Job shift on the horizon
Breakfast Song by Newsboys
Hi all. Things have settled back into a typical routine again for the most part. Things could be changing up a bit at my job soon, though. There's talk of shifting me from my current quality assurance testing position to programming. :o That would of course be a step closer to the things I really want to do in my career, and it will probably pay a bit better too.
The long weekend that included Martin Luther King Day was rather busy for me. I called up my old college housemate to see if he'd like to get together for games on Saturday or Monday. He told me Monday would be good for that, but he was going to an interactive entertainment convention hosted at the local science museum on Saturday...so I wound up going to that with him as well as visiting him on Monday. X) The convention was a mix of indie game devs showing off their in-development games, simulation companies showing "serious games" exhibits, workshops to teach kids the basics of programming, etc. There were also a couple of Smash Bros. tournaments which I participated in, one for the Wii U version and the other for Ultimate on the Switch. If I remember correctly, I made it through two rounds in each tournament (maybe three in the Wii U one) before meeting a serious tournament-style player and getting trashed by glitch exploits. X) About the best I can hope for in a tournament, really.
I managed to build up a little steam again this month on the ASCRS. The network communications for sending info about pending attacks and chat messages are working now, and I'm trying to fix things up so that somebody joining the game gets sent all of the current info. I just got yet another distraction, though: somebody reported a game crash caused by my DynBattleChoices plugin. I'm not sure if it's something I'll be able to fix, as some things are caused by DynRPG or RPG Maker 2003 itself, but I'm going to investigate it.
On Zelda RPG, Esava and Tommy have been dropped off on the roof of Ikana Castle by Esava's wyvern friend. Naturally something that huge landing on the roof caused some noise, so a couple of Garo (ninja ghosts) came up to investigate. Esava hid by jumping up into the rafters, and Tommy tried to jump out a window and hang from the ledge outside...but it proved too narrow and he got stuck. The Garo questioned him about the noise, and quickly realized he wasn't one of "the master's" scrubs because he spoke too cogently -- the castle's scrubs are apparently in a zombie-like state. Fortunately Esava was able to pounce on the Garo that had its blade pointed at Tommy, and Tommy got himself unstuck and finished it with his knife. Now the other Garo is on the attack, and I'm awaiting a pose from Esava to see how he deals with it. Meanwhile, the first Garo's defeat has alerted a certain someone that something is amiss in the castle...
I've also started up a plot starring some small, furry heroes! In a book I got as part of a Humble Bundle, Family Games: The 100 Best, I heard about a simple RPG called Cat: A Little Game about Little Heroes. It occurred to me that the Zelda setting would dovetail nicely with the concept, so I bought the PDF version of the rulebook (only $5) and drummed up a couple other players. The plot started with Sheikah (Shemri's feline companion) going to the dream realm and putting out a call for others to come help deal with malice specters which arose from the dark goo Ganondorf unleashed and started preying on people's fear. He was responded to by a grey-striped cat called Tipper and a snow fox called Kito (the rules allow for non-cat heroes if desired). They're now trying to get into the children's dormitory at night to take out a few specters, preferably without the complication of any two-legs seeing them and wondering why an unfamiliar cat and stranger still a fox are in the fortress.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate:
WOOOOOOOO!!! ^.^ Always great to get another Smash Bros. installment. I actually have some thoughts on this version worth going over besides the new fighters and where they fit in my four-elements fighting styles system, so I'm going to do a semi-regular review this month and do the fighter analyses in months to come.
First off, I'm very pleased that they brought back adventure mode this time. n.n It's really a glorified event mode, but it's a BIG glorified event mode and I like event mode as well. The story this time is that a strange being called Galeem shows up with an army of Master Hand copies and makes short work turning all the Smash Bros. fighters into statues -- all except Kirby, who escapes thanks to his warp star. Galeem uses the fighter statues to create puppet copies, then forces the spirits of tons of other characters who've been in Nintendo games to animate those puppets. When Kirby (or, as you free them going along, the other fighters) encounters one of these spirits, the power and behavior of the puppet fighter reflects that spirit. It's all excuse plot of course, but I like how they draw inspiration for the special conditions of each event match from the host of familiar (and not-so-familiar) characters.
