baconian

Nice post. And I love the pic, even if it is a kitchy Ad. I agree with everybody on this issue.

Phew I did a bit of work on my swimming pool last night but it's still there. Would it be out of the question to run a vanilla MC server without mods, as there is now whitelist functionality in the official release? Nether, sweet! Will check this out at some point tonight, when I get home pissed as a fart.

My first free time to mine in the Now Compliant MCidle server, and my free BTTF The GameTM Episode 1 eats up my game time with all of its gratuitous cut-scenes. Let's see if I can manage not to stay up until 5 am hacking pointlessly at an 8-bit texture.

I think there's still a certain resistance to this sort of idea in the industry. I worked on something like this a while ago for my thesis in college, and it's fascinating. You see elements of it slowly creeping into games though like in L4D's AI director and dare I say it - spore. It does sound like Bethesda will be more ambitious with their storytelling mechanics with Skyrim than with Oblivion. I'm optimistic.

Hi Yufster! Overclockers.co.uk are the best. http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=959&catid=1828 You can pay as much as you want on that site, but if you want to play games, I'd say don't spend less than 500 pounds. Overclockers put quality foremost, they don't sell shite.

In no particular order, I think all of these games are exceptional and deserve to be played regardless of your tastes. A relatively good year for games, although the shit is also piling up, if you want to take a peek. Limbo (finished) Red Dead Redemption (about halfway through it I think) Minecraft (I hate that I will never finish this damn crack...) Super Meat Boy (Never completed the last level of Rapture, as for some reason I have to drink hard liquor while playing this. It doesn't help) The Devil's Playhouse(finished. Astoundingly good. Jake's touch I believe has helped Telltale pull adventure games into this millenium. =) ) Deathspank(A fine and long awaited return for Messers Gilbert and Kauzlaric) The shit I will never play:

I'm only bumping this thread after I listened to Ron Gilbert's interview posted this week where he concedes that Ebert is most likely still spot on. I tentatively had a similar position in my head but didn't post about it here as as I assumed most gamers wouldn't. I'm relieved Kroms has pretty much the same position as me, IE: Games have the potential to be a great artform, but unfortunately they're still not there yet. I reckon they will asymptotically get closer to it, but there's something to the notion that interactivity itself introduces a 'toy-like' way of approaching a work that makes really substantial artistic expression a lot harder.

The Envelope - an unsigned local band, yes I know them, but I am only posting because I genuinely think they should be famous as hell. http://breakingtunes.com/theenvelope Edit: They're broken up...

thanks for asking! No.

I get the feeling notch prefers stuff like that to be in-game, so say you could make a world with portals to all your favorite servers or some shit I'd guess the interface for entering sign text would be a good template. biomes are pretty configurable with mods, and notch seems to be way more open to server mods, he said he's gonna add API support in beta I know just the man for the job! I didn't go near it. (edit: actually I did ride and enjoy it, I just didn't try and em improve it) Inspiration can come from the strangest places. All of the worlds are infinite practically.

So far, this reminds me of 'Lost in blue' a DS game that came out a few years ago. Great stuff, I hope they take some inspiration from it. If anyone's completed it, they'll know what I mean. It was basically a survive on an island game, you have to hunt and gather for food, craft tools to hunt and explore, and eventually once you have enough provisions and stuff you can trek to the other side of the island where you find ancient ruins with puzzles and a then team of baddies etc... I completed Legend after never finishing a tomb raider game before and I honestly don't care that I missed the rest of them, this reboot sounds possibly more interesting to me than the originals.

No-one's forcing you to play these games, you know. You can't seriously expect the last two to have no references to MI. Just to let you know, if you do play those two and then come back onto this forum and I see that you have bumped this thread to complain further, I will ruin your shit. Completely. I won't. I'm kidding. I like that you feel comfortable enough here to rant about things that get on your nerves, it makes me feel comfortable enough to troll your rant

Ah, It seems from his twits that notch is planning on making the portals in smp always transfer you to another server. Servers can run in nether mode, so you could in theory have a criss-crossing of portals across tons of different servers, including nether servers. This is really interesting to me from a design viewpoint as it effectively turns minecraft into a distributed massively multiplayer game, where you could theoretically bump into anyone of the 700k people+ who owns the game simply by traversing these portals. Minecraft makes my head explode.

yeah, I vote move the spawn and turn on monsters. Are portals and the nether working on the server? I built a portal and it didn't do anything. A portal and nether fortress to link two really far apart realms of thumb would be neat.

