mor: not as bored as before but starting to get annoyed by all these people who can't be bothered to write a good lead-in. i mean it's okay if you don't really have anything to talk about but then DON'T POST god. i really have nothing to say to random people who enter this thread just to rattle off a perfunctory greeting
i see that you have made an imitator topic and do wish you the best of luck in that endeavor
angelo: well you're like a 5.5/10 on the exciting scale. decent, but nothing special. anyway, what have you been up to lately? also that was almost as bad as mor's post come on you can do better man. ---
No he doesn't will please you refrain from slandering this poor man's good name?
--
You're messing with me! You're messing with me, aren't you!? You're making fun of me, aren't you!? Aren't you!? You definitely are! I'll murder you!
As a followup to Ed's question: Do you look for different things in male and female characters? I'm asking because we seem to match up decently well for girls but not at all for guys, which has always struck me as weird.
also requesting discussion of my shortcomings and weaknesses from your perspective
-- another place and time, without a great divide, and we could be flying deadly high
nee: it's a difficult platformer premised on exploring a 100-floor dungeon to find treasure. - it gets much, much harder than this and introduces more mechanics, but i wouldn't suggest watching much of the lp if you have any interest in playing the game.
asakura!p has some similarities to games like meat boy because you die a lot and don't lose more than your current progress on the level by dying, but imo the levels are much more interesting and each floor feels more like a complete challenge than a smb level does. toward the end i was spending over an hour on individual rooms. i'm pretty bad so take this with a grain of salt, but my final stats were like: 55 hours played, 9500 deaths. yeah.
there are also some puzzle elements - you can push blocks and pipes and turn enemies into blocks and all that fun stuff. there's a particularly devilish room near the end that took me longer to figure out than any puzzle in a lot of dedicated puzzle games.
my only real problem with the game is that it features iwbtg-style death traps in some rooms that you have no way to see coming, but this is rarely a big deal since your progress is saved on each floor, and there aren't that many of them (except in a couple rooms specifically dedicated to it, which are pretty funny in their own right).
other highlights include pretty good music, nice aesthetic presentation (though that's because the style is my thing), and bosses who shoot tons and tons of bullets at you.
would definitely recommend to fans of the genre. ---
zea - swirldude would kind of be just there and i'd forget about his existence, while swordz would talk nonstop the entire time. not a difficult choice.
though really i'd wonder which one would provide more nourishment if i had to resort to cannibalism, and on that i have no idea
you make b8anime sound like the roman empire. i think the chat 'worked' in the past because we could all rally (heh heh) around making fun of other people and their ideas, and nowadays we have a lot of splintered groups, each doing its own thing. i don't really talk in there anymore because, well, i don't watch anime and i have nothing to talk about. not that there's anything wrong with an anime chat discussing anime, but it is what it is. aside from that, certain people who shall remain unnamed up and leaving didn't help. things seem better now than the low they hit several months ago, but i haven't been paying much attention.
lefty: it's no secret that i enjoy shooters (dodonpachi and the like, not fps which by the way the term shooter does NOT refer to by default), since the good ones are extremely challenging and have no wasted space. in addition to that, though:
-i'm a big fan of grand strategy games like the civilization series, alpha centauri, master of magic, age of wonders, etc. they show that a game can be really big without being bloated; there's a lot to do, but you have a clear purpose (dominate the globe) and all of your choices relate to that purpose in a meaningful way. this is one of my favorite genres for its sheer complexity.
-fighting games are really fun, though series like kof and gg appeal to me more than capcom's offerings. you need both execution skills and an ability to read your opponent to succeed, and really it's just nice to see all the different cool things you can do with a single character. i actually haven't played sf4 yet because i don't own a current gen console, but i hear it single-handedly REVIVED THE GENRE so i should probably look into it (and the rest of this generation's fighters) at some point.
-i find that most straight 'puzzle' games aren't puzzling enough to be compelling, but i love split-screen puzzlers with an action component, like puyo puyo and panel de pon. could play either of those all day.
