http://www.mariowiki.com/File:Squitter.jpg You can't tell that the tongues of his sneakers have the DK logo on them unless you deeply study this hi-res render.
Treasure.
"I must disagree that owning 2000 of these 'micro-dogs' is the same as being a dog owner, even if it is "the same amount of dog by weight"."
"I'm sorry, but owning a barnacle, a slime mold, and something called an 'ultra-dog' aren't the necessary skills to work at this pet store."
"Mr. Bone, I laud your zest for job-seeking, but we can see you're just a skeleton covered in coloured foam. You're dead now - have a rest!"
"To be an Office Democracy Manager requires hard skills in diplomacy, law, and dodging questions about whether your job actually exists."
Man, how many portraits does this guy have?
How come Kirby only ever uses his "split into 3 Kirbies" ability for doing over-the-top victory dances? That seems like a pretty big deal.
"Extra World: these super-hard levels are for pros only! Hire one to beat them for you at a decent hourly rate. Do NOT try it yourself!"
"Retro World: stroll down memory lane as you play all 128 levels of Bouncy Flashy Square 1 all over again, with the original buzzing sound!"
Cool as a cucumber.
I like that when I press the 'turbo' key in this Game Boy emulator, it instantly goes from 60fps to 2177fps.
"The condiments in EarthBound were just the beginning⌠Complex spread-dip-garnish combos would arise to heal thousands of hit pointsâŚ"
"You can fly if you try, 'cuz the sky ain't no limit, uh, and when you shoot the moon you end up in the starsâŚ" improvises your bard, badly.
"Put me down!" squeak the tiny BulletBots as the GunBots scoop 'em up by the handful. "Nooo!" they cry as they're slid into gaping chambers.
"This so-called 'endless hallway' is just a regular hallway covered in warning signs about dying of old age."
"They say that when her would-be record-breaking pancake stack tipped over and splattered everywhere, her heart tipped and splattered too."
The officer shredded the door to bits with his claws, stepped in, and telekinetically rebuilt the door. "I want to ask you a few questions."
(The answer is, of course, five stars.)
-How am I supposed to rate the "graphics" of a Twine game that uses a freely available stylesheet that I wrote. #LD48
The hermit-crab's ghost tries to wrestle its old home away from its new occupant, but must sadly accept that death makes nomads of us all.
The ghost stumbles out of your closet, falls over, gets back up, turns to face you, and shouts "Doo!" You don't feel like correcting it.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5163 - I've also added that grim stylesheet to this page, if you don't find it too hideous.
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/GRAVEDIG.TWS/ - Decided to celebrate GRAVEDIG.TWS getting on @figames by doing up a nice fancy stylesheet for it.
The NPCs suspect that the endless fountain of coins spraying from this chest is a catastrophic glitch, but none of them want to speak up.
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/TreasureGalaxy-Palace.gif - Nice digs.
"Indiana Jones was originally a ripoff of Yosemite Sam, with Bugs Bunny replaced by an ancient civilisation of temple-building pranksters."
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=1084 - Here's a new Leongame! It was originally called "Escape App" until I thought of a much better name. #LD48 #LeonDare
The most joyous part of Final Fantasy 1 is when you finally unearth the Model T and get to drive all over the world map.
"The 'undiscovered country' mentioned in the novel is not death, but a 1-mile island in the North Sea that the author used for tax evasion."
"Now I know I planned for an animated boss fight in the last area," mutters the #LD48 competitor, "but maybe a static text dump is OK too."
All my OFF battle music earworms have been replaced with an OFF credits music earworm. I guess my subconscious finally beat the game.
"As you can see it's gonna be a puzzle platformer with subtle glitch-horror." The cockroaches nod at your laptop, largely out of obligation.
"This gun features the latest in gestural input. Instead of clicking a "shoot bullet" button, you flick bullets forward on the touchscreen."
"Don't worry, team - the hallway bombs only go off if they detect romantic tension, and we're all⌠what? Dennis? Rachel?! Seriously, now?"
Leon's schedule: draw someone in a bed, be brought to tears with maddening longing, go to real bed.
The strange suited men silently step into your hall and undo their coats - unraveling them entirely in moments, leaving piles of cotton.
The conveyor belt drags you inexorably into the roundrect machine⌠Will anyone save you from becoming a smooth, glossy UI element?
#IPlayed Babby of Towlr http://towlr.com/babby/ (again). Hard action minimalist obscurantist puzzler.
"This minimalist phone reads input through biorhythms. If you're not at the peak of your 'check email' cycle⌠you shouldn't do it anyway."
"Really minimialist haunted house. The furniture and the ghosts are just floating white cubes. The blood messages are written in Helvetica."
I'm going to sleep now, but #FF @MiyamotoSan.
RPG where, after a highly predictable plot twist, your character's status changes to "Astonished" and you try every item to make it go away.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5163 - Added another basic Twine stylesheet to this page. If you have any ideas for further styles, I might be receptive.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5020 - Updated <<cyclinglink>> to make the variable-setting work correctly with "end" links (and added the "out" option).
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5239 - Updated my <<revision>> Twine macro, enhancing <<revise>> with various <<cyclinglink>>-style text options.
"You then travel to 'the future', which is just a bare gray room containing a man who tells you "We destroyed everything except this room"."
You politely inform the tiny parasites living in your tearducts that they must leave. They depart in tears (you are forced to cry them out).
"Psst!" says the man, "I've got a ton of cheap Lucerne hammers back here! Works great against cavalry units," he adds, rubbing his fingers.
"MYTH: everyone who ventures to Foul Mountain never returns.
SCIENCE: the endemic Foulbears have 900 HP and a suite of one-hit-kill moves."
The ApprovalBots greeted each other with nods that soon escalated to warm grins, quiet claps, rousing applause and manic, riotous cheering.
Hopscotch 2: the concept of falling over returns as the game's villain, and has kidnapped Princess Numbersquare and taken her to its castle!
A list of all my Twine macros is available here, as always: http://l.j-factor.com/twine/
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5029 - Added a <<timedcontinue>> macro, which makes the rest of the passage appear after a delay - no end tag necessary.
The spikes in the pit split open and tiny animatronic tongues blow raspberries at you as you deftly leap away.
"To lower risk of deadly shards, the emergency safety glass has been replaced with concrete, and the safety hammers with safety dynamite."
"fee fie foe fiff, give me gold and i'll let your foot live" squeaks the pixie, waving a sharp sewing pin over the toe of your left boot.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5019 - Updated the <<replace>> macro, adding <<continue>>, which is a variant that doesn't need a matching <<endreplace>>.
For a very disquieting second I misread these as release dates.
I understood what a Game Boy's graphics were limited to, and that the colourful boxart was really just showing what it 'ought to' look like.
