Hurricane season is officially here
Praise You In This Storm by Casting Crowns
Hi all. I've been accepted for that developer position within my company. :D I officially start it this week, although my current supervisor has arranged to have me still working out some odds and ends with my team for a couple weeks. I'm sort of glad, because I'd like to complete a little sub-project I'd started -- refactoring our automated API tests to be more modular.
Meanwhile, though, we're hunkering down to ride out Hurricane Dorian. Right now it looks like it's going to be a pretty big storm (category 5), but it may not actually extend much more than its west edge onto Florida, especially central Florida where I live. Naturally, we're still taking sensible precautions. My brother came over on Friday to help me board up my windows, and my church today had an abbreviated service with just worship and prayer so that volunteers could help board those windows. I'm expecting things won't be too bad at my place; even when we lose power in that area, it usually comes back on within a few hours. I think I'm on the same grid as the local hospital. ;)
ASCRS progress this month isn't as much as I would have liked, even though I think I was a little more diligent than usual. The trouble was that I got stuck for a long time on a bug that I couldn't figure out. Turns out the problem wasn't with the data being passed through as I'd initially thought; it was simply that I forgot to set up some components in the Unity editor after writing them as code. =.=; It's not the first time that sort of thing has happened, so I'm going to make an effort to create and follow a checklist for new components moving forward. Anyway, the pending attack panel is now partially functional -- you can click on the button in the pending attack list to bring it up and it will populate with data from that pending attack, yay.
On Zelda RPG, people are still figuring out what to do about the transition from inland country to a bunch of islands dotted on a new sea. John did his best to pep up the Kakariko Town refugees that fled up Death Mountain and get them working on survival -- learning to fish and possibly sail, finding shelter, etc. There are two obvious options for that last bit: talk to the Gorons and ask for help (probably realistically the best one), and go clear some nasties out of the caves dotting the mountain (the more interesting option for RP ;) ). It looks like we'll be doing both, with John heading up the cave offensive since he's a soldier. Actually nobody else has really volunteered to go with him yet. c.c Itami is there, maybe she'll join him.
I also took these events as an excuse to bring Adrian back into the action. As you probably don't recall, he was part of the group that went with Link to Termina to try and do something about Ganondorf, but that plotline sort of left me behind because there were players in it who tended to pose several rounds while I was off at work. c.c The last time I posed as Adrian, they were at Great Bay. So I had Adrian come rushing up out of Lake Hylia when the goddesses opened the fountains of the deep. *.* I gave him another case of convenient amnesia, not nearly so much as last time, just enough to cover the time between Great Bay and now so I don't have to explain how he got separated from the group and what he's been up to. X) When Adrian realized he was back in Hyrule, and it was flooded, his interpretation of events was that Zora's Domain now covered the whole land...and thus he was inadvertently in violation of his banishment. @.@ So he set off for the spot he thought most likely to still be above water, which was of course Death Mountain. He launched up onto the trail while folk were orienting themselves, only afterward stopping to pick pieces of kelp tangled in his swordbelt off and toss them back into the water.
Tommy and Esava are with Link's group, which was in Kokiri Forest when the flood happened. They were relatively buffered from the event itself; their first notice of it came when Link saw that the Lost Woods was flooding. I think Saria did something to shield Kokiri Forest from both Ganondorf's meteors and the floodwaters, and it put her into a deep sleep. Anyway, the troop threw a raft together and went out to sea, and before too long they met up with the Crimson Wolfos. Esava apparently gets seasick easily, which isn't too surprising for a desert-dweller.
In the cat + fox scene, Kito and Tipper tried to interfere with the recurring dream scene, which eventually caused the kid to wake up and thus released them from the nightmare as well. Sheikah endured another round of dodging the Fear's attacks during that, and fortunately came away with just one scar, a nick on his ear. Tipper managed to pick out something in the dream that was faint enough that the kid probably didn't even consciously realize he'd heard it: a groaning from the chasm where the woman had fallen. Back in the waking world, they decided their best bet was to entice a human to follow them back to the chasm and investigate, since the cats wouldn't be able to lift an adult human out of there themselves. But trying to get a Gerudo riled enough to chase them would be a dangerous proposition, as they're known to be rather blade-happy. Fortunately the perfect mark presented himself: a certain Hylian bard sat down to play his flute in the hallway nearby. ;) Sheikah pointed this target out and that's where we're at.
