Back in business!
Calamari Inkantation from Splatoon
Hi all. It's been a busy month for me. A student asked me to be on her team in a tech challenge being run by the college -- turns out they were willing to let staffers participate as well as students. That ate up two of my weekends in a sense. The first was because the team was meeting on Saturday morning at another campus. I stayed at my parents' house (they live near that campus) so that I could get there on time, and stuck around because I would've driven down again on Sunday anyway. Then the actual event took place on the following Friday at yet another campus halfway between the two, and I again stayed over at my parents' that weekend to mitigate driving. The event itself was interesting, although it took a long time because each time was only allowed to do one event at a time (which in turn was because they didn't have enough faculty to supervise otherwise). There was a lockpicking event, a fiber optic event, a programming event, a web page development event, a computer assembly event, and a server hacking event. My part was the programming and web page events, although I didn't do stellar on the latter because it involved Dreamweaver, with which I am not very familiar. X) The server hacking event was actually done by a member of our team who was blind, and worked using a command prompt program that read text to him in a very rapid, garbled-sounding stream. He wowed the judges with how quickly he was able to break into the system, and much ado was made of it during the awards ceremony. Overall, my team placed second out of four, and we received micro quad-copter drones as prizes.
I've been contacted by recruiters a lot lately for some reason. They mention having found my profile on Dice, an online job website. I wonder if maybe it's been passed over before because I didn't have five years of steady work history until recently. e.ea So far the jobs they've presented haven't really interested me, but it'll be nice if something good pops up soon.
Relatedly, I recently gave in and got a land phoneline service. I'd always figured there was little reason for a reclusive guy like me to pay monthly for phone service when I already had a cheap yearly rate on my cell phone, but it seems my house is in something of a dead zone for cell service, which was made painfully clear by the trouble I had communicating with the recruiters. :P So I ordered service for my regular phone line, and along with it got my Internet speed doubled (I apparently couldn't do less than that as a package deal). It's actually going to be $5/month cheaper than what I was paying before, but only for the first year. c.c
I don't have much exciting to report in Forgotten Gates. I've mostly been chugging along (when I had time, which wasn't as much as usual even thanks to that tech challenge) on the battle plugin. I think I've got the code for reading skill data in working properly now. I'm not quite ready to actually make use of it yet, but it runs without crashing the game or anything. I also fixed up some aspects of the battle display system, which I unfortunately adapted to Forgotten Gates before making updates to the generic plugin. X) I'm at a point where I need to start altering how the scripting in the project's RM2K3 scripting works to work in tandem with the battle plugin.
My replacement graphics card fan finally arrived, and it did fix the trouble I was having. :D The cord was almost too short to reach where it needed to, though. c.c; With that, I've been able to get back to work on Bombercan, and while I haven't made much progress, the progress I did make was significant -- the essential gameplay is complete! :D It's still pretty rough, with no menu system, no recognition of a win, no round reset without actually restarting the program, and "killing" a player doesn't actually stop them from roaming around and dropping bombs. X) But there are four players in an arena filled with destructible blocks and working power-ups. Check my website if you'd like to download the first playable build.
Splatoon:
I've actually had this game for quite a while now, but I've only been able to play it sporadically because my old Internet connection apparently wasn't quite fast enough to support the online play. XD I'd join a match, things would appear to go smoothly for about 10 seconds (about how long it takes to reach the center of the map and maybe encounter the opposing team), then "connection is unstable" would flash on the screen, and a moment later I'd be dropped from the match. :P That's the first big thing you should know, if your Internet service isn't pretty decent, you won't be able to enjoy the primary meat of this game. For reference, my old plan allowed 1.5 MBps download speed, and my new one allows 3.0 MBps. I was able to play Team Fortress 2 and similar online multiplayer games without much issue on my old plan, but apparently Nintendo's games require a bit more bandwidth. Although, to be thorough, I should note that my new plan required me to get AT&T's special "U-verse" wireless router...maybe my old router was part of the problem.
Anywho, how's the game itself? Pretty creative, really. :) The basic idea is online team-based third-person shooter. Not that different from the pack apart from using third-person view, right? Well, you're using paint-guns rather than regular guns to splatter not only the opposing team, but the ground and walls of your arena. Okay, so it's about claiming territory by shooting it, that's a little more unusual. Oh, it gets better. See, you can submerge and swim in your team's ink, traveling much more quickly and safely than walking. You can't shoot while submerged, but you're invisible to the enemy team (apart from a very subtle wake when moving) and your ammo tank will refill quicker. Furthermore, the enemy team's ink will not allow you to submerge, will tremendously slow your walking, and will splat you if you spend more than a few seconds on it (which of course can be hastened if a foe catches and shoots you). Basically, covering territory with your team's ink not only contributes to your score, it confers a HUGE tactical advantage. It's a game balanced between zealously covering the map with your team's ink and utilizing that ink for sneaky ambushes.
