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!

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.

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.

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.

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".

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?

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.

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.

Nope, it's pretty much what you've got here.

Does this mean I have to go finish Snowbound so I can have been the first one to release a scenario with animated snow falling? 'Cause it's been on my hard drive for two years.

Gotta say, I love The Metagame, and own a print copy of the video games version of it. And I love how it creates discussions like this:

 

 

Meh. I never cared about the top 10. Doubly so since two of the leaders are gone. But sure, thanks for the sentiment, and it's nice to see you again too.

I'm so sad I missed this... I saw the Google NASCAR thing, but didn't think to check Maps. Saw the video later, and it looked pretty sweet.

 

Can anyone describe the questing portion?

 

Also I agree with Mystic that it looked a whole lot like SimEarth.

I resemble that remark!

THIS PLEASE. So many good memories. Also so glad that I made us finish the thing when it seemed dead.

Also still kind of mad about not being invited to the Hidden Temple on SV, and only finding it during a session of cleaning out spambots.


Also this. This is pretty much my stance on the whole history of the boards thing. I have many fond memories of this place, some less pleasant, but mostly good. I'm also flattered to have inadvertently started the current Age*. I should really come back more frequently...




*-even though Channelwood will always be the best Age

So... I haven't done a day's work on Blades in maybe two years, and haven't released anything in three? And now I win?

 

I mean, thanks to the judges for doing the contest, but I quite honestly don't know what to with this information.

 

EDIT: To clarify, I'm equally split between the "Still Not Coming Back to Blades" camp and the "Dude I Should Make Another Scenario" camp. And I am grateful for the win, just honestly surprised.

...and occasionally get turned green for no apparent reason.

*shakes fist at UBB*

The 80-hour weeks were a long time ago... now I work a lot less hour-wise, but get a lot more frustrated in the same amount of time.

Also, hi. I've been meaning to pop in again for a while now. Just got back from GDC again, so I've been feeling re-energized about making games enough I might even be able to try more BoA or AIMhack stuff.