Latrine

http://nightinthewoodsgame.tumblr.com/post/70718135700/night-in-the-woods-supplemental-1-longest-night'>Night In The Woods supplemental no. 1: LONGEST NIGHT. Just lovely. Very glad I backed this game.

Yeah, they've said part two will be in 2014. Probably May but I'm not sure they've officially locked down a date. Also when the Kickstarter broke out I think they were pretty clear about revising their initial estimate. The game would've been done in October 2012 if they only had $400,000 dollars to do it. With $3,000,000 dollars I imagine it would've even been hard to spend all that money within that small a time frame.

Well, there was some semi-promising news regarding the show: http://www.polygon.com/2013/12/6/5183260/why-spike-is-hitting-the-reset-button-on-its-video-game-awards Weirdly it seems they just decided to ditch the whole award show aspect of the show and just make it an extra long episode of Gametrailers. Now it just feels like any other outlet specific GotY. Oh well, I think the GDC/IGF is a pretty good awards show. I find the negativity about Gone Home winning pretty odd because it was only really up against other indie games. I know there's a bunch of people who disliked Gone Home and liked Papers, Please and The Stanley Parable more, but I would've thought better of people who had the good sense to like those other games. I liked Matt and Trey. "This is the future of award shows." Also the high as hell band was a nice change of pace from drunk and depressed Joel.

Also at this point most people listening at this point are not likely to play Call of Juarez: Gunslinger unless they know about its central conceit. Even with the Bastion comparisons it hasn't interested me enough to ever want to go out and play the game though.

True, although the Gunpoint demo was pretty cool. Certainly a Notable Demo.

Cool, except the next game wasn't Assassin's Creed III I am pretty sure that the alien subplot was inspired by those kinds of conspiracy theories. That was actually one of my favorite elements in Assassin's Creed II, it added more of an engagement to the events happening in both timelines rather than just being abstract historical conflict and abstract evil future corporation. All the clues were associated with fun little puzzles too. But then I never played the next games (Brotherhood, Revelations III, IV) partly because I heard they messed up the whole meta story elements. Although I am still interested in Brotherhood because I really liked the Renaissance Italy setting from AC I.

For something like that I'd recommend the Numberphile youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile/videos?sort=p&view=0&flow=grid Vihart also has some fun videos too: http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart/videos While I do agree that math classes tend to focus too much on solving problems by hand, I do think that basic arithmetic is a skill that needs to be internalized and practiced. Just like you need a mastery of the words in English and how to construct them to communicate efficiently, you also need to quickly do basic operations like addition and multiplication in order to reason about higher level mathematical concepts.

Well, the other problem with smartphones is you could easily have a cheat sheet loaded up on a test. Personally I've allowed calculators on my exams but not phones with calculator apps because of that. I think we only used graphing calculators in precalc in high school, which is kind of weird in and of itself that you buy this expensive device for a single semester and most kids just play games on them. And personally I think precalc is generally a poorly designed course since it mostly seems to be harder versions of algebra problems that they've already been doing in algebra classes.

Today was just nutty and it was mostly my fault. First I failed killing the first shopkeeper with the jumping trick and the items in his shop were definitely not worth it. I tried to kill him by grabbing the idol but the boulder miraculously went around him so I just had to run for the exit while he was stuck on the floor above. Fortunately aggroing that shopkeeper paid off because on the next floor there was a great shop with a jetpack and I would've had to go through it anyway to get the Udjat Eye. Going into the jungle I was worried I wouldn't have enough bombs for the black market but was able to spend my second to last bomb to get three more bombs from a crate. The black market itself was amazingly smooth and due to the shopkeeper placement I was lucky enough to kill most of them without using bombs. And there were a ton of bombs in the black market anyway. Now heading out of the black market I'm feeling pretty good about this run, but then disaster strikes. I see Monty the dog damsel underneath an altar and I try to carefully bomb around the altar but of course one tile of the altar is just within the bomb radius and poof out come a ton of spiders taking me to one health. I start sacrificing anyway to try and regain favor with Kali. Unfortunately I make another mistake trying to kill a Tiki Man and jump a pixel too far forward and land on his boomerang, killing me and triggering the Ankh. Dejected I go through the rest of the jungle and on to the ice caves. Here I say screw it and just start ghosting every gem possible trying to maximize my score. I even come across an altar and manage to sacrifice enough yetis to get a Kapala. Again I start to feel pretty good about this run. That's when I make my final mistake, similar to how I took damage from the Tiki Man before, again I try to jump on a yeti and was just a pixel too far forward and he starts hurling and rebounding me into a wall until I die. Definitely one of my most eventful Spelunky runs.

I wonder if high school calc/precalc classes still require graphing calculators. I suppose they'll eventually be replaced by smartphone apps. You can probably get a cheap smartphone for just a little more than the cost of the calculator.

