... is back, after a short interlude.
http://www.insertcredit.com/
I missed Brandon's little newsbits.
Moderator: JC Denton
by icycalm » 06 Dec 2008 04:05
by icycalm » 06 Dec 2008 04:11
by icycalm » 15 Aug 2009 14:32
Brandon Sheffield wrote:Hi pals. As you may have noticed, over the last several months, insert credit has become kind of a quiet place. Poor Ollie has been trying to keep it up all by himself, and it's become a bit robocentric in here. The fact is, I can't really commit the time to insert credit that it deserves, because of my full time jobs at Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra, and my freelance game script writing I do on the side.
The front page has crickets chirping, the forums are totally busted, and everything's outdated to the extreme, so I've made the extremely painful and depressing decision to close the site, and make it an archive of the past. That is to say, the site will be closed to new content until such time as I can really dedicate myself to it, but you will be able to still see everything that was here. To do that, I'll have to update the features and reviews pages properly, and get everything in order, which I will do over the next month or so. Maybe a bit more, because I've chosen to do this as I undertake a super ambitious project of epic epicness (it's not that epic). Also, in order to not have the site die with a wimper, I plan to force myself to post properly like I used to until the site goes bye bye, so that the final news page isn't too depressing. We may also switch the site over to wordpress in the process, in case it ever decides to see life again. So, that's what you can expect from the site for the next little while. I'll update this post with the RSS feed once somebody tells me what it is!
by icycalm » 21 Feb 2010 15:50
TORUMASUTA wrote:Fuck you guys. We had an unspoken rule: we don't talk about Brandon. Now I feel all misty-eyed about Insert Credit, and how magical that experience was.
Not the forums, mind you. The forums were great, but the site itself, the news. That was an experience. Every post was a window into some perplexing, constantly shifting meta-dimension of video games that hadn't existed for almost a decade. Back in "the day", you'd see two or three pages of the monthly video game rag you and your friends read about how Japan totally had these awesome fucking things that you would never see, and those thumbnail-sized screenshots were all the insight we had into another dimension. The Internet both gave and took away, because while there was humanity's most powerful creation, with the sum of all human knowledge, immediately at your fingertips at all times, it rendered all those dreamlike concepts into concrete terms. I spent a summer imagining what Front Mission on the SNES was like, based on one paragraph of text, one screenshot, and one picture of the actual cart--which turned out to be for a different fucking cart entirely, but Amano art was often techy enough that you believed it.
In five minutes I could download the Front Mission rom and play it myself, five more minutes would let me play it in English, and five more minutes would let me play either the DS or PS1 remakes. Ostensibly better, but the Dreamtime was dead.
Insert Credit, though, Insert Credit was 100% Dreamtime. If Japan was no longer dreamlike, they dug deeper, telling you about the independent gaming scene across the Pacific. Once that stopped being dreamlike, they reported on the independent Korean gaming scene. Everytime they revealed something, they had something deeper and stranger and more magical to show you, until finally the fount of all magic just kind of... stopped, and then we had to rely on Complete and Utter Fags (no homo) to deliver news to us that passed as semi-interesting. Websites that invoked nostalgia as a buzzword, with none of the actual nostalgic feeling. Game reviews which took a photo of a corpse and added the caption: "Lifelike! 9.5 out of 10!!!!" People reporting on feelings without form, or form without feelings.
I mean, hell. Being a website on the Internet used to stand for something. Icycalm, much as we disagree with every fucking thing he's likely to ever utter, is a hell of a lot closer to that feeling than any of the Web 2.5 gaming "news" sites are going to approach.
Brandon and early IC, though. That was like plugging into the Dreamtime again, and now that Brandon has a life (or something?), it doesn't seem like anyone else is capable of stepping up to the plate. It's all either regurgitations or exclamation points.
by icycalm » 29 Apr 2011 20:05
by icycalm » 01 Aug 2011 01:37
elend wrote:Oh please. Viedogame reviews are sooo boring. I want to read about the background, the things surrounding the games, the feelings, the crazy people...
I wrote:I.e. about what I call "industry, shmindustry" trivia. And you've certainly come to the right place! No one knows more about this stuff than Brandon and co., not even Wikipedia!
As for videogame reviews being boring, that's because you're been reading bad ones. Either that or you simply don't care enough about games. For if you did, it would be THE TRIVIA that you'd find boring, and not the careful analyses of the works and the artform that you love.
I wrote:So how about an article on Itagaki's taste for shades? Or Nagoshi's solarium schedule? Or Miyamoto's choice for garden fertilizer? "Insert Credit to Continue with Boring Industry Trivia" 9, 8, 7, 6, 5,...
by icycalm » 19 Oct 2011 21:39
108 wrote:oh, i'm not saying the core industry has died recently. i'm saying it's always been dead.
what i'm saying is that all of us -- social gamers and "core" gamers alike -- should probably just be reading books.
more on that -- in the next piece!
by icycalm » 09 Jul 2012 20:52
Alex Jaffe wrote:The premise is simple: instead of rambling tangentially on a single topic for ninety minutes or two hours (or three hours), we bring you ten talking points relegated to no more than six minutes each, making for sixty minutes of lucid, juicy content. Any time left over at the end will be designated for a rapid fire lightning round, as our panel attempts to quickly address as many quick questions as possible before the final buzzer. We’re pretty proud of how it’s been turning out so far!
by earthboundtrev » 28 Aug 2014 22:05
Brandon Sheffield wrote:I will admit the last reboot didn’t exactly go as planned. While the idea was solid, and we were initially enthusiastic, we petered out pretty fast after those first few months, and most of us didn’t post many articles thereafter. We had a few great ones! But in the end it kind of fizzled.
