Abdulmajeed Al-Shuaibi

This Saturday, two injury-stricken teams — Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest — will meet on the field, and both teams desperately need a win.

Hi, I’m Warren Arnold, a Director at Jackbox Games and in case you haven’t heard, we’re launching The Jackbox Party Pack 7 at PlayStation Store tomorrow! Seven Party Packs! How DO we do it? A lot of hard work, deep dedication and a spring of ideas.

In all seriousness, what drives our innovation is that we love to play games with each other. You might not think that a game company built on fart jokes has fun, but we do! And the great thing about playtesting at Jackbox is that you trust everyone here to look at your idea and give creative and uplifting notes that hopefully gets a game across the finish line and into a Party Pack. 

While I have at least part of your attention, let me give three examples from The Jackbox Party Pack 7 of how ideation and playtesting helped elevate some already great game ideas.

Quiplash 3

First, let’s take a look at Quiplash 3, which features a brand-new final round called Thriplash. Once we decided that there would be a new entry in the Quiplash library, we quickly decided that we would try a new structure for the final round. We had company-wide meetings that focused on what we liked about earlier final rounds and what we thought we could do to take Quiplash’s final round in some new directions. 

Many ideas were pitched and many were playtested before we landed on a classic tentpole of comedic structure: the rule of threes. On the surface, it seemed like a natural progression from asking players to create one joke for a prompt, to asking them for three. It playtested well, but we could tell it was missing one final piece: the reveal. Initially, the text appeared all at once, but a brilliant comment resulted in the text appearing one, two, three, which really helped the third part of the joke land. While we were happy with older versions of Quiplash, opening up an old favorite to new ideas really helped us find a simple, yet elegant final round.

Champ’d Up

Playtesting was also huge for Champ’d Up, an energetic drawing game where players create characters who battle it out for titles like “The Champion of The Graveyard.” In the first round, one player knows the title and the other has to create a challenger by only seeing their opponent. So one is left to wonder what sort of title a fancy duck or a muscular robot might hold before they create a challenger. 

The team could’ve stopped there but they wanted to raise the stakes in the second round. So, they took what was already working and made some slight adjustments. Through several play tests, they discovered that adding a round where neither player knew what title they were competing for made for some hilarious matchups and really raised the energy in the room. By heightening what was already there, the playtests immediately proved that we had a winner. 

The Devils and the Details

And last but certainly not least ambitious is The Devils and the Details, a cooperative game where players provide instructions to each other as a family of demons living in the suburbs. Just like any other family, they’ve got a crushing amount of mundane tasks to perform throughout the day. The Devils and the Details is heavily dependent on the controller to complete the family’s task, so the team had to test each unique chore to make sure it added to the building energy of the game. 

Chores, like driving the kids to school, require one player to monitor the GPS and shout directions to the player driving the car. Lost a sock? One player has to describe the sock, while another swipes the rest of the laundry out of the way on their controller. Each task needed to be properly ordinary but have a compelling action on the controller. And how did they find out what worked? Have you not been paying attention? Geez. Playtesting.

Each of these games greatly benefited from the time and effort put into them by people who really love what they do. Hopefully, you enjoy playing them as much as we here at Jackbox Games enjoy making them.

It's really easy to skip story cutscenes and dialog in an MMO. Whether your friends are ahead of you or you're racing for world first in a new expansion, the pressure is on, and the extreme length of the genre doesn't help if you only have a limited time to play. Thankfully in the era of YouTube folks have recorded their journies, and that's to say nothing of the ability to re-watch cutscenes in-game in some titles.

One such game is Final Fantasy XIV (which lets you watch everything in an inn), but if you don't want to go through all that trouble, this series of clips is the next best thing. YouTube user Tamiil has most of A Realm Reborn's 2.0 storyline available to watch, and eventually they may work on cutting Heavensward and Stormblood together.

XIV's narrative rivals that of a lot of core games, so it's probably worth checking out at some point -- even if you burn through it during the free month you got with the base version.

Read more...

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
In the future, you'll pay to chop wood, but it's not real wood.

