Games Journalism 2021 - Coming to you live!

Must-read feature for anyone interested in Tom Hall, Ion Storm or Anachronox.

That was a good read. I played Anachronox when it was first released. What a weird game. Pretty janky, even for it’s time. Although the author of the article suggests it feels like a finished game, it’s really obvious that huge parts of the game were cut.

But I loved it. A charming game.

There were so many things that were cut from the game, like the black and white ghost ship pirate level that was showed off at E3, and the massive cliffhanger never felt like an intentional end point but a “no more delays - this has to release” kind of situation. Despite its flaws, I bought it at launch on a whim and absolutely loved the characters and goofy humor.

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I still hope Hall shares more details about how he intended the story to end one day. Some of the places we never got to visit sound so creative:

Furthermore, according to Lee [Perry], “We created a lot (and you don’t understand how much of an understatement that is!) of unused content”. This included the planet of Matrix 0, the homeworld of PAL-18, Boots’ plucky robo-sidekick. As Tom planned, on this mostly created but unused world, “the crew doesn’t have any of the planet’s currency, so they are essentially poor, and they get stuck in rectangular solids with their picture pasted on them! They gradually earn the Matrix 0 currency, getting more polygons, some animations, attachment points, specular maps, and get on to meeting more important, more well-rendered people they need help from!”. This, on top of a pirate-themed world called Port Presence that was completely in black and white, was one of the many ideas and concepts that never made the final cut. Instead the game ends on what was originally planned to be the halfway point,

EDIT: oops, sorry, that was actually not the link I wanted to post. I meant to post this link, also from Decrypt

The world can be a very dumb place sometimes.

I mean we all pretty much agree this is some money laundering scheme, right?

Has Second Life made its return to insane Digital Store stage yet? Did any of the corps that created virtual stores in SL ever actually sell anything?

Don’t know but this all makes sense to me, non-existent property bought with non-existent money.

Figured this may fit in here well enough even if he’s not technically a journalist, what with its attention to detail and research: Karl Jobst posted in a new video on the ongoing Wata Games scam saga.

Don’t worry, it isn’t really $2.4M, but monopoly money:

And like most NFT scams, it will be people being both the seller and the buyer, buying it with a second account, to make like if your business is a great investment.

Yeah, there’s an analysis going around twitter this week showing that 10% of crypto users were involved in 97% of all transactions. It’s just a tiny group at the top manipulating prices with fake sales. Bottom line, if you are a cypto bro and not actively involved in fraud, you are in fact the mark.

Ok, I know exactly where this last guy is coming from.

This was linked from within the article

This is some peak… something.

I posted that in the eclipse thread yesterday. I really liked it. I especially laughed at this part.

But those are the very worst QD games, aren’t they? The problem with Quantic Dream’s games, especially the recent ones, is that they are - and I say this with all the love my heart can muster - awful terrible, no good messes with some of the worst, most facile writing you will ever experience in the medium of video games. Detroit is a game in which a robot character who has been tortured by a human turns to camera and says “who is the real monster?!” out loud. I will never stop talking about how bad the writing was on Detroit. Remember how you could give your group of political activist robots the slogan “I have a dream”,

Surprising to see someone go in that hard on Quantic Dream without even mentioning all the ways that David Cage is a huge asshole.

Probably easier to stay on the safe side of defamation.

Probably the last entry for the year.

Notable to me only because I completely missed the last entry. Someone violated the United Kingdom’s Official Secrets Act twice to prove they were right about an inaccuracy on the in-game tank model in War Thunder.

To prove that War Thunder’s version of the tank is inaccurate, a player posted an image of a classified UK military document on the War Thunder forum. The image was removed, and the poster was warned that the offense can carry “up to a 14-year prison sentence.”

Crazy.

Yeah completely nuts. There was brief post here:

IIRC, this was also not the first time that has happened on that forum.

It happened at least once again after that one reported in the roundup.