kosayn

2 years from now... the GaiKai vs. ex-Onlive grudge match of the decade, on PSN and XBL. I'm sure by that time both companies will be able to develop a game so hot and fresh that they can claim it would only be possible to run from a remote server.

This comments section has been a gold mine. Endermen, $20 Mode, the Silence, on and on with more stuff I didn't know about. It's impressive how a non-commercial creation has had so much influence.

As far as people complaining that Slender Man isn't scary - you know, people say that about absolutely every horror thing ever made. Partly it's bravado and partly personal taste. When I first read the create paranormal images thread, Slender Man definitely wasn't the scariest thing in it to me, but it was certainly the most compelling and original. Just saying, let people have their fun, even if you're not into it, ok?

Ah, it's too hard to be angry while looking at a picture of the dog ending. Why bother.

But I wonder if at some point in the future one of the closed gaming platforms could involve the community in patching buggy games. I mean, on the PC, if your game is fucked, it's the best place for official fixes. And it's just about the only place where the user can go in and fix the code themselves without breaking the law.

I didn't think wikis would work either, until they did. Vandals and cheaters exist, and do cause problems in open platforms, but overall they produce less content than constructive people.

Probably nothing like that will happen until game design gets even less technical.

I've been a fan of Bethesda games ever since picking up the extremely foil-covered box of Daggerfall. I gotta say, I'm just happy they made it out of the 90s and still make video games. Their reputation for bugginess is definitely consistent and well-deserved, but I think it's balanced by their reputation for building giant worlds full of minute details, history, and opportunities to actually role play.

I do wish they'd stop courting the mainstream though, and get back to the weird non-standard fantasy we saw in Morrowind. Imperial province and Skyrim have their charm, but they are definitely in the popular fantasy area, just like a vampires expansion is.

TOS's have been overturned in court before, especially the "click through and agree to this 8 pages of bullshit nobody reads to use our software" variety. I've decided not to be concerned about them any more - if the need for justice is severe enough, the law changes.

Patrick secretly gets articles done at work on google docs, when he's supposed to be playing Spelunky.

I feel that what has been lost in all this discussion and reporting is that apparently, if you are starting new on the current patched version of the game, the save deletion glitch won't occur. So, good for people who didn't buy it before the patch, I suppose. I'd rather see it on a different platform, of course. I can think of a few that could handle the game easily and wouldn't be subject to the same level of pointless closed platform restrictions.

It's unfortunate that Polytron and Microsoft won't sort things out for the core fans of the game. But we really have no sure data about what the 'work together on it' price would be for Fez to get a second title update. $20k? Free? I'm sure it's all very NDA'ed up. It's amazing we know about the $40k standard price in the first place.

You know, back in the day I was playing some Alpha Centauri with friends, directly connecting to each other without any need of an online gaming service.

And we had a bug, so we all went and downloaded this tiny zip file, some of us from the official site, and some from fan sites. These sites incurred almost no cost from the download because THE INTERNET. We copied the contents out all by ourselves into the game folder. Some of us might have been using Winzip, or WinRAR, or even the native Zip support built into Windows XP. The choice was ours, and anyone with half a brain was capable of accomplishing it. And you know, for the people that couldn't figure out how, frankly, I wouldn't want to be playing a high level strategy game with them anyway.

Compare the modern game patching experience. How is it better? Only in removing a barrier to entry for people who are barely capable of gaming.

Closed consoles are garbage. It's only about consolidating all the power and responsibility in the hands of the publishers, and disempowering the players and developers, not about convenience. There is no net gain of convenience. Consider the current xbox menu system when you take the position that closed consoles and IOS are about convenience.

Every single video game out there today could be one .EXE file that never even gets 'installed,' if we want to talk about convenience.

In a way, it's good that we finally have an example to point to of why XBLA/PSN's $40k patches are a problem. I would buy this game if it were fixed, but will I buy it when the latest patch has a well publicized game breaking bug? No, I don't. Not even if it is a small chance.

It'd be better for Microsoft to make money by selling games to customers rather than extorting it from developers, if you ask me. I'm sure even with a much lower fee, or none, developers would not patch 5 times a day and destroy the stability of the system. They have better things to do, patches don't earn money - only good will for future games.

It'd be nice if we lived in a world where every developer releases perfect products that never need a patch, but... games are not as simple as they once were. Fish did make a buggy game, but come on, he's hardly the first. I don't think a shoestring operation should have to give up the price of a luxury car just for the privilege to improve their product, and the XBLA service overall. It's a bit different for Konami to pay that money to fix their mistakes than it is for Polytron.

Hope it goes to another platform, and achieves better success. The game still has good exposure in the community, for now.

Hunting random items can be fun. But you need to have player agency in the process. With no standard items, a bad skill system, and a poor rate of any sidegrade drops, you can't feel like you're trying different strategies in Diablo 3. Just putting in time.

The game might have a future, but only if they stop deciding money is more important than fun.