-on platformers, the previously mentioned asakura!p is probably the best one i've played and was my second favorite game of 2011. i'm not particularly into this genre, though.
i could go on, but i think that's enough. anyway, each of the above examples fits what i like about games - i never (or at least rarely) feel like i'm wasting my time, i can struggle against and fail at these games until i conquer them, etc. obviously there's a different metric for challenge when it comes to games that you don't play on your own, but a quality competitive multiplayer game will have a very wide gap between its skill floor and skill ceiling, an interesting metagame, a good balance of options, etc. ---
xiii: yeah, of course i'm not saying there should be no checkpoints in anything ever. but they shouldn't feel like save states. also, i think that at least for some games, the 'but replaying earlier parts would be boring' sentiment comes from poor design or difficulty scaling. not necessarily with your example - it doesn't sound that way from how you wrote about it - but, like, imagine a segment in some jrpg where you have to go through a dungeon and then fight a boss. if the boss ends up killing you, you don't want to have to go all the way back through the dungeon again, but that's likely because the dungeon design is bad and going through it is a boring, brainless exercise in logistics. also the dungeon is probably way too long. in contrast, you wouldn't complain about having to redo a level of, say, some mega man game if you got a game over on the boss. at least i'd hope not!
what would you say are your least favorite video game genres? what are the most undeveloped genres in your opinion? what was the game you were most "disappointed" in?
regaro: imo lunatic mode is better about this. like, when i used to be trying for normal clears, the basic plan would be near perfect stages 1-3 -> die a lot on 4-6 and hope i have enough resources to make it though. but i've never even come close to perfect 1-3 on lunatic. i can still clear because i do relatively better on the second half. in other words, the early stages are closer to the 'average' level of challenge and are thereby more interesting. i can't ever let my guard down even on lunatic s1, really.
walrus: research is pretty much what i want to do, though i've heard you can possibly get a job in finance too, which might be worth looking into at some point. new discoveries...well, a lot of people are working on new theory, but i don't think anyone can realize what is particularly significant or groundbreaking before the fact. there'll just happen to be some breakthrough and people will realize you can use x theory to solve y unsolved problem, and then maybe they'll actually be able to solve y. it's kind of a blind process and one that has certainly slowed down from the rate of earlier centuries. or at least that's the impression i get. the 'big problems' make up a very small minority of current research, i think - mostly you just pick a narrow area of specialization and develop its theory. i believe that most of the new stuff is happening in topology; topology is actually really cool in a general sense but i wouldn't be able to tell you what exactly is going down right now that's exciting. on the other hand, the poincare conjecture was solved recently - that was pretty big.
you should definitely do something other than math if you want variety of job options, haha. and yeah, cs is much more recent. i wouldn't doubt it's the better field of the two to go into if you're interested in new finds. i just picked math because i like doing math more than doing other things.
From: HeroicGammaRay | Posted: 4/1/2012 9:48:23 PM | #117 regaro: imo lunatic mode is better about this. like, when i used to be trying for normal clears, the basic plan would be near perfect stages 1-3 -> die a lot on 4-6 and hope i have enough resources to make it though. but i've never even come close to perfect 1-3 on lunatic. i can still clear because i do relatively better on the second half. in other words, the early stages are closer to the 'average' level of challenge and are thereby more interesting. i can't ever let my guard down even on lunatic s1, really.
I think I perfect'd IN Stage 1 once except for Wriggle's ****ing last word.
but yeah back when I seriously tried (read: about the time I 1cc'd IN normal) I decided I wanted to 1cc PCB or something before moving up in difficulty <_<;
numbers: definitely. any good romance is touching, for starters. the yandere thing in particular is pulled off pretty well in tsukihime and fsn, though i don't think you ever got to the relevant parts. not that that's the only thing, but i don't feel my approach to fiction is robotic at all. i just don't see anything compelling in a game like journey (oh man two people on a journey together there is BONDING and SADNESS and HOPE yeah i don't know). emotionally resonating with that would be like being deeply moved by jason rohrer's 'passage.' look at that if you haven't - it's the most hilariously bad 'game' ever
best food? worst food? for "healthy foods" i tend to prefer fruits. salads are okay but entirely dependent on what you put on them. for snacks legitimate chocolate is good, and so is popcorn. good chocolate is hard to come by though. you'll have to make it yourself or pay out of your pocket for specialty chocolate as the big name candies are generally trash outside of reeses/mike and ikes imo.
