This happened to me as well - not exactly for the same reasons (though certainly the fighting games/wrestling/anime talk was not very interesting to me), but they talked a lot less and less about games and more about nonsense I didn’t care for just in general. I think the fourth or fifth time they were gearing up to talk about a game I was excited to hear their discussion over only to have them gloss it over with 5 minutes of “yeah, we played it” followed by “well we already did a quick look for this so check that out for our thoughts” and then they’d move on to talk about a pinball machine or something was about the time I finally unsubscribed.
I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I felt years ago that Jeff was becoming too cynical to really enjoy gaming as a hobby and that really tainted his opinions on games. I can only imagine it’s gotten worse since - the idea of following him for more thoughts on games is… not appealing to me.
That’s interesting. I have pretty much the opposite impression. I feel like when Ryan Davis was around, they actually spent much more time on off-topic discussion, and the Bombcast felt like it was almost equally divided between comedy and game talk. After his passing, a lot of the humor drained away and they spent an increasing amount of time just talking about games–but games I didn’t play or have an interest in playing.
I feel like Ryan’s death took a massive toll on Jeff, and he wasn’t really the same after. That, combined with the increasing stress of their increasingly corporate environment, seemed to drain a lot of the life out of him. This first episode of his new podcast felt like the first time in a long time I was listening to the old Jeff.
Yeah, for sure, the podcast was never quite the same. I guess I really dug the comedy and light hearted tone the show had, even when they weren’t talking about stuff I was into, but once Ryan passed I guess I had less patience. They also brought in editors like Dan that I just didn’t really click with, which didn’t help.
I suppose I should at least give this a listen before I pass any judgement, eh?
Shamus Young, a talented writer known for his critiques of Bioware and Bethesda RPGs, passed away yesterday of cardiac arrest. I wasn’t aware he was in poor health and always enjoyed his video essays and scanning his absurdly long, multi-part essays breaking down world design.
This is still a use case of something absolutely possible and better served by other, simpler technologies. Unless your primary goal is to inflate the speculatory value of the pay-for-trust mechanism.
AIUI it’s the “provably” part that can’t be done with a centralized server architecture. Not that that adds anything to the game as a game, and honestly I think it makes the game worse since you can’t patch it.
FWIW this was made by some MIT students and AFAICT there’s no money angle.
That’s a fair point. The curmudgeon in me struggles to identify why they (edit: blockchains) are equivalent or better for any practical application of proof in games. If cryptocurrency were not a speculatory asset desperately seeking any plausible applications, would we be solving this problem?
I do think blockchain is an interesting idea, from a technical “hey, that’s cool” standpoint. That said, having no practical applications, we’re stuck with Ponzi schemes.
Old Man Murray didn’t really report on industry gossip. (Such and such studio has this going on internally, etc). I think it was called fatbabies. But google searches revealed nothing.
Yup. I guess that’s a glimpse at how much control Google has nowadays. If it isn’t there, it doesn’t exist and it hasn’t existed, pretty much. That’s too much power in the hands of too few.
