Erkki

I played this a year or so ago. Probably the best Half-Life 2 singleplayer mod (but I've only played a few)

Started playing this. I have given it a try earlier, maybe an hour or so, a long time ago when it was in beta or alpha or something and remember not really knowing what to do in the game, what the goal was, or if there even was one. So I was positively surprised to find a fairly well-done tutorial for the combat. Played the tutorial, created a character, and was somewhat surprised (thanks to raised expectations after doing the tutorial) to find that the game still just dropped me into it's world and gave me no real clue where to go or what my goal was. I guess I deserve it as I chose Wanderlust for my characters motivation Did some training in the place the game began, then went for the nearest settlement and since I didn't know where to start, just asked the village elder for a quest. Now I'm supposed to deliver them some cattle in 30 days. I have no idea how I can do that, but I guess I'll find out somehow. Maybe this game is supposed to be played with a manual, either in the form of the in-game encyclopedia or a Mount & Blade community forum. I'll try to figure it out on my own first, though. Might be a nice change from most other games to have to do that. But I have no idea yet if I will like this completely free-form progression.

The battles are really awesome, better than in any other game where you control one character! But so far I suck at it, except in the polearm tournament, where the AI seems geometrically challenged. I actually won the first tournament I entered. In the second one I was on foot so got my ass kicked.

You should do a Far Cry 2 marathon (with permanent death)! (just kidding)

Chris is on the latest Gamer Dork episode: http://gamerdork.net/

*********? [edit] What the fuck, how the hell did I remember that ********* is censored?

http://j.mp/WZxH4

It would be fun to invent a religion where there are no special days, but special various amounts of time, down to minute precision. They last all year and come with all sorts of obligations. They also overlap, so you may have multiple obligations at once, or you can choose your favourite saints and only respect their minutes. This will affect your afterlife though. And then there's one day in the year where there are no obligations, anyone can do what they want and their deeds have no consequences.

A Life Well Wasted is awesome!

Wow. 150 games is crazy.

Has anyone played the Ceville demo? I don't know, it looks kind of fun to me. Sure, it's not visually top quality, and they seem to have made do with minimal animations, but it looks good enough. The humor might be somewhat lame at times and it's definitely not laugh-out-loud funny (at least so far), but I kind of like the tone.

Yay! I dropped the games I've already played from my list and completed Ceville and Blueberry Garden. The list is looking much shorter now. Blueberry Garden was actually much better than the impression left from the demo. But it took me a while until I started enjoying it. I thought I'd continue Aquaria next, but I just can't play that game for long periods. I resumed from an earlier save game, relearned the controls and played for an hour, now I feel like I won't touch it for a while. I think the game world is too big: it takes too much time just to get from one place to another while nothing interesting happens. Installing Mount & Blade now.

Maybe this is not the right thread, but here's a video from a workshop where Adam Atomic talks about his game engine, and there's some insight into the making of Canabalt and Fathom (probably only interesting to programmers) http://tigsource.com/articles/2009/09/17/flixel-workshop

don't remember what the level was called (I ignored the right part of the screen mostly) but I don't think it was that. You had to jump over spikes from post to post while carrying a box (upside down). [€dit] it was Reverb [edit2] nevermind, I just figured out how you can do the jumps without the crate

I just managed to complete my first Extreme level, and get silver on all the Hard ones, except the last. I'm feeling like the fun is slowly starting to disappear for me. I also gave up on some of the harder levels in Trials 2 (PC).

Ok, now I got my disappointments out of the way, here's what I liked about it: The characters are pretty good, especially the playable ones: Ceville, Lilly, Ambrosius. As I already mentioned, their relationship could have used more work, but they look good, are well animated (although a few special one-time actions could have used more animation maybe) and have witty things to say, even as the jokes and references are mostly too obvious and often unfitting (I'm just not that fond of taking an older time period and putting lots of modern things in it in a non-subtle way). The translation is good, most of the time it felt like it was meant to be in English from the start. Voice acting is also spot on. I especially liked Ceville and the two idiot guards that keep popping up everywhere. Also, all the characters have more to say than I expected. There are special responses for the majority of situations and combinations, as far as I could tell, with quite a lot of them resulting in a short dialogue between Ceville & Lilly. "That doesn't work" type responses are rare. Some of the puzzles are quite clever, occasionally making use of multiple characters in the style of Day of the Tentacle, but without the time machine component. It looks pretty good. Occasionally better than Telltale games, but not in all areas, and some backgrounds are ugly & low res. The story is not bad either, but the game could have used more in-engine cutscenes or at least some kind of transitions better than loading screens when the story moves forward. Music is good, most of the time I didn't even notice it.

Almost thought you meant Sande Chen, then did a search for older episodes and found there actually was a Jenova Chen one. Should listen to some of those. I didn't like the cast that had Sande Chen much, but the other Episode 25 segments were great.

Finished it. One of the worst endings ever. No effort was spent on it. Credits started rolling practically mid-sentence. And there was a brief sequence after that, hinting at a sequel, then the worlds "to be continued!?" appeared. Also, there was a second reference to "the cake is a lie". The devs must really love Portal.

So I'm more than half-way though (bought it on Steam some time ago, sorry Marek) and I don't really know what to think. There are makings of a good game here. You play with two characters most of the time, with the other following around, like Sam & Max. The characters supposedly have quite a conflicting nature, Ceville being "bad" and Lilly being "good". But the dynamic between them is not exploited well enough. When Ceville does or says something that Lilly finds really obnoxious, she just utters a chiding "that was not very nice" or something like that, but even if the action can be reversed, she never does it, nor does she ever change her attitude towards Ceville. The game throws bad puns and inappropriate pop culture references left and right. Games referenced include: Half-Life 2, Portal, Dungeon Keeper, Diablo, Sam & Max, Monkey Island, ... and so on. I can't even keep track. The humour is very much in your face, rarely does it manage to be subtle. Puzzles are maybe better than average, but there are some cliches, including the inescapable paper under the door and push the key out of the lockhole (BTW. I've actually used this in real life when I locked myself out once). There is some horrible 3D pixel hunting, too. I got really stuck early on and went to the walkthrough, discovered an item I had missed. After that I used the walkthrough several times because I wanted to get through the game quickly (and loading times can be quite bad when moving back & forth between areas). So the game has many flaws, but I still like it somewhat. [edit] actually, forgot to mention: there's a solution for the pixel hunting: holding space will show the hover titles for all hotspots. I didn't notice this feature at first. There's also a kind of a hint system that shows you all acceptable combinations by highlighting them in orange, but I turned that off.

Finished it. But had to skip the level before the last one: I figured out the puzzle, but it required too precise jumping (and you die for missing one jump). Maybe there's another solution.

Yeah, I guess I almost forgot that because I mostly ignored the story.

my only complaint is that the title is misleading: there's not much time manipulation, more switching dimensions. Also, it took 20-30 levels or so before it got challenging, but I guess that introduction was necessary to set up for the more complex puzzles later.

Yeah, and that's what existing Java engines (JMonkeyEngine, Ardor3D) do basically. So maybe there isn't much point to what I said.

Wasting your precious free time browsing forums? Go Cufk it instead.