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As I stepped out onto the bridge of the great airship, I felt that familiar urge.  Looking around and finding myself alone on the deck, I unzipped my pants and began relieving myself over the side.  It gave me a warm feeling inside.  No, not inside, outside...

I woke up and started changing the sheets.

"I have no mouse, and I must click"

Or causes explosions that blacken things.

Haha. There may be some of this in the game. 

There are lots of ways to transfer money from your japanese account to your australian account.  I keep my American account afloat with occasional transfers via GoLloyds which transfers your money to a foreign account via Lloyds of London bank. 

You can also do transfers straight from your bank, but I find that using GoLloyds takes a smaller fee to make this transfer.  This is because instead of making an international transfer from my little bank, I'm making a domestic transfer to a giant bank and letting that bank, which can do it cheaper, make the international transfer.

GoLloyds takes less than 48 hours to clear, so it's pretty fast.

Ok, youre just putting down something you've never even heard of. You have NO IDEEA what naruto is, yet it's only for nerds. Not all anime fans cosplay, and not all anime fans are nerds.

I know I'm late on this, but I'm pretty sure this was directed at least partially at me, so I thought I'd respond.

I was just making a joke.  I've got nothing against the less... deluded cosplayers (you have to admit, there are several out there, with documented evidence, that should NOT EVER be attempting to wear the costumes that they are wearing).  On the contrary, I quite admire the craftiness and dedication of some I've seen pictures of.

As for anime and Naruto, I live in Japan and teach elementary and junior high school.  When I arrived here four years ago, Naruto was all the rage with my students and so that I could relate with them when they talked about it, I watched it.  I watched about 50-60 episodes before giving up out of boredom due to pretty much the reasons Andail described.  It was pretty fun at the beginning though, and had some really neat ideas and cool fights.  But the talking!  It eventually got to me.  Plus, I eventually realized that I was watching a show aimed at kids under the age of 15...

I've at least sampled lots of other anime series as well while being here and before I came and my general opinion on anime is this:

-Limited run series, miniseries, or movies with less than 50 episodes total are often interesting and fun with a planned ending and story arc.

-Long run series that go on and on with no real ending quickly become boring and tedious.

Regardless, I haven't got the time for anime nowadays.  Thanks partially to the people in that awesome cheesehat picture that got posted again!

Still, anime and cosplay combined is level of nerdiness TOO high for even my brain to digest.
I thought that this is what 9-year old fat and ugly boys and girls do. And wonder why they have no friends.

Whoa, that's harsh. Not all cosplayers are like that !

I think this proves that not all cosplayers are fat, ugly, nerds.  Some are Japanese girls.

I have started offering my services free of charge to the owners of a number of restaurants and stores that I frequent here in Japan as a proofreader.  The problem is that it's considered cool to have English on something, no matter what it says.  That's why you see people walking around with shirts that say "Pet my beaver!" or some other often-misspelled nonsense.

Too many business owners will go out and spend a ton of money on signs, fancy printed menu's, business cards, etc with terrible laughable English on them.  It's really not that hard to find someone who speaks English fluently.  Especially on the island I live on where there's an American military base.

One French restaurant I went to a few months ago spent what must have been several hundred dollars on this engraved pillar outside the entrance that had the restaurant's name on it along with a slogan: "Freash eatery, relax frendry service.  Come In."  Spelling and capitalization exactly like that.  For something so prominent and expensive, couldn't you find one of the thousands of native English speakers that live on this island for a quick proofread?  Or maybe, you know, don't use English?

The straw that broke the camel's back was when the owner of one of my favorite restaurants, Yona, opened a second restaurant named Yona Labolotoly.

First off, I told him, "Laboratory" is spelled with 'r's not 'l's, so that huge sign you put up out front: bad.  All those business cards and menus: bad.  All those newspaper ads: bad.  Second of all, "Laboratory" doesn't exactly sound like a great place to eat.  I know it's Japan and that 95% of their customers won't even notice, but still, a 15 minute conversation with me and I can fix all the spelling and grammar mistakes in your menu, ads, signs, and even restaurant name.

A year from now, all my favorite restaurants will have impeccable English on their menus and signs.  Mark my words.

I see that message every year (since I live in Japan and have to go to work on Christmas... and then instead of working on real work, I work on games...) and I was happy to find that the new 3.0 editor does not stop me from working on Christmas!  I still got the message though when I opened up 2.7 to compare some features with 3.0.

I was wondering who would start the inevitable "OMG no AGS on Xmas!" thread.  Congrats, Proximity.

Thanks for reminding me each year how pathetic I am, Chris!

Ivy, you tell those bots to watch their mouths.  I'll have no one describe my mother and two sisters that way! 

Ignoring the question about light still traveling into the camera, if the camera's internal mechanisms were still working while time was frozen, then you didn't freeze time, you just froze the people.  The world would still be spinning and flying through space, the people just wouldn't be conscious of it.  If you're writing a scifi story or something, you need to figure out exactly what the dude's power is.

I typed a long paragraph about how silly the question was outside the context of a scifi story, but Increator pretty much covered it.

It's very impressive!  I would consider myself as extremely familiar with the ins-and-outs of 2.7, so jumping into 3.0RC3 is going to take a little getting used to.  I put in about two hours in the new editor today for the first time.

Aesthetically, I love the new editor.  No complaints there.

It imported the game that had previously been built in 2.7 with no problems.  Running it worked exactly as it had before.

