toblix

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by toblix

  5. Posted

    Thanks for that, Sean. I definitely brought my smiley into this without having thought things through, and now realize that – of course! – you already knew about the issues with American Apparel, but that there are issues with all suppliers (of which gross advertisements is just one!) and that it's not just a matter of sending a PNG to some t-shirt guy.

     

    Thanks for the detailed rundown, and for being conscientious about your merchandise.

  7. Posted

    Other than the Monday morning build-up, I can no longer actually remember interacting with the game through the week, even though the numbers say I pretty consistently click almost every golden cookie that appears throughout the day. I don't know what that means.

  8. Posted

    There are a few discrete phases to Cookie Clicker, I think, and at each phase transition it's understandable that people quit playing. In the beginning you're a bit skeptical, but amused that such a banal concept has so much visual polish and UI. You click a couple of times, maybe you buy some buildings and upgrades, and you get the joke and you're done. If not, the next phase is that you at least want to see how far they've taken it; how many buildings there are and how deep this joke rabbit hole goes. This is the phase during which you'll get hooked, if you're disposed to it. If it's not for you, you'll quickly get frustrated that progress is slowing down and you don't want to do actual boring work just to see more stupid joke stuff. If cookie clicking is in your cards, however, it's like a constant journey of exploration and revelation. More mechanics start appearing, and they start interacting, and you start paying attention to the numbers on the screen. You don't necessarily just buy every upgrade right away, but save up for a new antimatter condenser instead, since that boosts your CPS in a more cost effective way. Or you start thinking about how to handle wrinklers – are they just a pain, or can they help you in the long run? What's up with the milk? Suddenly you can change the seasons, and each one has its own set of things you can do – but in which order do you explore them? I don't know anything, but I expect a lot of players give up somewhere around here, tired of consistently diminishing returns on each investment, longer downtime between purchases, and those last achievements seem very hard to reach. This is where you have the chance to transition into your ultimate form, accepting that you're in this for the long haul. Not for a few hours, or even days, but for the foreseeable future. You begin the long haul, the slow churn, the long game. You realized that everything you've accomplished so far – the buildings you've built, the upgrades, all the golden cookies, the easter bunnies, the valentine's hearts, the kittens – all that stuff wasn't the game. That was just the first time around. The first link of the chain. The first step of a long journey.

     

    Resetting your game at this point converts all your cookies to "heavenly chips" which provide a small bonus to your future CPS on subsequent playthroughs.

  9. Posted

    Sure, WoW was super fun, but I never got as into it as I am with Cookie Clicker. Not sure if it's a game, or if it's funny? I don't think everything is supposed to be hilarious.

     

    It was definitely a fad at the time, and I'm sure not as many people are playing it today as when the whole candy box thing was going on, but it's still being actively maintained and developed by Orteil, so I guess he's getting at least something out of it.

     

    Oh, by the way, he's also the guy who made Nested.

  10. Posted

    It's one of life's great mysteries that I've never gotten addicted to WoW or Diablo or any other video game, but Cookie Clicker has its hooks through me. It is as if I only respond to addictive game mechanics when I'm playing them directly.

  11. Posted

    Oh, this thread exists! Who else is (still) playing this? A big update is incoming sometime in the next weeks; not the dungeons, but new buildings/upgrades, a huge re-spec of all cost/cps curves, plus a permanent upgrade system where you can buy bonuses using heavenly chips. It's an exciting time to be alive!

     

    I'm still working on reaching 200 prisms, resetting once a week for that sweet Monday morning build-up to 320 cursors and 200 AMCs, then setting into the slow Excel churn for the rest of the week. I've realized that I most likely won't reach my goal before the update is released, which will re-balance everything and throw my whole bakery into chaos.

     

    One of the moral quandaries I'm struggling with as a mid-level cookie clicker, is how much tooling is permitted. I've made an Excel sheet that I feed some basic figures and it gives me some useful info like what my minimum level of cookies should be, and the cps/cookies ratio for each building (sadly not including cross-building effects like what cursors have) Though a colleague is running a browser extension that gives him all this (and more) in the game's UI, I feel like that's taking it too far, and is approaching cheating, almost. Still, I've come to the realization that each cookie clicker must set their own bounds for what's morally defensible, and that it's up to each of us to set our own limitations for a safe and enjoyable experience. Who's to say what is the right way to play Cookie Clicker?

  13. Posted

    I could not find the thread for this game, so here is one. Look at this video:

     

    Pretty interesting, right? Open world, seems like it's not combat or action oriented, weird puzzles with mangled corpses right after crossing a bridge, etc. The mechanic of finding an object in an open world by getting to see its surroundings seems like it could carry a game all on its own, but here we get weird murder mystery stuff as well, and magic doorways. I don't know, I feel like this game could be pretty awesome, and it's out next month!

     

    But. I've commented on this before, but it bears repeating: Look at these pictures from the game. Look at them:

     

    Y6rQ8dD.png7ljCYmy.png

     

    How has that bridge not fallen down? Is this the mystery of Red Creek Valley?

     

  15. Posted

    I've said it before, and now I'm going to repeat it: the element of persistent progress transforms a roguelike from something I'm not very interested in to something potentially addictive. I feel dumb admitting it, because the whole point of a "proper" roguelike is supposed to be that when you finally make some hard-earned progress or defeat the dragon, all the leveling up was inside you all along, and you actually got better at the game, and that I prefer the manifestation of this as a persistent gold/xp/whatever mechanic admittedly feels like I prefer junk food to haute cuisine. It probably says a ton about me that I'm not satisfied simply by becoming good a a thing, but need constant affirmation and the help of improved armor and unlockable double-jumping to maintain my interest.

  16. Posted

    Apparently, they developers were excited to listened to the feedback of the consumers, and have patched in an both an easier mode, which removes some element of randomness that was apparently in there, and a pure adventure mode that I think has no fail state whatsoever. So if you enjoyed this game, but found it too punishing, you might want to reconsider.

  17. Posted

    Contextless emoticons are worthless and will achieve nothing.

    Jeez. Well, I guess it sparked an interesting discussion about clothing manufacturers :/

     

    My emoticon was triggered by being grossed out at the brand, and how they market themselves, (and I apologize for not providing context, incorrectly assuming everyone knew about the (allegedly?) horrible CEO and their awful misogynistic marketing) but I agree that the actual ethical issues with lesser-known brands are probably bigger in the end.

  20. Posted

    The problem with playing around with fov and perspective is that people start vomiting everywhere. They've spent so much time developing techniques and guidelines to prevent the Rift from being known as the new thing you put on your head and vomit. So, even though it does seems like a really cool thing to experiment with, you most definitely won't see any games doing it (unless they're intentionally breaking all the rules to make you puke.)