@Alex The idea of this column suits you down to the ground (in my personal opinion). You're a powerful user of the written word in particular and at your best when taking aim at an issue forcefully while not being tied down by any constraints. I think this will be a really good addition to the site.
A non-tangential aside: over the past year or more I've really gained a strong appreciation of your writing - I previously never had you in my mind foremost as a writer (e.g. just another one of the enjoyable gang on On the Spot), but you're really good! You are great at entertaining just by some words on the page and when I'm going out of my way to read a 1-star review of something by you even though I have no attention of ever playing the game or even caring to know about it, you know you have something special then. So keep doing what you're doing.
I can't get past #teambrad but I want to give an honourable mention to "Take him to the murder slingshot! Jeff Gerstmann 2012 political platform " because that was the most I've laughed at Bombcast in some time.
Just checked in after a while. Drew's images don't quite capture his essence for my money - it's a slight complaint in view of everyone else being completely amazing.
I think the issues you talk abou here are interesting. I would say that the opening the paragraph that you use to link in to these issues is something I don't personally see - my sense of my backlog which is something I'm very aware of is not something that has a connection to me feeling that games are more important to play at their time of release. I'm ok with games later and feel that they still hold their value though I concede that occasionally I want to play a game at the same time as other people to be a part of the zeitgeist and the discussions that follow soon after - the last example of that for me is Portal 2. In general though, I'm more and more ok with playing games whenever.
I think I'm ok with remakes of games making others obselete. Some things have just moved in ways that are only positive wwithout any negatives. They are other improvements that come at the cost of losing other things for value and in those cases I agree that it can be good for people to try out those things - that won't be for everybody though. There are some gems of games and types of gaemplay as well from the past that have just never been followed through on since then and where something really valuable has been lost - even more important in those cases that those things aren't lost where they're useful. It's probably most important that future game designers know about those old games so that the best tthings can find a place in new generations of games.
This reminds me that Paul Barnett (frequent Bombcast contributor) said that he was bringing up his son by starting him playing the earliest generations of games and gradually working him up through the timeline of games so that he took in all the important games of the past and games have gradually progressed - that sounds a pretty amazing way to go about things for that kid. One of the things we can lose the most by forgettting the past is how amazing what we have today currently is in many ways.
Interesting to read your thoughts - I'll be following in case I find other things interesting that you write.
It's easy for people to point at recent games and try to make some sorts of conclusions but I think that's being a bit too game-centric with perspective. These guys have been doing this for years and Bioware has become the megalithic conglomerate in the recent ones. They've probably gone as far as they can go and I'm sure the enterprise doesn't feel like it once was - maybe the size is now too much for them to want to cope with on a long-term scale. You can understand that they just wanted something different and that other life issues affected things.
The other question about whether this will have much material aspect on Bioware's games is also hard to answer. There's lots of great people there I reckon and hopefully that will work out, though who knows if the successors will arise from inside Bioware or outside of it.
Hey, so I thought this might be of interest to people. I just watched this video from the NYU Game Center lecture series where they had Tim Schafer presenting on that occasion and it features a really interesting and funny game idea Double Fine were pitching to an unnamed publisher who decided there weren't going to pursue it in the end. This lecture is from 5 months ago but I can't remember hearing about this from anyone at that time and I reckon others might also be clueless to this and yet still be interested to hear about it. It's worth watching just to hear some witty dialogue written (and even voice-acted) by Tim Schafer but the idea they had was intriguing: to use the Kinect to register gestures based on specific emotions that you want to cause people in the game world to feel for other people/objects in the game -e.g. love, fear, trust. And you're doing this as an ancient dagger with a soul trapped in it that can influence anyone who takes hold of you while in the meantime there is a crazy backdrop of a wedding on a boat where everyone has different competing motivations. It allows for you to be passed between many different people and experience different branching plots and endings which Tim admits might have been over-ambitious and very hard to implement.
I remember at the time of the Kickstarter that Tim mentioned that the success was a welcome one after a team had just experienced the pain of having a project they had been working on cancelled. Maybe this is that project he was referring to - though I don't know how much work these prototypes constitute for DoubleFine and so maybe this one is just another smaller early stage project.
It would be a crime if a half-serious but mostly dumb Giant Bomb humour, Persona-style Giant Bomb web-comic wasn't the result of these awesome designs.
Agreed.
I knew the art was good, but that 'shop a few posts back that puts Jeff by Chie makes it fully evident just how astutely the art style was emulated. Fantastic.
Anyway, this is what I managed to whip up in an hour or so. It's in the same vein as the Hardcore Dave shirt, and it could use some polishing, but the idea's still there. I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies, the original picture is super low res.
That's really cool. I think to make it work like the original still does you need to be able to see the look of hope, exhiliration, expectation etc. in the faces so probably needs a least some mouths and maybe eyes - could still be kept minimalistic though. Well done for the effort though - the original certainly is quite low-res that you're going off of.
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