Soul Calibur VI:
Yet another Soul Calibur title. From what I've heard, Namco doesn't have much faith left in the brand and this one didn't sell as well as they'd like, so I'm guessing this will be the last one -- at least until some time in the distant future when someone judges the nostalgia meter to be high enough to attempt a reboot or something. They are still slowly releasing DLC for this title, though.
I'll go over the changes to essential gameplay first. For the most part, it plays like Soul Calibur V, and the few changes they've made I personally regard as mostly improvements. Guard impacts no longer cost a chunk of soul gauge, instead eating a little bit of your largely invisible guard stamina. They're difficult enough to pull off as it is, they hardly need to have a heavy cost. Critical edges no longer require a double quarter-roll to pull off, just a pull of the right trigger, yay! Some fighters still have quarter-rolls and sometimes even more obtuse controls as part of their moveset, but as a casual player you can get along without being able to pull off every fancy move (a few of them really are just for showing off, giving barely any advantage over simpler moves -- Ivy has some prime examples).
The one clear innovation is a "reversal edge" mechanic, in which the user goes into a strong (though not totally impenetrable) defensive stance for a second or so, then strikes. If the strike hits (even against a guard that's been held long enough), both combatants stagger back and go into a tightly controlled sequence. In this sequence, it barely matters which fighter you're using; it's a rock-paper-scissors matchup decided by the next button you press. It's a little more complicated than the base matchup of horizontal beats kick, kick beats vertical, and vertical beats horizontal. You can also dodge forward, back, or to the side, which is riskier because it means you'll lose to two of the three attacks, but if you succeed it puts you in a position to combo your opponent with anything in your arsenal instead of the predetermined sequence attacks. Also, if both opponents choose the same attack, it results in a clash that extends the sequence, but after that the fighter who initiated the reversal edge will win a same-attack matchup, so it can't last for terribly long. The trouble is, doing a reversal edge in the first place is a very high-risk move, as the setup is very visually distinct and gives an experienced player plenty of time to sidestep and then punish with their best shot. I've found that it can work if your opponent is in the middle of doing a combo on you, since the defensive stance will absorb the hits and leave them no time to dodge, but there are also combos that happen to time their last hit just right to punish you as you're making the strike. Annoyingly, some fighters have a reversal edge as part of a combo, which results in a lot of accidental uses. :P
Next area, the character creation! :D This is the main reason I like the Soul Calibur series, being able to craft facsimilies of my own characters (and other characters from popular series, I made a bunch from RWBY this time around) and actually fight as them. For the most part, creation mode is just the same in this one as it was in the last. Most of the clothing parts available are the same...although a fair number of them that were available in SC5 have been locked away as DLC. XP Legally speaking, I believe a company should have every right to make their product work the way they want, but it sure leaves a bad taste when they try to sell stuff as 'extras' when they were part of the basic package before. There are a few new items, most notably the outfits of the canon characters. These ones tend to be a bit restrictive though, often being incompatible with a lot of other pieces. I think they reduced the control you have in shaping stickers, too; before you could change their height and width, now you can only change them both simultaneously as 'size'.
One thing that's new is that there are now a bunch of different races you can choose which changes the body model. Some of them are just small variants on humans, like Outcasts that add animal ears and optionally a tail, Angels and Demons that give different types of wings, and several degrees of Malfested which put corruption on the skin and make eyes glow. Others are more drastic, like Lizardmen and Skeletons which come with restrictions on what clothing items you can use. The Outcasts in particular I find annoying because they're the only way you can have the tails, but they must come with the ears as well. e.e
All in all, the creation mode is a touch disappointing compared to SC5, but there's one meta point that makes it better for me: SC6 is on PC, which means I can take screenshots of my creations directly. ;)
Moving along, how about story? As always, not the most important point in a fighting game, but it's there. SC6 has a story mode in which painted scenes and character portraits are shown with text and voice-acting, visual novel-style, in between the fights. There's one main story which follows Kilik, Maxi, and Xianghua, plus each fighter (including those three) has their own little story with a half-dozen fights or so. The fights in story mode are pretty easy on the whole; the last couple fights in the main story even give you unlimited soul guage, so you can spam critical edges to beat the boss. There aren't too many surprises for those familiar with the series; it's just a rehash of the same stories as before.
