syntheticgerbil

Sounds good to me.

I approve of this. Uncharted 2 was fine, but it certainly didn't deserve to sweep all of those awards, nor Batman. Maybe award givers just really don't have the time to play many games? That's how it seems to me, as if they just had no idea what to play.

I can understand this and I can understand how portraying someone (male or female) as hypersexual the whole game. I'm not going to lie, sometimes I find gratuitous nudity, sex scenes, or sexy characters to be nice or artistic in media, and I don't think any of it should be off limits. But I think it should be within context and probably not made as a selling point. I guess it's like, I'm sure most guys aren't thinking of their girlfriends sexually all times of the day and find certain times when bedroom pandering and naughty stuff is fun, but it's demeaning to become the essence of the latter at all times. At least that's my understanding. So when games have women walking around in ridiculous outfits, I get confused and wonder if they had to do that, why couldn't they contain it somewhere in the game? Ah I lost my train of thought... I'm horrible at this topic. I'm caught between my own hormones, the importance of being able to depict human sexuality in art, and why it's bad when someone's sleazy or crass about it.

MAYBE HE SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN WALLHACKING IN PUBLIC! Seriously, I think people who do this shit over games are fucking nuts and are all probably sociopaths and probably shouldn't be trying to function in society without meds and a caretaker let alone just playing video games. So what's up with this guy? Did his game get erased? I'm confused. Is it just too hard? I mean we've all probably thrown a controller at some point. I do a lot of cursing when I die, sometimes to the point of hilarity, but I don't think in earshot anyone appreciates it. But crying and hitting walls in fits of anger and sorrow? Yikes. So what happens when one of these guys hit a wall or lose a save late in one of those 120 hour JRPGs?

I feel silly for automatically knowing you were referring to a zipper by saying "YKK."

Here's Sam and Max in the Glazed McGuffin affair. XpR-Misimgw THEY HAVE MORE THAN THREE!!!

256 digits would make me want to spend less. Having a bunch of goats around would make me want to spend more.

Yeah, I'm protected, I'm not held responsible for any of the money (at least a maximum of $50 according to fraud laws). It just makes me mad either way. I forgot what all of the movies were besides Son of Mask. They were basically all new releases from the summer of 2008, so I either saw them or wasn't interested in watching any of them. I actually found out about that particular fraud because the guy renting the Netflix videos for me also used the e-mail attached to my credit card account, in which I was promptly notified that my movies were being shipped to me. Considering I check my e-mail way more often than I do my credit card balance, this was really bizarre. I called Netflix soon after and explained what was going on and then had my Credit Card company cancel the number. Netflix instructed me to ship them back. Two weeks later, I received a threatening call from Netflix where the guy was telling me to send the eight movies back or I'd have to pay $20 for each of them. I told him I had already sent them back, but that he should be nice to me since there's no way for him to charge me the $20 per DVD as the credit card they have on file for me no longer works.

Hooray! Someone just now somehow stole my credit card number and decided to spend $800+ at Neiman Marcus! The shipping address the Neiman Marcus representatives gave me (which was not at all in Texas, where I live) was to a house in a developing neighborhood in Mcdonough, Georgia that no on lives at or has not been moved into yet if Google street Maps and Florida real estates have anything to go by. I've had this happen before, and I know I shouldn't have a credit card, but I'm not interested in fully paying it off yet, since it comes in handy when buying things overseas. Last time the person weirdly only spent $15 at emusic.com and then rented me 8 Netflix DVDs which were sent to me at my apartment complex. Anyways, enjoy your expensive shoes and handbag, you cunt!

He seems to finish lots of games, he's just better at documenting his rage quits than his satisfactions with endings. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I have wife envy! Happy Birthday Kingzjester!

So can you press X to Jason in the middle of the sex scene? It would be great to do during orgasm.

That's so mean... Also, I think I am sick of hearing the adverb "emotionally" now, especially in reference to video games.

Next time tell the post office you are going to customly rearrange their face if they charge you.

That settles it, then. To hell with Jason.

Crap, I was thinking by getting the 100 Jason achievement and getting the platinum medal, that I would have saved Jason, but this does not seem to be the case. Is Jason unsaveable? Maybe I should stop trying to buy the suit then?

I couldn't save Jason no matter how many times I hit X.

Haha, I screwed this up and didn't realize they were nice enough to round up until talking to a friend who preordered yesterday. So I bought another Wallace and Gromit episode to fill my 10 cents. One day I will have the last one. Anyways, what a nice company and I didn't even know it.

Yeah, that takes roughly double the time to finish as it does in game. If you count a second while watching a gameplay video, it's hard to see because things are moving around, but basically 4 feet forward get in for most, if not all characters I've seen so far. I'm counting even one second with Guybrush and LeChuck talking during gameplay and I'd say even people talking (especially in all of the different expressions in 2) are usually running at roughly 12 frames per second, I think. Maybe it would be easier for you to tell if you took a special animation of some character doing something still and comparing it to how it is in the game? I was looking at this video where there's a lot of stuff going on: If you put together the part where LeChuck stabs the voodoo doll from here at 6 fps, it will mostly likely end in double the ttime, assuming you pick a part where no frames are being held: http://sdb.drshnaps.com/objects/17/784/Sprite/MI2LeChuckSheet.png Also LeChuck's walk cycle is easier to see since he walks across the screen slower. So if you count 1 second while he moves between rooms in the video, you'll see he only gets about 2 (or slightly more) feet or arms forward per second since LeChuck's 6 frame walk cycle is basically him lunging himself forward once each time. He's walking half the speed of most of the other characters I've looked at, but at double the amount of frames per step. So you may want to check that out instead.

