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Nobody goes to the IRC chat room because everybody has been using the very active Skype group for years.

We're only three episodes in, but I'm sure everybody is already clambering over each other to slit my throat. Nonetheless, opinions must be shared. There's plenty on my mind, and I want to share it all. That said, looking over this argument, my brain is a little too scattered to note if I've forgotten anything, which I probably have. There will probably be a follow up article some other time. I'm quite annoying by casual gamers . That is probably the biggest understatement ever heard by anyone. But, I don't think people quite understand why. A couple people would know of my usage of the words "Filthy Casuals". My anger towards casual gamers is probably a misappropriation of the term. I don't want to speak about casual gamers or the main reasons why they infuriate me today. No sir (although, I'll link to casual gamers and money when I get a chance to talk about them in another Wot I Fink segment). Today, I want to talk about something which I feel we need to establish in the industry. Something which, unfortunately, won't happen, but nonetheless would improve the quality of the industry and the standards of all developers, publishers and players. It's something I've thought about for a long time, and it's something I will continue to push for so long as I'm a player (pun not intended) in this industry. The very first video game was somewhere between the 1940's and the 1960's (I'm not here to dispute which. You can all argue that in the comments as far as I'm concerned). Right now, it's 2013. In the space of around 70 years, we as an industry have excelled in everything. Every single technology, every technique, every asset, and even every audience has changed. People will argue if it's for the better or not, and this is where my argument lies. Every day, viewing the review scores for games, there's this kind of disgust I get, as I see games I like become rated lower to games which seem to be of much lesser value. Why did that one game get a 7 when a casual game got a 9? You see, the problem with the way the industry is organised is that developers like Popcap Games and Irrational Games are thrown together in the same pit. They are two separate types of entertainment, even though they are both technically classed as video games. It's a problem which I think (beyond individual user preference) is solved by my idea. I've scoured dictionaries, and the definitions change from dictionary to dictionary, but the general gist of most is that a game is a form of amusement and distraction. You play games because you're bored and because you want something that will keep you distracted from the boredom momentarily. It doesn't matter the form, the media or the content. A game is just a way to keep you distracted. When you play Bioshock or Grand Theft Auto or even Call of Duty, you're not playing a game anymore. A developer who makes a deep game with a storyline, breathtaking graphics, a sweeping soundscape and so much more complexities isn't thinking that they want to just distract a player for a brief time. Those games are experiences. A developer who creates an experience wants you to sit down and be a part of the world that they created, in whatever form it takes, and make the most of it. Of course, the classification of all games into these two categories is difficult. The problem is when you come to games with multiplayer, and even games like Portal and Minecraft. Something to consider is that if I say the word "repetitive" to a group of 20 people and showed them some random games, there wouldn't be a single game which isn't labeled repetitive. The point is, any specific criteria we use to judge games into two different groups will be interpreted and used differently by individual people. I think the best way that I could potentially classify games into the two categories is in the idea of complexity and control. Basically, an experience is shaped. It's controlled and finely crafted by the developer. It's made to hit us with emotional impact. It doesn't work if you play the same scene 4 times in a row, because each we go through the same experience, it loses the emotional impact it was supposed to land on use. This is why when I, for example, see the ending of Mass Effect for the 5th time, I don't feel the same amazing shock that I did the first time I finished the game. It certainly still makes me feel really good, but it's not the same feeling I had that first time I fought my way through that level, experiencing everything anew. And no, I'm not talking about player choice or random weapon placement or levels rearragning themselves. Those are techniques which either form of entertainment can use. Meanwhile, a simple game is completely the opposite. We're given some rules, an arena and from there the game and the player do the work. If you play Call of Duty or even Peggle, you know what I'm talking about. In Call of Duty's multplayer mode, do you see planes crashing around you as the pre-scripted dialogue of a Russian soldier betraying his entire country plays, while you remain frozen watching the hands of your character play do some really cool animation? No, because you build your own experience in multiplayer. In Peggle, does the ball go the same way everytime you fire it? No, because Peggle is nothing more than a toolkit to keep you distracted from your boredom. I'm sure a few of you noticed my interesting use of the word "experience" in that last paragraph. That's because multiplayer in Call of Duty, or in any MMO, or generally most multiplayer games built upon a single-player experience are not mere games. We just discussed control. I could go on about how these games still have some form of control to shape them into an experience, but you're probably getting bored yourselves. Instead, we need to talk about complexity. If Mario was a brand new game today, I would call it a "Casual Filth". Yes, it has a story. Yes, the levels are carefully controlled to make sure the player gets the best experience out of the game. But can you figure out what it lacks? Depth. I'm not talking about meaning. The thing is, a game feels kind of...hollow. It's great as a distraction for a while, but eventually it's going to feel empty, and you're going to catch on that you're just wasting time. Unfortunately, that's the nature of experiences as well. However, do you know the difference in this scenario? A good experience is designed so that you don't catch on that it's a game with fancy clothes until you complete the experience, and sometimes not even until you complete it a couple times over (in case they hide content from you on the first go). It's all about impact, usually being emotional, and making sure that the player is constantly mesmerised by what is going on in the world of their character. Meanwhile, in a game, there's nothing stopping you from catching on from the very get-go. A game doesn't try to hide it. It tries to embrace it. This is why, generally speaking, games have better gameplay, whereas experiences shine in the other categories. They don't need glamorous character back stories or beautiful locales to enthrall you. In face, most games don't need characters or locations at all. By no means do experiences have lesser gameplay, but rather, it's not the focus of the experience. The experience is about showing you something more than you could ever experience in real life. It's about taking you to a place that you could never truly be a part of, and turning you into something or someone that you could never be, and showing you a possible example of what could happen if that world was real. A game, on the other hand, is about letting you take a break from your daily life, and just letting loose. Sometimes there's challenge, sometimes there's not. The important bit is that it distracts you. Everything I've presented here shows that we, as an industry, were not prepared for what people strived to do with the technology. We've grown up past the phase of little pixel space ships destroying entire fleets of other pixel space ships with no greater incentive than because it's a "cool" waste of time. We've grown up, and now that the games are too, we need to finally properly rank them as they are; not as video games as a whole, but rather games made to distract, and games meant to give us an experience. And that is Wot I Fink. P.S.: I'm sure people will call me out on Mario being a classic because of the time era it was built in, and casual games and indie games and so on and so forth; the point of this article is that I'm judging all games, regardless of being published by a professional AAA publisher or not as equal, before being split into the categories I noted above and then being split into genres. We all know that as we go on, new technology will cause our old games to become outdated, and as such, games should be judged within their appropriate time context, but any clever readers will note that I didn't say Mario was a bad game for its time. I merely talked about if it was a game of this age.

