They are calling it Thi4f.  Not only do I hate that but it makes less than usual sense.

Oh, ye Gods, I'm having a flashback to Driv3r. Please, someone, stop this before it's too late!

Yeah but a 3 looks like an E...sort of.

I mean...4...E...MY BRAAAIN.

They are calling it Thi4f.  Not only do I hate that but it makes less than usual sense.

Oooh yes.  Gotta put time in my schedule for this.

The .NET integration is what I like.  I feel like a sap for focusing on C# so much now that I have a Mac as well as a PC, but things like XNA and Silverlight make for a very appealing ecosystem for just that one programming language.

That chart is great.

I liked that, but I'm certainly for the "continue button" rather than reloading the flash every time.  It gets especially annoying once you are in on the gag.

short bursts of thought are the futu

you're wrong

please explain why in < 140 chars

Twitter scares me.  I only read fake twitters that are a parody of real twitters.

Can Captain Jonah Ahab slash his way out of the belly of the whale with his scythe-for-a-leg?

I would play that.  I would play that!

You know, I still haven't played Planescape.
don't hit me

Me neither.  It's in my big pile of games I ain't played.

I love these things.  Sweet.

When you have a certain number of lives in a game I really get angry, remove some of my score, hell send me back to start, when I die but when I die 3 times I do not deserve to get a "You fail"-screen, I suck at video games!!

Bonesaw does a good job of keeping the lives system, but not annoying people who simply aren't all that good at games.

Thank god, because man am I bad at Bonesaw.  Although I guess it's like all NES-era games (which I convince myself in my head that it is) in that it gets a lot easier as you get used to it very quickly.  And then you get to a new level and it's not easy anymore.

Don't try to play BG1 with a magic user as a main character though. They're too weak and fights take ages to finish. The game is really playable only with a tough character.

I have these on my shelf and magic is for neeeerdds anyways.  So maybe I will do this.

You guys are definitely taking this too seriously.

It's too bad Gustav Dore is dead.  He could have done some awesome visuals for an adventure game.

I once had an idea to make a game based on it. It'd be a Double Dragon clone. "Punch your Way through Seven Levels of Hell!"

Yes.  Make that.

Another possibility is the increase in organized sites about indie games -- there were indie games for a long time, but sites like tigsource and indiegames.com/blog are new.

This is also quite possible.  Hell, there was half the good games you could get on PC were indie games.  iD and Epic didn't pop up overnight.  I remember downloading their demos off of BBSes.

We used to get Big Blue Disk and between that and dozens of small-time games and clones in the 80s I probably only played big-name games half of the time on PC.

Re XNA and SDL and DirectX: Those take a way a ton of the effort to get into making games.  Input, sprite manipulation, etc.  Those are all things you had to program a long time before you could get into before.  Also those are the things that are most intimidating to someone getting into this stuff.  I say this as someone trying to learn XNA and C# right now.

I'm pretty sure EA is not implying they wrote the original Dante's Inferno.

I enjoyed the original NWN campaign immensely, except that it was hideously unbalanced.  There were several encounters that simply could not be done with certain classes without a seriously long and painful abuse of teleports to heal and restock items and such.

NWN2 has severe technical issues that cause it to perform very poorly with some patch level/video card combinations, but I really like the Storm of Zehir expansion.  The AI is miserably stupid, though.  You basically have to turn the AI off and pause and setup your attacks constantly.  Not that it isn't in the spirit of D&D, but it makes the real-time thing seem nearly pointless sometimes.

I think the tools are a big part of it.  Things like Game Maker, XNA, and even SDL really take out a lot of the hard stuff.

http://www.umop.com/rps101/rps101chart.html

Don't forget RPS-101