Wiper

It's definitely fair to warn people that the game may not be what they want, but I'd not really class any of the things listed as 'easy to address' for a game made by a single person; there's a reason that UI stuff and AI are frequently ranked as extremely hard things to implement, particularly for generalist developers!

Yeah, I've been following Mugsters for a couple of years, looking forward to giving it a try this evening (it came to under £3 after gold points and left over credit, so it was a no-brainer for me)!

A bit of both, I'd imagine. It's not just that the game is generally paying homage to Twin Peaks, there's the fact that SWERY's academic background is in film, so his appreciation of Twin Peaks is likely to run fairly deep; it's reasonable to assume that most such intertextuality* is intentional. At the same time, budget constraints will surely also have added positive reinforcement to that particular decision. *or whatever the equivalent term for film and TV is

Anachronox is a great, odd, American variant of the JRPG, and its failure was a great shame. The setting and story were something else, even if the combat and levelling always felt a little unsatisfying to me. However, it is worth noting that while this was indeed 'Ion Storm', it was quite distinct from the team that made Deus Ex; that was Ion Storm Austin, headed by Warren Spector and his own team, whereas this was Ion Storm Dallas. Ion Storm Dallas being the studio that gave us Daikatana, though even that was a different team, developed largely in parallel with Anachronox and led by John Romero, whereas Anachronox was led by Tom Hall. I mainly make the distinction because I think it's a massive shame that we never really got to see what else Hall and his team could have put out: Ion Storm Dallas was closed shortly after Anachronox's release and immediate lack commercial success (whereas Ion Storm Austin stayed open for a few more years, putting out Thief 3 and Deus Ex: Invisible War in that time).

Nothing for duck racing! A travesty.

I've used both KR and Battlefoam, and I have to say that Battlefoam's stuff is much nicer (both the bags and the foam), and not terribly priced if you get it when it's on sale. However, they've recently had their big sales (4th-8th of July, and an anniversary sale in May), so you're probably out of luck for a while on that front. I have a skirmish-scale bag of theirs which I use primarily for D&D (I bought it for my Infinity models years ago, which it would be ideal for, but I never actually found anyone to play with, so...), and one of their larger satchel bags which is perfect for transporting most of my paints along with the models I want to work on (I specced it out years ago to have nice, laser-cut foam to hold a variety of paint pot types, brushes etc.); it would also be ideal for a medium-sized army, if I swapped out the foam and/or still played any full scale wargames. That said, KR's stuff is perfectly serviceable. I ended up using two boxes, packed into a KR backpack, to transport a tournament-scale Gondorian War of the Ring army seven/eight years ago, and they did the job just fine. The bag itself isn't the best made thing in the world, but the miniatures were perfectly well protected... up to but not including the point where, in the final of the tournament, my impatient opponent decided he would remove my casualties from their movement trays himself, and snapped the legs off my cavalry while doing so (they were tacked down to stop them falling out of the trays, so needed twisting to remove, not just yanking as he did). Once would have been unfortunate, but after the third time he did it I got the feeling he considered it a bonus. But I digress. With regards the foam itself, pluck foam trays are easy to customise, but also lose structural integrity pretty quickly; if you can get something appropriate for your forces, I'd strongly recommend getting pre-moulded foam instead. For my Gondorians I used a mix of the two - pluck foam for the larger/more oddly shaped miniatures, pre-moulded generic foam for the rank and file infantry.

The SamShos are quite divisive, so it's hard to recommend a starting game. 3 is probably the most atypical of the set though, while 2 and 4 are the ones I see topping most people's lists, though frequently fans of one dislike the other... Yeah, that's not much help I'm afraid Last Blade is easier - I love both, but 2 is simply a better, fuller execution of the ideas of 1. Start with 2.

If resale value is your reason for going physical, surely that makes indie games even better choices for you seeing as they tend to hold their value due to scarcity?

I've not played the Switch version, but every other version I've tried confirms that it controls perfectly with cursor or touch screen control, but awfully with joypad controls, alas. Which does (presumably) make the portable Switch version a good choice, but TV play less so.

As a native speaker, I can confirm that 'thanks a bunch' can be used sincerely. It can also be used sarcastically, much as 'thanks a lot' can be used either way, and so there's a risk of misunderstanding online where inflection isn't clear, but your smiley face obviated that risk, so I wouldn't worry about using it in such a way!

I'm not referring to his comments as being harassment, I'm referring to the environment that employees of game studios generally (and non-white/male/straight/cis employees in particular) find themselves in where active harassment from 'gamers' is disturbingly common, and companies in turn have proven to be spectacularly rubbish at doing anything about it. I phrased it awkwardly (I was typing on my phone just before getting off my bus at the time), but I'd meant to contrast games companies' general lack of response to harassment of their staff generally with their immediate response to a single employee transgression. To flesh that thought out a little more: Games are a hostile environment to work in, and a disturbing number of employers in the sector have done almost nothing to tackle that - not even simple things like 'you insult our staff, we revoke your account'; you know, the equivalent to the 'you're barred' response you might expect to protect the retail/hospitality workers that keep getting brought up in arguments in favour of firing staff for snapping at people. So you get an environment which is particularly stressful for workers who maintain any level of public profile, with a whole variety of fun side-effects including increasing the odds that they construe even polite, if mildly condescending comments as being intentional attacks wrapped in polite language... And yet, just as most companies have proven toothless in the face of player harassment, we have these self-same companies turning around the moment their employees screw up and drop on them like a ton of bricks, in turn emboldening the arsehole contingent of gamers, and in turn worsening the above situation. Hurrah! Again, I think Price's actions were misjudged. But I also don't think that's particularly important; Price is a single person, and people make mistakes. The news story is ArenaNet's reaction; their actions are the actions of a far more powerful entity, they're entirely counter to what I consider ethical treatment of employees, they reflect shitty policies rather than simple human errors, and they only work to worsen the already toxic environment that is the games industry.

I've posted these before, but it was a few years back and in the game's specific thread, so maybe worth bringing out again as it is a spectacular looking game: All Mirror's Edge Catalyst, if anyone wasn't sure; first two shots purely in-game, second pair using photo mode.

Yeah, I prefer Binary Domain to Vanquish, but they are very different games - Binary Domain is the best third-person horde-shooter made, whereas Vanquish is the best shmup disguised as a third-person shooter made.

Also, as it keeps being brought up, that wasn't in response to her AMA. She had already done her AMA (on Reddit, naturally enough), and following that she recapped salient points to her personal twitter account - it was to that recap that she received the response. Relevant if only because within the AMA she was openly offering comments for response in an environment explicitly representing her role in the company, whereas her recap was neither. And yes, if I were to be talking about my job on twitter, a customer were to question my way of doing things and I were to snap back, I would expect disciplinary action, but absolutely not of the severity she received. If my company did try to fire me for such an action I would have my union screaming at them in a picosecond. The games industry generally, and the US industry in particular have some of the worst worker protections around, and that leads to situations like this - situations where employees can be harassed without consequence, but if an employee goes out of like they're dropped like a hot potato. And it fucking sucks.

It can be pretty difficult to keep biting your tongue when a colossal arsehole who made a good number of peoples' lives considerably worse through his behaviour passes away and social media and The Media in general are suddenly awash with glowing memorials.