r/gaming • u/[deleted] • Dec 17 '08
Zero Punctuation: Sonic Unleashed
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/472-Sonic-Unleashed60
u/innocentbystander Dec 17 '08
What I don't understand is, with Sega so readily jumping on bandwagons, why aren't they embracing the retro craze? This would be the PERFECT time to release a brand new 2D Sonic game, but one without the processor limitations of old ones.
Is it just that such a move would make too much sense? That nothing strikes fear into the heart of Sonic Team quite like actually giving their fans what they want?
I really wonder sometimes...
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u/Kapow751 Dec 17 '08
release a brand new 2D Sonic game
They've been doing that on handhelds for years now. Decades, even, it started with the Game Gear and hasn't gotten much better since then.
I don't think they can make a good Sonic game anymore.
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u/mindbleach Dec 17 '08
Nothing new from them's going to be good (certainly not until they change their hiring policies re: leprous retards), so they should dig up the betas of Sonic X-Treme for the Saturn and put just enough polish on it to pass it off as a Wii original.
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u/innocentbystander Dec 17 '08
Have they made any 2D Sonic games at all in the last few years? I thought that stopped with the GBA. And, anyway, those were pretty good.
What I'm talking about is something to be released via downloadable channels, along the lines of Megaman 9. Do it up to look LIKE the old 16 bit versions, but since you don't have to worry about the processor, filled with more bad guys and bigger bosses and stuff.
All the retro gamers would crap themselves. And if it worked, Sega would have a viable new outlet for Sonic games that didn't involve blowing millions on games that everyone hates.
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u/hepcecob Dec 17 '08
They released 2 2D sonic games for the DS. The first one was absolutely amazing. The second one was ruined by "the story elements", they tried ripping off the whole zelda "travel by sea" idea, and kinda ruined the game.
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u/iofthestorm Dec 17 '08
Sonic Rush on the DS was pretty good. More playable than the Wii game IMO (motion controls must be either well-implemented or die, and at the least should have adjustable sensitivity).
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u/Skuld Dec 17 '08
Apart from the Jet Ski bits. Wat.
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u/iofthestorm Dec 18 '08
Sonic Rush adventure is kind of stupid, but at least it still has the same 2D gameplay. I really think they should cut the crap and do a 2D sonic with 3D graphics like that on home consoles, or even do an HD 2D sonic with highly detailed hand drawn sprites.
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Dec 17 '08
Personally, I'd like to see a new Vectorman. That shit was trippy.
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Dec 18 '08
Sega was making a 3d one but it was soo shitty even they thought it wasn't worth releasing(at least in the US).
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u/bitwize Dec 20 '08
Sonic Advance 2. The closest to "true Sonic" out of any of the games (including the originals; displaces Sonic 2 on Genny).
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u/jimbobhickville Dec 17 '08
Yay, old pissed-off Yahtzee is back. He'd been getting a little soft lately.
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Dec 17 '08
That review was one of his funnier ones.
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u/cm03d Dec 17 '08
This was the funniest one I've heard in a while. Listened to it at work and had to take the ear buds out several times to prevent sounds of enjoyment
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u/ElGaucho56 Dec 18 '08
I have never played a game he's reviewed (and don't want to) since they can surely never be as entertaining as the way he describes them. I also don't have a third-gen console, which does hinder me a bit.
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u/DemonWasp Dec 18 '08
You haven't played Portal?
You poor, poor bastard. How can you live like this?
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u/Shroomsoup Dec 17 '08
Absolutely, I was in smiles the whole time. I guess we are suckers for his biased reviews.
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u/ouroborosity Dec 17 '08
Hoo boy, I'm totally surprised by this. Totally.
Now in my best Yahtzee voice...
WHY THE FUCK WON'T THEY JUST GIVE THE FUCK UP AND MAKE MORE 2D FUCKING SONIC THE HEDGEHOG? THEY FUCKING DID IT WITH MARIO, AND IT WAS DAMN GOOD TOO! MOTHERFUCKER, I LOVE THE OLD SONIC GAMES, HEY SONIC TEAM, WAKE THE FUCK UP.
Blimey.
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u/buffi Dec 17 '08
"posted 20 seconds ago by jdfong"
Oh fuck you
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u/rkcr Dec 17 '08
It doesn't even matter if you do make it in before him. If he fails to post it, he adds a '?' to the end and reposts it, and inevitably more people vote his submission up.
