Recent posts by Blackdrazon on Kongregate

Topic: Kongregate / Badge of the Day 2013 (BotD) Archives - February 24th: Dungeon Defender "Jailbreak"

MMO Week.

I will never miss as many BotDs as I will now.

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate Explored Trophy?

It hit me last night (thank you Kong!) and I joined about 5 years ago. Make your calculations.

Topic: Kongregate / Resident Evil on Kong

Originally posted by Shadowman3500:

They could borrow code from the computer resident evil games and edit it.

That’s not how this works, I’m afraid. A program for a specific platform only works on that platform – the same way Mac and PC programs don’t work for one another. To port a game for another platform, it often has to be entirely remade from scratch. Nowadays a lot of hardware has common roots that can make porting easier (PC to Mac, PS3 to 360), but when a program is older, the troubles multiply, because the code used was older and less compatible, the techniques used were older and never compatible, the hardware being catered to is now irrelevant and the people who wrote the code probably don’t work there any more (and they rarely leave proper instructions to their successors). If you were going to port RE1, for example, to even a modern windows machine, you would have to either port the PSX version, which is wildly out of date and alien to the PC, the Gamecube version, which is out of date and alien, the DS version, which is wildly alien, or the old Windows version, which is wildly out of date. And this is assuming the code is even still around at all, which it often is not.

But that’s not even the beginning. The developers would also have to port the games to a format usable on Kongregate: Flash, Unity or HTML5, to eliminate some options that are completely out of the question. However, none of these formats is compatible with the code we already have on hand. It’s just not the same thing. The game would, again, have to be completely remade for Unity or Flash, and in a way that is even more alien than porting an executable to an executable, as each of these three formats has limitations. In fact, that’s a bigger problem: each of these three formats has so many limitations they would never be able to support the weight of a PSX console game. Heck, I’d be surprised if any of them could support the weight of a large SNES console game. If they were doing a 16 bit game we could at least pretend they might make an Flash emulator but for the PSX I’d say that’s out of the question, nevermind that Sony would start throwing things.

And if they could do it, it would cost them employee time and salaries to the cost of thousands of unnecessary dollars… and on top of all that you’d be asking them to give it away for nothing but ad money, when the game is still actively on sale at the PSN store for $10. So if they could do it (and they virtually can’t), they wouldn’t.

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate Explored Trophy?

Thanks! Seems simple but fun enough, as site tutorials go. And of course, hope to see something for established users soon!

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate Explored Trophy?

So someone live, urm, vicariously for me. I don’t really care to start up an alt just to do a tutorial, but I can’t help but be curious about the details. What’s actually involved in this tutorial-badge? I think at one point I heard that it involved doing some, but not all, of a list of tasks, but what were the tasks?

Topic: Kongregate / Badge Suggestions!

Originally posted by adv0catus:

Originally posted by charlesing:

No love for The King’s League: Odyssey ? Current Rating 4.56… Just saying.

It has 3 badges and a challenge.

It didn’t when charlesing posted that three days ago.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Originally posted by jim_vierling:

When I opened the game pages of both of the newly badged games, I got a warning at the top of the browser stating “This website (uploads.ungrounded.net) is asking to store data on your computer for offline use.”. I will not let them under any circumstances.

That’s the Newgrounds content server. What on earth is it doing talking to us? no-one has to die doesn’t have Newgrounds achievements or anything but I did notice that if I go to Newgrounds, my save file is still 100% cleared. That’s not normal – the save file should be based on the site. What’s going on?

EDIT: It’s direct-loading the Newgrounds copy in an iframe! WHY.

EDIT 2: This is insecure and misleading, and it’s leeching Newgrounds’ bandwidth with what seems like no permission from them, afaik but feel free to fill me in. I don’t like it. Also, keep in mind that:

Kongregate makes no representations or warranties about the content, completeness, or accuracy of […] third party sites. Information you submit at a third party site accessible from this Site is subject to the terms of that site’s privacy policy, and Kongregate has no control over how your information is collected, used, or otherwise handled.

I realize we’ve had iframed games for a while now but they’ve generally been HTML-based and were easy to identify (and if nothing else, this has made me think clearly about the consequences). If Kongregate is going to approve of this, I’d want a label that a game is using an iframe so I can know that an external site is being granted access to my data. Firefox may be blocking access at present but if you give permission to one game you give permission to them all at that site, and that’s not right – and personally, while I don’t mind Newgrounds in particular and don’t think there’s any real harm in this one case (these two cases?), but I still don’t like information changing hands behind the scenes like this. If it can’t be up-front about it, I don’t want it going on. It sets a bad precedent.

