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Oh, the second question is what makes a bad game? Okay, this time not at all in random order.

1.Poor controls. Simply put, if a game has poor controls I'll ditch it within ten minutes. I'll name several examples if people want me to, the prime instance is being too lazy to implement keyboard controls for a LucasArts or VerbCoin GUI.

2.Poor humor. A game need not be humorous, but if it tries to be, it had better not fall flat. Although this is a matter of taste, imo anything resembling Larry entirely fails at funny. Another bad example is the endgame of KQIV - it is an excellent game most of the time, and not at all humorous, but for some reason they felt the need to make the climatic scene funny. And it fails at that.

3.Poor puzzles. It's okay if things don't make sense in advance, but you have this "OOH, I should have thought of that!" after completing it (e.g. the infamous Monkey Wrench puzzle from MI2). It is not okay if, after completing the puzzle, you wonder why the hell you were doing that.

4.Poor limitations. Telling the player "you can't do that" for no good reason is bad game design. A simple example is inventory items that you're only allowed to pick up if your character knows what you need them for. Another example is disallowing something that is logical, because it was not the solution the designer intended.

5.Poor voice acting, which in my opinion includes 95% of all voice acting - but I'll simply turn it off.

In no particular order,

* Non-linearity, and the ability to "play around" in the game without having to follow some set path
* Atmosphere, mostly based on the style of graphics and music
* Details, including animations
* Alternative solutions
* and a blue cup that helps you out

I propose to coin a phrase.

Rather, I suggest Herostratus therapy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard drive

Ta dah

1) bomb, since in 5000 years mankind will undoubtedly have either conquered space or made itself extinct.
2) insults, since I have a thick skin and $1M is good therapy.
3) punch, a broken nose is nasty but $1M can get it fixed easily; a black eye heals itself in a week.
4) nothing
5) magic, since it wouldn't be me receiving the money.

I think the simplest option would be for a switch for "commercial games" in the games.php page. I can just as easily imagine people wanting to search for commercials, as people wanting to search for everything but commercials.

Hey, I actually met the man, years ago.

What happened to him?

This is indeed a weird world we're living in.

There are way too many charities, in that it's hard at times to make sense of which is doing what. Worse, there are some that are misguided, or ineffectual, or even fraudulent (for instance, there's a Dutch lottery that makes a big show out of being a charity, even though it is rather obviously a commercial gambling effort).

What can one do... the easiest is to pick a good, solid charity (Oxfam is one, as is MCF / DWB) to donate to. Taking care where you shop can make somewhat of a difference as well. Other than that, it depends on how much spare time you have left. Most charities are always happy to have volunteers, if only to raise awareness of the issue.

Of special mention is Amnesty International; they don't really want your money all that much, but they do want your voice. Amnesty works by persuading governments, and this is most persuasive if they can say they speak for two million people worldwide.

For the Dampiry game, simply click on the board.

Spoiler

The balcony is optional, and you're not supposed to wait for him, nor to use the stairs.

[close]

Hm, I'm tempted to write a Dizzy engine that does not require the ludicrous system specs that DizzyAge does. I'm sure Macon's game is interesting, but it doesn't run on my system.

Well, at least she obviously wasn't hiding any bombs or antrhax underneath there. Weren't people primarily worried about terrorists, and actually asking people to take off stuff at the airport for security purposes?

I am curious though... speaking as someone who used to sell his indie games, I'm wondering if this "going commercial" is actually paying the bills for people? It's a tough market out there.

And I'm trying to point out that an entire country of people don't all vote on what a private business does with it's money.

But it's not just the company, there's quite the audience on the internet cheering them on, most of whom, incidentally, are from the country that invented (and makes good use of) Hooters Airlines.

If it was the SAME company than sure, hypocrisy, but it isn't so it isn't.

It's the same country. America is both the country with the highest amount of moral panic among its populace, and the biggest porn industry worldwide. Same thing.

Several (dudes) have commented on not minding at all 'cause they like looking at the women dressed like that.

That may have been a weird remark, but it seems obvious that if the women didn't want to dress like that, they wouldn't.  (unless they're really really blonde-minded... there was this shy-ish girl who used to come to the local disco and was amazed that she got way too much male attention, even though she was the most skankily dressed in the whole disco by a long shot...)

It seems like imagination is in danger of going extinct!

Oh, we'll probably get a backlash like we did in the eighties.

If I ran an airline I would demand at least 10% of every flight to be skimpily dressed women.

Heh. You could have an employee at the airport with a pair of scissors, to correct people's costumes...

I think America should start by banning fat people from flights. [/sarcasm]

Seriously though, this from the country that thought flight attendants in bikinis (aka Hooters Airlines) was the way to get people to fly again after certain airline incidents? Hipocrisy shows its ugly head. If skimpy clothing would be disallowed from airlines, what about buses, and libraries, and restaurants? Next thing you know there's an ethics police telling people how to behave, and arresting the wrongdoers. Because that's working oooh so well in the Middle East.

If it was, you wouldn't seriously think we'd admit that, now would you?

Okay. I just heard that the local church organization is organizing a kind of bike-a-thon (i.e. teens or tweens promise to make a day-long bike trip, and their friends, neighbors and parents will pay them a couple dollars per ten miles travelled) to raise approx $10,000 for charitable causes.

The charity? Buying plane tickets for these teens so that they can visit a prayer session in Australia. Because, you know, prayer is so much different on the other side of the world than it is here.

It really pisses me off that they dare call this charity. Just imagine the good an actual charity could do with this sheer amount of money... but instead of loving their neigbors, they're only loving themselves. It's really, really sad.

At the high end, this is clear; at the low end, this gets statistically insignificant rather quickly.

There are surprisingly few Sierra titles on there, and I am surprised at not seeing KQVI around there. Whenever "best games" are asked for, in my experience, the two titles that crop up almost immediately are that and MI2 (which, unsurprisingly, is right at the top there).

That's not mysterious, that's dead-end prevention I'm sure it would have been open earlier in your game.

I'm not sure how you got to the bedroom without dealing with the apprentice first?

Anyway, you're not stuck. Remember you're not alone here.