syntheticgerbil

I hate the art style of the characters. I hate when people use that style. That's all I have to add.

Thanks for the tip, I definitely need a fresh place to camp. We've been to a lot of places so far, so anything new that is supposed to be great helps.

So I'm moving into an actual house. It's a rental unfortunately that's also in a part of town that's somewhat worse than where I'm at (but it's Austin, there's really nothing comparable to Houston, where I was apparently living in an apartment which is currently the most violent area of the city as I found out). There's also tons of broken appliances and the house became a lower rate rental because it was "as is" and kind of grimy and dirty inside. There's also some roach issues with the German ones and lots of wasp nests everywhere outside. However the good news is we have a great property manager who has like 5 different repairmen visiting all of last week and this week to fix every broken thing, all on his expense, plus an exterminator is coming out soon even though my girlfriend has already laid out a bunch of traps. We have way too much space to the point where I don't know what to do with all of it plus the rent increase from the duplex we are in now is not too bad. It's also much closer to my work, less than half (I drive 50 miles everyday to work and back currently) and doing the math on the gas money saved almost makes the rate increase negligible. Plus lots of trees and far away enough from neighbors so that I don't have to have to deal with noise and bass anymore. I really need to do something special for my girlfriend. I feel really guilty because I've been in some idiotic crunch mode for the last four weeks of my mismanaged job and have hardly had any time to pack and move (we have a three week overlap with the two places so plenty of time). She's been taking on a lot of the move and readying the new place herself since she works 4 days a week. I really just wish I had more time to help her more and I'm really grateful for how helpful she's been with very little complaint. This is also coming off a three month thing that ended recently where I was working on an animation project with a hard deadline that was outside of my job, so I still had little time to spend with her. I have two vacation days left for the year to use... possibly a camping trip is in order.

Personally I hated Portable Ops. I'm still trying to force myself to get around to Portable Ops plus. The only thing good about Portable Ops was the story and the cutscenes. The game itself just consisted of boring massive levels with jack shit to do and all rounded out with useless hiding places and random item places. Even the bosses were very obnoxious hold-down-button-to-shoot-with-machine-gun half of the time, without any kind of strategy. The bosses also had a ridiculous amount of energy making you go through boring motions over and over again until they were dead (they weren't even particularly hard to kill). No MGS game I have played before had bosses with so much useless energy. I feel like Portable Ops is simply mediocre game or lower which I don't even think would be fixed even with better controls. However I greatly recommend Acid 2 as well. Brilliant game with some major depth and fun, despite the steep learning curve. I ended up collecting all cards and loved all the little touches and animations. I didn't have as much fun with Acid 1 and felt overwhelmed with 2 starting out where I left off but more complicated so I was sluggish to get very far in the start. If you keep going with 2 it's worth it.

I think it's more of an issue of developers not being aware in general than a cost and benefit thing. I certainly would have never considered some of the issues brought up by OJR. I've been on projects for web games in the past where text had to be added for blind kids as part of the government grant. The studio may have never even considered it were it not in the contract. Often adding little options like those can tend to be a collective 2 hours of people's work by just making a separate button the controls something that should be already scaleable, like the UI. I don't know what you'd do to solve motion control games where you don't have to sit so far away, especially since every motion control system right now tends to be super clunky, especially Kinect (where you have to stand the furthest away). God, those online codes are already bad enough as it is. I never understood the reason to print them so small, is it to prevent online code theft in some strange way? Why not have them big like credit card numbers since more often than not there's a large chunk of white space still around them anyway?

I always figured everyone used it as angry face and that it was only there to confuse people who did not have any intention of being mad. Has everyone actually been sad when using it from the beginning? I could have been misreading so many things!

Ahaha, I really didn't expect it to be a standard article. Someone must have just had a great time with that headline.

Gah, I hope they decide at some point what their brand is. Do they pay for all of the revisions and backtracking?

This was a good egotistical thread. Great times. I think I want to make one for my own soon.

I've met a dude or two through online. It's a weird thing where there's suddenly an awkward barrier even though you've been talking in chat with this person a lot. It kind of goes away after some meet ups. I also got a killer piece of contract work a couple of months ago because of a guy I met on the Sam and Max forums who referred me to some of his film buddies. Good things.

Yep, not animal tits at all: Also I sure love curvy hips on foxes.

This?

Is this what happened to the old people in Cocoon?

When I was younger I tried to make a couple of Klik and Play games. The way I did it is start with the intro, do all of the animations, and then create the title screen along with Level 1. So I'd get to the game part and then abandon it because I had no fucking clue what I was doing. Hope that was helpful.

My biggest issue with Gloria's Theatre is all of the hideous character models created for that setting. Ugh, the game is seriously ugly during that part.

Well the wasp is near cute for what it's worth.

Bees are the cutest! Must have pics when your hive is set up! DON'T FLAKE OUT!

Do you guys have to pay for the ambulance ride at all? Does that have anything to do with the hesitation?

Uplaywithyourself. I have a hard time not saying that out loud every time I load up Uplay.

Neat! It's back, thanks Tabacco! I would like that only because a few times in the past I have revealed spoilers only to forget what section I revealed, causing me to have to refresh the page.

Working for free on a fan remake for the worst LucasArts adventure ever?! Sign me up!

My girlfriend did that once. I took her to the ER like 20 minutes after since she was in so much pain. It cost $1,000 or so after insurance for them to do an X-ray and tell her the rib was not broken, give her a bottle of water, and sent her on her way with a prescription for Vicodin. She asked the doctor if she should get her chest wrapped up, and his response was, "I don't know, I guess, if you want." Great times!

I think you zoomed into the wrong section in the third picture.

No, he's an amazing writer. He filled Braid with vague walls of text that lead to no full story in particular. I really hate this stuff though. I think the most glaring issue in with the certification process with Microsoft and Sony is that it costs developers money to "publish" their patch because they need to employ testers each time to make sure the game is not messed up. However if that happened why can't this be handled through the developer's own support, skipping the QA, and releasing another patch if needed. Every platform should be like Steam, where developers have control over their product, not the publishers with the pocket book nor the fee holding developers back. At my job, where we make games live on the internet, I can easily fix art if I catch it, all on my own, making patches and bug fixes very smooth here among a company that is otherwise broken in process. Brutal Legend on PS3 is broken at about 80% where you can't finish the game unless you get to the point where the game will not reload and play until the end and never turn the console off or exiting the game. The was apparently caused by a patch that they prompt you to install when you start the game. Double Fine made yet another patch for this but EA refused to pay to publish a second one. Deathspank Thongs of Virtue suffered the same fate, also published by EA, where the Xbox and PS3 versions had a game stopping bug near the end where an item you need may not ever get dropped. Unfortunately EA would not publish the patch, leaving Hothead with some very angry customers. I remember they had a programmer assigned for weeks to fix PS3 save files that were sent to them. 360 owners were shit out of luck because you can't back up your saves on USB.

The funny thing is that this thread has had was more helpful responses (even though there are no answers) than any WebMD thread.