vogon

oh, yeah, also, Jake: http://magiccards.info/query?q=!Vesuvan Doppelganger it's worth somewhere between $2 and $8.50 now. so there's that.

what's weirder is that, in the US, all of the place names are from greater Atlantic City, so 95% of Americans haven't visited the places being named. for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marven_Gardens, which I thought was a totally fake name as a kid when I played Monopoly for the first time.

is anyone gonna get in on Super Monday Night Combat now that that's out? is that even within the demesne of Lords Management?

for what it's worth, Magic has continuously tried to improve itself on this front. in Magic 2010, they revamped a lot of the writing to be more uniform, and they have standardized rules on which mechanics are frequently-used enough to be used without reminder text and which ones aren't. that said, I keep a running tally of the number of games of Magic I've played in a row without any hint of rules lawyering, and I don't think it's ever gone above... 5?

you've read Critical Miss's article, right?

along the same lines, I've recently wanted to try an experiment where I buy like eight different reskins of Monopoly and play them all as one large common game, in the style of the puzzle The Mighty Duck Konundrum from an MIT Mystery Hunt a few years back.

at first I thought it was "bikes and awesome friends rule [n.]" and I was on tenterhooks wondering what the "bikes and awesome friends" rule was.

for C++ you should own Effective C++ parts 1 and 2 and Code Complete, as well as having access to a copy of Stroustrup's TC++PL even if you don't own a copy. you should probably also own at least a book or two about the platform you're developing on, since C and C++ are goddamn terrible at isolating you from platformisms. also, if you're writing something that people external to your company will actually use (as opposed to a line-of-business app for which you're the only user) you should probably buy Writing Secure Code, or a similar "computer security for software engineers" book. but really, I can't recommend enough that you try to learn Java as your primary language if at all possible. it is a significantly more pleasant experience than writing C++.

all right, so I just got to the first ending and started ng+. what the fuck,

yeah, I wouldn't say it's particularly deep -- when you can beat it reliably, most of the tension is gone -- but as a way of easing people into non-traditional board games, I like it a lot.

yeah, Carcassonne is another good one (though I personally don't like the scoring system, because it's way too easy to accidentally fuck up and misjudge your moves.) what don't you like about Forbidden Island, though?

Coloretto is rad, and simple. it's kind of rummy-ish. Cards Against Humanity is great, but it gets super, super blue. if you and your friends aren't ready for "And the Oscar for not giving a shit about the Third World goes to all-you-can-eat shrimp for $4.99" or "What am I giving up for Lent? Jerking off into a pool of children's tears." then you aren't ready for Cards Against Humanity. Forbidden Island is awesome, scales to any group of players, and is a good gateway drug to harder stuff like Pandemic.

Magic 2010. here's the article all about the change: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/42a the gist is that players never knew mana burn existed until someone sprung it on them ("heh, heh, noob, you just took two damage :grin:"), cards which allowed you to manipulate your mana pools had to include all sort of mana burn workarounds, and almost nobody ever actually hit mana burn legitimately anyway, so it was largely superfluous.

it's true that there are unwinnable games of Magic. your deck can be statistically more likely to win than someone else's, but if you get the one-in-a-billion shuffle where all of your land ends up on the top of the deck, you're never going to win. this is true of prebuilt decks, and decks you build, and of every deck that could ever be built. but there are ways to be doomed to a loss in every game with random components -- you'll be hard-pressed to win a hand of Texas Hold 'em with off-suit 2-3, or to win a game of Chutes and Ladders where you keep rolling 1s. I think the core of it is that Magic is a complex enough game system / collection of systems that it's very hard to extract information about what you're doing wrong without straight-up having a better player than you tutor you about what's going wrong. there are tens of thousands of moving pieces and a ruleset 192 pages long which stand between you and playing optimally in all circumstances. when the chain of causality between you and a loss could have been introduced by a weak combo; or poor defenses while you were setting the combo up; or a lack of acceleration meaning that you never got enough mana to play it; or the fact that you played Giant Growth at the wrong time and so your enemy chose not to block the dude that was going to kill their huge creature; or you misunderstood and thought that a particular ability wasn't blocked by "this creature cannot be targeted by spells or abilities"; or the combo you were basing your deck on was written up on the Wizards site, and a lot of people in the top 8 at a Grand Prix event have been using it recently, so your opponent built a deck with a card that explicitly breaks that combo... then it suddenly becomes very difficult to pin down exactly why you lost and how you can get better in the future, and there lies frustration. (personally, I find Magic really compelling, but I don't ever want to spend the time or money to actually become good at it, so I mostly just watch it from the outside. also, Duels of the Planeswalkers doesn't allow you to select specific mana to pay for a cost, and there is one puzzle for which there is an obvious solution that requires you to be able to do that. so fuck Duels of the Planeswalkers.)

yeah, that's what I understand; there's enough stuff unlocked by pure platforming to get an ending even if you haven't done everything in the game. (pseudo-spoilers, maybe?)

