It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these, and my inbox is getting full of emails-to-self containing links to interesting stories. As such…open thread!
Need a little more wi-fi range? Have a beer!”
And then follow the directions at the link above to turn the can into a surprisingly effective DIY parabolic reflector.
The Good News: Syndicate is coming back!
The bad news: Starbreeze has reincarneted the franchise as a first-person shooter. Bah!
Is the PC re-emerging as a gaming platform?
A better question might be whether or not the PC ever vanished or died out as a gaming platform. But if the word of a World of Warcraft developer means anything to any of you, it is his opinion that the PC is coming back into its own from a gaming perspective.
This is the Blizzard, though, that makes a point of sidestepping being labeled a “PC developer”, however.
Do you feel that people try to take advantage of you?
It should surprise nobody that Canadians and Americans tend to be fairly trusting people who expect that others have the best of intentions:
The interesting result, I think, is India. It would seem that just under 2/3rds of the Indian population tend to be highly distrustful of others, while the remaining third tend to be highly trusting of same. There is basically no middle ground to be found; Indians (it seems) will either completely trust you, or completely distrust you, and that’s that.
Kind of cool: A web-based iPad 2 simulator.
Skyrim developers will keep the “fun bugs” in the game.
“We try to solve most of it, we’re sensitive to a lot of it,” said producer Todd Howard. “There is a subset of that where we say ‘Well, that’s what can happen.’ If there’s entertainment value in that, whatever it is, we’ll leave a lot of it. If it’s gonna break the game, or unbalance the game in some way, we do try to solve it.
“If the solution is gonna make the game less fun … well, hey, leave it in. It’s their game.”
This is hardly a precedent, of course — one thinks of the weird graphical effects of eating mushrooms in Ultima Underworld, which was actually a glitch that the programmers opted to deliberately trigger in a special in-game case — but it’s rather heartening to hear, I think.
Do read the whole article; Howard also comments on MMORPGs and how Bethesda knows when big “is big enough” for a game.
I don’t know how many of you are Unity3D developers…
…but I’ve been toying around with that particular middleware for the last month or two, and I found this feature piece from Gamasutra to be a fairly interesting read.
You can play as a vampire in Skyrim!
The catch is that you need to catch the vampirism malady first, however.
A handful of Mass Effect 3 screenshots from PAX.
The game looks great, and I am honestly impressed with how well BioWare has been keeping a lid on details. It’s a bizarre thing about me, but I’m actually impressed that I’m starting to lose just a bit of interest in the game. Oh, not a lot; I still very much want it to come out, very much want to play it, and very much want to play it again after that. But, well…I’m a spoiler junkie; I love leaked details, and I tend to find that those are what thrill me the most during the run-up to a game or movie release.
And…well…there just haven’t been that many leaks where ME3 is concerned. None, really, that I can think of, apart from what few details BioWare has handed out. Kudos to them for that, even if I am disappointed by it.
Skyrim looks awesome, of course.
No, as in: really, really awesome.
Okay, here…twenty-odd minutes of Skyrim action. Are you happy now?
Part the First!
Part the Second!
Part the Third!
Tonight’s post brought to you by what if?:
The DLC concept is open to being abused.
