Josh

My mistake: It's control+OPTION+eject, which puts your machine to sleep. If you have your machine set to prompt for a password (I believe this is under screensaver) then it will prompt you when it wakes up. Sleep and wakeup is so fast on my machine, that this is what I've been using to lock it when I'm away from it.

I believe control+shift+eject does effectively lock your screen if you have your screensaver set to prompt for a password.

@DivinoAG

Yeah, you're right, Apple forced me to buy their phone.

Sure is a lucky coincidence that I just happen to agree with their opinion of flash, its impact on the stability of a system (from ANY company) and their approach to carefully maturing a solid, unified hardware/software platform, or I'd have been so screwed.

@DivinoAG

Yeah, you're right, Apple forced me to buy their phone.

Sure is a lucky coincidence that I just happen to agree with their opinion of flash, its impact on the stability of a system (from ANY company) and their approach to carefully maturing a solid, unified hardware/software platform, or I'd have been so screwed.

Flash is bloated, slow, and proprietary. It is absolutely ridiculous that you need modern-day, desktop-grade hardware just to run 2D sprite animations, or small video clips at a semi-stable frame rate. Running video playback via a custom software-only virtual machine is just lazy. I find it to be a stain on user interfaces in particular, and embarrassing, irresponsible software engineering in general. Adobe needs a swift kick in the pants, or better yet - needs to be eclipsed by industry standardized features proposed for HTML5 - to be controlled by no single company.

Flash played an important role in prototyping a new direction for the web, but it has remained terribly inefficient. It is time for it to significantly evolve, or be superseded. While it seems that now, finally, in 2009, adobe is just starting to make a push achieve this, it is only after years of pressure from competitors, and finally the threat of being made irrelevant by HTML5. Apple has been pushing hard to support HTML5, and I applaud them for standing their ground.

It's time for the future, and if it takes a few bumps in the road to get there, so be it.

Yes.

I think the artwork needs to look more complicated.

To Ludwig and zpoc,

Please read my posts. I say nothing about difficulty level, am not lamenting the loss of 'old school' games, or being unwelcome to progress in the medium. I ended my first post by saying that "I applaud any attempts made by developers to fix those problems - including this one."

Ludwig, you say: "...You're not discerning between Elika and a regular checkpoint system at all..."

Yet I spent my whole first post discerning the differences between the two. I don't know how that was missed. To summarize: Checkpoints only invade the immersion when you die. Elika invades the immersion at all times during gameplay - despite their attempts to make a place for her in the story arc. In short, I believe this solution undermines itself. My first post explains how.

Ludwig, you also say: "...The only real difference here is that Elika is a character that exists within the narrative, whereas checkpoints are invisible..."

...exactly.

Again, to reiterate: I am strongly _for_ the consolidation of all game concepts into the game world itself when possible, and I applaud them for taking the chance to do so. I just think they fumbled this one.

...and I forgot to mention - I still maintain that having a "continue screen in carnet" follow you around as part of the actual game world itself does more damage in the way of constantly reminding you "its just a game" than a separate "game over" screen would - which in my mind defeats the stated purpose for this whole solution.

"If you are constantly being saved, then you're not playing well enough! It's not Elika that's sapping out the heroism in that case, now is it?"

Sure it is. Because when you finally do succeed, what have you actually overcome? Because of Elika and the way the "checkpoints" work, now your failures mean almost nothing, and as such so do your successes.

And as far as damage to the players perception of their character: Even if you never even fall once in the game, and do it perfectly - this pair of gameplay training wheels is always on screen -- following you around "just in case". This does take away from the sense of respect for your character and what he (ie you) is accomplishing.

Would you like playing a motorcycle game - where the bikes were all trciked out and full of potential - only to have a pair of "training wheels" attached to the bike the whole time you played?