Chajusong

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Chajusong

  3. Posted

    Just finished it :tup:

    At some point I figured out the way to simply watch everything I hadn't seen in order. It sucks big time, don't do that. It's much more fun trying to find the keywords to puzzle together the story. (I did use the trick to 100% it, because some videos were just useless context wise, and I couldn't find the keywords).

    I'm pretty convinced that there's only 1 woman. Never were the two women seen together by others. Besides the whole story, there are also queues in the interviews themselves. Just try to match up the coffee and tea consumption, it's not consistent between Eve and Hannah.

    Quite early in the game I had they hunch she had a split personality, but then came the story of the birth and the two kids which set me on the path of twins for a while.

    I can't double check this right not but isn't it the case that

    Eve takes her coffee black ("I'm sweet enough as it is") and Hannahtakes it with milk+sugar? I think tea/coffee is a red herring, but what they ask in their tea/coffee is the giveaway.

  5. Posted

    Guitar Hero math!

     

    I couldn't find the exact dimensions online, but the guitar is a rough 3/4 scale replica of a Gibson SG, whose dimensions are available. It's a weird shape, but I came up with about 0.005 m^3 per guitar (which is probably ~20-30% bigger than the actual guitar but I figure that can account for stacking leaving air gaps.)

     

    The top selling Guitar Hero game was GHIII, which sold about 8 million copies. The top selling Rock Band game sold about 4 million units. Let's call it 12 million plastic guitars.

     

    The base of One World Trade Center is 3700 m^2.

     

    If you stacked up 12 million plastics guitars on an area the size of One World Trade Center, the stack would be 16 meters / 52 feet / 5 storeys high.

  10. Posted

    Gamespot ran this article back in November:

    Nintendo Reveals the Toad Gender Secret.

     

     

    During an interview last week discussing upcoming puzzle platformer Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, producer Koichi Hayashida offered some illumination on differentiating between male and female Toads. Toadette is the most visible female Toad, so would that make her akin to Smurfette in being the only prominant female of her kind? There are other female Toads, as seen in the Super Mario Super Showcartoon and games like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.

     

    As it were, Nintendo never really settled on a specific gender for the Toads, according to Hayashida. Toads are a genderless race that take on gendered characteristics. He also clarified that Toad and Toadette are not romantically involved.


    “This is maybe a little bit of a strange story, but we never really went out of our way to decide on the sex of these characters, even though they have somewhat gendered appearances,” Hayashida said. “But I think what I can say is that Toadette and Toad are not siblings -- perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are adventure pals. And that’s certainly true here [in Captain Toad].”

     

    So there, I guess. The Toad Gender Secret Revealed.

  15. Posted

    NES Remix is just my favourite thing, because of things like this, where the game just challenges you to get every single mushroom in the game, one after the other. 

     

     

    This challenge shows exactly how brilliant the game is, not just as a set of Wario Ware-style mini games, but as a thorough exploration of the design of NES games.

     

    Because these challenges are just put back to back this way, you get to see and appreciate exactly how Super Mario Bros. was designed back in the day. Every mushroom basically stands alone as its own mini-challenge, which maybe isn't visible when simply playing through the game, but is made apparent by changing the presentation.

     

    You see how the first few mushroom are obvious and easy to get, but how the game very gradually introduces enemies, obstacles and pits, tricky jumps, and hidden blocks, one at a time, and eventually together.

     

    You see how the game likes to build a vocabulary of challenges and expand on it:

    There's a mushroom inside a Hammer Bros structure, then a mushroom inside a hidden block in a Hammer Bros structure, and a mushroom being protected by a Hammer Bros on ground level. 

    Or when there's a mushroom in an early castle that's protected by a spinning fire arm, which is expanded later on in two divergent ways, once by making the fire arm longer and actually reaching over the block so you can't use it as protection, and once be setting two fire arms one after the other so that you have to time your run.

