Thu May 23 2002 08:01:
Kevan sends a link to the Spam
Scam Contest's first non-Nigerian entry.
- Sum: $36,000,000
- Kevan's cut: Not stated
- Proposed crime: I'm not entirely sure (conspiring to hide the spoils of war?), but it ain't legal.
Kevan hopes this will win the audaciousness award, and it probably will, not only for the bad light in which it seems determined to cast our boys, but for its obsessive use of military beuracratese and terrorism button pushing. "dreaded Taleban AlQeada terrorist network dot com!"
Thu May 23 2002 09:52:
The Enterprise cliff-hanger last night was quite exciting! Also, Daniels (the agent from the future) looks a lot like my co-worker Jason Brittain. The obvious conclusion: Jason is also from the future! He's come back in time to revamp our build system!
Thu May 23 2002 15:33:
Spam: "Receive great offers!" I just did!
Thu May 23 2002 21:26:
The tricky game feature now works, not perfectly, but well enough
that I can come back to it later when I'm in the mood for rewriting
and debugging. For a while today I despaired, multiplying beyond count
all the possibilities I would have to support. Not only would it be impossible for me
to implement all the cases, there would be too many slightly different options for the player to specify in text exactly what
it was they wanted to do.
Then I calmed down. Between the start of the game and the activation of the feature, the player must make three lateral thinking
breakthroughs, and by the time they do so
there's no longer any point in playing dumb and pretending you don't
know what they're trying to do. Much better to reward them by making
it easy to express the actions that, by the time they get to it, will be obvious
to them.
And, of course, any other useless cases implied by the small subset of useful cases can be dealt with by the game
designer's favorite trick: the arbitrary "you can't/don't want to do that" restriction.
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