Joflar

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Posts posted by Joflar


  1. Neptunes Pride... Wheeling and dealing? I'm not doing this and about to get sandwitched between a goliath and a dude that is flying his entire 52 ship fleet around at once. This is probably why I'm about to be extinct.

    Anyone else trying the free game or interested? I'm thinking of taking Chris suggestion, buying some credits and starting up a private game.

    edit: Imperial 2030. You guys mentioned this before and it sounded awesome, really been meaning to try this.

    I could paypal you like 5 bucks to help cover costs, I've been playing a free game and its a ton of fun. 3 of the players haven't logged in at all so its like we're the rude Colonial aliens that blow up the home bases of the technologically backwards civilizations and strip mine their planets.

    Saw this product in a Half Price Bookstore yesterday, was tempted to pick it up...


  2. Since I can't create a new thread, I'll ask this question here (it's loosely related). Could someone help me with the name of an indie game developer?

    I remember reading an article recently profiling the guys life. Seems like he made one of the bigger indie games from last year. He has a wife and kids and they live in a small shack in the country. I remember the article mentioned his yard was like a natural prairie. He may have lived in upstate New York. I also remember people leaving comments in response questioning his devotion to development possibly putting the kids at risk (I think in the interview he mentions the house being rather run down and unsafe).

    I may have imagined some, or all of those details.

    At this point I don't even remember why I wanted to know this information; all I know is I can't find the right google search phrase to find who it was and it's driving me nuts. Anyone know who this is?

    Sounds like Jason Rohrer http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/


  3. My dad had a habit of getting me cool comedy tapes when I was younger, and I'd listen to them in bed before going to sleep. One of them was a Tom Lehrer collection, of which I was very fond. Parts of it are so ingrained in my mind that, on reading the phrase "spring is here" on another forum, my immediate thought was this:

    4HVsgAWdQX8

    Heh, that mirrors my exposure. He was an awesome lyricist and always chose fantastic vocabulary words. It makes me happy to know that other people have listened and enjoyed him too :)


  4. really? doesn't look any worse that one guy one cup.

    I'm sure when they peel back the casts and show the faces stiched to rear ends it gets a lot ickier. Eugggh the concept is really gross.


  5. You can run these games on old hardware no problem:

    Ur-quan Masters is an awesome now freeware game that I played for the first time a year or so ago. Its slightly like 2D Mass Effect except there is a much stronger focus on dialogue and space exploration. I never finished it because I hit the time limit and lost all my progress, but I'm meaning to revisit it someday.

    In that list Sombre posted, definitely check out Iji and Knytt. If you play Iji without killing any enemies the story changes pretty drastically, makes a second playthrough really interesting. Knytt is really subdued and beautiful to run around in.

    You might be able to run Far Cry 1 too, that game was insanely scaleable. I played that recently and its definitely eclipsed by Crysis or Far Cry 2 but its still got interesting AI to fight. FEAR 1 is also worth checking out.

    Max Payne 1 + 2 still play pretty uniquely, considering that must 3rd person shooters are the slower paced Gears of War style now. I liked the comic-book style cutscenes, they're one of the few cinematics that didn't feel boring.

    These should all be pretty simple games to get into and play, and you should check out the hardcore pc games like System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. You can't really prepare yourself for them, you just need to have a lot of free time to get used to the punishing aspects.

    I think the games that got me into PC gaming in the first place were all multiplayer. Starcraft/Warcraft 3 custom maps, Battlefield 1942... I got into PC gaming when I was playing Gamecube games and that kind of multiplayer experience was completely new to me. Now though with Xbox Live and PSN this isn't really an issue. I think what seperates console and PC gamers is a DIY mentality (granted this is getting blurred, since there are people who mod xboxes and turn them into media centers and do crazy stuff with them). PC gamers want to have a lot of choice and decision making in their setup, while console gamers prefer to just plug and play. Even if you get a prebuilt system, you'll have to accustom yourself with Windows and have to canoodle it to get some games working. If you're into that sort of thing though, its intensely rewarding. The first time I built a computer, I overheated the processor because I didn't peel off a plastic cover. When I replaced the part and got it right though, seeing that Post screen for the first time was an incredible moment of triumph. I love playing games on any system, but having customizability and oodles of free time to twiddle with parts is the reason that I keep playing PC games.


  6. Oh man! Tomorrow The Tom Lehrer Collection comes out. Its a bunch of hilarious songs accompanied by piano, you can listen to a lot of his work on youtube:

    <object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TytGOeiW0aE&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TytGOeiW0aE&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>

    This is one of those things that my cool and also weird uncle sent me


  7. I hope Big Dog the robot teams up with Big Dogs the clothing company. Not only will the robots trample over civilization, now they'll be abrasive and rude about it too. The Big Dog will bellow "Slow down, I don't speak STUPID" to the cries of fear from everyone in its path.


