Joflar

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Posts posted by Joflar


  1. 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.


  2. Well, I am now in a position to talk, though I won't go into too much detail for the sake of fairness. I had allied with someone to completely screw over dpp. That person has called off his joint attack and is now carving up the rich and scientifically advanced empire I foolishly left unguarded while my slow fleets are out of range.

    I am probably going to have to resort to full-on vindictive "take as many of you with me" mode. The yellow empire is not going to be here by the start of next week, and things are going to get interesting.

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


  3. 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.


  4. 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.


  5. 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.


  6. I recommend you one of my all-time favourite FPS:

    No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy In H.A.R.M.'s Way.

    It contains shooting, sneaking, looting and plenty of humour. And the graphics are good looking up to today (especially the character designs).

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


  7. Wow, nice job. Tell me, how did you determine the values used?

    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.


  8. The Redistricting Game is a great example of something that has goals illustrating a serious point.

    I'm *kind* of with you both on serious games being a crappy and troubled label, but IMO it's more of a market limitation than an inherent limitation of the form. Many important and useful things are systems based, and can hence be represented using game-like systems. The lines are blurring somewhat between serious/non-serious projects, but the chances of any serious game going through a traditional distribution channel are minuscule.

    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.


  9. I think that games are the wrong medium for stuff like this. I might watch a film to educate myself a little about a subject, but this tends to be incident specific, nearly always once only and not really for fun. I play games to escape from worldly horrors, not be reminded about them.

    I cannot imagine a time ever that anyone will want to play games, which generally require a significant investment of time, about misery and suffering in our world. In fact, unless it had a deep moral message and was overtly educational (and thus less like a game) it could well offend people; imagine a 'game' based on the holocaust.

    I do think games are an art form, they are certainly on a par with great paintings in terms of beauty for me, I just can't see a way they can cross into the 'serious' realm the way that films, plays, paintings etc do.

    This is an interesting topic, and I'm a total art ignoramus, so please enlighten me if I'm talking bollocks (again :erm:) This is really quite an interesting subject :tup:

    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.


  10. 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.


  11. AH, I'll use this thread to babel about my experiences.

    So I'm wedged between a super goliath that will most likely win the game(if this is anything like all rts, where when you control the most resources you'll probably win) and a pretty big player(though over the course of this week he now has trouble below him with a rising empire)

    So I'm screwed right? Nope. Turns out it's too expensive to go through me and theres only a small strip on which they can fight each other, so I'm getting letters about neutrality from both of them.

    It could be a ruse and they will actually be allies or not... but the big guy could easily crush me if he gets any more space, so I think I'll side with the underdog and suicide into goliath territory to make him weak enough for the guy below me to finish the job.

    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.

    SquidEmpire.png


  12. Ebert sees games much like Chris Remo's dad seeing Zelda as a maze.

    BRAID = SUCK, BECAUSE YOU CAN'T TAKE MOVES BACK IN CHESS!

    He's just a rich troll using his reputation for his platform. In all these damning diatribe's he makes against video games, I've never heard him once actually entertain the possibility that he could be wrong, even when admitting the subjective nature of it all in the same article that what one sees as fine art may not be the same to another.

    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.


  13. If no one objects, I offered to sponsor the first game (or more, who knows) in the episode thread, so if not one minds I'll go through with it. Should we go with a quick game to begin with or a long game? I'm all for learning, but personally like the idea of the long game.

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


  14. Groucho - if you mean your PC, I THINK it's a browser game (correct?) so you should be good to play if you want.

    Edit:

    Yeah just heard the description on the cast. I'm definitely in.

    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/


  15. http://np.ironhelmet.com

    You will need a Google Account to play (you should already have this if you use G-mail)

    Tutorial here:

    http://np.ironhelmet.com/tutorial

    Important stuff:

    I recommend reading the combat section of the tutorial, which will save you a lot of grief.

    If you want to increase the size of your fleet, you can send them to planets that have built ships. With every planet they visit, they'll automatically assimilate ships that aren't part of the garrison.

    You need at least 1 Industry on a star for it to make ships

    While the Idle Thumbs game is getting set up, I'd recommend joining one of the free games and fiddling around with the interface. It's really easy to get the hang of!

    Alright, who is interested?