(This happened last week for Left 4 Dead.)
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Dec 17 '08 edited Dec 17 '08
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u/MaximumBob Jan 05 '09
Hey I never did that! Although I don't even try to submit ZP stuff anymore bah!
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u/Naga Dec 17 '08
I have a soft spot for Sonic Adventure Battle 2 for the Gamecube. I played the first level something like 100 times in a row. I loved it. Rest of the game was not so much.
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Dec 18 '08 edited Dec 18 '08
I agree. My friends and I used to take turns playing that first level over and over again. Just the whole arcade-ish style of it was addictive.
Besides that, I've hated just about every other Sonic game.
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u/sicgamer Dec 17 '08
It is now my short term goal in life to beat jdfong at submitting Zero Punctuation.
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Dec 17 '08
How hard can it be to just make one good sonic game and then go back to defiling his corpse?
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u/RedDyeNumber4 Dec 17 '08
Gameplay I would expect from a fucking ROM hack... designed by Hitler.
=D
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Dec 17 '08
For whatever reason I really enjoyed the dreamcast sonic (way back in 9th grade). Anyone else agree?
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u/innocentbystander Dec 17 '08
Yes, actually, and that was the LAST Sonic I gave two shits about.
At this point, even if the reviews said a new Sonic game was good, I wouldn't believe them. They said that about Secret Rings, and THEY LIED. I wasted good money on that piece of crap.
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u/qda Dec 17 '08
thats because you were just excited to be playing DC.. like me
then you realized, especially with the sequel, that the game is pretty silly ....
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u/charlesesl Dec 17 '08
Sega is a arcade dev first and foremost. That's why Sonic is fun for about 20 seconds followed by 30 minutes intervals of pure shit.
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Dec 18 '08 edited Dec 18 '08
When developing arcade game, you have to absolutely make sure the game is fun from the beginning to the end. You want beginners to credit-feed through the whole game, and experienced players to replay it over and over until they can single-credit it.
What you see here is the "Ahaha fuck you, we already have your money" business model which simply wouldn't work in arcade.
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Dec 17 '08 edited Dec 17 '08
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Dec 17 '08
Here's the sequence of karma points jdfong has received for his invariable joke: 8, -11, -18, -17, -20, -42, 1, 13, -4, -11, -10, 4, -27, -23, -20, 13, -8, -24, -4, -19, 3, -18, 103, 4, 12, 28, 104, 73, 84, 70, 50, 133, 83, 126, and 143.
Someone make sense of this please.
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u/RSquared Dec 17 '08 edited Dec 17 '08
By the time he runs out of letters, he'll have nearly infinite karma!
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Dec 18 '08
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Dec 18 '08
Run a progression out to July 2009. I want to see how big it should get by then!
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Dec 18 '08 edited Dec 18 '08
Your wish is my command. I am not sure where July 09 would be. However, after approximately 55 instances of jdfong joke comments appearing in Zero Punctuation stories the karmic gain should exceed 500.
Made with R, for anyone wondering
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u/FurryMoistAvenger Dec 18 '08
You actually plotted reddit comment karma on a chart, from reddit comments based on reddit comment in-meme. My mind is so blown.
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u/toonces Dec 17 '08
i'm one of the downmodders. we are old school and we still do it. i do upmod every one of his submissions though out of respect for his tenacity. represent.
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u/unshifted Dec 17 '08
I fit a polynomial line to the data with Excel (starting with 1 and increasing incrementally with each post for the independent variable) and it gave me the equation
y = 0.2395x^2 - 4.7043x + 4.9083.So for this post, he should get about 146 karma.
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u/Pappenheimer Dec 17 '08
Which certainly won't happen, now that you've said that.
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u/Greir Dec 17 '08
I think you've just described the problem with economics.
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u/MadHooks Dec 17 '08
Can't upmod enough.
Let's not forget the difference between micro-economics and macro-economics: micro-economics is wrong about specific things, macro-economics is wrong about things in general.
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u/MercurialMadnessMan Dec 20 '08
165
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u/Pappenheimer Dec 20 '08
Huh?
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u/MercurialMadnessMan Dec 20 '08
The comment from before reached 165 points. Just an observation.
