jeremywc

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by jeremywc


  1. I'm mad this thing got two million dollars in two days and Wildman couldn't get half its funding in one month.

     

    Well I'm not actually mad I just wish people were more open to things that weren't giant nostalgia bombs. Not that I have anything against nostalgia bombs; I've backed quite a few of them myself. But goddamnit.

     

    That was pretty much Chris Taylor's criticism of Kickstarter in a nutshell. A lot of people thought it was sour grapes, but I'm becoming more inclined to believe he hit the nail on the head. It's weird to me that people with drop $100 or more on experimental hardware like the Occulus Rift or the Ouya, but seem to turn their nose up at funding a game for $15-$30 if it's not a retread of an earlier game.


  2. I thought it was well researched and presented in a very even handed manner. There really isn't a need to get super passionate and angry when there is so much evidence to support her case. Just present the facts along with some offending clips of a bunch of popular games and you've got all the proof you need. The game industry has spent a lot of time putting their own head in a noose here. She's just pointing out what was already blatantly obvious to anyone with even a modicum of critical thinking ability.

     

    Anyway, I've been reserving judgement until I saw the first piece, but she definitely won me over. I'm interested to see the rest of the series.


  3. Huh, I just got everybody out of the cave... I didn't realize that

    the bad ending makes your character not appear outside of the Cave and the dialogue changes depending on whether they also chose the bad ending, the good one or if it's a mix. But what does that bad ending having your character not appear imply? That they can't leave the Cave for real unless they give up on the biggest desire?

     

    Yea, I think it's a way of saying that their selfish desires are destructive and end up trapping them in the end. The only way to escape is to let go. There's also an achievement for taking all of the characters to the fortune teller machine in the Hillbilly's area, where he basically tries to point them in that direction.


  4. If you want a trouble-free PC gaming experience, I still think the best thing you can do is get a mid-range desktop with a real video card. I see too many people with Laptops, Macs, and/or Intel video complaining about compatibility or performance issues on support forums.

     

    If you don't want to build the unit yourself, you can find something semi-decent from Dell or HP. If I were buying something today, I'd shoot for an Intel i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a GeForce 640 or 660. Don't worry about SSD drives, 7200 RPM SATA drives are still fine. You'll spend about $800-900, but that PC will last you at least 3 years and you'll be able to play anything that comes out between now and then.


  5. I spend entirely too much time on YouTube...


  6. But strangely enough, almost every explanation on forums or comment threads as to why they wouldn't support Chris' kickstarter was either "I can't believe Gas-Powered Games has sold out and is making a Lords Management" or "I'm still mad about Demigod, Supreme Commander 2, or Space Siege". There's not much to be done about the latter, but the former could have been easily avoided by making clear that mechanics are being borrowed from the Lords Management genre to make something different, rather than just being a straight DOTA clone. It seems like Chris' kickstarter pitch focused more on how they'd hitched their wagon to this exciting new genre, when he should have been emphasizing what made it different.

    Go back and watch the Kickstarter video again. The first thing he says is "Wildman takes one of our favorite genres, action RPGs, and combines it with the elements we love from real-time strategy." Shortly there after he says, "At it's heart, Wildman is an action RPG." They were playing up the ARPG and RTS elements from the start and at no point were they ever really pitching it as a Lords Management-style game. The press heard Lords Management and ran with it.


  7. As it stands, if they'd asked for half a million (and designed a game they could make at that budget), they'd be over their target today.

    Probably, but I don't know if it's possible for Chris Taylor to think small. Look at how even Dungeon Siege took the roguelike formula and added tactical elements. It's like his projects need this middle tier of budget that's too big and experimental to get funded on Kickstarter but semi-niche and therefore too small to get interest from AAA publishers. I mean, let's face it, for all the going on about how Kickstarter is funding innovation, I can't think of a single $1 million+ project that wasn't a rehash of something already done. The expermental stuff normally doesn't even get a sniff at that kind of money, if even gets funded at all. Look at Mak if you need another example of something that seemed to have a lot of promise and didn't get anything.


  8. I don't do too well with the sight of my own blood. A few years ago, I had surgery to repair an abdominal hernia. I had taken the week off from work to recover and decided spend the time sitting around the house playing EverQuest. I remembered I was supposed to take the bandages off on the third day, so I started slowly peeling back the tape in between following my friend to some raid we had decided to participate in.

    As I removed the bandage, I quickly realized the stitches had come loose and the incision point was not being held together. The room started spinning and I immediately passed out. When I finally came to, I was bleeding all over myself and my friend in EQ was asking me why I wasn't moving. I managed to get to the bathroom and clean myself up without passing out again.

    And then we finished the raid and I got some loot. Priorities. :fart:


  9. Because you paid for it with your Windows license, it integrates better than most AV solutions, it has a minimal footprint/performance impact, and it gets completely out of the way. Usually scores very well on AV tests too.

