reserved

[Epicness]

Epicness is right there in Origins. It's a massive quest to unite Ferelden against the darkspawn, ultimately defeating the archdemon - and you always have that looming main quest in sight, apart from the short origin prologue up to becoming a gray warden. There's intermediate quests and it all breaks down nicely - Defeat archdemon, unite Ferelden, gather allies, and each ally has a smaller quest for you to resolve.

BioWare: Dragon Age 2 is not epic. Right off the bat, you have no goal, no ultimate objective to aim for. You're Hawke, your home was destroyed and you're poor. The "story" follows the day-to-day adventures of doing side-quests for gold and (largely) invisible influence. There's some politics brewing but the actual plot itself comes into play on the last hour out of 30, again. There's no world, it's just the city of Kirkwall and its immediate surroundings (consisting of the one cave), and even those do not change in any way over the "10 years" the game is supposed to take place over. It's not falling apart, there's no big scenario. Well, not until the last hour, anyway. Until then it's dicking about. And even when the story turns interesting it ends before it begins, predictably setting the premise for the 3rd game. DA2 is like a long, pointless prologue to how epic events set in motion, as opposed to Origins where you were in the middle of them.



Loot, specifically useless items. Rather than finding gold directly, loot consists of different useless items you can only sell. Oh look, blank vellums. Private documents. Trade manifests. Each one takes a slot in your inventory, and each one is as useless as the next, only to be offloaded to the next merchant as soon as possible. And this selling of junk is tedius. You have to double-click each separate item and then choose what quantity of the useless things you wish to sell. How about all of them?

Core Xii: You should simply find gold. It's less realistic, but a hell of a lot more convenient. Or at least condense all of the garbage to a single "loot" item that can be sold at once.

BioWare: They made it possible to sell all useless crap at once, at least. But all the useless crap still take an inventory slot a piece, and now they don't even have images in the inventory, so all we have is the item's name stating it's a "spider fang" or whatever. And no, spider fangs don't stack with werewolf fangs. Gold isn't used anywhere else but shops (it was in Origins) so why do we have to have this junk system? We need a merchant to sell and buy anyway, so why can't you just find gold as loot and do away with the awful garbage?



Enemies in Origins were quite interesting and varied. Sure, the same type of enemy was used repeatedly such as darkspawn, walking corpses, etc. but every fight still managed to be different somehow. Maybe there was a lieutenant or elite with them, different mixes of enemies and repeated encounters were broken up by surprises, like a pack of mabari between groups of walking corpses, out of the blue, but appreciably varied. Different enemies also had special moves like giant spiders overpowering you or templars smiting your mage to the ground.

BioWare: Dragon Age 2 is very scarce when it comes to enemy variety. You'll fight generic warriors and archers 99% of the time, wave after wave. In fact, reinforcements materialize out of thin air before your very eyes at least thrice every battle. Some of them are made out of paper dying in two hits, some have stupid amounts of health, but they all bog down to auto-attacking you until either party dies. None have any special attacks. They just gang up on the party member that "draws" the most "threat", a stupid arbitrary mechanic I hoped they'd upgrade to actual zones of control for warriors and tactical battlefield manipulation spells for mages (such as Dungeons & Dragons has been refining for 4 editions now (I have a feeling BioWare designers don't actually play other games and end up repeating mistakes others have already solved)). But no; It's a clusterfuck and several waves of generic enemies are invited.

Very, very rarely you'll meet a more interesting enemy, like a mage that actually casts spells other than teleport or shield. Yes, most mages you face just auto-attack, cast an impervious but temporary shield and teleport elsewhere when attacked. Or maybe the way too fast combat and all the over-the-top blood and fire particle effects just distracted me from noticing them doing anything else, because you can't see a damn thing.

Bosses are special, of course. Sadly, for every boss you fight a million billion generic mobs.



Meaningful choices are better suited for a more open game. Origins is a largely linear story with no choice of not becoming a gray warden or doing anything else than you were destined for, really. There are some "moral choices" along the way but they are completely inconsequential, usually in the form of someone dying or not, but they actually play no role thereafter, hence carrying little weight. Unless it was a companion; Then I guess you'd care personally, but even then, it does little to influence the greater events.

Core Xii: It's a direct issue of work. In order to have a truly open and consequential game world, a lot has to be taken into account, again adding to voiced dialogue. But games of the past have managed fine without voice, and frankly I'd rather have an RPG where my decisions carry weight, than a fully voiced, "cinematic" adventure where I'm railroaded into things.

