James Margaris
A perfectly harmless box. Game dev, half of Dark Roast Entertainment. Games criticism at http://jmargaris.substack.com
- To all the other countries: please continue to boo our athletes. To our athletes: feels bad but we gotta take the L here - try not to take it too personally.
- Something odd about this new Horizon game's art style is that it makes the creatures not look particularly mechanical.
- Broadly speaking the people who want to quit their white collar consulting jobs to be farmers or who want to become trad farmer influencer types are the people with the least exposure to actual farming - their entire knowledge of farming is Stardew Valley screenshots.
- I would say "I could fix her" but she doesn't need fixing.
- This is why you should document variables when you create them
- I don't even remember what a synched anim even is in this context!
- People got mad at that "why don't games work more like Hollywood?" series of tweets but it's weird that, when describing a video game producer, you have to say "it's different at each studio." It really doesn't need to be different!
- You'll get different definitions at different studios but here's mine: a person who helps individual contributors (ICs) and leads work with each other to make workflows better/easier/[Radiohead voice] more productive. They should be like oil: reducing friction and energy required to get things done.
- I've heard that game design candidates typically don't like "play our game and write up feedback" take home tests. What are the specific objections to that? Too broad? Spec work? Puts you in the awkward position of being critical while trying to be hired? Retweets appreciated (research!)
- This is why they love AI so much. They've spent their lives struggling with the most basic tasks and it's genuinely life-changing that a computer can write out a complete sentence for them. And they assume it's life-changing for everyone since they're surrounded by these complete dunces.
- This guy does a "spicy" interview every two weeks. It's honestly a little sad. Find a hobby or something instead of living out the rest of your life as "guy who worked at Bethesda and has no respect for former co-workers."
- "Go back and play Morrowind and tell me that’s the game you want to play again," said Bruce Nesmith, who worked for Bethesda for over 17 years, adding that playing The Elder Scrolls 3 "would not stand the test of time." bit.ly/4q4GoKh
- I like how many pointless close ups and slow zooms there are - mimicking the language of cinema without any understanding of how that language is used.
- This looks like the world's worst bourbon ad.
- It is genuinely crazy to pitch "real accountability for murder" as a common-sense "reform" like it's some dull procedural matter. It's going to be the same people in ICE and the same people running ICE so what you're asking for is a pinky swear from the murderers to stop murdering.
- It's the same "if you try hard enough you can do anything" mentality that makes people think they could beat a grizzly bear in a boxing match. But it's also a fundamentally lazy world view in that it discounts planning, preparation, training, strategy and basic competence as not part of trying hard
- "I could beat the top-ranked female chess player." "Oh you mean after thousands of hours of practice?" "No right now, having never played Chess before. What does the horsey do?"
- Time to revisit a huge pet peeve of mine. When you start Highguard you have to read the EULA and then the accept button is a press-to-hold button. All you want to do on that screen is accept - why is it press to hold? If they accidentally accept (after reading!) who cares!
- I 100% agree with this but I would add this wrinkle: I think Marvel's Midnight Suns is not well-written, and I wrote a blog to that effect. But if I read a blog claiming that Midnight Suns is not well-written I'd suspect the author is secretly anti-woke, and I'd be right the majority of the time.
- Is it, IMO, statistically valid to assume that if someone writes a very well-reasoned essay about how Dragon Age is poorly written - an essay you agree with! - that the author is an anti-woke grifter mimicking a normal human. As Casey Stengel said that's just playing the percentages.
- As an author (who has written pieces like that in the past!) I have no idea what you're supposed to do with that information, other than build up a body of work to make it clear you're on the level.
- If you're making a single-screen game like a beat em up I think 3 people is a lot easier to track than 4, which can be too chaotic, crowd the screen real estate, etc. That said, for games that don't share a screen - no idea!
- Up until like 10 hours ago Democratic pollsters, pundits, podcasters etc were telling everyone that the public loves ICE and the DHS and that any negative take was bad politics that would turn off normies.
- I saw a cat outdoors hiding in our bushes and I was worried about what was going to happen to it during the snowstorm and thought "I gotta get this cat inside!" and then I remembered I live in Southern California and it's going to be 70 degrees.
- There's a 50% chance (I'm not going to check) that this is a sub about a huge chicken.
- Sit next to them at a restaurant when a waiter pops the cork on the wrong wine bottle.
- Every day I look for news that any Democratic official at the national or state level has done anything other than mean tweet. At some point this goes from "these guys aren't up the challenge" to "these guys aren't interested in challenging because they fundamentally approve of what's happening."
- Very few of the Dem consultant types have weighed in on ICE to a real degree. Ezra Klein, "third way" types etc silent. Matt Yglesias weighs in to say let's not overreact. None of the "data science" nerds are speaking. The Pod Save guys are like the only consultant dudes visibly upset.
- These Dem podcast / consultant dudes aren't saying "we need to actively combat this with X Y and Z", and most of them aren't even saying "this is bad someone should do something." Privately I assume they're all saying "wait for 2028."
- I appreciate this energy.
- Every movement has a meaning - this is top-tier performance art that only true masters can achieve.
- Production value aside Arknights Endfield makes a horrible first impression. Run from one glowing marker to the next, hold down one button to easily defeat every enemy, main character with amnesia surrounded by cute girls who love him, "anime-style" voice acting, plot an endless parade of cliches.
- The opening is like 15 minutes of a ghostly voice saying "unlock your true potential", "look within yourself to discover the key", "the past holds the secret of the future" - like someone just copies and pasted vague inspirational quotes from other media.
- Arknights the mobile tower defense game was good - it had a lot of actual gameplay and you could do well without spending money by using strategy. This seems like the polar opposite - very clearly a stat-check numbers-go-up game and the combat seems designed for auto-combat.
- I cut my finger on an ice cube. Reality being real on-the-nose.
- Yeah, I noticed a while ago that a bunch of people on social media have bios like "I'm an asshole and proud of it", but if you say "I don't really want to interact with you because you're admittedly an asshole" they get *very* angry and think it's incredibly unfair.
- Democrats are obsessed with this sort of messaging like "Greenland? Sure would be nice if we had more green in our bank accounts after a trip to the grocery store!" Comes off as totally unserious and like the easily distracted puppy meme. Just say invading Greenland is bad!
- There's something weirdly compelling about this style of game where the actual main game screen is only like 25% of the real estate. No idea how much of this is purely aesthetic consideration vs performance, thought big UI was good practice, etc.
- Got it again. "We win when we fight." I guess the implication here is that they refuse to fight unless they get your money first. Liz Warren please let me watch this SF2: Hyper Fighting video in peace.
- Paul Giamatti was the worst part of Starfleet Academy - more evidence for my long-running theory that actors having too much fun on set almost always results in bad performances.
- 2 minutes after posting this I went to youtube and the first ad I saw was Liz Warren begging for money so that Dems could "resist."
