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Serves er' right!

Fart. In tight places, such as elevator or crowded bus.
Then loudly blame it on some female. Try to pick the shy, fragile type.

epic win!

Paying $1.25 from every $5?
No-no-no.

Plimus offers $0.75 fee from every $5 and yet, their page & offers look alot less cheap'ish.
But I'm still looking for more options.

[is]

How does it work?

Let's say, I'm about to sell some tutorials, 3d models or a simple puzzle game.

Point is, it is distributed digitally, so there's no shipping. And for a really little price, let's say, $5.

What do I need? How it's done usually?
I've heard about paypal... what would be other, proven ways to handle money? Like, standard setup for such little business?
And downloads? How should this work? E-mail? Some crazy java/php system with passwords to e-mail?

Being a citizen of one of the most corrupt hellholes on earth, getting that money out from paypal/whatever simple handling service would probably cost more additional fees to local bank than I would actually earn. How to handle this? And survive generally without getting ripped off too much?

Let's share some wisdom here, people.
Because as much as I learned from Google, selling "dr. XXX's internet business secrets" to dumb people is the damn business.

Innovation aside, how come nobody made worthy UFO: Enemy Unknown remake/sequel yet?
It's been like what? 16 years?! I've tracked and played every damn remake/sequel attempt, from Project Xenocide to UFO: Aftermath and it's all worse than even Windows ME.

I'd gas hundreds of guitar hero/MMORPG/final fantasy sequel/other shameware making developer crews to just get one that's worthy and can do something good.

I personally don't even care about innovation. Let's have some gameplay, shall we?
Duke Nukem 3D was nothing so-innovative, nor was Blood or Red Alert 2 or Worms...

But they were good. In some strange, special way (which != my nostalgia).
I've played hundreds of modern games and don't remember even names, let alone what was game about or what was the story.
But I remember all cheat codes for Doom or fatality inputs for Mortal Kombat 3 or... hundreds of things I will never, ever need. Even though I haven't played those games for 10 years?

How come? What makes new games so unmemorable, empty, non-influencing?

Mountains?

3-button flash-made "tycoons" and horrid broken tycoons from valusoft.
Prison tycoon sequels?

I mean something big. Like Transport Tycoon, SimCity or Rollercoaster tycoon. Or theme hospital... The ones you play for hours and hours. Evil Genius, in all of it's broken gameplay and stupid system (almost impossible to make money, trap system is more on fire and exploding than being useful any way) was still last gem of a tycoon I've played. And Simcity 4. But apart from this...

...where are those mountains?

Last game that made me shake and wow and dream about it at night was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. PC version, of course.

Even kill-everything-in-the-room games CAN be innovative.

I'm talking about 3 scenes here.

The nuke (nukes in games rock by default)
Last drive of the middle-eastern leader (so who cares if it was just an interactive cutscene? It was uber!)
And, of course, plane shooting scene. It was like 1:1 rendition of random modern war video on liveleak.com, only... you could play this! Coolest thing in any game in the world, ever.

As hard as I might try, I still cannot bring any other game examples that had more wows than yawns... Since 2000 or so.
Some games though, such as Company of Heroes, really try hard. I wouldn't say that all gaming is only about money and zero innovation.

What I miss the most are 3 genres that all have same requirement for a player: brain.

Those genres are Tycoon-games, Adventure games, and of course, the most painful stake in my heart - turn-based strategies :'(. I don't know why those three genres died or exactly when, but somehow, they didn't success going-3D-revolution and so nobody makes them anymore apart from indie devs and some random central-european 3-man teams with broken engine and a blind artist.

I don't know if this applies to all or only some of LCD's but problem is in blur.

My monitor, Samsung Syncmaster 740BF, for example, has crisp picture at 640x480 and 1280x1024.

Other resolutions, such as 800x600 or 1024x768 are blurry as hell.
It kind of antialiases everything is really headache-inducing way...

Luckily, I don't need those blurry resolutions, since machine is fairly powerful, but with weak setup, it might be a problem (to play some resource-eating 3D games where you have to crank everything down for decent fps).

Low resolution problems were kind of terrifying at the start, but you gotta learn how your monitor works, what it likes and what not. I can play anything old at 640x480. I also force this resolution in dosbox. Non-letterbox resolutions are blurry, but AGS luckily has "letterbox mode" to fix the aspect.

Filters are selectable in newer AGS games, via winsetup exe. I - for example, play 320x200 games in letterbox - making them 320x240 and double that with 2x filter up to 640x480. And it's just fine.
Most of the emulators use filters too. I haven't met graphics filters anywhere else...

I'm quite used to LCD now, but must admit that I loved my old tiny 14" CRT more.

LCD monitors have kind of weird contrast/brightness issues (all of them, not only mine) and I always have to crank brightness too up to see anything. That wasn't a problem with CRT.

I'm not going back though. Simply hoping that LCD technology gets better someday.

It's still helluva impressive to see "modern" pixels. Even despite tablets and photoshop and... Such as King's Bounty: The Legend main screen.
Even though I hated the game, I spend 10 minutes starting at this screen and admiring detail. It looks kinda stupid in browser -- lower res and JPG, but in fullscreen, quality and full resolution...

http://www.mobygames.com/images/i/48/09/678159.jpeg

[WAS]

When you first loaded Quake or Tomb Raider, it really was an amazing experience

Was, comrade. WAS.
I'm talking about aging, not memories. You didn't know it was ugly because you didn't have any better. Also, games back then had a TON of more gameplay, unlike beautiful and boring "walk in the city/forest"-simulators today.
But now...

Well, to be honest, I'm not very eager to open up some AGI game today too.

Even though I finished Gold Rush! few days ago, just for the sake of nostalgia. It took way longer to "get used" to the graphics than about 15 years ago.
Of course, those huge pixels look alot bigger on modern monitor too, since it's 14" versus 19"...

Brilliant thread, and reply:

Thread:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=10548.0

teh relpy:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=10548.msg128351#msg128351

This is a simple question... pixels are immortal, everlasting.

I mean, look at games. 3D games.
I cannot bear to play games that were made in 1996-2002. They look so disgusting, with ancient 3D technology, no shadows or dynamic lights, muddy textures... Like Quake. It feels really like a virtual trip through colon, with everything brown/red. Few days ago, I tried to take up Blood. Really old and fun game. I remember how I loved it. Sadly, it feels unplayable and really bad now...  :'(

I probably feel same way about current "super realistic" 3D after 20 years.

But 2D, pixels... they're as nice as they were back in 1990. And will be so after 20 years.
Especially anything isometric.

In my opinion, this poster does not tease nor make me want to know more.

Maybe because I find fishing hat-type hats disgusting?
Anyway, boring poster IMO. Even though It's quite well done.

Change gradient, fix that chin (?) (too sharp right now) and add more, less bright stars to black area too.
Also, brown strip looks awfully out of place.

But not really making money yet?

I don't see prices on AGS nor ads (to use AGS as bait for advertising profit) on his page.
This Michael Prescott guy is not very good businessman, I say.

Let's sue his ass!

Luckily safe... yet. I got quite specific profession, it's really hard to find qualified replacement.

But bullets are passing close, very close... and unemployment has skyrocketed to over 10%!
For a nation consisting only a bit over million souls, it's really sensible amount of unemployed people. Everybody and their neighbors know someone who's out of job.

Next: The Crippen murder.

The WHAT?
I seriously doubt that international members have even slightest clue who that american doctor was or what he did.
Ted Bundy would be already a tough nut, but this...
I'm a history fan, and I've never heard about it.

I second Andail.

This piece was not one where to bitch about perspective. Or maybe try to put vanishing point into down-center, and build whole docks and city around it, something like a torus (donut shape) - somewhat Day of Tentacle feel...

But latest edit is actually quite good too.

On latest edit I'd decrease detail on farther hills, maybe cover them with exponential fog.

This way...

1) fog adds a bit of mystery to the scene
2) Looks a bit better in my vision
3) Leaves clearer background to title text, which is main point why I suggested this. Original version had this issue alright!

Also, colors and contrast on original were way better than on latest edit. More harmonious, less crazy. A bit too bright, though.
I know that "crazy" might go with the theme, but shouldn't apply to viewers eyes. Which is sadly the case with latter edit.

offtopic - what I would have also tried instead of you - was posting image in full size. We're all wary and user-friendly but I seriously doubt that anyone still looks AGS through 800x600 (or less) desktop resolution in 2009. This image, at horizontal size of 816px would be perfect first step to move on.

[You]

Ah, there you go again Nacho. Why are you so brainwashed?
I didn't talk about party members here, did I? And party members go with democracy, republic etc, not capitalism, which is absolutely different thing.

I was talking about collective census on forms of punishment/treating people like property and how we experience it every day.
While we all are more or less slaves of capitalist economy (some are even ignorant die-hard volunteers, like Nacho)
we all belong to something. To our country, our system, our employer, our regime and so on.

Yes, employer. While you have a deal with your employer and can leave him, employers have unwritten pact and other employer won't pay you much more than previous. That's why janitor or dishwasher cannot become a millionaire.

In capitalism, we experience this daily. Higher class earns daily what you earn monthly, your work earns him times more than he pays for it to you and so on. We mostly call it normal. Which is why I took this example.

Now imagine Islamic family. Man does work, earns & owns money. Wife takes care of kids and cooks. For this, man feeds her. How is man to his here so different from your everyday capitalist boss?
"to treat person as a property".
You are a damn property. And you have no problem with this. If you get fired, you might find another job.
But if all employers (capitalists!) decide to pay less wage to anyone of your profession, game over.

So I find "women abused there!" kind of hypocrite thing to say. I don't find acid throwing normal, but I don't see how it's so different with rest of us.
And with all that softness and fake tolerance around, I wonder why haven't anyone started throwing acid yet? There would be very little of response to this, due ages of voluntary slavery and being content with whatever rolls over you/whatever sick psychos run out there? Ooh, you threw acid into my face, let's lock you up in warm cell. But first, let's make sure some slick tries to defend you as well as possible, since we're so just & fair blah blah

And by default, we are human beings, which is also a responsibility.

Now, there's all kinds of scum that makes embarrassing to be a human. You (whoever) or me, law-abiding, moral and adjusted (to human ethics) humans are... somehow same species as that guy who took little girl away in his van and hacked her into pieces and buried them... are you okay with this? Seriously?

You really think that this only deserves a pat on the back?

I know that Smiley No need to tell. That's another things that one form the "civilized" world might consider as barbaric - to treat a person as property. Wink

Isn't that what capitalism is all about?

Don't your thoughts, everything you can imagine or do - belong to your employer? Everything you own is held at bank, or even belong officially to bank (modern way of life - debts & leases)?

I'm a designer, doing creative work and feel it maybe stronger than people in service or other industries. Or who are capitalists themselves...

I don't find "not barbaric" even a considerable argument.

We are not some kind of higher beings with endless intelligence we often like to think we are. Not while we have horrible things... like for example - coal plants, nuclear weapons, child labor, human trafficking and capitalism.
Fact is, humans are savages, either towards each other, community or nature. Some less, some more. Very few are really what's considered good. But even human moral scale - the "good" - is relative to humans themselves. Good is what most powerful human says is good. The government, the law, the whatever. Don't like it? We'll punish you, don't worry.

And by this, long-agreed system and our (or atleast mine) humanly feelings, some of humans are savage enough to deserve their balls to be cut off.
No amount hippie moaning will change this.

EDIT: Didn't notice post just before mine. I Agree.