I like the frustration that all Tim Schafer games inevitably involve at some stage. You can't be a fan and still not get that, too?!? There's always a payoff, that's the thing. Team Meat have really honed the concept of banging your head against a wall down to utter perfection, but I love the sort of raw frustrating evil genius that I always feel playing every one of TS's games. EGs - stuck on MI2 for a month until CU amiga came out with a walkthrough back in the day. Monkey wrench!? gah! - Day of the tentacle; not so much one particular puzzle, but the head trip of getting how changing something hundreds of years ago makes a difference now was fucking amazing. It was never spelled out. Not spelling things out is one of Tim's game design gifts. - Meat circus. If you found it that hard, you probably didn't come back to it on reflection. The best platforming puzzles are like adventure game puzzles in that you can think about the best approach to them while waiting for the bus, and have an a-ha moment. In Brutal, this stuff is there too. The bravery of creating a brand new game genre and introducing the sort of intentional frustration I'm talking about is immense. This guy has more balls than anyone else in the industry. I hated the RTSy stuff at first, but I gave it a chance, I had to, and I ended up really enjoying it. The thing was, because the end of the game was shortened due to [...blah blah blah Kotick can eat shit...] you never got much reinforcement of the proper tactics to take in each stage battle. Each one seemed to require a new approach and figuring out new ways to use the units, all of which would have been more gradually and explicitly taught to the player if it were, say, Valve, publishing the game. I think that's the source of the frustration, but if you can get past that, and not turn it down to easy mode, the stage battle game has a lot of satisfaction on offer. Basically, I don't think it's fair to say that Schafer is all about writing and not design, I personally put him up there with Miyamoto regarding design, at least in terms of vision.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://timisgod.mixnmojo.com/ But they paid him to do Brutal Legend when Psychonauts was such a flop??!!? One word: Episodic!

I love the Telltale band. Would totally pay to see a gig. The music in this trailer and in season 3 of samnmax is so fucking groovy. Tell those cats to chill! chill the fuck out. Jazz. Great.

I said World of Goo. If you're getting back into gaming after a hiatus, you need something charming and that you will complete in a short enough time, to get you enthusing about clearing off the rest of your backlog. That or Puzzle Agent.

My client keeps crashing after I'm on your server for about 20 seconds. I'm not asking to be able to create stuff, I was just going to look around, but it's happened on a couple of PCs with my MC account, gruntin. It even happened using the web client. Anyone else seeing this? I can connect to other servers ok...

AArgh. I just got puzzle agent a couple of weeks ago...

This is probably what you're talking about: from http://www.joystiq.com/2008/09/25/joystiq-interview-blow-unravels-braid-in-post-mortem/ I don't see what's wrong with what he says here. My problem with the games media seeming to have a consensus that Blow is pretentious is that I'm sure he actually reacts to that in a more negative way than the 'GAMES ARE JUST SUPPOSED TO BE FUN crowd' bollox. I think guys like blow should be encouraged by the games media, not insulted. The concept that a piece of art (let's not get into it, please) cannot be completely defined with a couple of paragraphs may be displeasing to mainstream media in whatever form it may take, but unfortunately for them, it also happens to be true. What I think he's getting at in the above quote is the very reason for expressing any original idea in the medium most suited to it, as opposed to writing prose. This idea in itself is not entirely suited to being expressed in prose. Now THAT's pretentious...

Not to me. I just don't see it. He's got some unique ideas on how to approach games as a medium, but it's people who don't have the substance to back up their image that come across to me as pretentious. This.

I think I know, but I just don't agree. How is having your own point of view pretentious? Leave the poor guy alone!

William and Sly By: Kajenx Available: free In browser Synopsis: Atmospheric sound design, an aesthetic, relatable characters, and comfortable platforming exploration gameplay with some slightly vania map design More: About a year old but I don't think it was posted here (are images allowed in this thread? I'll post a thumbnail cause I don't know... this is one of the game author's pictures, and I have a thing for these little guys (even though I'm not gay))

I don't have ta twitter, but someone should really tweet this suggestion to Notch, because cable cars would be a truly epic feature, and judging by the physics he got into the arrows, I reckon it would be doable. And judging by his receptiveness to suggestions, we might actually get it! -- This is one of the most impressive things about Notch I reckon. He seems to have crystallized a number of theoretical and practical approaches to game development and design, (... ) to the point where his success was pretty much inevitable.