Even voiced, Fallout 3 gives you the option of erasing an entire town off the map. A whole town, full of voiced NPCs with quests and stuff! Sadly it's downhill railroad from there but at least they tried.

BioWare: Dragon Age 2 is a 29 hours of inconsequential side-quests before the final act where your choices have no effect that I could tell. I started a second play-through and so far making different choices from my first made no difference. The dreaded dialogue wheel can have all the "no" and "yes" options in the world, but somehow the NPC you're talking to always manages to railroad you. In other words, there's three different ways to say "yes" on the damn thing.

On one side-quest you hunt down someone (I'm purposefully vague for spoilers). When you catch them, you have the option of killing them or letting them go. If you let them go, they appear later to do something specific. But if you killed them, someone else appears later to do the exact same thing. So your choice had no impact on future events whatsoever.



Runes spiced up Origins a little bit; You could add small bonuses of your own selection to weapons to spruce up their stats. That is... if you realized runes weren't permanent, as I didn't on my first play-through. They didn't say you could remove a rune once applied, so I assumed you couldn't, and ignored the entire mechanic for an obvious reason: If you wasted a rune on a weapon and then found a better one around the corner, it would have been lost. So I ended up stockpiling runes waiting for the "best" weapon - But that's pointless, as it'll be the last one you find and consequently the one you have fun with the least. When I discovered this wasn't the case, they added a bit of flexibility to equipment.

BioWare: So then Dragon Age 2 makes runes permanent. Well, at least this time it's not due to lack of documentation that I'm ignoring the whole mechanic. Seriously, an RPG is about finding nicer gear in every chest. Who decided runes should be lost when you switch? I found a bad-ass +30% attack speed rune but couldn't use it because had I found a better weapon, it would've been lost. (actually, I just put it on Varric's crossbow, the only character whose weapon you can't switch - and it kicked ass, too bad I couldn't have as much fun as Varric)



The AI sucks. That is to say, the 'tactics menu' is the wrong solution to the right problem; If you don't want to try to control the whole party at once with the awful interface, you have to let the game control the rest for you. Except, it doesn't. You have to use the very crude tactics system setting up pairs of conditions and actions. But there's only one condition per action, so you can't be very specific. You can't cast a certain spell on the enemy mage with the most health, for example; You can pick either to target the nearest enemy mage or the enemy with the most health, but not both. The tactics include a 'jump' instruction but the slots are far too few for that, being tied to the tactics skill on each character.

There's also a general 'behavior' setting you can set on e.g. 'aggressive' or 'cautious', but each type of role (melee or ranged, really) pretty much call for a specific setting ('aggressive' and 'ranged', respectively).

Core Xii: They should've just wrote proper AI so that your companions can use their talents smart. Why they delegated this task to the player is beyond me - it should be the programmers' job to make combatants behave intelligently in the game. As mentioned in the beginning, if they wanted you to play the whole party they should have designed the entire combat system differently altogether.

BioWare: Skills were removed and you gain tactics slots by leveling up. Other than that, no improvement. In fact, the system seems clumsier. I set the party rogue to use the evasion talent when attacked in melee, but he didn't when set to 'ranged' behavior, preferring instead to simply walk a couple steps back each time. The tactics menu itself is more difficult to use and downright buggy at times. It feels a little sticky and unresponsive like the rest of the interface.



This deserves special mention. In Dragon Age 2, there's a combat mechanic such that when a character is hit with a physical attack, they can be knocked back. It goes something like, if the damage is greater than 10% of your health plus your fortitude (from the strength attribute) then you get knocked back. Mages and rogues don't put points into strength, therefore they have no fortitude. They also can't invest heavily enough into constitution to have any amount of respectable health.

As a consequence, a powerful enough attack always knocks a mage or rogue back. The result? Complete stun-lock until death. If a dragon comes and melees your mage with no way of drawing it away with the retarded threat system (yeah, let's taunt the dragon to appear more threatening!), you're dead. It'll knock you back continuously with no way of breaking free until you die. This is especially noticeable on difficulties above normal.



I won't nitpick on the UI; Origins is very pretty, DA2 is "streamlined" (ugly but functional). A matter of taste, personally I liked Origins a lot better.



This review vividly demonstrates BioWare's inability to game design. Their writing may be above average but the gameplay department is in a different cupboard on a different continent. Is Dragon Age 2 worth playing? ...Yes, once, if you don't have better new games to play. Possibly a second time in a few years with all the DLC. Is it worth buying? No. I don't know what BioWare thinks they're doing. The quality of their games has been sinking since they were acquired by EA. Final verdict: Pirate, don't support the developer.

