Flynn

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Posts posted by Flynn

  2. Posted

    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   

  3. Posted

    You guys spend a lot of time in your episodes saying: "man, people are going to hate this." I understand that partially it's tongue in cheek, but you should realize that for every second that you talk about, say, Spelunky, or Super Mario 3D Land, yeah, there's probably someone rolling their eyes, but ALSO, there are people like me who fucking love hearing what you think about these games. 

     

    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.

  5. Posted

    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.

  8. Posted

    I don't really think that a Star Wars displaced serious sci-fi any more than Flash Gordon did, so I'm not sure how Le Guin makes that argument (unless it's "Star Wars made new readers expect my novels to be like Star Wars")

     

    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!

     

    ''They have taken the genre back 30 years,'' Le Guin said. ''There's no imagination in these big Spielberg epics. I resent the way he pulls everything onto an incredibly childish and predictable level and reduces it to something between violence and cuteness.''

     

    Nevertheless, fueled by Star Wars and derivative successes, the science-fiction field is enjoying a heyday, though without Le Guin's approbation.

     

    ''I don't like to be categorized as a science-fiction writer. It's a ghetto,'' she said, complaining that science fiction is reviewed separately and en masse. ''This is ignorance and bigotry.''

    To the intelligentsia, she said, ''it's relegated to something that odd young people read.''

     

    Le Guin's generation of science-fiction writers, including Gene Wolfe and Philip K. Dick, largely came of age in the 1960s.

     

    ''We were expressing serious concerns through the metaphors of science fiction and fantasy, as Tolkien did,'' Le Guin said. And the times were amicable to their vision. ''In the days of flowerdom, we were going to make the future better.

    'Instead of a cold, sterile futuristic place full of Star Wars, there was a feeling for a while of making the world more livable, more human. My kind of science-fiction writer fit right into this.''

    In a Le Guinian universe, Western industrial society is the archvillain and civilization is a negative concept, encompassing the ills of weaponry, overpopulation and the practice of male and class supremacy.

    A formerly pipe-smoking feminist and an active pacifist, Le Guin is capable of erupting on the subject as surely as Mount St. Helens, which juts up on the horizon behind the house.

    ''There is no ideal Western society. We've gone too far. Our children will have a less good world. It's going to change, who knows in what way. I hope it doesn't crash.''

     

    She said more recently:

     

    Atwood: "What about Star Wars?"

    Le Guin: "There have been really few science fiction movies. They have mostly been fantasies, with spaceships."

     

    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'.

     

  10. Posted

    It has speakers in it. When I used it, the cursor pad made a little mechanical rolling sound as you used it. It was really subtle and effective.

     

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

  12. Posted

    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.

  13. Posted

    Must have missed that part, did he go into any detail?

     

    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.

  15. Posted

    "Optimized for optical media" sounds absolutely ridiculous to me. If you optimize for optical media you reduce random seek times by duplicating content so that this content is closer to the other content that needs to be loaded from slow media. If this "optical media optimized" version is also used for the "downloaded" version of the game it should perform at least equally well (unless you harddrive is starting to fail).

     

    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.

  16. Posted

    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.

  17. Posted

    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.

  18. Posted

    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?  

  20. Posted

    Oh, this is like that candy game a bit... I had a bit of "Frog Fractions" moments when I didn't get it... I'm not sure I do, but I do get it more than before?

     

    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.

  21. Posted

    Kinda frustrated by the reflexive tut-tutting by the indie game community at the positive reviews of GTA V: as if the game couldn't possibly bring anything interesting to the table, or be distinguished in its craftsmanship. In a way, it's even more frustrating than the backlash against not-perfect scores, if only because I expect better out of them.

    There are some serious issues with the way Rockstar treats women and violence in their games, but that doesn't obviate the positive aspects—or justify ignoring the game when pointing to how AAA games never do anything innovative. I can understand saying that the game isn't for you, since if you don't like previous GTA games you probably won't like this one. But the reactions I've seen go far beyond that, to the point where Leigh Alexander's insipid ~parody~ is championed, when it commits the same "turning it to 11 isn't satire" mistake that many criticize the game itself for!

     

     

    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.

  22. Posted

    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:

    The first time the little brother acts alone it immediately feels wrong, the sense of something missing is so strong.

     

    Later the stick is very unresponsive as he cries burying the older brother.  It takes ages.  

     

    Finally at the end you have no choice but to swim which the little brother was never able to do alone.  I kept pushing into the water at different places trying to figure out what I needed to do.  By that point I was used to not using the left hand.  When it dawned on me to try pretending the older brother was still there, to do the actions as if he was still alive... I got a legit chill down my spine.  That was the moment of the game. I wish I could articulate how it worked -- it was like magic spell.  I was as surprised as anyone to have this little game hit like a load of bricks.  Damn.  

  23. Posted

    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.