A strategic decision the consequences of which you understand fairly well.

@Cerberus It isn't that you can't press the glass as hard. It's that 1. the glass press is digital, i.e. press/no-press. There's no distinction for a lighter press or softer. You can't rest your thumbs on a button without activating it. You can't feel for the button, you have to look at it to see where your thumb should be. You can't move your hands without also moving the screen. etc.

You can only fit so many buttons on a screen before it gets ridiculous. Modern console controllers have way more buttons.

And a console controller pales compared to a keyboard, which has a hundred buttons.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 You can always pause and minimalise. But, sure, it could be nice to have a single slot available where your game is saved out of port, but it is saved automatically when you exit the game and every minute, all in the same slot.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Your choices are not final: you can reload the save you made in port, which was perhaps ten minutes or twenty minutes ago.

When I pay a FPS game, my hand is in the middle of the keyboard: I can reach about 31 keys, easily, without moving my hand.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Why would there be such a cycle? I have never seen such a thing.

Saving on the brink of death. Always a danger in Doom.

And Quake and the others.

@Cerberus I've been in cycles like that. Where you have a save-point where your character is low enough on, eg, health or ammunition, where you cannot reasonably expect to defeat any enemies nearby.

Ratchet and Clank solved that by refilling your health and ammo when you reloaded the game.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I was rather thinking of a Nintendo game with up, left, right, down, A, and B. That should be enough for a decent game? Add X and Y if you really need more buttons. Sequential combinations could be used for extra actions.

But you had checkpoints, so you couldn't game it easily.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Of course a save point should be in a safe area. As in Pirates and many other games where you have save points. This can be done.

@Cerberus But it's hard enough to hit a virtual button on a flat piece of glass, nevermind combos!

Sequential combos.

Anyway, no game with savepoints has ever convinced me that it is an improvement on the game to deny me the ability to back up my progress or branch my gameplay without having to start over.

By the way, there are drawing applications that claim to register how hard you press the screen. They could be using a combination of duration and surface area.

And so far, no game has convinced me that a touch-screen comes at all close to even a classic Nintendo controller in ease of use.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I think you are still thinking of linear games.

Because all the games you have mentioned so far are linear, aren't they?

@Cerberus No, I am thinking of "Every game I have ever played"

Not being able to save whenever is a huge pain in the ass especially in non-linear games.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Nobody said it did. I was just speculating as to whether it could still work well enough to make a fun game.

@KitFox How so?

@Cerberus it's barely adequate.

@Cerberus Precisely because it is non-linear.

The idea is of course that there is pain. No pain, no gain.

@Cerberus Because in a non-linear game you want to save your game, then try going down some path, and seeing where it leads, and if you don't like the results, go back and try a different path.

@KitFox Non linear means no or less repetition.

@Cerberus wrong. See, I can gain without pain.

You get whacked and then you think "Damn it, when did I save last? Had I killed that dragon yet? Stolen that thingy?" etc.

@Cerberus No kidding.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 So...?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I felt that the new Pirates lost something without the pain.

There's nothing to tell you what you were doing and what you had finished.

@Cerberus So how is pointlessly denying me the ability to save "improving" the game? it worsens it! It means I must toil to the whims of the developer instead of them letting me play my way.

@Cerberus Great! Excellent! Don't save as often then! if that's how you like it. I do not.

@KitFox Hobbits Coming of Age

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 The idea is that you need to make an actual decision with real consequences instead of just trying the most risky option always for the largest booty.

@MετάEd Yes. I see. muses

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That's not possible.

@Cerberus I reject that idea as some kind of improvement.

@Cerberus why isn't it possible?

I think we are just not talking about the same games, so this discussion is pointless.

I make a small claim ("it's fun in some games"), you make a universal claim ("it's never fun"). I give you a game where it was fun, and you don't say anything about that game.

@Cerberus No. I am not talking about strictly linear or non-linear games. I am categorically disagreeing with you about your assertion that the "danger" in playing in an unsaved way is somehow necessarily an improvement. I have played games like that and I don't like it.

