Erkki

I want to make sure that I post in all The Swapper threads, lest the universe get to an inconsistent state.

*Bump* (sorry, I never do this usually)

Now there's only room for one more The Swapper thread until someone deletes the other two.

I hope this time there will be an Ulukai shirt I can buy. Also, this is the most unexpected video game news of the decade, probably. I'm thrilled!

I pre-ordered this after playing the demo. Again, found via RPS, and here's their WIT . Unfortunately, it's downloading at mind-numbingly slow pace. In several hours, 200MB out of 3.5 GB. I'm thinking of getting one of those download managers (used to have GetRight back in the day)... are they still useful? I thought browsers had the same resume functionality these days, but firefox doesn't manage to do it with this download (maybe the server sucks).

So I'm playing the sequel now (Critter Chronicles) and am somewhat disappointed. It has some of the original's charm, but the puzzles are so dumb up to the point where I'm at. Most of the time, I solved parts of puzzles before I had any reason to solve them. As a rule, you seem to get the items you need before you need them. One puzzle can be solved only after you've examined an item in the inventory (had to look this up in walkthrough), while most of the time there is no reason to do that at all. In a few cases, you need to do the same thing repeatedly before it leads to a successful outcome, proving to the game that you are insane (according to the "definition of insanity"). The number of combinations you have available is limited most of the time, because hotspots that don't prove to be relevant usually disappear after a few examinations (sometimes one, sometimes a couple, sometimes 3, sometimes more it seems) -- it's as if the design foresees that "combine everything" is a more successful strategy than thinking and thus eliminated extraneous choices to combine.

By that I mean lets pool all the money of valve fans together, buy it and create the ultimate ARG. Then donate it to Valve when they announce HL3.

http://www.valve.com/ is for sale!

I hear people say this all the time, but it just isn't true. I admit I don't know the metaphysics of it well, but on several accounts I have witnessed ghost gnomes being carried by living people.

Inform 7 seemed pretty cool to me, but I've never made a text adventure game.

That's surely one of the best queen songs, but if you put me under pressure I would have to pick a different song as my favourite.

I've been playing the time trials a lot. Got 3 stars on almost all except cranes 2 and shard one. Those will surrender too, eventually. It takes time though. Maybe a couple of hours for some levels to get to the point of getting 3 stars. I hope the sequel still has some kind of time trials. Also, I wonder whether this would be good with the Oculus Rift, or maybe it would be very disorienting.

Hmm... yeah. Although in Thief it was similar -- most places you'd want to get up were stone and sometimes a special wooden thing would be placed for rope arrow fun. Still, that was way more systemic-like than special anchor points.

Damn, 10 minutes later I went and did exactly that. Misjudged the distance.

I agree up to a point, but I usually seem to catch some form of common cold right after I've been too careless in Winter, or having too much air conditioning blow in my face for a long time.

Doors are simple. I'm getting a deja vu thoug, wasn't this discussed recently? Don't go out of your way to open doors for people Open if they have hands full or otherwise difficulties or just if you think you would need a fraction of the effort they would to open it (e.g. don't go out of your way) If they don't like it, that's their problem Don't hold a door open if the other person is too far -- they might feel the need to hurry or to tell you that they're not gonna hurry -- it is usually awkward If suddenly 50 people appear, they can fuck off I think that about covers it. Depending on your mood you may ignore some of these rules.

I'm guessing you don't want something to be googleable or something of that variety? But if the posts stay then deleting the account doesn't help likely.

What I do is have a pulse watch (that also functions as speedometer) and try to keep my pulse lowish (130-140) for a more relaxed ride or 150+ for a speedier ride.

Which shot? Oh you mean the training. I think that didn't count. I did accidentally fire a shot when I had just disarmed a guy later in the game, though. PS I think I had it somewhat wrong about what bothers me about the 2nd level qualifier times -- actually it is that the 2-star one demands a certain amount of perfection, as well as knowledge of shortcuts. It would be fine if the 2nd level was more lax and allowed a few mistakes, but required you to know some shortcuts. Then the 3-star one would be left for perfecting your run. Also it's incredible how much variety to the movement and momentum I discover (or remember, since I played on Xbox) only during the time trials and not during the story mode.

So I replayed Mirror's Edge (maybe for the first time on PC) and for the first time I managed to do it without firing a shot and then there's no achievement Anyway, perhaps time trials are the meat of this game rather than the main story. It's fun to do them, but I think the two-stars qualifier times are a bit evilly balanced -- mostly it took me a few attempts to get a 1-star rating. And then followed by tens of attempts to get 2-star (possibly spending an hour or so honing my moves) and often you are then set just making minor improvements to get the 3-star rating, as 2-star already includes the "big secret shortcut" of the level (like in the first time trial level) The lack of unqualified ghost is also not understood as you might spend several runs on some harder levels before you qualify

Thanks for linking that, those were a good read! Interesting what a simple generic resource system could achieve. Of course, seems they never proved that it would work well, and admitted the problem of unseen causality. Has anyone who worked on the Stalker ALife systems written about them?

Looking for recommendations for what cool things to do in SF or nearby. Vague plans so far: * Yosemite * Muir woods * Subbes' something-0 + 1 month birthday? * hang around in the city of SF a day or two * eat a lot of sushi * maybe visit Napa Valley * maybe visit Standford or Berkeley campus (I forgot which one of those someone recommended to me) * maybe visit Alcatraz * maybe visit relatives near SF My free time there falls between 19th and 27th July.

My next console might be a Mac Pro. It's almost a PC, looks so much better than the consoles (although I hope people won't confuse it with a trash can), and I can just run Steam big screen mode or something and hopefully connect some kind of controller.

Another interesting FP game on Greenlight (and had a kickstarter apparently). This is really interesting - a horror game from the perspective of a two-year-old. Also, making a whole thread for this made me think whether we should have a thread where we post links/descriptions to interesting but less known game Greenlights/Kickstarters/indiegogos/whatevers, like the Indie Compendium one -- kind of an Idle Forums curated crowdfunding. What do you think?

Bought this from the flash sale, quite fun so far. Seems to be somewhere between Super Meat Boy and Cargo: Quest for the Gravity in terms of wackiness.