i wasn't crying at the end or anything, but i guess it 'resonated' with me - death is my biggest fear, and making the connection between the two characters to myself/ashley made me sad thinking about getting old and having the past behind me and the fact that we'll one day be separated by death. it's reminiscent of the beginning of up, if you've seen that movie. (UP SPOILERS) the beginning has a small voiceless section that shows how carl (the older man) met and fell in love with his future wife, and their aspirations - to save up to travel/go on adventures - and how they failed due to life getting in the way, keeping them from saving up enough. she dies before they can do what they dreamed of, and it's sad.
i will agree on the front that passage wasn't particularly served (and was poor as) a video game; i feel like if you're going to make a video game that chooses to evoke an emotion, or be an 'experience' over a 'game', you need to realize that the greatest tool at your disposal is interactivity, and putting the player in the world. i feel like passage would've been better served as a more fleshed out short film (though the effects of the future when young/past when old were enhanced by the style, i'll grant). it just does a particularly poor job at making you feel as if you're the person.
what journey does effectively is develop a real connection. at the beginning i was just drawn in by the art style, and enjoying the beautiful expanse of sand in front of me, and eventually commencing on the journey. but once you find a teammate and you start to help each other through the obstacles, the silent communication and lack of knowing that you'll be able to stick with your 'friend' afterwards creates a connection that can very well be lost, and you don't want that to happen. there was a section where i had used up some of my flight and so couldn't make a jump he made, and he jumped down to help regenerate my scarf and we redid the jump together. it just makes you appreciate your teammate and not want to lose him. the slide sections create a feeling of tension because it's easy to lose sight of your friend, but you want to keep an eye on the world too - to lengthen your scarf and just to see everything in the beautiful world.
the first time one of the snakes attacked my partner i thought i had lost him and frantically looked where he was knocked to see if he was still there, or if i could bring him back or something, to be relieved that he was okay. when we walked through the snowy sections, we stayed huddled together so as to keep the scarves active/unfrozen. what passage doesn't do is create a palpable enough connection; you see the character walk into the girl and fall in love, but it's just like 'okay, i guess i have a wife now', whereas in journey you organically develop a connection with another person, in your attempts to traverse and understand the world around you.
i haven't played journey by myself, but i can't imagine it being nearly as engaging. but yeah journey with two rules and makes you feel a wide range of emotions - wonder, then happiness, then fear, then sadness, then happiness again - while cultivating a connection without the use of words, while traversing a vast and unfamiliar and fantastic world. all of which is accompanied by a fantastic soundtrack.
-- You saved science, SuperNiceDog! Call me numbers.
Yeah, I might have to check out AsakuraP (good old shortened names) then. I'm really big into challenging games. I used to think a lot of games were really hard, then a couple years ago I realized that you can kind of just plug away at most games to beat them, or just learn how to avoid some tricks that the game tries to throw at you. Finding that random game that really does frustrate me is a nice change.
I've been playing Elemental Gearbolt, a late-90's PS1 on-rails shooter lately. It's a ridiculously hard game that I've been trying repeatedly at for a couple weeks now, so it definitely has some difficulty to it. Dying sends you back the beginning of a level, and there's only 6 levels. You get a couple continues each time through, but only now am I consistently getting through most levels without using continues. The repetition in the earlier levels would normally get annoying, but there's a good amount of hidden stuff in each level. Also, there's an EXP system based on your score that levels you up, so it's to your advantage to find the hidden stuff in the levels and get stronger for the end. It's a good touch for what could've just been a terribly frustrating game.
