Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 13

@SceNtriC @wariat @diabellus Książka od półtora roku nie jest nawet w moich rękach, tylko w rękach ilustratorów, korektora i innych osób. Dwie z tych osób wzięły zlecenia i zapadły się pod ziemię, dwie inne zrobiły ale z opóźnieniem, jedna osoba ciężko zachorowała, no ogólnie życie w późnym kapitalizmie. Książka jest już sczytana w ostatecznym DTP i mam solennie obiecane, że do końca miesiąca nastąpi wysyłka plików do drukarni.

@Nifflas At some point I realized I'm perfectly comfortable stopping my car in the middle of the night and doing repairs because I know there's nothing out there trying to get me.

(unless Tourists are around; they're the only ones that seem malicious)

@jmac @Nifflas the actual experience is more akin to taming the unknown than being afraid of it. I've just finished the main story yesterday and tbh if there was the option to feed these anomalies or pet them, I probably would give it a try in some cases (some anomalies are pretty abstract, but others are more animal-like).

If you have a spare 20 minutes, this is an interesting use case for the twisted routes science often takes in pursuit of truth. It describes appendicitis and related treatments. Did you know appendix is *not* a vestigial organ after all?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrWSylKy50w

(FWIW, I had an open surgery appendictomy when i was 10, and I've never had complications)

@dgar Visiting a hotel with such decorations would certainly be an experience.

@glassbottommeg @demofox Depending on how cheap this gets, I might be tempted to try and backup my Steam library just in case. Steam hasn't failed me yet, but current owners aren't going to live forever, so the risk is ever-present.

@Nifflas You didn't, it was an anomaly.

@mlevison @cstross @baldur in 2010 there was an airplane crash that killed a few dozen top Polish officials, diplomats, military officers etc. including the president of the country. There was an investigation that concluded it was a perfect storm of human error and negligence.

There were also conspiracy theories peddled, among others, by people with PhDs in everything but airplane accidents (including things like history or medicine). "this guy must be right because he has PhD", basically.

@mlevison @cstross @baldur As an alternative to D-K, I'd like to offer the (hypothetical) "celebrity expert syndrome". People who are celebrated for their work in one field tend to be given a licence to exercise their authority in other fields. Some of them then have a big enough ego and little enough self-awareness to actually form prescriptive statements on things they know nothing about. This can become a community trend, too.

I have an example for this from outside tech.

Ok, after 15 hours of play I think I can officially classify Pacific Drive as A Good Game. The pace stabilizes at around 45 minutes per run (for the first of three "zones", which I'm still exploring), so the lack of the instant save function stops being an issue.

The way you take care of the car feels very organic. They struck a good balance between upgrades being very piecemeal and still feeling meaningful. E.g. I couldn't afford four shock-resistant doors, so I did the one that mattered.

@raptor85 Good to know, thanks. Also seems they've basically messed up their onboarding a little, because the game starts with an atypical experience, whereas the regular main loop is time-constrained.

Ok, so I tried Pacific Drive, but only did the first run for now. The game's fun so far. I like the mood. Feels a bit like Backrooms without actual backrooms - it's the same kind of creepiness.

However, I side with people who say there should be the option to save during the run. It's 1 a.m. and I should be in bed, but I didn't want to lose my progress, and the run was taking longer than expected (namely about 3 hours), partly because the inability to save made me ultra-cautious.

I run out of patience for Final Fantasy 7 around the time I went to the marshes. Either I clicked something wrong or it's just supposed to be this way, but I got to the place where the big bad killed a big snake, and there was no follow-up. Then I accidentally collided with the other snake, which I didn't feel like fighting, and it was like the 15th reload in an hour because something unintended happened. Bleh.

@rayckeith @lilithsaintcrow @NiveusLepus Coming from the opposite side, among the reviews I write the "1 star" ones are the most popular, the "5 star" ones are the ones I enjoy writing the most, but the "3 star" ones are where I feel I can have useful insight most often.

(granted, I write reviews for video games and I'm a video game designer)

Another blessing is they had to make do with a low resolution CRT display, and they could only fit so much text into the view. Hence short sentences, i.e. snappier, faster dialogue. This makes some of the dialogue actually work. By FF13 they no longer had that advantage.

They remade FF7 with "realistic" graphics, but they should have used more detailed puppets.

I remembered I actually had a Steam copy of FF7 (which I never played when it was new), so I gave it a second try (last time around I got stuck in a boss fight without health potions and didn't have a savegame to go back to and stock up).

The mechanics aren't that bad, actually.

The story and dialogue... juvenile, one-dimensional, silly, unrealistic - and that's okay, because this is a cartoon. The characters are presented as puppets.

The limited tech at the time was a blessing in disguise.

@quaithe To be fair, there was a cold war between Capcom HQ and the US branch at the time, and it wasn't difficult to pick a side, because at least this producer was competent, and the one at the HQ was not.

But yeah, I spent the entire project waiting for him to stab us in one way or another. I like to think he probably identified me as the weak link and got a nasty surprise as a result.

@quaithe There was also this producer from the US branch of Capcom, who was super nice all the time and was all about "we're on your side and not the HQ's", but then one day he called me when I was already at home and tried to guilt trip me into forging Jira tickets so that he could shift responsibility for a costly mistake from his company onto ours.

That. That was messed up.

@quaithe Had a situation a bit like that years ago. Polish studio, but owned by Americans, and they were calling the shots. At one point I quit a job and the company was like "nooo, don't go, we love you, we need you, how about a freelance gig", and then my keycard didn't work next morning while my stuff was still inside.

"But of course, this is America, and in America everything is great, and awesome, and lovely, until it isn't", said one of my teammates who's German and deals with our American publisher, and I think it's spot-on.

(Germans and Poles share a similar approach to communication, which in the US often comes across as rude, but we tend to think of it as being honest)