Recent content by Robyrt

I think this is because X-Men was the main cash cow for the publisher for so long. So the editors keep a really tight rein on the writers, the publishers can't figure out whether a title is good or just sells because Wolverine is on the cover, and the X-teams have to feature prominently in every...

Ancient Egypt circa 1250 BC actually has a lot of potential. With enough creative use of different date schemes, you can fit the Trojan War, Moses, and King Tut into the same game.

Good move decreasing the number of shoto style characters. SF5 has done a good job making Ken feel different from Ryu, and really Sagat's niche (fireball, uppercut, slow, long range) is much more suited to a new character than rehashing the same Ryu storyline we've had for 25 years. From a...

You'd be surprised how few people are actually into games that require multiplayer coordination. Yes, Destiny raids are a wonderful example of a video game that forces you to talk to people and plan your strategies, but remember that under 20% of Destiny players have completed a raid. Most...

Sure, but that decision was made at the corporate level, probably in January. By now, the community manager writing that post has seen the train wreck coming for months, and just wants everyone to know that they're still working on it, in an effort to stop the hundreds of hate mails pouring into...

One other big factor is sound. Uncompressed or lightly compressed sound is becoming more popular for PC ports, as developers spend ever more of their resources on graphics processing and don't want to wait for the sound pipeline to finish.

I think they're also trying to make it streamable, and thus grow the audience. Virtua Fighter has a similar problem, except with goofy alternate costumes instead of sexy ones: it's hard to tell who's who, and nobody looks like they would actually be fighting in a tournament. The DOA folks are...

Sadly, that view is pretty rational. In the media business, your best-selling album, novel or film is usually the one right after your creative peak, and falling sales are a sign that you need to reboot, rejuvenate or cancel. The game business is so expensive that you can only greenlight a...

Meanwhile, Activision embarks on the bold strategy of charging more money for their games. I've paid them $130 for Destiny, released on a rolling schedule over the course of a year, and with a similar total amount of content to a standard AAA game. I get my lavish graphics and new IP, they get...

And by "We love these characters", we mean, "We're still holding out hope for an X-Men vs. Doctor Doom mega-hit".

You'd love my new concept art installation. It uses the cases of 10,000 PS4s welded together to make an arch, with a fog machine powered by the PS4 at the very top of the crown. Welcome to the city of Omaha! I hope Sony is happy about the million dollars they spent on this truly remarkable work...

Morrison had a great run, and he injected some much-needed new ideas, but Marvel editorial was absolutely right to undo the "Planet X" storyline (where Magneto goes completely out of character and then dies) as soon as they possibly could. Claremont made the same mistake with the Siege Perilous...

Board game designer here. Generally, simultaneous turn games are way harder to design than traditional turn-based games. The rules need to cover every combination of "What if I do X while she does Y?" and the players also need to think about those things every turn. The classic example is...

My parents had a much softer limit - two hours of screen time a day, plus unlimited time on special occasions - and it actually turned out very well. I didn't really cheat to get more time, I developed a serious book habit, and I never got into trashy TV. (Trashy books, on the other hand, I...

The film actually addresses this; our resident super genius is explicitly compared to Mozart, who was composing by age 5.