I had an odd feeling of mixed curiousity when I was a child perusing the boxart of original Game Boy games in retail outlets.
Guy looks at Super Mario Bros. boxart, snorts "this fake 8-bit pixel art is a blatant nostalgia grab" winks into camera for 2 full seconds.
The "fake file select", for instance, is an excellent glitch-horror setpiece, but the game doesn't delve into glitch-horror very deeply.
I feel like OFF has a lot of great setpieces and events that I would adore if they were in an overall more interesting, focused game.
"This game raises the bar⌠then smashes it against a zombie's skull⌠then hangs it back up again, on a higher hook than before. Five stars."
"You're the hardest gamer alive. Your thumbprints were erased by a thousand buttons. You left the womb gripping your cord like a joystick."
"A new ultra-hard videogame called 'The Pro Challenge' appeared⌠All who tried it vanished⌠Are claims they were 'owned to death' accurate?"
I actually feel SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation was 90s videogaming at its most lucid, its most confident in its worth.
The greatest videogame in the simulation genre.
There's another timeline where the big sites all have names like .spl.end.ifero.us or .won.dro.us or .mar.vello.us, and no one's the wiser.
A part of me wishes the .del.icio.us pattern for Web 2.0 names had taken off. We could be using .gla.moro.us or .fan.tabulo.us right now.
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/48799633306/charlottes-web - Ten minutes into this game and I know more about the "Bucking Bronco attack" than I do about any of the characters.
This nice Magicant palette seems to only appear after talking to your mother.
There are a number of palette swaps in Magicant that only one NPC can provide. This one is solely from Everdred.
"What's a man gotta do to get a drink in this place?!" he jovially hollers. The other patrons jerk thumbs at a door marked "Sawblade Hell".
"The future of 1999. Society has turned violent and atavistic. Getting a loan approved means wrestling a guy in a rubber dollar-bill suit."
We enter the village's garbage shrine⌠a testament to the old days when garbage flowed through the streets like water⌠before the cataclysmâŚ
"Seems your 'magic' silent rocking chair isn't magic - just well-made, and Big Rocker has been duping us all out of silent rocks for years."
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5321 - Here's an odd bug in Twine involving string values containing "and" and "or", and a bugfix script.
"'Hello?' said our hero to who was on the phone. Or, perhaps I should say⌠WHAT was on the phone! (It was a computer with an election ad.)"
"Trivia: 'i18n' and 'base64' are short for 'internationalisation' and 'baseliescedescementaliskomenturnivialostasticistadiatiationalism.'"
You idly pass the time with one of your host's books, "Swords: The wounds they created, and the people whose bodies the wounds were in."
"The protruding tubular tuber-like protuberance perturbed her," typed the world-famous writer, getting visibly more excited by the second.
The swollen first sentence of the poem explodes with rancid floridness. You ready your gun as the word "resplendent" sails toward your head.
"AAAAAaaaaw," she screamed, having noticed halfway through that she'd misread "dearth" as "death", and then tried to parlay it into a yawn.
"Do you love me?" said her gaze, which was then redundantly repeated by her lips. He smiled and laughed gaily, which I suppose meant "yes".
The wind quietly howled, like a wolf that was considerate of its neighbours. A man climbed the steps and knocked on his fist with the door.
You see a Red Door Guardian by the Red Door, doing boss-like actions, being generally obstinate and exuding a thick aura of hitpointfulness.
As he looked over this week's specials, he thought that not even a century's worth of Bargain Madness could slash the prices in his heart.
"In an instant, our lurching hearts had been set aflame and brought together, like two viking funeral pyres colliding in a storm."
"Note: saying 'please let me keep the diamond' to the security guard won't work. His job requires him to say no regardless of his feelings."
"I know how races work, so here's the rules: winner must 1) get to the end first, 2) be the fastest, 3) take the least time, 4) be best."
"To avoid charges of immorality, fantasy novels would abruptly end with all the characters regretting violent acts and extolling pacifism."
"Unable to legally include violence, fantasy writers spun such euphemisms as 'a spot of crash-clang' and 'they hit iron together angrily'."
He blushed crimson at the effusive praise, and tiny embarrassed groans cascaded from both ends of his grinning mouth.
"The federal agent rolled around the room, absorbing every object in his path. No, wait, his eyes rolled around, eyes. Pretend I said eyes."
#IPlayed OFF. It feels like it has more alike with uin than Space Funeral, especially insofar as it's mechanically conventional to a fault.
"I just read all your wonderful comments and my cheeks got flustered and pissed their pants (they piss blood obvs)."
"Look at your weapon. That baseball bat has battered and slain hundreds of foes. But it cries out for a ball! Not once has it hit a ball!"
I wanted to include "University of Washington Virtual Walking Tour" https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58952342/UW%20Interactive%20Map.html but it contains 250MB of audio interviews.
That 7z file has almost all of the games on TwineHub, all of the #PPHS Twine games, most @Gtrwx games, and a few from my Twitter follows.
http://l.j-factor.com/twine/Twine_Spool.7z - Here's a 7z file containing 444 Twine games, for archival or browsing purposes.
Your magnificent sword glimmers in the moonlight. Wait, hang on, it only glimmers at a certain angle - just tilt it back a bit. More. Okay.
"The nerve of you, to breathe my air without askingâŚ! If you need air so much, as you so gruffly claim, maybe next time bring your own, hm?"
You madly chase after the smouldering dynamite fuse, which is smartly besting you despite being outnumbered in the legs department 2 to nil.
It's about to rain, so you step under the Emergency Anti-Rain Device For Repelling Raindrops, Withstanding Weather And Keeping Citizens Dry.
The shopkeeper silently glares at you as if to say "Please go away." He then says "Please go away." Whoa! What a coincidence!
She silently smirked like a cat who'd been given the keys to a kitchen in which it could roleplay as a mouse while a second cat was away.
You are no longer alive due to circumstances of a very unfair nature. "No way!" would be your cry if you still had a mouth or consciousness.
The explorer proceeded to wrestle the bear in the fashion of gentlemen (punching it in the mouth, then screaming at his own bloody stump).
We analysed the enemy's tactics like a genius playing Chess against a different genius - one who isn't quite as genius as the first genius.
She bolted upright in bed, opened her eyes, stopped screaming, woke up, began screaming, and opened her mouth - though not in that order.
"Permit me the first pick of weapons, as the challenged party in this duel." The other agreed, and the man gleefully picked the Hulk Hands.
The gunman's eyes unleashed a devastating gaze, his lip an intolerable sneer, his hips a monstrous swagger, his gun a truly obscene bullet.
#IPlayed Realistic WWIII Scenario http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/files/wwiii.html I like the cut of the best ending's jib.
