The development team is just under 10 or so people and it includes mysterious and productive Australian indie developer, Farbs. I really like the presentation of his Captain Jameson game. The BBS style menus for interacting with space stations really strokes my 80s computing boner.

But yeah, Card Hunter, It's cool. It's a little bit grindy, but not enough to put me off and the whole cards in hand equals what you can do or be protected from that turn system it has going is cool. Is a guy's crazy armour fucking you over? Well you could hit him with a armour disolve or armour boil spell OR if you're clever, maybe you'll just hit him with a memory loss spell since it's been a few turns and you figure his armour is the oldest card in his hand.

Anyway, I really just wanted to show off my priest. He's a skeleton with a giant skeletal arm as one of his maces and the severed hand of a GM's Mary Sue character as one of his unholy trinkets.

I'm going, are you?



I figure it'll be MARRIAGE THEMED so I'll bring my married girlfriend.

Saw this last night with the little woman, her husband and his girlfriend.

This was me as soon as the credits rolled,

"WOOF!.... Jeeze LOU-WEEZE... *laughing for a while* You fell off Scott."

This movie... this movie.

Micheal Fastbender plays the only character in it who doesn't blow donkey ass but nothing he or anyone else ever does in the movie makes any sense or isn't retarded. It's hard to watch a movie where everything every character ever says or does makes no sense and is logically broken.

It was like Phantom Menace but more chartoonishly dumb. I was reminded of Deep Blue Sea, have you ever seen the movie Deep Blue Sea? It was a really forgettable, dumb horror movie with LL Cool J in it I think. Remove all the cool "Alien" setting and concepts and Deep Blue see is a less stupid movie than this plotwise and characters wise.

There's a cool concept there, the synopsis of the movie would read cool, but the movie, blows. It just can't tell a story. The completely horrible and batshit characters ruin the whole thing and the pacing is just.... ugh... so many problems. When nothing anyone is doing seems justifiably motivated by anything or just plain make any FUCKING SENSE and yet stuff is happening so fast that there's no time for any tension... it really makes for a terrible movie. Also there's the fact that every character except maybe one person is a completely nonsensical character, a cartoon character, or a complete asshole for no justifiable reason, and you just care about nothing. Any time a character died in this thing I would just say in my mind or out loud sometimes,

"...GOOD... GOOD, die you stupid asshole."

I don't want to spoil anything, this is a really light and pretty meaningless spoil but none the less, tags for those who don't want any plot point known to them.

[spoiler]So they run into some dead Space Jockey corpses from 2000 years earlier and the geologist and the biologist - who I was calling Slyvester and Tweety for the whole movie because they were too cartoon characters who were never developed and just spouted really hammy over the top cliche lines and their motivations and actions never made any fucking sense - they decide they are gonna leave, their going back to the ship because FUCK THIS, I DIDN'T SIGN UP FOR THIS. Ugh. So they leave, some stuff happens and then the crew is called back to the ship because a storm is coming that will fuck them if they are out in it.

Well, for some reason, the two guys who leaf earlier, are still in the pyramid after everyone else who left after them got out when told to. Oh AND I guess they never heard on the radio that they were supposed to leave too I guess? Well anyway, that makes no sense, but the movie makes out that they got LOST. "Weren't we JUST here before?" the one guy says etc etc. They got LOST? The one guy is the guy who sent out the mapper drones... you just... YOU WHERE JUST ALL FOLLOWING HIM IN THE PREVIOUS SCENE! He was all like "Follow me, I made mapper things map this place. I know the way, follow me!" Now he's lost? Okay, why?

So two guys are stranded in the dangerous and spooky pyramid over night now. Okay, whatever they can breath in there. THEN EVERYONE ON THE SHIP DECIDES TO GO TO SLEEP OR FUCK SOMEONE THAT NIGHT... WHAT? There's two guys stranded in a spooky alien pyramid with crazy shit in it, in fact the captain like... makes JOKE I guess about how one of the droids has found a lifeform or something... Is this supposed to be funny? Why? What is GOING ON, MOVIE? Why does no one care about these guys' safety? Is this ship crewed by children? Why is every character acting like a 5-year-old? If you don't care about these to guys, why should I? What is the point of them being in this movie and getting killed? Like you already introduced the one guy as being a totally annoying asshole and the other as a moron. WHAT WAS THE POINT? Why are they in this movie and why does no one else on the story give a FUCK about them?![/spoiler]

It doesn't have a market, but I like the river.

The Benz Canton

Me myself, I’m sorry there are lots of other real projects which yell for attention and feedback for years, yet never receive the kind of input it wasted.

Well maybe those real projects should have an interesting concept behind them, instead of being yet another orc basher simulation.

Hahah, nice.

... to Ottawa, our nation's capital.

The tap water is really nice here.

At my work, everyone on in the games division is pretty much like me or one of you rubes. We play board and card games after work every friday.

Also, we have beer on tap in the office including one great Canadian brew I hadn't heard of before called "Beau's Lug Tread" which is a fantastic "lagered ale". I recomend it if you can find it at your local fancy beer having beer garden or are in the Ottawa area.