[bad]

Before I go into this I want to point out that there are fundamentally two ways to play Dragon Age; A 3rd person RPG, playing mostly as yourself and relying on custom tactics for your companions, and tactical RPG where you command your whole party as a unit. However, neither game provides the necessary interface for the latter style of play.

Dragon Age plays in real-time with the ability to pause anytime and lacking display for non-controlled party members' talent cool-downs. The interface is simply not designed for controlling everyone at once. You only control one guy at a time and can't tell what talents the others have available while doing so. For a tactical RPG, a different combat system is required, one where characters take turns selecting actions. So that when an ability becomes available, the game pauses for you and lets you decide. Dragon Age does not, leaving you constantly pausing, switching between characters checking their talent cool-downs. It's just inherently designed for controlling a single character.

Therefore, this review is from the point of view of role-playing the main character with tactics setup for your companions, only issuing orders to others than yourself in exceptional circumstances.

And now I'm simply going to list everything bad about Dragon Age: Origins that they didn't address in Dragon Age 2 and everything good about Dragon Age: Origins that they "addressed" in Dragon Age 2. First how it was in Origins, then how I'd have fixed it, and finally how BioWare did.



Speed of combat was a tad on the slow side in Origins. Especially swords of the sword and shield variety as well as two-handers took forever to swing (with awkward animations to boot).

Core Xii: Combat could've used a 10% speed-up with a little more interesting animations.

BioWare: Combat was sped up 300% in DA2 with completely over-the-top animations of characters flying through the air, swinging two-ton swords like they were made of paper. Forget realism, the combat animations in Dragon Age 2 are implausible even for a fantasy universe. The first time you see it it's kind of cool and you thank god for speeding up the combat, but it gets old real fast. There's so much super-speed stuff going on at any given time you can't tell what the hell is going on.

A related issue is that your characters run around really fast. You can kite every single boss by running around in circles, pausing to do a ranged attack whenever you gain ground (as the boss gets briefly stuck in the level geometry, being 10 times your size). It's the worst boss design I have ever seen, ever. A dragon chases you for 10 minutes while being slowly peashot its health down. (sorry for the spoiler, but I'd assume you'd figure that there are dragons in Dragon Age)



Talent cool-downs didn't reset when a battle ended in Origins, leaving you standing around like a lemon waiting for a 60-second cool-down to reset before heading to the next battle, god forbid you wanted to use one of the more powerful spells each encounter. This is inconsistent, because health and mana/stamina did (albeit with simply increased regeneration).

Core Xii: Talent cool-downs should reset or at least cycle with increased speed like health and mana/stamina after a battle.

BioWare: They made health and mana/stamina reset even faster after battle in DA2 (good), but talents still slowly cycle their full cool-downs. Certain talents have as much as 120 seconds of cool-down, so if you used one at the end of the last battle and intend to use that spell in the next, you have to stand around doing nothing for 2 minutes. My god, who play-tested this thing?



Talent trees in Origins were linear and restrictive. Strictly speaking, they weren't trees at all. If you wanted the 4th fire spell, you had to get all 3 before it, whether you considered them useful or (most often) not.

Core Xii: This is a fairly big and fundamental issue. Some spells are more powerful than others and BioWare wanted to restrict your access to them in a progressive manner. But this is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The problem is not "how to restrict powerful spells to balance the progression" but rather "how to balance the spells in the first place".

My solution would be to not have better spells, just different ones. A large area-of-effect (hereforth referred to as AoE) spell doesn't need to be game-breakingly powerful even if you get it at level 1. You simply make the spells scale by level, such that it does X × level damage with a radius of Y × level as opposed to flat amounts.

BioWare: We were promised a remedy with DA2's actual trees. Curiously, these "trees" are as restrictive as ever. Each spell not only has a level and previous talent(s) requirement but also demand an arbitrary amount of talent points already spent in the tree. This is no more flexible than Origins, sometimes it feels even less so. It's blatantly obvious with some spells having talent requirements that physically cannot be fulfilled before their level requirements (a hypothetical spell requires level 3 and 2 points in the tree. But you cannot have those 2 points before level 4 because other talents are restricted to level 4).