Useability-wise, the ability to have multiple scripts open at the same time is very very appreciated and is the thing that stood out as the biggest improvement.  Two comments about the scripts:

-I missed the old menu items that I used to use to jump straight to, for example, the repeatedly_execute or game_start section of the script.  Likewise, I used to sometimes use the room-menu "i" button to jump straight to a specific section of the script rather than just opening the script and navigating down to where I wanted to edit.  Maybe this functionality is in there, but it didn't jump out at me during my short use.  This is minor, since I can just use the search function.  Which brings me to:

-I liked the old search function better, automatically hilighting the first instance and closing the search dialog, then using F3 to go to the next.  Now, when it highlights an instance of the search term, the dialog stays open and I can't scroll around the script to verify if this is the instance I'm looking for.  I have to manually close the dialog, then scroll around, then open the dialog again if it's not what I was looking for.  (I do this a lot since I rarely, if ever, comment code... my old CS teachers would be so disappointed)

Most of what I was doing today involved importing new sprites, and a few things bugged me about that:

-Importing with the "palette index 0" as the transparent color apparently no longer works with high color games.  It used to, and was a convenient way to not have any transparencies on a sprite (when the sprite is meant to be a rectangle).  I couldn't find a way to import the sprite with no transparencies, other than adding another row of pixels to the sprite, then importing it with that row being transparent, and then using the sprite cropping.  That's way more steps than it used to be.  Is there a way to do this that I missed?  Can we go back to the old way?  Or can there be an option for "no transparency" when importing in hi-color (replacing the non-functional palette index 0 option)?

-There's no longer a quick import from clipboard option when right-clicking on the sprite window.  Now, to import from the clipboard, I have to go through the dialogue where all I do is click the "get entire image" button.  When bringing in a bunch of sprites one by one from the clipboard, this slows me down.  I liked the old option that skipped that window and just pasted.

-Losing the ability to drag sprites to rearrange them in a folder or to drag them to another folder is a big loss for me.  Much harder to organize my sprites unless I give it adequate forethought, which I usually don't.  Sorely missed.

In general, I found getting to the part of the Room editor that I was looking for a little confusing, but I'm sure I'll catch on quickly.

Also, when 2.7 would get to the point where my game took too long to compile for every test, I would start quick saving with ctrl-a and then running the engine straight from the game's folder to save time.  I didn't see a quick save option, but I didn't have time to mess around with saving and compiling much, maybe there's a way to do something like this in v3.  I hope so.

When I try to run the game in Direct3D mode, no matter what resolution I chose, windowed or no, it tells me that my computer doesn't support that resolution.  But I usually don't have any problems running games or other programs in 640x480 full screen.  I'm running it on a MacBook booted into Windows XP via bootcamp.  Not sure what's up there.

Those are all the observations I have from my first couple hours with it.  Hope it's helpful.

Characters is right.  That is precisely the reason my next game is in 320x240.  Bumping the resolution up to 640x480 multiplies the number of pixels required to make a character with the same size in proportion to the screen by four.  In addition, while a 320x240 sprite can look perfectly smooth with, say, a six frame walk cycle, a higher-resolution character will likely require more frames to look as smooth. 

So, the size increase alone is around 4x the pixels to push, the increase in frames required for each animation bumps up the work even further to 5 or 6 times the original amount.

When you're paying the pixel artist, like Dave is and I am, you have to wonder if the much higher costs of producing higher resolution art is worth the amount of extra business that you'd get selling your game in the higher (but still archaic) resolution.  In my estimation, the kind of people who would buy a 640x480 adventure game is pretty much the same set of people who would buy a 320x240 adventure game.  I don't think I'm losing much of the potential market.

For a freeware author of course, you just have to decide if it's worth your time and effort.

Of course, there are other ways of creating art that wouldn't be terribly impacted, effort wise, by a higher resolution, such as using vector art.  In which case, I would definitely go with higher res (and have with my last two games).  Nostalgia doesn't enter into it for me.

Go Packers!

I love that my New Year's Family Portrait sparked an international incident.  Going into that photo studio, I knew this was going to be a picture where my wife and daughter look amazing and I look like a total goof.  When they made me take off my glasses (which I look so dumb without) and put on the cheese hat, I knew it would be special!  Isn't Emi perfect though?

Wow, congrats!

Let me know if you need a hosting mirror for this one too!  Downloading now!

Edit:  Finished!  Short but stylish as hell.  Some more very interesting peaks into what looks like an intriguing story.  Well done!

Gorgeous as usual, Dave.  Congrats!  Where do I get in line?

Edit: Thanks Auriond!

Finished the Japanese version of Phoenix Wright (in English) a month or so ago.  Definitely the best of a great series.

The whole of the last case was brilliant.  They, really, could have left out the two un-connected cases, and I still would have been happy with the game.  But that would have left out some great jokes and glib references.

Bluescreens Inc. Employee: I'm sorry, I can't give you that data.  It's Super Password Admin Restricted Desktop Access.

Maya: This is madness!

Bluescreens Inc. Employee: Madness?  This is S.P.A.R.D.A..

or something like that.

All in all, the Phoenix Wright series is some of the most fun I've had playing games in the last five years.  Love the twisty stories and the great characters.  The last game was a great finish, and I'm definitely planning on buying Apollo Justice when an English version is available.

I wish you luck in this, Branden, but you don't need to post your intentions here.  Wait until you've worked on it a little bit more than... say... copying and pasting the story description from another website.

Make some graphics, program a bit in AGS, and when you know that you're going to see this one through, then post a detailed description in the Game in Production area.  People will then become interested because the game is something more than just an idea, which is all it is now.

Work hard!  Good luck!

By the way, I'm watching a drama now with my wife called "Galileo."  Only the first three episodes have aired, but it's pretty good.  Kind of like a reverse X-Files.  You should check it out.  Though, maybe not enough fan service for you.