Amazing what you can do with an open-source project with over a decade of development behind it. If only there were an operating system that worked under this principle!
Coincidentally, this is just like Halflife, which sucked the second you entered Super Mario World, but was great (fantastic, even) up until that point.
Try the DVD edition of Trivial Pursuit, which my sister-in-law thoughtfully bought us for xmas. Was great fun the first three times through. Then the questions started repeating. Bye-bye game. $13 a play, that was.
If you mean a LARP version, a group does a HUGE Paranoia event every year at the Origins gaming convention. Upwards of 100 people, all in one room, trying to report each other. Deathsaplenty. The best, of course, being when the GMs manage to kill EVERYONE off at once.
Why don't you play it on a MAME emulator and find out? I don't remember that from the arcade version, though, and my brother and I beat it several times.
What a time to have no mod points! I often have to endure my mother- and sister-in-law talking about the "absolutely goooor-may" meal that they got at brother-in-law's TGI Friday's.:|
Disagree with you here. I have both, and I find the emulation to be bang-on and the speed fine. However, the Intellivision games really haven't stood the test of time. The Atari ones are pretty timeless, and still enjoyable, but I haven't picked up the Intellivision control in months.
As I stated in a separate reply, Asheron's Call (the original) is going strong, was recently repurchased back from Microsoft (who did a horrible job marketing it and administrating it) is heading for an expansion, and has a monthly-updated storyline and content. In fact, the storyline is often updated more than once a month via player action or admin-run events that progress various plot points.
Asheron's Call is a $12.95 download that comes with a free month of play. For that $12.95 you get 4 years full of episodic content in an MMORPG. Then, you get a new episode every month, featuring new content, monsters, and storyline.
This content is significant: three towns have been destroyed over the course of the 4 year storyline -- Arwic, which was the TRADING HUB of the game at the time, and has since been rebuilt in impressive fashion (over the course of 3 episodes about a year back); Tufa, which has been sorta-rebuilt on the edges of the water-filled crater; and Yanshi, the residents of which now live in a nearby tent city.
Epic storylines culminate in huge battles which are of course for the Fate Of Dereth (tm). Political intrigue abounds. That, and it's a fun game, too, with killing aplenty!
The developer, Turbine, has recently purchased the rights for the game back from Microsoft, and are going to release an expansion pack soon. The game is not currently available for download (MS had dropped it when AC2, a bad game:), tanked) but it will be in the next couple of weeks. Highly recommended.
Isn't the whole point of a game to have fun *getting* the items?
Yes, but in some cases getting the items simply isn't fun. Having played a lot of these games, they are mostly fun, but occasionally you get mired into some quest for an item you really, really want, and find it's going to take days of camping the same spot for hours on end. Or killing boring, easy monsters over and over trying to make some cash. Instead of doing this, many opt to buy the tedious-to-get stuff for real cash, then go in to actually PLAY the game -- the fun parts, that is.
The point about the videos doesn't hold water. New players should always, always play the "Beginner" difficulty, or crash and burn horribly. This difficulty level shows an example dancer doing the steps, instead of the videos or whacky graphics. So, they won't even see the videos until they watch better players play. The problem with THIS is that if you get a MUCH better player going up, they will be intimidated and not want to play again. I've introduced dozens of people to DDR now and have the general rules now for introducing anyone over the age of 25 to DDR:
Show them the game first by using some just-better-than-beginnner players as demonstrators. I'm thinking 3 and 4 foot songs. These types of players are more likely to screw up a bit at random times, and to collapse in laughter, so it takes the intimidation factor away while making it look extra fun.
Explain the general point of the game. It's two sentences, really. "Well, the arrows go up the screen, and they reach the top in time with the music. If you step on them on the beat, your power goes up, otherwise, it goes down." Period. The only other things you'll have to explain as they come up while the demo is going on are the jumps ("you jump to hit BOTH arrows at once!") and freeze arrows ("ya gotta hold down the button"). Stuff like offbeat steps are unlikely to show up on 3 foot songs anyway.
Get 'em drunk. Well, just a little bit. The first time you play, you'll look uncoordinated anyway, so you might as well have a couple drinks to take the edge off.
Insist "you try!" once the beginners are done a few songs. The rest of the room will engage in "Come on!" "Oh yeah!" "You can't suck worse than *I* did my first time!" etc. You won't have to tell your other friends to goad them on, because everyone had to get practically pushed up there the first time.
Start the game for 'em and turn on Beginner difficulty. Then get the hell off the pad, but help them select a song -- a really fast song even on Beginner might be too disorienting especially for folks who -- GASP -- aren't used to playing video games.
Don't constantly tell them what to do through the song. I have a friend that does this, and we need to stick a sock in her mouth. "Left! Left! Up!" for 2 minutes straight, and your newbies are going to be heading towards Mario Party. A little help is OK, but it's not rocket science. They've just gotta figure how to move their feet for themselves.