Interestingly, that also contributes to keeping the game fun in between encounters with the opposing team. In a typical shooter, you might spend quite a bit of time simply roaming hallways and such, looking for targets to shoot. Maybe it's spiced up a little by the spawning of armor/weapons/etc. that encourage you to risk visiting certain spots, or maybe you actually find a little nook to camp in (YOU HEATHEN). In Splatoon, however, even during times when you're not faced with an opponent, you're busy with a decently engaging activity: efficiently slathering the map with your weapon of choice. There are still peaks and valleys of excitement due to combat and not-so-combat moments, which is psychologically a good thing for long-term play, but the valleys aren't as low as in most shooters.
I could go on and on about the different types of weapons and subweapons and special abilities available and the launch-in mechanic and the grind-enabling clothes system, but that would take much longer than I should spend on one of these mini-reviews. X) I'll just mention one pro-tip: get into ranked battles as soon as the game allows you to. They make it sound like it'll be significantly more competitive than regular battles, but at least at the start, what it really means is that you'll be tossed together with a bunch of players who haven't done many ranked battles themselves. In my first ranked battle, I absolutely dominated, getting 19 splats against the enemy team, 4 of which came from catching the ENTIRE ENEMY TEAM in a single special attack. XD More importantly, though, ranked battles are worth significantly more experience/cash than regular battles. If your team gets trounced, you get nothing at all, but a win is worth around three times what a regular battle win is worth. Also, the game modes in ranked battles are different from the basic "turf war" and have concrete win conditions, so a side can win before the time limit is used up, which means more matches per time spent playing.
Multiplayer aside, Splatoon does also have a decently lengthy single-player campaign. You spend it traversing a series of structures suspended in the sky, blasting from one to another and clearing them of low-threat (or not-so-low-threat) mooks. There are a few clever obstacles, like sponge platforms that expand when you shoot them or invisible walls that have to be painted to be seen. Occasionally you do a stage which pits you against AI opponents in one of the multiplayer arenas, or a miniboss or boss that requires you to somehow exploit your ink-swimming capability to get at a weak spot. I'll mention that there was one stage in particular that I thought was poor design. It involved a small Pac-Man-ish maze of passages roamed by invulnerable machines that cover the ground with enemy ink as they pass, and they WILL pursue you if they see you. If they don't see you, they still have a decent chance of turning toward you at any given junction. e.e; Any given attempt to get through is more likely than not to end with being chased back out the same way you entered, if you don't get trapped and splatted.
On the whole, though, it's fun and has a good level of challenge. I especially enjoyed the final boss, which had a lot of amusing chatter going on during it in addition to the exciting combat. That tune in the video at the top of this post? That's what plays during the final leg of that fight. ;) I won't spoil why, but it was a rousing anthem for that last push to victory.
Bottom line? As long as your Internet service can handle it, Splatoon is a fresh and fun take on the hardcore-polarized genre of online shooters. Grab it!
Monument Valley:
The Amazon store frequently gives specific games away to owners of their special Fire Tablet. I don't expect to find a lot of great games for tablet, but I try to play a few just for the design study, and when they're the ones that actually try to sell on their own merits commercially being given for free, well, why not? Monument Valley is a nice little gem amongst such.
The premise of Monument Valley is navigating Escher-esque environments where reality is tied to perception. From one view, you might see two separate, clearly-disconnected platforms. Turn the environment around, and those platforms will appear to align such that they actually touch. Well, that's just an optical illusion, right? It doesn't mean anything...until your avatar walks through the imaginary path. 8o The game presents all manner of space-warping puzzles, from making water flow uphill to walking on walls. Despite their unintuitive nature, the puzzles usually aren't very hard in terms of the number of things you could try. There are usually only one or two elements of the game world to manipulate at a time, and you just have to fiddle with them until you realize the bizarre possibility they open up. It's almost a guided tour of geometric oddities in an atmospheric and elegant little world.
Bottom line? An intriguing and not at all expensive little treasure. Pick it up if you'd like some contemplative impossibility-exploration.
