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No no, Crazy, that was an awful joke. Not an aweful one.

I just went and bought free-range eggs just for you, Meowster.

Wow really??? Yay!!!! !
you made me smile and woop!

Hehe... I saw him lobbing them at some cows earlier

Lies!

I just went and bought free-range eggs just for you, Meowster.

Good point about the metre, though I pronounce layered as "laird" normally, so it's only one syllable to me. Though it's true that traditionally speaking it should be pronounced "lay-erred" which would indeed throw the metre off.

I hate that line now anyway, I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote it.

Same point sort of with bluosity is that you could acceptably pronounce it "blue-oss-i-tee" and stress the Y a bit more than you usually would in normal conversation, though that is probably slightly contrived.

Glad you like it aside from the glaring faults. ^_^

It shouldn't be the case, no. That's the way that society has progressed, though, for better or worse. Maybe someday nobody will eat anything but free-range produce, and the animals will live in peace and prosperity for all their days. That day is not today, sadly.

And it would be hypocritical of me to just suddenly up and say OI OI I WILL HAVE NO MORE OF THIS INTENSIVE BALDERDASH because I've known about the issues and continue to just randomly buy whatever meat I happen to fancy cooking. It's not like I go out of my way to buy intensively-farmed meat, but I don't go out of my way to buy free-range either. I've never given much thought to where my food came from.

I should clarify that I was just agreeing with Snake that people have become desensitised to the plight of cows and chickens as opposed to, say, dogs because we no longer think of them as individuals. It's not my personal standpoint, but the fact of the matter is that since most people think of livestock animals in "groups" they aren't as concerned about them as they are the animals that they still individualise. Is that clearer?

The thing is, we tend not to think of cows individually. I mean, when was the last time you were driving past a field and thought to yourself "Oh hey! There's a cow." I bet you thought "Oh hey! A herd of cows."

The difference is that in those narratives the narrator wasn't himself a character.

Strange Visitor:

Spoiler

Look at the crack in the wall.

[close]

If I squint a little bit I'd swear to god that's a photo, so you must be doing something right. Fantastic work! *seethes with jealousy*

Because you could only flush inanimate objects, as clarified by Dr. Fred. Which is the reason you had to get the hamster to the future some other way...another ingenius puzzle.

Trust me, Tyrias is FAR from the grizzled, gruff old mentor cliche. You'll see in time.

I agree with you on the exposition. To be honest that part never really sat right with me, but I couldn't think of anything else to make this part longer (I think I'm going to make this a prologue, which are generally shorter than chapters, and go into a bit more detail with the swordfight with only a minimal introduction to the world and setting, for now)

And no, this is a completely original story.

It was Simon the Sorcerer 2 that had the hush puppies puzzle. It was in Sordid's lair, just before the whole time-stick thing and Sordid stealing Simon's body.

I think that the negative point here is against games that remove important dialogue options that, without the ability to revisit them, make puzzles that take into account things said during this dialogue practically impossible.

That is to say, if a character reveals -vital- information that you need to remember in order to progress, yet after talking about it you can never access that conversation again. (And I have played games that do this)

I agree wholeheartedly with Vince. Any piece of information in a game imparted through text that's going to prove vital to progressing in said game should always be accessible at a later date whenever the player needs it.

Torin's Passage did this. If you clicked on the little button above the main console, you could see a transcript of the past dialogue.

I didn't think imposing a length restriction would be necessary since the guide tends to be pretty short and snappy anyway. If you want to write forty pages about why the Xarlfargs of Pollux IV regard earwax as a valuable commodity and worship it as a god, feel free.

Big improvement on the original version, but that window is HUUUUUGE!

Let's look at this from another angle: the farmers themselves.

Okay, so everybody's up in arms about the whole intensive farming thing. We don't like how the animals are treated, we think it's inhumane, we think it's cruel.

Thing is, apparently the farmers don't.

Why do I say this? Because if the farmers felt bad about it, they wouldn't be doing it in the first place.

If more people buy free-range, do you really think the farmers are going to have a change of heart and stop intensive farming altogether? As long as there's demand for it they'll continue to supply, in exactly the same way they've been supplying. And what's to stop them from -saying- they're free-range just so that they won't lose business? (I don't know much about the farming industry, maybe this would be harder than I think)

So okay, you've convinced more people to eat free-range, and given a few animals a better quality of life before they're slaughtered and processed for food.

I pretty much just go to Tesco and pick up a packet of meat. It doesn't say on the packet how the animal was treated prior to being slaughtered and processed. The packet was still going to be there, and someone was still going to buy it if I didn't. (That's when I actually buy it, I don't often buy my own food anyway, my housemate does most of the shopping)