My understanding is, Mochi ads and other Flash game revenue can make you more money than nothing, but not really enough to pay a half-decent wage for the time spent making the game.  I know places like Kongregate are trying to change that, but even their model basically turns into "hits make money, non-hits get squat" because there isn't really any long-tail exposure.  It's like a mini-sized version of the mainstream game industry's economic model. =P

So, okay, if you were gonna be making freeware games anyway then it's a no-lose proposition (other than annoying your users with ads), but unless you're a really fast Flash dev it isn't going to pay as well as, say, a job.

The real money in Flash games seems to be in contract development for portals and other corporate websites, from what I can tell.

I can totally imagine companies being stupid and greedy enough to try and pull this kind of stunt.  But I can't imagine it working - as long as people kick up enough fuss when they actually try it.  The second my ISP tries this kind of BS, I will jump ship and I will very loudly tell them exactly why they've lost my business.  I'll pay money for a university dialup account if necessary - it'd be more useful than some "major popular sites only" crap anyway.

Heck, if there's really going to be a story in Time on this, it'll probably raise enough backlash to kill the idea before they even roll it out.

I think the problem is that the backlash wont happen because too much of the public doesn't know how the hell the internet works, and its not like anyone in the government knows either (speaking from an American's point of view, series of tubes, etc.)  I'm hoping for the best, but at the same time I'm not expecting it.

This is true, and it's a risk.  But this would break a sane internet experience for even a total interweb newbie.  I mean, imagine all the email forwards that hotlink random lolcat images or inspirational sunsets suddenly failing to load.

But, yeah, if I see any further signs of this being a reality, I'd totally voice my complaints about it.

As a parallel, look at what's happening in Canada with the gov't trying to roll out a new DMCA-inspired copyright law.  There is a LOT of crap supposedly in the works in there ... but the part that makes the news is the $500 fine for illegal music downloads.  Frankly there is a lot worse rumored to be coming up in the bill than download fines, but if that's what gets the public riled up enough to stall the bill then so be it.

You score 100 points.

I haven't yet, but I just came across this game working my way through the comp entries.  I'll print off the rules and give it a shot later.

Edit: Also, cheers for making a card game!  I know it'll get less attention and be less flashy (just like the mainstream board / card game market these days), but doing game design via board and card games is just as valuable from a design perspective as the digital kind.  Every game designer should be capable of prototyping ideas off of a computer and into a board game; it's often the best way to quickly and cheaply test out whether a concept will be fun or not.

[joshg]

Also, I owe a bit of an apology to joshg.  His death was due to an oversight on my behalf(I forgot he had a shield), but he managed to pre-empt my apology/efforts at reparation with a self-rationalisation, on technical grounds, of why his shield failed him.  I sort of decided to just run with it at the time, because he was okay with it, and I didn't want to cause any confusion.  SORRY JOSHG 

Aww, that sucks.  I was totally going out of my way to stir up trouble in the first round thinking that if I became a target I'd survive the first attempt, and it would flush out a werewolf.

The moral of the story is that you should always use Storehouse jars to buff up your shield to at least +15 if you want to make a successful run to the Golden Condor. 

I can totally imagine companies being stupid and greedy enough to try and pull this kind of stunt.  But I can't imagine it working - as long as people kick up enough fuss when they actually try it.  The second my ISP tries this kind of BS, I will jump ship and I will very loudly tell them exactly why they've lost my business.  I'll pay money for a university dialup account if necessary - it'd be more useful than some "major popular sites only" crap anyway.

Heck, if there's really going to be a story in Time on this, it'll probably raise enough backlash to kill the idea before they even roll it out.

The band name sucks but the picture and title are kind of funny together, in a completely depressing way.

Edit: also, I think this shows that my visual design skills still have a ways to go.  I just had no idea what to do with the band name.

How about gamespot, then?

That awesome game that starts with an A.

Abuse? Ambush? Can't remember.

This one?

http://www.mobygames.com/game/abuse

Dungeon keeper...hmmm...or was that already good enough?  Grr; I'm thinking of old games that were already plenty good instead of old games that weren't.  Grrr.  This is hard.  Going to have to go away and think about this for a while.

Dungeon Keeper was definitely good enough already.   

But a sequel with a Z-axis couldn't possibly be a bad thing, could it?   

Or a Dungeon Keeper roguelike, maybe.
 

I think the theme should be "Cave Story rip-off".
 

The lotus blossom
opens gently; life stirs anew.
Let's write, bizatches.

Awesome.  Was that all 100% real sounds from those devices?  I have no idea how he'd get pitch control over the scanner like that - friggin' awesome.

[YES.]

Syndicate.  It needs to happen.

YES.

I think the deadline is "Who cares, just make some sweet chiptune goodness RIGHT NOW."
 

Poetry, sometimes.

The two Elite sequels, Frontier and First Encounters.  When I played First Encounters, being able to fly around in a realistically-scaled, friggin' huge procedurally generated universe completely blew my mind.  Heck, even the space flight based on actual physics was pretty cool.  But the combat sucked so hard that I couldn't bring myself to get into it for very long.  A remake that did nothing but fix the combat and spruce up the graphics a bit would rock my world.

Dungeon keeper...hmmm...or was that already good enough?  Grr; I'm thinking of old games that were already plenty good instead of old games that weren't.  Grrr.  This is hard.  Going to have to go away and think about this for a while.

Dungeon Keeper was definitely good enough already.   

I really DON'T understand what I have done...

Whatever this is, it's frickin' awesome.

Is it strange that I don't like Clean Asia?

I tried to like it but failed.  Mostly because it was so ridiculously hard, I think.

Congrats to everyone who completed a game!  I was quietly working on something but got too ambitious and didn't have enough attention span time to complete it.  I'll hang onto it and maybe revisit it in the future. 

Probably I shouldn't have bothered working on the actual game engine stuff and just messed around with PG pixel art, which is what I was really interested in.  But then I got all distracted setting up layers and panning and whatever and didn't actually get around to making the dudes look cool.   

p.s. Is anyone going to compile a big huge download of all the games?  Because that would make me very happy.