Dave McLeod

Narrative enthusiast. Games as storytelling, storytelling as life.

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

Suddenly remembered the Mountain Goats acoustic of Autoclave performed in front of Seattle’s Fremont Troll.

Insert your own ‘GOAT’ pun here

https://t.co/BxOy5uAhh2

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

The score is middling, but I’m increasingly turning to JRPGs (like Bravely Default, another Team Asano game like Elliot) for rich stories told with nuance. The less prominent, the better, tbh

[metacritic @metacritic]

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales reviews are coming in now: https://t.co/NREbrrrwCi
"Elliot's adventures are wonderfully designed, consistently enjoyable, and utterly compelling." - GamesRadar+

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

@DannyKosarin @hughlaurie @jan_murray (In both books I’m referring to their entries on ‘Collective Nouns’ btw)

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

Hi Danny,

I’ll have a shot.

As Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage has it, Standard American English uses singular verbs with collective nouns (CNs), in all cases. Simple.
British English differs depending on whether the CN is thought of “as a single unit” or “as a collection of individuals”.
Examples of the former given are “A group of four young men, in denim overalls, was standing close to him” and “the Oxford University Press publishes many scholarly monographs each year.”
Examples of the latter given are “The jury retired at five minutes past five o’clock to consider their verdict” and “Let us hope that the Ministry of Defence are on our side this time.”

Brian Garner, in Garner’s Modern American Usage, directly explains the American tendency to use the singular as a tendency “to regard the collective nouns as expressing a unit.” The British, in his opinion, follow the opposite tendency. In either case he considers there to be flexibility depending on if the grammatical emphasis is on individuals in the collection (plural verb) or the collection itself (singular verb) - mirroring what Fowler gives as an explicit rule above. It’s apparently so difficult to call a correct answer that Garner, who is almost always a stickler for precision, says it’s hard to be doctrinaire on this topic.

You are indeed right that while all collective nouns are singular, they may take plural or singular verbs based on the above. And your idea of American English using a singular verb vs British English using a plural verb is straight out of Garner, who is an authority on American English.

So what about Hugh?
“….they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy.”

My takeaway from the above is that the correct verb depends on an intended emphasis of members vs the collective at hand. In Hugh’s usage, as best I understand it - and I am far from a grammarian, so I’ll probably butcher this - he emphasizes the audience as a unit or swarm, coming to a singular decision (as opposed to, say, a jury). NBC on the other hand he groups as a collection of individuals - perhaps reflecting the experience of working with multiple producers and executives from the organization who had input on the show.

I think in this case audience happens to be a very ambiguous edge case, like jury or faculty, and could go either way. I also however don’t feel strongly about Garner vs Fowler - the collective vs individuals emphasis is interesting, but maybe overthinking it?

Anyway thanks for giving me a reason to think about this, does this sound right to you?

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

Extremely this. The most boring parts of awards / trailer season is how calculated and corporate it all feels. TGA and SGF are best when it feels like there are wildcart skits moments or choices that are pure Geoff.

It’s such a loss that the big shows are all corporate affairs. Would be better if the outlets were competing to put on the best podcast special or whatever with their GoTYs

[roycebracket @royceybrackets]

the fact that he actually just really liked highguard and had to watch it die as everyone hated on it made me more sympathetic. he's not actually an industry ingroup ghoul he's just some dork

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

The masculine urge to destroy your circadian rhythms and call it being a free-thinker

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

Think the problem here is going to be the transition from (A) the Kratos duology, which was character-centric and rooted in fathers and sons, with the setting basically incidental, to (B) something that looks more interested in world-building and completing this transition into a universe/setting, where Faye is there primarily as a bridge to the previous games.
There’s something eternal and immortal about GoW 2018 and the Kratos-Atreus relationship, and even Ragnarok already felt like it was watering down the material by taking it further than it needed to go. Without that emotional hook to go alongside the gameplay and spectacle, low-hopes for this

[KAMI @Okami13_]

God of War: Laufey officially announced for PS5.

• Next chapter in the God of War franchise
• Play as Faye as she fights through the afterlife
• Set in the 'Everywhen' with gods from across DIFFERENT mythologies
• Combat is all about speed, control, and relentlessness
• Fight alongside a talking cube
• Coming soon exclusively to PS5

#GodofWar #GodofWarLaufey #StateofPlay

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

It’s important to remember this game as having been written during peak-post-Game-of-Thrones, where killing off central characters became a common flourish, part of creating an “anything can happen” tension.

The Eminem comparison is interesting - revisiting the shock-era of pop culture myself recently. Many, many decisions about how TLOU2 uses elements of the first game feel a little too engineered in how it handles elements of the first game with an eye towards big sacrifices of sacred cows. I feel dirty making the comparison, but it feels a little like the “The Last Jedi” of gaming.

Intergalactic is Druckmann’s big shot at showing the world whether he can successfully write another good story. I’m not confident, tbh, and feel this is the great shame over the loss of Hennig.

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

We’re so back (‘we’ being ‘Call of Duty Campaign Mode Fans’, of which there are dozens - dozens! - of us)

https://t.co/ibcxlYtTYG

[Raphael Colantonio @rafcolantonio]

Immersive sims fans:

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

@SynthPotato Likewise! These games can be kind of like Astro Bot at their best, extremely playable and easy to chill out with, but surprisingly deep in level design or their lore-references!