Your knife hovers over the slice of toast⌠One wrong slice with shatter it into worthless powder⌠You strive to control your quivering handâŚ
A tiny bat flies down and licks the spikes clean of the blood from your previous life. You behold the harmony of the death temple ecosystem.
You ask her if she's just sat on all your homunculi again. She feigns ignorance as dozens of tiny ghosts swirl up from under her thighs.
You struggle to think of pillow talk to distract them with while you reach over their head to the bedside and steal their magic glasses.
You regret taking aged weapons from rundown dungeons when your sword's flaming aura suddenly slides off and lands in a wet fiery pile.
"Violence isn't on the menu at Little Sally's," he grinned, pulling grenade after grenade from the salad bar, "but you can just ask nicely."
"Wait" you try and mouth to the dragonqueen from inside the Instant Ice Block trap, "come back, I love fire after all, love it, it's blissâŚ"
You're just about to hammer out that killer fifty-fav tweet, when a mind-fairy idly strolls in and sits on your brain.
Your gun can't fire underwater, so you slip it in your diving helmet and tie the trigger to your tongue, plus a cork to plug the bullethole.
The steel door is sliding down, but you can still make it! You boldly dive, slide under⌠and learn why the doorways are lined with velcro.
It's a miracle! The sound sensor bombs hadn't gone off! You breathe a sigh of relief. Alas, they were calibrated solely for sighs of relief.
The steelwomen haven't noticed you're a human in shiny bodypaint. You pray they don't make you join their invigorating tempering session.
Lost in the desert! You must take drastic measures. You switch your gun's bullet-hole type from 'blood' to 'cola' and shoot your manservant.
"Don't worry about me," says Mario as the quicksand devours his neck, "there's probably a bonus room or something at the bottom. No biggie."
"The venom will only take effect in direct sunlight," echoes the text in your mind. You enter the chamber and a maze of sunbeams greets you.
"Every part of me is ready⌠except for this bit," she said, pointing wearily at her head. "Just bite it off, and then we can begin."
The shy mute swordsdemon hands you a charcoal-black scroll inked with the ever-boiling blood of the damned. It reads "Please act afraid <3."
I wonder what it'd be like if Mega Man and Gradius swapped their tropes and endlessly recurring setpieces for a day.
A Zelda game where the sword is a minor dungeon item used solely for cutting bushes, tapping crystals and batting energy balls.
"Grumpy Wizards Finish Toxic Brew: evil Queen satisfied, evil Jack demands more poison, less foam."
I notice in my dreams how often depth perception is incorrect or simplified - distant mountains often appear to be small and 10 feet away.
An NPC who's become misaligned with the world's grid. Unable to interact, she searches in vain for another misaligned one to nudge her back.
An abstract RPG where the plot is told exclusively through the flavour text of randomly dropped worthless healing items.
Look I know the last time I just believed in myself, but we all know that the believe-in-yourself trick only works a finite number of times!
Arrgh, Ludum Dare is just days away. How can I possibly live up to my previous crowd-pleasing entries. How. How.
"How to Draw a Square: 1) Draw a perfect circle. 2) Cut it into quarters. 4) Stack all the quarters without rotating. 5) Trace around that!"
"Look, falling onto the "Revive Boss" button, then getting up and stepping on the "Make Boss 90ft Tall" button could've happened to anyone."
Your last words are spent telling the vampire you foolishly revived that it doesn't make sense to "make up for lost time" if she's immortal.
Small Mario tries to figure out how to duck, promptly compresses self into zero-blocks-tall entity that only sort-of exists.
You try to escape, but the door-frame has engorged and swollen over the door-crack. The walls and ceiling are puffing up more and more.
The true meaning of RPGs is dedicating your life to saving a world that despises and tries to murder you at every turn.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ce7rJUINd8 - I like the DQ overworld music, and I like that this version mostly keeps the original's humility and quiet mystery.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5280 - Here's a quick, rough Twine hypertext game I just forced out of myself.
"I guess no one questioned building a skyscraper shaped like a detonator plunger over the world's biggest TNT deposit⌠Hindsight, you know?"
For the first time, Mario just stands there and feels the star's invincibility wash through him, stoically letting the energy fade away.
"It's been 40 minutes - maybe now we should walk away from the giant ravenous crocodile whose jaws we comically wedged open with a stick."
The Noble Order of Cacklecreep Hunters is powerless to hunt the feeling that cacklecreep hunting was the only thing holding them together.
Now that the world's last cacklecreep has been slain, the Noble Order of Cacklecreep Hunters wonders if they can still hang out as friends.
You sense your AI behaviour was hacked to give "die in slime lady's acid embrace" a priority of 999, but you really want to do it anyway.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5195 - Klik of the Month, give it a shot - it's not colliding with Ludum Dare for the first time in who-knows-when.
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/48145971120/super-mario-bros-3 -It's interesting that Nintendo took SMB's setpiece Hammer Bros. battles and made them special events in themselves.
(I say "some text" but you could really make anything appear - an image, some <<playsound>> macros, maybe a <<toggletag>> macroâŚ)
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5271 - Here's a Twine macro that lets you make some text appear or disappear whenever you mouseover a part of a passage.
You had to scour a whole dungeon of blood skeletons, but you've finally obtained the god-like power to breathe and swallow at the same time.
You try to hold open the rapidly shrinking portal home, but dozens of slimy tongues are assailing your armpits. Oh, woe! What tiny cruelty!
After hours of attempts, it turns out that 98% of alternate universes you can open portals to are filled airtight with slobbery slimeblobs.
This 10 min. game over cutscene of the villains seductively bathing in your characters' blood feels like a thank-you note from the game.
I hope you Twine writers find my <<revision>> macro even a little bit useful⌠I've got several ideas for add-ons for it that I'd like to do.
You try to flee down the corridor, but since you only half-unlocked the door, you can only go halfway in. You then soon become fully eaten.
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/ALinkToThePast-BallAndChainTrooper.gif - Yeah, it looks like a silly cell-mate, but that treasure chest murdered 10 guards with its lid studs alone.
Evil acorn wizard's eternal youth spells are broken - suddenly explodes into vast gnarled oak in seconds.
You release one hand from the cliff edge. This causes you to fall halfway down. You then slowly release fingers until you're on the ground.
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/SuperMarioWorld-DonutPlains1.gif - Now that I look at it, that cape couldn't have been that easy to animate back in 1992.
New management ordered the half-completed bridge to u-turn and return to the start, "to appeal to customers who like being on this side".
"Chell exits room, Gladys says "Thanks for solving it, that was a toughie!" Chell says "Anything for you, my liege," kisses floor servilely"
"Chell uses box to hold down button without being on it. Gladys says "Critical thinking is the key to a success", unleashes Reward Bullets."
"Portal tweet. Chell breaks friend box, Gladys fills room with pink gas. Just perfume though, because "your puzzle solving stinks!" Ha ha."
