Winks

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Posts posted by Winks

  3. Posted

    Growing up, I wanted to be a writer. I got frustrated with journalism in college so I switched to the furthest thing away I could think of that I was still interested in and ended up with a couple CS degrees. I think making games takes advantage of my (hopefully) unique skillset. That said, I haven't exactly finished anything yet.

  5. Posted

     the issue isn't that it's SUPER DIFFERENT, the issue is that they're so similar that the differences are maddeningly magnified

     

    I agree with this. It feels like you're playing the same game, just inside-out and with the wrong hand. Which is even more frustrating, I think, because you know you have this proficiency with a different, incredibly similar game that just won't seem to translate to the new one.

  6. Posted

    I've heard a lot about what Dota 2 is like for an absolute LOMA beginner, but I'd be interested in hearing how Brad and Nick, who I think both played LoL a bit, found switching from one LOMA to another specifically. I guess Brad did talk about this a little bit, but I think it's an interesting topic that hasn't quite been exhausted. I've been trying to get my friends to make the switch to Dota 2, but we've just invested so much time in LoL management training that every time we try Dota everyone just ends up frustrated and confused. How do you cross that learning curve resistance threshold without just falling back to Lux or whatever?

  7. Posted

    My ears perked up when Sean mentioned getting lost as a kid at Cedar Point because I grew up very near there in Ohio. I think I should mention a fairly Thumbs-y ride there that was recently closed called Disaster Transport. It was basically a late-80s/early-90s space-themed indoor bobsled rollercoaster with this ridiculous narrative surrounding it about attempting to deliver goods from a space station to Alaska when DISASTER strikes. (Lots of klaxons and lasers and strobe lights and that sort of thing.)

    Why you were on a mission to Alaska and not Ohio always puzzled me as a kid, since you exit the building and there's Lake Erie.

    Quoting from Wiki here:

    The story of the ride was the passengers had been to deliver cargo from a suborbital factory to a station in Alaska. Large screen projections, simulated lasers, mist, and recordings were added to the ride. In the queue, guests would go through three rooms including Rocket Recovery, Mission Control and Repair Bay.

    I remember there being this great sort of industrial, dirty-Tron motif in the queue where everything was lit with red lamps and black lights and these little animatronic sort of factory-style robots would ever so slowly rotate back and forth.

    This is a pretty good example of what this all looked like.

    Disaster_Transport_black_light_car.jpg

    Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's since been torn down, but it was awesome and funny and I thought you should know.

  11. Posted

    The near short-story length of Sense of an Ending (which was great, btw!) made me think of another book on my "to read" list: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders. I've read other shorts by Saunders and they're really fantastic, and this is supposedly his best.

    Just a thought, looking forward to the first book cast.

    Saunders is absolutely wonderful (and so is CivilWarLand in Bad Decline). I wonder, though, if the fact that it's a short story collection would make it more difficult to discuss in a podcast.

    I think Joshua Ferris' books, The Unnamed and Then We Came to the End, would both make for pretty interesting discussion.

  14. Posted

    You are absolutely right. I'm a pretty defensive player, so I'm sure that has a lot to do with preferring the game that requires footsies and careful defense.

    And I often confuse tactic and strategy, because I am a fool.

  15. Posted

    The interesting dynamics offered by a good fighting game extend well beyond simply throwing out a complicated combo. Don't even look at the execution side of things, learn the systems and the strategies, technical execution comes later. The fun is when you understand your options and the associated risks, trying to discern the best way to respond to your opponent's actions while putting yourself in the right situation to execute on your own tactics.

    Right, I agree with this. The strategic aspect is definitely the thing I love most about fighting games. And, perhaps, this is the reason I like the Street Fighter IV series more than other recent fighting games. It's slow enough that I feel like I can get a more solid grasp on the actual strategy involved. I like GG, Blazblue, and Marvel, but, to me, these games feel like they're hiding their strategic depth behind a wall of execution that's difficult to break through.

  18. Posted

    I was expecting I'd have an advantage at this, having been a horse-mad girl and therefore knowing the cadence and pacing of the gaits (walk is a 4-beat, trot a 2-beat, canter a 3-beat) and being able to translate that into key-presses.

    Nnnnnnnnnnnope.

    This is disappointing. I was considering looking up galloping horse videos on YouTube to try to learn the rhythm, but alas...

  19. Posted

    I agree with Twunt for the most part, especially about programming being easier than you'd think. I had never written a single line of code when I switched from being a journalism major to CS during my second year of college. I can tell you from first-hand experience that the learning curve isn't as steep as you'd think. Programming is also, I think, a much more creative endeavor than it's given credit for.

    PHP is probably a fairly decent place to start, but I'd suggest something strongly-typed like C# (you can even learn it while making games with XNA or Unity) or Java. I learned PHP rather early on and I think it probably caused me to develop some bad habits. But really, I'm probably picking nits.

  21. Posted

    I'm a programmer, so I like the idea of programming being a part of this. I also firmly subscribe to the idea that most people would benefit from basic compuer programming knowledge, meaning I'm likely to support something that proposes exposing programming ideas to y'all nubbins.

  22. Posted

    Just beat Machinarium. The pizza guy came right as the ending cutscene started, though, so I missed that. Didn't want to play through the final room again (that shooter puzzle was a bit tedious) so I guess I'll have to just YouTube it or something.

    I was pretty fond of the game, though. I also liked the hint system they used. I'm sure it's been mentioned here before. Making it a slight pain in the ass to look up a puzzle's solution was enough of a deterrent that a couple times I just took another stab at -- and solved -- the puzzle instead of trying to play that weird shmup thing.

  25. Posted

    Hi.

    I came across the podcast a couple years ago by, I think, typing "video games" into the iTunes Store search bar. I immediately knew it was what I was looking for and have listened to the entire archive almost three times since. I donated to the Kickstarter and figured I may as well sign up here to talk to like-minded weirdos.

    I'm a 26-year-old adult-ass grown-up man living in New York. I program for a living. I really liked Studio 3's Constructor in 1997. I guess that's it.