toblix

God jul!

I'm out like a clout.

That metric is terrible, and you should try to stop using it.

Jesus, never have just one copy of your important files!!!!!!!!!!!!! Get a cloud thing like Dropbox or Google Drive or Backblaze or Jottacloud and that's all the ones I know.

I'm up for trying something on the weekend, though for my part, that will have to be next year.

I played this and am completely stuck on the ship weight thing. The hint means nothing to me. I literally cannot find what it's referencing.

This game looks really good and plays well, but it has one terrible flaw. That is to say, I have one terrible problem with it. Everyone has probably heard by now how this is the epitome of free-to-play; it's free, and there are buttons for paying you way through obstacles on virtually every screen you see. There are a lot of closed doors and portals, and each one can be unlocked either by collecting stars/coins by playing, or just paying some dollars. It's not very subtle about it either: it lets you reach the portal from the first world to the next one quite easily, letting you collect a handful of stars along the way. Then it makes you click on the portal, which has two buttons: one for unlocking with money, the other for unlocking with stars. The latter is disabled, because the few stars you got don't even come close to the number required to open the portal. Then, if you don't pay, it zooms back out to the first world map and starts adding stars to all the levels you just played. The game is saying «Look at all this stuff you have to do if you don't pay.» The additional stars aren't problematic at all – they're fun, challenging variations, and they're the actual reason you got the game in the first place. However, instead of presenting them as such, they're given to you almost as punishment for not paying up. But that's not even my big problem with the game – paying some dollars to skip to the next world is an expected feature, and the consequences are apparent. My big problem with the game is that it's selling plants and mechanics; not for in-game money, but for real money only. This time they're not selling you ways of "accelerating" the game, like the typical F2P option of being able to buy in-game money for real money. They're keeping huge parts of the game behind a crazy paywall, and if you're ever stuck or struggling with a level, you're left wondering how they designed and balanced it. Should you have bought the sun bonus thing by now? Do you need to buy another plant? If so, which one? The colorful PopCap aesthetic and tone of good-hearted, quirky, casual fun has been smeared by the dirty, sticky handprints of a thousand clawing money-grubbing paws frantically reaching for your pocket at every turn without regard to the actual game. I really hope PvZ 2 represents the apex of this gross trend.

Hard, hard, hard core cyberpunk.

Apparently everyone missed this one. Well, except you. Sorry! Is it getting too close to Christmas maybe?

Holy mackerel, that looks like it'll be the most intense, dynamic, amazing, challening, unique, fantastic, fun, immersive, engaging, exclusive, incredible, unbelieveable

You guys know this game could end up sucking, right?

I checked out Elijah Wood's twitter stream the other day, and it was the craziest stream of retweets you can imagine. Also, a bunch of video game stuff, including Campo Santo, which is cool.

Though I appreciate your enthusiasm for lamps, lamp-based games and/or other lamp-based digital or physical entertainment products or products/services derived therefrom, I urge you to change the nature of your game such as to avoid infringing on the upcoming interactive video game «Lamp Marine™» (http://www.lampmarine.com/) or the «Lamp Marine™» franchise, which would force us to take legal action. I appreciate your compliance in this matter in advance.

So, Xbox One, PS4 and ... the original PS?

Yeah, an inventory would make all that make more sense. It's interesting to have a power-up become a power-down, though, like if you have the cat suit in your reserve slot, and hit a block spawning a mushroom, suddenly you want to avoid it. The good thing about the overworld/level dissonance is that the current variation in level styles keeps things feeling fresh. I would tire quickly of five or six successive underwater levels. On a different note, I'm currently doing my best to get three stars, the stamp and yellow flag on each level as I go. Currently this only makes things more fun for me, since they hide stuff so cleverly, and running through a level is quick when you know where to go, but I'm wary of having that turn into a frustrating element as I progress. How big a reward is there at the end for the stars/stamps/flags? Is it worth slogging through some potentially more frustrating parts?