Once you've freed a particular spirit, you can use them in your continuing battles. There are primary spirits, which give you a boost to your stats (and believe me, that boost becomes a practical necessity against the higher-level opponents), and there are support spirits, which give special benefits like "start battle with X item" or "deal extra damage against giant opponents". How many support spirits you can have active depends on your active primary spirit, which can have 0-3 slots, and some support spirits take up 2 or even 3 slots. You're told before the battle starts what sort of special conditions are involved, so you can tailor your team to the match. Whether that's a fun addition or a chore is a matter of taste; personally I enjoyed it for the most part, but it did get to be a little old hat eventually. One gripe I had was that the spirits do affect your speed. The only stats listed are offense and defense, but you can tell the speed difference between a low-level and high-level spirit. Computer opponents at the high level, naturally, are capable of exploiting this zippiness to move in crazy ways, like zig-zagging as they fall and frequently managing to land right behind you while looking like they passed right through your upward attack. :P
As a bit of an aside, one of the things you unlock as you go along in adventure mode is a bunch of "dojos" where you can leave a primary spirit for a little while to learn a new style, which trades off attributes -- lower defense for higher offense, etc. DO NOT fall into the trap of trying to teach all styles to all spirits. *.* It's kind of fun and cathartic at first to watch some of your spirits achieve mastery of all styles, but as the number of unlocked dojos increases, you can spend upwards of half an hour sifting through your list of spirits looking for ones that have yet to learn this style or the other, and by the time you're finally done assigning the maximum of four spirits to each dojo, some of them are already done learning. Plus there's hundreds of primary spirits, so even if they'd provided a filter to make finding the ones you need quickly and easily (no idea why they didn't, they do have filtering when choosing support spirits for a fight), you'll be wasting a lot of time for ultimately no benefit. At most, I'd do one style for each spirit, either for gameplay benefit or thematic fun. I recommend the Tank style for most purposes, but that doesn't become available until very late in the game, so until then I like Brick Wall best.
Okay, on to other modes! Next is spirit board, which is actually almost the same thing -- event matches themed by the spirit you're trying to earn. The main difference is that you're presented with a board with several randomly-chosen options of what spirit to fight, and those options will disappear and be replaced by another after 5 minutes (15 minutes if it's a legendary-class spirit). It sounds stressful at first, but don't sweat it, if you miss or lose against a particular spirit, it'll show up again some other time, and the board has a strong bias against bringing up spirits you've already claimed. I recommend not paying too much attention to this mode until you're well into adventure mode. I wish they'd provide a mode where you can redo any fight you've won before at will, but oh well.
Classic mode is of course still present. They took an interesting approach this time. Remember how in the very first Super Smash Bros., the single-player mode involved going through a set of very specified fights that included a few special situations -- the army of Yoshis, the giant Donkey Kong, etc. That was thematically fun, but it was the same every time, and you never get to fight the special-situation characters under normal circumstances (oh how we all hate giant DK and his reach across half the stage :P). Subsequent Smash Bros. titles made things randomized, which keeps it fresh but loses the thematic boost. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate returns to the predetermined format, but gives every fighter in the game their own special set of five fights with an appropriate theme. For example, Fox's opponents are all space-themed, and Captain Falcon's opponents are all close-range specialists like him. Some of these even add crazy special conditions, like Toon Link always fighting alongside 2 computer-controlled copies of himself (referencing Tri Force Heroes) and Ryu having only omega-mode stages with stamina rather than the usual stock to simulate Street Fighter's simple HP-based combat. Overall I appreciate it a lot, but I do wish they'd allow playing a particular route with different characters once they're beaten, and maybe include an option to generate a random bunch of matches like in previous titles. As long as we're wishing, an editor for creating your own routes would be cool. Oh, and for some reason you can't play the Mii fighters in classic mode on this one. :(
All-star mode has been condensed in with multi-man mode (now called mob smash), giving a sub-mode wherein all the fighters drop in several at a time but are individually pretty easy to KO. I can't say I miss it too much, especially after the long, arduous slog to beat all-star at hard difficulty with all characters in the Wii U game. X) Other than having a few challenges involving mob smash (the most interesting one is to complete 100-man mob smash as Ken within a certain time limit using only special moves), the game doesn't seem to expect you to invest a lot in this mode.
Phew, that's about enough about that. I don't even have to say what the bottom line is -- it's Smash Bros., why wouldn't you want to get it?