How do you know I wouldn't agree with you about those games that you have played?

That isn't the point. I have never once played a single game where I felt that was an improvement. And furthermore, if you like the thrill of tightrope-walking without your safety net, fine! just play the game without saving as often! Just don't take my safety net with you when you go.

I need names of games.

Yes, yes. There is no need to argue about opinions.

As I said, the genre is important.

Perhaps it is never fun in RPGs.

You can like chocolate and Mr.Shiny can like vanilla. We don't have to yell about it.

I do not have a list of games in my head where I have catalogued the shortcomings for easy retrieval. I do know that when I play a game that doesn't allow you to save, I notice it. In fact, I have sometimes not bothered to play the game.

Almost every game I've ever played has allowed unlimited saves.

Besides, you mentioned several instances where you couldn't save at any moment that you found fun, like Bioshock.

Savepoints are a relic from consoles that had limited storage.

No, Bioshock allowed arbitrary saves.

It also allowed arbitrary dying/respawning without too much penalty.

Right.

But I tended to play with save/restore

the drawback was that it was really freaking slow to load saved games

I think it is really pointless to make a universal claim without having played Pirates.

I can't think of many games where it was good.

Almost every single FPS game allows arbitrary saves. Farcry was a notable exception. Due to a design flaw, they couldn't figure out how to allow it. I ended up looking up a cheat that allowed saving the game. Made it 10x more enjoyable even if saving sometimes broke the AI.

I now wonder what Thief would be like if you only had (many) save points, not arbitrary save. It would probably be a bit annoying. On the other hand, it could be exciting. Hard to say.

It is entirely up to how you like to experience your games.

@Cerberus How can "no saves are allowed except by the decree of the developer" be better than "you can save the game whenever you want, but you choose not to save very often"?

Perhaps RPGs and FPSs are just too linear for let save points shine?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Because people will save if they can.

I don't know how you can think that Skyrim is linear.

Self-limitation doesn't work.

@Cerberus Then they are denying themselves the thrills!

Or any of the Elder Scrolls games for that matter.

@Cerberus says you. I am perfectly capable of not saving games.

@KitFox Well, imagine if you could only save at the entrance of a dungeon.

@Cerberus How does that make it linear?

You would have to go through all the same rooms and caves again and see the same monsters.

So that would perhaps be a bit repetitive.

How is that different from non-linear?

Because the map of a dungeon is fixed.

That's funny. I consider Baldur's Gate et al to be very linear and they have random dungeons.

@KitFox Suppose you had a forest where the layout of the terrain, the treasure, the monsters, everything were generated at random every time you entered it.

@Cerberus And then, when you enter a dungeon and there's some monster you want to fight, and the monster requires a two-step battle strategy: i.e. one, defeat it one way to prevent it from breathing fire, then two, defeat it a second time while it claws and flies or whatever: if you can't save your game between those two steps, trying out a different tactic for the second half of the combat is ANNOYING

It hardly exists in RPGs.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I am certainly not! You can play any game with any self-limitation in theory, if you like. I don't think that's the point.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Oh crap I hate that. "Damn it, I am so effing good at cutting his effing wings off now that I have done this for the fifth time!"

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Again, am I claiming that this would be a suitable genre for save points?

@Cerberus No, that is exactly my point. When the game limits me artificially, I am annoyed. I do not care if other people are all "woo! tie me up!"

@Cerberus This is exactly what every save-point game I've ever played feels like.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I think this is meaningless if you do not disagree about a single real game, but only talk theory.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Then all those games were probably the wrong candidates.

@Cerberus In Bioshock, you can only wield either magic or guns at one instant, and you have to switch between them. That was an annoying artificial limitation (fixed in bioshock 2). In farcry, you could not save your game whenever you wanted. This was an annoying limitation.

APOTHEOSIS!

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 You're talking to a strawman. Cerberus is over there.

@Cerberus So you claim that savepoints make Pirates awesome. I claim that 1. you could get the same effect by just saving less often, and 2. savepoints make every game I've ever encountered that has them less awesome.