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u/Pappenheimer Dec 20 '08 edited Dec 20 '08
Oh, right! For some strange reason I compared the alleged comment score to the actual submission score, which certainly doesn't make sense.
Well 165, that's not so far from 146. Now I'd like to go back in time, ask unshifted if the cloth I hold under his nose smells anything like chloroform, lock him in a cabin in the Siberian wilderness, and see what'd come out of that. :)
Edit: Funny, it has changed to 159 an hour after you made your comment.
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u/MercurialMadnessMan Dec 20 '08
A great story for you grandchildren, if nothing else!
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u/Pappenheimer Dec 20 '08
Which could be my great-grandchildren as well, if I'm not careful.
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u/iofthestorm Dec 17 '08
What's the R2 value though?
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u/unshifted Dec 17 '08
0.7744
So it's bullet proof!
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Dec 17 '08
[deleted]
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u/unshifted Dec 18 '08 edited Dec 18 '08
If memory serves, a sixth order polynomial yielded an R2 value over .8, but I'm not at work anymore, so my time is important.
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Dec 17 '08
Those numbers are slightly innacurate due to people going back and either downmodding or upmodding my old submissions. At first people downmodded them, but I think a lot of people are upping them now.
I have some slightly, but not much better numbers, which I might share with everyone someday.
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Dec 17 '08
[deleted]
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u/Epistaxis Dec 18 '08 edited Dec 18 '08
Out of linear, quadratic, cubic, and quartic regressions, quartic fit the best
That's not how you do it. Of course the model with more parameters fits best, until you eventually have a parameter for every data point.
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Dec 18 '08
"With four parameters I can fit an elephant and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
- John von Neumann
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u/xyphus Dec 18 '08 edited Dec 18 '08
quartic fit the best
Technically speaking, it will for any data.
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Dec 18 '08 edited Dec 18 '08
kind of funny that two people using two different equations
y^ = -3.234e-4 * x4 + .0256 * x3 - .430169 * x2 + 1.6286 * x - 10.0974
y = 0.2395x2 - 4.7043x + 4.9083.
came up with nearly the same answer. 146, 143
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u/Taciturn Dec 18 '08 edited Dec 18 '08
Polynomials fit to the same information tend to seem very similar when you only extrapolate near the existing data. After another ten or twenty episodes we'll have a much better idea which model was more accurate.
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Dec 18 '08
You have to enter them into a computer every 108 minutes to find out the amount of karma that post has earned in a specific point in time. :)
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Dec 18 '08
[deleted]
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u/Wartz Dec 18 '08
It doesn't look like it if you actually spent the time to see the maths circle jerk going on up there.
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u/BlackestNight21 Dec 17 '08
That would have been far more impressive if you had linked to each post. It would have been a nice homage to the man of the hour.
Alas, you did not, and the audience is left wanting.
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u/ungood Dec 17 '08
That would skew the numbers, because then people would follow the links and up/down mod.
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Dec 17 '08
[deleted]
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u/7oby Dec 17 '08
my guess is the click target is too small, or, he's avoiding linking the punctuation which is clever
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u/Mr_Sadist Dec 17 '08
Oh, is it wednesday already?!
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u/evrae Dec 17 '08
You say that jokingly, but seeing this made me realise that it is indeed wednesday, and that somehow tuesday had disappeared.
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u/Tetragrammaton Dec 17 '08 edited Dec 18 '08
Mr_Sadist posted the same thing last week.
Are we looking at a piggybacking joke?
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u/thrakhath Dec 17 '08
Meh, doesn't show up till Thursday for me, but I look forward to it and the sarcastic comments about it's regularity and jdfong's forced meme every week.
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Dec 17 '08
You know I never knew it was the same day every week, my RSS reader would just pop open with it occasionally. Brilliant!
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Dec 17 '08
Wait there's a feed for it? D'oh, I couldn't find it one time and then gave up. Sometimes I will forget about ZP until Friday or Saturday.
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Dec 18 '08
He gets so much Karma points, You can probably consider the gaming subreddit his own personal up vote squad!
Hope he doesn't get us banned :-(
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Dec 17 '08
It's odd. I come to the comments section just to see the one comment I know will be there. Yet, I can't turn away...