"You may abort the test by exiting via the Emergency Non-Sliding Hinge-less Safety Door, which, for extra safety, does not have handles."
My latest findings about 86856527 are that it's fairly easy to survive if you actually try not to die.
"I must speak to your leader!" you buzz at the swarm. The bees debate whether seniority or expertise best merits leadership, and you escape.
A corporeal bear rises up over you! If you know the secret to outrunning bears, please set your font size to "very tiny" and type it in now.
Who knows what you will find in this cave! A gorgeous cave parrot? A vivid cave zebra? Your sheer naivety is your only guide on this quest.
"What? No, I don't know if the magic door can "go deaf". Did you shout slower? Faster? You did pause between 'open' and 'sesame', right?"
"Ten men have seen the dragon and lived. Just six have been between its jaws and returned! Only two escaped its belly with their lives!"
You're about to take the trophy for Wrestling Inanimate Objects, when a surprise final match is revealed! Your opponent: the trophy itself!!
"Maze escape tip: simply keep your hand on the left wall as you walk, and the wall, charmed by your affection, will open up and let you go."
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/taxonomy/term/6548 - I've updated <<timedreplace>>, <<timedgoto>> and <<timedloop>> to take fractions of seconds as time values.
"OK, a random encounter with⌠Um, I dunno, let's say Big Wraith x1, Ice Barbarian x4, Damage Thing x2 and Rock With HP x7. Well, enjoy."
"Ten 60GW Underdog capacitors. They're powered by teamwork." He drew his gun. "This ship's built for come-from-behind victories, alright."
"The market today was all just bleargh. Stocks were yuk in all sectors, and commodities were really icky-poo."
She sat at the prop desk, waiting fervently for the flood of warm goo to shatter the glass behind her and cathartically wash her offstage.
Your 50m shortcut through the Negative World has backfired! When you return to the Positive World, you're -50m closer to your destination!
The macro has a fairly straightforward effect but it was really quite complex to code, so I appreciate any bug reports, etc.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5239 - Here's that new Twine macro I've been working hard on. <<revision>>, a more complex variation of <<replace>>.
With deft hands, you swap the goblet in the statue's grasp with a "World's Best Deathtrap" mug. You glance around and listen for machinery.
One solitary NPC questions how physical change is possible if the premise of this game is that time has been devoured by the Time Devourer.
"2013 pop chart for dimensions out now: 1) Height. 2) Depth. Sorry, width! Seems you're the unwanted dimension for the fifth year straight."
"Our new staircase saves time by having just one stair that occupies every height at once. When you step on it, you're already at the top!"
Okay, I now have about 3K followers on my videogame GIF tumblr, so how soon do I show them the super-babies from Sluggish Morss.
86856527 doesn't feel like a typical roguelike - instead of exciting hot streaks every so often, each game feels equally potentially viable.
Each of your severed parts is in a separate glass tank. Right leg's over there, left leg's here⌠Hey! How'd your left arm get a bubble jet?!
A part of me strongly wishes the raccoon features had become ossified in Mario's design - the animal ears as ornamental as his overalls.
When I was a kid before I got my first console, I thought Mario having a tail and raccoon ears sprouting from his hat was his normal design.
"When the Ancient Greek dramatist Menander sagely observed that "Time heals all wounds", he surely hadn't purchased the NecroSlasher 3000."
Ah, I totally forgot Valley of Bowser had a fortress. What a lovely levelâŚ
Super Mario World's L and R button scrolling is convenient for framing the screen just right for a GIF.
The code also lets you wander around this part of World 8 at will. I like that Mario and his spotlight wrap around.
Every pyramid either sends you to that screen, or crashes. (Except for this one which is a copy of the Toad house.)
If you try and enter an inaccessible pyramid, you get sent to this single-screen level.
There's a Game Genie code that lets you walk all over the map. You can enter those pyramids as if they're levels.
Neither a wireframe nor a full model, the untextured mesh creature wanders between both worlds, a shining gray expressionless vagabond.
To clarify: I was already aware that the Hammer Suit stops fireballs. But the idea of using it against those enemies is amazing, exquisite.
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/SMB3-FireBros2.gif - I never once thought of trying this until yesterday. SMB3 continues to surprise.
You explain via morse code flapping that you're much happier as an abalone than a human, but they zap you back anyway out of sheer malice.
"âŚTo continue the Electroplankton sex metaphor, an orgasm is really like lighting up the secret flower in Hanenbow - nice, but is it music?"
"To combat flagrant and widespread illegal usage, our corporate website can no longer be accessed without a constant internet connection."
"Patch notes: by popular demand, comment boxes are now pre-filled with "I'm sorry, am I supposed to care about this person?" on page load."
"First, let's see the lab's Impossible Wing⌠Ha! It's the whole lab! âŚExcept accounting. Federal law says it must be in the Possible Wing."
"Thanks to you, I've had to power down the Not-Shooting-Lasers Devices. Now they're uselessly not not shooting deadly lasers everywhere."
"I was going to switch off the Dangerous Situation Generator after the next test. If only you'd waited a bit longer before being naughty!"
"Zelda games were always about the joy of cutting tall grass in woods - even the NES original where the grass had 4HP and shot fireballs."
The skeleton barbarians regret the fact that their silent, breathless battle screams look largely indistinguishable from maniacal cackles.
You can sing to the beat of your cell's incessant dripping. Unfortunately, if you stop, the agony will return. Guess this is your life now.
Your robot arm unbalances you⌠Its horrid weight makes you limp⌠To think, had you let them roboticise both, you may've escaped them by nowâŚ
On the run from the roboticisers, you wrap your hideous new steel limbs in thick rags, so you can pretend there's still flesh underneath.
A fire flower kicked out of the flower-patch for being a hazard - forced to wander the world until, unwanted, it buries itself in a ?-block.
My twitter and tumblr accounts were 75 away from having Follower Parity, but then my tumblr got spotlighted today, so⌠so much for that.
"While I'm in no position to question your choices, I wonder if this strong focus on bloodshed is not impoverishing the narrative somewhatâŚ"
"It seems your major contributions to the evolving give-and-take narrative of this videogame involve cruel atavistic mayhem⌠A bold choiceâŚ"
"Your attack is brutal⌠Clearly the enemies' utter defenselessness is only fueling your contempt for their lives⌠A vicious circle indeedâŚ!"
"I'm afraid we had some⌠irreconcilable differences. In battle prowess. Sad, really - she could've prolonged our relationship by minutes."
"This is the wormhole you'll be traversing. We can only make 'em a few inches wide at the moment, so prepare for the Liquification Process."
"No, it's a pyrofreeze chamber. Just like a cryofreeze chamber⌠but cozier. Please get inside. You're letting all the fire leak out."
