The Claw

I should have made clear that putting your sword away doesn't completely eliminate the chance that you'll lose grip on one hand when the colossus shakes around like a crazy man, but it does make it harder for him to shake you loose and gets you re-attached quicker if you do lose grip. It makes those situations where you're just constantly getting detached over and over less common.

Been reading this thread and thought I'd chime in with a couple of tips for the frustrated. It's been a while since I played the game so these points are vague, but here goes. As people have found you can jump onto the horse by holding the grip button. You can stand up on the horse, and hang from its side. You can also use the bow from the standing position, which is bad-ass. Don't obsess over steering the horse around, it's generally much better to just let him take care of it, he will avoid obstacles and colossi automatically for the most part so you keep moving and fall off less. This is really useful when you're scoping out a colossus for the first time because you can focus on locking on and firing arrows or shining your sword beam on him. Pull back on the left stick and hit X from a stand-still to make your horse dash. This looks cool and gets you the fuck out of a bad situation. Once he's saved your sorry butt, put your weapon away and pet him with circle. Mashing triangle makes you recover consciousness faster if you get knocked out. You can charge and direct your jumps while gripping. Jump-charging is generally a much faster way to get around a colossus than just climbing, and uses less stamina. Put your sword away when climbing around a colossus. If you have your sword in your hand you find yourself dangling by the other hand, unable to move. Be super patient and don't go on a collectathon unless you have completed the game on normal.

Probabilities in XCOM, interesting short article on sinepost about this topic.

That sounds pretty interesting, any chance I could take a look? Edit: Oops, I found it on your site. Will read it in bed. Awesome.

The discussion is about the applications of random numbers, not the quality of the source. We can assume they're good enough for computer and video games.

Not over time but at any instance in time. It will always give an 80% chance. Measuring it over many rolls would only prove that each individual roll has an 80% probability. Really? In my experience most accounting software simply uses high precision decimals for calculations and then does half-even rounding on the results to minimize cumulative error when dealing with actual credits and debits. Some more credible examples than movies would be cool if you have any, I used to work on this stuff. I'm sorry I didn't respond to you before, since this is exactly what I was getting at and it would be nice to move back to this question. I'd say that art is progressive and the only reason most artists create art is to benefit society, and if that isn't true then art is certainly measured in terms of its cultural impact, which implies some societal benefit. I don't think creators have any obligation educate; they do it by default or they wouldn't be creators. Not sure how important getting the probabilities right fits into that, but I guess getting them wrong sacrifices some of the integrity of the work in order to widen its reach. Video Games are a business! Good job it's called "shuffle" and not "random", then, eh?

Try this: I guess to achieve the behaviour that people generally expect you could just do something like success = (numRolls % 5) == 0 but this would not be at all random and would be immediately exploited by players.

I used Firaxis as an example, I'm sure other studios do this too and I didn't mean to single them out as bad guys or anything. I get what you're saying but there are decisions in life that don't boil down to gut instinct and experience can be informative. Also the distortion applied seems to depends on your outlook: people who play the lottery overestimate the chance of something good happening and also believe they can predict it.

This discussion reminds me of an old Thumbs cast where they mentioned Firaxis tweaked the probabilities in Civ to make random events "fit" better with how players generally evaluate probabilities, e.g. people get pissed off when something that is 80% probable does not occur, or they have a run of misses, so they cook it so that doesn't happen as much. Given that the public understanding of statistics and probabilities is already deep in the toilet I see this kind of manipulation of randomness as irresponsible - it reinforces incorrect ideas about what these figures mean and how randomness behaves which I guess could adversely affect the choices people make in daily life. Any thoughts on this?

Those animatronic muppet cats don't come cheap

The promise of randomness (or procedural generation) is that every game is unique to some degree. You don't have to play the game multiple times to appreciate its random elements, you just have to talk to someone else who played it. What makes XCOM and FTL great is that your experience in these games is personal to you, and if you have friends who play the same game it makes for great discussion. If you have a story-driven game where everything is authored there's very little scope for discussion since everyone who played it went through exactly the same story doing exactly the same things. Unless the story itself raises some interesting talking points (a rarity in games) the conversation is going to be pretty bland.

