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This is a very good first game. The "fog of war" works great! 

Not directly related, but I remember in one of the Knights of the Old republic games, one of the first missions/levels had you (a bunch of jedis) in an apartment complex on some random planet. At one point, one of the jedi was discussing local rebels who were attacking the apartment or something, and referred to them as "aliens".
I thought that was pretty funny. Humans gonna hume, and even the Jedi can't help being subliminally racist.

You know, this is in a Galaxy far away, a long time ago...so maybe the term "alien" was neutral then? A la how the terms "negro", "colored", "black" and "afroamerican" have shifted in how they are perceived. A jedi of today would say "unantropomorphic". No wait, that's just as bad. "Insectoid", perhaps? It's really difficult to find a neutral term.

Indeed, I remember somebody pointing out that several "Oscar-bait" films, despite trying to show racism is wrong, like The Green mile, still failed to show people of color talk to each other about something that wasn't a white person.

At least in The Green Mile, you also have white people talking together about a black person.  Like you said earlier in the thread, these rules aren't really rules and may be broken if that's how the story can be told in the best manner. I haven't seen The Green Mile more than once, so I cannot comment on the possibilites of improvement, but it's clearly nowhere near being a racist movie. In other Stephen King adaptations, they have occasionally cast a black actor playing someone who was white in the book, changing absolutely nothing in the dialogue or the way the character is portrayed. I can hear them arguing..."Yes, he was white in the book, but we can get Morgan Freeman! Morgan Freeman wants to play him!" 

I remember watching a Star Wars film, I _think_ it might have been the first of the prequels. It occurred to me that they tried to cater to everyone: There were white male heroes, sure, but also women and black people. (I think there were also Asians, but I can't recall for sure.) And I remember thinking that they tried to give every possible audience member someone to identify with. And if you make your living selling action figures and t-shirts, that's undoubtedly a smart move. If there's some equality gained by it, all the better, but I felt that the real motive probably was profit.

I think the main reason Settlers of Catan is my poker party's favourite board game, has to do with that it gives a sense of achievement to everyone. When the game is finished, everyone has expanded from what they started with. It also helps that you need to cooperate with other players - winning without trading is almost impossible.

I own a set of Stratego, but haven't played it all that much. I like the idea of uncovering what your opponent's pieces are hiding. Perhaps I should teach my kids how to play it. 

Another take on that idea is a small and fast game called Quicksand. Basically, noone knows which player has what character/colour, and everyone can move any piece. Then it's a race to the goal area...which means that if you can trick the other players into moving your piece in the right direction, you stand a chance of winning. If they think they know who you are, they will move that piece into quicksand instead.

I'm a board games fan, and I guess I have you solidly beaten when it comes to the sheer number of games on my shelves or in my cupboards. In my childhood, my friends and I used to organize tournaments where we played every game we had, even including tabletop football or ice hockey games and couronne. Then we got points for our placements in the various games, to end up with someone becoming the overall champion.

In my youth, we became more selective, playing mostly Risk, but also different economy games. For some years we had a tradition of playing Monopoly on New Year's Eve, shooting fireworks whenever someone went bankrupt. 

In more recent years, I'm playing poker with some friends once a week, and we often start off the evening with a board game. The group favourite being Settlers of Catan, due to the frankly endless variations one can make. I've found that games that takes more than say, 90 minutes to play, is a bad investment because they get played to seldom. That means me stearing clear of the more advanced tactical games, of the Axis and Allies sort.

Ufortunately, that means I won't that often get to play some of my favourites. One is Junta, where the players control a family in a fictive banana republic, staging coups and assasinations against each other. The goal of the game is to grab the most of the foreign aid and put it safely into a swiss bank account. 

My home country, Norway, unfortunately isn't a great market for board games for adult people. The market is dominated by classics, kids' games and quiz games. I play a lot of games with my kids, so that part is all good, but the choice in tactical board games is limited. I've found that German games, especially award winners, are to my liking. They are often made with graphical symbols, eliminating the need to read a lot of text, and due to German history, the developers have clearly turned their brains to invent games about something other than war.

My thoughts this round.

Tom and Jimi in: Blowout by Slasher

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Great humour made this one a treat. I really liked the animations, too - the mouse running to try to keep up with the cat's walk!  I'm one of those who get absurd thoughts when playing something like this, like "cats probably won't like rice". But the fact that they talk doesn't bother me one bit. I _so_ wanted to use all of those funny items found in the bins, but I guess they're only dressing.

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Ka and Da by VampireWombat

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I'm quite fond of time management games, but not when compared to adventures. Anyway, this one is a good idea, with some abduction humour thrown in, too. Unfortunately I can't see the endings, so I don't know how well I did, but I think perhaps 75 hours makes the game easy. I managed to keep all of the stats comfortably high/low. (But can't say for sure without the scale, of course.) Fine abuse of the AGS engine.

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Jason Saves Christmas by fernewelten

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Another good game with a few bugs. Good puzzles and funny characters. This has a very different feel when you swap characters, and that's a plus here.

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My vote went to

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Jason saves Christmas. Blowout was funnier and felt more finished, and this one had the better puzzles. Close call, but I let the puzzles win this time. I'm a hound for good dialogue puzzles.

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Is there an ending to Ka and Da? I somehow managed to

There are supposed to be multiple endings. But apparently I missed a few things. It looks like interacting with the computer is the only way to actually end it.

When interacting with the computer after the time runs out, it says I don't have enough energy.

