Messages

The paper-under-door-to-get-key-puzzle is way older than adventure games. I remember reading it in a children's detective book that was written in the fifties.

I think any puzzle can work excellently if presented in a good context and for a logical reason. Any puzzle can be awful if it's just random and illogical.

Some typical puzzles (or puzzle-types, really) I don't like:
* Pixelhunting. It encourages the player to click everywhere on the screen not to miss something, and it ruins the gameplay.
* Repetative clicking. Ok, so if I click on the character a fourth time, he'll tell me the secret.
* Extremely realistic/technical puzzles. Like "use knife to remove isolation from cable, use pliers to twist cables around eachother, combine batteries with screwdriver, etc etc". Heck, if I want to mend a radio, I can do that in real life.
* Surprise-effects-puzzles. This is quite common even in professional games. Items have hidden qualities that don't make sense, and to discover the effect you must try everything on everything, and that also ruins the gameplay. For some reason, Space Quest comes to mind, even though I can't point out a specific puzzles right now.

It would have been a really impressive finishing shot with you and your mother, completely exhausted, running out of a sea of flames.

Hey man this is really hard stuff! Most women just suck, sorry to all woman if I offended them, but I had my 2 cents of the female experiences...

I'm tempted to make some sort of sexist joke about how most women just suck, but seriously, if this is your conviction you need to start with changing yourself.
Or at least have some manners in a public forum.

looking good, Evil, but how about brass plaques for those music- and other-options buttons?
And the blue buttons at the bottom don't really work; either go for gradients or illuminating, not both. I would make them much smaller, plain light blue with a very subtle lighting effect.

I'm not much of a pixel artist, but here's an attempt to fix some major issues:




* Fixed proportions
* Removed outlines (outlines work best with high-res, cell-shaded graphics)
* Some shading
* Improved anatomy (still needs tweaking though)

"Big mountain with hole in it, being on fire..."

Are you sure it's not a volcano?

When the emotional music came I just had to turn it off.
He's a go-ahead person all right, but that thing was a tad too bitter-sweet, too staged for me. 

Almost 6 years, that's got to be some kind of digging record.

Yeah, I even mentioned it in another thread a while ago.

It's extremely addictive in the beginning, but after a while you've discovered most of the possibilities, and then you'll lose interest.

I built some really fancy catapults btw, I'll see if I can link them.

(damn, I could be correcting tests during these coffee breaks....)

Fair enough, I think we have settled on a few topics then. I'm happy that you have acknowledged Israel's responsiblity, and faults, in the conflict.

Some more points:

You can't really compare. Spain is a sovereign country and "has allways been".

I brought up Spain and the Moors just because Spain was muslim during the late middle ages, and muslims today could use that as an argument to re-settle on a territory historically theirs.

They are already doing it. Spain was the european country with less inmigrants 10 years ago. Now it's the first

But muslims don't proclaim Spanish territory their own nation. And some random Arab state doesn't suddenly decide that Andalusia should belong to the Moors, because they need a free state of their own, since they're being persecuted back in Africa.
Just painting up an allegory here, don't take it literally.

I don't think I'm being particularly pro-Arabic in general, but I think people in the "West" have a tendency to dehumanise them and lump them together as "terrorists" far too easily.

That' s incorrect. The UN resolution made two countries, one for Arabs, one for hebrews. Israelis accepted the existance of the arab state. Arabs did not accept the existence of Israel... Anyway, hebrews called everybody, even Arabs, to stay and live peacefully (Actually, 30% of the nowadays population is arab, they are integrated and participate as "normal first class" citizens in the life of Israel). What Ben Gurion did on the 14th of may was declaring the independence of that Israeli country, so, doing what the UN told him to do. The "war" started on 15th, 6 hours later.

Let's say that Moors suddenly immigrated en masse in south of Spain, and settled there. It would be comfortable for them, and rather provokative for the people of e.g. Cadiz, if they just looked around and said "let's now all live in peace!"
I know the stories are not related, but you need to try and take the perspective of the other side.

Wow... I know you have arab culture in great reputation, but I didn't  know you thought they had teleporting...

I don't hold Arabs very dear, but I sometimes manage to think with my brain and not with my heart. My biggest bias towards Arabs come from my girlfriend, who's Persian, and more or less hates Arabs.

