"Ah the Road, why won't they ever make a movie of you"

You know those books that you love that you’d think would make a great movie? You know how great it would feel if one of them was turned into a movie?

"Is this a new book cover... wait... ITS WHAT!?"

Imagine how you would feel if you found out that not only was there a movie being considered, but it had been made, released and gotten favourable reviews weeks ago.

Now imagine you have no money to see it and that in another week or so it’ll be gone from cinemas. How great is that?

Anyone seen it?

Lambo

I also have one of him in a pimp hat.

Take any game set in a really bright, sunny place. Far Cry 2 would be a decent example. Would it not be intresting, and add a bit more to immersion, to have a key to put on a pair of shades if you are heading directly towards the sun or you find that there is far too much glare.

Funtionally it should work like nightvision from any other game. but with the specs themselves having a more tangible connection to the world. They may be a commodity you can buy for example.

Obviously you would need to up the bloom ingame for them to be properly useful, but it would present a new (albeit small) layer of tacticality in combat. Whether to attack with the sun to your back if you don’t have sunglasses, or, if you have really shit, scratched and muddy sunglasses, to bother putting them on at all. Maybe if they are worn and battered enough they may suddenly snap or fall off leaving you momentarily blinded.

Also, putting on shades always does make you feel that extra bit cool doesn’t it?

Just a thought.

Lambo

When people say “If I were you, I’d…” I always take issue with that. The main reason for this is:

If you were me then you would do what I’d do because its ME!

I know people don’t really mean that particular interpretation, but it is an obvious flaw with the phrase.

Now, another thing that seriously bothers me about this phrase is its ambiguity. For example as well as the above, it could also mean:

• If you were me, in the sense of: you and all of your person as you are, were in my current situation, that you would do the action in question differently.

There is already a phrase to say that, from now on say “If I was in your position”. You have been misusing “If I were you”, please stop it.

OR YOU MAY HAVE MEANT

• If you were me and you had lived my life, with all my thoughts and experiences, whilst retaining your own personality, that you would do the action in question differently.

That wouldn’t work. Although some of our personality is indeed predetermined by our own self (Some call it you’re “soul” or “spark” or just your brain’s makeup.) your experiences have a massive effect on it as well. If this is what you meant, than that means that what you would do is irrelevant, you are not you anymore, if you have lived my life and become as much of me as you can while not sharing a brain you are someone completely different, someone you cannot speak for.

As you can see, neither really works. So please stop using this phrase.

If you disagree (or just want to agree wholeheartedly) or you think I missed another point of view on it, comment away if you wish.

Yeah, and I know a lot of that was as confusingly written as fuck, take your time, or just rant at me below. Its all the one.

Lambo

Email is about to get a kick in the nuts and the whole world is going to cheer.

It’s a beast of a demonstration, I know, I doubted I’d watch hardly any of it, but, god damn, it’s just so impressive. Thats one hour twenty minutes worth watching. I already have plans of a ton of different ways I could use this.

Take a look at this too. A cool little sample of what will become of internet communication.

Lambo

What if there were games designed solely for the purpose of the player taking the role of a more intelligent beings pet? Would it work?

I think its fair to say that at the moment if you were to look at the phenomenon (I’m not going to say “genre” because pet games don’t necessarily have to be a conventional videogame, although all my examples are, tamagotchi are debateable) as it is now, the games are separated into games where the player nurtures a cute ball of fluff, feeding, playing with and scolding the creature until it no longer does something annoying. Then you can ogle at its cuddly-wuddly loveliness all you want.

The other half would be things like monster rancher and Pokemon. These strip out most of the cuddles and replace them with training your creature(s) skills and stats to compete in (usually) martial contests. Again, these games’ goals are to have the player eventually have some “Ultimate Pet”.

The concept in my head is somewhere both in-between and inclusive of these two types of games. This is the bit where I tell you what the game would be like. This isn’t the idyllic version, not because it’s not the best I’ve come up with, but because I’m still in half a mind of whether there is such a thing.

First off, and I can’t emphasise this enough, the game world will not make sense to you.

Does a cat understand what a lightbulb is, or does it simply acknowledge its existence and simply recognise light sometimes comes from there? Does a dog know whats going on when a small child kicks a ball into a goal and suddenly starts whooping with joy? No.

This will be like that, but with the intelligence and complexity involved scaled up. The player will not be a dog or a cat or anything you’ve ever seen before. The reason is its simply not true to the experience if the player knows how things work.

If a dog uses its full brain capacity as a pet, so should you.

The player will be expected to have roughly human level thought capabilities. I’m not saying you will be asked to do math, but that you should have decent reasoning, communication and problem solving skills. This is because it simply won’t work if you have to pretend to be a dog or something, your simply not. Pretending to be something less intelligent than you would create a situation for the player where they don’t know what their character is supposed to be able to figure out. If you simply have the creature be as smart as the player then that problem is gone, what you figure out is what your character has also figured out.

