T w e n t y S i d e d
In a world with no Don LaFontaine…
Don LaFontaine, who has done the voice-over for almost every movie in the last quarter-century, has died…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Don LaFontaine”
Spore Leaked?
People have been messaging me since yesterday, letting me know Spore has been leaked and is now available to pirates.
It’s enough people that I do not doubt it, but I’d like to have some sort of proof to hold up. Would someone mind sending a screenshot of (say) the title menu or some other obvious aspect of the final game? (As opposed to the creature creator.) I need something that is obviously not a pre-release screenshot, and preferably something that wouldn’t appear in the Wii version. Perhaps an options menu or the dialog where you adjust the screen resolution.
shamus at shamusyoung dot com
If you don’t want to email the screenshot, put it up on photobucket or something and let me know where I can grab it. I’m going to write about this, but the first charge to get thrown into my face will be that it’s a lie.
Thanks.
OurTube
This site turned three years old yesterday.
Looking back, I see a lot of posts that I’m proud of. There are posts from that first year that I still point to and talk about. But there are also goofy posts where I was amusingly wrong about things, and those can be fun to read for completely different reasons.
Two and a half years ago I stumbled on a site called “YouTube” or somesuch. I wrote about it, and how I couldn’t wrap my head around it. It looked like like a thin coat of respectability over the old filesharing model, spiked with a bit of dot-com foolishness – here was a site that was going to consume massive bandwidth (money) with no real way to make money.
Stolen Pixels #17:Bill of Limitations
We’ve seen Stardock’s version of the Gamer’s Bill of Rights. But what would the list look like if it had been written by EA?
Gamer’s Bill of Rights
Thanks to the dozens of people who sent this along. Sometime around the eighth or ninth email it dawned on me that people weren’t sending this so that I could read it, they were sending in the hopes that I would read and then comment on it.
Stardock president Brad Wardell wrote the following for Edge Magazine. Do go and read the whole thing for context.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Gamer’s Bill of Rights”
Pork and Beans
Weezer made a music video, and they invited the internet.
Understand that it is an act of extreme generosity for me to link to a video that doesn’t allow embedding. I’ve passed over many videos I wanted to blog about because the maker didn’t allow me to embed the video here. Sending you off to YouTube with instructions to come back here and read what I have to say once you’re done is pointless delay and busywork for you, and interferes with the conversation I’m trying to start. But I’m willing to tolerate it here because I think the video is worth the extra effort. If you’re up for it, you can go and watch it, and then come back here.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Pork and Beans”
Stolen Pixels #16::Azeroth Travelogue, Part 3
Today I deliver the final stroke to the equestrian corpse that is my World of Warcraft series. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed the weeks of intense cravings, vomiting, cramps, and terrifying hallucinations that I experienced during my WoW rehab.
From The Archives:
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
Deus Ex and The Treachery of Labels
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
If Star Wars Was Made in 2006?
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?