Noyb

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Noyb

  1. Posted

    Gone are the days of the booming caterpillar market on the auction house. It costs either ~120 energy or 400 credits to get a butterfly egg. When less people knew animal husbandry, caterpillars could go for up to 800 credits. They've dropped down to under 500. Barely a profit in terms of credits or energy. Now I don't know how to efficiently make money anymore. #firstworldproblems

    I also don't know what's best to donate to shrines. Been doing caterpillars, too, but they've been giving around 70 favor points per donation, which has been a bit of a grind.

    Edit: Shops give more money for caterpillars than players. Interesting. Guess there's a large contingent of players who undervalue their time and intentionally lowball prices on the auction house just to get their goods sold. :blink:

  4. Posted

    Good review over at RPS: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/04/review-glitch/

    That's good as in making valid points about the grind, not good as in glowing with praise.

    I'm surprised they didn't mention that in the bureaucracy quest

    you had the option to skip the bureaucratic hassle and just outright buy your papers from someone else at the auction house. And at the city hall, you can clearly see one of the bureaucrats playing Farmville in the background. Nice touch.

  11. Posted

    Okay, so it's more of a "reshape the world" deal. Cool.

    Started playing again. Found my stats reset, but with a nifty weird beta-tester only item in my inventory. Fooled around with it and started

    hiccuping beans for a solid minute

    . Neat!

    I must have been in a bad mood when I first played it, because this feels really charming. Seems like a lot more thought has been put into making this an actual game, rather than a psychological trap.

  12. Posted

    Amazon is still giving away free apps daily in the US App store.

    FWIW, some mobile developers have been pointing out some developer-unfriendly terms in Amazon's Free App practices: https://shiftyjelly.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rotten-to-the-core/

    Some of the games I've been playing lately include:

    Ancient Frog - puzzle game based around moving a frog limb-by-limb on a leaf, constrained by how its limbs can naturally rotate. Lovely graphics.

    BlooKid - Solid single screen platformer.

    Phone Story - Interesting conceptually: a mobile game that exposes inhumane treatment of workers involved in the manufacturing process of mobile phones. Very short and no replay value, so it's not particularly worth buying unless you support the cause or Molleindustria.

    Shortyz - Good collection of daily crossword puzzles.

  13. Posted

    I do not think the brumak or tank sequences are enjoyable in that game, and they are even less so when played on higher difficulties because it becomes painfully evident that those mechanics have not been tuned to the same degree that the rest of the game has.

    The tank was awful in Gears 2, especially when crossing that iced-over lake. So much trial and error. I plummeted to my death many times after naturally stopping safely next to an edge, but forgetting the tank had no way of backing up cleanly. :(

  14. Posted

    Played for an hour or so. Didn't really grab my interest, although I'm not a huge fan of MMOs/social games. Neat art style, it's just that everything seemed rather ordinary gameplay-wise: do quests, develop skills, buy stuff, plant seeds, feed animals, harvest things. There were also hints of weird endorsement of trolling behavior - you can buy some potion to kill other people's plants.

    There was an interesting quest I got early on to

    eat a clove of garlic and then kiss ten players with a teddy bear used for interacting with other players physically. Felt a bit uncomfortable and decided not to do the quest, since that's the kind of thing that would make me seem like a total creep to random players.

    Not sure if that's indicative of the kind of stuff they're going for, since that was literally the only interesting thing that happened in my first hour.

    There were also some platforming sections in a visually interesting Macro-zone style dining room, but the controls were nothing to write home about.

  17. Posted

    Some insight into the workings of their visualization algorithm:

    KMA23JJ1M1o

    This video is organized as follows: the movie that each subject viewed while in the magnet is shown at upper left. Reconstructions for three subjects are shown in the three rows at bottom. All these reconstructions were obtained using only each subject's brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video that did not include the movies used as stimuli. (In brief, the algorithm processes each of the 18 million clips through the brain model, and identifies the clips that would have produced brain activity as similar to the measured activity as possible. The clips used to fit the model, the clips used to test the model and the clips used to reconstruct the stimulus were entirely separate.) The reconstruction at far left is the Average High Posterior (AHP). The reconstruction in the second column is the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP). The other columns represent less likely reconstructions. The AHP is obtained by simply averaging over the 100 most likely movies in the reconstruction library. These reconstructions show that the process is very consistent, though the quality of the reconstructions does depend somewhat on the quality of brain activity data recorded from each subject.

    So apparently the visuals aren't directly read from the brain pixel-by-pixel. They're reconstructed by averaging together one-second YouTube clips that their model believes would have generated similar brain activity upon viewing.

  19. Posted

    I vaguely remember GoW2 had this weird matchmaking system where you either had to wait forever for a match, or get into matches where autobalance usually made sure you weren't on the same team as the friends in your party? :erm:

    Is that still around for this iteration or am I remembering things wrong?

  21. Posted

    That reminds me to give Splodge another chance. Was having some issues with my American keyboard, iirc.

    I'm lucky enough to have a 32-bit OS that doesn't need to faff about with emulators to play KNP games. You'll probably find more help at Glorious Trainwrecks, yeah.

    Don't have any experience with VFD. I believe DOSBox allows you to mount folders as floppy/CD drives.

    Once you have the original KNP files, you can actually open them in later Clickteam apps. TGF2: Newgrounds Edition lets you export KNP games to Flash for free, albeit with a Newgrounds-themed ad-filled preloader. Might be sitelocked to localhost and Newgrounds, too. Also, it can't play MIDI files.

    MMF2 is able to produce EXEs that modern PCs can run, and can play MIDI files, but costs money. And there's a chance the game won't run as intended, due to over a decade of bug fixes to the underlying code.

  23. Posted

    And Square Enix announced a game titled "Bravely Default: Flying Fairy."

    I heard this is a spin-off of Recettear, focusing on the consequences of shopkeepers who default on their loans.

    I heard wrong.