Ditto with not explaining technique the first few times they play. The only thing I ever say, because EVERY new DDR player does this, is "you don't have to go back in the middle after each step, you can just stay stood on the arrow, and it won't mind". Say this after the first song. If they keep doing it, don't worry about it.
Great game, and people get right into it, but the videos have absolutely zero to do with that. It's a combination of fun music, getting endorphins going, and cracking it up with friends.
Congratulations, you were a tape monkey. Welcome to the club. And interfaces like the one you describe weren't -- and scarily enough, aren't -- uncommon at all.
Wrong kind of roundabouts, AC. Those are the small, common, mini-roundabouts that as far as I can tell are only found in North America. In England and elsewhere, roundabouts are the equivalent of highway ramps. You are driving down a highway, or on a major street in a city, and suddenly there's a huge, 3-lane-wide roundabout. You need to pick your lane carefully and aggressively so that you end up on the outside at the precise moment that your exit from the roundabout comes up (there are usually 4 or 5 exits from a roundabout).
It sounds like chaos, and it looks completely disorganized when you first think of or see it, but you quickly realize that there's a reason why traffic congestion in England, even in big cities, is so much lower than in the US: the roundabouts, and the relative lack of traffic lights. The drivers in England also tend, in my opinion, to be better. You can spot US and Canadian drivers in England very easily, as they're the ones who timidly stop before a roundabout, aren't sure when to merge, etc. In England, I've seen major roads in rush hour change from 2 lanes, to one, back to 2 again, and traffic never slow below 20mph as cars dance in and out. In Vancouver, if there's a car parked in the right lane during rush hour, traffic stops.
Oh no! That guy's got an active connection to me, too!:O What's more, according to my hosts file, he seems to have his fingers in all sorts of spam and advertisement sites! Where will it all end?
Are these the exact, original versions, or slightly-changed-enough-to-be-annoying versions like the Mario Bros. that comes with all the Super Mario Advance games? That Mario Bros. has two major annoyances I can think of offhand. (1) You can't move until the level-start ditty is over. In the arcade, you could move straight away, which often made all the difference to positioning yourself for the impending assault. (2) YOU CAN'T SEE THE WHOLE DAMN SCREEN AT ONCE. What were they thinking?
It'll be nice to see if the id folks can make a good game (you know, with a plot and stuff)
Yep, I still remember the old QuakeTalk posts to usenet, which would quote the id folks talking about Quake as the ultimate multiplayer experience, featuring dragons, cutting heads off, an inventory system, etc.:|
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Amazing what you can do with an open-source project with over a decade of development behind it. If only there were an operating system that worked under this principle!
I'm looking forward to hearing the Dungeon Master's voice boom out: You can't leave without your buddy Red Wizard! Superfly!
Inviting a developer to speak at one of these academic conferences would be like inviting a printsetter to speak at a science fiction convention.
Coincidentally, this is just like Halflife, which sucked the second you entered Super Mario World, but was great (fantastic, even) up until that point.
Try the DVD edition of Trivial Pursuit, which my sister-in-law thoughtfully bought us for xmas. Was great fun the first three times through. Then the questions started repeating. Bye-bye game. $13 a play, that was.
If you mean a LARP version, a group does a HUGE Paranoia event every year at the Origins gaming convention. Upwards of 100 people, all in one room, trying to report each other. Deathsaplenty. The best, of course, being when the GMs manage to kill EVERYONE off at once.
ALL HAIL KING TORG! Oops, sorry, was thinking of Kobolds Ate My Baby.
Have you got your copy of the Paranoia RPG, citizen? What's that? The old version? SCRUBBERS!
Why don't you play it on a MAME emulator and find out? I don't remember that from the arcade version, though, and my brother and I beat it several times.
What a time to have no mod points! I often have to endure my mother- and sister-in-law talking about the "absolutely goooor-may" meal that they got at brother-in-law's TGI Friday's. :|
Disagree with you here. I have both, and I find the emulation to be bang-on and the speed fine. However, the Intellivision games really haven't stood the test of time. The Atari ones are pretty timeless, and still enjoyable, but I haven't picked up the Intellivision control in months.
As I stated in a separate reply, Asheron's Call (the original) is going strong, was recently repurchased back from Microsoft (who did a horrible job marketing it and administrating it) is heading for an expansion, and has a monthly-updated storyline and content. In fact, the storyline is often updated more than once a month via player action or admin-run events that progress various plot points.
This content is significant: three towns have been destroyed over the course of the 4 year storyline -- Arwic, which was the TRADING HUB of the game at the time, and has since been rebuilt in impressive fashion (over the course of 3 episodes about a year back); Tufa, which has been sorta-rebuilt on the edges of the water-filled crater; and Yanshi, the residents of which now live in a nearby tent city.
