Nachimir

A few of the hard levels actually made me gnaw on the controller today, but I managed them... I also spotted something funny: Where there are usually signs with diagrams and arrows showing what you should do with the bike on new obstacles, Dynamic Range has a couple that show someone flying off a cliff and a crossed pair of fingers (they whizz by at 2:43 in that video - not by me) I eventually managed gold on that level with no faults. Still haven't taken any video, but the same guy who posted the one above also made this one of a really impressive platinum run. Didn't realise you could hop the balls like that

Rather improbably, the game only ever crashed twice on my PoS outdated gaming rig, perhaps because I had some settings right down. I absolutely loved the harshness of this game, because I only ever felt it was punishing me for bad decision making, poor foresight and lack of observation. Successfully hunting snorks in Yantar was also quite satisfying, as were some of its narrative quirks. Amnesia is a really big cliche, but they used it nicely at some points, especially in

Not a subscription, but Edmund McMillen sells the past 10 years of his work on a CD for $10. It's called "This Is A Cry For Help".

I really enjoy games that keep on ramping up the difficulty instead of holding your hand, so I'd like to collect a list of them. There's something incredibly fulfilling about banging your head on a level repeatedly, then finally finding something clicks and you can do it. The build up of tension and adrenaline as you're getting close can be magnificent too It's not the same as just having a very hard mode above the normal difficulties; I mean games that actually deny you progress with harder difficulties and offer you no easier alternative. Today I'm finding the medium levels on Trials HD are a *lot* harder to get gold on than the earlier ones. Some of the achievements in it are actually meaningful too, for instance completing a particular map without changing the rider position. Previously, I've found similar spikes in difficulty with Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! (especially the last level) and it's sequel, and Wipeout HD is one of my favorites for this kind of thing too. I worked on a project last year with a guy who was a producer on Wipeout (and 2097 too, I think), and he said he used to argue with the development team all the time, asking them to make it easier, but they insisted on keeping the harder, later difficulties in What other games are there that do this kind of thing to the player?

:0 That's both shocking and hilarious.

Congrats again Scrobbs, and Wrestle: Gutted A *lot* of people I know have had cards cloned this year :/ Woo: I run a half marathon on Sunday. There's nothing quite like being on closed roads, running to music surrounded by thousands of other runners. Meh: I've managed virtually no training and missed the last week of it due to a headcold. Bah: It's going to be 18 Celsius already when the starting pistol goes at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning. I think I'll be lucky to beat last year's time of 1:55, let alone the 1:45 I was aiming for :/

It usually takes me less than an hour to nail a level at the moment. I think I might video the next one to show edited fuckups followed by a 0 faults run and how long it took me in total.

So he got to it first and repeatedly spawnkilled you all? Magnificent!

What on earth happened there? I jumped over a wall at the start and almost immediately got a car, and couldn't believe your kill count at the end.

Ok, a few tips: The moving markers you get for friends that are close to you on the score table help you to see when you can do part of a course faster or not. You'll probably find that with a bit of repetition, you can nail the beginning of the course as fast as if not faster than the people in your top 6 or so. From there, you have scope to see how you're doing with the rest of it in comparison to others. Also, the score tables egg you on in showing that things are at least possible. Akumifune and Scrobbs have both been kicking my ass on some tracks, and I know a student who also seems to be way better at it than me. Their markers come up when I'm doing well, so I can learn what pace I should be managing from them. Gaining and maintaining momentum is all about keeping your back wheel down. Back wheel = traction = speed, but like a real trials bike, it also has an immense amount of torque and will throw you straight off the back if you're not careful (especially with the Scorpion - not unlocked any more powerful bikes yet, but you don't need this one until you get to the hard levels). By the mid point of the game, you'll be tending to shift your weight forward a lot more than you have to shift it back. If you come to a standstill on a steep incline, plant the wheels, rev the bike a little, then increase the frequency of the revving until you start to climb (Shifting weight forward at or before that point will just lift your back wheel and cause you to fall/roll backwards on the front one). After a bit of revving, you'll have just the little bit of upward momentum you need to open up on the throttle and simultaneously throw your weight forwards into the ramp. When landing, try to keep the bike parallel to the surface you're landing on, this will minimise bounce and let you put as much power down through the back wheel as possible. Having the back wheel touch just a little bit before the front is good too. If you do bounce, trying to correct it by shifting your weight after it's started is deadly, as it's liable to just rock you from one wheel to the other until you overcompensate and crash. The best way if it does happen is to let off the throttle and tweak the rider position just a little at a time until the bike settles down. At the top of little up-and-back-down-the-other-side ramps, shifting weight forward at the apex of a tiny jump is also a nifty trick for getting your back wheel over the top quickly and economically. When you get it just right, the engine block hovers just above the apex of the ramp, the bike more or less pivots around it, the front wheel makes contact with the other side and you roll out of it. Too slow and the engine block lands on the apex of the ramp, and you're fucked If your engine block is lifting up very far above the top of hills/jumps, or you're having to land on the back wheel, that's pretty inefficient and likely to make you crash more frequently. The exception to that is when you're going so fast your speed will let you fly over or at least up the next one too (Finding a fast route through the level called Container Rush depends a lot on finding which jumps you can skip through speed, and hitting the ones you can't just right on the run into them). It's about a compromise between traction and air. For instance, the tracks in the very first tournament are all quite gentle and undulating. If you slow down enough to not jump off all those hills, you'll get a shit time; the extra speed you get by not jumping doesn't come anywhere near making up for the amount of velocity you're dumping into your brakes to stay on the ground. When a course is that gentle it's best to keep the throttle wide open and concentrate on landing well to get more traction in the time you are on the ground. A lot of the courses have a mix of these kind of compromises - there are sections you should absolutely nail through, and others you should treat more technically and take your time on. Getting lots of air on steeper jumps looks good, lets you practice landings and also lets you do somersaults, but you don't get rewarded for any of that, just the speed with which you can negotiate the course. Hitting a steep ramp at the right speed to send you into the next section of the course is way more important than just hitting it fast.