Yeah, I'm hearing it might be an issue specific to AMD cards. Again.

I've noticed a bug where I popped out of the artist's appartment and immediately got the "kill a dude with a wall of light" achievement, looks like a guard just committed suicide, I never hacked the wall of light and now I'm concerned that I'll get blamed for any random death in the world... Also on PC is anyone else having this awful chug when loading saves and looking around for the first time? It happens at the main menu too when it does the pan from the beach to the street. After this it's fine, but it've had a few close quickloads where the game can lock up for a second while I'm doing a 180 to leg it. I guess it's pulling in assets, I just wish I could edit the ini file to tell it to preload all that stuff...

Hi, I've been lurking for years and listened to every episode of Idle Thumbs, evangelised it to friends etc. I've made a few posts on the boards already but never got around to a formal introduction. My name is Steve, living in Birmingham UK. I'm a coder but I'm also interested in the many facets of design and music. I suppose it'd be a good idea to share some stuff I like with you: 99% Invisible is a great little podcast about design (from architecture to Trappist beers) by Roman Mars. I enjoy it so much I backed its kickstarter, as I did for Idle Thumbs. Radiolab is probably the best produced radio show in the world, you must've heard of it. It's a jewel. Gary Hustwit's documentaries (Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized) are all wonderful. Alfred Hitchcock's work. Specifically Vertigo and Rear Window but I'm still working through his films. The demoscene. The scene's most popular site is also the most offputting, so instead of a link there have some of demos I enjoy for their technical and aesthetic qualities. You should download and run them realtime if you can.Cornelius. His impish brand of alternative and electronic music . I recommend Point or Fantasma as good albums to start with, but 69/96 remains my favourite despite all its flaws.BBC 6 Music's Freak Zone. If you're able to listen to this in your part of the world and are of inquisitive taste when it comes to contemporary music, this may be up your alley. I tend to read a lot of factual stuff, but I'm big on classic sci fi like Bradbury, Huxley and Wyndham. I enjoyed Sense of an Ending a huge amount, but Cloud Atlas not at all. It seems I am the sole dissenting voice there. Oh and then there's video games. I'm playing Dishonored at the moment with a view to finishing that and trying out some XCOM. When I just want to play a fucking video game I play Trackmania or Burnout, which I love for being honest-to-god video games without all that overbearing pomp and ceremony that's so prolific these days, and crucially can be enjoyed in 45-minute chunks.

He's stated that he needs to raise $2m to prove that people are interested and get the more traditional investors on board. I think this was in the GDC Online talk linked above. Seems understandable to me. The $16m thing does sound like a lot, but I guess it's in-line with the size and scope of this project - most indie games are small 2D affairs, seems like he's going for a grand 3D space opera with a ton of very high quality meshes, textures and animation to build which will cost big bucks.

Classic episode, nice to have Hot Scoops back.

This project is just great for so many reasons, but I think the biggest draw for me is his approach to story. The idea of the devs being dungeon masters who can react to and guide the overall narrative is exactly what this genre needs. I try to play a lot of these games and they all seem to be either "play our prefabbed story" or "make your own story" and neither are satisfying: the predetermined story undermines the promise of scope and freedom, but the total freedom approach lacks direction and results in analysis paralysis or a lack of interesting goals. MMORPGs have this awful problem where other players break immersion all the time by talking a bunch of shit about TV and lolcats in the middle of a magical forest. In the past I've thought a lot about how AI trickery could be used in single player RPGs to capitalise on the player's creative interpretation of simple or random systems to give them a sense of narrative that is "all in the mind" and totally personal to each individual player. People have a tendency to overlay human characteristics on opaque systems and I think this maybe hasn't been fully explored in games where the AI is usually too deterministic. Games like Stalker and Far Cry 2 go some way towards implementing this. The problem with this is it's difficult to get the player invested up front or direct events so that they aren't turned off by bad dice rolls up front, and it also doesn't work in a multiplayer environment where players can confuse eachothers interpretation of events. Roberts' idea of treating players like a participating audience is a neat way of solving these problems in the multiplayer space while maintaining a gentle authorial control over the narrative.