Click to viewHi all. It's been a busy month for me. A student asked me to be on her team in a tech challenge being run by the college -- turns out they were willing to let staffers participate as well as students. That ate up two of my weekends in a sense. The first was because the team was meeting on Saturday morning at another campus. I stayed at my parents' house (they live near that campus) so that I could get there on time, and stuck around because I would've driven down again on Sunday anyway. Then the actual event took place on the following Friday at yet another campus halfway between the two, and I again stayed over at my parents' that weekend to mitigate driving. The event itself was interesting, although it took a long time because each time was only allowed to do one event at a time (which in turn was because they didn't have enough faculty to supervise otherwise). There was a lockpicking event, a fiber optic event, a programming event, a web page development event, a computer assembly event, and a server hacking event. My part was the programming and web page events, although I didn't do stellar on the latter because it involved Dreamweaver, with which I am not very familiar. X) The server hacking event was actually done by a member of our team who was blind, and worked using a command prompt program that read text to him in a very rapid, garbled-sounding stream. He wowed the judges with how quickly he was able to break into the system, and much ado was made of it during the awards ceremony. Overall, my team placed second out of four, and we received micro quad-copter drones as prizes.
I've been contacted by recruiters a lot lately for some reason. They mention having found my profile on Dice, an online job website. I wonder if maybe it's been passed over before because I didn't have five years of steady work history until recently. e.ea So far the jobs they've presented haven't really interested me, but it'll be nice if something good pops up soon.
Relatedly, I recently gave in and got a land phoneline service. I'd always figured there was little reason for a reclusive guy like me to pay monthly for phone service when I already had a cheap yearly rate on my cell phone, but it seems my house is in something of a dead zone for cell service, which was made painfully clear by the trouble I had communicating with the recruiters. :P So I ordered service for my regular phone line, and along with it got my Internet speed doubled (I apparently couldn't do less than that as a package deal). It's actually going to be $5/month cheaper than what I was paying before, but only for the first year. c.c
I don't have much exciting to report in Forgotten Gates. I've mostly been chugging along (when I had time, which wasn't as much as usual even thanks to that tech challenge) on the battle plugin. I think I've got the code for reading skill data in working properly now. I'm not quite ready to actually make use of it yet, but it runs without crashing the game or anything. I also fixed up some aspects of the battle display system, which I unfortunately adapted to Forgotten Gates before making updates to the generic plugin. X) I'm at a point where I need to start altering how the scripting in the project's RM2K3 scripting works to work in tandem with the battle plugin.
My replacement graphics card fan finally arrived, and it did fix the trouble I was having. :D The cord was almost too short to reach where it needed to, though. c.c; With that, I've been able to get back to work on Bombercan, and while I haven't made much progress, the progress I did make was significant -- the essential gameplay is complete! :D It's still pretty rough, with no menu system, no recognition of a win, no round reset without actually restarting the program, and "killing" a player doesn't actually stop them from roaming around and dropping bombs. X) But there are four players in an arena filled with destructible blocks and working power-ups. Check my website if you'd like to download the first playable build.
Splatoon:
I've actually had this game for quite a while now, but I've only been able to play it sporadically because my old Internet connection apparently wasn't quite fast enough to support the online play. XD I'd join a match, things would appear to go smoothly for about 10 seconds (about how long it takes to reach the center of the map and maybe encounter the opposing team), then "connection is unstable" would flash on the screen, and a moment later I'd be dropped from the match. :P That's the first big thing you should know, if your Internet service isn't pretty decent, you won't be able to enjoy the primary meat of this game. For reference, my old plan allowed 1.5 MBps download speed, and my new one allows 3.0 MBps. I was able to play Team Fortress 2 and similar online multiplayer games without much issue on my old plan, but apparently Nintendo's games require a bit more bandwidth. Although, to be thorough, I should note that my new plan required me to get AT&T's special "U-verse" wireless router...maybe my old router was part of the problem.
Anywho, how's the game itself? Pretty creative, really. :) The basic idea is online team-based third-person shooter. Not that different from the pack apart from using third-person view, right? Well, you're using paint-guns rather than regular guns to splatter not only the opposing team, but the ground and walls of your arena. Okay, so it's about claiming territory by shooting it, that's a little more unusual. Oh, it gets better. See, you can submerge and swim in your team's ink, traveling much more quickly and safely than walking. You can't shoot while submerged, but you're invisible to the enemy team (apart from a very subtle wake when moving) and your ammo tank will refill quicker. Furthermore, the enemy team's ink will not allow you to submerge, will tremendously slow your walking, and will splat you if you spend more than a few seconds on it (which of course can be hastened if a foe catches and shoots you). Basically, covering territory with your team's ink not only contributes to your score, it confers a HUGE tactical advantage. It's a game balanced between zealously covering the map with your team's ink and utilizing that ink for sneaky ambushes.