So then came the podcast – we’ve done it for two years, now. It wound up becoming the focus of insert credit for some time, and people quite liked it! Recently though, we’ve been thinking about what we want from this. If we’re going to invest time in it, the audience needs to build, so we thought about a few ways we might do that without changing things too drastically, or making it too much work for ourselves (because if it becomes a lot of work, we just won’t do it – that’s what happened last time). Here’s what we’ve come up with – we will roll this all out slowly, and it may change somewhat, but here’s the current plan.
1) Scaling down. insert credit will just be brandon, tim, and frank. There will be guests, but in the way that Idle Thumbs is just those guys, insert credit will just be us guys, content-wise. This is more of a conceptual change than a structural one, but since we all live near each other, this also opens up the kinds of things we can do.
2) The insert credit audio show. This replaces the podcast, and will eventually have a better visual component, while still having an audio-only version. Since we’ll now all be able to be in the same location, we can slowly make the livestream and video component more interesting – watching talking heads is not very engaging. We will also not talk over each other or have lag anymore, because we’re in the same room! That’s nice. The format will also change – it will be looser than the initial 10 question/6-minute format, with the intention of building some articles out of the audio content over the period of months, kind of integrating the whole thing.
3) The insert credit video show. Though all the names are subject to change, this will be a livestream in which we play through games we think are interesting. We’ll play all the way through them, in installments, and the only rule we’ll have is that one person in the group knows the game well, and that person is not playing. They’re more of a coach for the player(s).
4) Article content. Articles will remain! Tim and I both have articles we’re ready to put up, and just haven’t yet. But much more interesting than that will be our formspring (or spring.me) integration. We plan to have a field people can fill out to ask us game-oriented questions. We will go through these, pick the best ones, and write responses to them in article form. As mentioned, the audio show will also influence some article content – building lists of best games over time, or weaving together narratives.
That’s pretty much the plan, overall. A new version of the site is currently being worked on to reflect these changes, and we’re pretty confident this will generate a lot more interesting content than we had before. This should also more closely integrate the audience with the whole experience. Many of you have known or interacted with us for years, and we’re hoping this will bring everyone closer to the experience.
There will be some growing pains, to be sure, but please bear with us as we gradually turn this into a bigger and better thing!
by earthboundtrev » 18 Nov 2014 14:06
Brandon Sheffield wrote:Then it hits me...I’m in it. This was the feeling. Not just the game, but the environment, sitting on the easy chair wearing the sweatpants I just slept in. Not going to the bathroom even through I really have to pee, because I want to beat this damned game. Realizing how well the game was designed brings up that old feeling of excitement and discovery. What the hell happened to Video System anyway? Do they still make games?
I’m worried about nothing. This is undoubtedly what enlightenment feels like. I’m remembering every good time I’ve had simultaneously, and projecting them into the future. I wonder if this day will be one of those I recall years from now.
You can go back. Don’t let them tell you otherwise. It’s there, you just can’t try overly hard for it. The world has to agree with you first. And when it hits you like a wave, don’t question it. Just ride it to completion. Life can wait!
I encourage you to dig out your NES or your Genesis and find a day to just isolate yourself and play. Don’t worry about what you have to do tomorrow. Go get yourself some candy and a soda. Go call up your pals and play through Double Dragon 2. No matter what happens…it’s good for what ails you.
by icycalm » 18 Nov 2014 16:42
George Smith wrote:The Frat Boy
The Frat Boy loves podcasts, because they allow him an opportunity to sit around with his like-minded coworkers/frat bros and be obnoxious jerks on the company dime. "I'm not being a drunken idiot! I'm generating dynamic multimedia online content!"
by icycalm » 11 Jul 2020 01:10
by icycalm » 24 Mar 2021 17:21
by icycalm » 15 Apr 2021 20:30
by icycalm » 02 Jun 2021 19:09
by icycalm » 09 Jun 2021 11:03
get rid of artificial hardware requirements, the technology is there to bring games to almost any device
by icycalm » 09 Jun 2021 11:13
by icycalm » 14 Jul 2021 11:09
Gaagaagiins wrote:I feel like even Marx would be shocked to the extent workers have been pushed while still yet not banding together into mobs to drag bosses out into the streets to beat them to death.
by icycalm » 08 Dec 2021 20:53
by icycalm » 01 Jan 2023 16:20
Syzygy wrote:On Mega Threads
The question was raised as to whether we should let the forum’s longest-running threads like currently playing, new games, etc., continue indefinitely or not,
Pros: a single thread to “follow”, easy to find, builds up a sort of tradition
Cons: nearly impossible to find older posts / conversations in them, increasingly daunting to newcomers, huge infinite scrolling tends to have technical issues
What do you think?