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Please modify your posts to add more comments instead of double-triple posting

you're not missing much, here's a translation:

bb: something relevant

helm: not something relevant, but some minute alteration of something relevant. Plus, I'm smarter than you and enjoy the intellectual high-ground.

bb: No you're not, but thanks for assuming! I did philo 101 at business school! Plato: How to make an Ideal Sell!  Sartre: Hell is in Other Products! Camus: The Strange Cold Call!

helm: read books I've read!

bah, I know this scale inside out but I still couldn't do anything worthwhile with it for this. Oh well.

BAH!

No problem.

It's one thing for to people to agree on something and completely another to depend on their common definition on being understood and endorsed by those agreeing. Human interaction doesn't work like that, I think. We're not so simple machines to agree on the RGB value of 'navy blue' and all understand the same thing. The evolution of ethics has grown in the relative direction exactly to cover for all the loss of signal going on in seemingly otherwise simple agreement-based human interaction. You've studied Kant you say, then maybe you need to study something a bit more up to date, like Mackie's 'Inventing Right and Wrong' or something.

Your analysis is sound. If you want to maintain the control of the pacing of the game, especially for dramatical purposes, you can't have too much syntactical back-and-forth.

The solution is to have simple puzzles with few inventory items, some reusable stuff, some variable solution puzzles as fuzz says, and focus more on puzzles where well-timed (yes, timing) ACTION (not just 'use' things, use them how. Give the player those options) is more important, where Dialogue puzzles are more important, where even tension-solvers like violence and high-risk situations are important. I'm not saying to make it Dragon's Lair, but there are a few other aspects to adventure gaming than 'use mustard on forehead' type of puzzle-solving.

Of course this becomes a matter of GUI design too then. A simple point-and-click sierra-type gui usually promotes absurd inventory use, whereas a more verb-heavy inventory gives the options you need. Consider the latter. Something like Revolution games, Lure of the Temptress era where there's more than one 'use' relevant to an object might be a good idea. Even a full game without more than just barely few inventory items is possible like that, and probably all the better for it.

I'd rather play a well-written, well-paced game any day over a puzzle-heavy syntactical 'lol adventure game' throwback to the early 90's. But that may just be me.

Well, there's absolute ethics, there's relative ethics... There's morality systems without categorical imperatives, we're not stuck in Kant's age, thankfully... Your golden measuring stick stuck in a museum is a concept that isn't the same in two people's minds, and seeing it, scrutinizing it and even fully agreeing on it's features doesn't mean it becomes the same in people's minds, as the point of view of a human being is strictly subjective, so a bit more advanced systems of dealing with codified human interaction have been devised since the stuff you were talking about have been relevant trends (again, check back in Kant, lol!) Big Brother, please do study these things before proclaiming the Futility of Relative Ethics. Thanks.

jazz drum and bass ambient something

Tuxedo Moon were good, yeah.

Listen to Gorguts - Obscura and The Ocean - Here where Nothing Grows and Mare - Mare ep and Nomeansno - Wrong and anything by J. Hellborg.

Flashback is a rigid step platformer. You can move from a tile to exactly the next, not in between. Blackthorne's the same way, but missing much of the specialized movement that make Flashback gameplay so good. OOTW is quite more free, you move per-pixel and most of the jumps you make aren't as precise. Prince of Persia 1 is in the middle almost, where you can move in steps and in pixels, but when you for example try to grab a ledge the game will nudge you back into place, or when you run, the game will position you on proper tile placing...

Honest question: Would you then say that every declarative sentence in your post is an assumption? For example, is your assertion that anything held to be correct and enduringly reliable is subject to faith also subject to faith?

Well if my assumption "every assumption believed to be truthful is based on faith" is in my opinion truthful, then it belongs in the set of held-as-truthful assumptions, and therefore requires faith as I said. I know where this leads to. I have no problem accepting a bit of epistemological despondency here... Language doesn't lead to any undeniable truth as far as I'm concerned, it's just a socratic organon, invented to be put to social use. The use of absolutes is inherent in language and you'll go nowhere fast trying to protect yourself from them, everything you say will draw dualistic boundries. But be wary of self-referential paradoxes, they're more sophisms based on how language and logic operate than a valid argument against them. At least not on any high level... If you try to shield yourself by what seems to be an 'error' in logic, you'll find yourself on that path, asserting absolutely nothing whatsoever and that's fine as long as you're prepared to be a solipsist. I'm not. I enjoy human interaction. Me saying that I believe something to be truthful and me accepting that there are undeniable, objective, enduring truths do not necessarily follow.

A discussion such as this (in this thread, not in our two posts. The latter is pretty useless, actually) is useful on many other levels than those that people may believe lead to truths. It tells us a lot about the people speaking, it's stimulating and enjoyable for many reasons and that's good enough for me. I hope we won't have to discuss this epistemological undercurrent much more.

The problem with "disciplining yourself" is that everyone does according to their own will... which is not God's will.

There is a little zen story encaptured in this sentence.

We can use Wikipedia on our own, rharpe.

Logic relies on the least possible number of assumptions, as stated by Occam and Descartes.

The least possible amount of epistemological assumptions has always been, and will always be: None. Good luck with that. Anything you hold to be correct and enduringly reliable and possible on top of that, is the subject of some sort of faith. Faith in causality, faith in gods... we're not talking strictly different things here. However much of this goes outside the scope of the thread. Excuse.

2. Absolutely not. Law is about rationality; belief is about passion. The two don't mix.

Are you SURE about that? Does reason completely devoid of passion even exist? Can it?

It's a very nice way to look at things, Radiant, but Law is about imposing restriction, and has abstract moral founding to do that. And morality is very much about passion as well. So... what OSquinky said.

Thank you.

Please reconsider posting if that is the absolute height of prospective amusement we are to enjoy from your future posts.

(These is my desperate attempt at being funny)

Spectacular fumble.

um, what?

if you don't script in game-maker the games come out completely flawed.

http://www.zoggles.co.uk/asp/tutorials.asp?tut=1

this is useful for the isometrically inclined.