Friday, January 11, 2008

SheepSpace

My Sheep

I've decided to create a MySpace account to play around with. I'm surprised that they limit password length to about 10 characters, although they do force you to include at least one number.

Uploading a picture now. I see that it doesn't recognize the transparent GIF format, so I'm going to fix that.

I already have a friend! Tom. That name sounds familar. Perhaps he's the founder. Talk about eating your own dog food. Maybe Tom created my space because he was lonely?

Verifying email address. You know, someday we'll teach kids in school these basic life skills. How to get an email address, how to create a myspace account, how to use PayPal, how to pass CAPTCHA tests, etc.

Tom has 216588760 friends. That's a lot. I hope he's not lonely anymore.

I'm filling out my profile information. Just using whatever answers come to mind. I probably should have thought about this more.

Whoops! My first Server too busy error (500). I had read about myspace's performance issues. They care, but not too much. I mean, it's not a life or death sort of application, is it?

I hope Tom doesn't take it personally, but I've removed him as a friend. Now I don't have any friends.

There's a lot of information here. I doubt I'll fill it all in. Well, schools, companies, and videos I can skip for now.

I was really hoping for more mash-up like stuff. I've got videos on You-Tube, I've got (well, should create) a facebook account, and I've got a board game geek account, too. I'd prefer to link them all together rather than entering everying again.

Anyways, that's enough for now. We'll see where this goes.

posted by FlyingSheep @ 8:39 PM 0 comments

Sunday, January 06, 2008

Sly and the Great Tree

Sly 2

Sly Cooper is what I wanted Thief (Looking Glass Studios) to be. Direct combat is possible, but not very effective. The game encourages you to be sneaky without restricting you to only being sneaky.

The Great Tree

I can tell when a game is really good when I need to set a limit (ahead of time) on how long I will play that game. For a number of Reflexive game demos, this limit is built in (60 minutes, or for some generous games, 2 hours*).

  • For bad games, I don't even get to the 60 minute mark before putting the game aside, writing a quick review, and being done with it.
  • For mediocre games, I'll play until the 60 minutes are up, and then say, "Well, I've wasted enough of my life on that game.
  • For good games, I'll go through the entire 60 minutes in a single setting. Then, exhausted, I'll think, "Boy, that was fun, I should buy that game for more."

Certain games, like Star Defender 4 and The Great Tree, are so good that that fall out of this scale.

  • For excellent games, I carefully dole out the fun in measured quantities. I'll just play through this set of levels, or play until I lose all of my ships. The disappointment when I stop playing is actually outweighed by my anticipation of playing again.

This may be some new take on the "just one more turn" type of games. With a time limit in place, there's a sort of artificial value inflation (when a resource is limited, it becomes more valuable). How does one create a game where the anticipation of playing is as good, or possibly better than the playing itself?

* Two hours is really too much. You're taking a risk that the player will get bored of the game in that much time

posted by FlyingSheep @ 8:18 PM 0 comments