Anyway, here's how my apartment looked 1.5 weeks ago.

http://tsamurai.pyoko.org/images/my_apartment.html

I'm getting a little tired of the indie game scene spitting out game after game that are just Super Mario Brothers, Zelda or a Rogue-like with exactly one gimmick added and I mean GIMMICK, not idea, GIMMICK.

I'm especially tired of this Gimmick ALWAYS BEING THE SAME ONE: Making clones of yourself.

Seriously, I looked at the indiegamesblog today and two of the games on the front page are offenders of this and they are posted one right after an other. It's hilarious. Yeah, Braid had this mechanic, and it also had a lot of other ones.

Didn't the guys who made that Raptor Safari game already make a self cloning game about donkeys? Isn' there that totally unfun looking game with cool graphics cloning game P.B. Winterbottom or whatever coming out on the Wii soon?

Heh, Clone game clones, I just realized the irony.

Please stop making puzzle platforming games! Stop making yet an other Roguelike.

Desktop dungeons is cool. Why? Because he didn't make a totally generic Roguelike and then add one gimmick to it. Instead he came up with the IDEA that it would be cool to have a roguelike that was more like a puzzle game where you just had one level to clear out and every single step you made was important to winning and you had to take in the big picture all the time.

See that, that is called an IDEA not a gimmick.You can tell it's an idea because it makes his whole game totally unique to any other roguelike almost to the point that you can't call it a roguelike anymore.

Like, I don't want to toot my own horn, and Pike & Shot is a ways from being anything worth talking about, but if I get it done I think it'll be a cool game. Did I try to come up with a totally cool way to turn an existing genre on its head like make a game like super mario except when you jump on a goomba's head the goomba eats you!? No, because I am not some fag making stupid gimmicky games that are a waste of everyone's time.

I said hey, it would be cool to have a game where you controlled a little formation of guys but instead of being a big serious strategy game, it played like a cute little shooter and your guys moved around and engaged things in a very automatic, low input necessary manner that made the situation controllable. This is not super clever, it's not something that's gonna make anyone go "Wow, Geo is so smart he totally turned video games on their head with this one." But it is an IDEA that is original and I hope fun and fresh rather than gimmicky and forgetable.

When you ban him he gets bored and then stuff like this happens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoYxlMHRIdg

Hey, hey MongDUMB...

SHUT UP ABOUT MY TYPOS!

Remember when I lent you $500 so you could pay off your credit card and then you paid me back. Well... CONSIDER THAT REVOKED! That's right, I'm giving you back the 500 you repaid me and then I want you to give it back to me thereby undoing the friendly solid!

I need to actually play at least the demo of VVVVVV so that I can comment on it. But assuming it is a really good game, it's still just made by one guy and seems overpriced to me.

Having not played it, I can't say if it is worth 15 dollars or not, but what I still feel I can say is that if he had just charged 5 dollars I think he'd be doing a lot better on sales. If I ever actually sell Pike & Shot and not just give it away, I'm not going to charge over $2.50 unless I devise some sort of micro transaction scheme that actually seems cool.

If you are making an indie game with a one or two person team, even if it's actually a really good game, I don't feel like you can afford to present any noticable barrier to entry or people just aren't going to care. The video game market seems like it's getting pretty saturated to me and even though some people might look kindly on Indie games that legitimately offer something fresh or different than what is out there, they EXPECT either the quality or depth of the game to be limited so asking a "legitimate" game price seems like you are pricing yourself out of the market to me. It has to be a no brainer purchase.

"Canabalt, it's a really cool looking game. I like the music. Cool, the glass breaks when you jump through it and the doves flutter around. $2.50. SOLD"

Now Canabalt is really cool looking, and well made for what it is, but what IS it? It's a one button platformer with frequently unfair level generation and very little variation. I haven't played VVVVVV, but I bet it is much deeper and hell, just better than that. However, Canabalt was almost a hit and bet it will end up with way higher sales than VVVVVV.

"This game looks like an old Amiga game, okay. I guess if I'm from England or over 25 that matters to me at all. Hey you can't jump you just flip, cool/gay. 15 dollars, hmmmm.. Yeah that demo was pretty neat/lame."

I mean, it's not the bungle of bungles, but he made a bad decision in my mind. I'm not saying every indie game has to be 99 cents, that's bullshit, but what I am saying is that unless you look like Aquaria and get a ton of good press leading up to release, I really don't think you can charge even close to $10 and hope to do much business.

Of course the other point that stands out in my mind is this: get good press leading up to release and market in some other ways or don't even bother charging.

Some people just have no clue though, check out this guy's game on TIG. I'm serious, download it right now and play it, it's a really fast download. He's seriously asking if he can charge $10 or $20 fucking dollars! What a piece of shit! I played it for 5 minutes and I was just amazed. Wow, wander around in a vague flavourless block maze playing a gauntlet clone with NO INNOVATION WHAT SO EVER. I love the two first weapons you have access to, shitty unsatisfying shot that goes no where and shitty shitty unsatisfying shot that goes full screen. WOW, sign me up, I wanna be a wizard on a turtle's back with assinine cutscenes and terrible fonts.