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Tycho

Scott’s going to put us in charge of the shop while he’s off on some kind of adventure.  This seems like a very dangerous business, and I suspect that he knows that all too well, given his attempt to mitigate the damage pre-emptively.

We aren’t intimidated by these restrictions, because - as you’ve seen here on the site - our oeuvre is crazy robust and rarely falls back on a handful of shopworn themes.  We came up with several incredible scenarios for PVP’s Francis Ottoman just this afternoon.  For example, Francis might:

- become trapped inside of his favorite videogame
- run afoul of Francis Otherman, a doppelganger who is slightly more handsome and who also has a ding dong he can remove and throw like a boomerang which also has a novel, chewy texture
- really start feeling it at the pump thanks to Obama’s misguided energy policies
- befriend an injured bird

and that was only, like three hours of consideration.  Imagine if we had invested four.  Fear not, Mr. Kurtz!  We’ll take it from here.  We will try not to pulverize your ancient and respected brand, try with a capital T.  But no promises.

I’ve had positive experiences with the succession of Macs I’ve had the last few years, and eventually began to savor the flavor of crow as I tip-tapped away on its minimalist keyboard much as a true creator might.  But I did it, now; I gave every writing moment of the last several years to this machine, and it served like a stalwart little clockwork knight.  Most of the writing I do eventually moved to a cloud platform, so there was nothing native about it: all I’m doing is starting at an (aluminum lined) browser window ninety nine percent of the time.  The rest of that time was spent wishfully, in perpetual low level hunger for electronic amusements which do not exist on the Mac proper.

It’s not that I necessarily need some powerful Clydesdale snorting and pawing, it’s that the kind of stuff I really like is made by two or three weirdos who don’t and probably can’t prioritize multiplatform development.  There’s too much happening at the Indie scale, too many genius free-to-play maneuvers, and too many hopeful Kickstarters out there getting by me.  I feel a responsibility to those little games.  I want to pat their misshapen beaks and tell them it’s going to be alright.  To be frank, this many years on from the Intel switch I expected much greater parity in this kind of thing: platforms like Unity are certainly points in that continuum.  I’m ready to go, though.  I won’t miss it.

Except Byword; I’ll miss Byword.  But not as much as I’m missing everything else

(CW)TB out.

(instrumental)

Gabe

NEWSFLASH, I made some people angry. I know it’s hard to believe. It seems a lot of people are upset about my post regarding the TERA beta. I’m a little surprised considering I talked for three paragraphs about how amazing the game is and then gave one paragraph about how I didn’t like the quests. If your take away from that was that I shit all over the game I think you’re probably just spoiling for a fight.

I tried to make it clear that I had only played from level 1 to 12 and so that was all I was really basing my impressions on. Some people have told me that’s not fair and explained that the game “doesn’t really get good until level 20”. That may be and I’m certainly hoping to see that stuff during the next beta but I think it’s fair to talk about a person’s initial impressions. That 1-12 game is your introduction to the game and the world. A lot of people will make up their mind about a game during that period. If you have some awesome stuff it might not be a bad idea to front load a little bit of it.

The reality is that I loved TERA and I was disappointed when the beta weekend was over. I’ve got my calendar marked and I’m ready to jump back in for the next one. You can like something, and still talk about what you think are its flaws. Honestly if I hadn’t liked the game I wouldn’t have given a shit about the quests being boring and I never would have talked about it on the site. But I loved it and so I did care and I did want to share my thoughts.

So there you go. I hope that clears things up.

-Gabe out