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Nice to hear of the extension! I've written most of my entry down already, but I think it's going to need a lot of polish if it's going to be any good.

[D-BLAZT]

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/CotPgs4.gif[/imgzoom]
Chad Ical, A.K.A D-BLAZT is a top secret government supersoldier experiment with alien DNA and an para-military ex.secret agent who now works as a rogue mercenary gun for hire
who fights by cutting his adversaries so they bleed (preferably by using the katana which he received from a ninja master from ancient China), so that he can
use his enhanced alien abilities to make their blood explode, wherein he can literally surf on the blast waves using his specially built surfboard.
Whenever he strikes a hit, Chad shouts his catchphrase "TOTALLY CHADICAL!!!".

D-Blazt also have a super deep and dark and secret past, he used to belong on a superhero team, but he has always been a lone wolf and had to leave the team after he created
an evil clone of himself known as KOLD (because he's evil, so his heart is cold) in an attempt to resurrect his dead parents and KOLD killed five other team members.
Ever since that fateful day, D-Blazt took the ashes of those slain and used them to paint a black X on his shirt and vowed to kill Kold in order to avenge his dead parents.

In his spare time he's likes to practice break-dancing and he's best friends with like, all the cool rock stars man.

some questions. As I understand it, the following applies, but correct me if I'm wrong:
1. The word 'fantasy' in the title refers not so much to the genre but to the weapon being fictitious.
2. The weapon should be 'held' (in the broadest sense of the word). But should not be e.g. a tank, or be handled by multiple characters (though it might be held by multiple creatures while one handles it).
3. The weapon is the character, and the 'voted-on' piece should not contain 'creatures' (is an impression of the weapon with a creature allowed?).

Yes, I do realize now that I should have been more specific, but yes, the weapon should be something which can theoretically be held and used by one person, and the sprite should depict a weapon first and foremost,
but you are allowed to include a character to demonstrate how the weapon is wielded, but no votes should be applied to the character, only the weapon.

You were also right about the fantasy part, I used that word as a short-hand for made-up weapons since it's very common in the genre, but if anyone wish to draw a sci-fi, steampunk or other type of weapon, they are welcome.
I hope that cleared things up, if you still have any questions, let me know.

[Most difficult and cumbersome to use]

It took me a while to come up with a new idea for a sprite jam, but I hope this one will be fun. At first I thought about doing something with Lovecraftian horror, but since the last sprite jam was about aliens it felt too similar, so then I thought, what about Liefieldian horror?
This Sprite jam will have a tongue in cheek focus on an all to common trope in Sci-fi and fantasy, namely, weird and unwieldy weapons that would never, ever work in real life.

The task is to draw a sprite of some sort of fantastical weapon, and entries will be judged on three categories:

Most difficult and cumbersome to use

Most likely to injure the user

Most tacky design

Here are some pics to show what I'm talking about, and I hope you have fun coming up with weird wild ideas for odd weapons. Deadline is September 10th.

Hot Fuzz is an awesome movie, it makes great parody of tons of action and police-movie tropes!

Speaking of parody, one thing that I'm tired of seeing in adventure games is intentionally dumb and convoluted puzzles making fun of dumb and convoluted puzzles. Having the protagonist pointing out how dumb and irritating a puzzle is doesn't automatically make it fun, the player is still forced to do a stupid puzzle, except the programmer knew it was stupid and still put it there. One example that comes to mind is this scene in The Whispered world. That puzzle was not fun and did not feel rewarding to solve, it just yanked me out of the story.

Blondbraid, these days anyone will ALWAYS cry "sexism/racism/whateverism" (not you), so it's a situation of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

I know, but I've never seen any actual feminist complain about a male and female character facing off in a fair fight, and likewise, I don't think anyone would complain about a similar situation with two characters from different races.
Instead, this is an old trope from when most writers considered women to be the weaker/fairer sex who wouldn't be able to fight a real man, and then it stuck because they thought it unfair to hit a lady.
Now, I don't think you should hit anyone who's weak and cannot defend themselves, but that could be applied to men and women alike.

While I personally have some suspension of disbelief for the "one man army trope" if it's done in an intentionally fun and over the top way, one action trope that annoys me is the Designated Girl Fight, whenever several heroes and villains face off, the one girl on the hero team always only fights the one girl on the evil side, and in some bad cases the evil girl only exist so that the token girl on the team will have someone to fight. But it's not just women, I have also seen similar scenes when two opposing sides both have token black guys. It's just plain ridiculous to think that people actually in a real fight would sort themselves out so that everyone fights their counterpart with the same sex/race/background.

If anyone here hasn't heard of it yet, go to tvtropes.org and find even more pet peeves.
...
Be aware, Tvtropes can make you binge read!

I've read a lot on Tvtropes myself, and part of that is what gave me the idea to start this thread.

What breaks my immersion in adventure games is when dialogue/conversation options don't update to reflect things that have happened in the game. Like, if you've discovered in the course of the game that your neighbor is a serial killer and have had him arrested, the next time you talk to your doorman, that topic might come up, maybe?

