Box Tactics

Yikes, dude. Get better!

Hey, does anyone else here listen to Be Your Own Pet? Some highlights include Adventure, Becky, Creepy Crawl, October First Account, and Take That Walk.

I think so, yeah. Also, I love this for foreshadowing reasons because Gordon is a cult leader, inadvertently.

This is just a really bad idea. Fortunately, I trust Ross not to do it. I'd be very surprised if he had a lapse in judgment this bad.

The Cinematic Mod is terrible, though. I'm all for Ross taking steps to make the show prettier, but the Cinematic Mod is just unimaginably bad. It'd be worse than switching to Black Mesa would have been, and that would have been the wrong choice by a long shot.

Neah, they announced that it's definitely coming this summer.

...huh, you know what really seems like a Game Dungeony game? JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain. I swear. For real. That shit was my childhood. It's a legitimately atmospheric and memorable game.

I wonder if this inspired the stunt Adult Swim pulled today with the Rick And Morty premiere. Haven't had a chance to watch it yet but everyone seems to be saying it's legit.

I'VE BEEN DOUBLE-BLIND-APRILS-FOOLED

Admittedly, we've recently fallen behind Moore's law, but if Moore's law did hold true, then that would suggest that in ~30 years, our top supercomputer will be able to run a human brain in real time. The fact that human brains are notoriously inefficient with their massive processing power isn't really an argument in your favor. This simply indicates that we don't need a computer nearly as computationally powerful as a human brain to have an AI more intelligent than a human.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol This was supposed to happen, like, ten years from now. In some sense it's no more like a human than the computer that beat Kasparov at chess twenty years ago, but it's not just the old game-beating algorithms with more processing power; the algorithms themselves are better. Until recently, a lot of AI skeptics were saying "beat top humans at Go and then I'll be impressed". It comes from the same team that does DeepDream, which has mostly just been treated as a funny novelty that puts out weird acid-trip pictures, but is also a huge leap forward in terms of AI, and has only been improving in the months since it was first announced. Guys, I know that remaking non-dog images out of dogs isn't exactly high art, but it's also the kind of thing that was flatly impossible for computers to do until recently. DeepDream isn't a lost Photoshop filter, it's a major step towards human-like creative thought. The starving artists are going to be starving harder when they're also replaced by computers. Do I think that AIs are going to become self-aware soon? Probably not, depending on how you define soon. But I do think that they're going to become more intelligent than most people anticipate, and as a direct consequence, more people's lives will be threatened than you assume here. What happens to the wealthiest businesspeople when the best computers can run large corporations more efficiently than they can? What happens to our economy in that case? What happens to our culture when popular media is literally designed by algorithms that optimize products like films and books to succeed? What will be the first nation where the human government decides to act simply as troubleshooters for a governing machine? All of this could cause disaster very gradually, but a disaster could happen suddenly, too - not if a powerful AI attains self awareness, but rather if a powerful AI metaphorically forgets that it dropped a grenade and then stands in place.

As TSA proponents are very attached to the idea of the United States not being run over by violent insurgents.

Not a red herring at all. You seem very attached to security theatre.

Are you a TSA fan?

Collective punishment is barbaric and more befitting ISIS than a corporation that intends to make a profit selling a product to consumers. If people care about accessing content, pirates will find a way to break its DRM. The side that wins the DRM/piracy pseudowar is consistently piracy.

RandomGuy, your support for DRM is incompatible with Ross's opposition to killing games. Tactics that majorly inconvenience legitimate customers in exchange for minimally inconveniencing pirates are not a legitimate response to piracy; they're a power grab.

And PopCap Games, the indie company that once raised the bar for "casual" games (frankly a bullshit category if I've ever heard one; where would gaming be without Tetris?) and now lowers it. I mean sure, it still exists, technically, but it's all EAed up now. Their games are F2P microtransaction fests, and they fired a lot of the old guard in the creative staff, and are gradually dropping support for games released before the EA takeover. That's fuckin' right, EA is buying up other companies and killing their games. Fortunately they weren't online-only, but good luck finding tech support. Or, y'know, buying them.

EA's already sent shills, Ross's plan is working! EA is just more evil than he could comprehend.

Huh, come to think of it, this'd be interesting in a game with a morality system...