And, let' s remember it... "Palestines" were not the owners of that land. Brits were. And brits told: "This land for hebrews, this for arabs". Who was not happy about it? Correct!

But in a Palestinian's point of view, this cookie is pretty hard to digest. Brits "owned" the country because of the results in the war, and had no history, interest or legitimate excuse to be there. They said Jews could be there because of a European holocaust-related guilt trip. But it was not the Palestinians/Arabs who gassed millions of Jews, all that happened in Europe. A Palestinian could easily argue "let the Jews get a free state in Europe!"

Be pacifist... But be it allways. Criticise the arab attack on the one day old Israel.

I did.

And I'm eagerly awaiting your response to my question about Israel using excessive force.

[1 day old]

Because when Israel was 1 day old, Egypt, Siria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and a Palestinian militia (Called the "holy Arab army") ignored the most important UN rosolution at the moment and attacked Israel with the determination of slaughtering a tiny population of holocaust survivors.

I think "slaughtering a tiny population of holocaust survivors" is a strange way to put it, when that particular war resulted in 250,000 Palestinian-Arabs fleeing or being expelled.

The huge influx of Jews into Palestine began before the UN decided to re-draw the map. For a Palestinian at the time, and for that entire generation, what happened was:
1. Huge amounts of Jews immigrate to Palestine and Jerusalem.
2. UN says "Ok, you guys shall all live here. Try to live peacefully together".
3. They try to live peacefully for a while.
4. The Jews proclaim independence and suddenly the whole country is called "Israel".
5. A war breaks out because the Arabs wonder what the heck happened to their country. (This is definitely something I condemn, since I think a war is virtually always the wrong solution.)
6. Israel "wins" the war and the Palestinians get some minor territories annexed by surrounding countries.
7. In the end, another 700,000 Arabs has fled the country.

I'm aware of how the history stretches back further, indefinitely, but for any given time in history, it's impossible to tell who's got the right for what.

And Nacho, I asked a question in my previous post.

Can we agree on that whoever is right in whatever point, Israel is currently using excessive force? I'm going to repeat the numbers until you reckognize them. (Or am I on your ignore-list as well?)

A dozen killed Israels, a portion of them killed by friendly fire.
Over thousand killed Palestinians, and tens of thousands of buildings destroyed in Gaza

How is this justified?

Even if you can't acknowledge that Israel did wrong by isolating Gaza and turning it to a humanitarian disaster-zone (which happened prior to the rockets by the way; it was simply a response to Hamas taking power there)...

...let's at least agree that Israel is using excessive force.
A full-scale military invasion, killing more than a thousand civilians and laying waste to tens of thousands of buildings, as a response to home-made rockets that all-in-all killed 8 people?

I mean, 8 people...come on.

Sorry, I don't watch Star Trek!

My father is constantly reminding me... "Ryan, when I was your age, I had $100,000 saved up" (I'm almost 25).
And it's true.  He used to work three jobs: a butcher, a bartender, and a mechanic.  Now he has a comfortable enough life to enjoy it. 

I agree that it is wise to save money, but sacrifying your entire youth just to be able to kick back later in life might not always be worth it.

To save up $100,000 (if he was your age at around 1980, that equals $250.000 today) by manual labour alone is a tremendous task.

I think it's wise to save up money corresponding to one month's salary as a security buffer. It means you won't have to borrow money immediately if you lose your job etc.

And never ever loan money to buy things, if it's not some kind of investment (like an apartment or a house, that won't drop in value). Only buy things for money that you own.

They are surrounded on three sides by friendly Arab countries.  Over the years they have received billions and billions of dollars of foreign aid from both the West and other Arab countries.   They have had every opportunity to create a modern and prosperous country just as Israel has done but they have chosen another path.   Instead of building a future for their children they spent all that money on hating Jews.   Now they have only themselves to blame for their current situation.

You quoted this from my earlier post but apparently haven't read it.   Your response doesn't seem to be at all releated??

I did respond to it. I said that Israel is controlling the land, air and maritime borders of Gaza and purposefully works to impede any sort of development therein. Therefore it is wrong to claim that Gaza has any opportunity to grow and prosper, but chooses not to. That's a very narrowminded and cynical view.

You (and many others) seem to ignore that by most standards, Israel is an occupying power in Gaza. Both UN and Human Rights Watch assert this (though I guess you, Rick, don't care much for UN and what they call things).

