What about the movie, Mario Brothers?

Is Peachs Dad ACTUALLY a fungus?

Why are Goombas giant dudes with tiny heads when filmed but crab-walking mushrooms with teeth and eyes when viewed in two dimensions?

Do we just pretend the movie doesn't exist in order to keep things simpler(sort of)?

Then there's the kids show, but I'm not even gonna get into that...

Lego Island for PC.

You will burn in hell.
That game is my childhood.

Sure, mine too, but think about how excited you were when you saw the adds in magazines, you were all "This is gonna be SO COOOL!  I'll be able to build what ever I want!"  Then it came out and all you could do was walk around the island on the roads, build the same five models over and over to play those same five races and eventually catch the brick-thief (what was his name, again?)

It did have a really good sense of humor though.  Pretty much exactly what I'd expect from a game based on legos.  In fact, looking back it pretty much set the style for all the lego games that are out now.

Damn.  Now I wanna go play it again, just for the sake of nostalgia...

The bmx bike jump over lava orbiting a black hole.

That or the nest of sharkbees in the attic.  I hate those sharkbees.

And you have a black hole that somehow doesn't suck lava into itself in your house WHY?

Black holes are just like any other body of mass.  If something's moving fast enough in its gravity well it will keep orbiting.  It's only if the orbiting objects orbit decays and it eventually reaches the black holes event horizon that it gets sucked in and crushed forever in its gravitational singularity.

That's why.

The bmx bike jump over lava orbiting a black hole.

That or the nest of sharkbees in the attic.  I hate those sharkbees.

Lego Island for PC.

Awesome game.  I've been playing it on and off trying to figure out how to build an army that can survive the hordes of greenkins and elven archers.

So far I've figured out how to make money and can defend my castle for a while before I'm overrun by greenkins and elven archers.

At first it appeared after you build a building the peon dies but eventually I realized the peon is simply behind the building and won't be selectable until the building receives orders.

As far as I can tell the first thing to build is a lumber mill, which seems to make money so long as the tiles next to it have a positive forest value(?) and a positive good value(?).  The lumber mill reduces the forest value of the spaces around it so eventually they'll become negative forest and become grass.  In order to counter this you build planters at the mill,

which seem to raise the forest value of surrounding(?) tiles every turn.  Apparently your units increase the good value of surrounding tiles whereas enemy units reduce them. This becomes a problem if you don't have anyone to hold off enemies since they'll turn your forests evil and you'll stop making money from them.

Other stuff:

-Fighters guilds don't always build the same units(?)  One game I built a fighters guild and all I could build (all I could afford) was an archer, which I had never seen available before.  Was this due to the terrain?

-Ocean level seems to rise occasionally.  Don't build important buildings next to oceans.

-Oceans and mountains are dangerous.  Your units can't swim and occasionally will eventually die if left in the mountains.

And I thought this was addicting before there was a plot...


Also, Sgt. Stinkholm is a bastard.

Even where it is now this game is super addicting.  The timed and classic modes are particularly good.  It'd be cool to see more pipe types- S bends and U bends and the dreaded cross pipe that forces you to overlap two loops.  It'd also be neat if the timer got faster as you gain points to increase the difficulty.  Perhaps getting more points for using more bends or something.  Maybe having a low probability bomb that gets rid of gray pipes in puzzle and timed.  I dunno.

Course, all that's assuming you planned on continuing to work on the game.  Not that you should or anything.  It'd just be the greatest game of all time (hint hint.)



P.S.  You should finish this game, cause I wanna play it.  It's addicting.

So I've been lurking for the past couple months, downloading and playing compo entries obsessively.  Now that I've finally caught up with the current competition and have been trying all the bad-ass games coming out of Assemblee I figured maybe the time has come to register so I can let the folks developing the games know when they screw up on my computer.

I also like the idea being able to spout gibberish at the coolest people on the internet.


BUT!

I have a deep, dark secret.


I... Am not a programmer!

 
BLOOHOOHOOHOO


It's OK, though.  My dad is a programmer.  He worked at Milton Bradley in the seventies with Noah Falstien who recently stopped by and I got to hear him and my dad reminiscing about working on Dark Tower and programming with all their crazy co-workers in the plastic fumes and trying to hack into Smith College's VAX.

I grew up playing Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.  Also Sim Earth (I could tell you how global warming works or what the Gaia Hypothesis when I was six), Sim Ant and Sim City (even if it was just to watch buildings explode as a giant newt crawls over them).

I'm a PC gamer of the nineties.  While my friends were playing Star Fox 64 and Crash Bandicoot I was playing Warcraft II and Alien Vs. Predator.  I loved Unreal Tournament for it's player created content.  I was recently devastated to realize my CD of all the skins and maps and mods and models I had downloaded for UT has disappeared into the ether and there's nothing I can do about it.  Polycount is no longer around.  Terrible.  I played all the nostalgic games of everyones childhood on emulators.  Eventually I did get a PS2 with the hopes I might find a copy of Symphony of the Night somewhere and so I could own my own copy of Silent Hill 2 but I'm still a PC gamer at heart.

Anyway, I've slowly grown alienated from the gaming industry as I watched it stagnate and grow uninspired.  Instead I turned to the indy gaming scene for new and creative games.  I'm convinced that the indy game scene is the only remedy to the industries games-produced-as-commodities cause the status quo will buy anything if they're told it's groundbreaking and sparkly.  I think I'll stop there, since this subject requires an entire rant of it's own.


So that's who I am.  I'll be around, trying all the beautiful games.