Defrag

What redfigure + zyndrome said!

I hope it's arcadey like BF2 and not geared towards the 3 bullets-and-you're-dead-from-20-miles-away-with-blood-splatters-instead-of-health gameplay of BC2. BF2 was the buggiest game I've ever played, but very few games matched its replay value. Infantry? Fun. Tanks? Fun. Shooting down choppers using the TOW for humiliation factor? Fun. Flying choppers? Fun. Soloing choppers? Fun. Jets? Fun. Two man jet rape? FUN. It was ace. BC2 felt small and too CSey for my tastes. Also: Fuck infantry only. If you want CS, go play CS!

Repton & Elite ... on the BBC micro. My mate had one; I had to wait a while to get my spectrum +3 Elite was something of a mind-boggling experience. Such a huge, complicated game on such a piddly storage format. I wasted hundreds of hours playing Elite II on the Amiga CD32 with the same friend. Spectrum -> Megadrive -> Saturn -> PC

Purchased a load of cheap games in the Steam sale -- got some nice bargains there Currently playing: Super Meat Boy Fun in short bursts, intermittently frustrating and satisfying, but mostly the latter It has a lot of charm. Trying to get an A+ on every level soon takes a toll, especially when using the keyboard instead of a game pad. BF:BC2 I'm warming up to this now. I still think Dice made some mistakes, though. For example: The medic starts with no medpacks or shock paddles -- you have to unlock them and, when you don't know what the hell you're doing, it takes a while to get the points together. Until that point the medic has his wings clipped; it's a pretty weird decision. Overall I prefer BF2, but BF:BC2 started being a lot more fun once I'd got some unlocks (movement detectors + pump shotty = one shot ambush machine). My KDR has gone from something like 0.5 to 1+ in a few days because I've got some decent kit now. I'm not sure that's a good design decision; they should've dished out all of the basic kit from the start, imo. The game itself is fast-paced, looks nice (even though I'm playing with everything on low because my machine can't handle it @ 1920 x 1200) and the audio is the best I've heard in any game to date. The only main dislike I have is that the weapons are so effective at all ranges, it means you do a lot of dying without knowing where you're being shot from. In older BF games, the weapons suffered from significant bullet travel & bullet drop timing, whereas I can pistol snipe in BF:BC2 without suffering much loss of accuracy. I guess I'm just a sucker for anything that makes it more of a CQB brawl... Just Cause 2 Terrible acting, clunky UI and controls, but so much to blow up. I spent an hour just grappling the ground & gliding along a road with my parachute -- very cool. Will come back to this later I think. Trials 2 Basically elastomania but not nearly as much fun (<3 elastomania). Has possibly the worst UI I've seen in forever, and if you ride your bike past the finish post (because it's not at all clear where the finish is most of the time), you'll wipe out and then have to redo the entire level. grnnnasighdsigh. It's ok for the money but I'm not that bothered about it. Bully Played a few hours of this and I think it's pretty good, though the minigames part of it is already starting to grate. I lol'ed when I humiliated a bully and my character grabbed the guy's hands and started punching the guy with his own fists, "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself!" The downside is that it uses an archaic save system and you have to remember to go to your dorm and save the game manually. Already lost about half an hour of play because I forgot to save Worth a look though!

Mafia = win

That's superb, hessi

Squier P Bass . Got a Yamaha LL6 acoustic, a Fender Strat and this now, so I'm officially ready to form the world's shittest one man band.

Picked up super meat boy (9 million levels) for £3 and BC2 for £7 -- bargains all round

Nice job, fellows! 60% playing to the end is a nice figure to hear.

lollin'

Skjalg: what do you think of them? I'm tempted to buy one, but I've heard that the black depth is poor unless you set the contrast to 100% and them use a hardware calibrator. I can probably borrow a calibrator from work, but it's hassle

That's life, I guess :F

Usually it's not down to playtesters being incompetent, it's down to scheduling & developer resources. It's always slightly terrifying to see how many bugs are waived as "won't fix" when a deadline is looming...

I doubt they can do the same with maps, as paid map content packs will split the community. At the very best, all they could do is bundle up a decent amount of maps (say 5) into one pack so that it guarantees pack owners will be able to play together. Even then, I can't see it happening.