So far I'm loving this game. The movement is perfect, the levels are super-interesting and varied, and getting all the collectibles in a level is just hard enough. However: Whenever you've done a thing and come back to the overworld, you have to wait for it to save, which is completely unnecessary in a technical sense; the amount of data they're storing couldn't possibly be super-large, and even so they could do it asynchronously like every other game I've played the last five years. So I'm guessing it's a conscious design choice, and the reasons I can think of for them to surface game saving so heavily is that they want the player to know exactly when the game state is saved (not confused by checkpoints or moving around in the overworld?) or to make them feel safe the data is stored and they can turn of the Nintendo. These do not seem like remotely good enough reasons to make me, a cool pro gamer, wait so long before being able to jump back in when I just missed a star or whatever. I guess it says a lot that this my main problem with the game. The one-off power-up houses that give you a single thing. They're one-off, so you're supposed to use them strategically, but they're often random, which means they're strategically useless, and you still get power-ups throughout the level, usually where you start. These appeared in SMB3, right? Were they any more useful then? What happens if you lose all your lives? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess nothing? Do you lose any more progress than the last mid-level checkpoint? If you complete a level as small Mario, you start the next one as small Mario, which feels like a punishment and makes no sense, seeing as passing a checkpoint restores you to full Mario. Are points used anywhere for anything, like leaderboards? The ghost player stuff is a cool idea implemented in the most annoying way. Why would you want strangers jumping around and confusing you when you're trying to precisely jump on one of those invisible money frogs? They're not even ghostly! The overworlds are themed, but none of the levels seem to care. The actual in-level gameplay is good enough to make all my concerns irrelevant. It really feels like one team design a super-great, well-tuned, platformer, and then some other team takes all that and places all the levels around the overworld, because that's what you do, and then I guess they should have some other stuff to do in the overworld since it's just levels, and they couldn't think of any really relevant things to add.

What are the coolest Vita games? Tearaway, Frobisher says, aaaannd ?

SPEAKING OF MAKING GAMES I made a sweet game in Unity wherein the player can sort of drag a starkly lit cube around until it gets too close to the camera. The player has no option but to drag the cube, but doing so brings it closer. The player cannot move and ends up facing the cube, dragging it ever closer until they both exist in the same space and there are no more choices but to stop playing.

What's this from where is this

Oh my God, Killzone looks fantastic. I only played the first couple of levels since I quickly got frustrated with it and didn't enjoy it, but holy crap did those levels remind me of Half-Life in the best way.

Got this for playing SM3DL on, which feels so far like a great game. However, the way everything other than the game stuff is done, both in the game and on the rest of the system, is just incredibly, unfathomably clumsy and outdated, like the game pad controller thing. From the very start it was clear to me Nintendo did not know what to do with this dumb thing in UI situations. Nintendo Land had some neat uses, and the Zombi U game seems like it hit the nail perfectly, but adding a second screen to Nintendo's already poor UI stuff is just hilarious. It's assuming you have the game pad turned on all the time, so they have the two different screens you can switch between that does I don't know what, and I just want to play Super Mario with my pro controller, so I turn the system on with that, and the game pad screen still comes alive, and I have to hit the pro controller power button again to enable it. And there's no way to tell the system I don't want to use your dumb big controller (though turning it on with the pro controller should've given it a clue) so it just sits there mirroring the screen and playing audio until its battery dies, and that's just dumb and I hate it. Also, the way they slowly show all these one-sentence screens to tell you obvious stuff (aka mom mode lol) is super annoying. It's like someone at Nintendo decided the system should only do one thing at a time, and always show what it's doing. That's why connecting to the internet on the 3DS is like dialing a BBS in 1991, and that's why the 2013 video game Super Mario 3D Land pauses after each level to tell me it's saving, and then pops up a message I have to dismiss to let me know that hey your game has just been saved please press OK to continue playing. But Mario is super fun. However, do they only have ten seconds of looping music per level?

So with all these new consoles coming out with their fancy HDMI and lack of analog sound output, I thought maybe I'd replace my stereo receiver with an A/V-receiver, so I could have just the one HDMI cable to my television. Then I started thinking about input lag, and did some googling, and apparently everyone recommends hooking consoles directly to the TV because HDMI receivers add so much delay to the video. Is this common knowledge, or no longer a problem or what? If I get a new HDMI receiver, how much of an input lag can I expect?

After all the talk about the ending I went and watched a playthrough on Youtube, and yes, the ending is cool, but it's yet a sucking reminder that you still have to be super-indie if you want to tell a cool story about stories and fate and regret without also having it be about killing literally thousands of people.

Is this sharing stuff new? Has it been here all along? Has anyone ever used any of them?

God, that's outta control!