Is there an ending to Ka and Da? I somehow managed to

There are supposed to be multiple endings. But apparently I missed a few things. It looks like interacting with the computer is the only way to actually end it.

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From there, the endings are supposed to vary depending on your friendship points and abductions. In theory it should still end if you have negative time left... In theory.

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Perhaps I have missed something.

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I don't think I have found a computer to interact with. I didn't find any hotspots in the engine room, so maybe I haven't looked close enough. I love the theory of the multiple endings...hope I find a way to see them for real.   

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Unfortunately I ran into the same problem. Not enough options (seem all very similar), and I have seen the white arrows :-)

Otherwise it looks good.

If you want to see the ending, you can read my bug report a couple of posts back here.

Right now my only choices are:

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-Give me that key, you vermin
- Nice nose..
-tell me again about your chores
- Tell me again about your cheese hobby. 
- Are you living alone?
- How many children do you have
- Nice ears
-Nice weather
- Have you seen a key?

I've been through the cheese and chores options many times and get the right answer and no new options appear. Anything else makes her get upset. I can't get the brush. Can you please advise as to what to do next?

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This may be obvious, but:

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Have you noticed that you can click on the arrow-type thing underneath the dialogue options to see more dialogue choices? Does the colour work make it invisible to you somehow? The dialogue options you list doesn't have a "talk more later" sort of option, which is supposed to be the one on the bottom.

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I've completed the game, but there is a bug, I'm afraid.

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On my first go, I gave Scratchy the broom, and Joey said that he didn't want to ask for the key yet. After finishing all the talking, the mouse doesn't give out the key, he just says that we have run out of subjects to talk about. Then I retried, thinking I perhaps had to finish the talking first, then giving him the broom afterwards. But as it turned out, this time around, when we finished talking, he thought he had already received the broom, and gave me the key in return.

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Is there an ending to Ka and Da? I somehow managed to

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get a negative count of days. At zero, I got the message that I had no more time, but it went to negative time when I tried talking to my crewmate. Is there a specific action I'm supposed to try at zero, or is zero supposed to trigger the ending?

EDIT: I tried again, this time it was looking at the TV that made the time go to minus one. (Possibly it was that the first time, too.)

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Otherwise, fine game. I'll make reviews when I've played them all. A bit last minute before voting this time around.

My personal opinion is that any fan of the show going into a MASH game that didn't open with a version of the opening title credits with a version of Suicide Is Painless playing is maybe not gonna be feelin' the vibe you are working hard to create.

Rest assured, Mandle. The opening screen has a picture of the crew and the song running in retro-style like it would be if orchestrated on, say, a Commodore 64. 

I will eat a whole tin of surströmming (and probably die).

Now THIS is game material! 

Or at least a Black Story. 

So I guess that means that, if you want any amount of potential dialogue, whether it is 2, 3 or higher, you have to put the "ultimate" dialogue first. A potential dialogue has to be younger than the dialogue below it, and older than the dialogue above it.

Have to is stressing it, but it's probably the easiest way. You could perhaps make a dWoman string change to false when the option that replaces it is chosen - the gaffa tape method.  I think your original code would work fine if the options were mutually exclusive. (Like if you choose a class for your character in the start of the game and want different responses given to a wizard and a warrior.)

Try putting the most radical change first. From what you write, I guess if you check for dSnake1 first, it should activate dMan3. If that's right, you can solve the problem by swapping places - checking first for dSnake, then dSnake1, then dWoman1.

Btw, the text in the document in my story is an actual text (not maps). It's just that it presents a very strange game in a maze, and has ties (as to its meaning; obviously doesn't reference those) to some early 20th century math too.

It's common knowledge that Pac-Man is an echo of an ancient Sumeric tale of the Great Gobbler in the Labyrinth of Knossos, forever hunted by the Ghosts of dissimilar colours. 

Handwritings have been copied a lot, and we rarely have the originals preserved. That makes it hard to date when a manuscript is from without using text analysis. The scroll itself just gives a limit to how old the copy could possibly be.

You can probably read up on carbon dating yourself if you want the details, but it wouldn't be a stretch to to date a scroll within a century. This depends on a lot of factors, and you can have error margins going a couple of hundred years either way, or it could turn out more precise.

Mind you, one measures the amount of a carbon isotope in organic material. If you don't want the scroll to be possible to date in your story, have them carve into metal. It doesn't really date the writing on the scroll. You would have to examine the ink somehow to do that.

I would guess really dating a scroll's content would rely heavily on linguistic and historical comparisons as well.

And here I had prepared another slew of pics without the dogs in them... Paw Patrol it is.

Am I the only one watching these shows with my kids and thinking "But how can this work?" And I'm not thinking of the talking dogs, or whatever, but of how expensive it all must be to build and maintain. Postman Pat uses a helicopter to deliver some balloons... 

Cassiebsg, you're up.

The major problem when deciding a curriculum will be time. I don't know if pupils or students in other countries mostly read novels or complete works; in Norway the norm is short stories or excerpts from larger works, and the occasional full work. Thus, even in Ibsen's home country, you may go through school and only have read/watched one or two of Ibsen's plays. The Norwegian subject is not fully a literature class, however. There're all kinds of writing and reading skills, analysis, grammar and extended culture (because it doesn't fit anywhere else, I suppose).

Many students think that a typical short story is much shorter than the norm, simply because their school textbooks mostly contain short stories only a few pages long. Again, it seems that time is the criteria used for choosing this text over that. I think it will be difficult to find a course that delves into the actual text and poetry of the greek classics in any depth below university level here in my country.