Dead End Thrills is a lovely blog that takes screenshots of beautiful games and presents them as best they can. For example, to generate this lovely image from Stalker, they used nine graphical mods. These are things you can add to the game to make it look even prettier. To produce the image from Kentucky Route Zero above? None. Just a bit of offline antialiasing in Photoshop to smooth some of the lines.
“The next and much bigger piece [of the business] is microtransactions within games,” he revealed. “We’re building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level to buy a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever it might be, and consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of the business.”
It’s a shame, because the game itself could be great. It features some of the most impressive mobile graphics we’ve ever seen, the list of cars and courses is endless, and the way it integrates your friends’ lap times into your races for a pseudo-multiplayer experience makes it all the more immersive. The problem is that it all just feels so cheapened by the business model; while it’s possible to play the game a little each day without forking out money … the constant nagging for cash grates.
There’s a good game somewhere within Real Racing 3 - and there are plenty of free-to-play games that prove this model can work successfully while respecting the player. Firemonkeys, and perhaps more pertinently EA, have got that balance horribly, horribly wrong, to an extent where the business model becomes the game - with gut-wrenching results.
In addition, let me take this opportunity to apologize to anyone who’s ever been offended by anything at any point throughout time. To be challenged in any way, or made to feel an emotion that is not immediately recognizable, is the worst thing in the world, and something for which the incredible human gift of language should never, ever be used. We are sorry if your feelings were ever hurt about anything.
I’ve been following this routine for a couple of weeks now and, so far, it seems to be working. I process my inbox a couple of times a day and then spend the rest of my time in the “starred” section, clearing out anything that needs some attention. One thing I’ve noticed about this is that I’m much more likely to reply to an email now, even if it’s just a two-word response. I’m usually prone to procrastinating about replying to people, especially if the answer is in the negative. Strange that this email strategy seems to have broken me of this.
Unfortunately, Sparrow seems to be the only desktop Mac mail client to support Gmail keyboard shortcuts. Mail client developers: support Gmail keyboard shortcuts!
Peanut Gallery: A script that takes a start time and an end time and generates a subtitle file for your twitter stream (or a given hash tag), so you can watch a show or other live event with (time-shifted) real-time twitter commentary.
I woke up this morning to a twitter stream full of amazing Oscar commentary. For example, from the ever-reliable Zodiac Motherfucker:
@ZODIAC_MF GET MRS POTATO HEAD THE FUCK OUT OF HERE
By itself, this is a hilarious sentence, but who is he talking about? Without context, I’m missing something. Actually, for most of my twitter stream last night, I don’t know what people are referring to. I’d say the same thing happened for anyone who wasn’t watching the Sony PlayStation announcement. For certain shows and events, a snarky running commentary makes that show infinitely more entertaining.
I’ll probably watch the Oscars tonight – time-shifting a live event – and I’d love to be able to time-shift my twitter stream as well. I think a subtitle track for my media file would be the best way of doing this.
Unfortunately, I think this is the kind of thing Anil Dash was referring to in his essay The Web We Lost: I don’t think Twitter’s API allows this kind of usage. Shame.
Michael Heilemann’s site is to Star Wars what Lee Unkrich’s The Overlook Hotel is to The Shining. Exhaustive and written by a true obsessive. Beautiful.
johnke.me
