darthbator

What would be a good location? I'm not exactly SF scene savvy anymore. I'm flying up tomorrow morning and should be on the show floor Wednesday morning! I plan on just generally freestyle bumming it around SF most of Tuesday, so I have no particular agenda then either. Would be super great to meet up!

I have to admit I really need to fight the urge to not be negative about this thing. When I look at people wearing it something inside me feels like it's screaming "THAT'S NOT HOW I WANT TO PLAY GAMES!?". I'm doing my absolute best to reserve judgement until I put one on (obviously failing on that front...).

It's also a very very small team.

Yeah that looks absolutely awesome. I'm super super excited to play this!

Their funding has certainly slowed. Hopefully they can hit that 3.5mill tier.

I thought it was pretty obvious that the King Killer Chronicles are stories with an unreliable narrator. Even if they're not I do find them to be an extremely well realized world. It's a like an almost scientifically realized version of Earthsea! I'd actually be really happy to see him sign onto this project.

I remember playing Last Crusade a lot more then Fate of Atlantis cause my computer couldn't quite hack it on fate. I didn't get to actually complete that one until we got a "pentium" class computer.

I absolutely loved this game growing up. I too feel like I have forgotten almost everything about it.

Looks neat to me. I'm more then willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I was just making sure we weren't all behind and supposed to be on 11.

Jeff Gerstmann gave the impression he has played it on the bombcast this week. He said you would "stop and consider and plan". Kinda enforcing the idea this will be a much slower more tactical type of experience. However it plays, it looks and sounds stunning. Not really a surprise but it cements in that I'll play it just to hear and look at it.

So I just finished #10. That's actually the first time I have died in this play through! Am I current? If so maybe I can finally post some impressions tomorrow? If not I guess I'll use that time to kill yet another one. I think I'm getting much worse at video games as I age. I don't remember it taking me so long to kill these years ago!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiePaAHK3jE So recently I've been thinking a good deal about physical character orientation in games (probably cause I've been making lots of stuff rotate recently). As my thoughts often do when I start thinking about gaming things I started thinking back to all the games I played during my childhood. It's hardly a new realization to anyone (or thankfully to myself) that almost all of these older platformers moved from left to right. It's so ingrained that it's a common practice to hide collectibles in a location that requires the character to scroll the screen left. I've even heard some developers talk about using leftward motion in platformers to convey a sense of "unease" or transition. They say the desire to continually move right is so ingrained that making the player scroll left for a good length of time is noticeable if just on a subconcious level. It makes sense. There's lots of reinforcement for that. Even in reading we always move from left to right here in the west. Wait... Most of the games I am thinking about from my youth where Japanese... In Japan they read top to bottom right to left.... Is there some western precedent set during the Atari era that just stuck? I'm amazed we haven't seen more people try 2D platformers dominated by left scrolling stages. I actually can't think of a level/scene based platformer (not something in the adventure vein) that defaults to right to left scrolling. The only games I can recall that have long left scrolling segments are rooted in the idea of transversing a larger map (even in something like castlevania 4 where the stages attempted to represent the larger castle map). Why do you think this is? I noticed this sort of "right bias" transfers into almost any 2D game I play. It we're playing street fighter I want to be P1. Pushing left to go forward just doesn't feel as "correct" the joystick maneuvers don't feel the same. It's probably not enough for anyone else to notice a decrease in my ability to play, but it's something I certainly feel. Anyone else happen to have a similar right side bias? Do you think it's caused by lots of Genesis-NES-SNES era platformers? Slightly off topic.I thought that particular video was the trailer for a kickstarted documentary about 2D platformers. However there's really no information on the video's youtube page and I was not able to find the kickstarter. Does anyone here happen to remember what that was (or if happen to be nuts).

From my understanding airplay has 2 modes. Direct screen mirroring is one of those modes. The other mode supports playing a video stream from the device to a TV. I have only seen this work playing directly from a file on the device but I don't see why you couldn't make some kind of special file type (like a unix socket or something) and then "stream" through that file. I also am totally unsure what kind of state your device is in if you do stream a file over airplay. They could very well be using the graphics hardware on your device to do something to / for that file. Based on what I read I imagine you could hack together something using that mode (streaming video files to an airplay endpoint depending on events generated in game on the device?) but it sounds to me like a far stretch to render an entire second scene, encode it to video, and then stream it to the endpoint. Either way currently the amount of technical work needed to do something like that is probably way to great for the likely payoff (total failure). BTW I am sure there are people on here that are better equipped to answer that particular question then I am. I actually don't have any direct iOS development experience. I've really only worked with Unity and in Android.

