Recent content by incoherent

I was reminded of the Missingno glitch in the same game. Through a certain sequence of events, you could encounter a pokemon with a "missing number" and various garbage for data (its moves were Water Gun, Water Gun, and Sky Attack, and its type was Bird/Normal, where Bird wasn't actually a real...

Mostly, I liked NMH2, and if you liked the first one you'll enjoy it to an extent, if for nothing else because it's more of the same. The main problem with No More Heroes 2 was that the bosses just weren't as memorable or interesting. Both games are very focused on the boss fights: the...

People have overly high expectations for the gear simplification in Cataclysm. At present, unless some other major change is announced, each player will have maybe one fewer stat to balance on gear than they do in WotLK, and in several cases they will have the same number of stats to balance...

I liked the article a lot; it gives a perspective from someone who understands both the psychology of addiction and the appeal of WoW. It seems like any time the words "addiction" and "WoW" end up in the same sentence, you see people take a stand one way or the other. Either WoW is evil and...

Hm. Perhaps the answer to "what is Massive" is similar to the answer to "what is an RPG": there are "massive elements" just like there are "RPG elements". (I hate the term "massive elements" already and I just made it up.) Where leveling up and character statistics might be "RPG elements"...

That's sort of the problem: not all griefing is against the rules. It's not against the rules for me to go have a dance party in the middle of the battleground instead of fighting the opposing faction, but you may feel that I am griefing you by depriving you of a player who is actually doing...

Anyone remember Playing to Win? Of course you do; you've probably read it more than once, maybe read a couple of the follow-up articles. One of Sirlin's big points in that article is that by imposing arbitrary rules on a game, you create for yourself a different game which bears little...

It's only confusing because there are also "Best Of" issues, which are similarly random in topic but are articles which ran before.

My contention is that they made healer mana too strong because they HAD to; otherwise Patchwerk would have been an exercise in frustration and praying to the RNG gods. The 10 man Patchwerk doesn't have nearly this problem because Hateful Strike hits for a quarter of the damage, making it more...

I will disagree with you here for one, very theorycraft-wonky reason: Patchwerk. Patchwerk, for those who are still reading this thread despite never fighting him, is a boss who hits very fast and (at least on 25 man) relatively hard. He's an example of a boss who gives healers fits because...

One of the big problems with game storytelling compared to movie storytelling is that in a game, you have to make sure the player actually sees the story that you've so lovingly created. If they get stuck on the boss of level 3 and quit, then you could have the most amazing story ever, and that...

There may well be a base scripting language, but it's probably something that some group of programmers at your company is doing (assuming you're a big enough house to actually have such a group), and yes, they're rewriting it every time the hardware changes. Game hardware does tend to change...

I can't help but think of Audiosurf, where you can be the best in the world at something if you can find an obscure enough song.

I... think... it's telling us that our science isn't weird enough. But I'm not positive of that, and I think if I think about it any more it'll ruin the effect.

As has been mentioned the last time we had an article on virtual reality, there's some physical fitness implied in a full-VR system that isn't implied by current games (Wii and DDR are as far as we go currently). Couch potatoes aren't going to become Samus Aran any time soon.