shammack

Thanks! I'm having a great time (apart from missing subbes ).

Guys, it turns out the problem wasn't the terrible presentation, it was that Kickstarter has sold out:

I thought Jake's Thing blood test metaphor was pretty apt.

I installed Dawnguard the other day. I started playing for the first time in months, assuming that, like with the Fallout DLC, I'd just wander around for a few minutes and then get a message telling me where I needed to go to start the DLC. That didn't happen, so I thought I'd go back to my house in Whiterun and drop off some stuff, then start asking around at the tavern or something. But as soon as I entered Whiterun, a bunch of vampires appeared and started murdering townspeople. I killed the vampires, but there had been several civilian casualties, including my buddy Adrianne the blacksmith. I was mortified that just by installing this DLC, I'd compromised the safety of the town I considered my home and been indirectly responsible for the death of this woman I'd spent 50 levels hanging out with, smithing and selling her the results. I decided I couldn't live with that, so I turned off the console without saving and didn't come back to it for a few days. The next time I loaded it up, I tried again, hoping to kill the vampires before they could kill anyone else. But in the chaos, it was hard to tell who was a vampire and who was just a villager, and I ended up hitting some villagers by accident and getting a bounty, so I panicked and turned it off again. Eventually I had the bright idea that instead of fast-traveling directly into Whiterun, which was putting me there in the middle of the night, I should wait around outside the gates until daylight. So I tried that, and while the vampires were still there, they were weaker. So I used my "slow time" shout to help make sure I was attacking the right guys and managed to pick them off with the only casualty being an anonymous Whiterun guard, which, whatever, that's his job. I looted the corpses, dumped them under the bridge (because otherwise a kid kept coming up and looking at them), improved their stuff at Adrianne's shop, and sold it to her. Now I'm at a point in the quest where I have to decide whether I want to become a vampire or permanently make myself their enemy. It's a tough decision because I'm interested in seeing the new skill tree and stuff, but on the other hand, this incident has left me somewhat prejudiced against vampires (although the vampire follower I just picked up seems all right -- I consider her one of the good ones). I've also been playing a basically "neutral to good" sort of character the entire game, so I don't know if I'm comfortable with suddenly becoming a monster at this point. So I saved and quit and am taking some time to think it over. I know that abusing the save system like that is kind of a lame way to play, but I think it speaks to the strengths of the game that I'm emotionally invested enough to agonize over this stuff.

Have you tried Endless Ocean for Wii? Granted, it's the Wii, so it's not exactly photorealistic, but that's pretty much what it is.

I'm 28. I picked up a lot of this stuff pretty early because my dad was a computer scientist. I started playing games on the Commodore 64, and since the command line interface also sort of doubled as a BASIC interpreter, it was easy to transition into learning how to print my name a bunch of times and stuff like that, and he taught me the basic principles of programming from there. I also took a couple of classes in Pascal, C, and C++ in high school and college. The good news is that nowadays there are a lot more tools available for making stuff without having to write any actual code. Playing around with a level editor for a game you like is a good place to start.

A couple of years ago I was thinking that I really wanted a wooly mammoth simulator for the Wii, where you could use the nunchuk to move around and the Wii remote pointer to control the trunk. There wouldn't be anything wacky about it; it would just be a straightforward attempt at simulating what it's like to be a wooly mammoth. The title would be "Hairy Elephante." But then I saw an episode of Futurama where they used that phrase, and everything was ruined.

I only started working at a game development studio about a month ago, so I feel like I'm allowed to answer this. I also made stuff in BASIC when I was a kid, although I don't think I ever managed to make anything that would qualify as a complete game that way. I do remember making a sort of "expansion pack" for a game called Escape from School that I downloaded from AOL, adding some new features and little cutscenes between levels. Then I made a bunch of ZZT games. ZZT was a shareware adventure game with ASCII-based graphics that was written by Epic Megagames's Tim Sweeney; it came with a couple of "worlds" but the main attraction was the editor, which had its own simple "object-oriented" scripting language. I made a handful of small games using that, and then a couple more using MegaZeux, which was a similar but more advanced game/engine. Around the same time, I also wrote a patch for Nethack that added cows as a monster. (This was mainly an exercise in figuring out how the Nethack source code worked and how to make a patch. Cows were just a new type of quadruped that didn't really do much except that levels would sometimes generate "cowhives" full of cows and you'd be alerted to their presence by hearing mooing.) That was all before high school, and then for a long time I didn't really make anything. I would occasionally experiment with various tools and libraries for making games but never had the motivation/patience to get very far. Then a couple of years ago I taught myself Inform 7 and started writing text adventures. The only one I actually released so far was Chunky Blues, which I entered in the 2011 IntroComp competition and lost. Then this year I wrote a full game which is basically done but hasn't been released because I was planning on entering it in this year's IFComp. Then I got hired by Telltale, so I don't think I'm allowed to make stuff on my own anymore.

Weh, someone took all my obsidian/lava. So I tore down, flooded, and buried my house.

