Erkki

Haven't read the recent posts in fear of happening on spoilers, but man this second episode is really good! Just a few gripes: For the first time in any Telltale episode I'm noticing the sound compression problems others have complained about. I never noticed that with earlier games, but it is especially bad in the opening sequence of this episode and also whenever Elaine speaks. Also, found a bug (might be spoilerish):

Fuel demo was indeed boring. I only took me 15 minutes to realize that.

I tend to agree with this quote from a comment on Gamasutra regarding the possible boycott of this game. Seriously, these people made a great game, of which story is the weakest part and can safely be ignored, and Card didn't have much to do with it anyway as far as I can tell (he is credited in Very Special Thanks or something like that). Still, why did they even have to associate this with OSC and some existing IP when it's so generic -- I have no idea.

Man, now I've played about 9 hours and still haven't beaten it. Not as short as I thought. But I'm poking around the place a lot instead of following the blue path most of the time.

This is not Dragon's Lair says Cage

So I played quickly through the demo. Not sure what I think. It seems like there could be quite a lot of depth to it, but on the other hand it only seemed slightly more interesting than the Kung Fu Panda demo.

Yeah, this could be interesting. If I ever happen to buy a PS3 (thinking of getting the slim when it comes out) then I think I'll try to not play it during the first playthrough. I.e. whenever QTE-s come up, I'll just ignore them. I wonder if the game can still be enjoyable that way (although I think we don't even know if it's quite possible to play through it like that).

I've been playing 5-6 hours and still haven't beaten it (just got the FD, don't know how far that is).

I'm also enjoying it a lot, despite the crap story. So this is what Metroid & Castlevania games are like? Maybe I should play one of them someday.

I'm totally incapable of scheduling. And planning.

Thanks! I'll give that a try. Oh, and I forgot: thanks for the offer to help, Toblix. (edit: it worked!! Thanks, Nevsky)

I think I can only use UK points (since that's where I lied I was from), but I'm not sure. But actually, I was thinking of maybe going to the UK for a week or so anyway next week, so I might buy them myself.

I fucking hate the shitbox right now and the microsoft cockmongers. Let me explain: I live in a stupid country called Estonia which has about 1M people, and maybe 1000 XBox live users... So MS doesn't bother with us. We have to pretend we're from Finland or UK or some other country so we can use XBox Live. But MS only accepts credit cards that are from the same country that you say you are from so my options for buying something on XBL are: 1) buy the physical points, help the world consume more plastic. Except that the local stores only occasionally have them (and right now is not one of those times) 2) buy them online. yeah right, here's what game.co.uk tells me: Unfortunately we are unable to ship orders weighing over 1kg (e.g. most hardware) overseas - please either select UK delivery, or delete hardware from your basket to enable an overseas delivery. You fucking pieces of shit! MS Points, a currency more virtual than the already pretty much virtual real money, is now HARDWARE and weighs over 1kg? 3) have somebody in UK buy them for me (any volunteers? though I'm not sure how I would transfer money to you) 4) buy it from the grey market

What the world actually needs is not mini-ninjas that can fit in a cello case, but GIANT NINJAS whose disguises enable them to blend in with skyscrapers!

I think The Witcher is one of the better examples of an interesting morality system. Few of the decisions are ever on the good/bad scale, it's more like choosing the lesser evil among two, or the evil more suitable to you. The game never really judges you, but there are two main factions and you can only be good friends with one of them. But this only affects part of the game, the story is still mostly the same. One of the stupidest examples of morality systems was Deus Ex 2 I think, which had you working for all warring factions and they never got pissed off with you (as far as I remember).

My bet's on Flash.

Sorry I may have missed the "at least" part.

I used to write a bit, including poetry. But that was so long ago. I've dabbled in photography a bit but not seriously at all. This is probably my best shot: http://www.flickr.com/photos/47129281@N00/32913991/ As a kid I used to design board games (and completed them!) and during highschool & uni I worked on maybe 10-15 different computer game projects over time but completed none of them (except for two which were too basic to release). Right now I'm working on a simple 2D game (Orbitum, posted about it here earlier this year) that I'm pretty sure I'll finish (but this year the situation at day job kind of intervened with development) and also a game engine/library, programmed in Scala. I'm starting to think that maybe I'm obsessed with Scala and actually should be doing stuff in C++ to be able to potentially get the game on more platforms, but I just don't like to work in that language. Also, for some weird reason I don't like Flash, although my game might work well as a browser game. Also, most currently I'm working on some low-level Scala compiler optimizations for part of the game engine which might (or might not) end up giving the best performance/code-readability ratio for 2D vector math on the Java platform (and I'll probably add 3D later). But I'm really messing with something I know almost nothing about (compilers) so it has already eaten more time than I planned for and still needs work. I have some other programming projects too (like Ziggy) but I'm letting go of some of the non game related stuff to focus more on making games (except that I have this somewhat good non-game product idea that might let me start working for myself if it works out, but it requires lots of time to develop). Beyond that I hope that once I have finished my first game or get rich with selling that product I'll somehow find a way to do games as an indie and make some money off that or get a job at a game developer (as a game-play or tool or engine programmer, except I don't really grok any of the complex 3D engine stuff).

That was hilarious.

Wow, that movie on GiantBomb got me a lot more interested in it. And it's out in 2 days? Awesome!

Yeah, but we're talking quantum/bilogical computers. They are in their infancy and there's years and years of research to be done there probably before they become mainstream. But sure, that kind of lighting might be doable in real time in 10 years.

These vignettes look more interesting to me than the gameplay shown so far: http://www.gametrailers.com/game/mini-ninjas/10730 But I guess we'll see how it plays this week as a demo is coming.

A decade is very optimistic, I think.

I haven't actually played the previous ones. Generally don't play strategy games much at all, unless there seems something really unique/interesting about it. I've been playing this a lot. Still building the city for the second scenario (4000 noblemen, need 1000 more then it's done). I'm finding I have to move production lines to other islands as I build more houses. The problem is that certain plants can only be cultivated on some really small islands with little space. It's getting harder and harder to satisfy the needs of the population. I guess that's how it's supposed to be near the end of a single game, but I wish this inventory tetris with placing fields didn't exist because it's making the game play a lot slower than necessary. Also, the game doesn't show as much numbers/stats as I would like. Some summarizing stats screens would have been nice. As it is, I have to monitor all these different places to keep things efficient. I ended up always keeping the browser open while playing with a document about the production/consumption rates of various buildings. I read on some forum that some people even go as far as breaking roads to keep the carts moving as efficiently as possible.

For some reason this multiplayer thing didn't make me any more excited about the game. I never played Pikmin and didn't like Sacrifice (from the little I played, probably the demo only).