flgr

Everything breaks and this is actually a good game mechanic.

In other games you can end up with ridiculously overpowered gear, and then cheese your way through all the areas of the game that are note late game.

If you do this here, you will waste very good weapons on enemies that are not very hard. Then you'll pick up their middle-tier weapons. Or you'll just preserve your good weapons by not wasting them on cheap enemies, which actually makes things more fun.

It also runs the other way. If you go straight for Hyrule Castle you'll actually find precisely the kind of weapons you need for Hyrule Castle there.

You can sneak into Hyrule Castle in the early game to get great weapons, but they won't last forever.

In a previous life we used LDA (together with some other techniques) to find clusters of similar Android applications (based on their descriptions). We then looked for apps within a cluster that used vastly different permission-gated APIs to identify malware and grayware. It worked pretty well.

See http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2568276

Wow, looks super interesting. Thank you!

Just ordered this one; thanks for the recommendation and thanks for the takeaway summary as well. :)

I also had a lot of fun playing Super Mario Galaxy. Great soundtrack as well.

Exactly this! If you think Apple and their profit margins there's a big parallel. And both Apple as well as Nintendo have gone for gimmicks that weren't obvious big hits (the Wii U, 3D touch).

(On the subject of the Wii U, in a lot of ways it seems like the Switch might be the second iteration for being hip and also making a tablet, where the Wii U was the first one.)

Not sure if it's still true that all other console makers are subsidizing theirs.

I guess what surprises me is that we haven't written down mechanics or principles that will make a game fun instead of just addictive. (There seem to be many well established dark patterns for getting people to spend money on freemium games, but I haven't seen much about what makes a video game more fun.)

And yet they kinda manage to still teach you things carefully. It feels like in the past they were afraid of making things to subtle, but if you look at the game with an eye of game design (just create a second user on the Switch and restart it from scratch) it's surprising how they still manage to steer you. The whole plateau is a tutorial, but it doesn't jump into your face as much.

And then there's that one annoying motion controlled puzzle with a way to bypass it that a bunch of journalists mentioned in their reviews, and it's as if it was designed with that trick in mind. So that journalists discover it and write about how this game is different.

Which is interesting. Almost like they thought of how to communicate that this game is different and how to best let people notice, and then they came up with that.

I'd like to see them succeed with episodic game play.

I'm not sure if anyone really ever did that. I know that Valve wanted to do it with Half Life 2 and then just stopped after two episodes.

It sounds like Witcher 3 had two great extensions, but that's it pretty much.

It sounds like one of my favorite childhood games had that in mind, but then others figured out how to create content, and they let the community create new content instead.

Is anyone actually doing episodic game content successfully? I guess MMORPGs like WoW do, but is anyone successfully doing episodic content for games outside that genre?

I'm surprised by how similar and non-gamy Pokemon Go feels (feels more like a grind / freemium mobile game). I was also surprised by how much the core mechanics have a vibe very similar to Ingress.

I think it'd be interesting to see a Pokemon Go designed by Nintendo / Game Freak themselves.

> it focused on that over flashy graphics and shock-and-gore > They seem to me to be like the Pixar or Apple of games, or better.

I think that what both Apple and Nintendo have in common is that they don't just try to put hardware components into a box and sell them to you for cheap (e.g. Dell).

They have a chance of higher profit margins by taking themselves out of that race via trying to find creative ways to add value instead of optimizing raw performance / sale price.

It's super interesting that Nintendo seems to have down the elements of game design really well that actually make a game fun.

Compare that to other games such as Pokemon Go or No Man's Sky, which feel like the designers might have forgotten to add the core game itself. It's also interesting to compare to Witcher 3, which is another great game (but via different means IMHO).

I'm surprised by how much Nintendo nailed this (what features to invest time into to make a game fun). Seems like they might be ahead of others there. And that makes me wish that that part of game design was better understood.

I wonder whether now that they have a functioning engine and tools for large open worlds it might take less effort to create another open world like this — and then allow them to spend that time on also having the more traditional big dungeons in there. That'd be neat at least.

