Noyb

Phaedrus' Street Crew
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    968

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Noyb

  1. Posted

    Awesome. :grin:

    49236,192,49192,49152,128,57368,0,49158,49152,48,49152,192,57344,5376,49236,40

    9744,4112,51200,4112,9728,4224,51216,4096,9730,2048,53264,2048,9760,4096,51216,4096

  2. Posted

    My main problem with The Marriage was that his metaphor was so simplistic that with a different title it would have a completely different meaning. I would argue that the title is outside of the rules of the game. Since growth/decay can model so many different interactions between individuals, creatures, entities, and concepts, the same ruleset could inform a great number of different metaphors depending on external information like the title, an artist's statement, and the graphical style.

    If The Marriage were called The War:

    The squares represent two warring civilizations. Their size represents their economic strength, and their opacity represents their willingness to fight. The circles are resources. Over time, a nation's economy collapses without an influx of new resources, and their will to fight also decreases. Your mouse is the hand of Fate, removing resources and compelling the nations to attack each other. Pink is a stronger military nation than Blue, so each fight ends up strengthening Pink and hurting Blue. After each fight, both nations see their will to fight reinvigorated. Once a nation either runs out of resources or loses the will to fight, the remainders of the two groups are assimilated, as in the final scene with tiny blues and pinks (individual people from each group) living in harmony.

    I also want to argue with this attitude that he is one of the first artists to use video games to convey a meaning through the rules, but I'm having trouble thinking of any earlier games off hand that are quite as abstracted as The Marriage. I am almost positive he isn't, although without a specific counter-example and with the barrier to programming games so low in recent years, I can't actually make that claim.

  4. Posted

    If you see any games you know that are short, tell me so I can tackle them first...

    Apart from Bikini Battle Babes (I think that's the first time I heard of someone actually getting that), the PC list overlaps my childhood so much. :grin:

    Bureaucracy is short, and has the added bonus of needing a strategy guide to beat in any sane timespan.

    Eric the Unready was one of the more straightforward Legend Entertainment adventure games.

    Gobliiins was short, although you need to abuse the save/load system so the guessing penalties don't sap your health.

    Metal Slug Advance should be short, so long as it gives you infinite lives like the Anthology collection. Each Metal Slug game is an hour of beautifully pixeled action.

    Rayman 2 is moderately long, but worth playing and not excessively challenging (though the rocket flying parts near the end might be annoying on a keyboard.

  7. Posted · Edited by Noyb

    I still have no idea how to unlock the secret rooms.

    I think that finding certain items before finding yourself in front of your grandmother's house unlocks the rooms.

    With Ruby...

    a knife I found lying in the woods, the man's two-headed teddy bear, and the car

    all had prominent rooms in the house to incredibly great effect, and the results screen said I unlocked all three rooms. Conversely, with another girl whose name I forgot, I found her traumatic incident after finding only one or two items. The end house was relatively straightforward, and I was more confused than creeped out since I barely knew the character.

    Ruby also had one of the most frightening moments I've had in the game, made possible by the combination of two design decisions. First, grandmother's house takes place from a first-person perspective, where every single button on the keyboard moves you forward along the path, and the mouse limits your view to a small radius. Second, to get a girl to interact with something, you leave the controls alone for a few seconds. There is no action button. You leave her alone, and she acts under her own accord. This really drives home the Little Red Riding Hood theme, since everything potentially terrible that happens to her isn't something you directly ordered her to do. It is an action that the character performs of her own free will, done simply because you did not say no, because you yourself did not take the action to stop it. Without giving too much away, something startled me enough to stop moving, then start moving again out of fear of what the girl might do with it.

    The girl had shown suicidal thoughts when wandering through the woods, and I physically fought with the controls to try and stop her from picking the knife up during her explorations. When I saw it pop up in the house, I stopped with shock. After a few seconds, the screen started to go dark, and I started mashing the keyboard to get her out of the room as fast as possible. One of the few moments of true fear instead of gut-wrenching foreboding I had in the game.

    I only played three characters of this so far, in two sittings. Doesn't seem like the type of game to power through all at once. Loving the atmosphere.

  10. Posted

    I vaguely remember hearing that it was a way to decrease the total number of credit card transactions, which means Microsoft can sell a larger quantity of micropayment items without losing a good chunk of profit each time. So it's a combination of elmuerte's theory of incentivizing small purchases and the framework to ensure maximum profit of those purchases.

  11. Posted

    Did anyone see the Indie Game Maker Rant? From the description, it sounded epic, including a dramatic reading of the script to Gears of War 2, a rant against the IGF including well-funded games, and an attempt by the creator of Crayon Physics to make a Ragdoll Peggle prototype in five minutes.

    Also, I published my first GDC piece a little while ago. It's concerning Tarsier's lost but not forgotten The City of Metronome.

    http://tinyurl.com/gdc09-metronome

    I hope you find it enjoyable to read.

    This news makes me very happy. :woohoo:

  15. Posted

    The demo for Retro/Grade is up on both Steam and the developer's website.

