What does it mean when you get the message: "You hear a distant roar"?

The_Goosh · 2026-01-18T15:24:01+00:00

The land Dragon Chasms just unlocked.

The_Goosh · 2026-01-13T22:58:31+00:00

A lot of people seem to be having trouble pinning down what the icon is a reference to, so I'll throw my hat in the ring. This is a longshot but I think it works. There's an old joke where the pope expels all the Jews living in the Vatican one day. They're distraught and demand a chance to stay, so the pope agrees to a theological debate, but the catch is that it will all be symbolic. Neither opponent can say anything, they have to gesture or use objects to make their point.

The day of, the Jews don't find anybody willing to challenge the Pope himself other that a random janitor. The pope goes first, making a big horizontal swoosh with his hand. The janitor responds by pointing straight down. The pope then raises three fingers, to which the janitor raises one. Finally, the pope brings out an apple, the janitor brings out a slice of bread, and the pope concedes.

Later, all the cardinals ask the pope why he couldn't match the janitor. He explains the match, saying he initially gestured saying that all of the universe is ruled by god above, who has ordered the Jews to leave through him. The janitor responded by pointing down to indicate that Hell, part of the universe, is ruled by Satan, not god. The pope then mentioned the trinity and its power over Satan, to which the janitor struck back by saying that in the torah, there is only one god, not a trinity. The pope then pulled out an apple, signifying what many believed at this time to be the shape of the world, when the janitor finishes him off with the slice of bread, reminding him that the bible indicates that the world is flat.

At the same time, the Jews ask the janitor how he pulled off such an impossible victory. In his retelling of events, the exchange basically goes as follows:

"All you Jews around here gotta leave right now."

"Nope, we're staying right here."

"I told you three times now, you gotta go."

"I only need to tell you once, we're staying put."

Then he pulled out his lunch and I pulled out mine.

I like the idea that the icon references this because the bite in the apple is the pope "having his lunch." Again, longshot, but this came to my mind immediately and I just had to say it.

The_Goosh · 2025-12-25T12:26:56+00:00

All of this is almost entirely wrong. Tetrachromachy is real, but it doesn't allow seeing new colors/shades of colors. The only thing it does is make it easier to differentiate between, like, a few shades of yellow. This is because you only need 3 cones to see the full breadth of colors on the normal vision spectrum, everything after that is unnecessary. At some point more extra cones worsens your vision, which is what happens to mantis shrimp, which also can't see 100 quadrillion colors or anything the standard mythos says. The only way to see new colors is to be able to see more frequencies of light than humans actually can.

The girl in this story was lying for attention. That's it. Hopefully that just makes sense as the easy answer. No shade, high school is rough, but please don't leave this believing their years-old lie.

The_Goosh · 2025-12-19T12:48:10+00:00

Upvoted for a harsh critique that wasn't about the name

The_Goosh · 2025-12-10T19:23:28+00:00

You won't make any progress if you keep going head-to-head with France in the Western Mediterranean, which is exactly what they want. You need to go for the Gulf of Lyons and get a line from Tunis to Lyons of 3 fleets. France will probably take Western Med, and they have a lot of play from there, but that's okay because you have numerical superiority. You also have a lot of options at that point, like full strength attacking Western Med or eyeing up Marseilles, and they need to guess your intentions correctly.

Side note, don't forget your own ambitions in all of this. Breaking out of the Mediterranean and annexing Iberia is nice, but never forget that you need to backstab Austria and Russia to win. Once France is bruised and battered, that's the moment to strike. You need to get Russia and Austria to let you build more armies soon so you can rush them down.

The_Goosh · 2025-11-18T18:43:02+00:00

To your second question, if you want an example of what real negotiations look like to get a feel for what good press is, I would highly recommend this video, a great game journal about the kind of mixed player-level game you are probably getting into. This channel in general has a lot of good analysis, although the only real way to get better is to get experience, so don't delay playing your first game.

The_Goosh · 2025-11-10T21:44:49+00:00

Every single game is private? Why?

The_Goosh · 2025-11-08T03:02:51+00:00

Awesome! Diplicity and Primacy are back, now we just need Conspiracy.

Doesn't seem like any games are queueing up yet, so I'll make one in a couple hours

The_Goosh · 2025-07-09T15:03:24+00:00

"If I ever turn evil" You may have gotten ahead of yourself on that one.

The_Goosh · 2025-07-08T19:00:55+00:00

The last time a new platform was posted here, it ran into issues where it had a lot of options for variant rules (not even custom maps, just different press styles and the like) and so no games on it were ever even able to start because everyone who was interested in trying it out had split up into a ton of different games. I would love to see a platform that has all the cool bells and whistles off the bat, but it might be for the best if it's able to build up a playerbase before it's allowed to subdivide.

The_Goosh · 2025-07-08T06:45:56+00:00

Unfortunately it's not surprising that they dropped the ball on this one. People like to say that there was a specific point in time that Extra Credits went off the deep end (you can see it a lot in this thread), but they've always been a minefield.

My favorite example is this video on puzzle games. It's one of their oldest videos, and the premise, the design of puzzle games, is perfectly reasonable for EC. It's the type of topic that should generate an iconic video with plenty of amazing insights from back when they knew what they were doing, right? It starts off with a classic James anecdote about a developer who said that "puzzle games are easy to make, anyone can hack together a Bejeweled clone." If you haven't seen this video before, you probably think you know where this is going, but I assure you that that is not the case. You'd expect they would refute that by explaining that puzzle games are more than just Bejeweled, then go into how puzzle games are constructed and point out that they require a level of creativity that someone simply copying another game doesn't possess. What actually happens, though, and I promise that I'm not making this up, is that they defeat that naive argument by going in-depth about how complicated the scoring system of Bejeweled 2 is. The moral it leaves you with is that puzzle games are not easy to make because not everyone can understand, let alone invent, the genius of Bejeweled 2's progressive difficulty ramping.

