Noyb

That sounds so idiotic on so many levels. Did the EA pricesetters not understand currency conversion? I thought the business model for Rock Band would be to get as many packages out there, and then nickel-and-dime the consumers with some of the most tolerable DLC around. I've been having fun with Rock Band, but nowhere near $350 fun. Have EA responded at all to the community backlash yet? Edit: Found this post on the Rock Band forums by one of the developers.: http://www.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42720

I didn't see your original post, but he doesn't seem that pretentious from this interview. I'm tending to think all the overanalysis is just an extension of the joke, since the game itself is supposed to be short and straightforward. As for the game itself, it was a short, cute joke. The ending song was pretty funny, although the lyrics got really repetitive.

But how will you be able to type with boxing gloves on? I'm suddenly imagining a Karoshi-like game based on the Teen Girl Squad, but a Sam and Max style game with Homestar characters could work. I am worried that the characters can't pull off an actual story arc, since they're usually funniest in the short emails, and even the longer cartoons don't last too long or have much sense of continuity. If anyone can do it right, though, it's Telltale. Anyone still visiting the site? I loved it back in the day, but fell out of the habit around the time of Thy Dungeonman 3. Oh, and they never finished the final level of Stinkoman 20X6, their surprisingly fun Megaman parody, though they mentioned it in their press release.

My guess is that a good number of them are used to the standard forums on the internet. The ones with so much needless antagonism, pointless crap, off-topic posts, and unsupported opinions that their minds have grown to filter everything out.

I played the XBLA demo, which was enough to tell me that if I were to buy the game, it would completely consume me for a while. So, like WoW, I choose not to get involved, for the sake of my friends, my work, and my sanity.

Download (524 kb, Windows) I was really bored last week, so I made an entry for The Independent Gaming Source's Video game Name Generator competition, where participants had to make a freeware game with a name randomly created by this site. The title I chose: Shameful Pachinko Romance. After about a week of work, it ended up being a game about forbidden love in a decaying pachinko parlour. If you find the goals are too vague, there's a full spoiler breakdown in the game's readme file, but I wanted to experiment with semi-symbolic feedback mechanisms. Anyway, hope you enjoy, or at the very least break out of your ennui. I'm interested in seeing what you think of the game and your interpretation of the meaning. Story: You never thought to find love in that old pachinko parlour. But that alluring stranger has been there every time. You haven't spoken of anything meaningful, but the sideways glances tell more than words. Friday night: the parlour is nearly empty. Your beloved takes a machine next to yours. Is tonight the night you work up the courage? Do you have the balls to announce your shameful love? Features: Hot pachinko action Shame-based difficulty levels Four characters 13 different endings - one unique good ending for each character combination, and one shared bad ending Balls Controls: Mouse-controlled. More details within game.

Thanks! By the way, there's a cheat for when you get tired of the gameplay proper and just want to see the other endings. Oh, and did anyone find the epilogue?

Telling your pokémon to perform tackle was never like that in the old games.

I don't think you're a true pokémaniac. True pokémaniacs know how to accent the name of their favorite game properly. However, you seem like a fine, upstanding fellow, and so I will help you obtain the rare pokémon you so politely seek. Mew: Hoho: I thought that just meant he really liked his Bonsly. Be sure not to take any rare candy from strangers, kids!

Glad you like it, and thanks for letting me know about the coverage. I don't read Kotaku that often, but...

Someone did: http://www.synthesiagame.com/ I don't have a MIDI keyboard, so I can't vouch for how it plays.

Yeah. That one was a little obscure, just because the description of the item's useful characteristics only appeared once, and not in subsequent descriptions. Hint: Hint 2: Solution:

It is a bit of a timing puzzle, but I don't remember it being that tight. I think you're probably trying to be a little too fancy with your portalage.

I tried it like that at first, but since the physics engine is deterministic, that means that you could have just found the one exact pixel that gives you 100s for the entire round if you monotonously click in rhythm without moving the mouse. Granted, it's still possible to find a sweet spot like that in this version, but forcing the player to go back to the center makes it more possible for the player to have interesting variety in his drops.