1 is just not true. People don't work like that. You don't limit yourself in a game. 2 is irrelevant for a universal claim.

@Cerberus Cerb: in my sample of games, NOT ONE has ever been improved by relying on savepoints instead of arbitrary saves. And every time I've encountered that, I've usually been annoyed. How many times must I run the experiment?

So speaking of porn.

@KitFox hey you remembered our safe word :)

Yes. Yes, I did. Safety first.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It doesn't work like that in a universal claim. It means nothing.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That's a good one.

Thank you.

That was before balrogs, or I might have used that instead.

It's also a rather obscure reference.

@Cerberus On the contrary. It means that until I play a game where I am never once annoyed by not being able to save, I will remain unconvinced that savepoints are a good idea.

@KitFox Which is probably good. You don't want something you're likely to yell out.

Right. And also it adds a little sexiness to a potentially embarrassing exit.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Suppose there is a skating game where you have to carry out as many combos as possible while riding a railing. When you fall off, your points are calculated, and the longer you're on the railing, the more points etc. you get. How about if the game auto-saved every second. Would that be fun for you?

@KitFox I like Nike of Samothrace.

Hmm. Interesting.

An essential part of the skating game is that you must carry out as many combos as possible before you eventually fall off.

@Cerberus Please don't introduce new features that are not under argument. auto-saving every second is not what I am asking for. And to answer your question anyway, no, because I want to control when I save.

@MετάEd I knew a guy who used a pattern of grunts. Because. Well, you can probably figure that out.

It is relevant, because I'm trying to show you how more saving can sometimes defeat the purpose of a game or make it less fun.

@KitFox I knew someone who always said "Look! The winged victory of Samothrace!" when she wanted you to look the other way so she could steal from your plate or something.

Hahaha. Cute.

@Cerberus You are adding automatic saves on a constant basis. That is way more saving than what I asked for.

So?

@KitFox SOS?

Are you saying automatic saves is sometimes worse than less frequent saves?

@MετάEd No, let me think. I was some military jargon, along the lines of WTF...

Oh, no. It was T-O-T-O.

SNAFU?

@Cerberus I am saying that I never wanted automatic saves. I wanted to be able to save WHEN I WANT.

"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Why don't you want automatic saves?

You can always choose no to lead them.

@MετάEd Good guess. Actually "tap out, tap out."

@Cerberus But yes, automatic saves can be annoying. eg. I think an automatic save in Bard's Tale may have fucked my character.

@KitFox That sounds like all star wrestling.

I mean an automatic save in a new slot, so you can load from whichever point in time you like.

@Cerberus Saving every instant of the game would be pretty boring, like bowling with the bumpers in the gutters. But you'll note that that is not at all what I asked for.

@MετάEd It does, rather, doesn't it?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Why would it be boring? If you don't like it, you can just not load it.

For me, saving the game is a tactic. If the game is really hard I will save more often. if it is really easy I will save less often. But I want to be able to choose, dammit!

So what would be more interesting for me to write for Nanowrimo: Lovecraftian erotica, or a story about a psychopath?

> For me, saving the game is a tactic.

Now we're getting somewhere.

It is indeed a tactic.

And it changes the game.

@Cerberus That's true.

Just as giving you the ability to pause a game.

@Cerberus For the better!

Or giving you the ability to confront a foe in battle (as in a FPS or an RPG, as opposed to Thief).

You can say "make Garret more powerful in Thief, so that people who like to do so can battle enemies; stealth fans can still steal about, can't they?".

But that's not how it works.

You claim that "Pirates" is better than "Pirates 2" because it forced you to play unsaved. I claim that Pirates 2 is less annoying because at the end of the day you can play the game how YOU like it, and not how Cerb likes it. If you are not Cerb.

If the game is very hard, I will be too tempted to kill some enemies in battle, if I can't pull it of in stealth mode. And so the game changes for me.

@Cerberus See: one of those things is the actual gameplay. The other is just making the user do stuff over and over.