The reason no one cares is because almost all the games anyone cares about require you to touch the device's screen, which almost always means looking at the device. What is the point of streaming the same content the user is looking at on the tablet to the TV? I can think of some strange unbalanced mp style games with multiple local clients, but nothing that would be easy to implement or obvious. I think it's important to note miracast and airplay are about getting the exact screeencast from one device to another. Not about second screen functionality or extending the logical display space of your device.

"No, not that one.... It was moving the wrong way.... It's a bad omen to kill the left bound doe!"

I've been looking (not hard) to see if anyone has ever asked anyone why they chose to make those particular shifts in orientation in those classic games (like keen and Prince of Persia). I actually don't remember PoP very well but I do remember 2 shadow flame pretty clearly. I remember that game feeling explorative in a metroidvania kind of way. However it was still based in levels right? I always remember finding those games super hard, but really loving the sword combat.... Memories! <3

That was kind of the big motivation for me really writing this post. Realizing most of my rightward scrolling experiences where from japanese developers where they do not have that enforced in their reading/writing etc. However lots of really good points as to why that might be have come up in this thread. The precedence of games like pitfall. Right handed dominance, and the fact that most Japanese developers probably coded in a "western" oriented language (although I don't think that plays to quite the same level IMO). What about SHMUPS? Those kind of shrug the idea that reading direction enforces directional scrolling. One would think JP SHMUPS would move downward but I can't think of a single vertically oriented SHMUP that is not presented with the craft "ascending" to the top of the screen. I don't know if I can rightfully recall playing any kind of SHMUP that scroll from R->L either....

Android devices on 4.2 have miracast built in (a similar kind of screen sharing technology). But no one really seems to be using it for anything yet.There's nothing to stop ouya or Google from providing a similar functionality. Ouya's selling point is basically exclusively the assured presence of a controller on a self publishing focused platform. The fact that it's android is only due to the fact that android is open source and has developer support.

F Nick Breckon. Team Vanaman!!!

Is the next podcast going to be titled "The Nick Breckon Situation"? Cause it probably should. Actually you might want to google that, there's probably already a ska band with that name...

I don't feel like digging through the entire thread to see if this was addressed so I would much rather just resurrect it! How the hell does the camera in this game work? Is it just always unconditionally bound to P1? How is this actually meant to be played? Is it supposed to be MP or SP? That's how I wanted to play it so I fired it up with my girlfriend. However most of the puzzles required us to split from the same screen causing one of us to just have to sit idle... Should I be doing this with 3 people for the most bestest time? I really want to like this game. I think it's a fun take on the general adventure genre to put it in 2.5D, and I think the atmosphere is fantastic. I just REALLY don't like the camera / character focus design choices. Keeping the characters together is also a really serious pain. Thoughts, suggestions? I was thinking about trying it out 3 player tomorrow night. I was wondering if it's even worth it or if I should just play through it SP.

Actually lots of times when I encounter people (and when I myself say) "oh that's just pretentious/snooty" what I'm actually saying is that I don't agree with it's point of view or value judgements. IMO it's hard for something to get called pretentious unless it's at least attempting to espouse some kind of point of view. Not accounting for times when someone is just swinging at ideas outside of their creative league I think most things being labeled as pretentious just present things in a way the labeler doesn't agree with.

I'm not above the fray I'm just disinterested in it. It's gotten to the point where it subsumes every single conversation I have about video games. Her particular project is a sore point for me due to how much funding she managed to raise while many less known developers with good ideas/projects are failing all over kickstarter. I'm not trying to knock this thread off the rails, when there is honestly no point in having that conversation here. I should probably just keep my opinions to myself as they are almost always unpopular. Is this really the just the Japanese manual? It looks like a child's story book. That's really beautiful!