There's also a mission mode that's a bit more original and still kinda story-driven. In it, you create a fighter of your own and take them through a journey that touches with all the canon characters. Your fighter, referred to as 'The Conduit' outside of mission mode, wakes up in a world similar to their own, but unfamiliar -- east and west seem to have been reversed, for one thing. Their dreams are haunted by visions of the destruction caused by Soul Edge, and Zasalamel informs them that they will either turn into a mindless Malfested or die...unless they can manage to tame and absorb the energy from a phenomenon known as astral fissures, which have been appearing around the world since Siegfried took Soul Edge (or more accurately, Soul Edge took Siegfried) and became Nightmare. So you set off in search of astral fissures to sustain yourself, and along the way you run into plenty of other fighters, both canon and NPCs, and follow all sorts of side-plots. You choose your fighting style ("Soul of so-and-so", mimicing one of the canon fighters) at the start when you create your fighter, but you acquire new weapons along the way which offer more strength, so you're encouraged to try different styles (although there does seem to be a strong bias toward the game giving you more of the same style of weapon you're already using).
Mission mode has considerably more meat to it than the canon story mode, and the fights get a lot tougher. Towards the end, the game starts popping up random astral fissures that you can pursue or ignore at your leisure, and instead of the NPCs created by the game's designers, these fights appear to use characters created by other players. It's a lot like the quick battle mode I enjoyed so much in SC5, except you really are seeing stuff made by other players. I think it may even use statistics on the players' play styles, because I notice strong habits when fighting them that don't show up in other CPU fights. If you care to grind until you've leveled up to 'mastery' with all the different weapon styles in the game, it keeps things decently interesting.
Final notes: the fighter roster is a bit smaller than in some of the other titles of the series. It makes sense that they would drop the newcomers from SC5, since that was set significantly after the events of the other games and SC6 is a return to the main story, but they also disincluded more long-standing characters like Cassandra, Tira, Setsuka, and Rock. I suspect their strategy is to make most if not all previous characters available as DLC sooner or later; Amy and Tira were such options when I got the game, and Cassandra came out just recently. The newcomers are Groh, a taciturn wielder of two swords attached at the hilt, and Azwel, who summons weapons into being from shards of Soul Edge and Soul Calibur and is essentially mission mode's main antagonist. For guest characters, there's Geralt from The Witcher series and 2B from Nier Automata, neither of which I am particularly familiar with (and 2B is DLC).
Bottom line? If you enjoy the Soul Calibur series in general, it's probably worth picking up Soul Calibur VI sooner or later. I'd definitely wait for a sale, though; it occasionally goes down to 66% off on Steam, which is how I got it.
Click to viewHi all. I've been accepted for that developer position within my company. :D I officially start it this week, although my current supervisor has arranged to have me still working out some odds and ends with my team for a couple weeks. I'm sort of glad, because I'd like to complete a little sub-project I'd started -- refactoring our automated API tests to be more modular.
Meanwhile, though, we're hunkering down to ride out Hurricane Dorian. Right now it looks like it's going to be a pretty big storm (category 5), but it may not actually extend much more than its west edge onto Florida, especially central Florida where I live. Naturally, we're still taking sensible precautions. My brother came over on Friday to help me board up my windows, and my church today had an abbreviated service with just worship and prayer so that volunteers could help board those windows. I'm expecting things won't be too bad at my place; even when we lose power in that area, it usually comes back on within a few hours. I think I'm on the same grid as the local hospital. ;)
ASCRS progress this month isn't as much as I would have liked, even though I think I was a little more diligent than usual. The trouble was that I got stuck for a long time on a bug that I couldn't figure out. Turns out the problem wasn't with the data being passed through as I'd initially thought; it was simply that I forgot to set up some components in the Unity editor after writing them as code. =.=; It's not the first time that sort of thing has happened, so I'm going to make an effort to create and follow a checklist for new components moving forward. Anyway, the pending attack panel is now partially functional -- you can click on the button in the pending attack list to bring it up and it will populate with data from that pending attack, yay.
On Zelda RPG, people are still figuring out what to do about the transition from inland country to a bunch of islands dotted on a new sea. John did his best to pep up the Kakariko Town refugees that fled up Death Mountain and get them working on survival -- learning to fish and possibly sail, finding shelter, etc. There are two obvious options for that last bit: talk to the Gorons and ask for help (probably realistically the best one), and go clear some nasties out of the caves dotting the mountain (the more interesting option for RP ;) ). It looks like we'll be doing both, with John heading up the cave offensive since he's a soldier. Actually nobody else has really volunteered to go with him yet. c.c Itami is there, maybe she'll join him.