    No, Security Essentials is absolutely terrible antivirus. It was OK when it first released, but like most things Microsoft does, they got bored with it and haven't put anything into it lately. Even AVG Free is better than MSE.

    Better advice: Don't be cheap when it comes to your computer security! Pay for The Good Stuff like Kaspersky or Bitdefender.


  10. I've made it through with all 7 characters at least once now and overall I enjoyed the game. My second and third play-through's were pretty quick since I had the common puzzles memorized and got better with the controls. I think all the work Double Fine has done with 2 Player Productions to show case all of the talent they have there is paying off. I'm starting to see little pieces of their games where I can be pretty sure I know who had a hand in creating them. As an example, when I first dropped into The Adventurer's area and saw the hieroglyphics, I immediately thought they looked like Scott Campbell's artwork. I get a lot of enjoyment out of things like that.

    One thing I have always liked about Ron Gilbert's characters like Guybrush and DeathSpank is the way they are constantly making silly or sarcastic commentary throughout the game. The Cave kind of takes a similar role, but you don't seem to hear from him nearly as often Ron's other characters. I thought the dialog and voice acting for that character was really well done and would have loved to have heard more from it. It's also awesome that they worked so hard to get the game on as many platforms as possible at launch. I'm sure that was no small feat.

    Nitpicks: The only time I felt like the back tracking was more excessive than any other adventure game was in the miner area. That is probably the weakest of all the areas because the puzzles don't seem to be particularly difficult, just time consuming. The mouse controls do need some work, because they do not feel natural at all. During my second play through I switched to just using the keyboard exclusively and it felt better, but in the end I played it out with a gamepad. Some people were annoyed with the Steam achievement bugs and the weird resizing of the cave painting art, but I'm sure those will get fixed up in a patch.

    While I don't think it is Ron's or Double Fine's best work, it's still a decent game in its own right. If Double Fine releases any DLC with more characters or puzzle areas (or both!), I'll pick it up and run through it again.


  11. I probably wouldn't enjoy Sublime if I actually paid for it. I have difficulty justifying $70 for any program, let alone a text editor. (A big reason I haven't bought Skyrim, thanks to the Australian pricing differential.)

    If you spend all day coding or working with huge text files, it's well worth it. I've been continually renewing my license of UltraEdit for 12 years just because it's the only editor I've found that has all to tools I need for work in one package.


  12. I picked up Supreme Commander 2 not knowing anything about the game or the franchise or strategy games as a whole. The moment I "figured out" the AI was when I accidentally left the game running while I went to class. When I came back, not only had I not lost, but my automated manufacturing had hit the unit cap, and in front of my base was a line of wreckage from repeated attempted assaults by the other faction. I zoomed all the way out to strategic mode, selected my entire army and marched them right into the enemy base, which was completely pitiful and desolate, having whittled itself down to the barest scraps with its own ill-planned attacks.

    So anyway, that's how to beat Supreme Commander 2 I guess. I still had fun and it was gorgeous.

    Ha! That's an awesome story. I love that aspect of Supreme Commander - the automation tools are so great that you can easily get to a point where your forces are just doing their own thing and you're just pushing forces at certain points to apply pressure. The first Dungeon Siege offered a lot of automation for a ARPG too. By the end of the game, I could usually just drag my party into an area and wait for them to demolish the room. I guess in a way that takes some of the challenge away, but it's such a satisfying feeling to me to watch this force I crafted to just move in and demolish everything in their path.


  13. I meant in the list of credits at the beginning (where Dungeon Siege was mentioned), it just tickles my funny bone how that game is omitted everywhere.

    Great episode, I love hearing Chris talk about the Good Old Days of programming.

    I think it's still technically true when talking about Chris anyway, as he only served as Lead Designer on Supreme Commander and Dungeon Siege. Probably not a coincidence that those are also the best two games they've put out.


  14. I bet I'm not the only one that had to suppress his laughter in theaters when Darth Vader did his "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"?

    I didn't bother suppressing mine. Between that and the Frankenstein-esque way he broke free from the table, it felt appropriate.


  15. Yeah I think it's more consistently useful to say that "crazy people kill people" than to say "violent media inspires killings" (though that's an oversimplification). I think there's some value to making a conscious effort to eschew violence, in the same way that it's valuable to consciously avoid casual racism or sexism, but in any case the violence in the media is probably more a symptom of the problem than a cause by itself.

    This mostly matches my line of thinking.

    Something else that occurred to me last night: I think most of our studies on mass violence are flawed in that they usually exclude those who have committed mass violence. For example, there have been studies that show that playing a violent video game doesn't cause you to want to go out and shoot people. But those studies are dealing with a "normal" group of individuals who would otherwise be categorized as mentally healthy. All that says to me is that most people have no intention of committing murder, which we already know through basic common sense. I don't think there's a common "murder" switch in every brain that is just sitting there waiting to get flipped when the proper prerequisites have been met. :-P