She Remembered Caterpillars:
On with the Humble Bundle march. This game is a point-and-click puzzler about little colored beings dashing around hand-drawn hex-grid environments to reach goal points. The challenge comes from figuring out how to get all of the beings to their goal points at the same time past the obstacles in each stage. There are bridges (the titular caterpillars) that will only allow a being of their own color across, and gates that will allow anything besides their own color through, and a few other mechanics introduced as the game goes along. Importantly, two beings of different primary colors can temporarily merge into a being of a composite color -- red + blue = purple, red + yellow = orange, and blue + yellow = green -- which passes for both colors at once, allowing them to both get across a bridge but neither pass through a gate. It could all be reduced to graph theory if you cared to analyze it that way, although the combining and splitting would be tricky to represent.
So how did I like it? Well, it was clever and original, but not all that exciting. If you're not fond of brain-benders, it would probably frustrate you well before the end. I'm not ashamed to say I looked up a video walkthrough for the very last stage; it turns out there's a move that has to be made early on or you'll get stuck near the end. If you do like puzzles like that, it might be worth picking up, but not for more than $10 at the very most.
Her Story:
For some reason I had the impression this might be a game I would find unpleasant; maybe it's because it was advertised as being by the creator of a Silent Hill game (I'm not big on horror). As it turned out, it wasn't all that disturbing, although it wasn't all that engaging either. It was a creative idea, I'll give it that at least.
In Her Story, you're trying to learn about an incident through recordings of police interviews with a woman. Unfortunately, the recordings are not available in complete form; they're chopped up into little pieces, and you have to call them up out of a database by searching for words that were spoken. The database will restrict you to the first five entries that match a given search, so it's hard to be sure you've found all the relevant information about something, especially from the later entries.
And, that's about it. There isn't exactly a win condition, unless you're aiming to see all the available video clips or get all of the game's Steam achievements (which amounts to almost the same thing). Once you've satisfied your curiousity about the story, you can end the game. What is the story? It's hard to describe it without spoiling things, and I'm not entirely certain about my own conclusions. It involves the death of the woman's husband, which naturally puts her under some suspicion, and the peculiar life she had. If the idea of gradually piecing a story together from bits that you search out yourself appeals to you, give Her Story a try. Be forewarned, though, it's really not much of a game in the traditional sense.
Click to viewHi all. Things have settled back into a typical routine again for the most part. Things could be changing up a bit at my job soon, though. There's talk of shifting me from my current quality assurance testing position to programming. :o That would of course be a step closer to the things I really want to do in my career, and it will probably pay a bit better too.
The long weekend that included Martin Luther King Day was rather busy for me. I called up my old college housemate to see if he'd like to get together for games on Saturday or Monday. He told me Monday would be good for that, but he was going to an interactive entertainment convention hosted at the local science museum on Saturday...so I wound up going to that with him as well as visiting him on Monday. X) The convention was a mix of indie game devs showing off their in-development games, simulation companies showing "serious games" exhibits, workshops to teach kids the basics of programming, etc. There were also a couple of Smash Bros. tournaments which I participated in, one for the Wii U version and the other for Ultimate on the Switch. If I remember correctly, I made it through two rounds in each tournament (maybe three in the Wii U one) before meeting a serious tournament-style player and getting trashed by glitch exploits. X) About the best I can hope for in a tournament, really.
I managed to build up a little steam again this month on the ASCRS. The network communications for sending info about pending attacks and chat messages are working now, and I'm trying to fix things up so that somebody joining the game gets sent all of the current info. I just got yet another distraction, though: somebody reported a game crash caused by my DynBattleChoices plugin. I'm not sure if it's something I'll be able to fix, as some things are caused by DynRPG or RPG Maker 2003 itself, but I'm going to investigate it.
On Zelda RPG, Esava and Tommy have been dropped off on the roof of Ikana Castle by Esava's wyvern friend. Naturally something that huge landing on the roof caused some noise, so a couple of Garo (ninja ghosts) came up to investigate. Esava hid by jumping up into the rafters, and Tommy tried to jump out a window and hang from the ledge outside...but it proved too narrow and he got stuck. The Garo questioned him about the noise, and quickly realized he wasn't one of "the master's" scrubs because he spoke too cogently -- the castle's scrubs are apparently in a zombie-like state. Fortunately Esava was able to pounce on the Garo that had its blade pointed at Tommy, and Tommy got himself unstuck and finished it with his knife. Now the other Garo is on the attack, and I'm awaiting a pose from Esava to see how he deals with it. Meanwhile, the first Garo's defeat has alerted a certain someone that something is amiss in the castle...
