go while you go

I originally misread this article as being about a game in which you skiied down mountains desperately looking for a toilet (and, i suppose, explode if you can't find one in time.)

That's not quite what they meant by combining skiing and peeing...

(although after the wii game Think Geek had for april fool's, I'm dubious about this until there are pictures!)

these holes three are not for thee

Somewhat more common in novels than in RPGs, but... A lot of times, there is a Prophecy. Now, obviously, you have to accept a certain sort of magic in the world for there to be prophecies at all, but you really have to wonder about the gods in books where prophecies exist only in very bad rhyming verse. Sometimes even the characters in the book admit that the rhyme sucks (signal from fred!) but the question of WHY it's rhyming is rarely addressed.

Surely, if the ancient gods wanted to give you a poem, they could make it a poem that didn't suck. Divine powers and all that.

Now, there would be reason within a game world for someone to turn a non-rhyming prophecy into a rhyming one, or particularly into a song. It's easier to pass down the oral tradition that way. Which can be handy in fantasy-medieval communities where literacy isn't all that common.

It would be nice to see a plot in which the characters had to track down the original source of a prophecy and find out just how distorted it had gotten over time through the license of bards...

games are just like comics!

Everything tastes better with a monkey!

Cutscene Stupids (and what games could do instead)

So, a typical Cutscene Stupid:

You're playing a Rogue-type. You're sneaking around in stealth mode so that no enemies can get the drop on you. You enter a new room.

Suddenly control is taken away from you. The game turns off your stealth and marches you blithely forward into the center of the room. A bunch of enemies come out and surround you. There is a long, non-interactive conversation where the villains posture about how great they are and you click through in frustration, not paying much attention, just wanting to get back to your character.

Finally, control is given back to you and you begin a boss fight, annoyed.

How can it be done better?

***

First possibility, making the pre-fight dialog not a cutscene. Imagine the scene like this instead:

You sneak into a room full of pillars with an altar at the far end. As you approach the altar, you step into some sort of sensor or trap and you are detected. The doors to the room slam shut, blocking escape. The Villain appears in front of you, laughs, and starts talking.

Every time he speaks, you have the option to reply (possibly in multiple ways) or to say, effectively, "#*)% you" and start the fight right away. However, when that dialog box comes up, you can still move your character - on a timer. If you move too far away from the villain or if you fail to answer for more than X seconds, the fight starts immediately. But if you're careful, you can take a few steps, answer, take a few steps, answer - all the while moving yourself to a more advantageous position.

So you carefully back away, looking frantically to both sides as you try to keep the conversation going, looking for an exit, something you can use... finally, you're just far enough, and you jump to the side, dodging behind a pillar. The villain roars in outrage and combat begins - but you're out of Line Of Sight and can engage stealth again! The villain's first shot splats harmlessly against the pillar you're taking cover behind!

This is much more cinematic and makes the villain dialog less pointless - if you have to reload and go through the 'cutscene' again, it's not a total waste of your time, because it's actually part of the fight.

***

Second possibility, intertwining dialog and combat. Talking can be an actual combat tactic. Asking the villain questions, insulting him, relaying information to him to try and change his mind about things - all of these could serve to either DISTRACT the enemy, allowing you to get in a better hit, or PERSUADE the enemy and actually end the fight via diplomacy. Fighting diplomacy. You may have to fight to keep yourself alive long enough to make him listen to you!

Again, this is more cinematic. Hero and villain in movie are likely to be talking WHILE hitting each other with swords, rather than only before and after.

adventures in the obscure

Here's something odd I turned up - in production, apparently, a Russian visual novel.

Based on some famous work of Russian literature and not likely to get an English translation...

*blush*

So, um, I haven't been posting much.

That doesn't mean I don't play any games at all.

Actually, the game I've just been playing is, er... a free demo that's quite innocent of a game that isn't. :) See, the basic idea of the game is that you're a cute little anime girl and you're playing a game very similar to Uno with a bunch of other cute anime girls. They all giggle, blush, sigh, whine, and otherwise react to the way the cards are played and it's just.... CUTE!

In the full version of the game, when you win you can choose one of the girls with the lowest scores to see naughty pictures of, but in the demo it just says 'Buy the game to see the CG', so it's not really naughty. Still, this isn't a game you'll want to be looking at if you're opposed to That Sort Of Thing.

There's not really much point to it... there's only so much skill and strategy that can go into playing Uno, and the 'reward' of the full game isn't there. But it makes me giggle. Oh, and the game is in Japanese although enough of it is English that it's pretty obvious what to do - choose the first option on the menu to start the game, click on cards to select and play them.

Obviously the following link should be considered not work safe, but if you want to see, go here - Shoujo Mahou Gakuen - Oshaberi Card Game (Magical Girls' School - "Chatting" Card Game)

The Rainbow Road is really punishing!