Your “master” in-game will be doing things that are simply beyond you, both in an understanding sense and in interactive sense. Your master might suddenly keel over, turn to jelly, split into five clones, stand back up and then give you a treat. Which would make as much sense to us as to when we take off our jacket does to our cat.

“Progress” in the game would most likely be measured by simply how good of a pet you can figure out to be. For example, relatively early on in your pet life you might figure out that when your master says a particular word, he is calling you (The “word” could just sound like a noise to us, or it might even be some freaky, lightshow, gesture method of communication).

Everything is alien to you. Even yourself, you cannot understand as much of yourself as humans understand animals. For that reason your body will also be alien. You might be playing as some quadrupedal tiger tentacle thing, or an enormous purple ball of fluff on wings. The master’s species don’t necessarily have to be bigger than you, they simply need to have a degree of power over you, and will be smarter.

The reason your not a human is because I can easily envisage it simply seeming like a game where humans are captured by another race. “Oh no! what do we do”, the answer would almost never be “Just be a pet”. The player needs to be detached from preconceived notions of what they are in the world. By not being something recognisable, the in-game world can do that shaping in a much more dynamic and interesting way.

From here I’ll simply list out some of the more technical aspects of the game to build the picture then finish with a small thought on the feasibility of the game being successful in any way.

- The player could pick and choose aspects of the game before starting. EG: Their species, their masters’ species, a rough choice of the area they are in (obviously there are massive differences for a pet being in a farm type thing, or purely domestic.) You could leave your masters temperament random or set it to kind or hateful, or whatever you want.

- The player (depending on species) might remain with its siblings and parents. These could be AI controlled. They could even be human controlled and the game could play like a sort of MMO. The players would share their experiences and thoughts on the world with each other (this would be OK seeing as the characters, as I have said, would be of human intelligence, so it would be only natural for a species like that to do it in some form anyway)

- Communication between your own species should be easy. You could have a in-game system like text chat or, in the case of AI, prescribed sentences or whatever. When said these should then be “translated” in assorted howls/twitches/scents etc for in-game effect. It should be easy for an adult creature because we can communicate easily, most species can (at least in conveying important messages).

- Communication with other species (EG: Your masters) will have no help. Obviously they will make an effort to teach you commands for what they want you to do. Since your smart yourself you should be able to pick up some other telltale things overtime but don’t expect their language to be “just another dialect”. The smartest dog in the world will never understand the english language. Therefore you will never be able to fully comprehend your master’s communication.

- The player should ideally be able to control as much of the creatures motions and “expressions” as possible. A keyboard could allow for a decent go at this, but seeing as this is a purely theoretical game I’m pretending that the player has a great amount of control.

- There will never be a goal published right there on the screen for the player to complete (unless the master decides to do something like that, you never know). All goals are made by you. You can strive to have your masters affection or to excel in whatever duties you may have been assigned (you may be a police dog, a messenger, a hunting animal or something like that) Obviously you may be a very powerful animal (a dragon-like thing is a good example). You may wish to try to escape, you may even succeed and even join up with others of your species. You’d still be the game’s equivalents of packs of wild dogs but it may be a good change. Or you might just want to devour your asshole of a Master. It’s up to you. Just like it’s up to your dog whether he does what you want him to or not.

Would it work? If the whole thing was proposed as a “simulation” of sorts then I’d say it would be a very interesting and possibly successful piece of work. It wouldn’t be a particularly fun “game” but it would be thought-provoking and definitely rewarding to understand what is being proposed to you in-game and then doing it to please your master. If this was ever made I’m sure it would sure as fuck get a load of attention at the very least.

Anyone else out there have any thoughts? I feel like I could go on a bit more but I’m tired now.

Lambo

Well lets pretend I did let you know that I was spending the last week and a bit in Lanzerote.

You all still believe me that I’ll do Daily Topics and everything is fine now, it has to be.

Lambo

I now, however, seem to being without any consistent form of entertainment (not that the exams were entertainment, I’ve been bored while doing them also.)  I need something to keep myself amused, busy  and hopefully constructive over the holidays.

For the forseeable future I’m going to be doing Daily Topics about whatever I feel like I should talk about. Mostly games stuff. While I was considering this I realized that there is no way in hell that I’m going to be able to keep that up. Instead I’m going to do the Daily Topics once a week.

Why is it still called “The Daily Topic”? Because as I’ve mentioned, I hate deleting what I’ve already typed and also I’ve already placed an order with the t-shirt shop for 5000 of these

I should be able to sell these easily enough, right? ... Right?

The topics may be about a game in particular, some new news or developement that sparked some thoughts or maybe even a retarded breakdown of why life would be better if monkey were made of custard.

