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Don't by either one, or any DRM'd device.

Does such a thing exist? It seems like every portable player out there is either tied to some proprietary DRM'd music service (iTunes, or Microsoft's media store), or requires some piece of crappy software to copy your music onto the player.

The Zen Nano supports DRM'd WMA files but doesn't require it; also it works straight away with no software (the software that does come with it is, indeed, crappy, but quite optional).

I remember back when the Sony rootkit story came out, I immediately went and download one of the 'protected' CDs just to prove a point.

I am definitely never going to buy any CD that has that kind of protection. Never. I don't care if it the RIAA wins, and all file sharers are rounded up and executed, and all CDs come with a million layers of security and fingerprint identification so you have the priviledge of listening to the product you bought. I'll just live without music, and the RIAA will live without my money.

I would say neither but that's probably because I don't want my mp3 player to also play movies/display pictures/all that other stuff.

I got a Creative Zen Nano plus, it's cheap, really small, and fun to use.

I think it would be handy if each sprite had its associated file path saved somewhere, so that if you modify the file you could select a bunch of images and click something like 'Reimport from file' to get the updated version.

I started playing adventure games when I was like 7 or 8 (making it like 18 years), when my parents bought Kings Quest 3 and 4 for my sisters, and Larry 1 for me (no, I had no idea what was really going on ).

First of all the games helped me learn english, (I'm from Quebec) - I remember looking through the dictionnary and everything for a long time to read a dialog that just said 'you can't look under the carpet because you're standing on it'. 

Second, I was attracted to the puzzle-solving part of it and I think that kind of skill-building did transpose to regular life. I'm a physics student now, and when something breaks, I go into 'adventure gamer mode' where I have to figure out how to improvise a solution with what's at hand. For instance we have to manipulate samples in an ultra-high vacuum chamber, and we have various manipulators that can move remotely but usually only have 1 or 2 axes of freedom. When something is about to fall off or we need to do something unusual, we have to think outside the box to do it, because we can't just reach in there and fix it

As far as escapism goes, for me it was (and still is) just fun, not so much an escape from something bad.

Kings Quest 1: Guessing that stupid dwarf guy's name, when I read the solution I thought, "Who the hell thought that one up?" (It's Rumplestiltskin spelled in a reverse alphabet or something)

Yeah that was insane! I think they saw that it was too hard, since in the remake Rumplestiltskin backwards would also work.

But why bother sticking with MSPaint? You'd just waste time and cause yourself unnecessary aggravation.

It's unknowable, pretty much by definition, until you die. But don't worry, you will someday, and then you'll know! 

Yeah, what was that song? Was that Trent Reznor?

Make sure that you've copied it in the right spot (same folder as the AGS executable).

Thanks Vince, I just finished it. My idea wasn't totally original  :'(

It was a very interesting experience, and some good puzzles too!

I'll make sure not to implement any playable scenes where you can't see anything.

Well, if you were blind you would feel around to know where you're going, and use sound too, right? Try an experiment where you close your eyes and walk around carefully. By touching objects, you build up a mental picture of what is where. So... how about it working like this, you move the mouse around, and somehow using the mouse cursor you try to convey the feeling of touch. As you move around edges, you start to "see" objects. Say you are touching a bowl of fruit... at first it would be represented visually as, say, first a vague fuzzy round shape, eventually gaining detail so that you find out that it's a bowl of fruit.

Hmm and then since you forget what was where eventually, when the player moves away from the bowl of fruit and starts to focus on something else, the bowl of fruit starts to fade away and become less clear.

Anyway I think that's a really neat idea and I'm curious to see how you go with it. My mother is legally blind (she is still ambulatory though) so I've often wondered what it would be like to be blind...

I was about to bid, but then I saw this auction. Frankly that's much better than what you're offering, cheaper too!

Yeah I guess the problem is that if a book is really good, then you wouldn't want to give it away... therefore instead of the best books circulating this way, well, the worst ones do. Or at least the kind of average ones.

Hmm, interesting - reminds me of geocaching somehow, but with books! I do have books I could get rid of this way... this idea might need kind of a 'critical mass' to work though, if only one guy drops books in a city it would take forever to catch on...

I have done this in a plugin but I haven't released it yet. There were a couple of things I was unhappy with ... the snow flakes didn't look right, and it didn't support changing resolutions very well. One nice thing though is that the rain was drawn on so that if there is lateral wind, the rain drops look slanted - it looks good.

If enough people are interested I may finish it for public consumption.

The mazes in Zak McKraken. A great game otherwise, but come on ... what was it, 3 of them?

Come to think of it, the Neverhood had a couple of mazes too - they weren't very complex, but they were needlessly long.

Sometimes it seems that game designers want increase the length of the game without increasing the content - not a good thing! Even Half-Life 2, amazing though it is, had that really long bit with the fanboat.

Should we ban violent video games? No. But we should remember that kids are pretty dumb and easily influenced, and some things are simply not appropriate for them. In the end, as has been pointed out before, only the parents can enforce that.

Also, isn't the underlying problem that we live in a culture of violence? I mean people make violent movies/games/whatever because people buy them...

I love watching Cspam ! 

Thanks Ghost for your comments, I think that's great advice! I also find that starting the game without a clear, defined plot all the way through the end is dangerous. I started a RON game thinking I would figure out how to finish it as I made it, but what I ended up was a few good jokes and no ending to the game .


KillerKlown, maybe AGDI's designer journals would be of interest to you:
http://www.agdinteractive.com/news-2001.php