Did anyone else notice the title should say "Unofficial", not "Inofficial"?

I am planning on adding some pictures for the story (all were done in an iPad app called iDraw): This one will be used in a scene: This one is a very badly done poster: And I might use this one but then perhaps not: That is all...

It's easy enough to fraps the videos in-game but it'd be nice to get our hands on the original files, wouldn't it? I think it would. And afaik it hasn't been done yet. So I've had a look into the video files and made a little more progress than I have before. Using Riffpad I looked through INTRO.SI, which refers to the following videos and their corresponding wavs: legomed.smk mindscap.smk intro.smk outro.smk badend.smk goodend.smk I think the file names are pretty self-explanatory, apart from outro. I'm not sure what that one is, as goodend and badend are presumably the two Polkacide endings, and the credits video is contained in CREDITS.SI. For anyone who's not familiar with smk (Smacker) files, they are compressed videos designed to be used in games, similar to bik (Bink) files created by the same company. The are usually very easy to play and convert, but I'll get to that in a minute. After a bit of googling on the extraction of files from riffs, I found a little program called mediaextract (https://github.com/panzi/mediaextract). I wasn't expecting it to work at all, but to my surprise, when I asked it to spit out all the smk files contained in INTRO.SI, it instantly gave me 6 of them. As you can see above, there are 6 smk files in the SI file. The command I used was this, if you want to try it: mediaextract -f smk INTRO.SI You'll need mediaextract and the SI file to be in the same folder, I just copied it across. You can specify an output folder if you want, if you go to the link I posted above there's a list of all the options you can use. Now, I had already tried a couple of other commands with this and had ended up with hundreds of tiny mpg variations that seemed to be empty, so I wasn't too hopeful about these .smks to start with. But then I noticed that they had much larger filesizes and so must actually contain something. The original filenames did not survive the extraction though, and they were named as follows: INTRO.SI_01dc0be8.smk INTRO.SI_002a1846.smk INTRO.SI_023c2956.smk INTRO.SI_00000280.smk INTRO.SI_00381a50.smk INTRO.SI_01772eac.smk I can't find those codes in the SI file so I assume they were just generated by the extractor. I tried to play the files with the RAD program but didn't have any luck. I also tried to convert them into avis but either ended up with blank videos or errors. I did have a look into the files a bit more though, and I found their durations: INTRO.SI_01dc0be8.smk - 24 seconds INTRO.SI_002a1846.smk - 11 seconds INTRO.SI_023c2956.smk - 1 minute 44 seconds INTRO.SI_00000280.smk - 14 seconds INTRO.SI_00381a50.smk - 1 minute 22 seconds INTRO.SI_01772eac.smk - 30 seconds This suggests that: INTRO.SI_01dc0be8.smk = badend.smk INTRO.SI_002a1846.smk = mindscap.smk INTRO.SI_023c2956.smk = goodend.smk INTRO.SI_00000280.smk = legomed.smk INTRO.SI_00381a50.smk = intro.smk Which leaves INTRO.SI_01772eac.smk as outro.smk. It's only 30 seconds long so it can't be the credits, but just to check I had a look at CREDITS.SI and extracted CREDITS.SI_00002306.smk, which is 3 minutes 33 seconds and corresponds to credits.smk. Interestingly, it appears that only the text from the credits is in this video, and the pictures are separate bmps contained in CREDITS.SI. That's as far as I've gotten so far. I think the next step is to locate the other video files - the character profile videos etc - and see if any of those work with RAD. And to see if there are any other extra files that don't match up. I might also try hex editing INTRO.SI to see if I can swap outro.smk with legomed.smk or something to see what it is. UPDATE The character videos are in INFOMAIN.SI. I also found the underwater video from the lift but I've lost it now Also, it's not the most interesting video but I extracted the "You need to put the CD in your computer!" video as well. Still no luck playing anything though. UPDATE 2 It looks like the mysterious outro.smk is an unused video showing the power brick flying off the top of the information centre.