I also took these events as an excuse to bring Adrian back into the action. As you probably don't recall, he was part of the group that went with Link to Termina to try and do something about Ganondorf, but that plotline sort of left me behind because there were players in it who tended to pose several rounds while I was off at work. c.c The last time I posed as Adrian, they were at Great Bay. So I had Adrian come rushing up out of Lake Hylia when the goddesses opened the fountains of the deep. *.* I gave him another case of convenient amnesia, not nearly so much as last time, just enough to cover the time between Great Bay and now so I don't have to explain how he got separated from the group and what he's been up to. X) When Adrian realized he was back in Hyrule, and it was flooded, his interpretation of events was that Zora's Domain now covered the whole land...and thus he was inadvertently in violation of his banishment. @.@ So he set off for the spot he thought most likely to still be above water, which was of course Death Mountain. He launched up onto the trail while folk were orienting themselves, only afterward stopping to pick pieces of kelp tangled in his swordbelt off and toss them back into the water.
Tommy and Esava are with Link's group, which was in Kokiri Forest when the flood happened. They were relatively buffered from the event itself; their first notice of it came when Link saw that the Lost Woods was flooding. I think Saria did something to shield Kokiri Forest from both Ganondorf's meteors and the floodwaters, and it put her into a deep sleep. Anyway, the troop threw a raft together and went out to sea, and before too long they met up with the Crimson Wolfos. Esava apparently gets seasick easily, which isn't too surprising for a desert-dweller.
In the cat + fox scene, Kito and Tipper tried to interfere with the recurring dream scene, which eventually caused the kid to wake up and thus released them from the nightmare as well. Sheikah endured another round of dodging the Fear's attacks during that, and fortunately came away with just one scar, a nick on his ear. Tipper managed to pick out something in the dream that was faint enough that the kid probably didn't even consciously realize he'd heard it: a groaning from the chasm where the woman had fallen. Back in the waking world, they decided their best bet was to entice a human to follow them back to the chasm and investigate, since the cats wouldn't be able to lift an adult human out of there themselves. But trying to get a Gerudo riled enough to chase them would be a dangerous proposition, as they're known to be rather blade-happy. Fortunately the perfect mark presented himself: a certain Hylian bard sat down to play his flute in the hallway nearby. ;) Sheikah pointed this target out and that's where we're at.
Soul Calibur VI:
Yet another Soul Calibur title. From what I've heard, Namco doesn't have much faith left in the brand and this one didn't sell as well as they'd like, so I'm guessing this will be the last one -- at least until some time in the distant future when someone judges the nostalgia meter to be high enough to attempt a reboot or something. They are still slowly releasing DLC for this title, though.
I'll go over the changes to essential gameplay first. For the most part, it plays like Soul Calibur V, and the few changes they've made I personally regard as mostly improvements. Guard impacts no longer cost a chunk of soul gauge, instead eating a little bit of your largely invisible guard stamina. They're difficult enough to pull off as it is, they hardly need to have a heavy cost. Critical edges no longer require a double quarter-roll to pull off, just a pull of the right trigger, yay! Some fighters still have quarter-rolls and sometimes even more obtuse controls as part of their moveset, but as a casual player you can get along without being able to pull off every fancy move (a few of them really are just for showing off, giving barely any advantage over simpler moves -- Ivy has some prime examples).
The one clear innovation is a "reversal edge" mechanic, in which the user goes into a strong (though not totally impenetrable) defensive stance for a second or so, then strikes. If the strike hits (even against a guard that's been held long enough), both combatants stagger back and go into a tightly controlled sequence. In this sequence, it barely matters which fighter you're using; it's a rock-paper-scissors matchup decided by the next button you press. It's a little more complicated than the base matchup of horizontal beats kick, kick beats vertical, and vertical beats horizontal. You can also dodge forward, back, or to the side, which is riskier because it means you'll lose to two of the three attacks, but if you succeed it puts you in a position to combo your opponent with anything in your arsenal instead of the predetermined sequence attacks. Also, if both opponents choose the same attack, it results in a clash that extends the sequence, but after that the fighter who initiated the reversal edge will win a same-attack matchup, so it can't last for terribly long. The trouble is, doing a reversal edge in the first place is a very high-risk move, as the setup is very visually distinct and gives an experienced player plenty of time to sidestep and then punish with their best shot. I've found that it can work if your opponent is in the middle of doing a combo on you, since the defensive stance will absorb the hits and leave them no time to dodge, but there are also combos that happen to time their last hit just right to punish you as you're making the strike. Annoyingly, some fighters have a reversal edge as part of a combo, which results in a lot of accidental uses. :P
Next area, the character creation! :D This is the main reason I like the Soul Calibur series, being able to craft facsimilies of my own characters (and other characters from popular series, I made a bunch from RWBY this time around) and actually fight as them. For the most part, creation mode is just the same in this one as it was in the last. Most of the clothing parts available are the same...although a fair number of them that were available in SC5 have been locked away as DLC. XP Legally speaking, I believe a company should have every right to make their product work the way they want, but it sure leaves a bad taste when they try to sell stuff as 'extras' when they were part of the basic package before. There are a few new items, most notably the outfits of the canon characters. These ones tend to be a bit restrictive though, often being incompatible with a lot of other pieces. I think they reduced the control you have in shaping stickers, too; before you could change their height and width, now you can only change them both simultaneously as 'size'.