I've also started up a plot starring some small, furry heroes! In a book I got as part of a Humble Bundle, Family Games: The 100 Best, I heard about a simple RPG called Cat: A Little Game about Little Heroes. It occurred to me that the Zelda setting would dovetail nicely with the concept, so I bought the PDF version of the rulebook (only $5) and drummed up a couple other players. The plot started with Sheikah (Shemri's feline companion) going to the dream realm and putting out a call for others to come help deal with malice specters which arose from the dark goo Ganondorf unleashed and started preying on people's fear. He was responded to by a grey-striped cat called Tipper and a snow fox called Kito (the rules allow for non-cat heroes if desired). They're now trying to get into the children's dormitory at night to take out a few specters, preferably without the complication of any two-legs seeing them and wondering why an unfamiliar cat and stranger still a fox are in the fortress.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate:
WOOOOOOOO!!! ^.^ Always great to get another Smash Bros. installment. I actually have some thoughts on this version worth going over besides the new fighters and where they fit in my four-elements fighting styles system, so I'm going to do a semi-regular review this month and do the fighter analyses in months to come.
First off, I'm very pleased that they brought back adventure mode this time. n.n It's really a glorified event mode, but it's a BIG glorified event mode and I like event mode as well. The story this time is that a strange being called Galeem shows up with an army of Master Hand copies and makes short work turning all the Smash Bros. fighters into statues -- all except Kirby, who escapes thanks to his warp star. Galeem uses the fighter statues to create puppet copies, then forces the spirits of tons of other characters who've been in Nintendo games to animate those puppets. When Kirby (or, as you free them going along, the other fighters) encounters one of these spirits, the power and behavior of the puppet fighter reflects that spirit. It's all excuse plot of course, but I like how they draw inspiration for the special conditions of each event match from the host of familiar (and not-so-familiar) characters.
Once you've freed a particular spirit, you can use them in your continuing battles. There are primary spirits, which give you a boost to your stats (and believe me, that boost becomes a practical necessity against the higher-level opponents), and there are support spirits, which give special benefits like "start battle with X item" or "deal extra damage against giant opponents". How many support spirits you can have active depends on your active primary spirit, which can have 0-3 slots, and some support spirits take up 2 or even 3 slots. You're told before the battle starts what sort of special conditions are involved, so you can tailor your team to the match. Whether that's a fun addition or a chore is a matter of taste; personally I enjoyed it for the most part, but it did get to be a little old hat eventually. One gripe I had was that the spirits do affect your speed. The only stats listed are offense and defense, but you can tell the speed difference between a low-level and high-level spirit. Computer opponents at the high level, naturally, are capable of exploiting this zippiness to move in crazy ways, like zig-zagging as they fall and frequently managing to land right behind you while looking like they passed right through your upward attack. :P
As a bit of an aside, one of the things you unlock as you go along in adventure mode is a bunch of "dojos" where you can leave a primary spirit for a little while to learn a new style, which trades off attributes -- lower defense for higher offense, etc. DO NOT fall into the trap of trying to teach all styles to all spirits. *.* It's kind of fun and cathartic at first to watch some of your spirits achieve mastery of all styles, but as the number of unlocked dojos increases, you can spend upwards of half an hour sifting through your list of spirits looking for ones that have yet to learn this style or the other, and by the time you're finally done assigning the maximum of four spirits to each dojo, some of them are already done learning. Plus there's hundreds of primary spirits, so even if they'd provided a filter to make finding the ones you need quickly and easily (no idea why they didn't, they do have filtering when choosing support spirits for a fight), you'll be wasting a lot of time for ultimately no benefit. At most, I'd do one style for each spirit, either for gameplay benefit or thematic fun. I recommend the Tank style for most purposes, but that doesn't become available until very late in the game, so until then I like Brick Wall best.
Okay, on to other modes! Next is spirit board, which is actually almost the same thing -- event matches themed by the spirit you're trying to earn. The main difference is that you're presented with a board with several randomly-chosen options of what spirit to fight, and those options will disappear and be replaced by another after 5 minutes (15 minutes if it's a legendary-class spirit). It sounds stressful at first, but don't sweat it, if you miss or lose against a particular spirit, it'll show up again some other time, and the board has a strong bias against bringing up spirits you've already claimed. I recommend not paying too much attention to this mode until you're well into adventure mode. I wish they'd provide a mode where you can redo any fight you've won before at will, but oh well.