I also hope to interspace this with short sum ups of the interesting shit I found during the week. I think I attempted that before* but left it at one post. The usual odd tidbits may also pop up in between as well.

First topic will come before christmas.

Lambo.

*Related note: I actually DID take up canoeing, well rowing actually. At no point when writing that did I actually want to go canoeing, and at no point when I decided to join a rowing team did I recall that joke. Funny how stuff like that works out.

My clever hat was functioning well.

Same deal as last time.  I had a nice brainstorm session (fueled by yogurt) with a group of fellow RPS community members, (namely Yargh and Land) a while back.  I can’t remember how long ago this was but I’m finnially deciding to get this concept posted somewhere for the same reasons as before “Blah blah blah I’m selfish and I want it to be MY idea blah blah” or something like that but more cleverly written to make me not seem like a hateful prick.

Anyways. I decided the easiest way would be to just translate the end idea from the convo to a paragraph to stop confusion.
This is how *I* would do fighting with lightsabers in a Star Wars game….

I’d scrap health bars and instill a new mantra: “Unless your super lucky, a hit to your body kills you.” (this is for lightsaber vs lightsaber). I’d replace health bars with what I’d call a  “balance system” or something to that effect. If you hit someone, they block it, but they are slightly more worn down. You trade blows in a stylish manner until the weaker one, or the stupider one suddenly misses a move and gets impaled. Basically higher level means you can do more blocks and dodges before fucking up so for the sake of clarity.

lvl20 sith VS 10 lvl 1 jedi
The Sith wins after about 12 or so moves unless the jedi blows him up or something.

Fancy moves are like abilities in any RPG or MMO, for example, you have a “punch” ability — 30% chance to punch a guy after the next swing, to leave him open — .  Force choke — By my reckoning would be pretty useless against jedi. It either has a really low chance of success against them, but it wins the fight, or they have to be fairly open/weak after doing a big move.

Stuff like that.

At the start, when your Level 1 you can probably do … I don’t know, 2 or 3 blocks consistently. Your early fights would be 1 on 1 and you’d win (or lose) in a second or two. You’d need a decent player skill to beat another person (whatever the control scheme is I’d presume there would be a method of making your move at the right time in this concept). Your animations would be very wild and unskilled. Your early fights may literally be you just hacking the crap out of some animal or bar thug. As you progress and level up, this is rewarded with a greater quality of attack moves and animations. Your training would actually *TRAIN*  you , the player, in better skills at controlling your character. Fancy moves (flips and big complicated cool looking moves etc.) would be left under your control, and it would be the players responsibility to use them at the correct times to improve their chances of success in a fight. Normal attacks and parries could fall under one or two buttons (similar to Batman Arkham Asylum maybe?) and they would be completely up to the computer to handle.

An example would be You versus 2 goons. You are across the room from them and only have your light sabre. They have standard guns and are considered pretty standard enemies. You begin running up to them (maybe a “force leap” to get up close) and you hold down the general “attack button”. You swing 2 chops and the first goes down within a second or two. You’ve also deflected about 5 or six shots the second. Your bar is almost empty though (you’re only about Level 5) and so you quickly hammer “backflip” before you’re character drops the ball and gets his ass shot. Then you follow it up with some move that spins out of a backflip and impale the second guy before he gets a bead on you again.

The only epic sabre fights you’d get is between two high level “masters”. These would be the typical ones you get in the movies. But hopefully full of the awesome that you can see in this example. This puts a good perspective on those fights. They make them full of spectacle to weaker players and a good satisfying reward for those who can pull them off.

I’m not really sure how to deal with deaths. It really depends on the game type. I will talk about repercussions for losing a fight though. Pretty much the only way to heal from light saber wounds appears to be with cybernetic prosthetics. Your character could become more machine than man after a while if you lose a good few major bouts. As long as you can make them look like real parts if you wanted that would be great, as in, not forcing a giant mega robot hand upon your sexy female Jedi  as some might find that unpleasant. I like the idea that after an epic fight against a big jedi you could end up like a darth vadar kinda thing, but a smaller fight leaves you with a temporary (or permanent) scar or a new hand. In game currency could be used to customise or remove/repair them so people can remain close to the image they want for their characters (EG Nifty gloves over bionic hands). This works make your bionics be a mark of pride to show who you’ve fought in the past. I wouldn’t recommend having them be upgradeable or useful for the most part however, as that would be both unnecessary and hard to do right. When you lose a fight you blackout and wake up with your wound, if it was a big lose you wake up on an operating table or something with your spleen replaced. Or you wake up at the side of the street  and have to buy an eye patch off the nearest vendor until you get the eye repaired/replaced. It can be also be that if you lose your balance and get shot, your character takes over and finishes them off brutally (or runs away with the last of their power) and crawls into an alley, which explains the above blackout. For shooting characters you can have your squadmates drag you to safety as your losing thing. A dropship landing by your corpse would be a good one. You could then regain control as a medic heals you and the ship circles the battlefield. Then you drop back down and pick up where you left off.

