The first of the three that I played was for Shank, an action-packed murderfest. After playing through the demo, which consists of the game’s first level, I immediately bought it. This game is nothing but non-stop death and it is awesome. I was a little worried at first that all of the different weapons and combos that you can use would make the controls difficult, but that is far from the case. Pouncing on a guy, stabbing him a few time in the chest and then shooting the enemy that is running up behind you before pulling out your chainsaw and gutting somebody else is easily accomplished. That is good because such combos become a necessity as hordes of enemies are thrown at you with varying weapons and tactics. If you are a fan of action games, you must pick this one up. The only thing that I find a bit disappointing is that the cooperative campaign can only be played locally and not over Live.

Next, let’s take a look at some ninja combat. The Naruto fighting games have all been great, and Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 looks to be no exception. The gameplay is fairly simple and the art is beautiful. The demo takes place after Naruto returns from his three years of training with Jiraiya, and has met back up with Sakura and Kakashi. Kakashi challenges his former pupils to the same challenge that he presented to them when they first began to study under him: they must take two bells form his belt. There is a little more to this particular battle than a standard 3-round fight. It plays more like a boss fight where there are some patterns that you need to learn as you look for openings where you can deal some damage. You can call Sakura in for assistance, but it’s not a tag-team fight. I’m really looking forward to the full game, which is supposed to be out this fall.

Last up we have Scott Pilgrim. I was pretty excited about this one too. The music was done by Anamanaguchi and the art style is fairly retro. The story seemed silly enough that the game would be really entertaining. First of all, it has a lot in common with River City Ransom. There is a leveling system which I haven’t explored yet. Enemies drop money, which I haven’t spent yet. There are all sorts of weapons lying around that can be swung at enemies or thrown (including the enemies themselves.) There is a multiplayer option which lets up to four people play cooperatively, but that is only available locally. The game is tough, but really repetitive. To be honest, I didn’t spend much time with it because I wanted to get back to Shank. Scott Pilgrim will definitely satisfy anybody looking for an old school brawler experience. It is unfortunate that it was released alongside a stronger game that falls roughly in the same genre.

Uncoolest thing ever: holding Apple accountable for giving the iPhone 4 shitty reception and shitty construction.

It’s pretty dumb. Just click on the dude to make him jump over the bad thing and you win. It was thrown together using jQuery. It’s not nearly as awesome as what the other guys have been working on, but it’s something.

See you tomorrow!

Pasty is doing some coding. Ran and Idan are tossing around some design ideas. Sullivan is drawing lots of pretty pictures. Chuck is setting up some source control for us. I arrived a bit late, so I’m still trying to snag myself a worthwhile role. I figured I might as well document things.

The theme for the Global Game Jam is “Deception” but we’re going with “Escape” because we don’t let anybody tell us how to jam. I’ll post more as progress is made.

He had a caustic shotgun that turned bandits to slime in no time flat.  He had a shocking machine gun that depleted shields and dealt heavy damage at an ungodly rate.  His SMG did 4x fire damage and was great for settings those hard-to-see critters ablaze.  His new shocking sniper rifle was adequate and thoroughly useful.

I’d just put two points in a skill that regenerated health for him after every kill.  His class mod increased the magazine size for every weapon for everyone in the game by over a quarter.  He was a nice guy but he didn’t take no shit from no skags.  He will be missed.

Yes, I saved the game and no, I didn’t interrupt it.  I was playing with someone else at the time and that character (Brock) is intact, while mine is pushing up daisies.  And to make matters worse, WordPress is being a total bitchass about the formatting of this post. Reported the bug on the Gearbox forums.

Google has just added a URL shortener service (and provided shortcuts to it from their Toolbar and other products) named goo.gl and it will “compete” with services such at bit.ly and others.  The reason for these URL shorteners is that some things give you very few characters to send URLs and the long URLs (especially those auto generated by content management systems) don’t leave much room for anything else. And by “some things” I mean Twitter and SMS messages. And since URLs in SMS are a LOT more rare than in tweets, it basically comes down to the fact that Twitter is too short to support real world URLs so you have to use these services to post links via their service.  140 characters on Twitter wasn’t enough for these massive URLs, so we had a problem, and now we have URL shortening services.

Problem solved.

Fuck that.  This isn’t a problem that was solved, it’s a problem that was manufactured, and then compounded.  Where does this bit.ly link go? It could go to goatse, and you wouldn’t know until after you clicked it.  Decades of progress on the WWW thrown away because Twitter made ADHD popular.  Well, at least the short URL leaves people room to give context in their tweets or SMS messages.  Except that these same people are short-attention-span having mofos who post all their links by saying “click here.”

Let’s look at this problem from the beginning:

• When did it start: when Twitter got popular
• What websites commonly are afflicted by this problem: twitter.com
• What websites is this fix actually useful for: twitter.com

So here’s my suggestion:

Twitter, clean up your own mess and provide metadata fields on tweets: exactly one URL field per tweet that does not count against the (wholly arbitrary) 140 character limit will do.

Assuming they were to listen to me, this costs them a little more bandwidth, limits tweets to 1 URL per message (which is a good thing) and avoids all the problems associated with URL shorteners (which includes linkjacking in addition to the anonymous destination problem).

“But,” you whine. “That’ll make it harder to submit URLs through twitter!”

No, you twit, it will not.  Just put your URL anywhere in the tweet and Twitter can use magical text processing to automatically move the URL to the metadata field. No URL shorteners, full 140 characters available, no muss, no fuss.

That, mother fuckers, is how you solve problems: I tell you who to blame.