     

    You see how the different kinds of enemies present in the game change your behaviour when they're guarding a mushroom - a series of Goombas under blocks are dangerous because the blocks disrupt your jumping, but Piranha Plants and Bullet Bills and Koopa shells all present their own unique challenge.

     

    The grading scheme NES Remix has builds on top of this: you can simply complete the challenges naively, but you'll probably only get two stars. To get a perfect grade, you have to really master the snippet of game presented to you: in this video, it's things like switch a mushroom's direction by hitting a block instead of jumping up and chasing after it, or running under jumping Parakoopas instead of waiting for them to pass.

     

    So just in this one level, you get presented with nearly the entire set of challenges SMB has, and you need to master advanced techniques you wouldn't even need to beat the game in order to get a perfect score.

     

    The people who make this game have a fantastic eye for this kind of thing, and they repeat it game after game. Games get recontexualised by grouping challenges by mechanic, by challenges that challenge your assumptions about the game [there's one challenge, again in SMB, that has you speedrun world 1-2, where you learn that the top of the screen shortcut is actually slower than running through the bottom normal part of the level, because the top shortcut only gets you two stars], or by having you run through touchstones of a game very rapidly [Zelda 1 has a series of challenges which mash two or three dungeons together in a Find the Dungeon Entrance/Get the item/Beat the Boss/Find the Dungeon Entrance/Get the item/Beat the Boss pattern], and I found when playing that I was just as likely to be thrilled at myself for beating a hard challenge that I was for realising something about why a certain level or mechanic worked the way it did or was designed the way it was.

     

    I love NES Remix. It's probably my goty.

  16. Posted

    I actually think the trope of a young woman being trained by an older, wiser man is fairly common. The most egregious example I could come up with is Buffy, where there were two prominent male characters who filled that role. Sadly, I can't think of any examples where an older woman trains a younger woman in anything but seduction techniques or how to be a good wife/mother.

    The CW's recent (and under appreciated!)Nikita reboot has a whole lot of woman-on-woman mentorship action, though obviously it's a show on the CW so it had a very limited audience.

    And, yeah, she was being taught how to beat up people.

  20. Posted

    Hey so Alan Simpson, according to Wikipedia (according to a Court)

    In Simpson’s words to this Court, “I was a monster.”

     

    One day in Cody, Wyoming, when Simpson was in high school, he and some friends “went out to do damage.” They went to an abandoned war relocation structure and decided to “torch” it. They committed arson on federal property, a crime now punishable by up to twenty years in prison if no one is hurt, and punishable by up to life in prison if the arson causes a person’s death. Luckily for Simpson, no one was injured in the blaze.
     

    Simpson not only played with fire, but also with guns. He played a game with his friends in which they shot at rocks close to one another, at times using bullets they stole from the local hardware store. The goal of the game was to come as close as possible to striking someone without actually doing so. Again, Simpson was lucky: no one was killed or seriously injured.
     

    Simpson and his friends went shooting throughout their community. They fired their rifles at mailboxes, blowing holes in several and killing a cow. They fired their weapons at a road grader. “We just raised hell,” Simpson says. Federal authorities charged Simpson with destroying government property and Simpson pleaded guilty. He received two years of probation and was required to make restitution from his own funds – funds that he was supposed to obtain by holding down a job.


    ... As he [simpson] has described it, “The older you get, the more you realize . . . your own attitude is stupefying, and arrogant, and cocky, and a miserable way to live.”

  21. Posted

     

    A Texas firm has revealed a personal security drone with a stun gun capable of unleashing 80,000 volts.

     

    The firm showed off the drone in a series of shocking demonstrations bringing a volunteer to the ground.

     

    It says the drone uses a smart app to track intruders, and once it had received the go ahead from a human operator, it fires taser darts and unleashes 80,000 volts.

     

    The Drone was created by web firm Chaotic Moon studios, which has previously created a pizza ordering table and a series of hit apps for clients.

     

    It was unveiled at SXSW for reasons (??).