Topic: Kongregate / Absolute worst (and I guess best) Kongregate badges

Originally posted by ConeyKrab:

Good advice for achievements CAN actually just be “don’t, because it’ll draw in the majority of Kong players, and the majority will hate you, and then there goes everything”.

Again: no it can’t, because the advice isn’t for Kongregate. It’s for the the designers of the individual games. Unless you’re suggesting that in-game achievements for MMOs discourages players, which it doesn’t seem to do given their proliferation. The MMO badges are “bad” only in that you don’t like them as badges for Kongregate, not because you don’t like them as badges within the games themselves, which is what this is about. It’s about in-game achievements, Steam achievements, PlayStation trophies and 360 achievements, not meta-game achievements assigned from a content aggregator designed to draw in people for no other reason than to get badges. It’s about achievements for people that are already playing the game, because they like it, ergo talking down the game is useless when it comes to exclusively talking up the achievements for that game.

“The majority of people” cannot, by default, hate the designer for making badges for a game they would hate, because the subject audience is already people who like the game!

You are saying “This would make a terrible ad to run during Game of Thrones, because it only appeals to people who like Game of Thrones.” Yes. That’s the point!

Topic: Kongregate / Absolute worst (and I guess best) Kongregate badges

I may be harping a point but it seems kind of unlikely that Greg would be hiding from you for not “picking” the MMO badges when those weren’t the point of the thread to begin with. The point of the talk was about picking achievements in the game the developers are already making, not picking which badges from other people’s games to highlight for your content aggregate. The developers of MMOs can’t take the advice to “not badge free-to-play games and badge single player games instead” because they’re not Kongregate and this thread was never meant to be advice for Kongregate. As a result, that advice – and 90% of this thread – was completely irrelevant.

Even if you’re trying to communicate to devs that you don’t like F2P energy-based games, “Your game sucks!” is still awful advice on how to make achievements.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Well, there’ll probably be a challenge in an hour or two, that’s something! EDIT: Or “as I’m posting,” whichever.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Originally posted by Pykrete:

Then again, picking Alliance and Magicians gives you a dedicated tank and healer, which means you’re pretty much set for the whole game. I think I lucked out on that, because I wouldn’t have been able to do either myself.

The Runners also give you a Tank, though I can’t really say which one is better. But at least you don’t have to worry about that being a gap in your lines!

Originally posted by ChooJeremy:

So, new badge.

Game was OK, the book was very helpful in hinting on what to do when you got stuck as well. I got stuck after talking to the woman though, since I didn’t know what to do to move (tried clicking on the sides, everyone on the screen, no dice). 30 minutes later I realised you had to click on the map and then click on the location to move.

Given that the map is barely a factor in the game is also kind of irritating. There are no branching paths, no reason to wander about, they really could have just had roads connecting the few locations that did require the map and snipped the whole dead-ended feature!

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Buying lots of potions is really a solve-all strategy. I managed to win with just 40 potions and my party at Level 13. Allies will automatically use potions. I didn’t even realize this at first but it’s key to playing… or spamming through if you’re tired of the game. If you are tired of the game and never plan on going back, just blow all your cash on equipment first and then enough potions to drown the entire arena.

Topic: Kongregate / [Archive] Friday Challenges - Enigmata: Stellar War

Originally posted by Thorock:

jeash not having much fun during this challenge, a bit more tedious than I thought it was going to be.

I agree. Not only have party members convinced the designer to up enemy HP counts, but auto party members, auto party member potion use in an emergency, auto attacks and me making the mistake of being a ranger have just combined to turn HoW into an idle game while I play naptime in the real world. The game is playing itself! There is no other way to put it!

Perhaps a bit more useful to the designer: Faction shops were so boring at first that I outright stopped checking them and stopped requesting faction tokens. If Skills had been available from them from the start, they would have always looked interesting! Instead, I didn’t know where to get any skills at all until I got my third party member. Maybe that would have engaged me more on the previous complaint, but as a Ranger, I honestly I find the targetting system too clumsy (targetting an ally costs you your autotarget, but non-autotargetted attacks no longer exist?) and slow to make healing with one hand and attacking with the other a viable strategy.

