The first was whether or not you understand what killed you. If you don’t know what killed you, that death is failing in providing you the feedback it’s supposed to, and you won’t be able to figure out what you could have done differently. Unsurprisingly, we saw that these deaths were highly aggravating to players, and in sufficient number caused new players to stop playing entirely. Trying to reduce the number of these deaths in TF2 was done through a variety of changes. It was one of the reasons why we chose to remove the hand-held grenades that each class had in TFC, which were one of the primary causes of these deaths. It was one of several goals that led to the creation of the freezecam.

…but they added critical hits.

The second was whether you felt you were actually engaged with the person who killed you. Dying to someone you weren’t engaged with, especially when you were already engaged with someone else, was aggravating. Even worse was dying to someone who you couldn’t have engaged with, even if you chose to. In that case, you’re very unlikely to believe you could have done anything differently to survive.

…but they added the Sandman.

Ah well.

Why another post about TF2 oddities? Well, my total playtime as Soldier finally overtook my playtime as Pyro, making the Soldier my most-played class. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been playing Soldier a lot more since he had a higher skill ceiling, and I’m more or less at the point where I can play the Soldier decently in public games and score reasonably high on the scoreboard. Unfortunately this has also meant that deaths due to crits have become about 100x more annoying as a result. It’s so goddamn annoying to have a decent streak as Soldier ended by some dumbass Engineer’s crit wrench because his sentry managed to kill some dipshit Spy a few minutes earlier. Or to have a Soldier that I successfully juggled one-shot me with a crit shotgun blast that wouldn’t have killed me otherwise.

And don’t get me started on Soldier and Demoman crits, even though I get my fair share of those. Ugh.

Why are there so few nocrit servers out there :(

http://stephenfry.com/podcasts/

You’ll need iTunes to listen to it. Alternatively, you can read it in written form here:

http://stephenfry.com/blog/?p=44

Kotaku covered an interesting interview on Gamasutra with CD Projekt’s VP of PR and marketing. For those not in the know, CD Projekt developed The Witcher, one of the standout PC games of last year. Click here to read the interview.

All in all he pretty much chimes in with what Stardock’s CEO mentioned in that interview I linked a while back (although honestly I think the whole “PC Gaming Alliance” thing is basically hot air until real initiatives to popularise PC gaming are proposed). He does raise one point which from my experience is pretty much correct, though:

As time goes on, sites that don’t offer any unique perspective will probably watch their readership dwindle. There are a lot of great sites out there that are worth visiting just for the quality of writing; so while they might not provide a lot of in-depth editorials, it’s just entertaining to read their takes on the day’s news. As someone who has predominantly worked on PC games in recent years, I have a different gripe: most of the major blogs just don’t really cover the platform very much.

This is pretty much spot on, I think. My experience with the major gaming blogs has been that PC gaming news, be it related to games or new hardware, doesn’t really show up that much outside of the occasional small piece on PC games sales charts (always accompanied by those “lol PC gaming is dying” comments that I loathe so much). I cannot give credit to any of the major gaming news websites for discovering gems like Sins of a Solar Empire (I discovered it from a review I read on technology enthusiast site Ars Technica), or The Witcher for that matter (I have Penny-Arcade to thank for that one).

I know the audience for PC gaming is relatively small compared to the combined market for consoles, but why can’t my platform of choice be treated with equal regard as the others? It’s not as if the major sites shirked PSP titles when the platform was doing poorly.

Another rhetorical question, I suppose.

(On a side note, a handy site I discovered from that Gamasutra article was Rock, Paper, Shotgun – a blog devoted to PC gaming. Needless to say, it has been added to my RSS feed aggregator)

In case you’re curious, the banner picture is from a photograph I took when it snowed here last December – my first real experience with snow in quite some time.

I’m not sure I want to migrate 5 years worth of posts given how tedious it is, but I’ll need to keep my Livejournal account for other things, so it shouldn’t be a problem. For now I’ve just imported all my recent blog posts up until the start of 2008.

So…welcome, everyone! Stay a while and listen. :)

There are some caveats, though…embedded items don’t show up (those are stored on LJ servers for some reason), and LJ cuts aren’t translated properly. In addition, all the LJ user tags which I used to link to other people’s blogs are missing. And on top of that, the comments and tags don’t carry over either.

Looks like I’ll have a lot of cleaning up to do.

Another peeve – LiveJournal only lets you export your posts one month at a time. Seeing how my LJ post history goes all the way back to 2004, this may be more of a pain than it’s worth.