Merus

I was under the impression it was a Super Play video recorded by Nintendo.

I think, if you were to do a Columbo reboot, you'd have to manage the legacy of the character. Peter Falk owned that character, and you don't want to be running a show where the lead actor's being judged on their ability to mimic Peter Falk. Columbo's mannerisms don't matter so much as how they make him look like an incompetent cop who's clearly having trouble dealing with the tangled web of lies the villain has woven. I'd almost say that you call it a Columbo remake in the promotional material and then name it something completely different with a different protagonist with the same basic hook, but 'Columbo' is a great name (I wouldn't be surprised if it was a portmanteau of 'Columbia' and 'dumbo'. Maybe 'Justamble'? Little on the nose). Well, House is very openly a medical Holmes, so if that's what they do then they've fucked up and probably should have just adapted Holmes again. Or Poirot; there's lots to mine in Poirot.

Hmm, this raises further (and much less frustrated) questions! From my understanding, prefabs allow you to package up a collection of objects into one, and future objects can derive from the prefab. I'm using prefabs for my player character and enemies, and I'll probably use them for the controller and UI objects and any modelled objects I create. Most of my levels are terrain data, with box colliders for checkpoints, with defined start and end points where players go back out to a world map. Are you saying that, for stuff that's being used once and one at a time, prefabs are still better?

I was thinking about a portrait the other day, actually - a knight in armour holding an adorable piggy? A pastiche of that famous photo of Muhammad Ali? I am glad that this exists instead. the suit so good

I remember the last string of missions, but I've complained before, loudly and often, about how the single best aspect of Assassin's Creed 1 was that the assassination missions told the story of the people you were killing through their actions and the gameplay, and how that's been abandoned in favour of leaving them out in the open so you can solve the puzzle of how to drop down on them.

I feel like Columbo probably deserves a reboot more than most mystery shows: its central premise is of a very blue collar policeman, when most mystery shows these days tend to star highly intelligent and skilled investigators who are difficult to work with. Making a show about the guys who exist in all those other shows solely to make the protagonist look clever is appealing, but then I've always wanted an Ace Attorney-style show from the point of view of the defence lawyers in Law and Order.

I got twenty seconds into that trailer before I had to stop. BUT WHAT IF THE ROBOTS... WERE KILLER ROBOTS? what a twist

I'd imagine Facebook money would make this significantly more likely to happen than it was. This sounds like exactly the kind of thing Facebook would be interested in, because it's not particularly difficult to put together and it diversifies the platform beyond just video games.

I wanted to post about the potato salad Kickstarter, and this thread is better than anything I would have made.

It blows my mind that Unity's a mature platform using OO principles and scene loading's still done with strings. For this prototype it'll be fine, but the intention is eventually to have a lot more levels so I'm going to have to look into prefabs one of these days.

I have a very informed mildly negative perception of Fallen London - I have a lot more tolerance for interesting games that aren't always fun to play than very polished games that don't do anything surprising. I don't know if I would have finished Assassin's Creed: Now With Boats! if I didn't have it for a brief amount of time.

There are also the Destinies, which are flashforwards available during particular holidays that describe the eventual fate of your character as they leave Fallen London for where they need to be. They're the actual endings of the game. (And knowing what counts as the game's endings crystallises what's important about some of the ongoing plot threads - I didn't work out what the deal with the Mountain was beforehand.) I do not begrudge anyone for finding Fallen London too tedious - as I think I mentioned, Sunless Sea has all the things that are great about Fallen London but is also a game that is fun to play. I think Fallen London is structurally very interesting, but Sunless Sea uses the same system. If you intended to play Fallen London, I would suggest avoiding Persuasive as a core stat; Watchful and Shadowy both have interesting stories and gameplay, but Watchful gets all the really juicy storylines. I used to strongly suggest you avoid Persuasive, but Persuasive has an early espionage storyline that's half-decent now. Of the Ambitions, Bag a Legend is probably the weakest, followed by Heart's Desire (although neither is bad, exactly); Light Fingers is seen as the strongest right now, and Nemesis is also a strong choice. All of the Ambitions show their age - the later material is more structurally interesting and better written than the early stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised, when the Ambition storylines are finished, that part of it is making the early steps much stronger and rooted in the setting that's developed. I am playing as Merus and am happy to assist with actions that require other humans, although I'd ask that if you have any pass-the-cat parcels you send them instead to Mister Merus, who is the alt I have to make unwise decisions. Some people put entirely the wrong sort of cat in those parcels.

