Merus

I don't know, I'm reminded of Chopper Reid's paintings. Chopper's not a rapist, but he was a gangster and a nasty piece of work, but he'd found that being a celebrity gangster was easier, more fun and much more lucrative. His art wasn't bad, but people really didn't have much of a problem putting aside what Chopper had done as a gangster, particularly because he was relatively charismatic. It feels like it's got more to do with their crimes not personally affecting you. Chopper Reid is a larrikin who inspired some things I really like, but he probably killed a few people and certainly did permanent damage to more - but it's easier for me to see the larrikin. For most people, they've got a closer relationship to Woody Allen's films than they do to pederasty.

Don't make everything public: the whole idea of having to give things explicit permissions is to force you to think about exposing as little as possible. If you don't, once you start building sizable projects, your code will become a nightmare. Think of each class as a self-contained entity. For instance, take a bullet hell shooter. PlayerShip would be a class. GameState would also be a class, which would know about the PlayerShip. Your player ship has things it needs to be told, and things other entities need to know about it: for instance, the PlayerShip needs to know when to move left and right, and shoot a bullet, and the game state needs to know when a collision's happened. You might think we should report the boundaries of the player ship to the GameState and have the GameState work out whether or not something's collided. However, we want to send as little information as possible, because that way it's easy to predict where the code makes a decision. We also want to ensure complex and potentially buggy code like detecting collisions is in only one place, because that kind of code is usually rewritten more times than it's written, and if it's in more than one place you're almost guaranteed to forget a bug in one of them. Because we only have a few different types of things that care if they've collided with something, namely ships, we can put collision code in a Ship class, and have our PlayerShip and our EnemyShip inherit from that Ship. All the PlayerShip needs to do is tell the GameState if it's collided with something - this seems roundabout, but it's not much slower (compilers will pull these bits together) and it means all the GameState has to worry about is 'does this bullet hit the ship? if so, destroy the ship'. So we'd have public functions that would let the GameState reset the position of the ship, and tell the ship to move. (This also means we can change the movement logic without needing to change the controller code - maybe you speed up a little if you move long enough in one direction.) We'd also have one that, when given the collision area of an object, returns whether or not it hits the ship. See how you don't actually have to tell anything else what the coordinates of the ship is? The only things that actually care about the coordinates now are the PlayerShip itself, and the display class - and even then the display only cares about the coordinates because it needs to translate them to an array of pixels. Unity usually handles a lot of this stuff for you, but the principle is the same.

I don't!

My condolences, subbes. So you might recall I was a little blue last week; I'm getting the strong suspicion that the attitude that it's safe to judge someone as forever an asshole based on one mistake - basically, social justice warriors - actually triggers my depressive mood. I developed depression as a result of mishandling my perfectionism, and the idea that I have to be perfect perfect perfect or everyone will judge me sends me into a panic. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say; I need as much self-confidence as I can muster because I'm supposed to be jobhunting.

The morality system I described were definitely drawn from actual games - the first is the one Fallen London uses, and I believe Ultima IV uses something similar as well. The second is from Dragon Age, and I did think it was a pretty elegant solution.

9/11 conspiracy theories are in the news! Although someone pointed out to me how sublimely ridiculous calling for 'the truth' behind the World Trade Centre attacks is: if 'the truth' was revealed, it still wouldn't be the worst thing that administration did. The US government lied to the American people and the world? Yeah, we know. They killed thousands of Americans in perpetuating this lie? Yeah, and Afghanis, and Iraqis. I mean, they managed to make America the closest thing to a fascist state possible while still being a democracy, tortured (and justified torture), and held foreign nationals in unaccountable prisons charged with nebulous crimes - and you think that 9/11 is the outrage?

You may be suffering from clinical depression. There are self-evaluation quizzes; find one, give it a go, and if it comes up positive, see a psychologist pretty soon. If not, it's just ennui; remember you can change as soon as you give yourself permission.

I'd enjoy a game where there are a couple of different playstyles, but if you specialise in one your reputation starts to precede you. So if you do a violent playthrough, friendly NPCs stop trusting you because they think you're a sociopath. A stealth playthrough means that the late-game enemies start putting mines in the obvious passages. A persuasive playthrough, and at some point the bad guys decide you're a soft touch and manipulate you into a vulnerable location. Best used with plot elements reinforcing the 'can't play how you want' theme.

I think binary morality systems that tie into game systems need to go away. The two kinds of morality systems I think work are: * along multiple trait axis, where 0% is 'has not or does not usually show this trait' and 100% is 'showed this trait at nearly every opportunity'. I like it because it lets you put your themes into a game system, it lets you build choices that set up any two (or more!) traits opposed without having to commit to a dichotomy, and you don't have to dichotomise it by having every trait have an opposite. * along NPC axis, where 0% is 'they hate you' and 100% is 'they would die for you'. For similar reasons. The idea is to build a system that reflects your choices, instead of shaping them; essentially it means that you can let traits flavour the world and your character's actions, but they shouldn't have serious gameplay implications. Honestly if you can swing it, have the meter fill in such a way that it fills up much slower when it's higher, so you can't really "cap it out".

Elite is by no means a known quantity in the States. It was big in the UK, but I don't think it travelled much. I think the appeal of No Man's Sky is the idea of standing on a lovingly rendered alien planet, and not so much travelling through space. It sounds like Elite Dangerous will have that 'eventually'.

We use Tsuro as a palate cleanser and warmup/cooldown game.

It's called Downworthy, tegan.

