Posts by Jetsetlemming

Quote from Taylor

So how are Atari getting away with firing lawyers at everything that represents their classic games?

The way lawsuits (and threats of lawsuits) work is that you can basically do whatever you want without limits or recourse unless the other parties can match your ability to fund lawyers to defend themselves. Think of all those phony piracy accusations where they just mass spam official looking letters to people saying "We know you're a pirate, confess! You must pay us $5000 or we'll sue you!!". Absolutely no legal justification for that bullshit, but tons of people paid, because the time and money of defending yourself in a lawsuit is enormous, especially going up against corporately funded lawyers. There are tons of horror stories about people attempting to fight corporations in court, clearly in the right, but getting dragged out for YEARS in delays, demands, appeals, etc., driving them into bankruptcy, unemployment, and debt higher than the value of what they're fighting over. Fighting Atari (or zynga) in court would cost far more than what an iPhone app typically brings in in profit.

Tiny Tower has a ton of charm and style to it and that kept me playing it for about two weeks, at least. There just really isn't any gameplay to it though but "wait for these things to finish then restart them, you can pay to make them finish faster if you want". You could design an identical, less cute game out of that computer in Lost that they kept having to put the numbers into to stop the island from blowing up. I wish Nimblebit would make a game that had gameplay that was worthy of their stylistic quality.

Quote from Rick_D

be honest, did you see a surge in TT sales after this?

Tiny tower is free with in-app purchases of tokens you can spend to make the game go faster. It's the exact same insidious business model as Zynga's products.

Quote

":22gpfbk5]I still play angry birds when I got to the shitter, bout time I move to something else. Tiny tower it is.

No, Tiny Tower isn't an actual game, it's a chore. You'll be checking your phone every ten minutes until your spirit is broken and you stop playing, but when you dedicate time to sit down with it, there's nothing to do but endlessly move people up and down the elevators. If you want a bathroom game, get PathPix.

And here I was thinking Jacob's Ladder was the primary inspiration of SH

Tiny Tower looks way better, yeah, especially the character art- zynga's sprites look dogshit. Their tower may look all fancy and shiny, but nimblebit's consistent pixel art and style has way, way more personality.

I'm near the end of yet another replay of Call of Pripyat, this time with the "Misery" mod. The mod changes how combat works so, basically, everything dies far quicker (including the PC), but ammo's like Metro 2033 levels of rare. You can actually kill a boar with a pistol if you start shooting early, but if it gets close enough to gore you you ain't making it back to skadovsk. This has the side effect of making the hamster rat enemies the single most dangerous threat in the entire game. You can't really get below "one shot and you're dead" weakness, which they already had, but now they'll bite you for like 1/3 your health and they swarm in packs of about a dozen typically, and when they surround you you can't get away, and just get your feet nibbled to death in a second. It's very frightening.

Just noticed something watching the trailer again: They show four playable characters. Leon, Chris, and then two new guys I didn't recognize (merc with Ashley from RE4, military guy that was just a dude who knows), though I wouldn't be surprised if they were previous side characters, like Steve from Code Veronica or Carlos from RE3 or something. That number immediately makes me think "L4D mode"

Quote from Froyok

Meanwhile in USA :http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/0 ... -decision/

I think it's time to nuke a little the government.

This is actually the Supreme Court ruling the US agreeing to a European treaty on copyrights. It's not "You can arbitrarily claim a public domain work as your own", these works in question were public domain by the rules of the US, but still protected in Europe.

That trailer looked pretty cool, especially the monsters. It was a bit too schizophrenic with the cuts though, and a cover system in a zombie game seems kinda dumb.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GUq7E3zRDI

Upgrade to ios 5.0.1, jailbreak, and install the Corona untether in Cydia, and the battery issues go away, or at least they did for me. on 5.0.0 if I didn't plug in before bed my iPod'd be dead in the morning, now it can last 3-4 days.

I wish more people used Gamersgate (or, alternatively, Gamersgate was better at selling itself). The storefront's their website, and you download and install games and run them directly. But the problem there is that Gamersgate customers have no reason to regularly revisit Gamersgate after buying their game, since seeing GG's website/store is not necessary to play their game after it's installed. This hurts their ability to sell shit to people, something Valve clearly does not have a problem with. EA wants to have Steam, they don't want to have Gamersgate. This is pretty understandable when you look at the scale of sales figures.