Feel free to suggest me hard/good/enjoyable games you come across in the future. I'm generally a fan of most genres if the game itself is good, but I feel a lot of the ones you mentioned liking are neglected more often these days and I don't hear as much in those.
--
ONLY FIVE CAN LADDER. Sushi, kamikaze, fujiyama, nippon-ichi...
From: HeroicGammaRay | #113 xiii: yeah, of course i'm not saying there should be no checkpoints in anything ever. but they shouldn't feel like save states. also, i think that at least for some games, the 'but replaying earlier parts would be boring' sentiment comes from poor design or difficulty scaling. not necessarily with your example - it doesn't sound that way from how you wrote about it - but, like, imagine a segment in some jrpg where you have to go through a dungeon and then fight a boss. if the boss ends up killing you, you don't want to have to go all the way back through the dungeon again, but that's likely because the dungeon design is bad and going through it is a boring, brainless exercise in logistics. also the dungeon is probably way too long. in contrast, you wouldn't complain about having to redo a level of, say, some mega man game if you got a game over on the boss. at least i'd hope not!
It's more about something being difficult, but you being able to do it perfectly most of the time. To use the Rayman example again, I might be pretty damn good at Sequences 1 and 2, but I would still be capable of dying there if I wasn't concentrating. And because I know I can do it, I get kind of...lazy? Kinda makes Sequence 1 and 2 into a chore when they shouldn't be, because they are good, and fun. The problem is that when you've done them a couple more times the fun starts to fade and even when you can do it right 90% of the time, the 10% of the time you get it wrong and you die on something you shouldn't die on becomes unbelievably frustrating.
I wouldn't necessarily mind running through another MM level, but if I got killed by some enemy I would otherwise wipe the floor with on the way to the boss, that would wind me up.
I think Rayman Origins does actually address a lot of the problems you had in that long post, actually. It's not a hard game to beat to the credits, though there's a fair amount of challenge to getting the lums, cages, chests (which you really need to finish the game properly - they're not superfluous). When I was playing RO I did feel kind of like I was playing a brilliantly designed videogame. Not like, say, Uncharted where it feels like a cinematic experience (a great and enjoyable experience, but yeah). It's hard to explain, I guess I'd just say there are no tricks or frills to it - it's just an amazing game on its own. Best game in years imo.
I Wanna Be The Guy is a great example of intentionally horrible game design, but it did one thing really well - different difficulty levels with fewer checkpoints as you ascend in difficulty
meanwhile in VVVVVV it's all or nothing, and I feel it could've really benefited from a system like IWBTG's
-- thelefty for analysis crew 2008 imo -tranny I have a third degree burn in flame-o-nomics -Sir Chris
okay i'm briefly going out of order because i want to continue these conversations but i will get back to everyone
nee: yeah, i wouldn't put it at 'ridiculously' hard or anything since it's still one floor at a time, but frustration abounds. or at least it did for me and everyone else i've heard of who's played it. will keep you apprised if i find anything cool.
xiii: i like there to be some risk of screwing up early, even if it's really frustrating, because that makes the end result all that more rewarding. i'll bring up shooters since they're my area of expertise - you don't know how many times i've screwed up and died on stage 1 of 6, on things that DEFINITELY should not have been problems, and i hated it and in my anger wished stage 1 didn't exist and had to try over and over again to put it all together and get a complete run. but when i finally did, i wouldn't have traded that experience for anything.
of course it's a matter of degree. it's entirely possible that you can have a big level with checkpoints each of whose individual segments feels like a 'complete' challenge, and that's fine too. i can't say anything about rayman without playing it (i want to, but i don't have the means to do so at the moment). the game i was talking about with nee has 100 checkpoints, and it doesn't matter because the rooms are so diabolical.
lefty: iwbtg traps themselves are awful, but one thing i do appreciate about iwbtg is that getting through it wasn't a walk in the park even when you know the locations of all the traps. also the dracula fight was pretty fun. on checkpoints, yeah, i liked the very hard setting. impossible is a bit much - a flawless run does have a certain appeal but the game's really much too long for that.
