shammack

I agree with you about Dead Money (my least favorite of all Fallout DLCs by far), but I liked Honest Hearts. It gives you a nice big outdoor environment to explore and increases the usefulness of crafting quite a bit. I think the goofiness of Old World Blues made it my favorite of the add-ons, but gameplay-wise, I think Honest Hearts is a little stronger. If you played the Point Lookout DLC for Fallout 3, it feels fairly similar to that structurally.

It's definitely possible to get an ending without being allied with any of the factions. I haven't done the House quest line, so I'm not sure what options are available to you at the point where you are, but I recommend talking to if you haven't already. He doesn't care about your reputation.

Clearly, the voters are all Nazis. I think that situation has too many unknown variables to really justify working up a good rage. Some people really do just like blondes, and they're entitled to that opinion, no matter how wrong it is. Was this election run by the publishers? Was it binding?

I think that comic is fairly accurate, but I'm wary of anything that reduces the participants in an argument to caricatures like that. (This is the same problem I have with those bingo cards linked earlier.) My personal view is that equal rights, opportunities, etc. are so obviously desirable goals that I kind of can't believe this is a conversation that still exists. If, as a straight-ish white male, I'm apparently not allowed to consider myself an actual feminist, I would certainly consider myself an "ally" of the ideals of the movement. That said, I can't say I've felt very welcomed by some of its members.

hotttt

He's a cat with a pop-tart for a torso that flies through space and leaves a trail of rainbows. What's not to like?

"You should be able to identify major gaps in the gameplay and conceive of creative solutions that will blow gamers’ minds." "Above all we are looking for somebody with enthusiasm, passion and the desire to create combat experiences that are going blow gamers out of the water." -- Irrational Games

I've played about an hour of this and it looks like there are some promising mechanics, but I have serious problems with the interface. You move around with WASD (no diagonals!) or by clicking on a tile to auto-path to it. Clicking on a tile can also interact with whatever is on top of that tile (like to open doors, pick up stuff, attack a monster, etc.), but you have to position the cursor very precisely to indicate which of those things you want to do, so I frequently found myself trying to close a door on a tile and moving onto that tile instead, or trying to attack a monster but walking around it instead. Since it's a roguelike, having stuff like that happen can be pretty disastrous. Also, whenever you pick something up, it just attaches to your cursor and then you have to manually move it all the way into a slot in your inventory or belt before you can do anything with it. There's just a lot more mouse movement necessary than I would prefer -- but it's also not practical to play it with mouse only, for the reasons I cited above. There's also no hunger mechanic, so if you get low on health or mana, there's little to dissuade you from just waiting around until they regenerate (granted, that's not an exciting way to play, but it is the path of least resistance, so if you're playing with the goal of making progress, why would you eat your food when you can save it for later and just wait for a bunch of turns instead?). And you can't attack enemies by walking into them, which just annoys me on principle. The art and animation is nice, the crafting seems like it could be interesting, and it has a sense of humor that's sort of amusing without being overbearing about it, but these issues make it pretty frustrating for me to play; I find myself asking whether it's really worth struggling with the interface just to play a roguelike with less complexity than free ones like Nethack or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Maybe he should set up a Kickstarter fund.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I haven't played on the server in a couple of epochs. Do I need to apply for build permissions? My name isn't grayed out, but whenever I try to break a block it just reappears. (My username is czircon.) On a related note, I may have accidentally erased the sign listing the floor numbers for the conference room, restaurant, and train station. I was trying to correct a misspelled word, but since I couldn't mine the sign it just got replaced by a blank one. Sorry!

Here is a zip of all of the songs I have. There's some overlap with Squid's, but whatever. I think they're the original files as they were on the site, unless iTunes did some weird transcoding to them for some reason.

I've been employed editing local TV commercials for nearly four years now, and it's been at least three since I've learned anything new from it. There's been progressively less opportunity to make anything I would want to take credit for, because the goal, more and more frequently, is just to get something on the air as quickly and cheaply as possible. I've decided that if I'm going to be spending this much of my life on something for this little money, it should at least be something that I care about and that doesn't actively make the world worse. So after a quarter of a century of playing games and wanting to make games and talking about games and talking about wanting to make games, I think it's time to get serious about actually making games. I released a game intro that I think is a pretty good start. I'm applying for jobs at places where I want to work, however lofty those goals might seem, and meanwhile I'm continuing to teach myself new skills and hone my existing ones. If none of those jobs pan out, then I'll just have to hire myself, but one way or another, by this time next year, I will be involved in making games as a career. I'm posting this here as a matter of public record so that when I get discouraged I can remember why I'm doing this, and so I can be held accountable for actually following through instead of just getting lazy and sticking with the relatively cushy job I have now forever.

Here's Wuxtry! in MP3 form. I think that's the last one, but if anything is still missing, I have the whole podcast archive and all of the music that was linked from the front page as MP3s.

I forgot I never posted mine. http://steamcommunity.com/id/czircon

I think giving hints is OK, but I'll send you a PM just to be on the safe side (discussing it privately is fine).

I've got some shit to plug. I've got a game in the 2011 IntroComp, a text adventure competition where you write just the beginning of a game and people vote on how much they'd like to play more of it. My game is called Chunky Blues. You can get it as part of the IntroComp zip file and run it with your favorite interpreter, or download it and/or play it in your browser from its website (which I recommend as it's a newer version than what's in the IntroComp zip). I'm not allowed to discuss the entries in a public forum while voting is going on, so that's about all I can say about it for now, but I'd love to hear what you all think of it.

Anybody playing Cities in Motion? I got it during a Steam sale a couple of weeks ago, and it seems like the kind of thing that would be relevant to the interests of some people here. You manage the public transportation systems (including buses, trams, metros, ferries, and helicopters) for several different cities at various points in time. The population is made up of a handful of types of people who each have their own homes and destinations, and you try to make your transit system more efficient for them than driving their own cars (you don't have any direct control over car traffic, but you have to take it into account so your buses and trams don't end up in traffic jams). You also manage salaries and vehicle inventory, take out loans, buy advertising, etc. It's not as complicated as something like SimCity in terms of things you have to manage, but the simulation is pretty deep, you can give your lines amusing names, and it's relaxing to watch your vehicles make their rounds (until you notice a stop that has a hundred unhappy people waiting at it). There's a campaign, a sandbox mode, and a map editor. If you're into that sort of thing, I highly recommend it.

Well I liked it.

I think this really depends on the software design. There's plenty of iPhone software where I've wished I had a stylus because the UI elements were just too small or too close together for my sausage fingers (this is a problem even in the built-in ipod and contact list apps). Nintendo has been pretty good about keeping this in mind (e.g. the giant buttons in Pokemon), so I would imagine that in cases where you're expected to use your bare hand, it would be limited mostly to broad gestures. Certainly a capacitive, higher-res screen would be nice, but this thing's going to be expensive enough as it is. I'd be concerned that throwing in luxuries like that would bump it into PS3-at-launch levels of decadence.

Most of those games are actually good, though. I'll grant that there are a few more Mario Party games than anyone really needs, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss Mario Tennis, Golf, Strikers, etc. as "awful." Putting Mario in a sports game is a fairly reliable signifier that it's going to be a goofy, simple but fun take on that sport. It's not like they're saying, "hmm, how are we going to sell this piece of crap? Let's just slap a Mario on it."

It's a brand of chocolate syrup. There's an episode of Seinfeld in which George's ATM code being "Bosco" is a plot point. QLOC8iFpehg

Be sure to hold start and select when loading a Game Boy game to play it native-res with a sweet 3D faux-Game Boy border. They really should have made that the default.

Killer tofu