Noyb

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Posts posted by Noyb

  2. Posted

    Perhaps Bronstring Marek Bronstring is just wondering what all of the spoilered comments in this thread are referring to?

    This thread is getting way too meta.

  4. Posted

    Seems like a bunch of my Club Nintendo points are arbitrarily expiring this summer. Ten coins shy of the magic 800 number after a few years of saving up (and not picking up many Wii games).

    Are either of the Game & Watch carts worth picking up? I think the descriptions say there's only 3 games each on them, which is loads less than even the game boy color collections.

  5. Posted

    Speaking of

    , there was a second David Bowie pack for Rock Band out earlier this year. Wanted to belt out "Ziggy Stardust," so I picked it up without realizing that Harmonix had dropped backwards compatibility for their new DLC. Even though this track in particular has charts for all of the original instruments, I still can't play it in RB2. :fart:

    Looks like they also dropped Rock Band Network from RB2 during the transition. I can still play my old purchased RBN songs, but I can't see the RBN shop from within Rock Band 2.

    Not sure when all of this went into place, since I haven't played Rock Band in ages, but it still kinda sucks that they're either adding arbitrary restrictions in a clumsy attempt to upsell RB3, or that they just don't think it's worth the man-hours to roll the new chart parser into RB2 if it's a matter of a changed note chart format.

  8. Posted

    So, I spoke to Dan, and posting those games may happen at some point in the future.

    There were some others that never got finished or were along the same lines, but I'll stop there. I have to say, we could deffo do a developer's commentary or something, where we point out how these games led to the Zombie Cow stuff and how KnP is a really good tool for teaching yourself design instincts without having to learn how to code.

    Awesome stuff. I'd love to see an explanation of when/why you moved on from Clickteam products if this goes up. :tup:

    Noyb, couldn't get Fatty Rain or Trail to work. Got some error message about "This version of the file is not compatible with the version of Windows you're running. Check your computer's system information to see whether you need an x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher." Got Canabalt For Pink Daleks working, though...

    Do any of the KNP games on the Pirate Kart run? KNP games don't run on 64-bit systems. If you're running one, there's a guide on Glorious Trainwrecks. KNP games are also by nature open-source, so it's possible to open them up and run them in any of the later Clickteam apps.

    I did port The Trail to Flash using the TGF2->Newgrounds exporter. Works pretty well, although you need to manually convert all of the MIDIs you inevitably used to wav/MP3, and some behavior might be different (i.e. no climbing up the walls with the default platformer engine.

    Word of warning: some computers (including many of the FlashGameLicense staff reviewers' computers) experience a lot of slowdown with exported games. Didn't affect me (who has yet to earn a dime from amateur game design), but it threw a wrench in the monetary plans of a few developers.

  10. Posted

    Also in this playthrough almost all characters are dead or captured, can that even be avoided?

    For some, yes, but you practically need a strategy guide to know what to do.

    After making a series of unintuitive choices throughout the game, you get set on the path to a crazy hard secret level + boss leading to a third ending along with a bit more backstory. It is combinatorially unlikely that you will get this path correct if you guess, especially since some key decisions not only aren't clearly marked as choices, but have some unintuitive "correct" responses.

  13. Posted · Edited by Noyb

    The story mode in Dance Dance Revolution Universe 3 (the third xbox 360 one).

    Ugh, by now I would have thought obligatory tacked on story modes required to unlock songs in rhythm games would be so common as to not have any major design issues. But when retrying a challenge on failure requires at least seven button presses and three loading screens*, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Especially when the challenge in question is to hit a ten second streak of notes near-perfectly, while the notes disappear a beat or so before they hit the strike zone. Especially especially when a sample of the song plays on the loading screen, but is out of sync with the beat of the song when it starts playing, meaning I'm on a completely different rhythm than I need to be for a challenge that fails me if I'm off by a fraction of a second for any single step.

    It also doesn't help that the game has an opaque -10 to +10 slider on the main menu (not any in-game menu, mind) to deal with input lag on HDTVs, but no real means to test out what the appropriate number is besides trial and error in-game, complete with the now-expected loading delays between playing and menus.. :frusty:

    Makes me appreciate everything Harmonix has done for the genre more and more. Especially the open secret "unlock all songs" cheat present in all of their recent games, meaning you can just play the goddamn game without jumping through hoops.

    *I am not joking about these numbers. On failure it loads the map screen. You need to skip through about 2-3 lines of generic dialogue chiding you on your poor performance. Press A again to reaccept the challenge. Skip through about 2-3 lines of generic dialogue encouraging you. Then the challenge subscreen loads, where you must select the difficulty of the challenge. Then the song itself loads. Repeat ad nauseum.

