Patrick R

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_New_Zealand

Same with Houston!

In the land of the illegal weed, all who smoke weed are criminals. In the land of legal weed, it's just a thing some people do that makes you giggle a little more and kinda makes your mouth dry.

That makes a lot of sense.

Sure, you can add my bandcamp page! Something you might want to do is start playing around with is seeing how much you can monkey with the samples and find new sounds. I don't know a ton about music theory, so I can't tell you how much you have to learn on that side, but an easy way to make your stuff sound more interesting is to use as few preset sounds that come with the software as possible. Especially with drums, stock sounds stick out like sore thumbs, like hearing the Wilhelm scream. Even if you just change the pitch of a snare a little bit it can help a lot.

For your instruments, do you use stock plug-ins and sound packs that came with your software/keyboard or do you modify them?

From 2007 to 2009 I did the local DIY folk scene, played house shows different places in Illinois, stuff like that. It was very lo-fi folk punk sort of stuff, all recorded with my laptop's mic, one take, no multi-tracking. Not much of that stuff remains online, but I am now (slowly) working on a new album that will actually be produced and have other musicians, and doing a development blog for it. Basically the goal is I'm going to upload every demo, write blog posts recording my progress, my songwriting sessions, basically every thought I have. I've already got a dozen or so demos for songs that will become the album up right now. I also did electronic music during that time, and released two albums that are up on bandcamp. A lot of my first album, Disorient, started by me teaching myself how to use Fruity Loops, experimenting mostly with sampling. That kind of ended up being my bread and butter, so both albums are mostly sample-based, from mash-ups to experimental percussive glitch stuff. It's that stuff I'm most proud of because I still like how it sounds and have never heard anything quite like it. It's also extremely noisy and off-putting, so I've never really met anyone else who likes it. But I do. I want to get back into it but the new version of Fruity Loops is arranged way different and I find it impossible to work with, so I'm looking for ways to get a copy of older versions I used to work with.

I've been trying to clear out a bunch of my backlog but my impatience means that it's just a bunch of new games I quit: Thomas Was Alone: Pretty interesting as a demonstration of the human mind's willingness to anthropomorphize (I kept thinking about this part of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics") but ultimately I found the puzzles more tedious than challenging. I've played this before and, to my understanding, got within a few screens of the ending but I was too bored and frustrated to continue. Thought it only right I start from the beginning since I didn't remember any of the story but now I don't think I care about the story. Maybe one day I'll finish this. Sine Mora: Extremely slick-looking bullet-hell game where time is your life resource. The 3D art is impressive but it also makes things way less precise (it's hard to know when things are in the background and when things are actually able to be shot), which feels like a strange move but it's clear enough most the time. I only had to stop playing it because it made my laptop overheat. I'll probably return to this whenever I get my next computer. Superfrog HD: Like the Popcap version of a platformer, all feedback and shiny collectibles and sounds. Imagine Sonic the hedgehog if there were 5 kinds of rings to collect, and 80% of empy sky in the level were those rings. Now imagine the art, control and level design being way worse. Basically this is a game for 6 year-olds, which is fine. I only got it as part of a Team 17 humble bundle anyway. Imagine Me: Feels remarkably unfinished, like someone's Unity demo. Lousy platforming with lousy "this is a story about a sad boy who is sad" story screens in between. Practically no animation, horrible SFX. Even the menus felt weirdly unresponsive. HowLongToBeat said this was the shortest game I owned but I had to turn it off after 11 minutes. Amazing this got on Steam.

Gritted my teeth through Yoshi's Island. I remember liking that game so much but I think I was just responding to it's graphics. The thing I like about Super Mario World is the fluid movement and the feeling that I can run headfirst through most levels if I can respond fast enough. Yoshi's Island feels more puzzle based, with way more maze-like levels. And the less said about that damn crying baby Mario the better.

Even if they wanted to, if Polygon took action over someone admitting to smoking weed in their free time they would come across as so incredibly out of touch and draconian. I imagine video game journalism is not an industry with a lot of drug testing. If anything I tend to take someone smoking weed (or having smoked weed) as a given almost as much as I take someone drinking alcohol as a given. Sure, plenty of people don't do it regularly (and many not at all), but it's so incredibly common. If anything I was a little taken aback that it was even worth mentioning on the podcast until Danielle said she headshot an eagle and it became my favorite thing ever.