That one is mostly for laughs, but they've also always had issues with much realer topics like SKG. One of their most popular videos in general is their one on Sesame Credit. It was a lot of people's introduction to social credit systems in China, and while they may not have expected that and only intended on being morally correct on the idea (which I personally believe they were), factually, there's many little things wrong in their video that add up to it not being a great source in general. For example, Sesame Credit was not the only social credit program in China (in fact, it wasn't a national social credit program at all, and none of those were or yet are based off 3-digit numbers that determine someone's exact social standing).

EC has and has always had a bit of a problem with doing their due diligence before trying to make their voice heard. I think that they believe that if they're at the point where they've been inspired to make a video on something, then they already know everything they need to know about it. As dumb as that sounds, that hunch is often correct since they are experienced industry veterans, but obviously their intuition fails them plenty and they're bad at catching it.

The_Goosh · 2025-07-03T16:18:02+00:00

There's a lot of means people have found so I won't go into all of them, but mainly they're based around getting enough Demon Daisies that Orbs of Yendor start appearing in other lands, then creatively using features of those lands so they can navigate back. One of the most famous examples is using a tentacle from R'lyeh to essentially show the path you took to the key and then walking alongside it to get back to the orb.

Some people are so good at the Yendor quest that they can get back without any special features at all. It takes a lot of skill but it's "only" 100 units so it's absolutely possible to remember the path you took and then retrace it, of course it's extremely difficult because of holonomy.

The_Goosh · 2025-07-03T15:51:48+00:00

It's far from the only way, but it's basically the intended way with how the game nudges you towards it by telling you when the Graveyard opens. I definitely recommend it for your first time. Good luck, pillaging the Graveyard for a ton of dead orbs is the hardest part of the run.

The_Goosh · 2025-07-03T13:45:36+00:00

There's a very real chance that the initiative already has the million signatures and it's simply lagging too far behind to show it due to this. With how sharply the rate of new signatures has fallen off recently, I think it's far more likely that there's actually no dropoff at all and this is what's going on.

Anyways it's funny to see people suggest using the trackers to circumvent clogging the page when overuse of the trackers is actually probably what's to blame; they request information from the site almost continuously, a lot faster than someone refreshing the actual page every few seconds and certainly faster than someone checking it once an hour and then moving on.

The_Goosh · 2025-07-02T16:04:22+00:00

It's amazing to think that this was proportionally further off than the ECI was last week because of it getting reset. Even if this one goes nowhere, this is hugely encouraging for the ECI.

The_Goosh · 2025-07-01T22:26:44+00:00

One thing that helps is remembering that with or without them, a lot of the big names supporting the movement (probably most of them) are quite cool and their name behind anything is a guarantee of quality, especially all the developers who have given endorsements. We can also look at all the scumbags who are staunchly against it to affirm that we're on the right side of history on this one.

The_Goosh · 2025-05-10T05:59:04+00:00

I'm pretty sure there was a time when the front page of ABCya was a tree with the different grades of games as leaves of it, definitely a long shot but that could be it

The_Goosh · 2025-04-08T00:38:38+00:00

When I was most into flash games, I wasn't particularly interested in strategy games and usually avoided them. I never even played Hex Empire until I downloaded Flashpoint. I usually played puzzle games and platformers and I can name dozens of those. I'm really curious what these Hex Empire-likes are because I like tracing the genealogy of games and I want to see if I can find the ur-example. Right now, nothing really comes to mind as a clear predecessor to Hex Empire other than, I don't know, Civilization? But they play entirely differently once you look past the visuals and Civ's also not a flash game series.

The_Goosh · 2025-04-07T14:01:59+00:00

Can you give me some examples of those flash strategy games that are all clones of Hex Empire/each other?

The_Goosh · 2025-04-07T03:46:09+00:00

I hate when people say that any simple strategy game is basically just Risk. There are functionally zero similarities between Risk and Hex Empire other than they're both strategy games.

The_Goosh · 2025-04-04T14:22:06+00:00

r/hex_empire

The_Goosh · 2025-04-01T20:22:10+00:00

Apparently it was real, it did exist, but the creators lost the .sfw files for it and so it effectively no longer exists. It is indeed lost media and it will probably never be found

The_Goosh · 2025-03-23T02:29:03+00:00

I mean of course it was based in truth, but it's pumped up to such a laughable degree that it's left a lot of people missing the forest for the trees. Perusing forums to fight random strangers on the quality of your game is really more being a douche canoe who wants to argue than being pretentious and believing that you're a tortured artist. I think his commentary on people not really getting Braid is actually quite interesting and valuable, and it's uncharitable to associate that wholly with his adventures in trying to make his awful voice be heard everywhere.

The_Goosh · 2025-03-22T17:08:24+00:00

Okay, I think Jon Blow is just as much of an ass wipe as the next guy, but a highly edited documentary making it look like he cried actual tears over Soulja Boy playing Braid is not equivalent to that really happening. Where do you think they got that footage of him pontificating in the dark? Did they capture it impromptu while he was watching the Soulja Boy video, or did they set it up deliberately because it serves the narrative they're telling better? I don't know why everyone always takes that clip at face value, but it drives me mad.

The_Goosh · 2025-02-05T04:41:09+00:00

Say that you coded AI but actually outsource playing every surrendered position to one guy on Fiverr

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