vogon

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by vogon

  1. Posted

    Also as always when people bring up motion-controlled sword-fighting I'm doubtful of its FUNNESS because there's no way to administer a proper tactile response to swords actually CLANGing against one another. The game may express the CLANGiness to its heart's content, but I don't feel the CLANGiness. My arms continue a-swingin'.

    you could probably do something with a flywheel or gyroscope that throws itself off balance when the virtual sword is hit, but I'm not sure that's physically feasible to do in something that's designed to be a game controller you use in a living room.

  5. Posted

    I started writing some stuff, then decided to read through Heckers article as well, and found my post in an string of nonsense.

    Basically, I think what these guys are looking for was never really a good fit for game jams. Building a game in a couple days is about building a game in a couple days, not furthering game design (as Hecker put it). I've definitely seen some amazing game concepts come out of jams, but to me they've always been about celebrating games as an applied field. They're about getting over paralysis and just building something. Trying out ideas, rather than dismissing them.

    While Depth Jam sounds like an amazing thing to participate in, I really enjoy the current trajectory game jams are on. I want bigger, crazier, and more people discovering that they can make something fun.

    I'm gonna argue that they're both valuable, and they're both necessary, for different reasons.

    traditional game jams are a shotgun; they are many, many groups of people throwing ideas against a wall to see what sticks -- or, even, just to see if they can fully realize them and at least get something interesting done.

    the Depth Jam is a sniper rifle; it's a few, very small groups frantically iterating on ideas they already know (or at least think strongly) are good, to try and get a solid chunk of gameplay out of it for their "real" game designs.

    people who want ideas and a creative spark should participate in traditional game jams. people who have ideas but don't know how to make them into a game that they actually want to sell should go to a Depth Jam.

  7. Posted

    SF is based on multiple grids at crazy relative angles. Also, fun fact: Duplicate street names exist, because of the presidio.

    similarly, there is a set of numbered streets and a set of numbered avenues, which are arrayed on opposite sides of a central street, and never/almost never meet.

    as a result, living in the Mission, it confuses the hell out of me whenever I get an address for anything in the Sunset or the Richmond.

  8. Posted

    As for Blizzard storytelling, let's just say my friend and I correctly guessed every single story beat and were wanting to kill Leah by the end.

    the worst example of this is when Emperor Hakan II warps in and tells you that he knows the true identity of Belial.

    :finger:

  9. Posted

    Really? I need to look harder. Most of it seems overpriced.

    presumably the market is seeking sustainable prices right now, which means you're going to see a lot of things which are way too cheap, and a lot of things which are way too expensive.

  10. Posted

    I hate to be a complaining git, but last night I had lag in my single player game.

    you're not alone. I got to the end of the first act yesterday afternoon, and I had really bad sporadic lag for the entire

    Butcher fight

    . that fight is super latency sensitive, and I died three times because of the bursts of lag.

    I suddenly don't want to play Hardcore, like, at all.

  11. Posted

    tried this. it seems to work OK, but the worst part is that it looks like Elective Mode doesn't unlock all of your skill slots right away; at least for me, slots unlocked with level progression as normal. (that is, until you level up to the point where you'd normally unlock the category, you won't be able to assign skills to 1/2/3/4.)

  13. Posted

    for what it's worth, the behavior of the physical disc described by Gwardinen is identical to the digital download copy.

    I wouldn't be surprised to find that -- if Blizzard is planning a day-1 patch -- they punted it out of both the disc and the initial digital download, and it'll be downloaded through the WoW-style installer we saw in the beta, which we don't even have access to yet.

  15. Posted

    incidentally, if you want to read some of David Foster Wallace's stuff but don't want to jump into Infinite Jest right away, you could do worse than to start with The Broom of the System or Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. to some extent I think they're the The Crying of Lot 49 to David Foster Wallace's Gravity's Rainbow -- it feels like they have as much, if not more, of his voice despite not being as intimidating as Infinite Jest.

    Brief Interviews, in particular, features one of my favorite pieces of writing ever, "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life":

    When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

    The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

    Agreed.

    also, on a side note: I want to put in another vote for doing The Pale King one of these months. I haven't read it past the first half-chapter or so yet.

  16. Posted

    you really should read Infinite Jest. even if you're not the type to get way into literary criticism and analysis, it's a tightly-wound, interesting, and extremely funny book.

  17. Posted

    That's a funny, haphazard conclusion to draw. Enslavement, 2012: highway repair.

    I don't know if that excerpt's particularly insightful, at least to me. I had most of those revelations when I looked at a furniture catalog when I was ten.

    Edit: I'm sorry I came across as an asshole. For some reason, that excerpt jarred with me.

    it ties in nicely to a point he mentions earlier: "in The Sims, nothing is everything." The Sims lays bare all of the subtle machinations involved in getting yourself out of bed and out to work in the morning, by forcing you to do all of them explicitly, and all around the world, billions of people are doing variations on the same thing.

    all of the greatest works of mankind, all of our art and media, all of our science, all of our wars and atrocities, are done by beings which are fundamentally just trying to be near a bathroom so they can take a shit in a couple of hours. (the road construction bit, I think, is just a reflection on the scale of humanity. or, at least, that's how I'm reading it.)

  18. Posted

    just started reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman this afternoon. loooooovin' it so far.

    The Sims makes the unconscious conscious, but not in an existential Zen way; The Sims forces you to think about how even free people are eternally enslaved by the processes of living. Suddenly, I had to remember to go to the bathroom. I had to plan to take a shower. Instead of eating when I was hungry, I had to anticipate an unfelt hunger that was always impending. If I didn’t wake up at least an hour before work, I’d miss my ride and get fired. And though I need to do all those things in reality, the thoughts scarcely cross my mind unless I’m plugged into this game.

    After playing The Sims for my first ninety minutes, I paused the action, logged off my computer, and drove to a Chinese restaurant called The Platinum Dragon. I had to pass through some road construction, and it suddenly occurred to me that there would always be road construction— not always on this particular road, but somewhere. There will never be a point in my lifetime when all the highways are fixed. It’s theoretically plausible that my closest friend might someday abandon me for no reason whatsoever, but it’s completely impossible to envision a day where I could drive from New York to California without hitting roadwork somewhere along the way. It will always exist, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And for the first time, that reality made me sad.

  19. Posted

    Yeah, how the hell do you unlock that last one?

    you have to buy every weapon and armor upgrade and finish every mission and monster in the game

    except the boss and the second, real boss

    , if it's the one I'm thinking of.

    there's no way to do it other than slot machine abuse, I don't think.

  20. Posted

    yeah, I don't get the hate in some of the comments. the idea of the game seems awesome -- it seems like removing arbitrary movement would change it from a traditional FPS to more like a timing-based action puzzle game, where the key gameplay challenge is effectively using cover and choosing when to pull up stakes.

  21. Posted

    protip for after you clear parameters the first time:

    the slot machine is super broken, and if you click on it really quickly it will pay out a fairly good fraction of the time. if you exploit this behavior as soon as it opens, you can clear the game in under 30 minutes.

    yes, I just laid down a protip for parameters. yes, I know how sad that is.

  23. Posted

    I watched the Giant Bomb quick look of The Walking Dead this morning, and chuckled a bit when someone mentioned "Ol' Breckon down the road."

    I am so not a zombie person, but I am tempted to get in on this from the good buzz it's been getting.

  24. Posted

    man, I didn't throw all that money into double fine adventure just so they could hire Chris with it.

    *picks up the phone*

    hello, Federal Trade Commission? I am upset about video games.

    (seriously, though, congrats Chris.)