I'm glad you liked the writing. I had way too much fun with some of the endings. Can I ask what your favorite ending was? (in a spoiler tag, of course) I agree that the actual gameplay gets old rather quickly, and oh god, playing one ball at a time must have been painful. I probably started the player off with too many pachinko balls, but I also wanted it to take long enough for a first time player to experiment and figure out the goals by the end of the first session. Good to hear that the endings were worth replaying the game for despite all that.

Maybe it's a bit of a dry spell after an amazingly dense winter season, maybe we're all getting older, maybe we're just not looking in the right places for innovation. I for one absolutely loved the most recent Sam and Max episode, Chariot of the Dogs. I'm still not completely caught up with the winter's backlog, and I've been delving a bit into older games with my free time. I finally played through Super Metroid on the Wii VC (:tup:), and I finally see why it's such a classic. I'm also slowly working my way through the entertaining bizarreness of Killer 7. Plus, I haven't even touched Zak and Wiki, nor bought Professor Layton or Aquaria, all of which I was hyped about but haven't had the urge to get started on until I finish what I already have.

I liked it. Not as much as the original, but I personally felt it was much more charming than the horribly boring grind of Super Paper Mario, straightforward puzzles aside. I really liked how the enemy patterns kept changing as the game went on, keeping the combat always interesting as you played a 4-player single-switch minigame by yourself to do special attacks. And I have to give Nintendo props for creating a game where throwing younger versions of yourself into spiked pits and enemies is not only possible, but encouraged.

http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/03/video-guitar-he.html

Oh, god. I'm terrible at finishing making larger games. Hell, the only ones I've ever honestly completed were some short one-level arcade-style games, and my largest unfinished project (completed ~13 levels including cutscenes and boss fights before setting it aside) was a juvenile Mario parody I made in, erm, middle school.

I just saw No Country for Old Men... In a theater where the bass speakers reverbed like crazy, making it difficult to make out most of the low-pitched characters' dialogue, including Tommy Lee Jones.

Tim Schafer plays a sadistic Joystiq blogger's text adventure: http://www.joystiq.com/2008/03/07/return-to-quest-quiz-tim-schafer/ (There are other developers' solutions, but most chose to brush off the annoying journalist, and hence are nowhere near as funny.)

Up to level 3 until the daily bandwidth limit expired. Seems fun, but hopefully the writing will continue to make up for what seems to be dropping into grind territory already. I'm suspicious of anything that actively limits how much you can consume of it at a time, like my dislike of bubble tea. At the very least, I'm glad to finally figure out what's going on here. Edit: Okay, there have been some entertaining non-grind quests.

I created a set of five consecutive minigames based on this topic at the Idle Forums. It was made in Multimedia Fusion 2 over the course of about a month (with lots of downtime), and is intended as part of a future collaborative game at The Daily Click, each level based on a forum topic. All minigames are played using only the arrow keys and shift. Download: http://realnoyb.googlepages.com/tehforumgame (1.0 mb)

Not rude at all. It strokes my ego whenever someone actually shows an interest in what I create. Just the level based on Idle Forums: http://realnoyb.googlepages.com/tehforumgame The whole game: http://www.jonnycomics.com/games.htm

We still have them precisely because they become annoying only later in life. If they were a problem in the early teens, evolution would have selected against wisdom teeth early on as hindering reproduction. But since they happen after people are able to reproduce, and modern medicine is able to easily take care of them, there's no selective pressure to get rid of those genes. Or at least that's what I'd guess from an evolutionary standpoint. Wiki says they were useful when tooth loss was common, but remained in the gene code long after selective pressures shrank human jaws. I had mine removed a little while ago with no ill effects, and spent about a day recovering while playing video games. Worse though was when my orthodontist decided to anchor my braces to a baby molar, which became impacted, trying to root itself in the gums while the adult molar was coming out. Not fun.