numbers: you're the soft-spoken older girl the main occasionally comes to for advice. it's strictly platonic, though.
shortcomings...i get the impression that you're too hesitant to offend other people. of course, i love offending other people, so you can take this with a grain of salt. but i feel that you're concerned with keeping the peace and maintaining stability (hi dante), which sometimes leads to going with the flow when you're not entirely fine with it.
kp: you're the former student council president who resigned in protest when things didn't go your way.
you can be hardheaded and fanboyish, often take things too personally, and tend to make hyperbolic statements when you're annoyed by something. i think you'd enjoy yourself more if you stepped back and relaxed a little.
on games: yes; see previous posts. also i've played like 100 games of league with you come on man.
these shortcomings posts are going to be on the terse side because everyone and his mother is asking for them ---
walrus: yeah, that's definitely a sensationalist piece. my understanding from the sources i've consulted is that hazing indubitably goes on at dartmouth (and pretty much everyone is aware of this, to some extent), but some of lohse's claims are exaggerated, and not every house does terrible stuff. a number of essentially harmless practices are still technically violations of dartmouth's hazing policy, not that anyone does anything about it.
there is truth to the claim that everyone at dartmouth is expected to love dartmouth and you're considered abnormal if you don't, but at the same time you need not be affiliated to get by - i wasn't and never felt pressured to. to be fair, most people do genuinely like it there. there are all kinds of people at the school; the people involved in this kind of drama are just much louder than the rest, and it's much more difficult to find a social group that's disconnected from the fraternity system.
the main problem is that our administration is completely clueless and cares more about preserving its image than about solving problems. administrators sat on lohse's information for a year, then after he went public took a good two months to respond to the initial press, then in hilarious fashion charged the entire sae fraternity before dropping charges against everyone because they didn't have sufficient evidence. they have no idea what to do to improve the situation.
i chose not to play pong at dartmouth but i hear it's quite something ---
angelo: #vgmc5 (yes it's still running lol) is my favorite because it's just me and other people i like in there. and we make fun of everyone else from our lofty perches, do cool group projects, etc.
as an aside, aim chats in general are pretty bad because everyone wants to be cool and have a unique font color and/or background, but they all clash and make the text a pain to read. irc is much better (and also allows you to kick people and all that).
th3l3fty: i feel that you are overly concerned about public opinion and could benefit from caring less about what anyone else thinks of you and what you do. you are getting closer to that point due to recent events and were definitely worse in the past, but yeah. get on my level
and sometimes you present your views in a needlessly curt and confrontational manner, which causes people to take personal offense when you didn't really mean any. of course that's kind of on them, too, but tact can be useful.
ed b: this is a pretty difficult question to answer in much generality because i -can- like almost anything depending on how it's presented. all of my preferences will go out the window if i see a character who's really well-written. i tried listing some general traits, but for each one i thought of, i could immediately come up with examples i like that exhibit the opposite trait. so i'm first going to talk about a couple important aspects of presentation.
-the author needs to not try too hard to make you like the character or to sell the plot in general. this is really important. writers who try too hard can turn appeals to emotion into laughable, trite sob stories (key is a big offender here: clannad and so on). they can make cool moments seem overblown and pathetic - for this reason i tend to dislike most attempts at being 'badass' or whatever. in short, anything that could be good with more subtlety becomes garbage if the author tries simply to beat you over the head with it.
-at the same time, there shouldn't be so many obfuscations that it dampens the effect of what's really going on. being able to read into things, characterization that's implied but not outright stated - these are all well and good, but too much reduces the human element for me. i felt zero attachment to, say, tim from braid, especially because in the words of roger ebert that game 'exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie' (i don't endorse ebert's opinions on games generally, but that's a really good quote).
the above gives a general idea of some things i don't like, but of course it's hardly a complete set of criteria. i'll say i appreciate an interesting design (not that it's the most important thing but it's an easy absolute statement that i can make) and unique personality quirks that make characters unlike others i've encountered. of course those who simply fit archetypes can be quite good too - yanderes as previously mentioned, self-serving manipulators, the unabashedly greedy, etc. but even these tend to have something that distinguishes them from others of the same general type. it's really a delicate process and not one that can be summed up easily. that said, i think to know me well personally is to have some sense of the types of characters i'm attracted to. ---
tl;dr: Pretentious, but not so much that I notice.
