Luftmensch

I was kind of disappointed in Twilight Princess for not living up to what I expected from the E3 2004 trailer. Which I know is totally stupid but my expectation was that there'd be battles on horseback and night raids and cool interesting monsters all over the place. There was that one scene where you chased people around Hyrule field which was okay but it honestly made the field feel smaller, since it was just trotting around old terrain in circles. I wanted battles to be exciting feel big and important, and then they turned out, as usual, to be the thing that gets in the way of solving puzzles, which is fine but not what I hoped for. I have no idea how my conceptions would have worked or have been any fun, but it didn't feel at all like what I hoped. Twilight Princess disappointed me in a lot of dumb ways really. Eh.

I just remembered this TV ad. This is the most beautiful thing ever. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVGAfA15U1I

Going back to Gabe Newell being really goddamned smart, I think one insight of his that made me really appreciate his perspective and ability to deconstruct ideas was something he said on The Nerdist (and probably elsewhere before): he mentioned the type of hate mail he gets, just enormously heated angry all-caps ragefests, and he said something along the lines that "sometimes the amplitude of the signal is a function of feeling like you're not getting through." I may be giving him more credit than he deserves for that quote, but the whole idea of emotion as an amplitude is kind of mind-blowing and makes a lot of sense in a lot of contexts. It's not a rigorous science, but as a casual analogy it's incredible to me. Also the fact that Gabe will reply to hate mail with open civil discussion is a huge testament to his character.

MLA standard for citing Tweets.

I misread that as "so far she's alright" and briefly concluded that you're a bad parent.

I liked that you brought up Greed Corp because what Jon was describing, where you have a predictably changing map that eventually just depletes, is exactly what that game is about and does extremely well. I've definitely mentioned on this forum before that I'm not a big strategy game player at all, but clearly that is a game that succeeds in just forcing the player to adapt and ending the game without letting the map get stale (although I have run into late-game attrition warfare, but it's pretty fast-pace as far as turn-based strategy goes). Sounds like that Atlantis game is the same sort of deal, though less predictable and player-driven.

Either way it's arbitrary. I picked the one that was on my computer anyway and seemed like a more interesting challenge. Fwiw, I think I've already learned a lot about the scale of what I don't understand and where my expectations need to be. So far I've only even opened a couple dozen of the source files and I'm already baffled.

Well, there was a keyboard input option for S&S, which worked fine but it felt kind of disconnected from the rest of the experience. The on-screen controls were unusable.

This is not comical. But it absolutely blew my mind. With the many hours I've spent planing wood, I'm baffled and impressed that this is possible. Note: A micron is 1/1000th of a milimeter. A standard sheet of office paper is about 100 microns thick.

Yeah, that's more or less my plan. That's kind of what I did when I played around with Flixel, although I never did go back and try to learn more of it, which is probably bad form but whatever. At this point for me amount of time I have to spend just reading code I don't understand and scrolling through poorly organized documentation kind of rules out the whole idea of making a bad prototype every week. I think, if I can't figure out how to make Source work for me anytime soon, I'll settle for implementing my own character model and animations and maybe make some kind of aesthetically interesting level. Then scrap it all and move the whole thing over to another engine.

I hate playing 2D platformers with an analog stick so I can't imagine it the other way. It did kind of piss me off that, even though there's a config file and you can totally just change it if you want, Team Meat still decided "How about instead of putting in an options menu, let's just make the loading screens admonish players for not having a game pad?" Then to add injury to insult, they made the default keyboard controls the most uncomfortable contorted hand position.

Nine days in on my ill-fated Source project and it's looking grim. Mostly just because I'm an idiot and have no clue what I'm doing, which thankfully is a curable condition. It really is strange though. I keep discovering all these bizarre little quirks that don't make any sense to me, but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't get rid of it because it was built over the course of a decade by very smart very experienced people. Also I don't know anything about proper programming form so I'm probably making the grossest ugliest edits ever. If I'm going to have anything to show for this, I should probably focus a lot more on the art side. I don't really have much experience 3D modelling yet but this sure as hell is a good excuse to learn. I'll be posting a bunch of sketches on the blog later. In the mean time, here's a couple posts about the weird placeholder protagonist. I'm hesitant to spend a lot of time on developing an art direction since my first goal is to construct an interesting movement system with a lot of core interactions (kind of like Donkey Kong on the Game Boy), but I'll probably dump Source and pick up something like Unity before I manage to do that. So I guess I should make assets and crap. P.S. Right now my "game" is called Dickaround: A Platformer, Starring: Guy Ping

That's a badass steam engine and I want to install it on my boat.