I really like the fact that Zaga-33, the "zugzwang roguelike", gets followed up by a game where waiting a turn is a spell, a form of magic.
"OK, I wrote two lines of code - time for another half-hour of 86856527." - my workflow for the past week.
"When you are mortally wounded⌠it is always the hate that bleeds out first," murmurs the mortician. "The love flows out only at the last."
"These wounds are utterly astounding⌠exquisite⌠Only a true artist made these beautiful gashes⌠It saddens me to have to sew them upâŚ"
The professor's on his third pipe of slime today⌠Each sentence is punctuated with a learned puff of goop-bubbles⌠His eyelids are droopingâŚ
"What do you mean, these leeches attached to my body are keeping the hate-curse at bay with their sheer animalistic love for me?!"
Positing your current form is but a juvenile version of some truer, fuller self, so advanced it would appear to us all as insensible, alien.
But even more so is the idea of growing -yourself- up, of becoming a larger, more monstrous, exaggerated, yet grander version of yourself.
This idea of fictional growth beyond adulthood, where you change size and proportions even more and gain further intelligence, entices me.
What I fixated on in http://portraitdex.tumblr.com/ was when they drew evolved versions of themselves - drawing a grownup version of a grownup.
As a child I felt odd about adult versions of child characters - transformed beings with new intelligence and unfamiliar head-body ratios.
You thought sticking your finger in her gun barrel would make it comically explode, but it's just inflating larger and larger and largerâŚ
Your attempt at making a little snow-robot out of ice cubes in the ship's kitchen doesn't cheer up the NavBot enough to return to Earth yet.
After two entire dungeons of being slammed against hard stone and brick, this slime dungeon feels so gentle, so soothing⌠so ~heavenly~âŚ
"Patch notes: the password "I'm sure a gorgeous login box like you can make an exception for me ;) ;o ;D" no longer lets you login as admin"
"Living dead, eh? I got two reasons why that's a contradiction, right 'ere! C'mon, put up yer dukes! What? Ya can't even clench a fist, eh?"
In the death-scoured wastes, no game is more enticing than Flashing Lights. Which light will flash next? Red? Green? Other Red? "AddictiveâŚ"
You may be from a doomed future, on a mission to set it right, but right now, your objective is to hug this green grass and weep at the sky.
"We can't forfeit just 'cos the other team's 20 feet tall! We just need teamwork!" *tries to lift huge basketball* "âŚUh, hello, teamwork?"
"After fierce fighting, all but one of Earth's warships was destroyed. This is where you come in. Please draft this surrender declaration."
This isn't good⌠The Dark Lord's got random boulders working for him. You still have time to negotiate with the falling stalactites, though.
"This isn't how croquet works!" your head cries as she places her foot on it and swings back her giant mallet. Moments later, it's airborne.
Beholden to a wealthy retweeter who made your videogame tweet a star, you become grimly indebted to the tune of a hundred favs.
You fall into the robotic comfort of SeatBot. SeatBot plays soothing music as you sit, then asks when its Limb Privileges will be returned.
Hacked game files reveals anhedonic robot character has numerous unused faces showing the strong, intense joy he never got to feel in-game.
"Expel the ghosts by pushing the key corresponding to the number of vowels in its name, but beware: the Unholy Y only counts on full moons!"
font-family: BurningLettersSans, "Immolated Type", HellfireFont2, HellfireFont1, "the font where letters are on fire", Arial, sans serif;
"Ah," she says, glancing first at your paralysed form, then at your sweaty finger marks on her electrified goblet, "giving up so soon?"
"This ain't what I signed up for! You said I'd be hunting dragons! âŚYou know, dragons, long thin insects, four clear wings, live in swampsâŚ"
"We're stealing ten thousand tons! Imagine: no more scrounging in gram stores, no more living from kilo to kilo⌠We'll be in heavy heaven!"
In a tiny office, an even tinier robot prints out web images, manually stamps a watermark on them, and then cheerfully scans them back in.
"As we have recently changed to a new air provider, we are removing all our old provider's air from the station over the next 30 seconds."
"A flock of magpies has claimed our power lines by squatter's rights. Your job is buying it back from them. Here's ten rolls of tinfoil."
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/47807649219/pid - A small regret about Pid is that it doesn't have any other treasure chests that do this when you open them.
This seems to be my current plan for the syntax⌠Brevity, flexibility and readability tussle like dragons in my mindâŚ
I feel a bit more positive about this syntax⌠Seems both flexible and rigid in the right areas, I thinkâŚ
-I'm not keen on having "empty clauses" such as these to act as insertion/removal⌠Just doesn't seem readable enoughâŚ
"Unscramble the ghosts' names to escape the Manse, but unless you remove the Verboten Vowel, you'll be the ghosts' butler forevermore!"
"Your joystick is the only thing keeping Earth from ending up on an intergalactic dinnerplate - and washed down with the Milky Way!"
I get the feeling this many features may be altogether a bit too general, butâŚ
"All you wanted was to eat cherries and stomp flowers in peace, but these pesky busy-bees can't wait to riddle you with sting-holes!"
"You said you were an arm wrestling CHUMP, but the alien agent misheard! Now the beefiest arms in the galaxy stand between you and freedom."
"You're in the Silly House. Walls and doors leap like frogs. If you find the exit, you'll live. But if not⌠you'll be silly 'til you die!"
No matter how much you jump up and down on the stuck trapdoor, it just won't open. Then you notice the builder installed it with a doorknob.
Your cheers of "Fingers, fingers, you're the best / If you don't grip it, we're all dead!" aren't making them grip this cliff any easier.
Wondering about the possible efficacy of an optional 'shorthand' version of the macro.
I like that there's a byte in the Super Mario Bros ROM that, if changed, makes the goombas re-inflate themselves soon after you stomp them.
Playing custom Portal 2 levels illustrates just how strongly the portal gun can be limited by just being clever with line-of-sight.
"Weapon: the blessed blob-splattered Splatter of Blobs. You took it off Blobsplatter XVI in the plane of Blobsplat, on Blobsplatsday 3rd."
Also, I probably should make more "CSS demos" showing ways to style the macros, like I did here with <<cyclinglink>> http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/files/TwineMacro-CyclinglinkTest3.html
-The current resultant HTML from <<replace>>, <<timedinsert>>, <<timedremove>>, <<timedreplace>> and <<cyclinglink>>.
I ought to try and make the CSS hooks and HTML output of <<replace>>, <<timedreplace>> and <<cyclinglink>> more consistent with each otherâŚ
The fact that it was just made of the "used block" sprite, instead of resembling a coherent creature, added to its disconcerting nature.
I remember the brick snake in Roy's Castle being strange and disconcerting - being entirely at the mercy of a weird construct of blocks.
