Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
Why Batman Can't Kill
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
I love Child’s Play and Desert Bus. It’s awesome to see the gaming community come together for good every winter. (I keep forgetting to listen to your interview…will do that tonight.)
I chuckled. :)
I honestly don’t know how the LRR people manage to do it. If it’s anything like fishing in WoW (i.e. incredibly dull, yet still requires you to be attentive to get anywhere), I’d probably go absolutely bonkers after ten minutes.
I did a summer vacation job a couple of times in a factory at a conveyor belt. I had to stare for 8 eight hours at beans coming straight from the farm. I had to pick out all rotten/malformed/too small beans and throw them away (and one time a whole family of death rabbits 0_o).
The first day I almost succumbed to applying a pick axe to my frontal lobes. The word ‘boring’ is an understatement for this kind of job. However, one of my coworkers assured me that after a couple of months you enter a sort of zombie trance state in which you do everything on automatic. Once you can do that, the time at work almost disappears from your mind when you’re shift is done. It’s the same when you drive every day from work and back. After a while you get in the car and suddenly you arrive at work without actually remembering having done the driving. Almost zen-like in a weird kind of way.
Applied to ‘Desert Bus’ this means that if they keep this up for a couple of months they’ll reach a state where they can do it without thinking.
Or commit suicide off course. Entertaining either way.
I still think there is something deeply disturbing and sick about this whole business of paying to see people suffer.
I will donate 10$ to the one who can go 12 hours without a single bathroom break.
Schadenfreude is good business!
My ultimate hope: some future Desert Bus event will involve them driving an actual bus between Tucson and Vegas, while within this bus Desert Bus is played, interviews are done, prizes are won and we all get to enjoy it via the wonders of the internet.
Some day!
I am wholeheartedly in favor of this idea.
The interviews should be live too, with some kind of a parachute entrance.
I, for one, love this plan.
It’s really interesting how excited we get about other people suffering.
Then again, they could also be doing something really usual, like marathoning every Final Fantasy game in a row, or something, and I think it would still be successful in what it does. I think that gamers in general just like the idea of Child’s Play, and so they donate to things like this.
Really, the fact that it’s Desert Bus, and it’s basically self-flagellation for our entertainment, just accounts for the publicity it gets.
Maybe.
I’ll pay $100 if you do four white mages!
A few of my friends and I have been tossing around the idea of doing some marathon fundraising for Child’s Play later on in the year. Final Fantasy was a possible candidate (the series, or at least a couple of the games in the series)
Doing a Megaman marathon of all of the games is another possibility.
If we do end up doing something, and that something is Final Fantasy, and 4 white mages, I’ll look you up. :P
So that mirth you lost was on the Desert Bus all along?
Good to see you got it back.
So the LRR guys stole his funny? Is that what you’re implying? LOL
I’m glad to see a new Stolen Pixels, too. Hopefully it’s not just a fluke and Shamus really does have his mirth back.
Personally, I could care less about the driver and his semi-conscious state. I have, however, been known to watch for hours because they SING. Badly, yes, but they sing and dance. My favorite is when they do Monty Python songs. Although I was witness to an incredible rendition of “Rest in Peace” (Spike’s song from the musical “Buffy” episode) the other day that blew all other Desert Bus music out of the water.
… ahh, I want to see that >.> I don’t suppose they tape things so they can post the good things to youtube or something later?
Hey, on your interview there was talk about you doing a “Lets Play” about desert bus.
While there isn’t that much you can do about it, this could still work out as a parody of your own series – in that, it would only be one episode, but you cram all the jokes and comments that you can think of about that one ‘game’ into that one set of about 5 pages.
I think that the LRR crew did a video review of the ‘game’ last time they did this challenge, and they sounded really enthusiastic about the game.
Just a thought.