narcolepsy
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Robotoki's platformer starring a narcoleptic child, The Adventures of Dash
Robotoki is keeping busy: It's working on a zombie survival romp called Human Element, a prequel to that game for the Ouya, and now has a Kickstarter for a cute 2D platformer, The Adventures of Dash. The Kickstarter has 30 days to raise $400,000. If it reaches its goal, Robotoki wants to launch the game in seven months, in November of this year.Led by former Infinity Ward man Robert Bowling, Robotoki's The Adventures of Dash is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer – for PC, Mac, Linux, Ouya, iOS, Android and consoles – starring Dash, a 9-year-old boy with narcolepsy.Dash falls asleep anywhere and for any reason, including at school, in his lunch, while on a walk and in all manner of slightly dangerous situations. When he dreams, the art style of the game changes along with the gameplay. The Adventures of Dash pulls art from a range of 2D artists and throws it all into one game under a semi-seamless plot device.Robotoki hopes to launch Dash on PC, Mac, Linux and Ouya in November, and will then work on building touchscreen controls for mobile. Profit from these initial sales will fund console development, though if the Kickstarter raises more than $400,000, the extra cash will be used to develop and ship console versions day-and-date with the first group.%Gallery-180410%
Recent MBPs suffering from 'narcolepsy'
There's an active thread on Apple's support boards about current-model MacBook Pro machines, running current builds of Leopard and Snow Leopard. These MBPs are refusing to wake from sleep. Specifically, users find a black screen when trying to rouse their machines, despite hearing the disk spinning up and (in some cases) seeing the screen contents displayed without a backlight. Only a hard restart (holding the power button until the machine shuts off) can revive it. The issue seems to be more prevalent on machines running Mac OS X 10.6.3, but some 10.5 users have spotted it as well. In long-running thread (12 pages worth), the affected users have identified a few potential triggers: The Sudden Motion Sensor, overloaded virtual memory swap files, and an excess of remembered Wi-Fi networks. After disabling the motion sensor (how-to here), several users reported that the issue all but disappeared. It wasn't eliminated entirely for everyone that tried it, but it seemed to occur much less frequently. Another group reported a sharp decline in the issue after cleaning out the machine's list of remembered networks. To do this, launch System Preferences and click Network. Select Airport in the left hand column and then click Advanced. A new slip appears with a list of your "Preferred networks." This is a listing of all of the Wi-Fi networks you've ever successfully connected to. If you're the type who hops from coffee shop to library to bookstore, it could be quite long. Simply select any you'd like to eliminate and click the "-" beneath the list. Just remember that, should you encounter those networks again, you may have to re-enter your access info. My MBP is an ancient artifact, and so far free of this issue. Now, the inevitable question: Has this trouble plagued your machine, and if so, have you found a fix?
Animations to die for
I was chatting with a friend the other day (shut up! I do too have friends!) and we were playing reference poker -- you know, someone makes a comment referring to some aspect of pop culture, and the other person replies in kind. She said ' ... you are eaten by a grue.' I made the obligatory Zork return reference and we moved on, but the bit about being eaten stayed with me for some reason. That night, I was running around in WoW and realized that nobody in Azeroth is eaten by anything.Why can't we have encounter-specific death animations? I, for one, would love a chance to be messily devoured by a Sludge Beast! I can imagine the horrific wounds as it slid over me, eating away at my flesh until only bones remained. A much more affecting experience than merely swooning and dropping dead, as though nothing more mortal than narcolepsy had occurred. Or how about a set of pre-built death animations, available at the touch of a key? Everything from 'clutching at your heart: myocardial infarction', to 'going white as a sheet and dropping dead from fright', to 'Scanners cranial explosion'. In fact, wouldn't this make pulling off the ol' 'Feign Death' trick a lot more fun? I'm telling you, it's the little things in life that make existence bearable. Let's see more creativity with our dying moments, developers! Believe me, you stand to ... make a killing. Hahaha! Oh, I slay me.
