Well, I survived the visit from my lovely god-daughter. Everything went swimingly, actually. It was a lovely weekend filled of such delights as the Tower of London, six course dinners, early nights but earlier mornings, eating lobster in black bean sauce rather messily with chopsticks, wearing Snow White outfits (not me, you understand, her) and Spiro the Dragon. We have just had Christmas lunch and she's back off on the Eurostar to Paris. It wasn't half as scary as I had imagined and it was great to know her better. Pretty tiring though...
I'm trying to make up for lost time and now that Parrot 0.0.3 is out I'm updating my examples page on parrotcode.org with some parameter passing examples, and maybe even PMCs too. I won't have time, but I'll try and port my entire website over to OpenFrame...
Games with such direct, simple interfaces always intrigue me. I think an inverse relationship exists between interface complexity and world richness sometimes. (That is, the designers will occasionally get so bogged down working a flexible interface together that they forget to bother with level design or plot.) _Spyro_ made up for limited controls with massive, massive worlds, much the same as _Max Payne_ did.
I just compared _Max Payne_ and _Spyro The Dragon_. Clearly I could use a drink.
Re:Spyro
acme on 2001-12-11T12:24:46
I really like Spyro, actually. Yes, he is terribly cute and is pretty much targetted at kids, but I love the game. The worlds are varied and the subgames are quite interesting. Of course, the best thing is that there is a constant feeling of progress and you are always quickly rewarded. I like those kind of games, which is also linked to why I like writing small, simple tests in my Perl;-) I haven't played Max Payne, as it came out after I had decided to stop playing PC games (they never used to work properly on my computer / 3D card and I wound up being frustrated). I have since bought Alpha Centuri for Linux, and love it. It installed simply and just works, unlike Windows games.
I'm still addicted to GTA3 on the PS2...