"Listen," said the necromancer, "I don't really know what 'grave dust' is. âŚI have a feeling it's actually the same as regular dust."
Suddenly, your water glass pops out of your right hand and into your left, spreading your bewildered fingers back. Continuity error. Sloppy.
"Note: the effects of walking east are many and varied. Some report no issues. Others claim to have died horribly. Please exercise caution."
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/47646391755/game-boy-camera - I hope this showed up correctly on everyone's browsersâŚ
Brand executives can't find their product placement in the final movie, but discover their logo permeating their dreams for weeks to come.
"That horse over there's for sale, but I don't wanna look too interested. Tell me what casual insults to use as I pretend to walk past."
"Once they sold the IP rights for red roses, their price got higher and higher until the market crashed. Not a single one ever grew again."
Still puzzling out what syntax this particularly flexible macro should useâŚ
That previous tweet isn't all that flippant. In my teens I had a powerful fixation with Gradius games and horizontal shmups in general.
*Reads latest Indie Royale bundle* Knytt Underground, nah⌠Real Texas, hmm⌠What? Cheesy Hardcore Gradius Fangame?! *is on it like a hornet*
"Earth found itself unduly conquered today when the President was tricked into borrowing a small rock with ten trillion percent interest."
I like how "revise" and "revert" are antonyms of each other, but I wonder about their use as 'forward' and 'back'âŚ
Even though it looks longer, the bottom example (with proper bullet) is more along the lines of what I wantedâŚ
Hmm, maybe this syntax would be preferableâŚ
Planning out the syntax of my next Twine macroâŚ
Your failed attempt to execute a midair spin kick instead makes your character gently hug and soothe the boss, refilling all its hit points.
"Too many zombie movies and zombie games nowadays⌠Not enough zombie haikus."
A role-playing FPS where the RPG elements passive-aggressively disparage and contradict the FPS elements, and vice-versa.
A game where, after you've hacked a vending machine, you can increase its prices and redirect all its NPC-derived income into your account.
"That's because it's so beautiful⌠it hurts!" "No⌠it's killing me because it's a spike⌠I'm really quite sure of that nowâŚ"
A ChainsawArmBot looking lovingly into the eyes of a RefuelerBot as it pumps gasoline into the other's blood-soaked chainsaw arms.
"Let's see now⌠this cord's RS-232 to USB⌠this one's USB to urethra⌠this is spine-port to trepanation vent⌠tearduct to moth chrysalisâŚ"
This GIF wasn't supposed to come out looking like this.
"Earth's people must continually restate that they're not lobsters or mongeese, despite their galactic species name of "Mongoose Lobsters"."
"In this chamber, you'll encounter the Hellspider. It only has two weaknesses: Christian holy iconography, and being hit with weapons."
Playing Proteus with field of view down to 20 is strange - it's as if you've been shrunk down. You can get so close to the animals.
The frog hops in Proteus sound like some musical being trying to politely bring an end to a conversation with you.
<img style="background:url(...)" width="..." height="..."> - The latest in no-right-click image technology.
Typo or spelling reports will still be accepted for any of my gamesâŚ
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Dining_Table/ - Reminder that I released this game on Monday, if you somehow missed it.
"Tiny robot patch notes: robot now ignores any unpatched robots still possessing feet, no matter how persuasive their calls to arms are."
"Tiny robot patch notes: removed all memories of having feet, walking, etc. If you have evidence your robot ever had feet, do destroy it."
"Tiny robot patch notes: reduced resource footprint by 97% (by removing both feet)."
It's clear this Prototype Super KillMech just isn't going to be destroyed by a plucky rebel in its first battle⌠Such a waste of resourcesâŚ
A flock of KillCopters soars from the Citadel⌠Another fool rebel gunman triggered the Chapter 2 finale sequence, I guess⌠War is senselessâŚ
"Experience lifting rocks, dumbells, crates and logs is essential. Familiarity with anvils, safes and wrecked cars is highly desirable!"
"I've got you a present." *ceiling opens, gift-wrap coated spiked ceiling slowly descends* "Don't open it until you've guessed what it is!"
"9mm rounds. Five triggers, for whatever finger you like best. The barrel's 20 metres long, so you can kill from at least that far away."
"To escape, find the cracked rock, and set your sword's sharpness level to "hammer". If you can't find that option, simply look harder."
You run in a manner that decreases the distance between you and the dragon's blast of incandescent breath. âŚOr increases, I dunno.
The exit is left. A fiery spike pit is to the right.
>LEFT
Your left or my left?
>YOUR LEFT
You go your left, into the spike pit! Oh no!
"Care for a cup of tea?" Foolishly, you say yes. A vortex opens and you're dragged into the Hot Water Drop Catching Minigame for 15 minutes.
The Sun Police land on Earth. It seems a few trillion watts of unauthorised solar energy leaked out, and they'd like us all to return it.
Yes, a globe-trotting man of action⌠No nation bordering the northwest Mediterranean is strange to him⌠All four of them⌠oh, and MaltaâŚ
A man of international intrigue⌠Some days he forgets which exoticised part of western Europe he's in today⌠The accents blur in his mindâŚ
I really like how Will You Ever Return? 2 is the story of the random unnamed mugger who shoots you in the intro of Will You Ever Return? 1.
"But Ms. Vettrue⌠you said we would rule the world⌠togetherâŚ" Your heart sinks as her smile grows, wider and wider like an uncoiling snake.
"So now that the four Doom Gems touch, will the world be saved, Ms. Lily Vettrue?" *suddenly realises her name's an anagram of UTTERLY EVIL*
"You found an Odd Potion! You look really pleased about this even though it probably only heals 1HP or reverses your controls or something."
Some of these @WeeklyFrogJokes tweets are getting outright esoteric https://twitter.com/WeeklyFrogJokes/status/321325289470820352
I kind of like "mario becomes a turing machine" http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5196 as a spiritual sequel to Mario Battle No.1 (http://www.year01.com/archive/mario/)
"How loathsome is the adventure hero! How selfish! They hunt down creatures immensely better at the combat arts than them - and kill them!"
Hacking minigame where you politely ask the mainframe for the data in the most fitting servile posture and tone you can muster.
Disappointingly, Chess 2 is just a scrolling platformer where the white king collects floating pawns and rides knights like Yoshi.
The merchant lays his hands on your money, mutters a spell, and disintegrates it into ash. "Do come again," he says, giving you the potion.
"If you remove the picture on your hotel wall and look in the crack, you can see a bunch of unused game assets lounging in the next room."
"Ironically, even though the player character stands for the entire game, the player themself was probably just sitting in a chair."
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5163 - Added a genericised version of the CSS from my game "Dining Table" to the end of the page.
Notice that the last toy in that set requires you to hold the DS upside-down. How many other games did that, however briefly�
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/47400186120/warioware-touched - I like this toy brand.