Yes, that can lead to some pretty silly situations in the game. It reminds me about a similar problem I had with Assassin's creed 3, a sandbox game set during the american revolution, during the main missions you fight to expel the redcoats from the colonies, and after the player completes the story missions, the revolution is over and all the British soldiers that patrol the map are replaced with american militiamen to show that the British are gone and America is independent now.

But there are many optional sidequests where the player is supposed to defend civilian npc:s from redcoat soldiers oppressing them in various ways, and if the player hasn't completed them before completing the main story,
all the British forces are now replaced with american soldiers doing exactly the same thing, unintentionally evoking this before/after gag in Tintin and the Picaros, wherein Tintin topples a dictatorship in order to install a new and better leader:

Both Assassins Creed 3 and Tintin end with a big revolution that ultimately makes no difference for the people, only the flags and uniforms have changed,
except that in Tintin it was an intentional satire of the nature of dictatorships and in Assassins Creed it was lazy programming.

A similar immersion breaker occurs in RPGs when you start as a nobody and work your way to the top, and even after saving the kingdom, getting knighted and hoarding a pile of riches, people still approach the hero to ask them to collect pie ingredients or kill rats in their basement or what not. Because of course someone in gold armor with a truck-sized sword on their back is the type of person you'd ask for help with your grocery shopping.

I thought about starting a discussion on what breaks the immersion in movies, books, adventure games,
these sort of things that makes you groan "No way, that isn't how it works!" whenever you see that
thing pop up in a work of fiction.

For example, one thing I've noticed in a lot of fantasy and historical movies is when we are told that the heroes are travelling through a wild forest,
yet all the trees are exactly the same size and the same species, and planted in square formations, so it's obviously a modern planted forest.
Once I've seen it, I can't unsee it! Just compare the images below:

While I did love the first Avengers movie when it came out, it was just epic to see several movies build up to a big team battle,
I can't help but feel the whole shared universe trend have gotten a little overboard to the point that none of the movies that try this are able to tell a satisfying standalone story, and it perpetuates the mentality that it's ok for a movie to be pretty mediocre, because it's just there to set up the next movie in the franchise. Like I mentioned, Marvel managed to make it work out OK, but I can't think of any other shared universe that I actually liked.

Now, I do think Easter eggs is fine, as long as they are that, Easter eggs, and not whole scenes that grinds the rest of the movie to a halt just to advertise coming movies from the same studio.
Now, I know these movies aren't popular amongst everyone, but I kind of liked the Van Helsing movie with Hugh Jackman, The Brothers Grimm by Terry Gilliam and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie,
and all those movies managed to put many characters from different stories into the same film, but they also worked as self-contained stories that didn't rely on the audience coming back for a dozen sequels.

Good lord, I've actually found an item worse than the Trump fidget spinner!

ITYM Washington and Jefferson rather than Lincoln, Ali. At least those were the presidents Trump originally compared Lee to.

And Confederate "heroes" may or may not have been personally racist (or more racist than the average person of the day), but they fought for a racist cause. A statue honoring Robert E. Lee is problematic just as a statue honoring Erwing Rommel would be: both had admirable qualities, both are highly respected as military geniuses, but both fought on the side of an evil regime and seem to have been in sympathy with many of the basic aims of that regime.

So what about this statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest?

I have an idea, though I haven't got far yet.

Cool!
I still remember first trying the first chapters of Technobabylon on this site years ago, and then buying the whole game on Steam to see the full story.
It's such a great game and I love the characters and story, so it's fun to hopefully see more people finding this game!

When I finally saw the ending though, I got curious, is there any plans for a sequel?

I remember an acquaintance of mine mentioning last summer that if Hillary were elected, it would be good for USA but bad for the rest of the world,
but if Trump wins, while it would be bad for USA it could be an improvement for the rest of the world as he has been consistently had a policy of
isolating USA, barring people from entry, attempting to build a wall, promoting nationalism etcetera. Their argument was that, judging from America's
track record in nearly every global conflict post WWII, USA limiting their global influence be a good thing.

But I agree with Scavenger in that Trump should have openly taken a clear stand against the white supremacists rather than just making some weak statement that both sides are equally bad.

[Baron]

Very well, the new votes have broken the tie with Baron as the winner with Roccinator as a close second and SilverSpook and Sinitrena in the third place.
Congratulations to all the winners!

I tried for a long time to come up with a good visual metaphor that would adequately represent redemption,
but in the end I ended up tossing my hands in the air and wound up drawing dead albatrosses instead. Here are the trophies:
      

Wow, what fun and awesome animation in the last GIF, reminds me of those classic cartoon shorts!

Wow, the new tracks are really great, "Move it Out" and "RPG Battle Climax 2" will be perfect for my next AGS project!

Well, the deadline for voting is over, but depending on how you count SilverSpook's vote it's a tie between the entries.
However, since Mandle mentioned being about to vote later, I'm willing to extend the deadline one day further.