For example, the second ice spell (Cone of Cold) requires not only the first ice spell (Winter's Grasp) and you to be level 8, it also requires you to take two other talents from the same tree for no reason (Fireball and then one other, possible Winter's Grasp's upgrade which also requires Fireball before it).

It gets even worse with upgrades. At least in Origins, even if we had to get 3 other fire spells before Inferno and be level 5 (it requires 34 magic which is attainable at level 5 at the earliest) at least we got it in its full form. In DA2, the equivalent upgrade to Firestorm requires you to be level 9, have Fireball, one other point in the tree and of course the spell itself, another talent point. That is in no way less restrictive than Origins.

A minor interface issue relating to the talent trees is that you can't see the upgrades until you zoom into the tree. So to see if you have upgrades available to your talents you have to check each tree one at a time. The hell?

Here's the mage spell trees BioWare made for Dragon Age 2:



The requirements aren't laid out in a simple hierarchy but have stuff like "Requires: 3 points in Elemental" (that's including its prerequisites, making it even less intuitive and visual).

And here's how I would have laid out the mage spell trees. Now they're actual trees with options; No level or point restrictions or upgrades. The entropy tree requires you to take every spell before the last... but by its description it's really powerful, so I'm not too worried about that (and it combines effects from all the other spells).





Stat transparency was problematic in Origins. The choice of +1 in one stat or another was oblique at times. At worst, you didn't know mana and stamina were used interchangeably in item descriptions as they were listed separately, or that +1 spellpower was strictly inferior to +1 magic because each point in magic grants one point of spellpower. Items also often listed stats multiple times, like a staff that had Spellpower: 7 and +1 spellpower. Item sets granted bonuses you couldn't see or look up.

Core Xii: This is mostly a documentation slash interface issue. Whenever the player is expected to make a decision, he should be able to access the relevant information. The choice between one item or another should be perfectly clear and enumerated, as it's a fairly big part of the game. Fortunately, otherwise Origins was simple enough. +1% magic resistance meant you had a 1% greater chance of resisting a spell. Simple...

BioWare: ...so then why Dragon Age 2 would be even more oblique is beyond me. What does +1 magic resistance do? The hell if I know, because it's not very well indicated. Stats have the weirdest, most contrived formulas for deriving their final values which is not at all transparent to the player. They added a display for what your attributes do, then somehow put another layer on top of it as oblique as before, only making it worse.

Information is scarce and all over the place. +1 strength gives +1 attack to a warrior which translates to a few percentage increase in their chance to hit, which you can clearly see on the attributes screen. But if you find an item with +26 attack, you've no way of seeing how many % it translates to. Even worse is that +1 in something often has diminishing values; +1 armor is huge at level 1, but completely insignificant at 20. In Origins, +1% magic resistance was +1% magic resistance, regardless of level, and hence easier to understand.

Which brings me to...



Attributes. Origins had a bad case of uselessness in some attributes, like willpower, because simply leveling up granted you some and item bonuses provided enough to offset the balance. It was annoying, but in a harmless way; You just didn't put any points there. Gear had an attribute requirement, such as strength for swords, but thankfully no item required willpower.

Furthermore, the extremely gradual progression makes the choice difficult. Should I put 1 point into magic this level when it has a 0.01% effect? But if I don't, will I be gimped later and then have to retroactively dump points into that stat three consecutive level-ups? The investment of points seems so insignificant but if you don't, you'll invisibly gimp yourself until it's too late to do anything about it, since your points are long gone to another stat and you only get 3 on the next level-up.

Core Xii: I don't think the whole attribute system works, at all, really. If your character knows a talent, its success shouldn't be tied to a stat you have to raise independently. Indeed, they half fixed that in DA2, by making talent success independent of attributes (I still have no idea how +1 magic resistance factors into this). Sadly, damage is still largely tied to stats.

You should be able to choose talents to suit different tactical situations, and their effect should be tied to your level, if at all (since both you and enemies level up...). Such a system would be fundamentally tangent to this flavor of RPG, though.

BioWare: Not only did they make willpower not useless, they made it mandatory. Every item has two stat requirements now; Every mage robe requires equal amounts of magic and willpower. Bye, choice. Similarly warrior gear takes strength and constitution and rogue gear dexterity and cunning. They might as well just combine each pair into a single value, because you'll never get to raise one without the other. Gone is the choice of dexterity rogue vs cunning rogue. Gone is the choice of DPS warrior vs tank warrior. The three classes are set in stone now and there's no diversity. Warriors tank, rogues DPS and mages CC (crowd control). Some people call it streamlining. I call it stupid.