I think I'd actually be more amused by hearing Lee say "That's the stuff" upon picking up a banana. It makes sense! Food is scarce! He'd be pleased to find a banana! That could totally go in. P.S. The "worm" is clearly the best NASA logo.

Did you, um, dig up, dig up dinosaurs? Heh-heh-hah hrmhrnngh ha-HA, ha, hrmmnghrgh

I'm not sure if that was supposed to be ironic, but I actually thought the XBLA Burger Time remake that came out a little while ago was pretty fun.

I'm kind of of two minds about that. I'm the kind of player who likes to poke at the edges of the game systems and try to do things that aren't what I'm obviously intended to do, but I do find it kind of delightful when I try to do something weird that I don't really expect to work and it turns out that they actually made a special case for that and the game responds appropriately. That still breaks the illusion that my actions were unexpected, but it feels more like discovering a little easter egg that the developers left there just for me to find, whereas if they gave you an achievement for it, everybody would find it because they'd just be loading the achievements list on GameFAQs and checking them off one by one.

Like what? I've seen that argument made a few times, but I can't think of a lot of examples of in-game rewards that would actually motivate me to do a difficult/weird task like that just for the sake of getting the reward. Maybe if it let you unlock a sweet character or weapon or something, but personally I find arbitrarily locked-off content like that much more annoying than achievements. Plus, any kind of reward that makes a substantial difference within the game is going to be a non-trivial amount of development time. I'd imagine it's hard to justify spending that on something that only the nuts who accomplish that ridiculous task will see, when you could just make one API call to award the achievement. To answer my own question, my favorite in-game reward for "achieving" something is the way that when you beat the Special Zone in Super Mario World, the map's color palette changes and the piranha plants turn into weird jack-o-lanterns and the koopas wear Mario masks.

I had only the vaguest idea that that conflict existed before I read it. I still don't really have a good sense of how much of it is real and how much was fiction (I never bothered to research it afterwards, shamefully), but I thought that what was depicted of it in the book was given enough context that I didn't have a problem following along the same way I would if it were completely made up. I didn't latch onto that stuff early on, though -- as I recall, the stuff that was most interesting to me at the start was the parts narrated by Hal. I just found the prose very enjoyable to read, and as a former precocious kid who was kind of an asshole, there was some stuff in there that I felt I could "identify with." I was hooked from the "professional conversationalist" scene.

I worked at an NBC affiliate during the last Olympics and the attitude there was basically "milk the Olympics for all they're worth because we've got fuck-all else that's making us any money." For months leading up to it, we were promoting it constantly and producing ads that not-so-subtly hinted at associations with the Olympics without actually using the words. I'm very glad that I got a new job just in time to avoid that fiasco this year, and I don't envy anyone in Britain who has to deal with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDRUhhBVrng

It seems like in both of his examples, what he's really complaining about isn't the certification process, it's that a convenient feature isn't built into the Xbox. Sure, it would be great if the console did the work for you, but given that it doesn't, these don't seem like unreasonable requirements to me (especially if they're not even actually required). Title-safe sucks, but I'd rather have the developer spend a little extra time dealing with it than end up with a game where I can't see important information because it ends up displayed off the edge of my screen. Also: Has he used iOS software lately? Like, not the few good apps that people actually talk about, but the other 95% of stuff on the app store? Because there's plenty of sucky, crashy stuff on there. I'm sure it's a pain having to get your stuff certified as a developer, but as a consumer, I actually do appreciate that that process is there so I can be reasonably confident that the software I buy is going to work the way I expect it to.

I always liked Norm Macdonald's safe word.

"You like to work hard, just like your mother. But, I don't think it's good to work too hard." - Earthbound

"Yeeearrgh! I'm cursed!" - Zelda: Ocarina of Time Sam: "My mind is a swirling miasma of scintillating thoughts and turgid ideas." Max: "Me too." - Sam and Max Hit the Road

I don't know for sure, but TITP 5: "His Cyborg Familiar" looks like a likely candidate (the games discussed include SWAT 4).

I started my new job a couple of days ago and I'm super stoked about it. Everybody's been really nice and seems genuinely excited about the stuff they're working on, which is a pretty big change from the last place I worked. Now I just have to avoid screwing this up!

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/04/pikmin_2_finally_reaches_north_american_wiis_soon Hope you didn't spend $200 on a copy of the Gamecube version yet!

I agree that if you don't know the difference, an SLR is probably more than you need, unless you're planning on learning about photography or something. Otherwise you're most likely just going to set everything to "auto" all the time and get basically the same results as you would with a cheap point-and-shoot camera. That said, if you really have your heart set on a DSLR, you can probably pick up a used Nikon D70 or D40 (or whatever the Canon equivalent is) for relatively cheap (Google says around $200 with no lens). The newer DSLRs can shoot video, but if you don't care about that, an older model should be more than adequate. I have a D70 and I'm quite happy with it, but even though I sort of know what I'm doing, I haven't ended up needing most of its features very often, and in the end I think I probably would have got more use out of a cheap camera that I could fit in my pocket.