Interestingly, that also contributes to keeping the game fun in between encounters with the opposing team. In a typical shooter, you might spend quite a bit of time simply roaming hallways and such, looking for targets to shoot. Maybe it's spiced up a little by the spawning of armor/weapons/etc. that encourage you to risk visiting certain spots, or maybe you actually find a little nook to camp in (YOU HEATHEN). In Splatoon, however, even during times when you're not faced with an opponent, you're busy with a decently engaging activity: efficiently slathering the map with your weapon of choice. There are still peaks and valleys of excitement due to combat and not-so-combat moments, which is psychologically a good thing for long-term play, but the valleys aren't as low as in most shooters.
I could go on and on about the different types of weapons and subweapons and special abilities available and the launch-in mechanic and the grind-enabling clothes system, but that would take much longer than I should spend on one of these mini-reviews. X) I'll just mention one pro-tip: get into ranked battles as soon as the game allows you to. They make it sound like it'll be significantly more competitive than regular battles, but at least at the start, what it really means is that you'll be tossed together with a bunch of players who haven't done many ranked battles themselves. In my first ranked battle, I absolutely dominated, getting 19 splats against the enemy team, 4 of which came from catching the ENTIRE ENEMY TEAM in a single special attack. XD More importantly, though, ranked battles are worth significantly more experience/cash than regular battles. If your team gets trounced, you get nothing at all, but a win is worth around three times what a regular battle win is worth. Also, the game modes in ranked battles are different from the basic "turf war" and have concrete win conditions, so a side can win before the time limit is used up, which means more matches per time spent playing.
Multiplayer aside, Splatoon does also have a decently lengthy single-player campaign. You spend it traversing a series of structures suspended in the sky, blasting from one to another and clearing them of low-threat (or not-so-low-threat) mooks. There are a few clever obstacles, like sponge platforms that expand when you shoot them or invisible walls that have to be painted to be seen. Occasionally you do a stage which pits you against AI opponents in one of the multiplayer arenas, or a miniboss or boss that requires you to somehow exploit your ink-swimming capability to get at a weak spot. I'll mention that there was one stage in particular that I thought was poor design. It involved a small Pac-Man-ish maze of passages roamed by invulnerable machines that cover the ground with enemy ink as they pass, and they WILL pursue you if they see you. If they don't see you, they still have a decent chance of turning toward you at any given junction. e.e; Any given attempt to get through is more likely than not to end with being chased back out the same way you entered, if you don't get trapped and splatted.
On the whole, though, it's fun and has a good level of challenge. I especially enjoyed the final boss, which had a lot of amusing chatter going on during it in addition to the exciting combat. That tune in the video at the top of this post? That's what plays during the final leg of that fight. ;) I won't spoil why, but it was a rousing anthem for that last push to victory.
Bottom line? As long as your Internet service can handle it, Splatoon is a fresh and fun take on the hardcore-polarized genre of online shooters. Grab it!
Monument Valley:
The Amazon store frequently gives specific games away to owners of their special Fire Tablet. I don't expect to find a lot of great games for tablet, but I try to play a few just for the design study, and when they're the ones that actually try to sell on their own merits commercially being given for free, well, why not? Monument Valley is a nice little gem amongst such.
The premise of Monument Valley is navigating Escher-esque environments where reality is tied to perception. From one view, you might see two separate, clearly-disconnected platforms. Turn the environment around, and those platforms will appear to align such that they actually touch. Well, that's just an optical illusion, right? It doesn't mean anything...until your avatar walks through the imaginary path. 8o The game presents all manner of space-warping puzzles, from making water flow uphill to walking on walls. Despite their unintuitive nature, the puzzles usually aren't very hard in terms of the number of things you could try. There are usually only one or two elements of the game world to manipulate at a time, and you just have to fiddle with them until you realize the bizarre possibility they open up. It's almost a guided tour of geometric oddities in an atmospheric and elegant little world.
Bottom line? An intriguing and not at all expensive little treasure. Pick it up if you'd like some contemplative impossibility-exploration.