I was away for the weekend but happy later birthday Lobster!

Guh. I find it really stressful that this new study will be ignored either way and that the large music and movie corporations will still use strong arm tactics and government payoffs to get everything they want to fight for theoretical money they think is rightfully theirs. I mean, it is rightfully their money, but they are still always operating on the stupid assumption that because someone stole intellectual digital content, they wouldn't have done so if they had no access in the first place. Being a big bully and getting the government to allow a giant corporation to financially ruin or jail one individually for such petty things is no way to solve the problem either way. My personal feeling is that would just make more people want to steal from them and not care about their well being, since almost everyone seems to know the money doesn't really flow directly to the artist much anyway. One thing the major music companies for sure have never tried hard enough on is just drastically reducing their prices. I'm sure they would still make a profit if a music CD were generally $7 retail and DVDs maybe $11.

I think this pretty much sums up really well how I feel. Said much better too. I don't think they detract from the experience though, which kind of helps makes me not upset that I don't fully understand what's going on outside of the basics. I did think the weird epilogue level was sort of stupid and obscure though. Well I'm assuming Thunderpeel understood the themes and the bits related to the level. Those are pretty well spelled out. I got that he was referring to all of the details of the story, like http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/xbox360/file/943284/53842 This story guide goes into a lot of depth, but doesn't seem to find any answers to the further questions it tends to create. Ultimately, I was left feeling that Jonathan Blow didn't really have any clear direction or big reveal that it seemed to me that he was going for in the beginning texts of the game. I think it was intentional, but I don't like that intention, I guess. I agree with everything you have said here.

The squirrel/nut thing on Pyramid Pile-up, which is actually just one character, but I guess he's reused over and over. I haven't really been involved with much else on the Playnormous art or website though besides that. I like that game the best though, just because I find it a lot more addicting and user friendly than the other flash games, but I must admit I don't really play our games much. It was fun to do the simplified vector/cut-out paper method my art director (who did all of the GUI stuff and animation) wanted. I have a lot of concept sketches of weirder squirrel monsters that I should really upload somewhere one day.

I don't have anything to add to this thread since I haven't played Bioshock 2, but I just wanted to positive troll and say this image looks great! Are there more?

Well that's the thing nowadays, unless you are doing pixel art in it's native environment, resolution has almost become a moot point since almost everyone has the tools to work big and save out their animations small. I'm not saying the original Monkey Island art team did, because this article you linked to is fully correct, but I think it didn't impact the original team as much at the time since they still made more than enough frames for their animations. And for 1989 in video games, it was outstanding. My main point is that the I think the original team gave enough frames for a typical limited modern animation crew to work with in a video game at the highest possible resolution, but screwed it up completely by making bad poses and drawing badly. Maybe a lot of people are expecting the fluidity of something like Worms 2 and Armageddon? While that looks nice on a simple worm, it can be hard to achieve for much more complex characters, so I can understand when most people don't. Yes I agree fully. I was not at all happy with the animation poses created for the first SE, among other things. I was no champion of that game. I guess this is just my personal experience, but my thing is that I've seen enough animation with low frame count that moves wonderfully just by having great poses that fill in all of the blanks and knowing when to hold or reuse the key drawings at the right time, which is pretty much the cusp of traditional animation in the first place. I don't think this is a good analogy though. Animating in 3D and 2D are very different outside of making poses and keyframes, especially in a 3D video game where you are supposed to be allowed to see from any point of the camera at any time and make sure the characters look nice from all angles. The textures don't really impact the animation or the poses, no matter what resolution or polycount the final animation is output at, but it would certainly look nicer to have higher resolution textures no matter what. Look, I'm just going by the standard native environment that traditional style animators are taught and deal with, classically being 24 (film) and modernly being 30 fps (NTSC TV), so even if the game were running on 15 -18 fps like Jayel said, that's still the equivalent of a regular 2s animation on 30 fps, since again it's not often many people are animating on 1s, even constantly, unless they have a Disney budget. Again, refer to the sprite sheet. If you roughly count the timing on most of those animations, especially the special ones, none are working even close to 2 fps. It's impossible for me to know exactly what rate everything is running at without seeing some sort of timeline of exactly what frames are doubled up or reused. This is wrong. I think you didn't know what native fps you were working in, but I'm not sure. So you put the 6 frame walk cycle in? Even though I knew beforehand there was no way that Guybrush is performing 2 steps (the full 6 frame walk cycle) in one second, I went ahead and tested this in Flash. If I test the six available walk cycle frames displaying one time each, evenly spaced out at 5 repeated frames per sprite each in a 30 fps native environment, you get the walk cycle running at half speed or less than what it is in the game. Way too slow. My best guess without seeing how it's actually set up in the game and trying to recreate it myself is that it the loop repeats 2-2.5 times per second (I think it may be exactly 2 times), making the frame rate (for the walk at least) 12-15 fps. I can even make a swf for you if you want and send it to you. The lower frames per second you have, the slower your animation will perform. Again, almost nothing in Secret of Monkey Island is performing at 2 fps, if anything even is (I think even the guy that has 3 frames slowly rocking back and forth on the barrel that Buemba mentioned earlier is running even faster than that). I'll give you that it's possible many animations in the game are performing at 6 fps, but it's certainly not Guybrush's walk cycle or his special animations. And it's especially not LeChuck's death scene. If you were to put all of the frames for that animation running at a rate of 6 fps it would be ridiculously slow.