Also, I think a glitch may have prevented me from continuing the main quest after killing the jungle boss. I just… not seeing anybody offering any main quests. Anywhere. Somebody? Anybody? Oh, this series.

Topic: Kongregate / Broken badges

Originally posted by SumGato:

Anyone having problems with the in-game achievements in Flight ?

Yes, and it’s been mentioned twice in this thread alone. You’ll need to start a new save, no one knows why it’s happening.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Only had one memory leak issue in the time it took me to get all Badges, and since it never happened again, I think the blame falls on the thing I was only doing during the first half: Survival. I imagine the problem is there, what with the whole 500 horses thing.

Topic: Kongregate / [Archive] Friday Challenges - Enigmata: Stellar War

Kong can always use Kongai to fill in a gap. It’s possible no one else is offering to provide for the giveaway. Either that or they’re just eager to get out the full Robot set.

Topic: General Gaming / Games with Permadeath

http://www.kongregate.com/games/raitendo/you-only-live-once

PERMAdeath.

Topic: Kongregate / Where are Kongregate save files located?

Yeah, this is an issue that came up a little while ago. I’d find the threads but, you know know, no forum search. Unfortunately, backup apps aren’t covering assets.kongregate. :(

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: Mini update to ads and homepage modules

I suppose I’d be interested in screenshots but is anyone really sitting around with a screenshot of the old ad close box, thinking “Soon… soon it will be MY day to shine!”

Topic: Kongregate / Absolute worst (and I guess best) Kongregate badges

I don’t know if Greg would actually respond to this: but is the point of the GDC talk to talk about assigning achievements to a variety of games from an aggregate like here at Kongregate, or to assign achievements within a given game? I ask because if it’s the latter, every single complaint about types of games not deserving achievement on principle don’t really serve the talk in any way whatsoever, and are just turning the thread into a way to air the usual gripes. The role of Kongregate in picking which games get badges to begin with, as an aggregate, is not really what anyone coming to the talk to hear about to begin with: as developers, who are probably coming to learn which badges to give their games in the first place!

In short, it’s not enough to say that certain games don’t deserve badges at all, but like several posters have done above, to specify which types of badges they don’t deserve, and better: why.

Topic: General Gaming / Slimes in RPGs

Originally posted by EliwoodX:

Originally posted by Seizan_7:

Originally posted by DrYoshiyahu:
just to see who was first.

First was most likely Dungeons and Dragons.

Umm… Were they called “oozes” back then?

The Grey ones were Oozes, the Green ones were slimes and they weren’t really similar. So not only do they go back to D&D, but the arbitrary system of giving different names to aesthetically identical creatures goes back to then as well. It really makes more sense coming from a tabletop game, if you think about it. “Something drips on you. Something hostile this time though.” And then a few weeks later: “Something drips on you. Something different from last time, though.” Fighting them in random encounters in the overworld, now that’s weird.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Originally posted by racefan12:

I wonder if any of the tools players have created can rank Badged games by rating?

http://zalbee.intricus.net/kong/badgerank.php

Thank you! And as it stands, Bubble Sky is now the #2 lowest rated badged game still on the site, just above years-later-that-name-is-still-awful WetDike.

Topic: Kongregate / kong devs please read: rating system stagnation/complaints

That’s odd, I actually thought it was there. Oh well, it’s more likely I have a bad memory than that they removed a useful feature. Yes, that should definitely be there as well.

Topic: Kongregate / kong devs please read: rating system stagnation/complaints

Originally posted by Pykrete:

Another feature could be to let a user remove games from their recommended list. I assume it gets there by some kind of ranking system based on your ratings, so just keeping a list of games for it to pass over as the user Xes them off would be sufficient.

Hover over the game in your recommended list.
Look at the X that appears in the corner, by the game.
Admire the X.
Adore the X.
Lick the X.
Then click it and the game will go away.

The feature is already here, it has been there for almost as long as there have been recommended games.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Originally posted by Blizzard2000:

Is this the first badged game to fall below a rating of 3 since Prince of Persia?

Good question, actually. I wonder if any of the tools players have created can rank Badged games by rating? Unfortunately there’s no “Badged” tag, since Kong is perfectly capable of sorting tags by rating. Actually, now that I think of it, maybe that’s WHY there isn’t a Badged tag, but I still feel this wouldn’t be that complicated a code. Hrm.