Aran

"We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation...and we wouldn't even know." -Michio Kaku

It's eating tiny people's arms and then tossing the rest away!

To go back to Tolkien: One apt example of the original McGuffin are the silmarils. They have no power, abilities, or particular significance other than being unique and looking pretty. The only thing that makes them central to the Quenta Silmarillion is that Morgoth took them and Feänor wanted them back. Neither of them even needed to use them for anything; they were essentially baubles.

I definitely want to do this, but don't know if I have the time. Maybe later this week. Too awesome for words. (I didn't know Japanese also had logograms, but Wikipedia says yes.)

You should send Jeff a job application for designing the next game's graphics.

... I thought I was hallucinating when I saw that name pop up. Welcome back!

Well, it's certainly possible; you're just going to need the right tools, drawing skills and plenty of time. I'm pretty sure no such project exists right now. The sprites used in Exile and the first Avernum trilogy are compatible with the respective Blades platforms, so you have vast stores of custom graphics to choose from. The later games have more complex graphics, and use a lot more animation frames, so it'd be much more work. (Obviously there's no way to pick a texture pack in-game. You would have to replace the existing graphics folder.) ((I'm also not sure about distribution, but as long as your pack includes no game files or non-original graphics, you should be fine.)

Probably if they don't listen to it often enough to buy it, and don't listen to enough music in general to subscribe to a streaming service. Also, even compared to piracy* Youtube is easier and less risky. (*AndThatWouldBeWrong) I'd consider Youtube music analogously to shareware; it's inferior to the real product, but good enough to gauge whether you want it at all.

Happy birthday then! Or happy two-day-belated birthday; either way.

We wrote each others' code, after all. My current absolute favorites by Two Steps From Hell is Blackheart and Winterspell. Otherwise (not trailer music), this.

>>> This unit is pleased with your offering of $cake. It has been determined that $cake == TRUE. Oh joyous day!

Spoiler alert: No. :| On the other hand, "probably someday" is better than any previous answer he's given regarding open-source BoA.

I don't care who narrates; I just want him to voice Redbeard.

Oh yeah, I remember that trick; some of my most interesting E3 and BoE play-throughs were third-slot singletons. Never did figure out why Jeff did this. My best explanation is that he noticed the archer build being underpowered when using the pre-fabricated party, and decided to train him a bit more instead of revising the archery mechanics. I suspect this balance stuff is why recent games have been increasingly insistent on pre-fab parties, fixed classes and pre-ordained skill trees. Which is a pity; I really liked being able to mix and experiment with strange builds. Playing E3 with a priest party (Anama, of course) was kind of awesome. It was also hard to part with the vast array of spells available in the Exile games. So many different status effects and fields and summons.

The age of the protagonists probably contributed to that. The Belgariad has a kid protagonist, while Sparhawk started the series as a grizzled veteran. As far as quality and immersion goes, I also found the Sparhawk series to be more captivating. However, while I think the Malloreon was a huge improvement over the Belgariad, looking back I now like the Elenium a bit more than the Tamuli, which went a bit overboard with literal god-characters and power. They quasi-teleported all over the place (which was kind of funny, mind, because I took it to be a parody of the Traveling at the Speed of Plot trope), and in one chapter I think Aphrael summoned some kind of futuristic ship thing? In order of preference, I think I'd go with Elenium>Tamuli>Malloreon>Belgariad.

Hawthorne shot first!

He didn't even change the color of the good and evil magical stone McGuffins.

Great idea, though the way this bundle is selling within just the first 24 hours, he could buy out a small pizzeria.

David Eddings had the Orb of Aldur, maybe a McGuffin in the stricter sense: In-universe, since it was basically some random stone a god picked up and rolled in his hand for a couple of centuries. And outside, Eddings freely admitted that the Belgariad+Malloreon are so formulaic as to be a template for fantasy series, including the choice of McGuffin. One of his forewords listed the "ingredients" as follows:

That list matches the release order pretty closely, though it groups by series. If you wanted to go strictly by release date, you'd be alternating between the Geneforge and the first Avernum trilogy a bit, but since they're entirely separate stories I don't see how that matters. Avernum 1-6 and EftP, Geneforge 1-5, and Avadon don't share a setting. If you're going for the gradual evolution of the game engine rather than just the story, then that list is a really great idea to follow.

The top contributor list now contains "Bon-Ihrno". I think someone posted under that name here once; doesn't mean it's the same person, of course; not with canon characters. Edit: No luck finding anyone. I now suspect I was thinking of Bain Ihrno.

I suspect that the mean reflects the proportion of enthusiasts more than the price most people are paying. There are a few high-paying contributors and a ton of people paying minimum price. It seems likely that the former are particularly fond of this kind of distribution model, where Linux would be over-represented, while the low-paying ones are more representative of actual OS usage. (It could even be some artifact caused by sampling size, where the high-paying outliers skew smaller platforms more strongly, but I don't have the statistics-fu to back that up.) It'd be interesting to see some histograms or distributions.

The quicksave was right before hitting the gong. I have a save from before asking Shavon, but I was hoping the game would just let me leave and return before actually starting the battle, so I wouldn't lose as much time.

I was helping Shavon with his basilisks and got slaughtered - Shavon in particular died very quickly since I didn't have a way to heal him. So I reloaded and decided to return and bring along Jenell instead of Shima (going for the one-companion challenge). However, when I came back, Shavon was gone; he wasn't in his camp anymore either. When I summoned the basilisks on my own, the game mentioned that "Shavon is dead". Is this intended - as in, if you leave the caves before the battle he loses patience, rings the gong himself and dies - or some kind of game flag glitch?

Aw. Oh well. Edit: Wait, I guess the invites have disappeared because Steam says it's free to play now. Neat. Wheee! (... why don't they just distribute their free content through a torrent?) Edit again: Oh, the queue is limited by their game server cap, not the bandwidth.