One thing that's new is that there are now a bunch of different races you can choose which changes the body model. Some of them are just small variants on humans, like Outcasts that add animal ears and optionally a tail, Angels and Demons that give different types of wings, and several degrees of Malfested which put corruption on the skin and make eyes glow. Others are more drastic, like Lizardmen and Skeletons which come with restrictions on what clothing items you can use. The Outcasts in particular I find annoying because they're the only way you can have the tails, but they must come with the ears as well. e.e
All in all, the creation mode is a touch disappointing compared to SC5, but there's one meta point that makes it better for me: SC6 is on PC, which means I can take screenshots of my creations directly. ;)
Moving along, how about story? As always, not the most important point in a fighting game, but it's there. SC6 has a story mode in which painted scenes and character portraits are shown with text and voice-acting, visual novel-style, in between the fights. There's one main story which follows Kilik, Maxi, and Xianghua, plus each fighter (including those three) has their own little story with a half-dozen fights or so. The fights in story mode are pretty easy on the whole; the last couple fights in the main story even give you unlimited soul guage, so you can spam critical edges to beat the boss. There aren't too many surprises for those familiar with the series; it's just a rehash of the same stories as before.
There's also a mission mode that's a bit more original and still kinda story-driven. In it, you create a fighter of your own and take them through a journey that touches with all the canon characters. Your fighter, referred to as 'The Conduit' outside of mission mode, wakes up in a world similar to their own, but unfamiliar -- east and west seem to have been reversed, for one thing. Their dreams are haunted by visions of the destruction caused by Soul Edge, and Zasalamel informs them that they will either turn into a mindless Malfested or die...unless they can manage to tame and absorb the energy from a phenomenon known as astral fissures, which have been appearing around the world since Siegfried took Soul Edge (or more accurately, Soul Edge took Siegfried) and became Nightmare. So you set off in search of astral fissures to sustain yourself, and along the way you run into plenty of other fighters, both canon and NPCs, and follow all sorts of side-plots. You choose your fighting style ("Soul of so-and-so", mimicing one of the canon fighters) at the start when you create your fighter, but you acquire new weapons along the way which offer more strength, so you're encouraged to try different styles (although there does seem to be a strong bias toward the game giving you more of the same style of weapon you're already using).
Mission mode has considerably more meat to it than the canon story mode, and the fights get a lot tougher. Towards the end, the game starts popping up random astral fissures that you can pursue or ignore at your leisure, and instead of the NPCs created by the game's designers, these fights appear to use characters created by other players. It's a lot like the quick battle mode I enjoyed so much in SC5, except you really are seeing stuff made by other players. I think it may even use statistics on the players' play styles, because I notice strong habits when fighting them that don't show up in other CPU fights. If you care to grind until you've leveled up to 'mastery' with all the different weapon styles in the game, it keeps things decently interesting.
Final notes: the fighter roster is a bit smaller than in some of the other titles of the series. It makes sense that they would drop the newcomers from SC5, since that was set significantly after the events of the other games and SC6 is a return to the main story, but they also disincluded more long-standing characters like Cassandra, Tira, Setsuka, and Rock. I suspect their strategy is to make most if not all previous characters available as DLC sooner or later; Amy and Tira were such options when I got the game, and Cassandra came out just recently. The newcomers are Groh, a taciturn wielder of two swords attached at the hilt, and Azwel, who summons weapons into being from shards of Soul Edge and Soul Calibur and is essentially mission mode's main antagonist. For guest characters, there's Geralt from The Witcher series and 2B from Nier Automata, neither of which I am particularly familiar with (and 2B is DLC).
Bottom line? If you enjoy the Soul Calibur series in general, it's probably worth picking up Soul Calibur VI sooner or later. I'd definitely wait for a sale, though; it occasionally goes down to 66% off on Steam, which is how I got it.