Ego

I thought I wasn't going out tonight so I took some acid but now I am going out and aaaaah Exai should turn this 2 hour transit into a fun journey!

Those who have preloaded on Steam can cheat the region lock and unlock the game using an Australian VPN. Going in now!

Still want one? What's your Steam ID?

It's easy to hate on EA because they don't seem to love us customers either. They've also bought and dumbed down or killed off a lot of great studios. They had a short burst of creativity with a lot of new IP's around 2007-2008 (Mirror's Edge, Mass Effect, Skate, Dead Space...), but they've been pretty much milking those cows ever since. Have you seen their PR department at work? Pretty much everything they tell the press these days they will backtrack on later. Some of the things EA has blurted out in the past year or so: "We will put microtransactions in all our games", "Our games won't be Origin exclusive", "Steam sales cheapen intellectual property", "Single-player only games 'finished'"... I would love to play buzzword bingo in an executive EA meeting. I'm not sure customer satisfaction, creativity or quality would get much hits. I don't think that the new SimCity is bad just because of the server problems. I think it's bad because of the incredible small city size. If the simulation can't handle bigger sizes, they should have simplified the simulation. But I'm sure they had their hands full figuring out some convoluted client-server architecture and coming up with features to justify this bad idea. Maxis might have had some right intentions, but the people that make the big decisions at EA do not.

This is pretty good. I love how huge the skill trees are.

I wish they'd just adopt the left analog stick position and ergonomic triggers of the X360.

I love vekoS. What a badass track. So much texture. That mutating bassline and psychedelic ending.

I got pulled into Proteus again. I adore the summer atmosphere. I stayed up the night and seeing the sun rise again and the summer day kick off feels amazing. Makes me nostalgic for childhood summers. It's also pretty damn fantastic how some of the animals like the owl or the squirrel are animated so convincingly in like what? A total of maybe 10 frames of 20 pixels? Or the water which is just lines expanding and contracting. Or the simple but oh so effective tree crown animation when you're getting close to a progression zone or when time is progressing rapidly... Aaah I love it.

I enjoyed it. No real gameplay to it. You run around a randomly generated world throughout a few seasons. Plants, structures and regions have different sounds and melodies so you run around looking for pretty sights and ambient melodies. Mostly melodies since the art is barren and the music can be very beautiful at times. Sometimes it subtly takes control back in a certain way and does something special and there are certain cues to guide you to progress. The synergy between the music and visuals can really work. It does feel a bit magical. But for such a lo-fi world they should have a better draw distance. The far clipping plane is very obvious. It's also very short. Played through it in 40 minutes or so and wasn't playing in a hurry. Maybe I'll see and hear different things on another playthrough since some of it is procedural?

They certainly share a lot of DNA. Same sense of exploration, a lot of focus on atmosphere and setting, very minimal, intuitive, natural feeling gameplay systems and the story telling and progression is a lot like Journey's. They're also similar in the way that they're the result of a very clear and daring vision which gives them great artistic merit. ICO is dated so the game design can feel very sloppy in places but it's still an important piece of gaming history and very much worth playing.

There's a lot of ambiguity in the narration. I thought it was too cryptic as well. I couldn't keep up with who was who. Here's a reasonable explanation I've stolen from a guy on Eurogamer: It's also probable that the narration becomes more wild near the end because your character hurt his leg and is on a lot of painkillers.

Same here. What a desperate soul. Why is it extinct? If anything, it has only gotten easier to get funding and distribution with stuff like kickstarter and greenlight. On a related note. I saw Minecraft: The Mojang Story which I can't recommend. The story is obviously heartwarming. A good hearted guy becoming successful keeping his modesty and not succumbing to become a corporate machine. The documentary isn't made well. Shows nothing new, repeats itself over and over again and uses too much footage for the sake of using the footage.