The Cloud Cuckooland music has ambient birdsong even though the level's a bare rock a mile in the sky with no birds. Aural hallucinations?!
All I have to say about the game is that I listened to this a lot while making it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t028IEHnlX8 This fact will explain nothing.
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Dining_Table/ - Here's my #PPHSjam game. It's about a simulated date, I guess......
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5019 - Fixed a bug with <<replace>>, where the new <<insert>> variant wasn't working differently from the normal.
My hope for all my games is that people play them, think "that was unusual" and then forget about them entirely for the rest of their lives.
Toad revisionist historians clumsily conceal the atrocities Mario committed in World 5-3 by replacing them with a tweaked retelling of 1-3.
"The ogre's stomp sends stalactites falling, but fortunately it tries to quickly catch and carefully re-attach them before its next stomp."
"We bought the naming rights of this spatial anomaly, but the public is still calling it 'The Lizard Hole' thanks to those endless lizards."
"Nintendo finally releases a map of SMB showing which blocks Mario canonically hit⌠The beanstalk/no-beanstalk fanon war will soon be overâŚ"
"Patch notes: tweaked enemy animations so their backflips and forward somersaults are no longer more gorgeous and extravagant than yours."
"Support for the <vortex> tag is removed. It shouldn't have made spec. Tens of hours have been lost staring mesmerised at spiralling pages."
"DEATH-AREA facts: 1) Rains tiny femurs instead of raindrops. 2) All musical instruments sound like electric guitars for some reason."
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/The_Blob_Family/ - Fixed some bugs. If you thought Jackie and Harriet were acting too similarly, well, you may have been on the money.
"Call in now, and we'll throw in a free copy of 'Hm Hm, Ha Ha: 10,013 Incorrectly Told Jokes To Scratch Your Funnybone's Noggin'!"
"You get 10,009 GOLD!
Surprised? Just a little bit extra for my favourite player. I'm so glad you remember to play me every day. ;-)"
The warrior by the fire feels jealous of his sword - that which, on the coldest of days, can leap and dance in the hot flesh of his enemies.
"The ideal person has 1,000 followers after 10,000 tweets, weighs 100kg, and has *exactly* 10 trillion cells in their body at all times."
"10,000 years ago, humanity's greatest weapon was the rock. Now KILL-Inc, the owner of the rock IP, has launched a Kickstarter for Rock 2."
A cloud of 9999s appears over the boss as you unleash your most exquisite attacks. She chuckles and grandly morphs into her Seduced Form.
"Feel free to talk," booms the Party Chamber's intercom. "I've disabled my omniscience circuit for 1 hour, so it's like I'm not even here!"
"Look, I really need my hands - I can't grab stuff with these cookie jars. Even if they had fingers, there's no telling if they'd obey me."
"Ice bullet. For desert combat. It melts to water in the body, so the victims feel refreshed and rehydrated while they bleed to death."
"We call it the Multikill. One trigger-pull shoots a laser, a phaser, a beam, a ray, a blazer, an electrozot, a negajolt, AND a zippyzap."
Time to go back to writing that Twine game, I guess. *drags previous night's work to the trash* *feels a great weight lifted from shoulders*
"You look like hell. You look like a garbage truck in a thunderstorm. Your face is an inside-out t-shirt in a clothesline-dog tug-o-war."
"Killing the enemies should be your top priority for beating this level. (Note: though it's easier, killing yourself is _not_ a good idea.)"
"We'll destroy him⌠We're gonna hit him where it hurts!" *pulls down chart of human nervous system, tries in vain to turn on laser pointer*
"The most sophisticated gun to date. The 'trigger' is the screen, and you shoot by pressing the circles until the numbers add up to 100."
"Padded grip. Low recoil. Does +25% damage to humans, but -95% damage to ducks. You can pump lead into them all day, they don't even care."
"You're holding the ultimate killing machine. 9mm dagger-shaped bullets. Steel scythe trigger. The hammer's a tiny executioner's axe."
"Yeah, go get 'em tiger!" *punches the air in a flurry* *mimes getting walloped by uppercuts* "HelpâŚ" *keeps miming for 5 minutes straight*
The Octoroks that were sprite-hacked in wizards look confused, ungainly in their new bodies. Their arms flailing, their lips puckered.
Time is a very potent elemental power - even more than Ice and Laser - and its inclusion in Twine games must be handled with grace.
Do tell me if you spot any bugs - they're still pretty simple scripts so I don't anticipate any, but I'm ears anyway.
Also someone suggested adding a matching <<insert>> variant for <<replace>> http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5019 that doesn't remove the link text.
Previously you could do <<timedinsert>> by omitting the <<replacewith>> from a <<timedreplace>>, but I decided that was a bit confusing.
I've updated <<timedreplace>> http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5029 adding slight variants <<timedinsert>> and <<timedremove>> that just add/remove text.
I like that one of the food items in Dungeon Crawl is "a sultana", which you just find on the ground as easily as any other object.
Whenever I talk seriously about tweets, I still can't help fondly imagining the phantasmal sneers of hundreds of tech bloggers from 2007.
"Ah, winter, my favourite season⌠Every living thing is dead, utterly dead⌠Nothing but chemicals and minerals⌠A true heavenly wonderlandâŚ"
Proteus is good but how do I hack it so that it plays the Click Clock Wood music from Banjo-Kazooie for each season.
"TIME FOR SEX" flashes on the walls. You both enter the Appraisal Room, where you silently scrutinise each other's naked bodies for 25 mins.
"Many dots were lost to the 'Trojan Cherry' strategy, whereby dot soldiers hiding in fruit would try to take Pac-Man down from the insideâŚ"
"You don't understand," he whimpers, "I was ironically RTing the Win A Free Slimeification tweet! Please, I hate slime, I love being solidâŚ"
Goblet Grotto Guide To Monster.
I also like that most of Coletânea Esses Games Violentos has the Game & Watch as its design predecessor - swapping beige LCD for paper.
*Opens fridge, moves finger over empty vials labeled "Ghost Blood", "Invisible Blood", etc.* "Uh oh, seems we're out of Imaginary Friend."
Wobbly starts panicking if Pac-Man takes too long, believing that a horrifying monster called "Baron von Blubba" will appear at any moment.
Reject Pac-Man Ghosts: Picky gets choice anxiety at intersections. Scarper ignores Pac-Man and frantically tries to find the maze's "exit".
#Iplayed Coletânea Esses Games Violentos. I couldn't help grinning at Pac-Man running through a maze with echoing, squeaky footsteps.
"Look, that wasn't just a jokey description - this brick wall really does have ten billion health, and right now you're just making it mad."
The cyborgs' heads were purely ornamental. In fact, they usually decayed first, leaving them metal Blemmyes, free of the veneer of humanity.
