We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

thanks, nintendo

weirdee are you a wizard

nah, i almost ended up deleting that email but i read it just for the hell of it

(i'm not sure if that code is actually a money voucher or not, you're welcome to try it yourself)

PS:

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This is the time of the year when we're humbled by the generous SantaPhish's marvelous gifts. Thank you for your gift, i've been wanting to try Braid for a long time.

Cat Mario has become my favorite Mario powerup because it lets you divekick. What more do you need?

This is the time of the year when we're humbled by the generous SantaPhish's marvelous gifts. Thank you for your gift, i've been wanting to try Braid for a long time.

I, too, was blessed with a Phishmas Gift of PixelJunk Eden, and I received good TiDini-ings in the form of Risk of Rain. Thanks, guys!

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Phish is intent on sucking up every last hour of my life.

St. Nick ain’t no saint.

Left 4 Dead 2 is free today, so go pick that up if you don't already own it.

Which is also why the Steam store/community servers have been getting hammered for the past couple of hours; it could take a while to get in, it could take seconds, but either way it’s for real.

I intend to never play it, but it can’t hurt to have the SFM assets.

oh

i thought they were giving away free super rare items or something

at least the cheeseburger apocalypse is over

for now

I'm not going to ask you to elaborate.
But I hope the answer isn't zombie porn.

Don't answer.

hurf durr lookit me not answerin

I did once see a question posed, why many old RPGs would make you stat out your character when you had no idea that, say, Charisma is completely useless in this game. The answer, of course is that the old expectation was for people to restart games a few times (or many times, depending on the game) before they could really get going. For western RPGs, this expectation lasted well into the 90s. One could screw oneself at character creation as late as Deus Ex.

This extreme trial-and-error stuff is, of course, not a particularly transparent way of presenting decisions to the player, and I don’t think we want to go completely back to it except in some fundamentally unavoidable ways (“Charisma is useless in most games, ya doof!” and other metagaming... hm, sounds like a title for a book). In its absence, though, game design has to try a lot harder. I know not the ways. But my guess is that’s why there have been a number of indie games over the past few years where difficulty is back to “absurd”; it’s clearly not all bad to be unfair.

eh, less attributable to "expecting to restart a few times" and more attributable to designers not being able to actually create the features they intended to make and ending up with something halfway done, or a bug they didn't fix, or creating an actually useless feature for the sake of filling in the game and just leaving it there because they didn't have any more time to do anything else (in some cases, just making filler for the sake of looking like there's more game when there isn't)

they still make those games today; it's an inherent flaw in many design processes, and aside from extremely tight development based on learned lessons from those days, it'll keep happening until somebody stands up and declares that forcing players to make fundamental decisions about their gameplay before they even understand what those decisions mean (in their ACTUAL context) is a shitty thing to do, when it is based on system based descriptions that 'mean well' but are actually misleading

The main reason you end up with games with a useless Charisma stat is "this game is modeled after D&D or some other tabletop game that has a Charisma stat which the GM can make useful but we're not actually including that stuff because it's a pain to program".

in other cases, it's retrospect when a really cool feature you included (like jumping from above and goomba stabbing enemies in far cry 3, or its older brother, stomp plus bonus bystander shivving) didn't really pan out overall in terms of usefulness as development progressed (five instances where it's actually useful, unless we're counting being able to make a dramatic entrance with a hang glider/wingsuit)

this is basically where all the instant kill spells in final fantasy went, except for that one time when they coded it wrong and you were able to destroy a boss with it

i fault the uselessness of charisma more with a lack of creativity of how that stat could actually be useful when all the developer wants to do is have you kill your way through the entire game, with any crucial interactions not being stat walled, generating situations which are heavily biased towards the developer's envisioned approach, rather than attempting to be evenhanded, such as making a stealth system that actually works or is useful, or an alternate approach that ignores all these fancy guns and abilities that the developers worked really hard on and want you to use

you can really tell in deus ex: hr that they didn't want to include the nonviolent option, but put in the exp bonuses and ingame kill shaming in order to look like they were still abiding by the system, even though they also arranged patrol patterns in really frustrating formations

this is why i appreciate far cry 3's tight structuring where the progression in terms of the areas you're going to gradually increase in intensity, but each location has its own distinct features, which makes it entirely possible to take them all down creepy stalker batman style if you just look at the situation hard enough even when the odds are heavily stacked against you (for instance, a facility that really covers all of the viewing angles particularly well has only one alarm station, which means you can just shoot it and strand them without help, as opposed to trying to disarm it manually, which isn't necessary if there's only one of them, and is fairly impossible when there's four guys standing around it, as opposed to another facility with more alarms which prevent you from shooting just one without setting off the others, but with one of them near a spot where you can access or create a security hole)

but i digress

A lot of games program CHR as a mercantile skill, but then single-player economy is an oxymoron so it rarely makes sense and blegh.

tl;dr: implementing charisma in a meaningful fashion requires more character writing than most developers want to commit to (when in competition with making a game look cooler visually), especially now that the fancier games insist on voice acting

A lot of games program CHR as a mercantile skill, but then single-player economy is an oxymoron so it rarely makes sense and blegh.

Now I'm imagining an MMO where this is the case, between players as well as with NPCs, and I'm pretty sure that would lead to the most beautifully fucked economy ever.

I like the Mario and Luigi games' approach to charisma. Upgrading your charisma lets you buy cheaper and sell more expensive, as well as upgrade your chance of critical hits, but even if it did nothing charisma would still be the best stat because it's actually labelled STACHE.

A lot of games program CHR as a mercantile skill, but then single-player economy is an oxymoron so it rarely makes sense and blegh.

Now I'm imagining an MMO where this is the case, between players as well as with NPCs, and I'm pretty sure that would lead to the most beautifully fucked economy ever.