    Edit: cheated my way through with a wired 360 controller (instead of the dance pad) and some stubborn effort in the training mode. No way I'm doing the other two difficulties where you need completely perfect timing with even less visual indicators, but at least it let me proceed. I feel so ashamed. :getmecoat

  14. Posted

    A big part of accessibility is recognizing that gamers, often through no fault of their own, have wildly different abilities and skill. You mention difficulty in terms of button inputs and timing. Some gamers are physically incapable of responding to rapid tests of reaction time. Some gamers are physically unable to interact with games that require more than one input button. Accessibility is all about getting gamers like these to be able to play your game, which does not mean dumbing down the game for others lucky enough to be more physically capable.

    Rob Fearon, creator of the Squid Yes Not So Octopus series of arena shmups had a lovely article on this: http://www.merseyremakes.co.uk/gibber/2009/10/entitlement/

    I’m sure you’ve read this in some form or another across many forums, comments sections, articles and debates. It might come in the form of “Games used to be hard, I grew up on them, that’s the way I like them and you cannot take that away from me”. It might come in the form of “They’ve already got their games, leave mine alone”, there’s a thousand variants that can all be boiled down to someone essentially shouting “what about me” at the world, always done in a manner that implies that they are absolutely entitled to hold the superior position here. It could be that they’ve been playing games for 20 years, it could be that they believe only hard or obtuse games are proper games and everything else is Wii-fodder but it always comes down to “What about me?” at the end of the day.

    Well, y’know, what about you? You guys, gals trotting this out – you’re not special y’know? More to the point, you’re not entitled to a bigger say than anyone else for an arbitrary reason. You’ve all got no more nor less right to be able to play games than anyone else. And that’s important, y’know? I’ve been playing games for over 25 years now and last time I looked I didn’t have a certificate of service that entitled me to have a bigger say in what games should be and if I did, I doubt it’d say “yeah, you can have games but no-one else can because you’re special. Love, The Gaming Police xxx :mwah:”.

    Game Accessibility is a great site to read for more about this subject: http://www.accessibility.nl/games/index.php?pagefile=home

    Can a game be somewhat difficulty AND accessible?

    Yes.

  15. Posted

    I agree, I think it's the best example of

    a disappointment

    in any recent game I think of. Having

    absolutely nothing

    at the end of the game was a big surprise, especially the bit where Levi the Hobo

    didn't even acknowledge your achievement

    . I can't wait for the everyone else here to discover

    the non-ending and feel as let down as us

    , especially when they see

    there's no final

    cut-scene. Of course, like you say, I think

    a small budget

    was probably responsible for all of these things.

    Does anyone know if Brutal Legend had the same type of ending?

    Just 100%ed it. Damn you all.

    (Also, Toblix is totally right about this thread. I thought these posts were in the original Stacking thread and was confused when they weren't.)

    Edit: I am fully aware of the irony of posting my support for Toblix's proposal in this thread instead of the meta-thread about this thread.

  16. Posted

    Finished it today. It was... definitely a video game. Totally charming in parts, but most of the time I felt like both the game and I as the player were just going through the motions.

    The achievements screen says something about "the Lost Hobo King adventure." Future DLC? :erm:

  19. Posted

    Read Gabriel Garcia Marquez' A Hundred Years of Solitude recently. Absolutely beautiful prose, and I can't remember the last time I read a book with this many characters in it that all felt like real, living human beings with stories to tell.

    (Why do I get this niggling memory that quotes are not what's used for novels? Damned 8th grade English.)

    Quotes are generally used for short stories and poems, like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Larger works typically go in Italics, like Love in the Time of Cholera.

  22. Posted

    Eased most of my fears about the story and character. It would be really refreshing if some of the player characters were legitimately physically disabled. You don't see that too often in games (Harman Smith from Killer 7 is the only one that comes to mind).

    Their marketing angle is a bit weird, since it seems to be addressing people who haven't been following the Tower Defense genre with an innovation that has already occurred multiple times over. I wouldn't consider myself a fan, but even I can name a few TD games which give you control over an avatar to attack enemies with: Lock's Quest (NDS), Immortal Defense (PC indie), Toy Soldiers (XBLA).

  25. Posted

    There was still some strong tension between storytelling and mechanics in RDR. Most notably, the dueling mechanics allows you to end duels non-violently by disarming the enemy (and shooting off his hat for style points). However, this feature is arbitrarily disabled without informing the player for several story-related duels. Similarly, you can lasso and hogtie enemies to dispatch of them nonviolently, but not all story-related enemies can be hogtied (

    At least one of your old gang could be, which was awesome, but not the norm

    ), and I think there were a few sections which wouldn't let the player continue without explicitly killing all enemies. Out of the blue in a cutscene, Marston also kills

    three Mexican rabble-rousers for trying to extort money out of him

    , which was quite dissonant with the way I was attempting to play. Still, the presence of non-violent means makes this dissonance loads better than the GTA games.