The journey is its own reward and mastery is the greatest treasure of them all. The gold is pretty nice too. Today's daily challenge was super bomb rich and I finally beat Yama. I'm glad since I haven't been able to play every day and was afraid my skills would be too rusty to ever beat him. It was a lot easier this time than my previous runs because of all the resources, I was able to get Vlad's Amulet and mostly bomb around the hard parts of the hell levels. Now I have to fill out my journal (argh, I forgot to pick up Vlad's cape) and see if I can beat hell with a more fair seed.

This is cool: Spelunky Death Extractor. (via @JaTwoKe) This one looks familiar. And this one.

I thought it was about having a beard and glasses and making a podcast in San Francisco.

Well I think my problem with the game is just that

Ah, I didn't know someone also did a co-op eggplant run as well. That's cool too.

Also BananaRex did it. He may be the first person to have truly beaten Spelunky.

Actually I don't think you can save yourself with ropes when you're falling since you can only throw them up in midair. So I was doing a kill all shopkeepers run and managed to clear the black market but I stupidly got frozen in the ice caves and fell into the abyss while trying to juggle the shotgun and Monty. And apparently the Ankh is bugged so you just get a black screen when you die that way and have to manually end the run.

"Be careful not to hurt your knees. Actually I got mustle (sic) pain after testing this program"

It's a smaller game, so I guess there's less by volume? I would say it's more dense given the size of the game. The environment is perfectly realized as a realistic space, not just a sequence of video game corridors. The game is all about incidental details and I do not see the notes as "telling" since they aren't explicitly expository and the player has to interpret meaning from them. In films you have the "show, don't tell" principal because you're trying to differentiate from books and use the tools of the new medium. For games this should be "interact, don't show", why show the player every scene of what's happened when they can interpret what happened by personally investigating evidence? The voice logs are just a narrative device, I agree the explanation for them is tenuous but I think the game is better for having them. It's a minimalist independently funded immersive sim that shows off a ton of narrative tools employed by its predecessors and employs them with great effect. I haven't played the original System Shocks but for me Gone Home is a much more interesting and mechanically sophisticated and refined game than its other predecessors.

I didn't agree with Bogost's criticisms of a lack of literary merit or complexity. There can be beauty in telling a simple story, especially in the context of a medium that doesn't tell simple stories. I hate to use the word but basically it feels like Bogost wants the game to be more pretentious and Gone Home refuses him at every turn. Also I think he focuses too much on the narrative elements and overlooks the overall design of the game and the player experience, attributing it as simply derivative of Bioshock or Dear Esther. His whole point seems to be that storytelling in games may be stuck in adolescence because there's this one critically praised game about an adolescent? He says that very well and gets double meaning out of the word "adolescence", but it doesn't make a lick of sense.

A multiplayer poker game where player facial expressions are perfectly mocapped. Or just some other game about lying where you know that other players can read your facial expression. Personally I think dancing games like Dance Central are probably already the best idea for skeleton tracking. It's hard to think of other full body motions that can be incorporated naturally into a game without haptic feedback. Maybe a running game? (That actually reminds me that I once hacked together a Kinect based 2-player interface to Foddy's CLOP.) How about a clothing design simulator where you can virtually wear your own creations? I'm surprised there hasn't even been a crude paper doll version of this. I guess Avatar clothes kind of count? Basically I think the Kinect will never be a good replacement input device for a controller because of the lack of feedback on performing realistic motions creates dissonance with the intended action. Also even with low latency it will always be faster to push a button than make a gesture. You have to look at the totally new applications you can get with a 3D camera. Zeus: I think the problem with headtracking is you're limited by the position and size of your TV. Basically the effect will be weaker the further away you are. This is kinda why people are pursuing VR goggles like the Oculus Rift, so that the screen is always in front of your eyes.

I think Beyond is maybe more tonally consistent. It introduces the supernatural elements early. So when everything starts going crazy at the end it doesn't come out of left field as much. But yeah, the ending is sci-fi splurge. The best analogy is that I feel like this whole game could easily be a Syfy channel miniseries. That's the level of writing on display.

Great podcast, really enjoyed the first episode. Really enjoyed the insight into what Jake and Sean were trying to do with the Walking Dead and some of the stories about personal inspirations that went into writing some characters. It's also really striking how Episodes 1, 3, and 5 they had more of a hand in and the tone of those episodes is really different from 2 and 4. In particular I felt 3 and 5 were really melancholy whereas 2 and 4 relaxed the tone and explored more genre tropes. Also a minor nitpick but it seems like everyone forgot that Clementine will shoot and kill a zombie in episode 4 regardless of player choices. I guess that's different from killing a human, but it does display her competence with a firearm.

This game is much more like Farenheit/Indigo Prophecy than it is Heavy Rain, both in terms of gameplay and story. I liked Farenheit well enough but I was more forgiving of it because it was a first effort and more unique at the time. Beyond: Two Souls is just too much of a badly written hodgepodge given its production values and structurally is mostly a retread of Farenheit. As for the multiple endings...

It is possible to kill shopkeepers fairly consistently. There are a few ways I know of.