Is this the real life

It’s Final Fantasy.

Step 1: become computer hardware engineer
Step 2: design and build your own ZIF mechanism
Step 3: laugh like you got away with murder because you are master of an enormously difficult field with a median salary of $100920 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics

So tod—yesterday, I tried out Wing Commander for the first time (when it came out we were still running an 8086 and I was like two or three, so I just never got the chance). Not only is it still plenty fresh and exciting, it’s... er, too difficult for me. I invariably don’t survive the first attempt at a mission. And I’m only on the fifth one. I guess not wanting to bother with setting up all the controls doesn’t help, but it’s simply not an easy game and I’m not particularly good at it.

But the presentation is pretty nice. There are some nice cinematics, even if they are used over and over again. And the sprite-based 3D made it look a cut above pure polygons, although the low resolution with nearest-neighbor sampling kind of kills it (well, to my modern eyes; I recall this sort of stuff looked great back when this was all the resolution you got).

*gasp* what’s this? Branching mission structure depending on how well you do?

Warren Spector was around for this one; this smells like him. Or maybe he smells like it.

Music’s great, too (The Fat Man). The GOG version is the original DOS release, so no CD audio or anything like that for now (there were other releases, which I probably won’t investigate too thoroughly, but one was a CD re-release that supposedly has appreciable but not quite vital improvements). The music is dynamically looped, best I can tell; you get things like a few bars for a little victory cadence during tense fight music when you take out an enemy, for instance. And while it took a little doing, the Sound Blaster emulation in DOSBox sounded wrong enough* that I went and looked into it; turns out if you have an MT-32, you’re in for a treat. Not just for the music, but also the sound effects. PC Speaker is supported but absolutely a bad idea.

Despite what I said about the Sound Blaster sound, this game apparently helped make it the de facto standard sound card practically overnight, because ain’t nobody can afford an MT-32 after buying a computer beefy enough to run this behemoth.

* wait for the fireworks to hear what I mean

It makes more sense when you realize the whole thing is partially Top Gun fanfic

I'm four hours into Mario and Luigi: Dream Team. So far, I'm enjoying it! More thoughts in the spoiler:

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•My very first impression: Shit, this game is ugly. Earlier games in the series invest real heavily in their sprite art style even when other handheld Nintendo series tried to go polygonal, and the Mario and Luigi games ended up really beautiful in the process. The sprites, which are all very sprite-y, looked at the same time flat and bulbous, and delightfully squishable. See Bowser's Inside Story:


Superstar Saga:


Since Dream Team is on the 3DS, they decided to go with 3D polygons for the overworld, instead of the isometric sprite overworld of the previous games. While this does make the platforming sections easier to read (especially if you turn 3D on -- apparently depth perception makes it easier when you're trying to perceive something's depth), they ended up forsaking the lovely art style of the previous games in favor of sprites with more shadows and gradients that fit in better with a 3D background. The result looks worse:

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Although the background elements still look nice and charming:


•On the other hand, the dream sections, which are 2d platforming with some 3D objects, look good. I still recommend 3D on for these sections, but that's not as necessary for gameplay.

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•The general concept of this game, that Luigi is especially attuned with magical pillow people because he's really good at taking naps, is just great. Thanks for keeping up the humor, Mario and Luigi.
•Battles in Luigi's dream world are a nice change in the Mario RPG formula: Luigi's subconscious version of himself possesses Mario, powering him up, and making basic attacks get multiplied into dozens of Luigis doing the same attack. The battles end up similar yet distinct from in the overworld, it's all great.
•A part of the battles that doesn't work so well is their use of 3D. Enemies might attack from behind and you have to judge their depth to know when to jump; some attacks feature a lot of things flying past but you only have to counter the ones in the same plane as Mario, Mario in the dream world has to move back and forth to dodge things, and so on. It's a nice variation on the formula, and it makes good use of the system, but even with the 3D on it's sometimes too hard to judge the depth to know when to attack, especially when enemies run toward you from behind.
•I'm really appreciating the difficulty! Maybe it's because I'm trying to go through without grinding, but it's not trivially easy. The first boss in the dream world, against the apparent main bad guy

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Antasma possessing Bowser--I love how these games give your enemies the same battle abilites they give you

was actually difficult. I had to restart several times, and ended up winning by thinking about the opponent and adjusting my equipment to it.
•Too many tutorials. You showed my how to use badges an hour ago. I don't need another tutorial on how to use badges. I don't need to confirm 3 times that I don't need another tutorial on how to use badges.
•This is 2013. Do we still need to be kidnapping princesses? Can't there be a female character with any agency?
•As a long time fan of the series, I appreciate the things they've brought back from Superstar Saga. I'm not talking about the nods and references to that game, but rather the design choices. Setting the game outside the Mushroom Kingdom so you can have more liberty with the design -- good. Mini-Mario -- good. Making the overworld a single contiguous space -- good. (Bowser's Inside Story kind of does this too, but only for the Bowser segments. They leave half the space on the cartridge for Bowser's insides, and they keep pulling you away from the kingdom and back to Bowser. The world ends up feeling small as a result, and there ends up seeming like no real reason to look at part of it more than once.)
•The game has achievements called Expert Challenges. I like them! Some of them get a bit repetitive (Oh, you entered a new area? Try getting 10 Excellent attacks in a row here! Oh, you found a new enemy? Try winning a battle without getting hit against this one!), but they feel unintrusive and are a nice side goal to go for while you're going through an area. For the most part you're likely to complete them during regular play without having to go grind to get them.I mentioned that I hadn't been grinding for levels, but in order to complete Expert Challenges I have been going back a bit to beat enemies I had skipped past. Winning nice equipment from them is a good bonus.