Epic storylines culminate in huge battles which are of course for the Fate Of Dereth (tm). Political intrigue abounds. That, and it's a fun game, too, with killing aplenty!
The developer, Turbine, has recently purchased the rights for the game back from Microsoft, and are going to release an expansion pack soon. The game is not currently available for download (MS had dropped it when AC2, a bad game :), tanked) but it will be in the next couple of weeks. Highly recommended.
Make that 16.
Why would you want to turn off freeze arrows?
Yes, but in some cases getting the items simply isn't fun. Having played a lot of these games, they are mostly fun, but occasionally you get mired into some quest for an item you really, really want, and find it's going to take days of camping the same spot for hours on end. Or killing boring, easy monsters over and over trying to make some cash. Instead of doing this, many opt to buy the tedious-to-get stuff for real cash, then go in to actually PLAY the game -- the fun parts, that is.
Show them the game first by using some just-better-than-beginnner players as demonstrators. I'm thinking 3 and 4 foot songs. These types of players are more likely to screw up a bit at random times, and to collapse in laughter, so it takes the intimidation factor away while making it look extra fun.
Explain the general point of the game. It's two sentences, really. "Well, the arrows go up the screen, and they reach the top in time with the music. If you step on them on the beat, your power goes up, otherwise, it goes down." Period. The only other things you'll have to explain as they come up while the demo is going on are the jumps ("you jump to hit BOTH arrows at once!") and freeze arrows ("ya gotta hold down the button"). Stuff like offbeat steps are unlikely to show up on 3 foot songs anyway.
Get 'em drunk. Well, just a little bit. The first time you play, you'll look uncoordinated anyway, so you might as well have a couple drinks to take the edge off.
Insist "you try!" once the beginners are done a few songs. The rest of the room will engage in "Come on!" "Oh yeah!" "You can't suck worse than *I* did my first time!" etc. You won't have to tell your other friends to goad them on, because everyone had to get practically pushed up there the first time.
Start the game for 'em and turn on Beginner difficulty. Then get the hell off the pad, but help them select a song -- a really fast song even on Beginner might be too disorienting especially for folks who -- GASP -- aren't used to playing video games.
Don't constantly tell them what to do through the song. I have a friend that does this, and we need to stick a sock in her mouth. "Left! Left! Up!" for 2 minutes straight, and your newbies are going to be heading towards Mario Party. A little help is OK, but it's not rocket science. They've just gotta figure how to move their feet for themselves.
Ditto with not explaining technique the first few times they play. The only thing I ever say, because EVERY new DDR player does this, is "you don't have to go back in the middle after each step, you can just stay stood on the arrow, and it won't mind". Say this after the first song. If they keep doing it, don't worry about it.
Great game, and people get right into it, but the videos have absolutely zero to do with that. It's a combination of fun music, getting endorphins going, and cracking it up with friends.
Congratulations, you were a tape monkey. Welcome to the club. And interfaces like the one you describe weren't -- and scarily enough, aren't -- uncommon at all.
Also a practical consideration there: by the time you've successfully downloaded HL2 via Steam, HL3's source will have been stolen already.
It sounds like chaos, and it looks completely disorganized when you first think of or see it, but you quickly realize that there's a reason why traffic congestion in England, even in big cities, is so much lower than in the US: the roundabouts, and the relative lack of traffic lights. The drivers in England also tend, in my opinion, to be better. You can spot US and Canadian drivers in England very easily, as they're the ones who timidly stop before a roundabout, aren't sure when to merge, etc. In England, I've seen major roads in rush hour change from 2 lanes, to one, back to 2 again, and traffic never slow below 20mph as cars dance in and out. In Vancouver, if there's a car parked in the right lane during rush hour, traffic stops.
Oh no! That guy's got an active connection to me, too! :O What's more, according to my hosts file, he seems to have his fingers in all sorts of spam and advertisement sites! Where will it all end?
Are these the exact, original versions, or slightly-changed-enough-to-be-annoying versions like the Mario Bros. that comes with all the Super Mario Advance games? That Mario Bros. has two major annoyances I can think of offhand. (1) You can't move until the level-start ditty is over. In the arcade, you could move straight away, which often made all the difference to positioning yourself for the impending assault. (2) YOU CAN'T SEE THE WHOLE DAMN SCREEN AT ONCE. What were they thinking?
Thanks for paying the tax, then. The 1.1 mill my wife won last year came in handy. Long live stupidity!
It'll be nice to see if the id folks can make a good game (you know, with a plot and stuff) Yep, I still remember the old QuakeTalk posts to usenet, which would quote the id folks talking about Quake as the ultimate multiplayer experience, featuring dragons, cutting heads off, an inventory system, etc. :|
Wait, I *love* to be blunt. Welcome to online gaming!