If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
I haven't kept track of the framerates of the games I've played, but apparently Anodyne is locked to 30 fps and I didn't notice anything amiss about it. (At least it is according to TotalBiscuit's list here: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/9393382-The-Framerate-Police/ . I haven't played anything else on this list.)
Also apparently anime is normally 30 fps? And people say it looks funny when it's 60 fps? So why do gamers want 60 fps? Though I guess anime does look a little choppy at times, but I'm not sure that's even 30. And don't most displays have a 60 Hz refresh rate anyway? Why go higher?
Rome-themed builder games: Imperium Romanum, CivCity: Rome, Grand Ages: Rome.
Also I'm now wondering where my CD-ROM of Caesar is. I think it's in a box in my apartment.
For some reason I am currently in the mood for a Rome-themed city sim game.
Not a surprise at all that many of these codes come from credit card fraud, press kits, and bundle promos. What's more informative is the fact that this story took the time to actually investigate the multiple links of the chain, actually confirm that someone's gotta be lying somewhere along the way, and report all the details that came out of the investigation.
BTW, in case you weren't convinced press kits are a source of these keys, do recall the Original Traders Group / Original Curators Group scandal, where a group leader bribed/extorted keys from devs by promising/threatening good/bad reviews, and then went on to resell/trade the keys away.
Well, guess what, I just happened to have had some attempts to hijack my Steam account.
If you're looking for me on Steam, I won't be online for a little while, while I look into this, as I locked my account just to be safe.
THANKS GABEN
(FYI it's fixed now)
I forgot how weeb this thing is.
Why do you hate me so much
Why do you spawn so many pegasus knights
because pegasus knights are cute
and interested in impaling youanyway
So last night I had a dream about a game design. In a game, there are seven times when you have the option of stealing (or getting more than your fair share of) something. (In my concept, it was a logo-branded pen, the kind that one might encounter at a career fair or a corporate office.) If you take the 7th one, you can get a really awesome item as a consequence of doing so. Thing is...if you've stolen these things the first six times, and then you try to get the 7th one, you get a game over.
So you gotta not be too greedy earlier on.
I'm in favor of making it possible for players to unlock and re-lock achievements at will, in addition to keeping it possible for games to unlock achievements in their normal way. Ideally, each achievement should have not just an unlock status and an unlock timestamp but a table of unlock/relock actions, who did it (manual or normal), and corresponding timestamps.
I see it as a way to deal with bugged achievements that don't unlock properly or unlock too early, and also allow a player to re-lock and re-unlock achievements for replay value.
But other people are arguing that this cheapens the whole point of achievements (or what they see as the point, at least), saying that the existence of an officially-sanctioned way to cheat them changes their meaning, and speaking of how much they value getting rare achievements.
My reply to this is that achievements ought to be about recording one's enjoyment of the game and overcoming the challenges it presents to them, rather than about the social dimension of showing off their skill or judging others' skill. Furthermore, as long as manual unlocking is something that one has to specially go and do, few people will actually claim the achievements out of the blue, since there are few or no external incentives for getting achievements in Steam itself.
What are your thoughts on this?
Barring the occasional "Add" and "LuCiel", Elsword is a rather silly name.
* Simon: metrosexual barbarian
* Sypha: has boobies
* Maria: can't stop talking about boobies
* Grant: mummy
* Dracula: actually not much changed; still an arrogant jerk
* Aeon: bad time puns
It could be worse.
It could be Fal'cie and L'cie. And various other things with apostrophes for no apparent reason.
1. religion as part of the premise, such as games designed specifically to teach or prosyletize certain beliefs
2. religion as part of the gameplay, such as priests with healing or smiting powers
3. religion as part of the characterization, such as what one's faith or beliefs mean to a character, especially in times of duress
They noted that #3 comes up rarely.
Well, I figured out why it comes up so rarely. Videogames generally don't have characters facing existential crises or otherwise pondering the meaning of their lives or other philosophical questions of that sort. First, such a feature would only appear in a very story-heavy game (the example they gave is from The Walking Dead). Second, generally speaking, videogames in their basic gameplay premises specify some sort of purpose to the player -- saving the world, managing the business, winning the race, destroying the enemies, exploring the ruins, etc.. There is no point at which the player is wondering "what should I do with my time here?" -- and should it ever come to that, the player can easily either discard this game to the wayside and do something else, or the player can attempt to create their own gameplay objectives. Players are rarely confronted with the inability (or seeming inability) to solve an open-ended problem -- it's always possible to defeat that enemy or overcome that obstacle, or it was designed intentionally that that would fail. And the purpose of such designs are typically transparent -- a beef gate or ability gate to prevent access to a certain area, or a barrier blocking access to an area that doesn't exist because it's not gameplay- or plot-relevant. Even when players become stumped by puzzles or strategic complexities, the objectives are still clear -- you need to get past those enemies somehow, or bring the blue ball to the green square somehow, or acquire that many units of a resource somehow...and the only question is how, not what or why.
To have this third kind of religion, you have to make the player wonder "what should I do?" in terms of the objectives, and correspondingly, "why would I do that?".
Religion and faith is very much tied to our attempts at humans to comprehend things outside our control or understanding. The phenomena of life of death, for example. Fate, destiny, mysteries, miracles, feelings, inspirations. And this includes vague philosophical questions such as purpose and meaning. To have this third kind of religion show up in games, the character must be in a story-centric (and hopefully immersive) scenario where he/she feels hopeless or confused as to her/his purpose or objective, and thereby transfer this feeling to the player, or the player herself/himself must be made to feel this way.
Incidentally, one common joke "deity" -- the Random Number God(dess) -- is used to personify a very common feature in many games, the random number generator. Randomness is a phenomenon that is, by its very nature, outside of our control, and some of us seek to make sense of it on a deeper-than-rational level by imagining it as a deity whose whims can never be predicted.
They lure you in with their pheromones and nice ti-thorax and just use you for your stamina seeping juice and pulling them out of pitfall traps before brutally smashing you to bits using their tail pincers. I-I miss you Stacey ;_;