I'm happy that Valve is redistributing the wealth (let's face it, a lot of people would contribute for buttons just to have their art in a great game), but I'm also slightly bemused at those amounts. That's a good chunk of a year's salary for most employees. Moreover, amazingly talented artists populate triple A titles with reams of amazing content and (when you spread those payments out to a year) only see a fraction of that money. Unless valve has very generous profit-sharing schemes, those contributors will be making so much money that they'll outstrip most Valve employees. Also, as already mentioned, there's a huge disparity with the amounts paid to level designers. I'm guessing a contributing level designer will be paid a(n admittedly not paltry) one-off sum for their work, yet someone who contributes a hat and a gun makes a huge wad of cash? I... brain... can't.... resolve this?! I guess all I'm saying is whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Not having a pop at Valve, just ... struggling to make sense of this and what it means.

Programming is arguably even worse in thatrespect. All you can do is explain to your boss/client that changes take time and money. You can have a mix of quality, speed and cheapness, but not all three things at the same time. Every time someone changes the plan/requirements, they need to understand the ramifications in terms of the amount of hours required to make those changes.

I think domination is definitely a better game mode for the masses, because it's much harder to do something wrong / counter-productive. I agree that CTF wasn't bad (it was great fun on certain servers), but in the general case, domination is ... less bad. You get a more consistent game experience from server to server, at least. It's that age-old chestnut : trying to make a game that satisfies the casual player as well as the hardcore. It's bloody hard! I agree to an extent and things like that are getting sparser and sparser nowadays, but there is still scope for it. My last 'big' game addiction was Battlefield 2, and it was absolutely packed full of nuances / tricks like: General gunplay mastery C4 chucking Strafe jumping Chopper TV missiles / soloing choppers Jet skills / missile avoidance patterns / tricks Long range TOW missile shots (always fun blowing up a chopper on the pad about 1 mile away via dipping it over a hill) There was always something to learn and master Loved it.

TFC is a pretty bad example when saying "it didn't need restrictions because it was based around a competitive game". I played TFC extensively and was in one of europe's best clans, as well as playing in |404| in North America (yup, I was a mega nerd). The leagues certainly had some rules but the vast majority of top teams adhered to various pieces of restrictive etiquette (either because they felt it made for a more enjoyable game, or they felt pressured to agree). It was considered bad form to: Use more than one HW Use a HW in the mid map Go all defence to hold a flag (unless it was in the midmap as the time ran out) Swap / Swing (temporarily move an attacker into defence) Potshot (have your attackers shoot other attackers on their way to the enemy base) Backtrack (have your attackers chase the other team's attackers) Spam respawns ... and all manner of things between. I took part in plenty of flame wars over stuff like that (good times ), including quite a few teams quitting midgame because of a dispute over unfair/unenjoyable tactics etc. In the NA leagues, there were a few clans in particular who were infamous for their tactics. Barely anyone liked playing against CNBL -- not because they were skilled (they had a few good players), but because they would try to win at all costs. This is also true, but I don't think it's a negative. IMO TF2's non-CTF game modes are much better in general. My guess is that capture the flag will barely figure in modern team based games. Indeed, one of my biggest regrets about Fortress Forever was making so many CTF maps instead of AD/Domination/other game modes -- CTF just doesn't work as a public game mode when compared to more modern alternatives. The same CTF problems existed in TFC -- typically nobody likes attacking (seemingly) alone, so they die a lot, give up and go defence. You end up with either lots of attack or lots of defence, but rarely a good mix on both teams. It was great on 'organised' public servers where admins kicked folk who refused to attack (admins 'fixing' your game is a sign it's broken) but most pubs were terrible and boring. You can go onto any TF2 server running non-CTF maps and get the same base experience because instead of having to divide between objectives, everyone is forced to pull in the same direction. The only schism tends to come in when teams stall instead of pushing for the next cap, but most of the recent maps are pretty fluid. As such, I believe capture point gameplay is superior to CTF for general gaming. I have quite a few TFC friends who play clanned TF2 and they claim it's good in a different way, and that there's a lot more teamwork & tactics involved, too. In TFC your tactical discussions basically went "ok, 3 soldiers, an engy and maybe a HW. If the flag is in the rr, build a sentry outside spawn, reset after it reaches the yard". It was very prescribed and inflexible. Most offence tactics were simply kill a forward defender (like top spiral on 2fort) then pile down the spiral. Since you were getting in 60-100 attacks per map, there wasn't much time for fancy thinking, it was just blunt attacking pressure combined with a bit of familiarity. I've played quite a lot of TF2, but it just doesn't do it for me in the way TFC did I personally liked TFC a lot more because there were more esoteric tricks and skills to learn (concing, bhop, trimping, ramp sliding, ramp jumping, skimming, conc aim and so on), whereas in TF2 you have a smaller set of skills and have to focus on improving those. I always seem to be attracted to games with a wide range of things to do, lots of classes and lots of nuances. Basically, I think games like QWTF/TFC were amazing, but they were also very much of their time.

