Erkki

Well, I don't even take such a black and white view that either someone is an asshole or isn't. There is no TRUTH. They may be an asshole about something or in a specific situation, but a completely nice person in another situation.

this! I just skimmed this thread, don't know who any of the two persons in the title are, but this I can agree with. You can't act like an ass around people who don't know you and expect not to be thought of as an ass. Unless of course, it is clear that you are in fact, acting, such as in a movie. I would even say that a stand-up comedian that keeps doing mostly racist, misogynist, etc. jokes throughout his career doesn't really fall under that exception. [edit] on another note, this thread made me look up the dickwolf thing. I don't like PA, but they had every right to do that comic and I don't think the rape was the joke there. But the way they handled things after that is just disgusting. And I surely skipped some stuff, but it seems like they called to stop the madness ONLY AFTER Mike's family was "jokingly" threatened on Twitter, while similar threats were made earlier against PA's critics. [edit2] now, to tie this back together, I don't think Mike and Jerry are always assholes (after all, they do the charity thing and other stuff), but they were about this issue. And maybe they are misogynists, I don't know their site well enough but it seems they have more misogynistic merch.

Can't wait! I just got my PC tower back, finally got it fixed (but downgraded a bit) after 6 months of only using laptops. But I guess I'll be building a new one anyway for Deus Ex 3, and other PC goodness coming out sooner or later this year.

This is a perfect example of achievements that I do like. Do they have those in PC Half-Life ep 2? I don't remember.

Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.

Hmm... after all the achievement-praising, I wish I had said "I do hate them" to balance things out But if most of you like them... remember when I was working on a new forum software? (sorry for getting some of you to try it out and then not finishing it) I was looking into if Steam/XBLA/PSN, including achievements, could be somehow integrated into a forum and found that there are plug-ins that do it for vBulletin (or was it gamerscore only..., can't remember). I'm not sure if the admins would want to install something like this though, or if the plug-ins work with Idle Thumbs' version of vBulletin.

Hmm... after all the achievement-praising, I wish I had said "I do hate them" to balance things out. But if most of you like them... remember when I was working on a new forum software? (sorry for getting some of you to try it out and then not finishing it) I was looking into if Steam/XBLA/PSN, including achievements, could be somehow integrated into a forum and found that there are plug-ins that do it for vBulletin (or was it gamerscore only..., can't remember). I'm not sure if the admins would want to install something like this though, or if the plug-ins work with Idle Thumbs' version of vBulletin.

Bastards!

I don't hate them, but I don't like that they are mandatory (on XBox at least?). There are very few games where I've gotten all achievements, I only feel the urge to get 100% if I'm missing just a few. And I absolutely don't like achievements based on game completion (a'la completed Chapter 1), I much prefer them to be about doing weird stuff that not everyone will do, so they will be a surprise. There are sites like what you were talking about, but I don't remember the names. Giant Bomb also pulls achievement data, but I don't know how they present it.

[edit]hmmm... mine still says 94 of 100 did you change it for new registrations or something?

my list is pretty similar to Chris' list. I'd add Baldur's Gate if that counts. And HOMM(?) -- not sure if Might&Magic was some kind of thing or not. And possibly some Cthulhu mythos game -- I had only read one short story by Lovecraft until recently. I knew he was very influential though.

Ok, now I'm going to get it, even though it runs poorly on my laptop.

Does the full game have save-anywhere or autosave more often than the demo? I keep making mistakes -- as RPS promised -- and killing myself and redoing the section from the beholder to past the village over and over again.

CHEAT!

Wow, this is getting quite ridiculous.

Oh man, I took a vacation the week before christmas because I was really tired from last year's work load and no vacation for more than a year. Then I got sick with pneumonia around new years. I'm ok now, going to work on Monday, but at least this period allowed me to play lots of games: DeathSpank DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue Back to the Future's first chapter Flower Assassin's Creed II Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood Heavy Rain Dream Machine's first chapters NightSky Saira Those I finished, King's Bounty, echochrome, Torchlight, Arx Fatalis will be completed later I hope.

Yeah, that's pretty much why I stopped playing Minecraft multiplayer the moment I started feeling a bit of obligation. And why I don't play MMORPGs. This summer I was quite addicted to Mount&Blade multiplayer, which doesn't even have any of this obligation inducing stuff (unless you're in a clan I guess).

Oh god, those timed levels on the farthest planet are awful. "Level 3" seems specifically designed to be completeable only within milliseconds, whereas on the next level I had 6 seconds left on the second attempt.

I finally bought it because Night Sky left me wanting more Nifflas' style. But I don't really like Saira as much as Night Sky. The thing is: Nifflas seems to be all about CAVES. I think he is pretty much overusing them by now. Except that his latest game is a PERFECT cave game. In Night Sky you are just a ball rolling around, no story and the atmosphere is second to the cool physics puzzles. I don't think caves and finicky jumping fit very well in this game, though. In the start it feels like it should be a relaxing exploration and puzzle solving game, but it ends up not being that. That said, it's still good and I'll probably finish it.

Well, I got pretty addicted to this, played 8-10 hours for several days, but now I've played more than 60h probably, just got to the Elves' land, getting somewhat bored. But maybe that's just me playing too much, I should just complete it over a longer period of time.

Windows version (and demo) are out now: http://www.nicalis.com/games-2/nightsky/ lIAvjR1nFzg Played the demo, I kind of like it, but the progression feels sort of random. "Powers come and go" is annoying, I'd much rather have one section with one kind of powers and another with other powers. I think it's by the same guy who made Saira and previously those cute games that's names I can't remember? yeah, it's by "Nifflas" who made Knytt, Saira and other games. I can see the similarity, and I think there was similar randomness there.

Actually, that was an understatement. Now that I've completed it in both modes, I'm amazed by how many different cool physics puzzles this game managed to provide. Really, this game deserves some kind of award for that. But then, many of the screens that seemed complex, were passable just by holding down a key or two. Not that that was entirely bad, as you don't usually discover it the first time you play and it makes it easier to pass when you fail in a later screen in the same level.

My idea is to simulate Ta'veren (in Wheel of Time, Ta'veren is someone who is somewhat controlled by fate and around whom other threads in the "Pattern" are woven). So you could look at what characters the player interacts with most and assign fates to them. A fate can be like a story thread template or something, and may or may not be completely fulfilled. That's part of it, but the rest would require a fairly complex simulation of a world and then putting ta'verenness into formulas, which would automatically make more interesting stuff happen to the characters the player interacts with -- not just the story template stuff, but also other game systems (even physics) could take ta'verenness into account.

I have a game idea I'm currently thinking about that would try to do that. I just wish I was a millionaire so I could work on this without salary

I don't agree with that at all. Have you played Gothic? At the time at least and possibly still, it had characters behaving much more believably than in other games and that impressed me a lot. And it was really in small things, they probably didn't even have to make a lot of effort to make it better than other games.