Noyb

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by Noyb

  1. GeoGuessr

    Pursued did the whole "figure out where you are after being plopped down into Google street view" thing back in February of this year. I had a very similar experience with both, but GeoGuessr is a lot cleaner. Clicking on a map is so much more intuitive than typing the name of a city (which may be mispelled, have regional variations) and gives good, analog feedback on how close your guess was. I also appreciate how much less stressful it is to play without a constantly ticking timer. The random starting locations also give it more longevity than Pursued's set of premade dev and user levels.
  2. Oculus rift

    Someone ported Salome, Increpare's first-person John the Baptist rolling head simulator to the Oculus Rift:
  3. thecatamites Writes Game Reviews Now

    Interview with thecatamites over at Gamejolt, in which he talks about his inspirations, creative process, and confirms that he deleted a1 reviews in a fit of self-loathing.
  4. Any (traditional) parades in games

    Final Fantasy VII has you infiltrate and march in a military parade disguised as one of the enemy soldiers:
  5. Notch makes the worlds oddest typing teacher?

    Yeah, Unity is great. (Although there's no browser plugin for Linux yet.) Tips: There's only one word per starting letter, so it supports a bit of memorization. You can also hit enter for more points depending on how many letters you've banked since the last time (up to 20?) 30 Flights of Loathing, Gurney and Let's Typing Some English are plenty odd as well, not to mention Typing of the Dead.
  6. Plug your shit

    Your review of Sugar Cubes is pretty rough. There's a lot of scattered facts, but not enough context or critical thought. I left the review without much understanding of the game. Harsh nitpicks below: You might want to link to the specific game page in addition to the developer's site. I have no idea what "flipped" means in terms of mechanics. Does a tile turn from solid to empty air and back? Is every level a front side and a not immediately visible back side? Do the tiles rotate in the plane of the game field? Does this lead to trial and error gameplay? What happens when the player returns to an already flipped tile? "Flipped" alone doesn't describe the mechanic enough for me to picture what the game's about. Do the standard platformer elements interact in any way with this central mechanic in different ways than other games? Is there a puzzle or level you thought stood out? "The developer, Turtle Cream, is of Korean origin. That’s cool! The game won IGF China in 2010! I’m learning things!" Why is the focus is on your personal reaction? Is it cool because the gaming press doesn't talk about Korean games often? Because you don't have much experience with art from that part of the world? Does their background influence the game's art style or design? "17 levels and a boss per world" - ambiguous wording. Are there 17 levels total or 17 per world? Hard to tell, since I don't have a sense of how long a level is. The furry joke sticks out, doesn't match the tone of the rest of the piece. If you mention you skipped the cutscenes, you should probably say why you did. Voice acting? Bad writing? Low expectations? You don't believe narrative is important for games in this genre? That paragraph doesn't say much of anything, feels like you only mention the story in passing because you're following an implicit checklist for what you think game reviews should cover. If the boss is a surprise, is it worth ruining that for potential players? How can you be sure its presence is justified or not if you admittedly skipped most of the cutscenes? What makes the boss grotesque? Animation? Sound design? Attack patterns? He doesn't look that bad in the screenshots. Why won't the game tax my brain? Is it a consequence of the game's puzzle mechanics or are they poorly used in the level design? It's not a valid assumption that all puzzle platformer fans like an emphasis of twitch skills over thinking skills.
  7. Crosswords

    Adding to your process, sometimes when I'm stuck I try to make guesses for the end of words based on the tense/plurality of the clue. Or fill in individual letters when I'm pretty sure the answer is one of a fixed set of possible answers like EON/ERA, TSAR/TZAR/CZAR. Or make educated guesses whether or not a square in a partial clue contains a vowel or consonant. I tend to look things up when I get stuck for too long. Sometimes I learn something new that helps out in future crosswords, like a common fill relating to an athlete or actor that happens to have a first last name composed of 3-5 common letters, most of which are vowels. Been doing the AV Club crosswords for a few years, which has recently broken off from from The Onion and are trying to make it as a separate entity called The American Values Club. Weirdly refreshing to be doing crosswords that are slightly more in tune with my brain, are allowed to use foul language and have open editorial bitterness seep into the descriptive clues.
  8. Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube?