The most annoying part is that willpower is still useless even when it's forced to not be. Each point gives you +5 mana/stamina, but sustained talents reserve a percentage now rather than a flat value. So if you have 50% of your mana reserved in sustainables, +1 willpower translates to only +2.5 mana. If 100% of your mana is reserved, like a good blood mage should, willpower has zero effect. Yet, blood mages are forced to get as much willpower as magic in order to wear clothes. This system boggles my mind. Did they deliberately try to make the game less fun, or what? Speaking of robes...



You can't see what you're buying. In a game with full character customization and role-playing, you're shopping for pure stats. You can't see that the mage hat you bought for half your gold looks ridiculous as hell until you already have. So either you hate it and the developers for the rest of the game or you always quick save before shopping. Actually, this isn't limited to shops; You also don't know what gear looks like until you can wear it. So investing points into a stat to wear something which turns out to be crap can be discouraging - Though rarely fatal, since gear usually requires your primary attribute which you dump anyway (exception: cunning rogues).

Core Xii: Simple, obvious fix: A preview. An image of the item on the shop menu and inventory. Is that too much to ask? Or maybe they could've designed some headware that didn't make you look like a retarded bird.

BioWare: Nope.



Gameplay and narrative. Aren't these supposed to go together to provide the best experience? Not just tell a story independent of gameplay, but tie them together? Well, Origins doesn't. Progressing on your quest, you'll hear a million billion "blood magic is evil", "oh no blood magic" comments. Yet, you can be a blood mage and use it under their very noses and mysteriously nobody seems to notice. It gets even more perplexing when you're a blood mage and want to sympathize with other blood mages. Except you can't. Somehow, the writers decided blood magic is evil and the gameplay designers decided you can be one, without talking to each other, because your dialogue options are always that blood magic is evil, even when you're a bloody blood mage yourself.

Core Xii: Er, make people react. Let me use blood magic in dialogue to influence people. Have my companions notice I'm a freaking blood mage as they complain how evil it is. Give me the option of not killing blood mages whenever I encounter them.

BioWare: On the last hour out of thirty you can side with blood mages for the finale. Up to that point, every blood mage you come across is automatically evil, an enemy you've no choice not to kill. Well, except one of your companions. Again, nobody minds about that or the fact that you're an apostate blood mage (if you chose so). You go around doing side-quests of disposing blood mages without the option of sparing them. It's jarring. Clearly the writers are not talking to the designers at all.



The dialogue wasn't voiced in Origins. You got a number of lines of dialogue to choose from that read exactly what you were going to say. The choices were fairly varied and interesting, although the other characters didn't always respond in an interesting manner (they saved a lot of work by making more than one line invoke the same response, at the cost of some quality).

Core Xii: The lack of a voice is excusable. It would be prohibitively expensive to record all the different lines, in two genders, possibly in human, elf and dwarf voices. It might be preferable to separate what you're saying and how you're saying it, but again the voiced responses limit the number of possible options for the sheer amount of work required.

BioWare: Ah yes, the Mass Effect dialogue wheel. It's still not working. To be exact, the problem isn't with the wheel itself; It's just a shape of a menu. The problem stems from the incredibly vague, generic, voiced responses. The line on the wheel is nothing like the dialogue your character will spout upon selecting it. The wheel can say "No." and that can lead to "I'm so sorry, but I have to follow my heart" or "Ha ha, I'm not interested in your problems, peasant!". Technically both decline, but in rather different manners. Nothing breaks immersion like opening your mouth and having something completely different than you intended coming out. It's like Hawke is schizophrenic and you're the other half trying to nudge him into behaving in a certain way, rather than directly assuming the role of the character.

Having a voiced main character exaggerates this issue even further as we can have even fewer responses than before. So you get to pick from the paragon, neutral or renegade response. Or in DA2's case, the sincere, sarcastic or aggressive response. This is not role-playing.



Level design is good in Origins. You visit nobles in cities, soldiers in castles, mages in towers, elves in forests, dwarves in their underground deep roads, and demons in the fade. A number of locations, each large and unique. Between traveling from one place to the next, any of a number of random encounters can occur, providing even more variety. My only complaint is for all the walking. They should've just let you fast-travel from anywhere, at any time, because you can just hike your way back and back again, with the same effect, just incredible tedium.