Anyway, for sabre vs blasters

A normal shot should take off one block point off your “balance”

I’ll use sith vs trooper as an example. It’s the exact same mechanic, blasting gets blocked a set number of times, so if you let off a load of shots you’ll get one in eventually (also by just holding attack, same as above), but you’re absolutely screwed if the sith gets in close thats the lose point for you. There could be a mechanic where the sith gets a cooldown ability that gives you a chance to send a shot right back at the trooper but the chance is low if he’s high level. For example he may have the ability to dodge it, or his armor may protect him from his own type of annumition. If you are both high level you might be able to knock him down with the deflected shot or something, or stagger him completely. A low-level guy is pretty much boned. But the saving grace is that the ability is a once off thing with a 30 seconds cooldown.

Things like rockets for the trooper would be their ace in the hole. But again depending on the enemy they may have counter measures (doges, force powers etc)

The main “balance” gauge for a shooting class would be if you have enough distance. Shooting normal blockable lasers is generally enough as long as you have enough time for the enemy sith or whatever to run out of blocks and let a blast through. You may have a ability to shoot a aimed shot in first person. This would be the equivalent of the deflect. This works by going into first person and then you aim for a gap in the lighsaber swing. Pick a good spot to get the best chance to get through his defence. The chance is based upon how worn he is at the time (this leads to a interesting situation where you try to judge how worn he is, how close he is to you and how likely it is you think you can pop into First person and take a good shot before he reaches you.)

An interesting side note. Jedi reflexes supposedly come from being able to see the near future. This could allow for mid to high level force users to be able to rewind time. It doesn’t have to be Prince of Persia (that wouldn’t work in multiplayer) but for a small group of fighters the ability could allow the user to simply reset everyone’s characters (who are in this duel/fight/instance/group/whatever, not the entire map of people) to where they were about 10 seconds prior, with a 2-3 second slow-mo effect to allow people to adjust. The power has a long cooldown and maybe only a 70% chance to work, depending on the user and enemy. The reason this would work is as follows. Lets say a sniper hits a jedi in the back or something. This is unlikely because in the star wars movies jedi are supposed to see it coming and try to block it. So say the guy takes the shot and the jedi gets hit. He then hits the rewind button. The jedi now gets his chance to dodge the shot or block it or something, the sniper may still have a decent chance of  landing another hit but it is fairly reduced. The jedi acts in character and can have a back up against long shots and if he still dies then it’s basically like him foreseeing a hit, but it was still too good for him to do anything about him. This would also be limited to once every now and again to prevent frustration for other players.

unfortunately for this concept to work really well you’d need a fighting system composed of hundreds of moves that are chosen on the fly to cope with the other fighter. And thats just the basic parrying. Batman Arkham Asylum is on the right track, but you’d really need a huge amount more moves to make each fight seem unique.

Added bonuses would be the ability to eithre directly or indirectly affect your characters preference for move types so they look and attack in a more distinct fashion than others. As in they have a preference with fast and weaving moves as opposed to sudden, lurching, powerful ones.

Anyway. I think this system works because it make the sabres look deadly, without making jedi invincible. Jedi and Troopers who have the same skill and are equal in power would be a 50 50 fight if they both start at a reasonable distance from each other.

God damn thats a lot. I ended up adding far more than I intended, to what was discussed in the original convo. I’ll upload the .txt file somewhere if your interested in seeing what the original was like to laugh at our poor grammar. But for now, I am spent.

Lambo

PS Pictures may be added at another point to break up the monotony of text.

Irish Times article.

I verified its working. It doesn’t effect me much but I have found torrents to be useful in the past. The block  isn’t that complicated to get around eithre but its the fact that they are actively trying that gets me.

I’m mostly afraid of not knowing where they’ll stop after this.

They’ll obviously go after other torrent sites, then what? TVShack? Ovguide? Then onto fansites? As long as big companies keep getting their lobbies against anything they can blame for lower sales through to those who can mess stuff up for normal people this kind of thing will only get worse.

I’ll keep a eye on this kind of stuff.

Here’s the current one in use.

The original I stole from some random google search years ago.

Anything that improves, alters or is even vaguely resembling this will be accepted.

As for what set me off on this phase.

This picture really endeared itself to me.

If everyday really was a adventure when you were younger...

Full size here

It was the artists’ blog (http://www.jasonchanart.com) and seeing his other stuff that got me intrested. So now I’m browsing deviantart.com .

So if you know any, or happen to be, a charitable artist then I’d love to have a talk with you regarding the Lambo image. Yes, I am that cheap and demanding.

Lambo.