Yay birthdays
City of Color from Splatoon
Hi all. My family got together today to celebrate two birthdays, my eldest niece's and mine. My actual birthday is this Friday, but of course I don't object to celebrating a bit early. ;) I mostly got Discworld books (some of which are apparently going to be delivered digitally on my actual birthday) and money for games. My brother and his wife also took me to see The Incredibles 2 on Friday. The plot didn't grab me the way the original's did, but it was still plenty entertaining with lots of fun moments. My sister made a cake that looked like a dinosaur diorama, basically by stacking smaller cake pieces in the corner, covering the whole thing with chocolate frosting, squeezing extra vanilla frosting of different colors (green for vegetation, yellow-red mixture for lava) onto appropriate spots, and sticking little plastic dinosaurs on it. And it had sparkler candles on top of the volcano. ;)
Remember what I said last month about Unity's high-level networking API having a way to invoke functions on the clients and servers? Turns out that's limited by some permissions based on what object the script is running on. :/ It worked when I was testing with the host instance, but when I tried it with a client, it ran afoul of those permissions. It's quite possible I could've figured out how to set things up to work within those permissions, but while doing research, I found out that the high-level API actually does have functionality for doing what I really wanted to do -- send simple messages directly from client to server and vice-versa. It required a bit of setup that wasn't entirely clear from the main Unity documentation, but I eventually found a tutorial that helped me wrangle it up. So now the basis of networking is finally working in my Conflict Resolution System. n.n
On the Zelda RPG, Daray and his Yiga followers eventually found the location Ganondorf had marked for them, where there was a hidden trapdoor in the forest floor. Daray carefully rigged up a pulley to open the trapdoor and for once warned the others ahead of time to be wary. The scene-runner took that as an opportunity (or maybe he'd had it in mind all along, but I doubt it) to make the trapdoor booby-trapped with magic, and one of the Yiga was too slow to avoid it despite the forewarning and got skeletonized. Daray then proceeded into an underground tunnel, accompanied by one particularly bold Gerudo-turned-Yiga called Fuma.
After a while they came to a cavern where some monks with reptilian features were praying, and there was an enscription on the wall hinting that those who prove their worth without resorting to weaponry may be rewarded with a piece of power. The head priest took Daray into another chamber where there was an ancient tome on a pedestal. He explained that the mineral in this area could absorb the magic exuding from the tome, and told Daray he could have a couple of pebbles...if he could take them from the monk's belt. Very much echoing Kakashi's bells test from Naruto, although in this case there was no hidden agenda -- the stated challenge was exactly what was intended.
Daray did some experimental hand-to-hand combat with the monk, who turned out to be extremely proficient in formalized martial arts. He also had some sort of strange ability in which he seemed to become momentarily almost intangible and move very quickly. To clinch the fight, Daray pretended to be knocked back by one of the monk's blows...into the pedestal holding the tome. When the monk used his ability to catch the precious book just before it hit the floor, Daray was ready with a kama to the monk's kidney. Reminder, Daray is very much a bad-guy character.
After that, Daray left with the pebbles in one hand and the tome itself, wrapped in his Sheikah turban and hidden under his cloak, in the other. It wasn't long before the other monks discovered the murder and chased Daray and Fuma to the tunnel exit. One of the other Yiga waiting outside thoughtlessly dropped an explosive into the tunnel while Daray and Fuma were still climbing out, and Daray had to use the magic of the pebbles to seal the tunnel below them before they were caught in the blast. But anyway, the baddies are now in possession of a magical artifact that can reshape the landscape. :o
Full Throttle Remastered:
A little background on this one: the original Full Throttle was one of the lesser-known offerings from the golden age of LucasArts graphic adventure games. The story follows Ben Throttle, the leader of a biker gang in a vaguely-defined post-apocalyptic world. Ben finds himself framed for the murder of the owner of the only motor company remaining in the company. The unscrupulous second-in-command of the company beat the owner to death, sent his goons to rub out the owner's secret daughter, and plotted to shift the company's focus to MINIVANS! THE HORROR! So Ben has to dodge law enforcement, the bad guy's goons, and rival biker gangs while trying to gather the evidence that will clear his name. It's grittier than most of the LucasArts games, but still has a fair amount of silliness.