You probably already know my opinion on Trials HD Not messed with the level editor yet, I take it that it's easy to work with given the interface is a pad?

I approve of this cartoon

I suppose there's something subjective to it. One person's perfectly difficult game might be another's most hated. A part of it also seems to be that the games are harsh, but fair. If you can perform awesomely, the games allow you to rather than just randomly punishing you to increase difficulty. Trials HD definitely gives me an emotional peak that I've only found with the Ouendan and Wipeout series before; loading it up for a quick session, I know I'm probably only going to nail one level really well, if that. There are design choices that influence it too. For instance, if there wasn't an instant restart button in Trials I probably would have played it for half an hour and never looked back. Oh man. This does not bode well for the rest of September

As far as I can tell, plasma screens handle upscaling SD images better than LCD TVs, but still. DVDs look like they've had a watercolour filter applied to every frame. CGI in adverts can also become super obvious

elmuerte to learn E-Prime plx.

Yes, that's exactly it. I would say it gets frustrating, but it's a particular kind of it. It's a joyful frustration that dangles competence just out of reach, but only for short periods of time and you can feel yourself progressing through it. Braid (While one of my favorite games), and puzzles with time attack modes don't do this for me. A lot of other games feel like they're feeding me a load of regurgitated pap by the end, they're repetitious and never really ramp up much at all. I suppose building difficulty like this makes story more accessible... I suppose if you take this (much beloved by game designers): and build a difficulty curve that steepens enough as it progresses, everyone will find an optimum? Perhaps this only works for games that have no story (Trials) or are at least light on it (Ouendan). (Edit: Csikszentmihalyi talked about flow using real world situations, in which case "anxiety" is probably the right term, however, with games the stakes are not generally real, so "frustration" seems more appropriate). Edit edit: n0wak, I love that

Wow Tanukitsune, I hadn't heard of these as a named thing before. is a really weird thing to look back on, partly because of what the film did for CGI: I consider that and 8 bit consoles to have such a gulf, between them, when in fact they were still around at the same time. There's also the way it's been translated into 8bit, there are so many little things it picked up because that's what games were at the time: Sounds that could have been cribbed from Megaman, not just in what the SFX are, but the way it uses them, plus the really perfunctory treatment of story (Worth skipping to just before the boss battle at the end). Ah, total bollocks. They're a means of cultural preservation, as well as a way of looking at things you didn't own, never saw, and which would be hassle to get running nowadays. Besides, my brother and I used to spend time watching each other play games, and I knew a lot of people who did the same as kids. Even now, with a shared house, we sometimes watch for a while.

I did really enjoy TUT and the Thief games, but this just seems... better in some ways Oh man. Do I have cravings for EXTREME™ Thief?

I'm honestly not sure how it would balance up in Thief - it was something we tried with multiplayer Thief mod Thievery UT and never quite managed. I think it's partly character: Garrett just doesn't have the agility that you do in Arkham Asylum, and that agility makes sneaking incredibly badass when compared to hiding somewhere and then tiptoeing out to hit someone on the head.

It's really rare for a demo to leave me craving more, also rare for me to buy boxed games, but I'm buying this tomorrow. Hunting groups of people from gargoyles is fun. The game design does something the Thief games didn't quite manage, but which I always wanted from them. The mix of weakness in the face of direct conflict coupled with absolute sneaky badassery was the hairiest, most see-sawing aspect of the game balance in Thievery UT, and we tried all sorts of things to get it right. I think Arkham Asylum might have it Edit: Scrobbs, that's hilarious

Sure, I expect and want this. If there's ever a day when I can paint something that emits RGB light on a wall and it forms an ad-hoc address space to turn itself into a usable display, that will be a happy one. I think passing this threshold of detail in living room based screens was an important change though, one I didn't understand at all by marketing for it, but by seeing it and discussion among other reasonably technical people. People seem to either not understand it and consequently not be bothered, or not understand it and get it anyway because they think it's probably good so they can show off I did know someone with a 360 and an HDTV, who was using it with the switch on the component lead set to SD. He was pretty surprised when I changed that and he saw the difference, and for some reason thought he'd already been playing in HD

Yes, I'm in a shared house with one of each major console and a HD TV. I felt very, very cynical about HD until I moved in and saw bluray films running on a housemate's 37" screen, and shortly after he found a dirt cheap but excellent ex display plasma on ebay for the living room. A previous thread on HD here also helped me to understand that this isn't just a step change that manufacturers can repeat ad infinitum, but that HD standards mean we're at a point where, depending on screen size and distance, we can put more detail through a screen than the eye can perceive. Anyone that doesn't understand HD should be made to play Dead Rising on a giant, standard def TV

It sounds like it's speaking in tongues. It is clearly of the Devil ¬¬

It just seemed a bit dull to me. I think it might be a genre thing, a friend tried to get me to play a Castlevania game on GBA a few years back, and that didn't grab me either.

I quite enjoyed Timequake by him, though I think Slaughterhouse 5 remains my favorite. The Sirens of Titan is pretty good too.