BioWare: Here's one city, one beach and one cave, each of which you'll be visiting a minimum of 12 times. I am not kidding. There is one cave in the whole game with different quests in it, pretending it's a different one each time; They have impassable doors that are (seemingly) randomly closed, making you take slightly different routes. These closed passages aren't even reflected on the minimap! Ok, the deep roads were very long and samey in Origins, but my god, at least each samey tunnel was unique. DA2 has one cave. The same one. For fifty different quests. With slightly randomized placements of (copious amounts of) corpses and chests for loot. In a consistent fashion, there's also one beach, one mine (that doubles as a sewer when required) and one mansion, each passed off as a "different" location on each quest. The only unique place in the entirety of the game (of any significant length) is the deep roads which you visit briefly.

It's... I don't even know what to say. If you don't have the resources to model locations then you should look into procedurally generating them. Having one static cave you visit fifty times is... I don't even...

[Did you grow up in Finland or did you move to Finland to attend university?]

Hello again Core XII! It's been a long time.

I recognize your e-mail, where do I know you from? That... other community from way back, the Game Maker -oriented one? And, by the way, it's Xii. As in a name, not roman numerals.

Did you grow up in Finland or did you move to Finland to attend university?
I was born here, as most Finns are.

As a culture, how do the Finns look upon personal achievement or differences?
I think most Finns aspire for a family, house, job and eventually retirement. My father and his father both built their own houses. I don't really identify with most Finns so I'm no authoritative source on this. In my experience Finns of past generations are highly intolerant of differences (and once they arise, life-time feuds can occur). Younger ones that grew up on the Internet have seen the world more and are consequently tolerant.

Do you celebrate talent in your schools?
At least up to high school the atmosphere is more that of berating failure than celebrating success. If you're not the average person the system was designed for you get problems. Sit quietly, memorize, score well. And if you do score well, you may get ire from the other students that don't care for school. One teacher per thirty students leaves little room for questions, tutoring or debate. That said, there are private schools with different paradigms. My sister is in a special kind of school where they learn things differently, by doing and experimenting rather than memorizing for a test then forgetting afterward. I didn't go to one because you had to reserve a spot even before you were pregnant.

Do you feel like there are any social barriers between rich folks and poor folks in schools?
Schools have free lunch, so the only manifestation comes in who has the coolest toys. But in a technological society, everyone has gadgets. So no, I don't think that.

Do you have programs to catch the people who fall behind?
Yes. I was in a few myself. First of all in grade school I got put into a special class because I always questioned and argued with the teacher. Unfortunately, all the bullies and otherwise challenged are put in the same group, so I got beat up and it wasn't fun. But the class was smaller and slower, leaving more time and attention per student. Second, I was failing my Swedish which threatened my graduation from high school. The Swedish teacher tutored me personally and I managed to pass, barely.

Do you help special needs students?
See above. They try, but I wouldn't say they succeed, not in public school anyway. Private schools specifically for special people is another matter altogether. In vocational I was so largely ahead of the class (some/most people go to vocational because they couldn't get anywhere else so the atmosphere is lazy and unintelligent) that they put me in an adult program instead that was shorter. The classes were sparse and in the evening, and the tests were few and based on actually demonstrating skills as opposed to writing down memorized knowledge on a piece of paper. Since it was for adults, students were trusted to be responsible, unlike in vocational.

What sort of racial, cultural, and social make up did you see among students in your school? E.g. I attend an American public school, and we're 60% black, 15% minority, and 25% white.
It's 90% Finnish with the odd foreigner thrown in.

What are your personal impressions about the Finnish education system, esp. the pre-university years? What did you like about it and what would you rather change?
Personal impressions are what I've based most of my answers on so far. I'm quite exceptional in the system and it clearly didn't accommodate me very well. I've had my thoughts about improving it but I design games, not schools.

I've attended over a dozen different schools due to moving around a lot, so I like to think I've sampled most of it.

Please tell me you're making a stereogram rogue.

Any and every game I'll make will be 3D (as in, viewable as stereo) because it's easy as long as you do it from the start. Then when we get mass 3D displays most of the work is already done.

I'm one of those lucky people who can do 'snake-eyes', which is like the opposite of crossing your eyes and involves forcing your vision together without actually staring at your nose etc.
Makes stereograms instantly work for me.

Edit: apparently it's called binocular fusion. It involves splitting vision naturally into two parts and overlapping the resulting afterimage. Most people can do it in childhood and lose the ability later.
Can anyone else here still do it? I haven't even thought about it in a long time.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but I can cross my eyes instantly and with ease (in fact, they tend to do that on their own... I have corrective glasses for this). Keep 'em crossed, concentrate on either image, control the degree of crossing. No need for noses.