this is about my impression of it. the controls are a little sloppy for some of the things they expect you to pull off. my biggest complaint about it otherwise is that it seems like it's got a memory leak or something, because the stage transitions get choppier and choppier the longer you play it in a session, until it falls back to the "oh god I can't load stuff fast enough" load screen with the rotating cube on it. when you accidentally pop into a door because you were holding slightly up on the analog stick, the 10-second wait to get in, followed by half a second of gameplay, followed by another 10-second wait to get back out, sucks. but the art style is goddamn gorgeous, the sound design is so great and intricate that I could just listen to a bomb blowing up a wall over and over for hours, and I like the combination of platforming puzzles (favorites so far: ) and cerebral puzzles.

played a new board game today. Vlaada Chvatil's Dungeon Petz, winner of the "worst board game title of 2011" award. it's apparently a followup to another game called Dungeon Lords, which has a far more promising name. the flavor: you are a minion that escaped the dungeon formerly ruled by the Dungeon Lord, and you decide to open a magical pet shop with the help of your team of imps. it's a worker-placement game somewhat similar to Agricola in its flavor and some of its mechanics. the core of the game occurs in two stages: first, you bid on your turn order during the placement phase, by dedicating imps and gold to action slots; the more you spend, the earlier in the worker-placement phase you go, and the better the raw materials you have for the second phase. next, you satisfy your pets' needs with cards drawn from decks based on its personality, while not letting them get angry enough that they knock the walls of their cages down and escape, magical enough that they vanish from existence, sick enough that they die, etc. your pets get needier over time, so you're forced to decide between satisfying their increasing demands and selling them for more money and reputation, or getting them off your hands early. if the game has one flaw, it's how mechanically dense it is. all of the worker actions are available from turn one, not meted out over time. in the late game, you might be trying to map 20-25 different actions onto 3 or 4 separate pets per turn in such a way that none of them get out of control and ruin your reputation as a pet breeder. instead of an end-of-game tally-up, points are awarded through three different systems based on sets of (positive and negative) criteria which change every turn and are identified primarily through Race For the Galaxy-style glyphs on the board. our first game took over three hours with four players. that said, it was a really fun three hours, and I'd recommend at least checking around to see if any of your friends have it, and playing it if so.

oh, geez, how could I forget? http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/ yeah, even though most of them don't straight-up expose their programming bits, all of Zachtronics's games exploit programming skills: in SpaceChem [], you program robot arms to pick up and manipulate atoms (and in its predecessor, The Codex of Alchemical Engineering [], you do the same with alchemical elements); in Ruckingenur II [, but it's way too short], you reverse-engineer circuits by deducing the properties of their chips; in The Bureau of Steam Engineering [], you build steam circuits; and in Kohctpyktop [], you lay down pieces of an integrated circuit. note also that Zachtronics was the developer of Infiniminer, predecessor to Minecraft, and that brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and environs.

if you're hard up for a programming-based game, there are already a bunch out there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War [] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindRover [] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboRally [; find a computerized version or else the setup/learning time might kill your interest] there's a even a whole wiki that lists them. http://programminggames.org

yeah, definitely. the core problem with agricola is that it runs super, super slowly if people take a long time to decide on their moves, and if you're playing with people who don't know the rules well, or people who suffer from analysis paralysis, turns take forever. to top it off, the scoring system is complex enough that it's difficult to hold it all in your head at once, which leads to a lot of second-guessing and uncertainty about how good a move is, and the presentation of the available moves is super, super daunting at first. it would be a great computer game. as a board game, I see its merits but I'm not sure I want to play it on a regular basis. edit: also it's worth mentioning that we were playing with the simpler "family" rules, which omit professions and minor improvements.

I played a few new games on Friday as well. Takenoko - it's a game about building and tending a bamboo garden and trying to complete your secret objectives before anyone else by manipulating the layout of the garden and the movement of the pieces. I like it a lot, but it seems like you can do pretty well at it without really exploiting the depth of the rules; I'm not sure that it's a game that ends up being particularly deep if you play it regularly. Gubs - it's a lightweight card game about protecting the cards you have in play and fucking your enemies over by stealing their cards. it seems OK but really swingy; and with four people it's cutthroat in a way that reminds me of Coloretto. bitter rivalries spring into existence instantly and then dissolve in the face of a mutual enemy. Agricola - we played this game with the five-player expansion. only one of us kind of knew the rules. it took three hours. I never ever want to see it again. (actually I guess it was pretty good. I still don't want to play it again for a while.)

after the Molyjam, I felt a profound game jam withdrawal, and then I remembered about Ludum Dare (http://ludumdare.com/), a rapid game-dev competition. the next one's at the end of this month -- the theme hasn't been announced yet, but the themes of the previous jams are on the site -- and they're holding a 48-hour competition and a 72-hour jam. after hearing on the 8th progresscast that Chris was going through the same withdrawal, I thought that there might be some coordinated Thumbterest. anyone else down?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages reverse-RPN with parentheses is basically LISP. "chunk" + "call" is sort of a macro system. and in general, the syntax looks like you crashed ML into a LISP factory. I could see the Scala/Clojure/whatever flavor of the week functional JVM language community creating something weirder.

ah! I missed the joke, then. also this april fool's announcement is wayyyyyyyy too close to realistic for comfort. I'm sure by next month someone will have written an earnest implementation of FrostByte.

before Notch decided to go with his own architecture, DCPU-16, it was just a 6502 emulator; it's not surprising that DCPU is still register-based. also, if 0x10c ends up having Core War elements, where I can hack into your spaceship and inject code to reprogram it and take control, I take back everything I said about this game being unplayable.