  8. I have that book!

    Although I only ever got about 30 pages in...

    yay for Literature!

    I'll save you a lot of grief. The moral of the story is don't go swimming after the love of your life does vehicular manslaughter against her husband's lover with your automobile.

    Anyways, good luck on all that reading! The only thing that looked even remotely familiar to me was rime of the ancyent marinere...


  9. Hmph. I wouldn't call that a big payoff :-/ (Maybe you got my expectations too high?)

    Yeah, I was expecting to grow so big that the little cube you'd been hopping around in turned into a little dot. Still had a cool last puzzle:

    I kept running around the end zone thinking that my game was glitched, then it clicked that I needed to change my size to finish the game.


  10. If it's done anyway similarly to other ranked systems it does affect the probability. Mostly I am going to use the Halo 3 model, which is the basis of most systems, at least the theory behind it. Firstly the skill distribution is a bell curve, so to maintain this if one is to increase his skill level, another has to decrease. So say I have a skill rank of 10 and I play against someone who is rank 11 I am more likely to go up than against a rank 9. With increasing ranks you are partied against stronger players. However you look at this, the best player is less likely to win against someone who is a rank 50 opposed to a 10, assuming they are all ranked accordingly. Though with Halo 3 this has been gamed and thus the system has been effectively broken.

    Yeah I don't really remember what I was thinking. I had this sudden eureka moment that made me commit to a dumb conclusion without really bothering to think critically about it. Sorry for the verbal diarrhea!

    edit: Actually I was thinking about "Hot Hands" in basketball. People erroneously believed that players would go on hot or cold streaks and that would affect their chances of success on the next shot. What was being described on the podcast though seems more like doing an easy shot and having the follow-up shots get progressively harder, and dreading the inevitable point where you screw up and lose that sense of perfection.


  11. The idea isn't "you have to lose your next game because you've won the previous ones." The point is "you're stressed out because you've won a bunch of games, and the pressure to keep up a winning streak is overwhelming, and as a result you are nervous and you play worse." I think you're completely missing the actual point we're making here. This is absolutely real, in a physical sense. I'm not talking about some cosmic destiny here. When I win a bunch of games, I get physically nervous because of the pressure of the ladder system, and because your match is not random (well, it's random within a specific set of constraints). The more you win, the better the players you go up against. That's how matchmaking and ladders work. You don't just get matched up with any random person from the entire pool of StarCraft II players. If you win a bunch of games, the matchmaking system ranks you up higher, and you play against better players.

    But even if it weren't for that matchmaking system, playing StarCraft competitively is a stressful, high-pressure task, and the longer your continuous play session, the more subject you are to physical and mental fatigue, and all kinds of other psychological factors are borne out of that.

    These are not random factors. Your claim that there are no discernible patterns when it comes to this kind of thing is demonstrably untrue when you look at the play habits of pro gamers over long tournament play sessions or long periods of time.

    Oh ok, that makes a lot more sense now. Sorry for missing the point.


  12. How does randomness have anything to do with it? What specific elements are random? As far as I'm aware, there is no randomness in StarCraft 2, except when an opponent chooses a random race. You win or lose based on the quality of your play; that's it. And the quality of your play is affected by how confident and prepared you are. And your concentration and preparedness is affected by your stress levels. Which part of this do you disagree with?

    Ah I'm sorry for explaining this terribly. When you were hitting find game to get ranked in 1v1 you were getting matched up against random players. Thus the idea that you have to lose your next game because you've won the previous ones is fallacious. I'm saying having confidence that you'll know the outcome of the random matched game before actually playing it isn't logically sound. If you were playing like 10 games of 1v1 versus Nick Breckon then I'd be saying nonsense and your loss of confidence would be justifiable.


  13. It's funny you mentioned "flow theory." I remember reading a short article on Flow-The psychology of happiness in a doctors surgery when i was 18. In order to be able to find out more about the book and potentially buy it, I had to remember this fucking guys name. So I will never forget Milhali Six Cent milhali.

    I don't know anything about Flow but what Chris Remo was talking about sounded suspiciously like baloney. Your previous wins/losses don't affect the probability that you'll win the next game! When you examine such a small subset of data its easy to jump to conclusions about performance anxiety affecting player skill, but its entirely possible to have a night where you might feel incredibly anxious yet win every game. Its all down to randomness and there isn't really a discernible pattern.

    Radio Lab does a really nice job about explaining this stuff but I realize I might be gettin' mad based on some stray comment so sorry in advance if thats the case! I was too outraged about some dumb thing I perceived that may or may not be the real deal but either way doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Wizard.