Erkki

Yes

Where does the 'dots' micro-meme come from?

Just played a 12+ hour session of Twilight Imperium. The game is quite good, liked it better than Civilization, but made a horrible mistake in the middle of the game so the last 5 or so hours was just hopeless

Turns out I only had the final boss level to do when I posted that. So that's my review of the game. Overall it's with a slight leaning towards . It's entirely possible that the first one just seems better because it was the original. At least this time there wasn't a ridiculous timing based end level, but the boss actually disappointed a bit in how easy it was.

Bought this after trying the demo and played a little. So in the tutorial this guy with a shotgun comes and starts shooting (ok, he talks a bit first). How's that supposed to be handled? I thought it was because I removed a barricade, then when I played again, barricaded everything (or so I thought) and he still appeared. Third time I made sure I really barricaded everything, including the downstair bathroom, and now he appeared outside and started yelling through the window (I thiink). But when I went out he was gone. Anyway, the interface is a bit shit, and the game suffers from Garbage Collection pauses so the code seems a bit shoddy too (I've never seen a GC pause in Minecraft, although it's also resource hungry and in Java). Also saw lots of NullPointerExceptions in the console window the game stupidly opens in the background. Looks promising, though.

I had either missed this originally or completely forgotten about it, until RPS put it near the very top of their Exciting Games of 2012 list Dead State is a zombie survival RPG and sounds awesome! The first zombie game I'm really looking forward to. In it, you are the leader of a group of survivors, so there will be politicking and such. Your group lives in a school turned into shelter, but you will have to leave it often and go hunting for resources. There are no defined enemy characters (besides the zombies) -- who end up as allies or enemies is pretty much up to you and the character AI. I don't think we've really seen an RPG like this. Maybe some aspects of King of Dragon Pass is the closest I can think of. Jagged Alliance was mentioned in the interview, but I haven't played that (yet).

I had forgotten about Project Zomboid. Is it alpha funding like Minecraft? Seems already available, but not quite finished?

Telltale gets a bonus point for ending the URL with /age_gate though

Just hit TellTale's age gate for walking dead. So nice that they remembered my choice in a cookie or something. EXCEPT THEY REMEMBERED THE WRONG CHOICE. I accidentally chose a wrong year and now I guess I'll have to close all my browser windows to see that content. But oh, wait, I have an Age of Decadence beta download in progress, guess I won't do that. So, bye Walking Dead.

So this is going to be yet another thing we'll need to kickstart.

Congrats! Just watched the videos as well. Wished Chris would have played Space Asshole anyway.

Yeah, Cyclades is good. Again, only played it once, but seemed like fun. The bidding part starts to get really interesting in the middle of the game.

My pet peeves about age gates not even remembering my age for the browser session not even remembering my age if I switch from SD to HD or vice versa asking for a DATE when all they need is an age (or year of birth) * ** not having January 1st selected by default when asking for date * I mean, do they think a 17 year old is not able to make that calculation? current year - 20 years or so and any fucking date ** Do they really need date precision: yesterday, you were 17 and not able to watch this, but congratulations, you are 18 today and just became a responsible and trustworthy person and we can now show you this trailer

I've played many a board game since I last posted here. I'll just pick 3 to recommend. No Thanks! (we call it No Mercy, because of the French translation) This a rather dumb game, but it's short and a good filler. Each player has a number of chits they start with, which give points at the end of the game. How many you have is secret (except in the beginning). Numbered cards are drawn from a deck. If you don't want the card, you put a chit on it. Why would you want it, they give negative points if you take them. But if you're out of chits you must pick it up. If you get a row (each number appears once), you only get negative points for the lowest card in the row. There are a couple of more rules, but that's the gist of it. At the end of the game, everyones cards + remaining chits will be summed up and the highest score wins (usually all are negative). Warning: It's only good as filler, though. Kingdom Builder should be great if you like Dominion, Carcassone, or something else which allows quite a bit of variety with simple rules. The simplicity still allows enough strategy and variation to be interesting. It's a game where each turn you place some settlements on a hex map, and how well you placed them will determine your score at the end of the game. You must place on the same terrain type that is on the card you draw each turn, and you must build next to your previous settlements if possible. This means there's some luck involved, but it doesn't really determine the winner. What kind of placements give you points is determined by drawing 3 goal cards (out of 10) at the beginning of the game. For example, you might get points for every settlement in your largest unbroken settlement area, or the longest horizontal row, or by connecting city hexes on the map. Games are short, about 30-45 minutes. So far I like it a lot, but I suspect it might get boring as the goal combinations start repeating (3 out of 10 goals = only 120 distinct combinations, and a lot of them probably seem quite similar). There is also some map variation, though, so that might help. Wiz-War is, as you might have guessed from the title, war between (four) Wizards, which is why I bring it up. I've only played it once (and won!) and don't know all the rules, but basically each player is a wizard in a maze. The maze is made of 4 sectors, each wizard's "home" is in the middle of one sector. You must steal treasures from other wizards or kill them. I won by stealing two treasures as two other players were trying to stop the fourth player from winning. Wizards cast spells obviously (by playing cards from hand, which can be replenished). I didn't see any Spectral Blades or Improved Spectral Blades, but I did manage to cast Featherweight just as a Fireball was about to hit me, and that meant I only moved further towards victory as it hit me, instead of taking damage. You can also rotate the maze sectors, destroy and create walls, and so on. I even ate a wall. It is fun! But not as simple rules as the previous two games. Games seem short, but the one we played was more than an hour. I'm told an expansion allows a sextet of Wizards to partake in the Wiz-War.

I guess the universe would implode.

Nice!

Yeah, after pledging a not inconsiderable amounts of dollars to Idle Thumbs and Double Fine, and some to Wasteland 2 and another indie game movie project, I think the best other potentially interesting projects can hope from me is $15 or so, if that.

Can I plug a single blog post? Probably not much interest to most of you, though -- it's about the Scala programming language. I think it turned out quite well (also because I had a good editor) http://zeroturnaround.com/blog/scala-sink-or-swim-part-1/

Visceral

I'm not near anywhere it is organized, and haven't done any game programming for a while. I love the concept though, and the name. I think it was Jake who came up with the latter?

Happy Birthday, Orvidos!

I played just a little bit. The coop thing is quite cool. I was amazed. At first when I noticed another player we were kind of each still dicking around on our own, but soon we were doing things together. I really love how they've done the multiplayer -- no names, no chat etc. But how do you communicate? Just one action, I guess you can use it to say "come this way" but what else can you say?

Glaybga! (id drunk)

Coming to iOS

Yeah, that would be great. I think Dead State, the upcoming zombie survival RPG is attempting something like that.