Do they have the same Value and Saturation? Cause that might help a bit

No, just randomly picked a teal to go with the purple.

Fixed.

Made no difference in terms of the effect, but it looks less like bright magic and more like a hologram.

This is the next 3DS visual gimmick

I'm hoping it's a next visual gimmick for 3D displays in general, whenever we get them. I mean, it's pretty easy, you just need two color variations of the same texture (might seem that's twice as much work, but there's also specular, normal and illumination maps).



The effect itself is mostly limited to holograms and magic, though. I've tried using it to create subtle lighting effects, fire, etc. but it doesn't work that way.

Certain things in nature produce this effect, such as certain fish and insects. Their body reflects light differently from different angles, thereby sending a different color to each eye.

Core, just because 1/3 of people answered yes...
1/3 of people also said 'what are you talking about?' and maybe some of those people see it, but are not sure if they're really seeing something impossible.

Well I count them as not seeing it since, well, if you see it, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't think you're seeing an impossible color then the effect isn't working for you as intended (indeed the effects seem to vary from brain to brain).

If I stare at the teal-purple for long, it "settles" into gray. I wonder if I could combat that by switching the colors periodically...

I can't cross my eyes enough to tell, so they're separate to me.

...Or am I not doing it right... ?

Try looking from further away; There's a "sweet spot" for 3D viewing. If you're too close it's too hard to cross your eyes enough.

Also, I realized since this isn't actually a 3D image at all, you can also view it by putting your eyes in parallel instead of crossed if that's your preferred method.

So far it seems about a third can see the effect. Interesting.

[impossible colors]

Take a look at this cross-eyed stereogram.



As you may notice, some of the colors are different for each eye. Viewed in stereo, this may produce rather interesting results. You may see impossible colors, in this case, teal-purple and yellow-red.

However, apparently not everyone can see this. I hear for some people they see a blend of the two colors as one, a brownish purple gray (?) and orange in this case I predict. I want to know how many people can see the effect and how many cannot.

I studied electrical engineering for 2 years in a vocational institute.

As Tumetsu requested, you could be a bit more specific as to what you wish to know. The Wikipedia article should cover the basics.

It feels claustrophobic. But that's not necessarily a bad thing; It really feels like you're in a suit like you are.

Thanks for the heads up, I'm assuming there was no message on crash?

It just came up with the Windows "This program has done an illegal operation and has to be shut down" thingy.

Performance was smooth, though it crashed when I closed the window at the end.

I would use regular expressions.
use (the )?chair

That's how I worked my visual-design text adventure prototype.

[1900]

Or are you saying you want to just return the extensions that a directory contains?

That's what I said. I think your sorting suggestion is the easiest workaround for the lack of a good command line like on Linux. I'm ill and have nothing better to do so I'll just catalog my whole library. Fun!

I have ~1900 tracks or 5.5 GiB or ~100 hours of music. Some of it is "normal" artists, some of it movie soundtracks, but in large part it's video game music, a lot of it emulated. I consider a remix about a game to be part of its soundtrack, also. I did not list games that have no original music, e.g. technically I have the chip tunes used in Seiklus and Uplink, but just because I like chip music.

Code:

Animal Crossing Wild World
Anno 1404
Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts
Banjo-Kazooie
Banjo-Tooie
Battlefield 2
Battlefield Heroes
Beyond Good & Evil
BlockoFighter
Bomberman
Cave Story
Chrono Cross
Chrono Trigger
Civilization IV
Civilization V
Claymates
Command & Conquer
Command & Conquer 4 Tiberian Twilight
Command & Conquer Generals
Command & Conquer Red Alert 2
Command & Conquer Red Alert
Command & Conquer Renegade
Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun
Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun Firestorm
Command & Conquer Yuri's Revenge
Commandos
Conker Live & Reloaded
Conker's Bad Fur Day
Cortex Command
Crash Bandicoot
Crash Bandicoot 2
Crash Bandicoot 3
Crash Bash
Crash Tag Team Racing
Crash Team Racing
Crash Twinsanity
Crimsonland
Diddy Kong Racing
DK King of Swing
Donkey Kong 64
Donkey Kong Country
Donkey Kong Country 2
Donkey Kong Country 3
Dungeon Keeper 2
Dungeon Master
EarthBound
Empires
Fallout
Fallout 3
Fallout New Vegas
Front Mission
Gish
GoldenEye 007
Gran Turismo 3
Gratuitous Space Battles
Greed Corp
Half-Life
Half-Life 2
Half-Life Nightwatch
Halo
Halo 2
Halo 3
Halo Wars
Heroes of Might and Magic 3
In Another Brothel
Invaders Corruption
Jill of the Jungle
Lego Racers
Locomotion
Luigi's Mansion
Mario & Luigi Bowser's Inside Story
Mario & Luigi Partners in Time
Mario Kart 64
Mario Kart DS
Mario Party 2
Mario Party 3
Mask, The
Mass Effect 2
Mass Effect
Master of Orion 2
Maui Mallard in cold shadow
Metroid Fusion
Metroid Prime Hunters
Metroid Zero Mission
Mirror's Edge
Moonbase Commander
New Super Mario Bros
New Super Mario Bros Wii
Perfect Dark
Perfect Dark Source
Planet M.U.L.E.
PogoSticker
Pokemon Emerald
Portal
Proun
Psychonauts
Rayman
Rayman 2
Red Faction
Red Faction 2
RollerCoaster Tycoon 2
SimCity 3000
SimCity 4
Sims 2, The
Sims 3, The
Skullmonkeys
Spirit Engine 2, The
Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow
Stair Dismount
StarCraft
StarCraft 2
Strategist, The
Super Bomberman
Super Bomberman 2
Super Bomberman 3
Super Bomberman 4
Super Bomberman 5
Super Bonk
Super Mario 64
Super Mario 64 DS
Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. 2
Super Mario Bros. 3
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Mario Kart
Super Mario RPG
Super Mario World 2 Yoshi's Island
Super Mario World
Super Metroid
Super Princess Peach
Super Smash Bros. Melee
Super Smash TV
Supreme Commander Forged Alliance
System Shock 2
Tapan Kaikki Bloodshed
Team Fortress 2
Torchlight
Transport Tycoon Deluxe
Trine
Truck Dismount
Vegastrike
Vortex
Wario Land Shake
Warioland 2
Wolfenstein 3D
Wolfenstein Enemy Territory
World of Goo
Worms 3D
Worms Open Warfare 2
Worms World Party
Yoshi Touch & Go
Yoshi's Island DS
Yoshi's Story
Zero Gear

Due to technical limitations, some of these titles omit colons. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Emulated formats I picked out: miniusf, spc, psf, minipsf, minigsf, brstm, gbs, gb

Programming in itself is an easy thing to learn and understand. It's the build process that had me twisting my panties for a long time. That's why I'd recommend anyone starting out to avoid real programming languages like C++, and instead go with something easy and intuitive like Game Maker where you can still write code (GM has its own language, GML) but can get it running by just clicking a damn "run" button. If you use C++, you have to understand headers, compiling, linking... and if you're just starting out it will make your head spin and have you quit prematurely.

Another modern trick is to make the menu system part of the gameplay, too. MegaMan Anniversary Collection (somewhat) and Spelunky both to something along the lines of that.

But as a consequence Spelunky needs a separate configuration utility, because the menu already uses the controls which you need to configure beforehand. I don't like that approach at all.

One very important issue with modern games is settings/controls and the start of the gameplay. Some games dive straight into the action or plot while I'm still looking for the right mouse sensitivity or adjusting graphics for a stable frame rate. It's incredibly awkward if the game begins with me under a cinematic attack or (fake) time-critical mission. Like Mass Effect 2. "Get up Shephard, the station's under attack! No, don't change your graphics settings now, you need to hurry! Alert, alert, get to safety! Forget about the mouse sensitivity already! Damnit, Shephard!!" The absolute beginning of the game should be a calm-ish tutorial type of thing where I can set everything correctly.

Now that's interesting! what other systems ?!

Hm, I wonder how to query for all distinct file extensions in a given directory. Windows is so difficult when it comes to simple things like this. I have music from pretty much all Nintendo systems from Game Boy to Wii, PlayStations and what have you. Even some midis from old PC games.

Donkey Kong Country, the original and sequels 2 and 3. Chrono Trigger. Super Bomberman 3. Those are the better ones I have.

A lot of my music library is emulated, though I'm surprised so little of is was SNES.

That looks nice! What did you use to make it?

yEd

This suggests the GC is non copying

I think that's for D 1.0 whereas I quoted D 2.0. Your link talks of mark-and-sweep which the 2.0 collector is definitely not.