Nope.

With arbitrary saves: you can back up your progress and resume later.

It is actual game play.

You are forced to change your strategy because you can't save.

Without: you are stuck going down paths that might not pan out. You cannot go back. You must play until you reach a savepoint, becasue you can't put the game down. You must re-do the whole thing if you fail.

Remember? I explained a scenario in the beginning of this discussion.

That scenario didn't convince me. What if I want to try both options?

I cannot.

Because I can't save and fork.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Again, you are presupposing repetition. There is no such repetition in Pirates.

@KitFox Lovecraftian psychopathic erotica?

muses

Do you think it is possible?

heh

Depends

Can you just make one of the erotica characters a psychopath?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 You cannot, and that is exactly what makes it interesting and what makes you contemplate the consequences of your decision. Why would you not always try the riskier path if the reward is greater? What serious choice is there in that?

@KitFox I totally disagree.

@Mitch You would.

You realize of course that that had to be said.

@Mitch no you don't

@Cerberus Because it is harder?

Easy now, you can both be my sycophantic lackeys.

@KitFox I would and did. so in your face!

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 And you will end up in a situation similar to the path you did not choose sooner or later. It will not be the same, but the next time you might decide to risk mutiny instead of attacking ships.

Pirates sucks.

yarrrrr

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Harder, absolutely, but not harder as in "I have less HP", but as in tough choices. And tough choices are the best!

For @Cerb.

You heard me.

@Cerberus Cerb: I'm glad you really liked not being able to save your game. Why can't you accept that I don't like not being able to save my game? That I'd rather be able to save?

@KitFox awaits reruns of Upstairs Downstairs

I have played games with tough choices.

They all had arbitrary saves.

I can't accept your universal claim, that's all.

Stop. Just stop it. You are making me nuts.

Who wants ice cream?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 They weren't as tough, because you could just try again...

In Bioshock, you can upgrade your character. Each of those upgrades is permanent and consumes resources that you might otherwise spend on other upgrades. You get the currency for these resources by either rescuing, or killing, little girls.

What's wrong with saving a game in the middle? People calling don't know you're busy.

@KitFox Yes!

headdesk

Killing the girls gets you more currency. But there are consequences either way.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Oh, I remember that. And the big daddies.

I'm going to start posting pictures of kittehs.

In Jedi Acadamy you have choices to kill, or release, characters at certain points. There are consequences down the road.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Sure, that is another kind of tough choice. The toughness resides in being unable to reallocate at a later point the resources you have already spent.

@KitFox settles for chocolate that is here rather than ice cream that is there

In both games the ability to save doesn't fully allow you to branch and try the "whole" game because you cannot possibly keep track of enough saves of the whole decision tree.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I feel like you're almost talking about things that are not even real.

adorable children!

Thank you.

@Mitch almost not even real.

@KitFox whay did you leave your kid on the frozen tundra?

my kids have been sick for the past two weeks on and off

How are yours doing, @JSBձոգչ?

@MattЭллен Cute!

Oh.

@Mitch I didn't leave him there.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 How would you feel if you could simply reallocate all your skill points at any point in the game? In some games, that works well, and it's fun. In other games, I think it would be bad, because the toughness involved in choosing how to spend them is fun.

@KitFox Oh. Yeah, that's a good call.

@KitFox Awww...

That's me there.

Awwww2.

@KitFox building a trebuchet to storm the viking castle?

Not really Arctic tundra.

@Mitch No, the trebuchet was the year after.

Yeah, I can't see I guess, the water looked like snow somehow.

That's the potato cannon.

maybe she was building a trebuchet to launch her children

that's what I was about to do yesterday

so is that a stationary crossbow? a river rappel guide? a couple of pieces of wood?

@Cerberus I dunno. depends on the game. But saving the game is not part of the game. It's meta-game. It's "I have kids and can't stay up all night trying to reach a savepoint." It's "My one saved game is screwed and I don't want to spend 3 hours rebuilding my character". It's "I don't want to have to jump through too many hoops in order to play this game. Let me explore."

oh. the potato cannon.

