SHINAN'S PROFILE

I read up to Gran Torino and Changeling and then disregarded the rest.


HAHAHAHAHA You think Gran Torino and Changeling deserved wins...

I skimmed the topic so I'm not entirely sure what it is about. But I'm a big fan of numbers. But like (I think) Shadowtext I don't really like the meaningless ones. Without transparency you have no idea what the numbers do.

For example I'm a big sim game fan. Sport sims. A game like Football manager is nothing but stats and numbers. Occasionally you're not entirely sure what numbers do (but in the newer versions you can hover or click on the stat and see what it does) or whether it's good to have a high or low number (in some older games lower numbers in certain things were better. Such as aggression or proneness to injury). But there's a cap to the numbers (Traditionally 1-20 it seems) and they're sometimes colour-coded (green numbers=good/high)

Uhm yeah. That was just a paragraph of my love of numbers.

Exchanging numbers for words? I don't mind. I'm also sort of fond of a kind of "treshold" system". Which essentially is a low-number system but based around a different idea. For example a treshold wound system would have "unhurt, lightly wounded, wounded, nearly dead, dead". Often games that have these have numbers under them (100-95% unhurt, 95-75% lightly wounded etc) but what if you only had those numbers alone. So that an attack of a certain strength would take you down from unhurt to lightly wounded and then it'd sort of be reset. And each treshold would have its own treshold (so perhaps it'd be easier to go from unhurt to lightly wounded than from wounded to nearly dead)

Of course in the end those systems all work in the background...

Oh yeah. I just figured out a point that I'll be making now. Disregard everything I've written before this. It was just ramblings. (Actually I've found that people usually only read the beginning and the end anyway so no harm done)


The most important thing is that you, as a maker, know exactly what each number does and knows its importance. I think a lot of RPGmakers (that is the persons making RPGs not the program) don't themselves understand the importance of Speed 5 vs Speed 7 in the game they're making and just make up numbers on the spot because "they have to be there right?"

There was a previous topic on this I seem to recall.

There I recommended:
Meteos (Awesome puzzler)
Elite Beat Agents (Awesome rythm game)
Professor Layton and the Curious Village (Awesome puzzler)
New Super Mario Bros (Mario)

Three of these I got when I bought my DS and I didn't really feel a need to get anything else for the longest of time (until I got Curious Village)

I like loads of characters. Throaway characters that get 15 minutes before they are gone forever. The idea of showing "flashes of life", characters that otherwise don't make a huge difference and the player characters don't really know much about them but they still do their thing, cross paths with the player characters and then move on.

Of course I only like a very limited amount of central characters. So that the player identifies with one (or possibly a couple) that is the main character.

I heard Burn After Reading was disappointing.

Unfortunately I haven't really watched any fall films. (I think the last one I saw was Let the Right One In)

Also. There's not a whole lot that jumps at me from this year. The Dark Knight was of course fricking awesome and the previously mentioned Let the Right One in was pretty damn high up there of movies of the year for me.

Other films I really liked over the year was Be Kind Rewind, Doomsday and (which is technically a 2007 film but what the hell)

However there was a bunch of films I just didn't get to see. And my principle goes that I download movie that I don't really want to see but want to see for seeing sake. Which means the films I actually want to see go on a to-get-on-DVD-list (unless they're still running and I manage to get a day off work to go to the cinema). This is probably an incomplete list: Son of Rambow, Happy-Go-Lucky, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Hamlet 2, Wall-E, In Bruges and Slumdog Millionare (which has a March release date over here)

Movies that were good and fulfilled my expectations:
Hellboy 2

Yeah... that's probably it. Most anticipated films disappointed somewhat (Indy 4, Get Smart, Quantum of Solace, Tropic Thunder, Iron Man). Of course it might be that I had too much expectations. But none of them really left too much of a mark.

And then last. Films that you need to avoid:
Meet the Spartans
Disaster Movie
The Happening
X-Files - I want to Believe

When I say avoid I really mean avoid. I watch a lot of shit. And a lot of it has redeeming factors. Not so in these cases. (Except perhaps the laugh you'll get out of the Happening) As an example of otherwise shit movies I've seen that I find more redeeming than these: You Don't Mess With the Zohan, Mad Money, Postal, Baby Mama, The Love Guru, Meet Dave and The House Bunny.

Then there was a lot of average. A LOT of average.

EDIT:
I'll make a special shout out to the musicals of the year which I actually caught in the cinema: Mamma Mia! and High School Musical 3. Of the two I'd say Mamma Mia ranked higher. If only because I noticed after I left the cinema that I couldn't hum a single song from HSM3. Of course Mamma Mia has ABBA's classic music going for it but still. You should have at least one hummable tune...