Ephesos

Also, just as a general point of interest, I would recommend that you use better variable names in your own scripting. And by "better", I mean more descriptive. It makes a world of difference when you go back to an old script and know exactly what the variable "total_brooms" means, instead of staring at the screen for half an hour to figure out what exactly the function of "k" was.

Congrats, Nikki! I won't be surprised if you pass me soon, probably won't even take much effort.

Goodbye, FF! We'll always remember Mountain of Shadows!

Originally Posted By: Actaeon My experience is pretty much confined to watching the "snitch" (a human being dressed up as such) blast past me on an obscure corner of campus with a seeker (a running person with a broomstick) on his heels. This is actually the part I had the hardest part envisioning, in a way that wasn't stupid or broken from a balance perspective. The rest of it really boils down to dodgeball mixed with basketball/ultimate frisbee.

See, now emulating Quidditch has a serious built-in limitation in that we don't possess any sort of antigravity tech. With how much of the game depends on using all three dimensions, I can't imagine how this would look in practice. Like ultimate frisbee and dodgeball, but with brooms?

My college actually had it too. I never made it to one of their events, though... they seemed pretty disorganized. Which is appropriate, I guess.

Originally Posted By: garo It hurts me to think that the average gamer dislikes politics despite it is present in almost every game plot. Like Ackrovan said, most games that contain political stories have some serious tension between the main action and the overarching motivations. Like, I've been playing a lot of Skyrim, but I just can't get that interested in minor political plays by the individual cities when there are people getting eaten by dragons. That said, it doesn't absolve us of blame to just say "well, the news is so depressing." Which is what I normally do, but I find that as I go on in life I have less energy with which to be angry at things. Which is an even more depressing thought than the news.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan The other explanation is that video game reviewers often don't finish their games due to time pressures. (Of course, most people don't finish video games.) This is also just a unique point of the medium. When you get like Skyrim floating out there, you can have two people who played the same title without having come anywhere close to playing the same game. You can get something similar-ish in other media when you look at layers of meaning, but it's harder to have such fundamentally divergent experiences regarding content in other media. But anyway, that's something amazing about the medium, even though it can torpedo meaningful review scales. I kind of forget the point I was trying to make. But anyway, that's just an awesome thing about video games.

Originally Posted By: Iffy Matter of opinion. That. "Badass" is an incredibly subjective measure of... anything, that most people's opinions will differ. Unless you're being literal, in which case... well, you can't tell from a face if someone is literally "badass".

Originally Posted By: Beach upon the shores of reason The categories you've included for rating are all important. The weights you've assigned them are fairly arbitrary. It's most useful to be descriptive, but it's good for at-a-glance reviewing to just assign scores to the categories. The weights can be left to the preferences of the reader. Pretty much this, though generally I agree with Dintiradan that like/dislike is often enough for reviews to be useful to an average consumer. Getting into numeric scores and weighted averages leads to something like Metacritic scores, which can be helpful in a generalized sense (don't buy things with scores under 20, maybe). But it breeds score inflation in the long term, even with something as simple as a 5-star system or a score out of 10. Just look at any game review site and go average the scores. (I will admit, some of that inflation comes from the fact that most games which make it to any sort of release are complete enough that they couldn't ever be reasonably assigned a low value on the scale, but then that suggests the lower half of the scale is meaningless in the first place.) Even without inflation in those systems, eventually numbers reach a point where the average person can't draw a meaningful distinction between them, like Lilith said. What's the difference between a Metacritic score of 70 and 75? Anything meaningful to a player?

Originally Posted By: Soul of Wit I think this is an exercise in semantics. I'm using retro to define a more recent vintage of games. Now, classic games--those had no tutorial. I think we're just using random words to describe things at this point. In my humble opinion, the best kind of tutorial is the kind that you never identify as a Tutorial. Sufficiently integrated into gameplay/narrative where the experience isn't disrupted significantly.

Originally Posted By: Speed-O-Fie Hyper v2.1 Well, Green Fyora, you're right. But if we change their mage spell levels? Eh, I messed with this a bit when I was working on Siege of Copperpeak. It's no good to just change the Mage Spells level, because then you remove more spells than you probably wanted to. I'd recommend a custom script that removes their access to all summoning in the INIT_STATE (if making the fights harder is in fact your goal).

Wait what now? For realz? I know where one of my evenings this week just went.

Oh hey, I remember this thread. Most of mine have been meh lately, it'll be good to have some motivation to keep kicking out good ones. Some Flowers Also, New York City, aerial view.

To continue the line of "movies one should not watch with their parents", I present to you my two offerings. Snakes on a Plane and Thankskilling. The former, in addition to simply being a bad movie that isn't bad enough to be good, has at least one extended nude scene (after that one I just left the room). The latter... well, go ahead and watch the first five minutes. NSFW. I'll wait. ...yep. I can at least say I tried to stop them on that one.