Classic mode is of course still present. They took an interesting approach this time. Remember how in the very first Super Smash Bros., the single-player mode involved going through a set of very specified fights that included a few special situations -- the army of Yoshis, the giant Donkey Kong, etc. That was thematically fun, but it was the same every time, and you never get to fight the special-situation characters under normal circumstances (oh how we all hate giant DK and his reach across half the stage :P). Subsequent Smash Bros. titles made things randomized, which keeps it fresh but loses the thematic boost. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate returns to the predetermined format, but gives every fighter in the game their own special set of five fights with an appropriate theme. For example, Fox's opponents are all space-themed, and Captain Falcon's opponents are all close-range specialists like him. Some of these even add crazy special conditions, like Toon Link always fighting alongside 2 computer-controlled copies of himself (referencing Tri Force Heroes) and Ryu having only omega-mode stages with stamina rather than the usual stock to simulate Street Fighter's simple HP-based combat. Overall I appreciate it a lot, but I do wish they'd allow playing a particular route with different characters once they're beaten, and maybe include an option to generate a random bunch of matches like in previous titles. As long as we're wishing, an editor for creating your own routes would be cool. Oh, and for some reason you can't play the Mii fighters in classic mode on this one. :(
All-star mode has been condensed in with multi-man mode (now called mob smash), giving a sub-mode wherein all the fighters drop in several at a time but are individually pretty easy to KO. I can't say I miss it too much, especially after the long, arduous slog to beat all-star at hard difficulty with all characters in the Wii U game. X) Other than having a few challenges involving mob smash (the most interesting one is to complete 100-man mob smash as Ken within a certain time limit using only special moves), the game doesn't seem to expect you to invest a lot in this mode.
Phew, that's about enough about that. I don't even have to say what the bottom line is -- it's Smash Bros., why wouldn't you want to get it?
She Remembered Caterpillars:
On with the Humble Bundle march. This game is a point-and-click puzzler about little colored beings dashing around hand-drawn hex-grid environments to reach goal points. The challenge comes from figuring out how to get all of the beings to their goal points at the same time past the obstacles in each stage. There are bridges (the titular caterpillars) that will only allow a being of their own color across, and gates that will allow anything besides their own color through, and a few other mechanics introduced as the game goes along. Importantly, two beings of different primary colors can temporarily merge into a being of a composite color -- red + blue = purple, red + yellow = orange, and blue + yellow = green -- which passes for both colors at once, allowing them to both get across a bridge but neither pass through a gate. It could all be reduced to graph theory if you cared to analyze it that way, although the combining and splitting would be tricky to represent.
So how did I like it? Well, it was clever and original, but not all that exciting. If you're not fond of brain-benders, it would probably frustrate you well before the end. I'm not ashamed to say I looked up a video walkthrough for the very last stage; it turns out there's a move that has to be made early on or you'll get stuck near the end. If you do like puzzles like that, it might be worth picking up, but not for more than $10 at the very most.
Her Story:
For some reason I had the impression this might be a game I would find unpleasant; maybe it's because it was advertised as being by the creator of a Silent Hill game (I'm not big on horror). As it turned out, it wasn't all that disturbing, although it wasn't all that engaging either. It was a creative idea, I'll give it that at least.
In Her Story, you're trying to learn about an incident through recordings of police interviews with a woman. Unfortunately, the recordings are not available in complete form; they're chopped up into little pieces, and you have to call them up out of a database by searching for words that were spoken. The database will restrict you to the first five entries that match a given search, so it's hard to be sure you've found all the relevant information about something, especially from the later entries.
And, that's about it. There isn't exactly a win condition, unless you're aiming to see all the available video clips or get all of the game's Steam achievements (which amounts to almost the same thing). Once you've satisfied your curiousity about the story, you can end the game. What is the story? It's hard to describe it without spoiling things, and I'm not entirely certain about my own conclusions. It involves the death of the woman's husband, which naturally puts her under some suspicion, and the peculiar life she had. If the idea of gradually piecing a story together from bits that you search out yourself appeals to you, give Her Story a try. Be forewarned, though, it's really not much of a game in the traditional sense.