World: r3wp

And, this release only allows playing as Terran?  Guess I really 
am not buying it...

when playing multiplayer, you can play any of the three races.

I agree that is addictive as hell, and also much more challenging 
than previous versions.


I've never been annihilated so often playing this kind of game before.

henrik, what do you mean by "easier".

the SC2 campain is terran, but it has a few protoss missions In it 
so far.    the way the story is unwinding, I think there will be 
some Zerg scenarios also.

I must say, the story is much better than SC1 too.

only down side is that its a resource hog.  but that's to be expected 
with the level of detail in the game engine.  putting settings to 
low will allow the game to play on older machines without a glitch 
though...  it seems to be much more demanding on OSX.

Ah, good.  Maaaybe I will, then...

That's the irk I have with PC gaming: That you have to upgrade your 
hardware every 6 months and wrestle with drivers. I advised my nephew 
again to get into PC gaming for those reasons as I don't want to 
change the diapers on his PC, every time something doesn't play.

nephew against

well, there was a big shift in games about 2-3 years ago.  they where 
holding back because of a lot of older computers... but when vista 
came out  it had DX11 and computer users where forced to upgrade. 
 even those that didn't need to before.

a big step in GFx occured at about the same time, you could actually 
call it a leap.   Hardware shaders, better illuminations and gfx 
ram jumped to be 256MB at minimum on most cards.


but most games of today allow very low settings which allow you to 
work on older machines... I've got a 4 year old 1.5Ghz core duo with 
an old 8600M nvidia card.


and SC2 is quite responsive on it.  though I would like to play with 
a bit more graphics quality... its not the game's fault.  4-5 years 
ago 3D game graphics quality was still pretty deficient.  but with 
any average 100$ card today,  you'll get pretty amazing graphics.

Henrik: I played games on my as cheap as you can get 5 year old single 
core 450 Euro computer just fine, including the newest just released 
games. You don't have to buy a new computer every couple of months, 
you just can't set the graphic settings very high. So in effect, 
when you buy a new computer you are not paying to play new games 
but to play games in better quality. Now after these five years I 
bought another 450 euro computer just two weeks ago, with 4GB RAM, 
4x2,8 Ghz CPU and an Nvidia GT320 with 1GB VRAM, this will work for 
the next 5 years too I believe :)

Maxim: I really hope there are Zerg bonus missions. I just played 
through all the protoss ones. Some of those were really, really tough. 
And I'm playing on normal difficulty, can't imagine playing these 
on hard.

finished the game today... no zerg missions.  :-(


actually , I was disapointed by the last mission.  I hoping for a 
huge slugfest, but in fact the last protoss mission is much more 
"end of campaign" like.

the one thing I like less about this campaign is that perhaps half 
or more of the missions are very short, "do this quickly" 20 minute 
missions.     I was hoping that there would be many more massive 
maps to purge, like in broodwar.

A.I. games are much more challenging.   we can't turtle anymore. 
 and the labels to the hard levels are very representative...  very 
hard. is well... VERY hard.  I can't even begin to wonder how the 
insane level works out.

Finished it today too, some time this morning. Played the whole damn 
night yesterday, I was shocked when the sun rose :) Yeah the end 
left a lot to be desired but Starcraft 2 is a trilogy, so that was 
to be expected. I only hope Blizzard will really manage to get the 
second game out in just one year. I can't really see that happening. 
It'll probably be 3 or 4 years. Did you get to play all missions? 
My mission counter says 25 of 26 missions completed. Where's the 
26th mission and why wasn't I able to play it? ^^ And if I do count 
by myself I get to 28 completed missions in the mission archive anyhow 
so maybe their mission counter is just one big bug. The missions 
are very short but I'd say it took me between 30 and 50 minutes for 
each mission and with 28 missions + 4 bonus protoss missions, this 
is a whole lot of content. Most games only give you 7 to 12 hours 
of gameplay (some a lot less, some a lot more). Starcraft 2 took 
me over 20 hours to play through. And then you still got challenge 
missions, multiplayer, custom maps Vs A.I, user contributed missions 
thanks to the level editor, etc.