Gameplay-wise, Full Throttle is about what you'd expect from a LucasArts graphic adventure title. It uses a limited "verbiage" system in which clicking on an object brings up four options: look, interact with hand (pick up, manipulate, maybe punch), interact with mouth (talk, on rare occasion actually touch something with your mouth), and interact with foot (kick, climb onto). The Curse of Monkey Island used the same system minus the foot option. Due to the nature of the plot progression, the explorable world at any given point is smaller than in most other graphic adventures, which makes things easier -- less combinations of places and objects and actions to try. It does suffer from some rather non-obvious objects, though. The Remastered version mitigates this somewhat by providing object highlighting at the push of the Shift key, although even this doesn't solve everything -- oh look, if I hover the cursor near the side of this building it turns into an arrow indicating I can walk around behind it. c.c Yep, wouldn't have killed them to highlight the transition spots too. :P
There's also a brief segment of the game that involves actual action combat between bikes driving alongside each other, although it's mostly just a matter of leaning into your opponent and clicking attack as fast as possible. Different opponents have different weapons, and when you defeat one you claim their item, increasing your options. Certain opponents have particular weaknesses to specific weapons, and there's one especially important fight that's more a puzzle than anything else -- you need the right weapon, the right timing, and while the opponent actually doesn't attack you, if you touch him he'll lay down an oil slick that can instantly crash you.
Finally, I'll note that the final chapter of the game is rather annoying. It involves a climactic road chase and is the one part of the game where you can actually "die", although after the explosive animation the protagonist just narrates something along the lines of, "Dang, lemme try that again," and things reset to the last checkpoint. You do have to watch a bit of cutscene over again each time that happens, though. And some of the last puzzles involve exploring a computer menu for options that could solve your situation, with not enough time to look over all of them, let alone try them.
Oh, and in my personal opinion, the remastered graphics do look a lot better than the original, although I only briefly looked at the original, and my preferences do lean toward the cartoony. Bottom line? It's not the best thing LucasArts churned out, but it's a decent game with some amusing moments. Grab it if you like the old-school graphic adventure games, and don't be too proud to reference GameFAQs when you get stuck.
Click to viewHi all. My family got together today to celebrate two birthdays, my eldest niece's and mine. My actual birthday is this Friday, but of course I don't object to celebrating a bit early. ;) I mostly got Discworld books (some of which are apparently going to be delivered digitally on my actual birthday) and money for games. My brother and his wife also took me to see The Incredibles 2 on Friday. The plot didn't grab me the way the original's did, but it was still plenty entertaining with lots of fun moments. My sister made a cake that looked like a dinosaur diorama, basically by stacking smaller cake pieces in the corner, covering the whole thing with chocolate frosting, squeezing extra vanilla frosting of different colors (green for vegetation, yellow-red mixture for lava) onto appropriate spots, and sticking little plastic dinosaurs on it. And it had sparkler candles on top of the volcano. ;)
Remember what I said last month about Unity's high-level networking API having a way to invoke functions on the clients and servers? Turns out that's limited by some permissions based on what object the script is running on. :/ It worked when I was testing with the host instance, but when I tried it with a client, it ran afoul of those permissions. It's quite possible I could've figured out how to set things up to work within those permissions, but while doing research, I found out that the high-level API actually does have functionality for doing what I really wanted to do -- send simple messages directly from client to server and vice-versa. It required a bit of setup that wasn't entirely clear from the main Unity documentation, but I eventually found a tutorial that helped me wrangle it up. So now the basis of networking is finally working in my Conflict Resolution System. n.n
On the Zelda RPG, Daray and his Yiga followers eventually found the location Ganondorf had marked for them, where there was a hidden trapdoor in the forest floor. Daray carefully rigged up a pulley to open the trapdoor and for once warned the others ahead of time to be wary. The scene-runner took that as an opportunity (or maybe he'd had it in mind all along, but I doubt it) to make the trapdoor booby-trapped with magic, and one of the Yiga was too slow to avoid it despite the forewarning and got skeletonized. Daray then proceeded into an underground tunnel, accompanied by one particularly bold Gerudo-turned-Yiga called Fuma.