The following is a brief, but not comprehensive supplement to the above post.
Personality quirks that HGR enjoys: Women who are violent to hide their insecurity. Hair that changes shape Verbal Tics. Unabashed optimism uncontested by backstory or conflict Angsty protagonists with no apparently justification. Hotblooded and powerful characters.
Use some of these traits in your story, and you are guaranteed to have the HGR stamp of approval!
--
You're messing with me! You're messing with me, aren't you!? You're making fun of me, aren't you!? Aren't you!? You definitely are! I'll murder you!
drak: no, not really. i mean i don't want males and females to be exactly the same because that'd be just weird, but i'm not looking for fundamentally different things. guessing the discrepancy exists because most girls in fiction are lol, so when one is not lol we are both likely to notice and appreciate that, whereas guys have a much wider range.
not doing shortcomings because i tell you all the time ---
silver: never really been able to get into fps, beat-'em-ups, or adventure games. i'm talking about real adventure games like lucasarts' offerings, not loz and its ilk. they're not really genres but i'm also not a fan of rpgs (though a couple are good), 'sandbox' games, realistic driving games, sports games...
actual 'role-playing games' are extremely underdeveloped, i'd say. i don't mean the tactics games we call rpgs for convenience but rather games that actually try to deliver a genuine role-playing experience. to date, no video game has managed to do this. there have been attempts, but torment is the closest one i've seen, even it isn't really THAT close, and as i mentioned earlier it hasn't received a proper follow-up. instead we get games that try to be creative but fall into traps like giving alignment points, of all things. i'm not going to pretend to know how to deliver on proper role-play since it's an incredibly difficult problem, but in the past people were at least trying and...they're not really trying anymore.
disappointments? nothing that huge, but i played grim fandango maybe 7 years ago expecting it to be good - this was back when it had a lot of hype on the board. worst control scheme in a game ever until the ds came along. i don't know what monkey on the development team thought it would be a good idea to have a game in a genre traditionally suited to point-and-click have keyboard controls. and i greatly prefer keyboard controls over the mouse for most things! this design decision made it essentially unplayable for me. ---
dante: you are the token male friend who keeps trying to chat up the protagonist, often at inconvenient times. the main attempts to brush you off when he doesn't want to talk to you, but you're oblivious.
silver: i don't have a clear favorite food, but almost any pasta dish is a++. the banana is easily the worst food ever; i'm physically incapable of downing one. i tried to force myself once and ended up vomiting.
chocolate is quality, and the darker the better. european brands are decidedly superior to american ones. i don't actually like popcorn that much - it's kind of too dry, i guess? but it's not bad.
wigs: things are pretty good. yeah, it took me quite a while to beat the guy (though i think i was worse at games back when i was playing that). also i had to restart my playthrough once due to laptop failure - i was already like halfway in so that was unpleasant.
kakashi: that's a really broad question, and the answer completely depends on what the rng is being used for. randomness has no place in fighting games, for example. but i'm cool with, say, percentage chances to hit an enemy in tactics games; they add a risk-reward mechanic and can be planned around. on the other hand, random stat growths are kind of dumb and there's not much reason for them. there are really all kinds of examples, but i'd say in general that crapshoots are bad while an element of risk management is good.
there is also random level generation, which is really useful for roguelikes, since you spend a hell of a lot of time going through the dungeon and don't want to see the same one over and over again. recently some developers have been trying to make random levels for games in other genres, like platformers (spelunky). i think this is a terrible idea since the layout of an area is critical to good level design, and a random arrangement of elements has nothing on the possibilities that a talented human designer can envision and bring to life. it's fine for a roguelike because those are tactics games and the shape of a dungeon floor is relatively unimportant. ---