In addition to a very stubborn desire to control and close the Gaza borders, Israel uses far too much violence and illegal weapons.

From Wikipedia:

The Times Online carried out an investigation that "revealed that dozens of Palestinians in Gaza have sustained serious injuries from the substance, which burns at extremely high temperatures,"[385] and that the evidence that white phosphorus shells have been used is so compelling that the Israeli denial have increasingly lacked credibility.[386] On January 15 a UN aid agency accused Israel of firing white phosphorus shells at its compound, causing a destructive fire.[387]

Edit:
Another interesting point that has to do with how Israel accuses Palestinians of using human shields:

Counting casualties, Israel has killed more UN-staff and medical workers than Hamas has killed Israels.
In fact, Israel has killed more of its own soldiers during the invasion, than Hamas did with their rockets.
Excessive force, anyone?

Nacho, you have expressed that you don't wish to participate in this debate.

It's not good faith to openly ignore arguments of the opposition (like you expressively did with Snarky) and then keep posting your own arguments.

They are surrounded on three sides by friendly Arab countries.  Over the years they have received billions and billions of dollars of foreign aid from both the West and other Arab countries.   They have had every opportunity to create a modern and prosperous country just as Israel has done but they have chosen another path.   Instead of building a future for their children they spent all that money on hating Jews.   Now they have only themselves to blame for their current situation.

Are you unaware of or unable to understand that Israel is making sure Gaza gets neither humanitarian aid nor even electricity?

This is how UN officials describe it:

"A senior United Nations official has issued an unprecedented appeal to British MPs to use their influence to try to alleviate the impact of "indiscriminate" and "illegal" Israeli sanctions in Gaza which display "profound inhumanity" and are "serving the agenda of extremists".

In one of the strongest attacks on recent Israeli strategy issued by a senior international official, John Ging, Gaza's director of operations for the refugee agency UNRWA, said that "crushing sanctions" imposed since the Israeli cabinet declared the Strip a "hostile entity" in September had contributed to "truly appalling living conditions.""

From the Independent.co.uk

Fair enough, Nacho.

I think the most important thing is not to simplify things. It's a simplified notion that Israel was just minding their own business when islamic terrorists suddenly started launching rockets at them.
Likewise, it's a simplified concept that there is a homogenous group of bad guys out there who kill good guys, because, well, that's what bad guys do. It's a rigid and undeveloped worldview.

That being said, I agree that Hamas is doing a poor job on bringing the peace progress forward, and I'm convinced that many Palestinians in the area are quite obstinate when it comes to politics.

I support Israel because I have more empathy with them than with the people in Gaza strip. ETA put a bomb one kilometer away from my home and they have killed two people in less than 20 kms. from my house.

One girl I knew was killed in the terrorists attacks in Madrid. I feel "similar" to the people who is getting attacked with Kassams. I could die by a terrorist attack.

I don' t feel I am in danger of being a collateral victim of a bomb thrown by a country in an attempt to deffend theirselves. I consider very unlikely that, let's say, France, kills me trying to kill a member of a terrorist group who attacks France with rockets. I find very unlikely that in Spain the political side of a terrorist group who deffends slaughtering France wins with 60% of the votes.

I am sorry. I tend to go with the sides I consider similar to mines.

Do you know anything about the situation Palestines in Gaza find themselves in? How the area is effectively isolated by Israel, how they block resources, medicine and trade in general? It's not very far-fetched to say that it's the Palestines in Gaza who defend themselves against Israels.

I think you pretty much sign your own defeat in this debate when you say that you support Israel because you were in the proximity of an ETA-attack. It just shows that you don't think rationally. You hear the word "terrorist" and react impulsively. But two conflicts are never the same. There isn't a homogenous group of bad guys out there, everyone fight for their own reasons.

I'm quite surprised that some people, even though I know they are heavily biased, seem to hold the notion that Israel has thus far slept a peaceful slumber, only to be awakened by sporadic rockets from Gaza. Israel and Hamas/Palestine are both responsible for what's going on right now, the only difference is that Israel does far more damage.

But I think Hamas is 100% responsible for all civilian deaths caused by Israel bombing their military installations.

Come on, man, bias aside, this can't possibly be your opinion?

Edit: Oh and do read Snarky's post carefully, it contains facts and not just emotions.