After a while they came to a cavern where some monks with reptilian features were praying, and there was an enscription on the wall hinting that those who prove their worth without resorting to weaponry may be rewarded with a piece of power. The head priest took Daray into another chamber where there was an ancient tome on a pedestal. He explained that the mineral in this area could absorb the magic exuding from the tome, and told Daray he could have a couple of pebbles...if he could take them from the monk's belt. Very much echoing Kakashi's bells test from Naruto, although in this case there was no hidden agenda -- the stated challenge was exactly what was intended.
Daray did some experimental hand-to-hand combat with the monk, who turned out to be extremely proficient in formalized martial arts. He also had some sort of strange ability in which he seemed to become momentarily almost intangible and move very quickly. To clinch the fight, Daray pretended to be knocked back by one of the monk's blows...into the pedestal holding the tome. When the monk used his ability to catch the precious book just before it hit the floor, Daray was ready with a kama to the monk's kidney. Reminder, Daray is very much a bad-guy character.
After that, Daray left with the pebbles in one hand and the tome itself, wrapped in his Sheikah turban and hidden under his cloak, in the other. It wasn't long before the other monks discovered the murder and chased Daray and Fuma to the tunnel exit. One of the other Yiga waiting outside thoughtlessly dropped an explosive into the tunnel while Daray and Fuma were still climbing out, and Daray had to use the magic of the pebbles to seal the tunnel below them before they were caught in the blast. But anyway, the baddies are now in possession of a magical artifact that can reshape the landscape. :o
Full Throttle Remastered:
A little background on this one: the original Full Throttle was one of the lesser-known offerings from the golden age of LucasArts graphic adventure games. The story follows Ben Throttle, the leader of a biker gang in a vaguely-defined post-apocalyptic world. Ben finds himself framed for the murder of the owner of the only motor company remaining in the company. The unscrupulous second-in-command of the company beat the owner to death, sent his goons to rub out the owner's secret daughter, and plotted to shift the company's focus to MINIVANS! THE HORROR! So Ben has to dodge law enforcement, the bad guy's goons, and rival biker gangs while trying to gather the evidence that will clear his name. It's grittier than most of the LucasArts games, but still has a fair amount of silliness.
Gameplay-wise, Full Throttle is about what you'd expect from a LucasArts graphic adventure title. It uses a limited "verbiage" system in which clicking on an object brings up four options: look, interact with hand (pick up, manipulate, maybe punch), interact with mouth (talk, on rare occasion actually touch something with your mouth), and interact with foot (kick, climb onto). The Curse of Monkey Island used the same system minus the foot option. Due to the nature of the plot progression, the explorable world at any given point is smaller than in most other graphic adventures, which makes things easier -- less combinations of places and objects and actions to try. It does suffer from some rather non-obvious objects, though. The Remastered version mitigates this somewhat by providing object highlighting at the push of the Shift key, although even this doesn't solve everything -- oh look, if I hover the cursor near the side of this building it turns into an arrow indicating I can walk around behind it. c.c Yep, wouldn't have killed them to highlight the transition spots too. :P
There's also a brief segment of the game that involves actual action combat between bikes driving alongside each other, although it's mostly just a matter of leaning into your opponent and clicking attack as fast as possible. Different opponents have different weapons, and when you defeat one you claim their item, increasing your options. Certain opponents have particular weaknesses to specific weapons, and there's one especially important fight that's more a puzzle than anything else -- you need the right weapon, the right timing, and while the opponent actually doesn't attack you, if you touch him he'll lay down an oil slick that can instantly crash you.
Finally, I'll note that the final chapter of the game is rather annoying. It involves a climactic road chase and is the one part of the game where you can actually "die", although after the explosive animation the protagonist just narrates something along the lines of, "Dang, lemme try that again," and things reset to the last checkpoint. You do have to watch a bit of cutscene over again each time that happens, though. And some of the last puzzles involve exploring a computer menu for options that could solve your situation, with not enough time to look over all of them, let alone try them.
Oh, and in my personal opinion, the remastered graphics do look a lot better than the original, although I only briefly looked at the original, and my preferences do lean toward the cartoony. Bottom line? It's not the best thing LucasArts churned out, but it's a decent game with some amusing moments. Grab it if you like the old-school graphic adventure games, and don't be too proud to reference GameFAQs when you get stuck.