paulwgraham

@brian_: Weirdly, I had seen the video but completely forgotten about it until I found it on the wiki page. I guess my brain purged it in self defense.

@brian_: Damn beat me by a minute. The key for me was googling "space station game psygnosis"

My take:

Business guns will always keep firing. Riccitiello was let go because when the smoke cleared he hadn't landed the big new revenue stream the investors demanded.

Had he been able to land it he'd still be there no matter how bad it looked.

The board didn’t suddenly have some moral revelation. They wanted to save face and salvage as much of the brand as possible.

Maybe the new CEO’s direction will be more gamer friendly but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

There is quality to those early Konami NES/SNES games that I can't quite find the right phrase for. Castlevania and Contra had it.

It has to do with the games being hard but levels being short and the games overall being short. It lead to a style of progression where the game had to be considered as a whole.

At first certain levels or portions of levels would seem impossible. After enough attempts the player would figure out how to proceed. They would then become stuck on the next difficult obstacle. But due to there being limited lives and continues the player then had to repeatedly play the game up to the portion they were currently stuck on.

This leads to a kind of magic where as memorization and skill mastery develop the earlier levels of the game that the player had once found difficult became a breeze.

To me it feels like a phenomenon born from game designers finally moving on from arcade game style design that was meant to maximize the number of quarters spent coupled with the lack of saves or codes found in other NES games.

It’s a style of design not found much anymore and given how much the zeitgeist has changed and attention spans shortened I’m not sure if there is much appetite for it.

However, to me it is not surprising that the game feels unsatisfying when playing with save states as almost all of the satisfaction is hidden behind gradual mastery and progression earned through repeated playthroughs.

I thought this might be weird spam but no mrangryface is on the level. Here's the relevent clip: https://youtu.be/X_QP-rm7uJI?si=NcdJVYRWd8Silh_T&t=139

@zombiepie: I know about the initial captchas but I'm suggesting that there are clearly unusual actions (such as necroing a 14 year old thread) where it might be beneficial to add additional friction. Yes bots are getting better at solving captchas but they are far from perfect at it. Also they are still super bad at math so it might be sufficient to simply add a question like: “Whats 22 + 47?”

GB really should add additional captchas and other hurdles before users (that is to say bots) can necro ancient threads.

Also, it bugs me more than it should that Activision is at the top of this chart and not Atari.

@bigsocrates:

If we're being honest the only shocking thing that could have come from a campaign as wholly ill-conceived as this one is a game that was actually good.

After perusing that video the only way I could see this becoming a win is if that shark game turns out to be a Frog Fractions level head fake and it takes a sudden turn becoming an underwater FPS horror game and the father continues to makes video after video about the shocking discovery he's made and we get to see his gradual descent into madness as the game takes ahold of his life.

But, yeah, this is likely just the most predictable flop anyone could have seen coming.

You have to take the long view. Just think in 20 years when Tik Tok comes in mist form and is experienced by inhaling there will be contrarian influencers talking about this hidden gem and how it's actually a great game that for some crazy reason people hated.

And when that happens, BOOM, you get to cash in with your suddenly collectable antiques. Just put them in a safe place and hang onto them for two decades. You won't be sorry. Trust me.

@bisonhero: I too once failed the Turing test. There was a relevant xkcd about this kind of thing that I think about more and more now that AI is getting crazy. These days there does feel like there is an overlap between the comments made by the most advanced of AI and the dumbest of humans.

As for the phrase that pays:

I figured this would make a suitable shibboleth.