No I was just saying that the expression is putting the cart before the horse, which means to have the order confused, since it's very rarely useful to have your horse behind the cart. Sorry if that correction wasn't clear.

Either you've got your metaphor backwards or you're saying that assumption is correct? I dunno if this theory is going to go anywhere, but I think it might be relevant that Rayman was very much born out of a very specific illustration style that was popular in 1995 but hasn't exactly aged well. As I type this I can think of counterexamples*, but I feel like Mario was born out of an almost style-free format (at least, the stylistic options are very much computationally finite), and evolved over years to suit, but Rayman still has those weird googly eyes, a neckerchief, and stupid yellow skating shoes. *Of course, Mickey Mouse comes to mind, who somehow managed to keep those bizarre shorts with giant buttons on them and stick around as an cultural icon to this day. For what it's worth, he's gone through some pretty major changes since 1928.

Yeah, episode 88. It was the last reader mail that episode.

Yeah, I think "fundamentally" is a bit of a loaded term. It sounded to me like the reader was really just trying to say he had a really strong gut reaction, not necessarily that there's something inherent in his biology that makes him hate Rayman. It's not necessarily wrong to call that fundamental, since it really is based on a very deep-set emotion. It's just not very useful to base your anthropological theory on the fundamental principle that people hate weird armless bean cartoons. Edit: Ergh, I just started watching that video Mington posted, and it opened up with a Sim City ad, which I watched because it made me so excited, until I realized that the ad was suggesting that the Digital Deluxe edition would make your land values higher? That's... Eh, it's not bad necessarily, but it does seem a little more egregious than just adding additional gameplay features. Maybe it's just me, but there seems like a there's a line between paying for an even more advanced and interesting gameplay experience, and paying to just do better at the game. Maybe not. Maybe it just means there's a higher skill cap, and the way the system works, you can potentially make an even better city just by having more, deeper options. But that one tiny tagline kind of bugged me.

NO WAIT I GOT IT Get Jeff Goldblum on the podcast.

It's not really scientifically rigorous, but I do like Robert Pirsig's conclusion, as Phaedrus, that quality in art is a thing that only exists when the observer and the object meet, that quality as a concept is too subjective to exist without someone to be able to judge it, but it can't exist just in someone's head without being the property of something else.

Yeah, the whole issue with muddying the debate is why I'm pretty cautious about who I'm talking to, because I don't want to give the kind of people I know would be glad to justify their sexism any kind of ammunition. Since a lot of the concepts are pretty abstract, it's convenient to call out things that aren't sexist per se because they represent sexist trends. Somewhere there's a point where the feminist problem also intersects with a race problem, or an economic problem or, in this case, a cyclist problem. It seems worthwhile to be able to acknowledge common problems and consider them through a more broadly egalitarian lens, rather than partitioning them by political convenience. If that's counterproductive for public debate, fine, don't bring it there.

In Episode 100 everybody exclusively talks in silly voices (Fanboy, Ed Wynn, Phaedrus, and German Guy) and refers to each other by their whacky nicknames: Video Games (aka Space Rodkin), Famous, Scoops, and Gunga Galunga. Chris will sing an original song and edit memes in throughout the show. This episode is exclusively for the benefit of Idle Thumbs readers ca. 2008.

The only sort-of exception I can think of is in Cave Story, which really didn't have universal ammo (the only ammo was for missiles), but it had a universal weapon upgrade system where the same drop would make the weapon you currently have equipped more powerful. I think that makes a lot of sense. If you want to have universal ammo drops, you should still allow the different weapons their own individual ammo, but maybe just say that an Ammo Point equals either one missile or twenty five machine gun bullets or something like that. Hmm. That's not a bad idea. For some reason I've completely stopped playing games except for Middle Manager of Justice. I was having great fun with Whale Trail for a while but just sort of stopped playing for some reason. It's really damned fun though.

Oh god I knew about it because shitty radio personalities that air around here kept making comments along the lines of "that's what you get when you put an uppity black in the White House! He gets so big-headed he just starts naming things after himself!" Political radio is gross.

Mostly this one. Besides a disk sander and a power drill, all the tools I've used have been hand tools.