I mentioned kennings a while ago, the Norse metaphor system
that derives from "a is to b as c is to d" analogy pairings; after
playing the chain-game in a secret online forum for a couple of months, I've
gotten around to writing an automated, dedicated Kenning
Game Engine.
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Thief 2 is still the best first-person-anything game
I've played; I'm still slogging through it periodically, a burglary
here, a moonlit rooftop escape there. I'm probably a bit out of touch as FPS
games go, but the sheer epic scale of the levels is consistently awesome - all
the more so for seeming (at least on the smaller scale) designed first for
aesthetics and structural common sense, and then tweaked for
playability. You're given a pretty free reign as to how you go about breaking
into the city bank, yet whichever route you take feels detailed and developed
enough for it to have been the designers' intention all along.
They've cut right back on the silly zombies and monsters, as well, making it
far more of an edgy and realistic game than the first. Even having an evil
genius with the voice of Droopy
the dog is twisted to chillingly sinister effect, in the end. Thief 2
is going for five
quid on a budget label these days; if you've got something to run it on,
buy it.
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La même plaisanterie en Français (pour un prix de BlogNomic),
sans calembour:
"Il y a deux poissons d'or dans un réservoir de
verre. Une poisson tourne vers l'autre poisson et il dit
'Pouvez-vous conduire cette chose?'"
[ ]
Idle fade-to-credits persiflage on a television: someone tells the joke
about two goldfish in a bowl (one saying to the other "Can you
drive this thing?"), and someone else points out that it doesn't make
any sense if they're in a bowl; that they have to be in a tank for the pun
to work.
I'd always thought that two goldfish perceiving their cramped artificial
environment as a vehicle that they hadn't been trained to drive (both of
them lacking sufficient short term memory to think it through) was
the joke.
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"The number of worlds of outcomes grows too quickly. To anything I say,
you can reply with a million things. A universe of conversations after a
minute. So prune. Discard the conversations where you admit an affair. I
don't want to end like that. Keep the ones where you say you still love
me. Do I have any left? If I don't ask you if you love me still, then
you won't say no."
"For a fee of $5.00 per word (5 word minimum), our customers can have telegrams
delivered to people who have passed away. This is done with the help of terminally Ill
volunteers who memorize the telegrams before passing away, and then deliver the telegrams
after they have passed away."
Your money back if they're not dead within a year.
Afterlife Telegrams seem to be targetting a very thin
slice of the world's gullible.
[via Sore Eyes]
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I wrote this because, surprisingly, nobody else seems to have written it
yet:-
# |. ###e#+. |.
If I were a NetHack monster, I would be a floating eye.
I see and sense absolutely everything that happens around me. I just don't do very much about it.
(.hguoht ,tnetnoc golb egaruocne
ot yaw enasni fi doog a s'tI .tey ,gnihton ,rE ?naem stniop od
tahw dnA .stniop mialc nac yllufsseccus meht etelpmoc ohw sreyalp
;yadnoM yreve ,daeha keew eht rof sksat detaler-golb eralced
ot sreyalp eht wolla selur emag tnerruc eht - eno rehtona
si siht dna ,yrtne tseug eht ,gniht
cimoNgolB a saw tahT)
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America
is threatened due to specific
information, including absolute lack of times, locations, or methods.
Handily, Chris Morris has released an mp3 of the original Bush
recording upon which the document was (not really) based. RavenBlack
was there. He knows.
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"Chess is a good example of an extremely wide decision set. Your decision set is composed of all of your pieces multiplied by all of the spaces that they can end up on. At game start, when things are fairly simple, that means that your decision space is twenty wide. You can move each of the eight pawns one or two spaces and you can also move each of the two knights to two different spaces. As the game progresses, this decision set just gets wider and wider (for a while at least)."
A good article on decision trees in gaming; presenting players with enough of a
tree to make an interesting and rewarding game, but not so much as to overwhelm them. Some solid guidance on pruning the tree through move costs and turn-phasing and things. I can't remember if I've
heard the rule of seven (plus
or minus two) applied to a game-tree context before, or not, but it's a valuable
thought. [via Zarba]
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