    UbT0NGtF6IA

    For those who haven't been following the podcast, the game is a hybrid shmup-rhythm game. You're a space pilot being sent back through time through his previous battles, forced to catch your bullets and dodge enemy bullets to the beat in order to preserve the space time continuum.

    My first impression was positive. It was surprisingly intuitive to split my brain to watch for my own bullets coming from the right and enemy bullets coming from the left. The combination of rhythm and shmup gameplay works.

    The first few difficulty levels are fairly unchallenging, and the repetitiveness of the calm synth music makes the levels seem to drag on, which isn't a good sign in a rhythm game. On higher difficulties, though, the gameplay was pretty hectic and I found myself hanging on to that repetition to ground myself in the level, since even simple beats get more complicated when they're spread across lanes while you're being shot at from both sides. The second level was very difficult on "leet", which bodes well for the final game's difficulty curve. At that point, the shmup controls began feeling clunky, although I'm not sure whether that speaks more to my poor shmup skills or to a guitar controller being more appropriate for the highest levels.

    The Sands of Time style rewind seems like a good fit. One of the more annoying parts in rhythm games is failing a good length of time into the song and having to repeat the entire easy introduction to reattempt the hard part. It is difficult to use in the middle of a song, since the later difficulties where you would actually need it do not offer many calm moments to resume playing.

  16. Posted

    I think this game has single-handedly restored all faith I had in Nintendo games.

    What's that? They're never bringing it outside of Japan? The only well-told story in Nintendo's recent lineup is too dark for their current family friendly market?

    Characters that actually die? A surprisingly tasteful look at the grieving process? Fairies with even more overtly questionable sexuality than Tingle?

    My faith has disappeared again.

    But seriously, play this. For a JRPG, it has surprisingly little grinding. Combat is only with enemies you physically touch, and weak enemies can be easily brushed aside while running. The enemy design is fantastically absurd, and the rhythm-based combo system keeps the fights engaging. Plus, it has dancing monkeys.

  17. Posted

    Sounds awesome. I was a little skeptical, especially after No More Heroes turned out to have more padding than Super Paper Mario, but learning that the guys who did the underrated God Hand are behind it piqued my interest.

  18. Posted

    The tutorial was insulting enough to put me in a bad mood as the demo started, which is a shame because the chase scene at the end was pretty fun (apart from trying to use the closed sun-roof showing a placeholder text instead of an animation). I got used to the different voice actor pretty quickly. Looking forward to this, although I'll probably wait until I have a chance to finally play the Strong Bad episodes first.

    The mechanics feel a lot less streamlined than the Sam and Max games. It doesn't seem like direct control adds anything to the game. Is this a result of developing with XBLA as a lead platform?

  24. Posted

    Ok, so: Gamer's Inferno

    In Gamer's Inferno you play a gamer called Dante. Who ... <insert some (stupid) reason here why he has to travel through the 9 layers of gamer hell>.

    We need to figure out a mapping from a bad game design element to a circle.

    Some game design elements I can think of that should be feature are:

    - quick time events

    - "bullet time"

    - yearly sequels

    - stories without closure (i.e. "to be continued" if we ever going to make a sequel)

    - horse armor like add-ons?

    - ...

    Dante Allard, head of multi-billion dollar Video game company Electric Poetry, is well known for his cruelty. Rushing unfinished games to market, pushing programmers past their limits during crunch time, stifling any creative ideas that could possible emerge under his reign. Driving home wasted from a night of debauchery while his employees work the night shift on Generic Clone 6, he crashes his expensive Ferrari, bought from the ill-earned profits of Generic Clone 5. But the story doesn't end there. Because Lucifer himself has played Dante's games. And Lucifer is not pleased.

    More possible circles:

    • Camera angles - the camera is always pointing the wrong way. character is never fully on screen at any one time.
    • Localization - "translation" of dialogue is so poor, you have no idea what to do
    • Unskippable cutscenes - 30 solid minutes of unskippable, non-interactive dialogue. Perhaps to be combined with bad writing and quick time events.
    • Sound design - music is a 10 second piece, looped ad infinitum. vocals and sound effects are necessary to progress, much softer than the music. No subtitles.
    • Fetch quests/padding
    • Invisible walls
    • Unneeded grittiness
    • Xtreme sidekick
    • Illogical puzzles
    • Condescending tutorial

  25. Posted

    http://blog.wired.com/games/2009/02/san-francisco-.html

    Wired had a hands-on preview of the game, revealing the plot and some mechanics.

    The plot is basically the myth of Orpheus. With a scythe instead of a lyre.

    EA's take still features Dante as the protagonist, but the poet-philosopher is now a hulking veteran of the Crusades. He returns home from war to find Beatrice, the subject of his love and admiration, murdered. When her soul is "kidnapped" by Lucifer himself, Dante dives down to the very depths of Hell, armed with Death's scythe, to win her back.

    Best yet is that the first enemies you encounter in purgatory are

    hordes of unbaptized demonic attack-babies (with blades for arms)

    :spiraldy: