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What formula would you use instead?

Average number of downloads per game, as listed by category.

Goldrush is one of the prettiest AGI games ever made, in my opinion.

Yes. You know why? GIF support. All other AGI games use vector graphics for their background; Gold Rush is the only one that doesn't.

Also, it's got great atmosphere, multiple game paths, and clever use of NPCs. Definitely a game to recommend.

Give it time, creativity comes in waves. I can design for twelve hours straight if I'm in the mood, but I can also do nothing for twelve hours straight if I'm not.

Well...

I look for keyboard support. In fact I categorically refuse to play games that lack this. It's really easy to put in, so there's really not an excuse for not doing so.

I like humor. By which I mean the kind which is actually funny, but of course that is a matter of taste. However, I held a poll once about which kind of humor adventure games liked best, and among a list of e.g. the Coles and Al Lowe, the obvious winner was Ron Gilbert, of Monkey Island fame.

To hold my interest, I'd like a game to have either an intriguing story, or good puzzle design. Preferably both, of course, but I'm not that picky   Big perks include (1) multiple story paths or different endings; (2) puzzles with multiple solutions; and (3) non-linearity.

These statistics fail to account for the amount of games in a category. If category A holds a single game that is downloaded five times, it gets 500%. If category B holds ten games, one of which is downloaded ten times, it gets 100%.

Our chief weapon is adventures.
Adventures and games...
Games and adventures...
Our TWO weapons are games and adventures... and pretty graphics!
Our THREE weapons are games, adventures, pretty graphics... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Chris.
Our FOUR... no.
AMONGST our weapons...
Amongst our weaponry are such things as adventures, games...
I'll come in again.

Yep, been there done that. I've fried my hard drive no less than twice. In one case I could recover 90% of the data through manually reconstructing the partition table. In another it had become physically defective and the stuff was lost.

"Justine Kiding"?

META, hands down.

I've had some experience writing educational software as a hobby, as well as seeing several edutainment games in action. In my experience computer-aided teaching works fine, like a program that asks you math problems and tells you how many you did correctly - but on the other hand, educational games work barely if at all along children of eight years and up. To young kids, it's probably helpful; semi-older kids tend to consider it lame and/or not learn much. I am unaware of any succesful edutainment games, although I know several that tried.

Ask Google to switch to Firefox

Try booting in safe mode.

A replacement for the default bluecup is also long overdue.

There has been one for awhile...

Something that was discussed in the past and many people liked, is a list of "if you like this game, you might also like <foo>".

Here's how that works: if you rate a game, you get to type one game that (you believe) is similar. When other people look at the game, the interface lists the top three of those "also" games that had three or more nominations.


Something else that may be nice is to "show all games rated by <foo> ordered by rating". Akin to the above, if you know foo's tastes run similar to yours, this tells you more about them.


(edit) oh yeah, and categorizing by genre is also a great idea (that was also discussed and liked before). It may also help to categorize by style somewhat (i.e. are the graphics realistic or cartoony, and is the game serious or parody).

I wasn't overly impressed with Knytt, but WADF is very well made!

Hm, I'm tempted to post a link to a 404 page stating that my entry for this month is gone forever. I'd like to join some MAGS later this year but didn't have time for this one.

Well, except that WinRAR is paid software, and 7-Zip does the same and is free.

A coder? Faster PC, most like   there aren't really any special tools for the job other than more software. Maybe one of them ergonomic keyboard/mouse thingies but not everybody cares for that.

According to my Windows version, it's 9877.

I would suggest against doing a time travel story as your first project, for such stories tend to be complex and are very hard to do properly.