New comic!
Today's News:

The older you get, the less time for videogames you have. It starts slow, but soon it gets so bad that even the IDEA of long, time-consuming games like Witcher 3 (that used to be your favorite thing in the world) starts to fill you with existential dread. Dedicating over 100 hours to a game? When you've got other responsibilities, are trying to maintain some semblance of a social life, and are getting older and more tired and starting to go to bed at a reasonable hour (instead of staying up til 2:30am EVERY NIGHT).

What used to be a relaxing hobby has become...well, something else entirely.

Click here to see more great art by Andy Kluthe!

Robin Shelby as Slimer rehearsing a scene for Ghostbusters II.

The post Slimer appeared first on This Is Not Porn.

This is a buying guide, but I would be remiss to just point you at a list of microSD cards with no information to make your own informed decision. If that’s what you are after, feel free to scroll straight to the bottom and enjoy. But, if you’re interested in exactly why I recommend those cards and want to understand what to consider when making the decision yourself, then I encourage you to read on.

Read More

A buyer's guide to microSD cards: classes, speeds, recommendations, and more (Spring 2017) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

• Explosm
• Home
• Store
• C&H Show
• Comics
• Shorts
• Minis
• Live
• News
• Apps
• Joking Hazard
• Comic Generator

Some of you might remember Plastc. They were a company that jumped on the re-programmable credit card train Coin and Google Wallet started in '13 and '12, respectively. They may have been a bit later to the game in 2014 after even Google had decided that it wasn't a good idea anymore, but they made the attempt. Later even the funding-successful Coin had to close shop due to delays, problems, and a general failure to properly keep up with the market.

Read More

Plastc joins the likes of Coin, declaring bankruptcy was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

John Huston and Orson Welles on the set of The Other Side of the Wind.

The post John Huston and Orson Welles appeared first on This Is Not Porn.

Google's version of Android has historically been relatively light on features, but the Mountain View-based company has been rapidly closing that gap. Other implementations of Android have had multi-window for a while now, but that took until 7.0 Nougat to make its way onto stock Android. Now, we're getting another feature that we've seen on other skins: custom lockscreen shortcuts.

In Android Lollipop, those spaces were reserved for the phone (left) and camera (right).

Read More

Android O feature spotlight: Custom shortcuts can now be added to the lockscreen via System UI Tuner was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Link Bubble, originally released in 2014, is a web browser that displays pages in floating windows. Tabs were replaced by free-floating 'bubbles', which would expand and collapse the page content with a tap. Think Facebook Messenger, but with web browsing.

The original developer, Chris Lacy, later sold Link Bubble to an unknown tech startup. This was later revealed to be Brave Software, which used Link Bubble as the base for its ad-blocking Brave Browser.

Read More

Brave Software ceases development of Link Bubble, removes it from the Play Store was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Audition polaroids taken by casting director Mali Finn.

The post Audition Polaroids appeared first on This Is Not Porn.

A young Robert De Niro with his dad Robert De Niro Sr., ca. 1946.

The post Robert De Niro and Robert De Niro Sr. appeared first on This Is Not Porn.

Back in 2014, I found a way to loop YouTube videos using a feature of the HTML5 player. It looks like YouTube added "loop" as a standard feature. Just right click inside the HTML5 player and click "loop". This way, you can watch a video on repeat until you pause it or uncheck "loop" from the contextual menu.


It also works for embedded videos. Here's a short video you can use to test the loop feature:

Google's new Nexus phones are expected to arrive at the end of the month, and Droid Life now believes it knows the names of them: the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P. The 5X name has been floating around for a few weeks now, while the 6P name is new; in both cases, Droid Life reports that they should be final.

Continue reading…

According to CNet, Google will announce the oft-leaked two new Nexus phones at an event on September 29th in San Francisco. Based on multiple leaks, we're expecting two new phones, one made by LG and another by Huawei. The LG phone should be smaller, with a polycarbonate shell reminiscent of the old HTC One X and featuring a fingerprint sensor on the back. Of course, in 2015 "smaller" is a relative term: we're expecting it to have a 5.2-inch screen. Huawei's Nexus is potentially more interesting. It should have a 5.7-inch screen and a largish camera module on the back. It also is expected to have a fingerprint sensor. It would be Huawei's first Nexus phone, something that honestly has been a long time coming for a company that's been...

Continue reading…