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

Didn’t see this mentioned among the recent Uncharted 4 news: Alan Tudyk left the project after the management changes that now seem pretty clearly to be to do with Druckmann forcing out Amy Hennig. https://t.co/2O8ROh7VFb

Tudyk’s quotes (ripped wholly out of context) do kind of make it sound like there were broader philosophical changes during the changeover. Presumably this is to do with the idea that Hennig wanted to change how combat operated in the game, not even giving Drake a weapon until after the halfway point. This was supposedly in response to fan criticisms of the slightly inconsistent tone between Drake’s cavalier good-guy character and the massive body-count amassed over the first three games.

Assuming (as I wantonly am) that Druckmann was the guy who interrupted the famous internal vertical slice to accuse the game as sucking and totally without focus, this seems a little interesting. Druckmann is at this point coming off of TLoU, a game with its own thematic and game-design clashes around violence vs combat mechanics.

My take on Naughty Dog is basically that Hennig led their reinvention as the cinematic adventure game studio they’re now known as, but that this was just one of many iterations the studio had been through, taking on new challenges with every generation. With the PS4 the pattern changed, exatly as Druckmann takes over. Since then - and it’s hard to generalise too much given that we’ve seen a total of two games from the guy in the past fifteen years - ND has been locked into effectively becoming a vehicle for Druckmann’s mediocre failed comic-book drafts.

Reports from the TLoU series confirm my sense that the guy isn’t an especially strong writer or artist, so much as a guy who lucked into being able to produce his Walking Dead pastiche with the aid of the most talented graphics engineers on the planet and the oven-ready template of the series that really did reinvent narrative action gaming, Uncharted.

Im thinking here of Pedro Pascal having to ask the guy “Do you even like art?”, or Joe Carnahan, director-candidate for the Uncharted movie, calling him a “Hitchiker” for riding Hennig’s coattails.

Much as it’s so frustrating that Sony’s live-service push more or less sabotaged their whole stable of developers from doing anything interesting this generation, I resent Druckmann in particular for consigning ND to wasting decades on a handful of Reddit-tier, pseudo-philosophical, ultimately forgettable genre-trash

[Obbe Vermeij @ObbeVermeij]

After 3 years of work, it’s finally here.

My new game Plentiful launched in Early Access today.

It’s a sandbox where every change has consequences —
too many trees drain the water, one spark can burn everything.

It’s a bit different — we’ll see what people make of it.

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

@rafcolantonio YES MAN YES

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

A big factor that I don’t see brought up enough is how much IP Xbox is sitting on since the acquisitions of Bethesda and Activision closed. Microsoft could go far locking down heavy-hitters as exclusives in the future. It doesn’t quite work the same for Game Pass we’ve seen because of COD.

Apple have always done well through the so-called halo effect: iPhone users buy AirPods and Apple Watches and MacBooks etc, each purchase further incentivizing them to stay in the system, make their next phone an iPhone and so on. I think there’s a strong parallel with the console business than

Since we’re already seeing Sony return to the conventional exclusive platform model, and we know Nintendo have always done well despite never publishing elsewhere, if Microsoft go back on this too I would only assume that some marketing guys inside are seeing solid data that platform effects matter way more than anyone on the pure-publishing side understands. I am suspicious of rational-economic-man-type arguments about digital library lock-in: quality of life features like the Dualsense or Quick Resume and Game Pass will sway people different ways if everything else is equal (as do things like friend preferences on the same), and exclusives are the wedge that gets a company’s machine in the house.

All the better! Need more games built for particular machines rather than bonsai’d to fit multiplatform.

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

A big factor that I don’t see brought up enough is how much IP Xbox is sitting on since the acquisitions of Bethesda and Activision closed. Microsoft could go far locking down heavy-hitters as exclusives in the future. It doesn’t quite work the same for Game Pass we’ve seen because of COD.

Apple have always done well through the so-called halo effect: iPhone users buy AirPods and Apple Watches and MacBooks etc, each purchase further incentivizing them to stay in the system, make their next phone an iPhone and so on. I think there’s a strong parallel with the console business than

Since we’re already seeing Sony return to the conventional exclusive platform model, and we know Nintendo have always done well despite never publishing elsewhere, if Microsoft go back on this too I would only assume that some marketing guys inside are seeing solid data that platform effects matter way more than anyone on the pure-publishing side understands. I am suspicious of rational-economic-man-type arguments about digital library lock-in: quality of life features like the Dualsense or Quick Resume and Game Pass will sway people different ways if everything else is equal (as do things like friend preferences on the same), and exclusives are the wedge that gets a company’s machine in the house.

All the better! Need more games built for particular machines rather than bonsai’d to fit multiplatform.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

Same energy

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

Is there a Japanese game-design term equivalent to Eurojank? For eg exquisite attention to mood and style, unashamedly encouraging play for the sake of play, a combination of silliness and seriousness?

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

Forget Crimson Desert, when does this Riven remake drop?

[Dave McLeod @davemcleod]

Two predictions:
1) Steam Deck, and especially Steam Frame, is going to unleash a new wave of creative games driven by VR and the sSteam controller meeting the calcified console-space.
2) Starfield was always more-than-solid and will get recognised when it drops on PS5

[Raphael Colantonio @rafcolantonio]

@G27Status @NVIDIAGeForce The risk if we embrace it: at some point, the production process will turn into making blocky assets with basic animation and prompt “make it look cool and ship it”. We’ll lose our taste and ability to make art entirely over generations. Every game will look identical.