets him up from the start as a replacement for her brother. She'd just finished up hollowing out Vaz's mind with magic, violence, and her crazy plans. Jason's appearance was convenient.

Yes the story was a mess and it failed to capitalize on the clash of social and economic standings of the characters. However it's not a "white man is the best man" story. The author does have a point when he points out it says something interesting about the critic when they try to pigeon hole the story in that way.

They really need to change the bolded font.

I love that 5 or so tweets are indicative of 'universal disappointment' with the PS4 conference. also, Ian Bogost is a really awesome dude, I knew about Cow Clicker, but have been keeping an eye on his written stuff since that hilarious Hundreds piece he did.

Great as always! I kind of the dig the amount of well-written Twine games being put out. I've been trying to get into Blood Bowl recently ,so I feel like that twiter quote rings even louder in my head. Probability plays a huge part in Blood Bowl, because a bad dice roll can literally cost you a match. From what I played it seems to strike a good balance between probability and tactics. It makes me wonder how hard it must to be design a game that is more probability dependent than your typical RPG/Strategy game, while still remaining balanced.

Woof! Bold font is awful.

Klepek biting hard into the white man's guilt thing and refusing to let go.

The Teti article on PS4 seemed pretty inane. Of course it's first world problems - it's a video game console, not a sack of rice to be dropped in Africa.

Didn't Sony recently cut the developer of Playstation All Stars loose?

Oh that's a sweet x-ray. Good luck recuperating and thanks for burning through the pain.

TED?

I've sat through someone playing The Witch's House. It's an RPGmaker game featuring puzzle-solving with small hints of running away from things that want to kill you. I think the "True" ending is actually pretty cool, but I'm not convinced playing through 2-3 hours of this game is worth it. If you haven't already, I would recommend playing Ib. It shares the same framework as The Witch's House, but Ib--in my opinion--way more satisfying and unique in its horror design.

I wouldn't say the Gama interview was less positive, merely based in reality. We're leaving a generation when the PS3 may not have been open for gaming but shipped with Linux for non-gaming coding fun. Retail 360 units ran debug C# bytecode (with a bad garbage collector but it was a start and commercial games shipped using XNA) and there was even a hidden distribution and sales network where the gatekeepers were community cert.

The PS4 comes out and we get talk of open, people from Sony are reaching out (don't get me wrong, indie devs I've spoken to only have great things to say about Sony dev relations guys and how easy it is to get a meeting), but when you compare it to the other closed garden, the mobile land of iOS's restricted code execution or to XNA then it doesn't sound like they're learning fast enough. When you look over at PC or Android, totally open platforms where large SDKs are throw at developers for free and retail hardware is the debug hardware, places where you don't need to deal with anyone to get on a store because end users can run unsigned code so you can ship direct. Obviously the razorblade model of taking a cut of every sale to subsidise the hardware means we won't see high end open consoles but using retail units to run debug code and giving away all the SDK tools for free is somewhere we have already been and yet Sony's new 'open' console and dev friendly face isn't even reaching the bar previous consoles have reached. That's why that interview wasn't as gentle as it might have been.

I called it out on the last Worth Reading and I'll do it again, the bold font is way too hard to read. The white theme is a little bit better, but c'mon, you can't have one of your themes have such a problem. There has to be a better way to do that text (a different font maybe?).