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The beauty of Portal's barren linear tile maze is that it's probably going to be pretty much exactly as restrictive as HL2's "realistic" environment except it's going to be completely up-front about it. Portal's lab-rat environment means none of the cognitive dissonance, none of the usual bullshit barriers and predesigned paths and desperate attempts to explain every gameplay mechanic in terms of real life.

Portal's lab-rat environment maps almost perfectly to the experience of playing a story-based videogame in the first place: completing challenges in a completely predesigned environment that was created only for you, slavishly following the orders of the designer-god because you have no other choice. Portal is at peace with the fact that's it a videogame.

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... and then undermined this justification by suggesting in Episode 1 that the G-Man is not omnipotent.

At any rate, honesty is not the right word. The G-Man is anything but an open admission of gameyness. In fact, almost any other game is more honest about its gameyness than HL2. Valve avoids breaking the fourth wall as much as they can, as seen by their unprecedented efforts to justify such things as the HUD. I see the G-Man as an another HEV-suit-like attempt to nullify the gameyness and integrate it smoothly into the narrative. It's clever and shows perceptiveness, but at the end of the day it doesn't really solve the cognitive dissonance like it's meant to. HL2's world is still filled with things that imply that it is real and less restrictive than it appears.


Portal follows in HL2's footsteps in that it's still obsessed with subsuming gameplay elements into the higher narrative structure instead of having them exist for their own sake. Except that this time, they've actually found a setting that doesn't constantly undermine their goals.

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Anyway I started a thread about the game, we should probably continue there.

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Ack no, binary would mean exactly two endings. Nor does digital information have to be encoded in binary, strictly speaking. You could have a weird computer that uses ternary (0, 1, and 2).

HSB is correct in that "discrete" is best.

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A large number of gameplay movies of Super Mario Galaxy released today.

Holy crap. I'm sold. Easily the best Mario title since Mario 64. The sheer number of gameplay concepts alone is amazing.

Also, importantly: best Mario game music and sound effects ever?

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"It prints money" has a more literal meaning than we thought!

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Well, keep up the naive cynicism. Automatically assuming the worst of everyone isn't the same as realism you know.

For one thing, it's not really in their interests to commit a crime no, considering things are going well for them in any case, and the consequences would be grave if they were caught. Only a reckless fool with an ingrained habit of lying in all situations (e.g. Bill Clinton, ha) would do so. Most successful businessmen have learned that playing hardball pays but actively deceiving your partners doesn't.

I also don't think you have a sense of just how seriously official reports to investors are taken. The proof of how meticulously accurate they are in the great majority of cases is that major investors rely on them to make their decisions. Clearly these guys are no fools and wouldn't risk millions on potentially unreliable documents.

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Victory to L-Block!

However, now he is losing to ?-Block.

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Speaking of the Actiblizzard merger, check out this Gamasutra article from 2 days before the merger:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16440

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It is a load of hogwash. Reverse engineering the protocol used by these guitar controllers should be trivial. You just press each button on the guitar and look at what bit corresponds to what button in your packet analyzer. Bam, reverse engineered.

The only way it would be more complicated than that is if someone went specifically went out of their way to make it difficult (via encryption) -- which I suspect is what Red Octane did on the PS3 guitar, which would explain why it wasn't supported on Rock Band's release. It's all anticompetitive tactics.

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Has there been a PSP recommendations list thread recently? I've been hearing a lot lately about the quality of the PSP lineup but haven't internalized the names of the games that are interesting.

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NVidia buys AGEIA

I've long been saying that while physics cards have no future sold separately, they have a bright future as a component of GPGPUs. This confirms my thinking. What's especially interesting is that AMD/ATI on the other hand has no interest in physics cards, because they are planning to fuse the GPU with the CPU instead. We are beginning to see an interesting divergence in architecture which is a little unprecedented actually -- typically all the GPU makers take the same approach in a given generation. It will be interesting to see which is more successful in which niches.

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Best thing about combat in the original PoP: the way when the opponent found himself inside a chopper trap, the Prince sheathed his sword before the chopper actually activated. It always struck me as a cocky way of communicating, "well, you're dead bub, see ya." in the last second of the guard's life. For all I know it may have been just a small glitch in the sheathing logic though!

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No, someone else (vision I think?) had done the photoshop in the original thread, remember? I merely kept it in cryogenic preservation, patiently awaiting an era worthy of this degree of froth.

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So, iPhone store started selling third-party games today. Thought I would mention my roommate was the game designer for Trism, a Bejeweled-ish with the gimmick that the orientation you hold your phone in determines the direction of gravity in the game.

(The other guy involved was the ROM hacker for the first FFV fan translation!)

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it strikes me that there ought to be some kind of legal provision similar to that used to take away neglected children, to give to a foster developer intellectual properties that are being abused by their parent company