    Peter Molydeux made this joke on April Fools Day.
  9. BioShock Infinite

    To steal a phrase from the podcast, the looting system in this game is some goofy shit. Nitpicking follows. Am I missing something or does Booker only take everything or nothing from a container (apart from ammo)? He always eats everything in the box I'm looting when all I want are the coins. Even when he's at full health. Even when the food is *rotten*. I get that one button streamlines looting, but the implementation constantly leads to these contrived situations where the player chooses to temporarily give up on some loot because he wants to save some food for later or avoid losing health from bad food, but can't trust the player character not to eat it. (minor details and mechanical spoilers from the first seven hours, building off mjukis' post)
  10. GDC 2013

    Caveat: I don't know what your pass covers and I haven't actually been to GDC before and this reflects mostly my personal interests 10:00am - Emily Short (author of tons of great story-focused games) or Doug Wilson (developer of JS Joust) 12:00pm - professional programmer's panel with Anna Kipnis (Double Fine programmer) and others 2:50 - Indie Game Postmortems at 2:50 (Anna Anthropy is a great speaker) 4:00pm - Breaking into the Game Biz, starring Jake Rodkin (Or The Experimental Gameplay Workshop from 2:30-4:30, if you're fine with missing the last two) And make sure to check out the IGF pavilion!
  11. Why right?

    The only game I can think of that has the player predominantly moving left is The Mushroom Engine, and that's because it's a platformer you play backwards chronologically (in the same way Retro/Grade is a backwards shmup).
  12. The Witness by Jonathan Blow

    Calling it right now: at least one major section of the Witness will be Slitherlink puzzles. Or at least a variant of Slitherlink with fixed start and end points.
  13. Retro video game music quiz

    And PS2 games are retro now?
  14. I completely forgot this Roger Rabbit adventure game existed. Most of the levels involve setting up Rube Goldberg machines to painfully shunt you to the next level, except the boring last one which just seems like a way to punish you for taking too much time.
  15. Proteus

    Played this for the first time last week. Simply magical! I'd be wary of the Kotaku comment effect, where troll comments that get a ton of rebuttals float up to the top as popular discussions, but the system only shows the original troll comment unless you explicitly click to view the thread.
  16. Tower of Heaven

    I beta tested the download version back in 2009! I like how thematically it's a thinly-veiled criticism of religious dogma, and how this theme gets reflected in the mechanics. The god figure keeps giving you arbitrary and unnatural rules as the game goes on, some of which are so onerous you need to figure out loopholes just to get around, all the while the level design taunts you with how easy everything would be if only you didn't have to obey.
  17. Super Mario 3D Land

    ahahaha! let's goooooo!
  18. They could have paired Passage with Bennett "QWOP" Foddy's Passage IV: Race to the Grave, or killed two birds with one stone and showed Passagebalt. (There's a surprising number of Passage parodies out there.)
  19. Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube?

    - Every cube is really a person. You monster. - Molyneux has secretly promised to donate a certain amount to charity for every layer remaining by the end of the year. You monster. - The cube is a Pandora's box in GODUS that will unleash some banal evil on that virtual world when opened. - When the cube is opened you receive a bill for the carbon footprint generated by the iDevices on which Curiosity was played and the servers that kept it running. - 22cans has discovered indisputable evidence that the world we know is part of a vast computer simulation. You are playing this simulation while playing Curiosity. The proof lies within the center of the cube.
  20. Why you so bad: Dialogue in Video Games

    It's a depressingly rare occurrence for game VAs to get any of their lines in advance of recording. Far too often you're hearing cold reads of poorly written material.
  21. Or an ARG. It might be an ARG. Has anyone called that phone number? There could be clues on it. One of the inventors will go "missing," a newly sentient OTON engine will be the prime suspect, and we'll all have to play its games in order to slowly uncover cryptic messages and high-def advertisements, just you wait. A game generating engine is about as useful as the restrictions set by the developers. If the base games aren't fun at the core, no amount of palette swapping, randomly shuffling around platform and enemy locations and slightly modifying physics parameters is going to help its longevity. Case in point: Game-O-Matic, a serious attempt by academics to build a system that generates games based on user-inputted relationship graphs, sprites, and text. Neat concept. It makes things like this: http://game-o-matic....p?code=13778669
  22. Thank you so much for the SOMI story. At times I wonder what it would be like to come at that game fresh. I shamelessly FAQ'd and UHS'd my way through that game as a kid, but loved every minute of my time in that world. Regarding the sheer number of games being made, even the IGF doesn't catch everything worthwhile. Conversations about the kinds of games and developers that the IGF might implicitly filter with its $100 fee and possible biases led to the IGF Pirate Kart, a collection of freeware games by 100 developers who thought they were worth sharing, but wouldn't necessarily fit with the IGF culture. Even further on that spectrum, I'm also working on an odd project right now called Zero Feedback, a blog that collects games that were posted by the developer on a development-focused forum, but received zero comments from anyone else on that forum. I'm up to ONE-HUNDRED AND FORTY games so far that meet that criteria, with my backlog showing no signs of slowing down. We already have run out of players.
  23. In that vein, I can't believe one of the last scenes of Halo 4 seriously had this dialogue exchange:
  24. Halo 4

    Ah, okay.