It'll probably show you how out-of-step I am with the rest of the site on the Star Wars issue when I tell you I'm giddy at the thought of Episode 7 coming out, but leery that George Lucas has seceded creative control over the project to Walt Disney.

On a tangential note, first they acquire Marvel, and now Lucasfilm; is it just me, or is Disney making a habit of swallowing other hugely successful entertainment companies lately?

Of course, it could all be a setup.

Their expressions do almost say "surprise photo", but the screensaver(?!) in the background says otherwise. Why make that thing if not for that picture?

Wow, yeah, Lucas is not having the best of days in that photo. And now that the idea's been planted in my head, I'm suspecting the other dude's stiff little smile of being less than entirely innocent. Either way, neither of them look thrilled at having that picture taken.

I bet a lot of it has to do with the flop of his most recent movie, Red Tails. He had apparently been trying to get it made for years, and when he finally did, it kinda sucked - sounds like a recipe for demotivation if you ask me.

From what I heard, he's been making noises about wanting to get out of the blockbuster game for a while now, and selling Lucasfilm was probably his decision.

Incidentally, that sale netted him an estimated US$4.05 billion. To put that number in perspective, it's more than you and every generation of your family from the foundation of Çatalhöyük to the present day has ever made, combined.

I read that and now "brand" doesn't even look like a word anymore.

Wait, I'm wrong, Lucas has been shunted into a "creative consultant" role. Wow.

Disney is buying Lucasfilm and forcing George Lucas to make Star Wars Episode 7 at gunpoint.

Well, I dunno about the "at gunpoint" bit, but he looks like a beaten-down and destroyed man in this photo.

I keep meaning to spend more time with the Lizzie Bennet Diaries...

Incidentally - I did enjoy this article about Peter Molyneux and his Twitter parody. Although it's kind of ... symptomatic of all the problems with Molyneux himself , it's weirdly endearing.

"Molyneux had to admire @PeterMolydeux’s creativity. The updates were like messages from his younger self, reminding him of the excitement and energy he used to feel when he was building something the world had never seen before. Those tweets formed a chorus with the niggling voice inside his own head urging him to take just one more shot, to try one last time to make a game that could live up to his mad visions."

"What if you played a parody of yourself tweeting from the future ... or the past."

(hopefully others will feel free to comment on Lizzie Bennet, Diary having or no, but I didn't want to clutter my response to Alice with the reason I actually logged in tonight)

Just finished Railsea - probably my favorite Mieville, after being bored by Un Lun Dun, intrigued but utlimately infuriated and completely let down by Kracken, and trying to figure out if I'd actually like Bas Lag enough to start it. Perhaps it's because it's playing one of my favorite games - retelling stories WITH RANDOM STUFF - in this case, Moby Dick WITH TRAINS (and giant moles). Which is actually hilarious as it is, since I have deliberately avoided reading Moby Dick - but Mieville keeps things going without quoting fictional mole-hunting guidebooks, and throws in tons of awesome train-worldbuilding, pulp/classic adventure novel references and takeoffs, and actually manages to get some emotion into his characters that I managed to buy.

Anyone else read it?

Alice: Indeed I have been watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries!

My response to your analysis (very nicely done, by the way - it's rather frustrating that there's such a dearth of actually critical but appreciative commentary on the series - most of it is faily flailing, either positively or negatively, which doesn't do justice to both the series' major strengths or its weaknesses).

1) There isn't a need for it - but I think this is a great experiment with the kind of storytelling first seen in the initially exciting but ultimately incredibly stupid and spinoff crazy lonelygirl15. The Pride and Prejudice aspect is a great way to market it - it's what got me interested, certainly.
2) I think that if you think of it as a Pride and Prejudice adaptation then yes, a vlog is not the best way to do it. But if you think of it as an experiment in telling stories through the vlog format, then it makes a lot more sense.
3) It is really quite fun.

I think that the conceit of "realism" is definitely one of the weaknesses - I'm not a regular vlogger, and I don't actually watch that many of them, but I know that almost all vloggers (and bloggers, and podcasters) would never ever let things as emotionally damaging as several of the LBD episodes past the editing stage. But without those episodes, the story falls apart, or loses all resonance. But I don't really mind that - it calls to mind the whole "Dr. Watson is the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories" issue - something that really doesn't work if you try to match dates and publication information and such, but it provides important context and framing for the stories, as well as the supposed reason for being of the stories themselves.

I also really like their Lizzie, Jane, Charlotte, and even Lydia has grown quite a bit on me.

Ohhhhhhh!

They're not trolling.

I couldn't get past the dragon. :( Now I'm sad, because the comments indicate there's all kinds of weird shit further along in the game... unless they're trolling?

It is AMAZING. The first thing I did was upgrade my frog to a cyberbrain...

Is Frog Fractions the greatest free edutainment parody game ever created? You be the judge!

Has anyone else seen any of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (modernised Pride & Prejudice as told through Lizzie Bennet's videoblog)?

My reaction to the LBD is essentially threefold: 1) there's no need for another (modernised) Pride & Prejudice adaptation, 2) this isn't the best format for one, but 3) I still enjoy most of the videos.

I mostly think it doesn't really work because the conceit is that the LBD is a real person's real video blog -- but a lot of Lizzie's videos only make sense as fiction, if you're trying to tell the (modernised) P&P story. (e.g. Would she really post public videos that are so critical of Darcy after he knows about the blog? Would "Ricky" Collins really insist on being addressed as "Mr Collins", and talk the way he does?)

On the other hand, I find (the actress who plays) their Lizzie Bennett rather charming, so that + "I wonder how they're going to update this part of the story" = enough to keep me reasonably entertained.

Well, Planetary Annihilation got a lot of money via the 'make a video representing what they want the end product to look like' method.

Of course, PA doesn't really claim to be completely revolutionary, instead it says JUST LIKE THE BEST STRATEGY GAME OF 1997, except now you can BLOW UP PLANETS. Which is a persuasive argument.

Not sure that would necessarily work - if you are selling yourself on a unique gameplay mechanic you really need to be able to communicate how that would feel in play and it's damn hard to do that through a video.

I mean, a really excellent video could probably help a lot, but I don't think it'll entirely wipe away the "what is this what the hell am I paying for" factor.

Unless you just produce a video animation of what the game would look like. Still a lot of work, but less than creating a functional demo.

The pig-in-a-poke dimension does seem to be common to a lot of failed Kickstarters. I guess to make a successful Kickstarter for a game which does something genuinely new or unexpected you'd need to make a demo first - and if you've got your game engine to the point where you can make a properly functional demo and put some content in it, then you've kind of done half the work already.

I'm very much with James D and Kyra here. A pitch like "New School RPG" or "FPS that is to Half-Life what Half-Life was to Doom" contains *no useful information*. (And hell, as a person who doesn't like or play FPSes, "what half-life was to Doom" reads to me as "kind of the same, in most of the ways that matter").

The reason it's easier to attract investment for old ideas than new ideas is that most new ideas aren't really ideas at all, they're just catchphrases.

I am sure that no matter how Molydeux the concept, you'll find someone willing to seriously consider setting up a Kickstarter for it.