Joflar

I haven't played Splinter Cell: Conviction yet but it honestly sounds like the kind of thing Hideo Kojima would put in Metal Gear Solid. Having some goofy continuity between game mechanics and plot is practically his trademark.

Hey IDLE THUMBS. We didn't catch you at the airfield, but now that we're up in the sky there's nowhere to RUN!

Was studying for an economics exam and saw a goofy typo in the textbook, where instead of "wage rate" it read "wage rage." So now I know that a firm determines just how angry employees get over their payment, and then hires an appropriate number of workers.

I should have been more patient when doing the double cross, things might get a little messy...

2D DOS puzzle-platformer game, You were some kind of red circle with legs. It was a puzzle game and you could do things like push stones to make staircases and there were jets that could boost you up into the air. I only played the shareware version but in the full game you got a jetpack I think. The levels were always one screen that you had to manuever around. Sorry for being vague but it was a long time ago.

I'm trying to remember the name of a picture book about an archaeological expedition to the USA (Pronounced "YOOSA"). Did anyone ever read this? I remember that there was this elaborate description of a burial chamber with an urn that created a ceremonial whoosh sound to honor the dead, which was actually a motel bathroom. It was in black and white, and all the pictures had notations on them with descriptions of the items.

I need to go back to Batman AA. I beat the story but never did any challenge missions. My latest gaming conquest was Trine. They must have tuned the last level extensively because it wasn't terrible, and actually pretty fun. I ended up losing the thief and wizard at one point and had to hop around as a knight, freaking out until I reached a checkpoint. My favorite physics moment was finding a ferris wheel and using the Wizard to move it around in a circle while skeletons tried to hop on. Every time they touched one of the carriages the momentum killed them and their bodies would slide off with this really hilarious rag doll effect.

I've had a mail correspondence break a table, thats how much diplomacy is going on

Ah, this is such a great game. I need to play that again.

I really like the creature designs in this game, they all look so different.

Divide the number of attackers with the weapon skill of the defenders + 1, then divide the number of defenders with the weapon skill of the attackers. The two results are the number of rounds that happen until that side is completely destroyed. If its a decimal answer, round up to the closest natural number. Then out of the two results, take the smaller number of rounds and multiply it by weapon skill. That result is the number of ships you will lose in the attack. Subtract that number from your starting fleet and you get the survivors. If you're a defender and you win, then I add back the number of ships you would have lost if the turn completed itself. It was really fun figuring out how to make it, but that battle calculator William posted looks a whole lot spiffier.

(oops...)

GAME IS UP! I will send the password as a private message. The last person to join will cause the game to start, so if you're close to the last it would be really cool of you to choose a reasonable time (I think someone recommended 8pm GMT? Works for me)

I was thinking more about goals as scripted events, like how in GTA4 you have to kill Dwayne or Playboy X to trigger a call from Brucie to open up new missions. I guess what I don't like is goals without consequences, or goals that feel arbitrary. A lot of games depend on the player to be invested in the cutscenes to give meaning to the goals. In The Redistricting Game it sounds like you're given power to play around with the world, and then you can have an epiphany where you realize that what you're doing has analogies to actual behavior. The 1's and 0's could be easily substituted for real people whose lives you are affecting. I think for games there is a real technical limitation when you get to a personal scale, since you need to have a good suspension of disbelief. You can't model Playboy X in the same way you can model a demographic in The Redistricting Game.

My opinion is that games have trouble crossing into the serious realm because many of them are goal-driven. Players get tasks and do them, without having to understand the consequences of their actions. Doing Task A trigger Task B, and it all feels very fatalistic. Movies and books can pull off determinism because the audience is always an observer rather than a participant. Having a game like Real Life without goals that just presents a world and tells you to experience it seems like the way to go when trying to make serious games. I think that it does meet the educational and moral requirements for seriousness, insomuch as things that people care deeply about such as starvation and rape are represented factually and based on real statistics. Playing a few rounds will supplement your understanding of life in other countries, but I agree it doesn't replace the impact of reading or watching a personal story about life in other countries.

I made a spreadsheet to help calculate your success in fighting: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkMtNRK9gTN3dHhCUkYtc3JWekpRSFlYNmpuZW5zWHc&hl=en If you have any negative number in Final fleet strength, it means your fleet will get wiped out (I don't know how to make any number less than zero show up as zero.)

I honestly can't believe this game is so cheap at release, it seems impossible.

I wish more companies would put goodies online to offset the loss of in-box swag. I got really excited for Zeno Clash after reading the comic they posted to hype the game, and being able to download the soundtracks to Bioshock and Henry Hatsworth was pretty sweet. I will also ashamedly admit to enjoying the Dead Space motion comic.

Yo SquidDivision you have JamesM on there twice at #7 and 12. Still waiting for paypal to give the Ironhelmet people my money so I can get credits...

So if all goes well the game should start Thursday. I plan on starting a Medium-length game which should last a month or two from what I've read, but if you guys want to do the year long space saga or a shorter game then let me know!

Can you take a picture of this setup? My experience is like the complete opposite. I got really lucky in my game, since I started at a corner (I'm Purple). Blue and Burgundy are like a buffer zone against Teal and Red, which have much better tech than I do. I might be in trouble when their range lets them go straight into my territory, since a lot of my stars are undefended. Right now I can see blue's home planet and might invade to put him at a huge disadvantage, but I don't want to overextend myself and it seems like he's in a war with burgundy anyways. Green has been AFK for the past couple of days, so I'm just preparing a fleet to finish him off. If he logs back in though I'm probably screwed out of a lot of territory, since I extended around him and he can take it a lot of it without any retaliation... I probably expanded too much, I got really carried away pretending to create a diabolical space empire.

Well, to be fair the time rewind mechanic is so much deeper than a reset button. What makes Braid great is that the mechanic challenges preconceived notions of linear time, which wasn't explained very well by the presenter. The examples in the original video were not very indicative of how games can be meaningful to people, especially that David Koresh game.

I did send a paypal to get credits but it might take a few days to actually get them cuz it's the first time I've used paypal to send money. edit: says pending until April 21

Oh you don't have to worry about buying credits, I ordered some yesterday.

Yeah its browser-based and all the graphics are essentially still images. I highly recommend trying out a free game to see if you like the concept, because once we start the game it will take a long time to finish. Rock Paper Shotgun did a sweet series of articles about this game here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/03/10/pride-and-falls-neptunes-pride-diary-part-1/