I sort of like that the stronger Dry Bones variant enemies were given the awfully obscure name "Vomers".
You end up meeting the sword-pogo specialist "Shyster" enemy before you meet the generic "Shy Guy" enemy they're based off of.
Also odd about Super Mario RPG was how a few of the names were "off-model". Fireballs were "Fire Orbs". Paratroopas were "Sky Troopas".
Your third leg isn't too bad for welded scrap metal. Ever since three became fashionable, those who can't afford a bio-leg have to make do.
"Deathdude. Ghostwiz Gus. Angus No-Kill-Um. Yes, liches are household names now as lich-lit booms. Say 'phylactery' and the money rolls in!"
Mundane slice-of-life game with ominous bars labeled "oxygen", "blood", "body heat", and "slimeification %" on the right side of the screen.
You read the NPC's mind. You feel a sharp, low-res emotion - the love and gratitude of a game that knows, just for the moment, it is alive.
You sit on the level-up screen, ready to pick a skill to upgrade. A ball of nebulous, purely generic "skill" floats in your mind, white-hot.
"I found if you do the 'turn into a frog' spell on a frog, it becomes a different frog. We have access to infinite frogs, Billy! Infinite!"
The final prize for the puzzle was turning into a washing machine, which made you immune to terrain damage, but couldn't use running shoes.
I like that Banjo-Kazooie had an ultra-hidden jigsaw puzzle minigame, and when you won it just distorted Banjo's model in different ways.
"This really cheeses my grits. It just steams my rinds. It utterly chafes my beans. I'm saying it irks my curds! âŚDamn, now I'm hungry."
After six months of silently screaming at the stalwart hero, the princess realised this is just the boxart and she'll be doing this forever.
A little girl named Ana wondering if her name's short for Diana, so she could grow up to become a daredevil performer called Never Say Di.
"Who're the clowns who named these worlds "Frostfluff Field" or "Dewdrop Downs" instead of easy-to-remember names like 6-1 or DEATH AREA?"
Your wizard paws at your newspaper, thinking it holds ancient lore. You toss its scrying sphere across the room and it levitates after it.
"FINAL BLAST: A fearsome move so powerful that it can only be used once. Please rip this page out of this manual after you've used it."
An old lady on a park bench, sprinkling tomes and power crystals to feed the wizards. They flutter down, chirping incantations merrily.
One way to put a passage link in a Twine HTML block is <a href='javascript:void(0)' onclick='state.display("Passage")' class='internalLink'>
#IPlayed this game again, after a year's absence Took 25 increasingly humiliating tries.
"Swamp 2 had spent millions creating the Z-Bomb, only to learn that nuclear weapons get weaker as you go down the alphabet, not stronger."
"TRASHCAN SQUID: Someone was paid to put a squid in a trashcan in Corridor X31 who says 'Thaaank-you' when you throw away stuff. Just⌠why?"
The wizard hurriedly pushes rolled-up scrolls into her mouth, one after another. She notices your stare and tries to cover up with her hand.
"Need to memorise a few spells before we go." She rubs the open spellbook on her face and her forehead swells until her headband snaps off.
"This guy's been dead weeks - I'll need a huge healing blast." She blows into her thumb and inflates her spell-casting arm to massive size.
"And this part of the codebase is the s12n unit. âŚWhat? You know, 'slimeification'."
(Normally, items dropped from your hold box don't give points, but due to a design oversight, that doesn't apply to the Cape Feather.)
As a kid I was a bit annoyed when I discovered you could get infinite points by just going here and mashing Select.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DramaticDisappearingDisplay - I actually made this TVTropes page years ago. I feel like I'm the only person who'd write one just for this effect.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5177 - If you want inspiration for this level hack thing, I could recommend Mario Goes Underground http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=1075
"No, that's just forced perspective. In reality those dangling razor-sharp steel stalactites are like three feet above us."
The walk-thru-walls potion wore off just too soon! Your retreating foot pokes out of the now-solid wall, its bare sole at the Queen's mercy.
The trapped souls in your crystal necklace are getting raucous. You feel it jiggle on your chest, and your dinner guests' questioning gazes.
"Another April 1 in the can and I didn't see a single prank!" *climbs into large mouth* *rolls tongue over self* "Goodnight." *fluffs molar*
"The only way to stop this cycle of violence," he pants determinedly, "is to kill my way to the guys at the top."
After six hours and 820 sweet frags, the hero finally learns the profound wisdom that the entire game revolves around: "violence is bad".
http://www.mariowiki.com/World_9-7_(New_Super_Mario_Bros._Wii) - This was the best level in the whole game and I don't care what anyone else thinks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parodius_music - I'm a bit surprised that Wikipedia has a thorough breakdown of all the music in the Parodius series.
One of my favourite examples of elegant difficulty escalation.
All the flagpole stairs, more or less, in Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels.
All the unique flagpole staircases in Super Mario Bros.
"Pretty effed up that mirrors still work when you flip 'em upside-down, but books don't. Did mirror companies patent the tech or something?"
Locked in a cage of femurs, held by a scythe over a pool of black blood and weeping statues⌠The Princess of Sorrow is an expensive guestâŚ
"Hard to believe that at my age Alexander the Great had four games on Steam and won the IGF⌠Makes you wonder what I'm doing with my lifeâŚ"
You have been slain by an acidophilus.
>HOW
You had $92 and âŹ16.
>HELP
You reached floor 2, suite 8.
>UNDO
You bopped 5 crabs and 3 wolves.
A minor NPC trying to usurp the PC by imitating the player's movements and forcing their way into as many cutscenes and bosses as possible.
"I'm kind of zonked out at the moment. Kind of pooped. Feelin' vorbed. Just real zakked. Utterly snicked. Zorched. Blooped. Vomped. Gorked."
The rope is fraying from the weight⌠You glower at the gold idol under your arm. It merely frowns at your belly. Passing the buck, as usual.
"An ouija board spelling out CHICKENDANCE.MID⌠Who can forget this classic spine-tingling opening scene? No one, no matter how hard we tryâŚ"
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5177 - Since we're now at Super Mario Bros. ROM hacking month, I made a GT event about hacking Mario.
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/The_Blob_Family/ - Here's the HTML5 port of my new action-deduction game The Blob Family. "Can you tell who's who?!" â boxart blurb.
For non-Windows customers, a HTML5 port of The Blob Family will be coming, I dunno, tomorrow or something.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5184 - Here's a new Leongame: "The Blob Family". A tricky little action puzzle game. A sequel to "Dodge Bouncing Balls".
She snaps her fingers, and ten servants crawl in, their backs bearing platters festooned with fruit. You just HAVE to steal those fingers.
The teleporter operator assures you it worked, but, predictably, your astral body got left behind. He gives you 2 spectral-bucks for a taxi.