I think getting some longer more traditional dungeons as DLC would be amazing.

It allows you to store extra swords, shields, and bows AFAIK. Also has a couple of tools (hammer, others) conveniently available nearby.

In their GDC talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyMsF31NdNc) one of the core concepts they present is "multiplicative gameplay", which sounds a lot like what NetHack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup aim for as well.

It's a surprising amount of fun to have multiple ways to solve puzzles and try to come up with one that was or was not intended to solve it.

Sadly not at this time.

This one is still open:

Twitch | Sr. Distributed Systems Engineer | Berlin, Germany | Onsite | VISA + Relocation provided | http://www.twitch.tv

If you enjoy building distributed systems (in Go) that have 2.5 million users using them in the same minute, and if you also enjoy data analytics, let us know. We're a small team based out of Berlin. We primarily work on viewbot detection.

This is a pretty senior role and we'd greatly appreciate it if you already have experience building distributed systems, dealing with various failure modes of multiple systems talking to each other, scaling systems, and all that.

https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/2225a17f-7f4c-47f9-8134-6335d89... (the first paragraph in the ad is a little cheesy; sorry for that!)

Still pretty small, but growing. :)

Twitch | Sr. Distributed Systems Engineer | Berlin, Germany | Onsite | VISA + Relocation provided | http://www.twitch.tv

If you enjoy building distributed systems (in Go) that have 2.5 million users using them in the same minute, and if you also enjoy data analytics, let us know. We're a small team based out of Berlin. We primarily work on viewbot detection.

This is a pretty senior role and we'd greatly appreciate it if you already have experience building distributed systems, dealing with various failure modes of multiple systems talking to each other, scaling systems, and all that.

https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/2225a17f-7f4c-47f9-8134-6335d89... (the first paragraph in the ad is a little cheesy; sorry for that!)

This is not super-conventional, but some of the standard library uses panics in a similar way.

I think as long as panics don't cross library boundaries you're fine. And panics can cross library functions if the function is called MustConnect(). (Which means it'd be neat to have a pre-processor that generated MustX from X if it wasn't already there...)

I was thinking about forking the language just so I could add a Maybe monad.

I now typically deal with this via a Must() function that takes to values and return the non-err value or panics if there was an err.

That means you can call it like con := Must(db.Connect(...)).(db.Connection)

The UX of https://www.degiro.eu/ isn't the best, but they have very low fees. I've been investing there (mostly ETFs and some US Stock) for a while and am very happy.

I wonder if they have a service that automatically detects all those failures and terminates the entire node instead?

Interestingly, Facebook's algorithms also reward activity which has the effect of bubbling up group posts with a lot of drama.

> Cute write up though. In Norway, they call this "koselig".

That word sounds half-way between the English "cozy" and the German "kuschelig". A missing link. Interesting. :)

Except that for a company as big as Facebook your security provisions probably shouldn't stop right at the front door.

The black market may. Having what you need to replace an app installed on pretty much everyone's iPhone with arbitrary code is a pretty big deal.

Why does it matter if he deleted the credentials? As soon as anybody was able to get the credentials them, you'll have to make the assumption that others have been able to do the same.

And that means rotating all your credentials the very same day you learn about that happening. Why does it make a difference then if he still has stale credentials?

If they discovered the AWS credential thing on December 1 after the security researcher reported it, and wouldn't have discovered it otherwise, and it could be the case that someone else found the exact same attack path first, shouldn't they reward him for making them aware of a problem they would not have otherwise noticed? That they wouldn't have fixed? That others that discovered the same attack path might otherwise still openly exploit to MITM all the traffic, to do arbitrary things with arbitrary user accounts?

I thought I was clever and tried to enable it from the Apple News web browser so I wouldn't get ads there even when I follow links. But it doesn't seem to work due to third party cookies being blocked.

I wonder if that also means it won't work anywhere else where an embedded web view is used.

And I tried to see if it removes Video ads on YouTube (which I find very annoying), but that doesn't seem to be the case.