The irrelevant, pointless, space fillers that they have become. How are we meant to complete a crossword on a static pdf? Screenshot it and draw on it in paint? Print it out?

I do not wish to single out any particular magazine for the puzzles they contain but below is a screenshot of a puzzle included in a recently released GameMaker magazine – a crossword/wordfill with 5 answers.

A bit of fun – possibly, but do we really need GameMaker themed puzzles?

I await the first GameMaker themed Sudoku with anticipation.

Persistence presence of puzzles perplexes me is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Read his full post. He also suggests YYG to make 39DLL an official extension. What do you think? (essential request for comments: check.)

Is it time to deprecate mplay? is taken from: GameMaker Blog

The main content in this episode is reviewing the 10 “best games” for YoYo Games’ winter competition. The review system seems to have changed according to the criticism received.

During the reviews, the sound mixing often got a bit poor, making the narrator hard to hear [times slid to the technical side: 1].

The reviews did get a bit boring to watch: I’d liken if there would have been other content in the middle of the reviews. Oh well.

And I realized something that still hasn’t been fixed. Here we go:

“Are you after exclusives, Game Reviews, Devloment [sic] Articles and Free Sound Resources? Not to mention interesting interviews, then look no further, because Game Maker Technology has all that, plus…”

Eh. In any case, the reviews did not seem flawed any more: GMTV “balanced” the review process well. Graphics, gameplay and sound are all addressed: there’s also a review of how well it fits into the “winter competition” theme.

Something that disturbed me while Danny was on screen how he looked like he was looking at something above the camera. Oh well.

As for the interview with Bendodge, nice lava lamp. I’ve always wanted one, but I realized I’d just manage to break it in one way or another it’s at the end of the episode. Featuring basically questions about Scorptek (I like to call it “Parkedtek.net”), what he does in the community and then some filler questions and a small joke. Not too interesting.

That sums up this month’s episode. Reviews and an interview. While the content was decent, I would have liked to see much more than just reviews. How about tutorials? “Video editorials” or something similar? Three stars (out of five).

…technical side: I don’t know why they call the “high quality” video “high quality” when you can barely see most of the text onscreen due to compression artifacts. Not only that, it somehow looks to me like the video source material has already been horribly compressed. 0 points, guys! And the volume issue, too.

And a small ending note. If you post a comment that basically sums up the words “f**k”, “you” and “tuntis” (that’s not a word though), it will be deleted. (Just in case, seeing from what you guys have done to some other posts of mine!)

GMTV 3 detailed review is taken from: GameMaker Blog

I have written a complete list of necessary improvements to YYG.com, for everybody. I will divide these arguments into multiple categories: “Profile” and “Gaming”. Profile will contain criticism on the profile & user system of the site. Gaming will contain more criticism on the gaming section of the site, including all game management tools and InstantPlay. I’ll also include additional criticism on other parts of the website.

Profile

As YYG.com is the official community website for GM-made games, it should be clear that it needs a complete user system. But in this case, it does not: it is lacking in many directions.

1. While this isn’t exactly an issue related to the user system directly, the lack of moderation is worrying me: there are a lot of flame fests on users’ pages and imposter profiles keep on coming. No matter how many reports are sent, nothing seems to happen. Either YYG’s staff is taking one hell of a new year vacation or they just suck at checking the report queue.
2. The user shoutboxes or game comments are not user-moderation possible. While reporting is possible, there is no karma system (such as YouTube’s new commenting system) and users can’t even remove comments on their own profile or games.
3. The user profiles can not be customized almost at all: being a “web 2.0 gaming website” (as they claim it) means some sort of customization. But no, you throw in your age, description and some other basic user info and that’s it. Let’s say that you don’t have favorite games in YYG: your profile still shows it. It’d be convenient to be able to hide it from showing up.

Gaming

YYG.com certainly has made a lot of effort on the side of the games, their upload and playing. Their InstantPlay mechanism certainly has helped on the amount of games tested out: no more manual downloading, it does it for you. But deep down, this system is still flawed in many, many ways.

1. As Microsoft Vista came out (Please, do not make a 500 word long comment on how much Vista “sucks”), users quickly discovered that Game Maker 6- made games would not run on their computers. Obviously this caused some kind of outrage, but fortunately after a short time, an official GM6 to Vista “upgrader” was released, allowing GM6 made executables to be converted to Vista- compatible games. YYG.com lacks any indication if the game will work with Vista. They should auto-detect a GM6 signature, for example, in the game and show a warning to Vista users: or just simply demand game uploaders to do it themselves: GM6 or not (or made Vista-compatible)? [update: esh corrected that InstantPlay will make GM6- based games compatible on Vista; but some users might prefer to download it instead: they'll be greeted by a nice "game.exe crashed" dialog box.]
2. Although this is a minor point, InstantPlay needs some additional improvement. For example, users should be allowed to set another temp directory where it should download the games to.
3. The game pages should also allow maximum customization: maybe make it more attractive than the typical white background – green/gray content? Custom backgrounds would be nice, so would be custom text boxes (instead of the small Description box)… your imagination the YYG.com staff’s imagination is the limit.
4. The navigation is flawed. I doubt an user looking for games to play (snort) would want to go through hundreds of pages to find a good game. Perhaps a randomizer with some extendable search queries (e.g. I don’t want to play Adbarlian Castles Catch the Clown!) would help.

And the rest

I hope I’ve established some points that you are free to debate in the comments. But before that, I will point out some other things bothering me (note that this also includes some general criticism on YYG):

1. Their forums. There’s the GMC: what do we need a pathetic clone of it for? This is like decentralizing the community. There’s the “YoYo’ers” and “GMC’ers”. It doesn’t make sense: there’s always space for an YYG section in the GMC.
2. Their lack of communication with the community. Yes, we’ve got a lot of announcements, they even have a “glog” (and they even forced Mark to blog), but their communication with “us” just seems so stiff.
3. YYG still hasn’t used their full power to improve the state of GM: much more could be done.

That’s about it. Feel free to comment!

YoYo Games: what would make the website much better is taken from: GameMaker Blog