Is that a 'thing'?

We were reconfiguring the caisson.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 3 hours? Of course that would be bad. Of course it would have to be far more often.

If you can call it that.

No wheels, of course, but the general idea.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Why can't it be part of the game? Because that is exactly what I am saying. It can be.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Exactly. Or the other way...'Kid's go to sleep." "I can't there's no saving" "My hand is about to pull the plug..." "No....!!"

Then eventually I kicked it over and just launched it from my hip.

So Cerb, you're against saving? how many kinds of wrong is that?

Or shoulder.

@KitFox for azimuth control?

i agree with @Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 here. saving the game should be something that i do whenever i damn well please, not when the fascist game designers decide to let me

@KitFox kick ass!

@Cerberus I don't care if you get a bigger thrill from not being saved! I get annoyance! It has been this way since the 1980s! In King's Quest I could save whenever I wanted. On the gods-damned Nintendo, I couldn't! ANNOYING!

@Mitch Um, I don't think so. I think that was when we thought that tightening it down would help.

@Mitch All I'm saying that there exist games where only being able to save at certain points (say, after 20 minutes) adds something to the game, makes it more fun. These games may be few. Linearity makes it impossible, for instance. Mr S's position that it can absolutely never add anything to a game.

@KitFox to control kickback?

@Mitch Yes, exactly.

Which is why I ended up deciding that holding on to it was a better plan.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 What if it were less fun 99.9 % of the time, but more fun 0.1 % of the time?

what's the propellant?

AquaNet.

@KitFox holy crap. that's not safe.

do you spray a bunch or just pop in the canister?

We played around with wd-40 mix as an accelerant, but it tended to make it too damp.

@Mitch A 5-count shot into the chamber.

@Cerberus It'd have to be 1000x as much fun to make up for that, wouldn't it?

oh...yeah I've heard of wd-40 as the propellant itself.

@Mitch It doesn't combust very well.

I think saving a game has three functions: 1. allowing you to go do something else whenever you need to; 2. preventing repetition; 3. allowing you to play a game in Perfectionist Mode.

Straight AquaNet was by far the most explosive.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 No, because only the 0.1 % would have save points, d'oh.

@KitFox and easy to procure. what about lighter fluid? or does that burn burn?

as in burn the launch tube.

@Mitch Maybe if you could aerosolize it sufficiently.

YOu let your kids watch?

But AquaNet is pretty cheap, so why bother?

@Mitch I let them fire it.

as a (not very) troubled youth, hairspray would have scared the crap out of me. lighter fluid (or gas or whatever) from a light would just take too long.

Except last time we had to put the kibosh on it before the neighbors called the cops.

I'm kind of giddy just remembering it.

@KitFox exactly. what? you did it in your own yard?

@Mitch Well, normally we fire it off in a rural area out over the water. Up to camp, as we say around these parts.

Oh! Cute!

halloween costumes

Soooooo adorable!

it's hard to tell, but my daughter is a cupcake

I can't tell what your daughter is

I see!

my son is wearing the same shark costume as last year. We were going to give it away, but when he saw it he wanted to wear it again. But it barely fits him now.

@Mitch But the nephew was in town, and his parents are splitting up, and I knew it would annoy my ex-sister-in-law, and that my nephew would have fun, and come on, it's totally awesome fun anyway, so we decided that since we couldn't get more than 100 yards usually anyway that it would be perfectly fine.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I thought that he was a shark last year.

I find it weird that I remembered that.

Maybe my nephew was also a shark.

@KitFox yeah, a shark and a bumblebee. He was going to be the bee this year. We trade the costumes around with various friends and thus get a lot of mileage out of them before none of the kids fit in them. :)

@KitFox nice.

@Mitch Well, it was great fun, except that true to form, I decided to experiment with the rig. It's really bad when I'm with my brothers because we all have good ideas, but this was me and my husband and his brother, so it wasn't too bad.

it's probably too cold for a water balloon surgical tubing catapult.