When the modding scene for LEGO Racers exploded, I found it appropriate to create a new, updated version of the original LEGO Racers logo (because we all know that the Drome-style logo isn't anywhere near as awesome). Anyway, here it is: I've created a Test Track and Main Menu texture from it, which you can PM me for if you're interested.

The problem here is that as good a system as it seems, people are still going to just use it as shorthand for "what I like" and "what I don't like", you know, like they do with "hardcore" and "casual" today. Terminology is only as intelligent as the people who use it, and from what I've seen lately, it's not very. And what if you leave the developers decide? That's even worse. Every dev making something of decent complexity is going to insist that they're crafting an "experience", because that carries an air of a superior product. Then they can say it over and over again to make the game look better, regardless of actual substance. It's like "natural" on food products. It'll be meaningless.

Ben, a long time ago a user who shall remain nameless attempted to copy the work of another nameless member who was well-respected within the community. It didn't end well. The short of it is that the well-respected member became infuriated, and it became one of the reasons he used to leave. I tell you this because I want you to listen carefully and respect this; This is Fushigisaur's Intellectual Property (IP). If he says that you're not allowed to use it, you're not allowed to use it. Furthermore, I IMPLORE you not to go through with this. Creativity keeps the world spinning. Copying a FF which is already essentially a copy of a bigger work (which is probably based off other works if you wanted to go even deeper) only creates a stale piece of bread that nobody will have interest in. I want you to do your own work which you can be proud of, not take something that somebody else has done and slip up the opportunity to prove you have potential.

You might have interest in this. Do look at what I said before, but nonetheless, IIRC MovieBob does explain some important things about this movie's technical background. OXM is one of the magazines that I have a certain disdain for, because it seems like they are highly unbalanced with their reviews. I want to touch on this in a future episode. I unfortunately must admit that I do occasionally play it while waiting for something else to happen. It's not a particularly fun game, but it certainly keeps me distracted.

As Cyrem brought up movies, I can think of one very good example of this. "The Last Airbender". Yes there were some things that could have changed, like "Avatar" kind of stole the name (supposed to be "Avatar: The Last Airbender"), but how the critics rated it was a poor job as a whole. If you didn't know, this movie is based on the Nickelodeon cartoon series "Avatar: The Last Airbender", which was actually really cool to watch. It was one of the only cartoons that had an actual story behind it, which is part of the reason I watched it. As it did have some funny moments in it, it really was more of a serious cartoon. What the critics don't know is that "The Last Airbender" was an IRL movie based on the cartoon. They probably never even seen the series. The movie was only a part of the story, and therefore wasn't finished. They probably would have made two more movies to finish the story, had they not been so poorly rated. This is just my opinion though. You guys may have different views if you have seen the movie/series. Back to the topic at hand, I read OXM (Official Xbox Magazine), and every time I do, I see games that I wouldn't even think to play out rank games I have already played. All that you said makes perfect sense to me McJobless. Games aren't just games anymore, and needed to be treated as such. Also I HATE Peggle! It is very pointless to me and too happy cheery anyway. Sorry that I didn't have much to say on the matter but Cyrem brought up the movies and I felt that was a perfect example to use.

I couldn't agree more with that, and ofcourse with McJobless as well. For example, LEGO Island may be full of bugs and glitches, but the experience makes me love the game, even when I grow older. But back then, all I cared about was the gameplay, and not really about graphics and music. Heck, if I were the age I am now, in 1997, and played LEGO Island for the first time, I don't think I had liked it as much as I really do now. That's when I realise that your age also has an impact on how you experience a game, as well as the nostalgia you bear with that game. I can't think of anything else to say now, it's pretty much summed up already on this page.