Ah, Darkspore. Allow me to tell a thematically-relevant story about this game. I've followed production on this since I was six and it's traumatized me. It's haunted me. Spore was going to be the best game of all time. I do not mean that people said it was going to be the best game of all time. I mean that it was actually destined to be the best game of all time. Barely a game, really (ie, something with a win condition), but more of a creative open-ended narrative experience. The Sims for people who like science documentaries instead of soap operas, Sim City for people who can picture greater ambitions than micro-managing New York, the freaking Holodeck manifested in the earliest years of the twenty first century. People like to talk about how games are hyped beyond all reason, and Spore is often presented as an example alongside the likes of Peter Molyneux. But it wasn't. All of the potential Spore had - it was all real. The alpha was on a great track, and it didn't overly rely on prerendered tricks, ie, it was real. If the alpha had continued on the path that it should have - that it could have - I wouldn't be a functional human being today. I would have spent my teenage years playing Spore and would have become more invested in it than I was in reality. So what happened? EA wanted to murder the SHIT out of this game in the crib. I'm guessing that they were scared that it would raise the bar and, seeing its awesome scope, gamers wouldn't let them get away with their crappy shovelware games anymore. EA knew that they couldn't explicitly kill it, because it had already been demo'd in public and gamers wanted it badly. So instead they stirred up conflicts amongst the developers; a small splinter group formed inside Maxis who wanted to reenvision the game in a heavily neutered fashion; more on that in the next paragraph. EA empowered that group and basically engineered its takeover of the project. Spore was delayed many times, and ultimately came out several years later than it was expected to come out. It's often assumed that that was because there was a lot of work to do on it. The work was actually involved in neutering the game. Spore as originally envisioned - and as originally made - is an experience where you take a single cell, progenitor of all life on a planet, and guide a single line of organisms through their evolution to an intelligent race, then guide a single line within that race through their development to the dominant group, and then guide the entire civilization through their exploration of space. Spore as released, post-neutering, is superficially similar, but is aimed squarely as the nine-year-old demographic, and I don't mean nine-year-old me, either, I mean a nine-year-old as envisioned by a marketing executive. Amoebas and, to an extent, animals, look more like plastic figurines than life forms. Herbivorism is presented not as an ecological niche but as a pacifist moral choice, like a rabid vegetarian's take on a video game morality system. There are exactly three technology levels, primitive, modern, and futuristic, and advancing from one era to the next happens all at once and is occasion for a loading screen. This is just scratching the surface - in general, the running theme is that scientific realism is stripped away to appeal to the Pokemon crowd and the experience is stripped away and replaced with a half-baked series of minigames. None of these things were true of the originally-intended game which, I reiterate, is not a fantasy but rather an actual thing that was fully possible and that almost existed. When Spore finally came out, it was a flop. This was often blamed on the game's terrible DRM, and though the DRM was indeed terrible and a harbinger of things to come, I actually think it's just a scapegoat here. The game sold two million copies in its first three weeks, breaking a lot of records and whatever, but the sales dropped off when word of mouth got around, and the game's servers tell the real story: the game is online-only, and online activity for the game dropped very, very early, because the replay value - hell, the indefinite play value - had all been stripped out of the game in favor of making it more palatable to executives, ie, shallow and inoffensive. I think EA was, on some level, genuinely surprised that their neutered Spore didn't succeed with the public, because they had all kinds of movie deals and spinoff games lined up, which have naturally died off. Darkspore is the only spinoff game of Spore that was conceived after Spore's failure, and I think it was an attempt to fix the problems with Spore, based on player feedback that EA didn't really understand. They put real violence and a somewhat less cartoony approach to science fiction back in, but they also made it a standard action adventure game, ie, not Spore. TL;DR, Darkspore is a deformed bastard baby chewing its way out of a eunuch that doesn't know it's a eunuch.

I know it's been suggested a lot already, but I feel the need to, like, tenth Undertale or something. I should also point that Toby Fox, the game dev, actually started out making soundtracks and music, and moved onto doing games from there.

Seriously looking forward to the movie, although two years seems like a crazy unimaginable timespan to me. But anything that excites you this much has got to be the awesomest thing ever. You mentioned the possibility of doing some easier-to-produce, more abridged form of Freeman's Mind for Half-Life 2, and I've gotta say... if I have any say in it, then no way. I'd much rather wait a few years for Freeman's Mind 2 if that's what it takes to keep it at the same quality that you did for Half-Life 1.

......Have Ross and Magda actually did it? Ummm they're not married so I don't think so?

A loooong time ago, my dad worked for a company where one of his coworkers was fired and had a restraining order placed on him for casually discussing something eerily similar to this. He had serious bipolar paranoid schizophrenia of some kind.

For real?