Still, Gamersgate's pretty sweet. Lots of obscure eastern games and indie bullshit. It's where I bought Pathologic! Steam doesn't have no fucking Pathologic!

Quote from Sentura

i'm also beginning to think that the reason why ea pulled their shit from steam was that valve wouldn't let them link into origin somehow. i'm still dumbfounded over the decision.

EA basically wanted to treat Steam like Steam treats other DD sources- you buy the game, activate it in Steam, and never look at the original source again. Valve wants you constantly looking at Steam, checking the store, seeing their sales, etc. So does EA with Origin. The fight isn't over how and where you launch the game, it's over what software and its related storefront has your eyeballs when you're thinking of videogames. I think both Valve and EA's positions on this fight are pretty reasonable and self serving. Maybe not in the best interests of the customers, of course, who would do best with a) choice, and b) Origin being less retarded. But since when have corporations acted in the public interest?

There's been a bunch of new screenshots made available by Game Informer, either posted directly or in videos. From looking at the video shots, it appears that the game's using distance based movement rather than grids or hexes, explosives, health packs, and grenades are all dedicated UI buttons rather than having to be swapping into your soldier's hands, while swapping between main weapon and off-hand is separate, both using a "Shoot" button up by the grenades and stuff on the side of the screen. There's context sensitive cover markers on the battlescape that you can order soldiers to use. In addition to the original rifle, pistol, and rocket launcher, there's also an LMG and sniper rifle in the default terran weapons. No sign of heavy or autocannons unfortunately, however. Soldiers have prefixes to their names, possibly indicating squad or ability? Research looks pretty normal, and the Geoscape has an "Upcoming Events" panel that lists when your next financial review is, when purchases, constructions, and research is ETA, etc., and a "Scan for UFOs" button bound to Y (this is a pretty big change from the original passive detection based on radar installations, but there's no detail about how it works yet).

Quote from Sentura

only the cities labeled on the globe view have that high detail

you mean like new york? even copenhagen is labelled, but i still only get shitty textures

Works for me.

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/xghmy.jpg]

Quote from Sentura

i don't even get those textures, all i get is basically a 2d terrain texture over some bad uv mapping

only the cities labeled on the globe view have that high detail

Quote from Froyok

I bought this game when it comes out on steam. I have never been able to play correctly because the performances were very bad. It's better now ?

It ran fine enough for me mostly, but when the terrorist guys would catch on fire because I blew something up near them performance would go to shit until I looked away. Most of the time it was playable enough for me not to mention it among my complaints, but I don't know what kind of PC you've got. Mine's pretty bottom of the barrel (dual core and Radeon 4670).

Hydrophobia: Prophecy seems determined to be aggressively disappointing. The water looks and behaves awesomely but you almost never actually need to use it for gameplay reasons, it's either just set dressing or a huge pain in the ass, slamming props into you, ragdoll stunlocking you into death. The controls are not too bad, but the camera aggressively snaps to "default" positions like it's still assuming I'm controlling it with a right thumb stick I have to leave alone to interact with shit, and those default positions are frequently looking straight at the wall, not up or down, as I'm climbing on shit. The main character is constantly making whiny pain noises as I walk around for no reason, and they put jiggle physics in there despite her dressed in sports clothes (which itself contrasts with her being a sys admin according to the plot).

Quote from Serenius

Sadly, the shooter will probably still do better because the original X-COM is too complex for your average herp-derp gamer.

The original X-com was too complex period in some aspects. You don't need one button for going down ladders, and a second button for descending with your jetpack. Those buttons can be totally combined to one context sensitive "go down" button! Maybe even combine it with crouch, GASP!

Anyway, my main hope is that they don't dull the meat grinder aspect of it. If I'm not losing four or five rookies per mission, it's not X-Com. It actually turns me off, playing Jagged Alliance, how your units are all named and voiced and designed to be very near immortal if properly managed. Losing soldiers in X-Com is like losing HP in an RPG, or zerglings in Starcraft, it just happens as a matter of course.