Leads don't necessarily get paid much more (or even any more at all) -- it depends on the company and position. Some companies offer a dual career ladder where you can progress as a technical specialist and earn just as much as a lead. Others will offer a lot more money for leads. It just depends. That's a pretty naive outlook. If you've ever worked under leads of variable quality, you'll know why good leads are worth their weight in gold. I moved team about 5 times at RTW and the difference in productivity / effectiveness from team to team can be very noticeable. When an excellent lead is involved, they pro-actively identify and solve problems, offer support (either moral or technical) when needed, mentor team members and help foster a culture of self-improvement. The notion that you only do real work when sitting at a desk producing code/art assets etc. is totally ridiculous. I know you may have been half-joking when you said that, but it's a bit of a disservice to the awesome leads who really do make a huge difference Two of the most effective leads I worked under spent less than half of their time developing despite being in fairly small teams. The flipside is that some folk just aren't cut out for it. Some leads basically end up either ignoring most of their responsibilities and spend the maximum amount of time in the trenches. Someone can be an excellent developer and a lousy lead, but they take the job because there's more money on offer, or they feel they have to due to management pressure. Others just don't have the required personal qualities to lead teams, but fail to develop on the job and also receive a lack of support from management. So yeah, don't be hatin' on leads. I wouldn't mind being a lead one day

What Thrik said, though the level of management work varies depending on the team size. Some leads will basically do nothing but admin work (organising / scheduling / planning / communicating / geeing up the troops) to help ease the burden for the rest of their team. As a general rule, the more people you have under you as lead, the less production work you do. Leads are usually very busy chasing up problems and making sure the rest of their team can progress without issue. If you see a lead who is in charge of a huge team but spends most of their time doing production work, you should be... suspicious

Best of luck to all of those hit by this.

Noel at Snappy Touch posts some very useful things on iPhone development, marketing and stuff like that, too. Well worth a read, especially since he shares his full sales figures for periods when he launches new payment models etc.

I think it's fucking awesome that he's put out a totally unique game without compromise (I mean... seriously, you have to go trawl youtube to even know what the hell to do) and still become filthy rich.

You'll soon see if they're delusional -- they'll come down rather sharpish if they're too pricey. My guess is that a lot of people have more money than time and you'll see quite a few purchases. It probably takes valve very little effort to add a new hat, and any purchases are basically pure profit. If you're charging $10 for a hat (steep, yes!) and you get 500 purchases a week, that's still $5k in sales that you had to do very little for. They'll probably start with the price being overly steep and then bring it down, watching the effect it has on purchase count and revenue as they do so. If you check out some of the payment models in freemium games, it's not a surprising move to charge so much; look at this from Nimblebit's Pocket Frogs, for example. The 8% of very expensive transactions ($29.99) account for nearly half of their revenue for that game. Those numbers shocked me a bit, too, but it proves that a small proportion of gamers are willing to spend what you and I would consider a ridiculous amount of money.

That's why I'm trying not to kneejerk -- it's hard to get everything right when something has just been announced. On the other hand, if I can't look at the shop UI and easily discern that information (I got two things wrong from reading one UI screen), then I'd argue that the presentation is flawed