I've been thinking a bit about this over the last few days. In particular these few quotes, including my own. I think I've changed my mind on gambling. Sno might be right in saying that the fact that there are no tangible rewards and often no win condition makes these games worse than gambling in that they resemble confidence tricks, where players cannot win but are given the false impression that the game is simple, winnable and therefore worth playing. Typical freemium games achieve the same effect by gradually distorting the player's sense of value through the promotion of successive tiers of artificially rare prizes (like badges) and displaying these prominently to other players. The design goal is to establish a feedback loop where each payment moves players closer to the next opportunity to pay for prizes of increasing rarity and thereby increase their status amongst other players of the game. If the only goal is to capitalise on greed and engineer a community that fights over worthless crap then I guess the game is ethically wrong because it is more regressive than progressive.

I find it difficult to take anyone who says "we have data to prove X" seriously. The wonderful thing about unpublished data is you can abuse it to fit pretty much any claim, even if your intentions are good. There will always be people who are foolish with their money and I've yet to see a media business that would turn those people away. I don't think the gambling analogy holds water precisely because there is no monetary reward for playing these games. I have real trouble understanding precisely what is the ethical dilemma here. If it is that 1% of users prop up a bunch of freeloaders then surely shareware is unethical. If it is that these games artificially extend their lifespan by time-limiting a user's access to the content (as Jon Blow seems to suggest) then surely broadcast television is unethical. If it is that these games use psychological trickery to entice players to continue to pay to play then surely arcade games are unethical. Perhaps it is the combination of these factors that pushes it over the edge? One thing that is exciting about free to play it's still experimental and it is testing out new models. Many will fail. Anyone who believes there is a clear model for free to play games is a crazy person, whether you like it or not this is innovation and not every attempt is going to be acceptable to people. Ultimately I think the players of these games will judge, not some dudes with a vested interest in protecting the status quo. Edit: I_smell, I watched the video you posted about gamification and largely agree with it's main point that gamification is a stupid waste of people's time and doesn't increase engagement. This video struck me as a warning that gamification won't work when overlaid on top of existing models once people realise the rewards are bullshit. I'm not sure this applies to free to play games where the customer accepts the rewards are going to be entirely artificial up-front. People don't get up in arms about Solitaire. Not all entertainment has to nourish the soul, the very least it has to be is a distraction.

It impacts everything. . Maybe this is you telling me not to believe anything you said. Not sure. This game is all metaphors. When you gun down zombies in crazy-time land it's not real - you're fighting off the effects of the gas on your mind, battling personal demons, , and hiding from the raincoat killer who is the manifestation of your fear. Holding your breath makes the bad things go away because you're no longer inhaling the gas, and smoking reduces the influence of the player/Zach over Agent Morgan. Colour is important too. The red room represents malice, the green room nurturing, reality is blue (blue skies), and the white room is a neutral space between all three. The twins at the start of the game wear green and blue shirts or have green and blue feathers and are the only characters to share the same first letter in their names. They represent a bridge between reality and the green room This game is more than just "MAN ITS SO CRAZY I DON'T UNDERSTAND IT! IT MUST BE GOOD BECAUSE IT IS BAD OR JUST PLAIN BAD!" It's some of the most powerful and profound storytelling in games I've yet seen. Unlike Bioshock's one-twist "gotcha!" this game explores the schizophrenic relationship between the player and their on-screen avatar and uses that to heighten the impact of its story. That multiple personality vibe doesn't stop with Agent Morgan, though, it's woven expertly throughout the game world, the characters and the investigation itself. It's only confusing or crazy if you miss the point.

Another lurker breaks... Just wanted to say that if you have crazy jerking problems in the demo that make aiming and driving a bitch you can fix it by setting justcause2.exe's processor affinity to a single core. As for this game, well it's dumb fun. It has gas cannisters that fly up into the sky like in Duke Nukem 2. I grappled one and it flew me up into the sky and killed me. This was pretty awesome. Then I flew a helicopter and blew up some dudes. Sweet.