Just me with my crazy ideas.

probably too clod too.

Catapult? With surgical tubing?

@KitFox yeah.

good harmless fun that pisses off the targets. a lot.

We built a cabbage-pult a few years back.

no idea where it came from if you do it right. totally silent.

when you say good ideas, you mean really dangerous ideas?

Well, those are two different categories, now aren't they?

depends.

Venn diagram says yes.

I had -really- good ideas when I was younger.

I still hold that it would be really wicked fun to attach the plug to a pull start.

Right now, we use a piezoelectric grill starter.

@KitFox a plug of what to... for the potato thing?

wow that's using actual engineering and stuff.

Yeah, a spark plug. What would you use?

I mentioned that I'm an engineer, right?

Your idea seems good -and- safe(r).

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Awwww3.

@Mitch Safer than what now? I really can't imagine how else you could do it.

I didn't mention that I'm an engineer also, but only of things remotely connected to the real world (software).

Oh. Actually I suppose we used a hot magnesium stick for the prototype.

Impressive.

Did you know that magnesium is fun to burn?

But it becomes obvious pretty quickly that that is not a good mechanism if you want decent combustion.

I bet you do.

@KitFox you have access to actual things? I would have (if forced to think it through) used a model rocket igniter.

Not like serious pyrotechnics, no.

You can modify sparklers easily enough though.

And the grill ignitor is really good, although not consistent.

You get quite a bit of blowback, enough that the chamber really needs a vent, so if you use a twist ignitor as we did in version...2? then you run the risk of burning the shit out of part of your body.

The grill starter has leads on it, so you can hold your hand away from the chamber.

Come to think of it, we never did tap a plug into it. We really should. It would be so much easier to replace it.

Millions of people have been killed in combat with simpler devices. I'm sure we could come up ith something.

what is the barrel made out of?

PVC.

nice.

doesn't it singe a bit? stinky plastic smell?

Nope.

I bet you let your kids watch Jackass.

Well, baked potato.

@Mitch Oh god no. The eldest is only 4.

And they just do stupid stuff on Jackass.

I thought the PVC would have -some- degradation from the heat that is noticable by smell.

Mythbusters on the other hand...

yeah. That's science!

@Mitch Well, there is a larger chamber at the end.

There is singed hairspray residue.

It makes a pretty sticky mess.

@KitFox yeah. stinky.

But I don't recall any particularly strong smells.

probably toxic too

@Mitch Yes! And science should be fun.

I remember... shudders at memories of life threatening dangers taken as a youth ...

The potato cannon is only life-threatening at the other end of the barrel.

I can't remember what we figured was the exit speed.

the speed is 'get the hell outta the way!'

That's my brother's specialty. He's the mathematician.

stupid math stuff. BBL

Hey, Brits (@MattЭллен et al): Do you still say "telly" or is "TV" encroaching on that term?

both

I'm not sure of the prevalence

I've said both for as long as I can remember

@Robusto Looks like a penguin.

@MattЭллен Are there particular instances where you would be more inclined to use one than the other, or are they pretty much interchangeable?

@Robusto interchangeable, I would say

Stealin' our slang.

polluting our language!

We have said tayvay for as long as I can remember. It is just the obvious abbreviation. No offence.

Tayvay? giggles

> Prostitution, however, is all too easy. There is no challenge. Bonking your party members is the true test of your sexual prowess. Strangely, this overshadows most other desires, including saving the world. This is your true motivation throughout your quest. Every action and decision boils down to this most basic and feral of desires: to shag. Dragon Age does not have a karma system; it has a sex system.

videogamer.com/pc/dragon_age/review-2.html

Sweet.

Probably says more about the reviewer than about the game, but OK.

> You can go to a brothel in Ferelden's capital and pay 50 silver to shag a human, an elf, or a dwarf, of any gender.

But I don't think they display the act itself.

Would look dumb anyway.

Unless they built a complete porn engine into the game.

it won't be long

Can't wait. All my favorite stuff in one huge game.

the violence has more or less been pushed to its limit.