Coffee Talk

I've been trying to come up with some new topics. Every so often I get the suspicion that I'm sounding like a broken and/or uncreative record. Enough meta.

Here are a few points of discussion:

1. Permawound - What if your character is actually wounded with every hit and the damage just gets worse and worse until your character becomes a broken sac of mangled flesh and bone, unable to move or do much of anything but pray for the devs to institute permadeath?

2. Forget about class-based RPGs vs. skill-based. What if you had an RPG in which the player had to improve their character along some kind of progression curve by performing in-game actions? How does this compare to the alternative system of allowing no in-game progress whatsoever? What about the staunch DeRPers, roleplayers who forgo any kind of system entirely and don't play RPGs at all?

3. Flush from defrauding gamers out of millions with the con-game known as downloadable content, game developers are now planning on forcing players to compile the builds themselves and do their own testing/debugging. Gamers will have to pay the developer for every bug they find and fix.

4. We need to have an official ratings board for sports. Football, for example, would get a T for Teen due to its frequent violence and sexually suggestive content (tights, patting men on the ass, cheerleaders). The catch, though, is that if there was a particularly brutal play and, let's say, someone's helmet popped off - there was some blood on the field - then the ratings board would have to re-rate that particular game and the teams involved would get sued and the government would be up in arms over the shocking lack of regulation in the sports world. Hockey would be illegal. Also, soccer riots.

5. Everyone should play Armadillo Run. And buy the full game. It's really quite brilliant.

6. My first two attempts to download the Just Cause demo failed. The first time (from gamespot) took several hours and my computer reported 100% - this was sheer sophistry on the part of my OS. Thanks, Firefox download manager. The second time, Download.com's servers apparently crapped out around 10%. Here's a suggestion for Eidos, and any company that releases demos: make sure people can get the damn thing. My personal choice would be to create a torrent file - you relieve the strain on centralized servers and it spreads much, much faster. Anyway, snagging it from the official site gives me a good d/l rate so far - but I won't get to play it until tomorrow, and that makes me sad.