For anyone who's not seen it, Starcraft II Bug:  http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/07/28/blizzard-confirms-starcraft-ii-overheating-bug.aspx

Was Starcraft II written in REBOL ??

It wasn't?

your missing mission is when you decide to play between the ghosts 
mission. one is left uncounted.  so its not a bug.  :-)

Maxim: But there were two situations like that. You also have to 
decide if you want to help the doctor or help the protoss. Aren't 
these two different missions too? I haven't replayed the game yet 
so I don't know.

Graham: If you ask direct questions like that we have to tell you 
a direct lie ;) Of course it was written in REBOL! How else would 
you make a game like that? I think Carl was personally involved with 
the development of the game. He has mentioned it on his blog somewhere... 
I'm pretty sure about that. And I think he tweeted that he is afraid 
of chicken now because of the similarities to Zerg. He said something 
about "They are watching me, waiting for the right moment to charge." 
He's probably right now making little Overlords out of mashed potatoes. 
Call me a liar and I'll lie again!

How come he hasn't put the credits on rebol.com ?  I've placed feedback 
...

wrt the second choice... its the same mission, I think it only changes 
the win rules and spawning rules.   I helped the doctor.  my guess 
is that when you help the protoss,you have to destroy the settlements 
before they all leave.

in the ghost mission, its a completely different map IIRC.

Right, that could be the case. I guess I'll just try it out some 
time :)

http://machinarium.net/blog/2010/08/05/machinarium-pirate-amnesty/

bought ! The download is a bit slow, less than 200 K/sec

I cannot improve that, it's from Fastsprings' Amazon cloud. Maybe 
they should be renamed to Slowspring:) Maybe it's on your way slowed 
down.

Davide, so your are pirate?

Yes, but now I'm in amnesty ! 
(great game btw)

click on the up-arrow 

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/cxsor/machinarium_pirate_amnesty/

it sounds like the offer is open only to pirates but not to people 
who already don't have the game?

It's also for wannabe pirates:) No for everybody.. it's a form of 
advertisiment.

You're encouraging piracy!

Oldes, did the exposure on Slashdot sell more games?

I don't know.. I've no such a data. And I do not read Slashdot.

ok, I just stumbled onto an article there and several commenters 
noted they hadn't heard of the game. thought it could be a marketing 
opportunity.

Oldes, a friend asked me what the prospects of an iPad version of 
Machinarium would be now that the dev-tools restrictions have been 
lifted. Is there an official response available anywhere?

Which restrictions? We would like to make iPad version.. at this 
moment we are working on PS3 and WiiWare versions.. once the PS3 
version will be ready, there will be no problems to port it to whatever 
as we are converting the Flash sources to C code.

Oldes, various non-Apple developer tools and libraries were prohibited 
from use on iOS devices, but this has recently been lifted.

Yeah ....saw that.

minecraft, still in alpha, probably the best indie game of 2010 (and 
before)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogA9Bhh4luA
It's stealing all my free time (and some work time too)

oh my god.... can't show that to my legomaniac kid  :-D

Yes, it's very lego-ish !!

But it's epic too, have a look here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaMTedT6P0I

Minecraft web site is currently down, so everyone can try it for 
free: http://www.minecraft.net/

nice trailer !!  :-D

http://achrongame.com/site/looks cool, i don't have the pc power 
for it right now

Civ V.... must resits.

This may be of interest to those of you who need to [quickly] create 
hexagonal game maps ... but don't want to master a complex CAD program. 
My QAD attempt at a declarative solution yields results like this:

	http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8269768/ACW.png

The prototype code can be found here:

	http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8269768/MapMaker.zip


No documentation, but the sample map file (ACW.r) shows how the PNG 
above was generated. Note you can drag the map around by click-moving 
it. Map, game and software still WIP.

AWESOME  :-)

looks cool ....