I tried playing Crusader Kings 2 last weekend. Started as Boudewijn V, Duke of Flanders. Everything went to shit when my brother-in-law William the Conqueror made France fall apart and I got betrayed by my Dutch vassal after my son had to take over. I seemed completely powerless throughout. All these lords are assholes. I did worse than reality.

The distinction is a bit vague because there are languages you could call a programming or scripting language like Python. But a scripting language generally has a large built in library and a loose syntax, often with dynamic typing, and is mostly interpreted so no explicit compilation is needed. You don't have to deal directly with memory and low level operations so it's much faster to create and maintain software. Your code will look much nicer because modern scripting languages have evolved their syntax and paradigms and most of the low level work has been abstracted away for you. This obviously comes with a cost. Everything happens on the heap and there's overhead to everything you do so your software will take a lot more memory and CPU cycles. If you assign a string in Python 3 you'll create an object you can do a lot of operations on. You'll be able to search and replace, it supports multibyte characters, you can dynamically change the length and other stuff you'll quickly take for granted. If you create a character array in C you'll just get a memory pointer that points directly to a block of bytes ending by a \0 character. While extremely limited and prone to bugs because it's easy to mess something up, it's also extremely fast. For something like audio processing where you are working with raw audio streams and have to do a lot of time sensitive operations per second C(++) is certainly a good choice. The need for that speed is why C++ is still the standard in the game industry for engine code. The high level stuff like the game logic is often done using a high level "scripting" language like Lua, C#, Python or even Javascript because that makes the high level stuff easier to build and maintain. You don't need to be close to the machine code for that.

C++ can add a lot of unwanted complexity but a major advantage is that you can use STL containers and libs like boost so you don't have to reimplement every basic data structure. You can write C-style code while still using that stuff.

Forgot I didn't finish Max Payne 3 so gave it another go and finished it. I'm a bit partial to the story. The delivery in the narration is certainly noir enough despite the setting. But I thought the intrigue was lacking. Maybe because they all seem like untrustworthy assholes from the get-go. It's certainly a lot of fun once you get into the rhythm and start connecting headshots. The attention to detail in the player and enemy animations is fantastic. The animation tech really allows you to read a group of enemies to see which are the most immediate threat so you can prioritize shooting and movement. I still think there was no need for a cover system. This game is most fun when you break away from cover and move in aggressively. And oh my the fidelity on the PC is amazing. Some fantastic, detailed scenery. I really hope they pushed some of that high definition pipeline into GTA V. The character shading looks somewhat similar to what we've seen in the GTA V trailers.

Well it's CD Projekt RED, that's reason enough for a lot of people (including me) to get excited. The amazing production values of that teaser will carry through to the final game.

It's a shame how little they improved the core gameplay systems since the first game. The combat is still just the same mindless attack & counter system, the stealth is still overreliant on safe zones and has so little depth. AC1 and 2 were great because it was all novel. The game world was rich and expansive and the climbing animations were really awesome for that time. Take away the novelty and all that remains is a bunch of unengaging gameplay systems and more filler content than the rest of the industry combined.

Free: http://www.increpare.com/2012/12/slave-of-god/ Worth exploring for a bit. There's a lot of cool stuff in it.

Tabu - Fantastic mood piece, great aesthetic, made with a lot of love for film and sound. Magic. 5/5

They patched that relic issue on the PC, not sure if they did on the console. If you finish the game without that relic you should automatically get it.

I picked up FTL as well. Looks simple at the outset but the balance is ruthless. Have only gotten until zone 7 or so so far. I always get to a point where either my defense is too weak, or I run out of rockets which makes it impossible to get through shields in the later levels. It keeps pulling me back in for another try. I'm also learning Dwarf Fortress using the O'Reilly book. Very cumbersome interface. I'm hoping I'll start to see interesting situations emerge before I give up.

Jagten - Not bad. A bit predictable if you read the synopsis or once you realise what the setup is. Great performances though. 4/5