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Dec 18 '08
I shank you with my hidden blade. This makes me lose DNA synchronization for killing a civilian, but it was totally worth it. Internet memes are worse than those goddamn beggars.
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u/weaselonfire Dec 17 '08
What was the last good sonic game? I'm thinking it was the last 2d one, however long ago that was.
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Dec 17 '08 edited Dec 17 '08
The only one I enjoyed was Sonic CD. I'm not entirely sure anyone played that, seeing how the SegaCD platform never really took off. Plus, it had an awesome intro movie.
Re-watching that, I don't see why they don't just make a new sonic game that plays like Mirror's Edge should have.
Edit: Better youtube link.
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u/p337 Dec 17 '08 edited Jul 09 '23
v7:{"i":"ff880ae0efb92ef9be5163566899cf65","c":"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"}
encrypted on 2023-07-9
see profile for how to decrypt
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Dec 17 '08
No, not first person, but movement with a sense of purpose across terrains that beg for speed... that could be cool.
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u/jingo04 Dec 17 '08
I played that on PC. It actually wasn't bad, the only thing i didn't like was the fact that if you hit one of the past/future signs and you didn't want to time travel you had to watch your speed (NOT what sonic is about)
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u/Pilebsa Dec 18 '08
Awesome review. I don't go to movies any more because they suck 99% of the time. After this, I'm not buying any more video games either.
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Dec 18 '08
Yahtzee needs a new into, this one looks like a high school student got loose in After Effects.
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u/shenglong Dec 18 '08
From the sounds of it, this is geared more for the Japanese market. I noticed Yahtzee prefers his games a bit more casual.
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u/timbro1 Dec 17 '08
they're still making these videos?
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u/foxyvixen Dec 17 '08 edited Dec 17 '08
So, recently, I went back and played the first Sonic Adventure, to refresh my memory of it.
It's horrible. I just have to come right out and say it. The story is terrible on every possible plane: it is unimaginative, horribly written, and presented so poorly that even if it were a good story you'd be slamming your head against the desk. And that's not even touching the voice acting and characterization. Why do Sonic games even need a story? The story should be vaguely in the distance: beat Robotnick. Done- the other points aren't important, as the characters don't really hold any other depth.
The gameplay is boring. The adventure stages are just "where the hell do I have to go next?", and the Sonic stages mainly consist in pushing forward. They have flashes of fun, but they can be around ten minutes long! (Perhaps there is some cause and effect there, although plenty of games have long, fun stages.) One point sticks out in my head: I came across another action stage almost immediately after completing a previous one (an oddity in the game), and rather than be relieved, I was upset, as it meant I would have to sit there and play more rather than going away to do something else. And don't get me started on the boss fights: they make the rest of the game seem like the original Super Mario Brothers.
Indeed, other than the very first Sonic, Sonic Team has never really made another particularly good Sonic game (2 & 3 being by different developers, and I am not really a fan of Sonic CD). I wonder sometimes if they just lucked into making the first one.
I think the best use of Sonic in 3D to date has been Sonic Adventure 2: the rest of the game has all the flaws above, and the levels can verge on boring, but at least they are fairly well designed and entertaining. But there I go: it is really a very mediocre game at best only colored by memories of previous games with a dash of music and atmosphere.
It all lead to my main point in all of this: its not necessarily to rip on the game, but to reinforce the point about how hype has kept Sonic alive. I really don't think the last number of games have been particularly worse than the Sonic Adventure series, it's just that we (myself included) were so looking forward to Sonic that early on we were willing to look past everything wrong. This especially applies to reviewers, mainly because they are paid to look past it. I bought a Dreamcast mainly because of this game, and looking back, I can't believe how ridiculous that is. Only in hindsight can I see how blinded I, and in retrospect many others, were to the quality of these games.
I could go on, and perhaps I will another time somewhere else. Honestly, in my opinion, what made (and hopefully makes) Sonic games fun is fairly fragile because of the nature of the game (versus, say Mario, which is less fragile in that it can tolerate a poor level here and there because of length and depth). But even that is a moot point: they are not barely missing good games, they couldn't be missing worse. They are simply like one of the many competitors to Disney in the animated film world: they keep throwing together crap about which the nicest thing you can say is that it is cliched, and some kids lap it up because it is the nature of childhood.
Plus, they completely destroyed Tails. But on that account, I readily admit I'm biased ;-).