Flynn

A really generous limit would be fine as long it's actually a limit and not extended perpetually, so that new work actually falls into public domain. Life of the creator + 50 years? Sure, whatever.

Zack's thoughts on Cookie Clicker are dead on. It's so often referred to as a game like Candy Box and it's not. I played it for hours and was so disappointed. The joy of Candy Box -- what the heck IS this game -- isn't there at all! That game really is just about about clicking upgrades and watching your cookie numbers go up. It has charming humor and artwork but otherwise it's only the game Candy Box was pretending to be. Supposedly the author is adding dungeons and so on into Cookie Clicker... but I have a hard time imagining how those could be meaningfully integrated into the rest of the game if they are only being built at this point in development? For a game that is actually like Candy Box: http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ It's good in the ways Candy Box is good. It's not too long either, you can finish in about two full days of leaving the browser tab open and playing once in awhile. Edit: Wrote this while listening to the podcast and this was mentioned almost exactly as I finished typing. lol

Totally concur. Don't sweat the repetition. If the conversation is interesting to you it's probably interesting to me even if it means talking about the same game 100 episodes in a row.

Saw this on vanaman's twitter: So you guys tried this thing for real?

I've never played Smash Brothers, but I loved this peak into the sub-sub-culture that is the Melee competitive scene: Recommended! So melee was never designed to be a competitive game. In fact it was explicitly only supposed to be a party game and the creator did not want to encourage competitive play at all. But an accident of the physics of the game, the lack of prebuilt combos, etc, made it stand out among all the other fighting games and allowed for a 'meta game' that is still changing even 12 years later.

Really well done. Love it.

As an aside, I think I read every single Le Guin book when I was younger. Both the younger fantasy stuff and the science fiction. The Dispossessed was my favorite.

I googled what she said. It was in 1985. The article does mention that science fiction was enjoying a 'heyday' so maybe what was coming out between 1980 and 1985 was a bunch of star war knockoff stuff that is long forgotten as goofy 80s crap. Though she calls out Spielberg too! She said more recently: It sounds like she doesn't like how Star Wars has displaced what people used to put in the category of 'science fiction' in the public consciousness. So if she was self-identifying as a science fiction writer, she felt like they were cheapening the category and making her feel like she was stuck in a 'ghetto'.

I too dislike trackpads generally so I'm glad to hear that. Did you get a chance to try it in a first-person context? I was surprised to see them push Portal as the main example.

If you can talk about it, how would you compare the feel versus virtual trackpads or laptop trackpads?

They mix and match the Magic the Gathering and D&D themes kinda loosely, in that the older brother speaks of Card Hunter in the context of competition and tournaments like competitive CCGs... and then you play it like a tabletop role-playing game where that doesn't fit. The game-master is the game-designer, not a competitor.

I went deep into Card Hunter after last week's show. The deck/loot stuff is fantastic. I love low the item 'sets' can come with outright negative cards - a heavy weapon might make your character draw a clumsy card -- interesting gameplay and fits the theme perfectly. A tip about progression and multiplayer: around level 8 the game will nag you to try multiplayer. You DO want to. It's just an easy tutorial match against the AI, but in the tutorial process it will give you a bunch of cards and you can use them in the single player. I had skipped this step and hit a bit of a wall at the level 8/9 dungeons, but having just a few more options in my deck from the mulitplayer tutorial pushed me over the top.

Mostly that Valve finally decided to back VR instead of AR, as evidence by them firing everyone involved with the CastAR project. He said AR is great but practical options might be 10 years away, whereas VR is here now.

Both Spelunky and Dota have a reputation that they require a huge 100 hour committment or you shouldn't bother with them. It's silly. I enjoyed both from minute one and am not particularly good at either.

It's optimized to use both disc and hard drive at the same time, so using just one of them will never be as fast. Pretty neat trick to push these 8 year old systems too.

Yeah it's not that they optimized FOR disc, it's that Rockstar squeezes as much speed as possible out of the old systems by streaming form the disc and hard drive at the same time. Reportedly users who have upgraded their PS3s with aftermarket 7200 RPM Drives, or even SSDs, don't have the problem playing only from drive.

I can't see Intel letting those chips go for cheap enough for a couple of years. Those are for high end ultralight laptops. I wouldn't be shocked to see an AMD Steam Box instead, perhaps even with unified memory like the consoles.

Jeez, it's impossible to even understand what people are arguing about with GTA cause it's got way too many levels and directions. Backlash, Delight-in-Backlash, Meta-Backlash, Meta-Meta-Backlash. Everyone angry about the game or what people are saying about the game or at least other people being angry about stuff. I just saw a couple of retweets in my feed from Leigh Alexander about unemployed people spending their 'last 60 dollars on a fake world' etc, and was like, huh?

I guess that's cool but kinda strange to add that stuff incrementally if the systems are expected to interact. That's what makes Candy Box and A Dark Room work so well.

It's a cute game but it is not like Candy Box. Or Frog Fractions. What you see is what you get. You keep increasing the cookie counter... and keep increasing the cookie counter. There are some funny achievements to find but there isn't another level to it. I was really sad because the person that sent me the game was all, "it's like Candy Box!" and I was waiting and waiting for my mind to be blown and then nothing. Now I do my duty and warn others. Check it out but just know it really is all about the cookie counts. I highly recommend http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ for a game that actually is like Candy Box.

Well said. I'm reading a lot about the main characters being mean spirited, how there is little pretense of justifying their actions as revenge for a wrong or a man in the wrong place, etc... and I think that might make me like the game more. The earlier games were never able to sustain that with the carnage you cause. Red Dead did, and Bully, but the GTA games it was eventually impossible to ignore that your character is a complete sociopath, no matter how much Nico seemed to want to turn over a new leaf. Maybe better to have them simply be villains after money.

The reason this game resonated for me was specifically the controls. Half way through I thought they were neat but the game really ties it together at the end. End Game Spoilers:

Focus on getting satellites up over the remaining countries over anything else. Once you everything locked down it's very hard to gain panic anymore, even if you repeatedly wipe. For that matter, remember if you shoot down a UFO that prevents the panic -- you don't have to do the mission. Or you can do a half mission and retreat with everyone alive but some XP.

I wouldn't call a monkey who poops gold worthless...

Great point. I never think of that but it could actually be quite worth the money.