Gyokuyoutama

I think this is the Verge article referred to here. From the looks of this, Michel Ancel is auditioning to be the next Peter Molyneux. A bunch of buzzwords which don't really point to any type of concrete game concept (online worlds, early access, procedural generation, rpg elements), hype for some vague type of new technology (a "solar system tool"), promises of a vast game world where all your decisions matter to a ridiculous degree, changing what type of game is being described from sentence to sentence (it's a single player rpg, no wait you can do co-op, no wait it's part of a persistent online world, no wait it's more like Sim City, no wait it's a narrative-driven experience, but you and other players also determine everything that happens), and all of this is being said when practically nothing is implemented. It reminds me a lot of Peter Molyneux's descriptions of what Black and White (you'll be able to alter every part of the world and every creature will learn in reaction to your actions) or Fable (we'll keep so close track of your player that you'll tan in direct response to being in the sun, and you'll get scars exactly where attacks hit you) would be. The good news is that while Molyneux overhyped the hell out of everything, promising games that would offer more new features than had been implemented across the industry in the last decade, when he actually delivered a game it was always somewhat innovative and at least playable, even if it fell a million miles short of the promises.

They should just go all the way and have Peter Molyneux present every single game.

To be fair, that's exactly what Bubsy deserves. The first games may not have been as bad as people say (mainly because they were just one in a long number of similar platformers, many far worse than Bubsy) but Bubsy 3D was the height of a soulless cash-grab.

Reminder that Reinhard von Lohengramm did nothing wrong. (Incidentally I've always wondered how horrible of pacing issues the anime must suffer considering how every other chapter of the novels is "here's the backstory to yet another character" or "someone ruminates on military/political/economic strategies.)

To be fair, even with Pinkerton on staff we'd still have to wait two years to say for sure that the comic isn't coming out.

That's without getting into how much money they make simply by distributing games on Steam. All they really have to do for that is keep the servers running. They certainly aren't doing support work and they're barely doing quality control. I mean, remember that Christmas where they screwed up so badly that you could get automatically logged into someone else's account? And yet even after that people still trust them.

Now we'll never know how it could make sense for their canonically only to be one of each class.

Now that big SPUF is dead for reals, are majer and owels finally going to get on here?

There's actually a forum I've posted at for longer than SPUF, but the mods became so bad and the community became so toxic that literally the only thing I do there anymore is try to get people banned.

I'll say this: at least Valve actually has an alternative forum, even if it's a horrible one. When Wizards shut down their forums (which were far more active than SPUF at the time they were killed), they didn't have any plans whatsoever for having an alternative community site. The official line was that everyone used facebook and twitter so that message boards were pointless. But "better than Wizards" is not a high bar to clear these days.

In memoriam, let's recall who got some important post milestones:

I'm pretty sure there was another thread after the screenshot, but all I have for pages are "Forum Database Error" so it's not like I have proof.

Someone linked to a video right before the end, but I never got the post to load before the redirect. Also props to Toaster I guess for getting the real last random crits thread.

NOW, it's really dead for really real.

Reminds me how in Alpha Protocol I did one run as a super sneaky spy who was never seen, but my death count was through the roof because of the number of people I shot in the head with a silenced pistol. Then I did a run where I just ran into every room with a shotgun. This was almost a nonlethal run, since I would shoot people in their kneecaps and then beat them into unconsciousness when they stumbled to the ground.

Wait, was that the Beethoven who flipped out because I posted a joke thread about Shenmue 3?

The fact that about half of the active threads are new user introductions is either a very good thing or a very bad thing when considering the longterm longevity of this forum.

At least you can still buy it. Better than Beamdog's policy of updating an old game (mainly either adding unwanted features or adding things that were already available with mods) and then making sure that the original version can't be obtained individually anywhere on the internet.

Speaking of Paradox, here's an interesting article from 2010 from them (well really from Gamersgate, which was part of paradox until shortly before this article.) The best parts are when Berquist says that Steam is a bad platform because Valve can't be trusted to be impartial when they release their next AAA game, and the general theme that Steam can't "win," while since that point Paradox Interactive has done pretty much everything on Steam, even removing all of their games from Gamersgate without any prior warning.

Ditch the Timmy dragon cards, put Taigam into a deck with a bunch of dumb removal, card draw, and time walk variants.

I started watching the pony show again at season 5. I'm legitimately curious to see whether anyone has watched season 5 or beyond. It seemed like all pony threads suddenly and mysteriously died right when season 4 ended.

They banned it four days after the normal round of bans. I've understood "emergency ban" to mean any ban that occurs outside the normal review schedule. Of course, the timing shows that they really could have banned it on time if they had been thinking ahead, so maybe it doesn't count for that reason, but if anything that makes things worse. I kind of want to dig through the archives to find their articles from Mirrodin standard, both with the skullclamp ban and with the later "affinity is dead this time for sure" set of bans. I'm guessing that there will be a lot of promises that explain how they check and double check things now so that this can never happen again. It's still amazing to me though that they let the combo get printed in the first place, given how obvious it was, and even more so that they didn't realize how combo-friendly an environment with poor instant speed removal and poor counterspells is.