Yeah, I was wondering where it was going, but then in the second paragraph the word 'chairwhite' was presented as if it was a real word. When it started inventing its own racially-charged abbreviations for things, I realised how golden it was. Don't worry Problem Machine, I thought it was great. The postscript does mention that he's having a particular shot at William Safire, who apparently would write very condescending columns about gendered language using similar arguments. So the vibe that clyde was getting from the piece was absolutely written into it. It probably helps that I knew who the author was, and, like James, knew that he regretted the exclusion of females via his language in his first and best-known book. (He mentions in later forewords how happy he was when he found out foreign-language versions of his book flipped the gender of the Tortoise because in those languages 'tortoise' is feminine.

This thread got really weird when I turned on my viral headline neutraliser plugin.

I have genuinely seen the argument that Nintendo's handheld consoles are laughably inferior compared to smartphones, and Nintendo should quit trying to compete in hardware if the 3DS is the best they can do. There is a rainbow of arguments about what Nintendo should do. Nintendo's games sell their systems, but one of the games people seem ravenously excited about on the 3DS is made by Square Enix. Level 5 and Capcom both have iconic DS franchises. I think it's more accurate to argue that games that people want sell systems, and that Nintendo is not very good at convincing other developers to make games for their systems until Nintendo has already given hardware sales a shot in the arm.

This is my absolute favourite trope in games - genre savvy bait. I especially love it because it gives the designer an opportunity to make players unlearn some of their assumptions.

The Dead Eye God is named Alex you guys.

People I trust to know say that Mega Man 2 is the best one, closely followed by Mega Man 3 and Mega Man 9. They also recommend Mega Man X. (That is, the first SNES game.)

I certainly need the kick up the bum to actually make something. I am also in.

This reminded me that I haven't read a lot of Australian literature either, so I Googled 'best Australian novels' and added like five books to my list. I am apparently one of like five Australians to have never read The Power of One.

I disagree - Nintendo have never struck me as a company that benefits from a larger budget. They're engineers, not artists, and those resources would be surplus to the requirements of making the next game in a series that sells their hardware. They have a huge warchest - if they wanted to, they could take all their teams and get to work on a AAA game or two. It is much healthier, in the long run, to not have expectations of Nintendo. Whoa, whoa, whoa, no. Nintendo's engineers were and are geniuses at taking components that didn't seem particularly useful, or seemed close to the end of their life, and breathing new life into them. People tried and failed to copy the Game Boy for years, but no-one managed to make anything that was as cheap, durable, or as conservative with power. The NES and SNES hardware was incredibly clever, making good use of its relatively low-power hardware. And since then, they've had a reputation for reliability that neither Microsoft nor Sony can even touch. From what I can tell, Nintendo's biggest weakness is software - specifically, tools and firmware. It's easy to see this on the consumer side - Nintendo's dashboards aren't great compared to Microsoft or Sony, and apparently making games for Nintendo consoles is still a pain in the ass (they didn't have any kind of API for third-party developers to use Miis on the Wii, for instance.) They're still trying to integrate Nintendo Network into their storefront, like a year after launch? Re: Link Between Worlds: I am surprised Jake's not digging it because I think it's the best Zelda for a while chiefly because it ditches the Zelda formula. Both Zelda and Metroid (and Metroidvanias) run on exploration, and that usually runs on backtracking. What makes backtracking exciting is when you've got an idea in your head of the scope of an area, and you find this little hole that you didn't even realise you could do something with before, and it opens up so much more new stuff that your idea of the scope of the area shifts. Zelda games haven't really done that for a while - part of it is that they've settled on what Hyrule looks like, and part of it is that, over the course of the games, they've settled on what items you get and what obstacles they're best used for. I remember how fatiguing it was to see, just outside the Eastern Palace, somewhere to use the hookshot, the bombs, and the hammer, and knowing I'd have to come back three times to get everything. The game couldn't reveal any hidden areas because I could tell exactly where they were. The Dark World dungeons are particularly interesting because they mostly have their own unique mechanics. Because they don't have to fit themselves around the dungeon item, they have unique puzzles and layouts. I think the traditional Zelda formula can work - go into dungeon, explore until you find the dungeon item that opens everything up - but players shouldn't be able to predict until they're some way into the dungeon what it is they're about to get. The Metroid series mostly gets away scot free because Samus' iconic arsenal is missiles and the morph ball, and if you don't start off with them, you'll get them as upgrades 1 and 2. The rest of her arsenal tends to shift between games, and usually operates very differently between games. The environment is usually different enough that having things work the same everywhere tends to cheapen the fiction, so artists usually come up with unique ways to indicate what weapons work on what, obfuscating your capabilities and allowing the game to surprise the player.

Because he is wrong. That sounds flippant, but it's really not: he cannot conceive of anyone else's perspective on this issue, which means he has never allowed his own position to be challenged.

He seems like he is incensed that people are mocking the idea of objective reviews; he also appears to be conflating reviews with critical analysis, which is typically much more detailed and considered. I think he is also forgetting that we are talking about an interactive artform, and one that literally does not exist without a player.

Really? That is so weird to me because I gradually noticed all the NPCs starting to disappear after I visited them the first time, and then realised that, oh shit, it's the plot being handled through incidental details in the world instead of having your helpful companion tediously tell you. I mean, Zelda's plots have never been particularly good, they are basically an excuse plot, but my point is more that it is very common for game plots to be about the level of a Zelda plot. Go to The Bad Guy's Place! Collect The Macguffin! Rescue The Fair Princess End-Of-The-Game! Generally we're satisfied if there's a justification to get people to the next level, and maybe like a character moment or two. If you're lucky, you'll get a character arc, but don't go in expecting, like, a unified theme or anything.

I don't know if you know about Mirror's Edge (I'm an expert)