soralapio

Sorry to see you go, Dave. The relationship between the community and the design team and the transparency you were constantly promoting is a large part of what made Giant Bomb so unique and amazing. Never hearing "Dave, site's down" again makes me sad. At the same time you're doing it for the best of reasons so good luck to you and your family, and I wish you all the best.

And we get a silver lining too. Matt Rorie is back! Yay!

Fucking Disney.

@UltorOscariot said:

Man, I feel really bad for the people who are going to have their names attached to this thing

We need an Alan Smithee for the game industry. I propose "Derek Smart".

When I'm not tooling around on the Internet or making my indie games (see my earlier blog entries), I study computer science with an emphasis on game development and more specifically interactive storytelling. The Walking Dead was my favourite game of the year and in my opinion one of the best examples of how games can tell uniquely effective and gripping stories in a way other mediums can't touch.

I was so impressed with the game that I wrote a 10+ page essay on why and how The Walking Dead does such a great job. The essay was originally for a university course on interactive storytelling, so it can get a bit academical but I tried to keep the tone light and readable. That's just how I roll.

Anyway, great game, and if someone gets something out of this essay, great. Either way, let me know what you thought! Read it at: http://haxor.fi/~ml/published/ACaseStudyTheWalkingDead.pdf

When you submit stuff, does the page just reset for anyone else? Am I supposed to get some kind of "way to go, you submitted stuff" page or is it working as intended?

@oscarandjo said:

Blame Microsoft, They charge huge amounts of money for a company to release a patch and make it difficult for anyone (even developers) to make modifications to games. The Xbox 360 console is very closed off and playing it too safe.

Haha, like hell. 40 000 dollars is chickenfeed to Konami. The PR hit they're taking for this is orders of magnitude greater than that would've been.

@crusader8463 said:

You assume that it's going to be a yes/no voting system. It could just be a vote if you think this game is good thing and if you don't like it then don't vote. If I game reaches X votes then it gets on the store. Or they could go down the road of saying that in order to vote you need to put down a pre-order and if it meets a certain total of pre-orders then it gets on the store. If I could think of that stuff in 5-10 seconds I'm sure the Valve brain trust can come up with better.

I don't think they'll do the preorder part, but you have a good point. Somehow I latched on to the idea that it was going to be a 1-5 point voting system or something similar (too much time on Threadless I guess) instead of people being able to support X number of prospective games or something similar.

Still, I hope this won't be the only avenue and they work on streamlining their direct submission process as well.

I see an immediate problem with this.

If it's not handled with care and balanced properly, this will shunt out a lot of quirky or marginal games. Imagine your average Counter-Strike teenager looking at something like Sword & Sworcery. Will he vote it high or will he go "what is this gay bullshit" and vote it a 1? Now who are there more of, dumb people who have blinders on about the games they like, or people who are open to new and interesting experiences? Exactly.

So I hope Valve have thought this through.

@paulwade1984 said:

this thing will own 80% of the 20% share the i-pad doesnt have.

Yeah and what's up with Apple making a phone? That shit will fail so hard, it'll compete for the scraps Nokia, Blackberry and others leave off the table!

-- People in 2007

@Wallzii said:

2880x1800 with a... 650M? What kind of crack are they smoking? I really don't see the point of making any marketing towards gamers with this hardware and that screen.

Pixel doubling. Desktop stuff runs at 2880x1880 giving you hella crisp text, but anything more intensive runs at 1440x990 (like the normal MBPs) and then gets doubled to 2880x1880. At least until someone starts plugging in top end Thunderbolt GPUs. I guess those could do 2880x1880 at decent speeds if you cut down on the details some.

And yeah I agree, anyone who buys this expecting native resolution gaming goodness doesn't know anything about hardware. That being said, a new 11" Macbook Air is winging its way towards me as I speak. It's light, extremely portable and does what I want in a laptop.