So the talk about the use of 'exclusive' and how people are powerless to do much with it made me realise: in Australia, this would be considered false advertising. Mobile phone plans that included no up-front costs for the phone featured a price of $0 for the phone, because calling the phone 'free' would immediately result in a lawsuit from the consumer watchdog. They are so hardcore about claims that are technically true but potentially misleading that Apple was forced to withdraw the 4G iPad briefly because it wasn't compatible with Australian 4G at the time, and it was considered misleading to state the leading benefit of the product was to connect to a network that didn't actually exist. (They should have been described as e.g. '4G Ready'.) Australian consumer law does not fuck around. (Although now I'm wondering if we can use Australian consumer law to put an end to this? If E3 coverage was simulcast in Australia, it might count as an Australian ad, but the likely end result is not Sony and Microsoft stop pretending things are exclusives, but they start blocking E3 in Australia.)

I don't need dynamic scene loading, I just want to use the names I've already given the scenes instead of defining two names, one in the editor, and one in the code. (I was going to also have an object in each scene with some details about the level, but now I'm thinking that Unity would prefer me to associate that information with a LevelInfo object that contains all the levels.) Could you give me more information about this? I don't think I understand prefabs enough to judge whether this is a better solution. (Is this implying that having more than a few scenes in your game is a bad idea?) I'm not having a problem with communicating between scenes (and it's like the first question people ask, Google sorted that out easily). My problem is, when I fire up a new scene with Application.LoadLevel(levelName), I don't know how to derive the levelName from the name of a scene in my game. I can work around it easily, but I don't want to, because it's got the wrong code smell. (I would be just as satisfied if I could rename the scenes from strings in my code - just so long as there's one place where my code and the Unity engine both get the scene name from.)

So after what I think is a reasonable amount of digging, I still can't work how to avoid using magic strings in my code to refer to my scenes. I'm making a very simple game that has several levels, and I want to pass scores between the levels and a map scene. However, I can't work out how to actually tie my scene objects to any code - it doesn't look like I can assign scenes to variables, I can't work out how to grab their names, and it doesn't look like I'm even supposed to be using the strings I gave them as a name in favour of having hardcoded scene names in strings somewhere!

This is a self-correcting problem, because no-one will remember that name or be able to express it to the shopkeeper. Kingdom Hearts can get away with it because it's just The New Kingdom Hearts Game, but this?

This is probably just my weird personal priorities coming through, but I appreciate that Danielle has a very different cadence and pitch to the other hosts, so it's always clear when it's Danielle talking and not someone else, even in sub-optimal listening conditions.

SIDE TRACK ENDS

Oh man, that means you don't know about negging! That's when you use backhanded compliments and subtle insults to "play hard-to-get" (wear down their self-esteem) so they're more likely to sleep with you! One of my housemates was a pickup artist, and I will always remember the time I mentioned I was heading over to my friend Belinda's house and he couldn't process that someone I wanted to hang out with was named Belinda.

It's structured around storylines, and there's a definite progression from nibbling around the edges of mysteries, to plunging right into the heart of them. It takes a while to get to the point where you start getting more than the hints of answers, though.

Is tegan making a thread epic? No > Yes

One of the less contemptible pieces of pick-up artist advice (these are people who "teach" you how to "play" "The Game", "The Game" being how to pick up women, and "play" being how to exploit their emotionally vulnerabilities so they'll be suggestible enough to go home with you) is to wear something distinctive that will make you memorable, like one earring, or unusually coloured hair, or an unusual hat. This takes the burden off you to have a distinctive and memorable personality, although it also means that you can probably act more naturally because you don't have to establish your personal brand in a noisy and generally awful social situation. Also, fedoras are unusual enough on men that some men looking for their own 'look', but only willing to go as far as surface details, will adopt them. Fedoras look striking on men because they were originally designed so women could cut a masculine figure, although they found popularity amongst gangsters. If they're unwilling to examine the history of what they're wearing, they're usually unwilling to examine themselves, and they often have a lot of alarming prejudice sitting just below the surface. Of course, I've known some pretty decent guys who wear fedoras, so take these kind of generalisations with a grain of salt. In hindsight, they may have been wearing trilbys.

Well, they learnt their lesson about the OGL didn't they. They're jettisoning 4th Ed entirely because people didn't like it much, and they weren't allowed to publish fixed versions of it building on the core rules, so they just went off and made their own games. And now Pathfinder has taken a massive, massive chunk of the tabletop market, and there are still no 4th edition computer games why the system would be perfect for this

Radman has a creator that loves him and wants the best for him. He's like Mario in that respect: a character design borne out of extreme pragmatism, that would be monumentally stupid if their creator wasn't exceptional. Which can be evidenced by all the stupid mascot platformers made by people who aren't as good as Michel Ancel or Shigeru Miyamoto. I can imagine a universe where Sonic was interesting, where the characters had personalities and decent writing to back them up, where they enhanced the core Sonic gameplay with new temporary verbs instead of switching modes or trying to force it into the weak gotta-go-fast design of the 3D Sonics. I don't think we live in that universe, but then I look at those character designs and think that someone, somewhere, was trying. Like, 'conspiracy theorist' is at least more personality than Big the Cat had.

Haven't really looked at it, but it's very interesting that they've blown away a lot of the adding up for a roll twice/take the highest system.