"Zoom as far out as to see your full metropolis from God's eye! Zoom in far enough to see individual C.H.U.D.s crawl out of the sewers and devour people walking their dogs."

Fair enough! I thought it was hilarious and that the line it walked between sincerity and farce was really well done. And that every performance was pitch perfect.

That post was awesome. I doubt I will have the time to make it myself for the game jam but it absolutely gave me a better idea of the kind of preliminary work that goes into a even a game I consider "simple".

I watched Clueless last week for the first time since the late 90's and I'm still thinking about it. There are very few movies that make me so happy. So glad it holds up.

2D. Color matching 3 or 4 gems (depending on the block size), like (with a similarly sized playing field as Columns), except that the goal isn't just to keep the screen from filling up (though a game over will occur if that happens), it's to match the colors in a specific order. There is an ideal order, which the player can see visualized on the side of the screen, and the goal is to get that order 100% (complicated by the fact that the order of gems falling is randomized). After making a certain number of matches (say, ten to fifteen) the board is completed. The order you matched gems will correspond to an order of dance moves that the goblin performs for a panel of fantasy judges. This panel of judges will give it/him/her/them a score, figure skating style, based on how close to the ideal order it is. The % of the ideal order the goblin achieves corresponds to how much the floor of the board has risen. If it gets a low % than the floor rises more and the next round will be much harder because there's less room to maneuver and the player is more likely to fill up the screen. If it's 100% than the floor doesn't rise and only change for the next round is that the blocks fall slightly faster. The theme is fantasy and different rounds have different fantasy race judges, different environments. Maybe there's some light story stuff in between about the hard-knock world of high fantasy dance competitions. Everyone tells the goblin it/he/she/they has no chance because goblins aren't graceful like other races (maybe it/he/she/they has an elven rival). Maybe it's basically a high fantasy 8 Mile about fancy dancing. Maybe the player has to do some basic Space Channel 5/DDR music game stuff during the dance sequences to earn bonuses, maybe it's satisfying enough to watch your little goblin dance it's/his/her/their heart out. Maybe this is too much to bite off for a game jam.

I have an idea for a falling block puzzle game that's "Dance of the Treasure Goblin" and a "Cesar's Day Off" sort of idea for "On Blade". I have zero skills to implement them, so if you're interested send me a message I guess?

I told my terror-car story in the thread for Episode 193 so that (coupled with my general financial instability) means I will probably never drive again. But I really really really miss it. I don't mind the CTA, it's pretty good as far as public transit goes, but I definitely don't feel as free as I used to.

TEGAN OH MY GOD. Everything about that. It reminds me of after the Oklahoma bombing certain radio stations played a Live song mixed with news footage. There's a spectrum of tasteless "disaster tribute" music where Bruce Springsteen's album "The Rising" is on one end and on the other end is someone putting 9/11 news audio over terrible nu-metal and then putting Dragonball Z over that.

Oh, he's saying dumb shit for sure. But I hadn't seen what he was responding to mentioned anywhere and assumed it was something way different (like, "it's a game about queer people!" or whatever), and was surprised to find out it was a thing I also found dumb.

To be perfectly fair he was referencing that weird MRA Thor scene that we were talking about in the Feminist thread, which IS a good example of how bad inserting politics into fiction can be when done poorly.

In this direction, there's always https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NboSeVfWph8 Despite getting the ball rolling on this I actually don't know much about AMVs. But in 2002 I wanted to download videos to watch and for some reason AMVs were the only thing I could think of to look up. Probably because my friend had this one on his computer. I wonder if any really weird bands have been used for AMVs. Like, is there a Von LMO AMV? A Nomeansno AMV? EDIT: Oh man, .

Holy fuck. Hahahahahahaha.

But it says "Eye in the sky" and then it cuts to an eye in the sky! The synergy is perfect!

QUESTION Can I find the two specific video game AMVs that I downloaded on Limewire in 2002? ANSWER Yes.

If you steamed Twisted Metal 3 on Twitch would the music detector kick you off because of the Rob Zombie? How does Twitch deal with licensed music in games?