I don't think I've seen anyone against your blogs yet. Oh boy, I know what you are talking about here. I think I know what you are getting at, the problem is, games are very broad and it would be hard to divide games into 'experience games' and 'distraction games' when a lot have a bit of both. For example, Journey on PS3. Now, THAT was an experience... but it has no story. It was also a very short game and was very casual in it's gameplay. But it's style, music and graphics made it an experience like no other. It's not a game I'd play a second time, but I'm, glad I played it the first time. There are some games e.g Dues Ex, which are almost like interactive movies. I think the true problem here is not with the categorizing of games, but with the comparing and rating of them. Games bring their own words and own experiences. The experience depends on how the player reacts to it. Quite simply, rating a game is inaccurate and always will be. The only thing you can do is convey your experience. But I think that this not only applies for games... but also movies. How many movies have you thought were the best of the year, then find out people rated it 5 star with 'meh'. I think that makes sense...

So inofficial is unofficial? Seriously though, "unofficial" is the preferred word, "inofficial" is an awkward variant that's only used very rarely for no real reason (I've never even seen it before), a quick Google search confirms it's pretty much depreciated - heck, even spell check doesn't recognize it here. "inofficial" is not legal in Scrabble, so I wouldn't use it.

So inofficial is unofficial? Seriously though, "unofficial" is the preferred word, "inofficial" is an awkward variant that's only used very rarely for no real reason (I've never even seen it before), a quick Google search confirms it's pretty much depreciated - heck, even spell check doesn't recognize it here.

Inofficial: "Not official; not having official sanction or authority; unofficial; not according to the forms or ceremony of official business; as, inofficial intelligence" Unofficial: "Not official; not official or formal" The word is not in my physical dictionary.

Inofficial: "Not official; not having official sanction or authority; unofficial; not according to the forms or ceremony of official business; as, inofficial intelligence" Unofficial: "Not official; not official or formal"

could been our personal chat room

Thanks to McJobless, my topic 'Should've introduced myself.. shouldn've I?' got removed due to what may have been a fight in the topic. Lets start again and if people think they can get away with things that shut the topic down I might as well put it up again and again. Again, pleease ask questions and DON'T STRAY OFF TOPIC

All we asked is for you to apply our feedback and re-write at least the first chapter so we can see the difference. No need to change the storyline or get angry, you should be happy.

Alright, I've only read through the first chapter and I have some constructive criticism for you to improve your story writing skills. Spell checking. There was a lot of misspelled words in this story. Make sure you run it through a spell checker before posting. You don't have to do it now though, I have already run it through MS Word and fixed many words for you. Grammar. Some sentences are constructed incorrectly or use the wrong words to describe things. You wrote this: "His left was blocked by a forest and he would've easily been lost in it, his left was a deep embankment which ended up in a deep moat." You don't need to say the 'left was blocked' as a forest is not a brick wall. By describing the general surroundings like you tried to do, you can assume the reader will understand Fred's circumstances and why he might walk in a particular direction. Writing it the way you did makes it sound like it's a command/response game. "ground like a zit sticking out the skin" I don't think using a 'zit' to describe a hill makes for good reading. Besides, zits vary in shapes and sizes. Visualize your story to avoid saying things that are obvious. "He looked to his left at which he say what looked like a battlefield. He couldn't tell who was winning or losing ... before he could properly see what the soldiers looked like" Is this battle happening before his eyes? If not, he obviously won't know who is winning/losing. If it is, why does Fred seem invisible to the soldiers so that they just ignore his existence(Yet a bird notices him)? No Commentary. Don't add commentary to your stories "(the text in the brackets)", it should explain itself. The first paragraph shouldn't be in the first chapter at all. It ruins the flow of the story. Chapter Transition. Each chapter should flow on to each other. Chapter 1 to 2 in your story reads like this: "He could just see over the wall and was about to climb over the wall when the wall broke down" to "The wall crumbled and Fred with it. He ripped through a tent-like roof and landed in a pool of water." Wasn't Fred climbing the vine to look over the wall? Was this vine growing out of the wall or from a tree? Somehow the wall broke down itself and Fred managed to teleport inside the fortress in order to fall on a roof. It would be good, if you get a chance, to re-write each chapter with these things in mind. The story sounds interesting, but these things make the story hard to understand. PS. Your post had some bad text formatting which I assume is from copying and pasting from LMB's. I fixed it for you. PPS. Give this story a title.

you scare me you really do the base could be something like the central point and the players hub off of it? I don't know I'm confused as to how this would work.