Thanksgiving and, surprise surprise, sickness
2000 Decembers Ago by Joy Williams
Hi all. Not a whole lot to report this month. I had a fun Thanksgiving with the family, the highlight for me being that some of us got in a couple games of Flashpoint. Then the following day I came down sick. X) I think I was actually infected before the big get-together, my Mom had been sick two Sundays before and then my Dad had it the next Sunday. Saturday seemed to be the worst point of the sickness for me, I had a runny nose all day and couldn't focus on much. =.= Today I feel significantly better, though not quite symptom-free. And of course, these illnesses often end up having multiple stages, so who knows whether I'm really over it. :P
ASCRS development has been decently productive this month, apart from not getting anything done this last weekend due to the cold. I'm done with the Pending Attack Panel for now, and I've switched over to redoing some of the Action Panel. Before, I wrote the code that handles the Action Panel on the assumption that the local instance of the game app has correct data, and it can send commands directly to other instances for things like adding a new pending attack or defense. Since then, I've worked out a better pattern wherein local instances send requests to the host for certain actions, and it either responds with why that's not allowed (there could in theory be a change like a player's permission to do 'cheat' actions being revoked at the same time that player attempts to do such an action) or facilitates the needed updates for all game instances. Sort of a 'mother may I' approach. It's a bit of a pain since I have to think about the steps and messages going back and forth and all the different cases of what might happen, but it's good practice (or at least, better than what I had before).
I've also started going through some tutorials which came with a Unity Humble Bundle I picked up. The first tutorial is a space shooter game, which is pretty similar to the first one on the official Unity website. Most of it is stuff I already know pretty well, but I've been burned before by being too hasty to skip over stuff, so I'm forcing myself to go through it. I have learned one useful thing from it so far: if you tag a private variable as a SerializeField, you can set its value from within the Unity editor. I always thought that was only possible with public variables.
On Zelda RPG, Majora decided to come from Termina and take the Triforce of Power from Ganondorf. :o He pushed back the waters that were sealing Ganondorf just enough for them to have a fight arena, then Majora and Ghirahim (who had decided Majora was closer to his master Demise than Ganondorf) got into a big magical brawl. It ended with Ganondorf being cast into the void between dimensions, but he still has the Triforce of Power.
To get out of this predicament, Ganondorf sent a think-o-gram to his most reliable agents, the turncoat Sheikah Daray and Artifa. Daray was in the middle of raiding Lon-Lon Ranch along with the small group of Yiga trainees he had with him, after they barely survived the flooding of Hyrule. Artifa showed up and said she had an idea for how to get Ganondorf back, but she would need access to one of her labs -- which of course is underwater now. Daray's fine with that goal, but first order of business is recovering from the long swim and gathering together the needed supplies and materials to go rafting. So now they're looking through the ranch...and as a couple of Yiga have found out the hard way, the ranch hands are apparently no slouches at ambush. c.c
Sonic Generations:
The Sonic Humble Bundle continues. The story of Sonic Generations is that a literal time monster starts tearing through Sonic's world and displacing various locations (plus Sonic's myriad friends) within an endless white void. Somehow, Sonic running through these locations seems to restore their vitality, so that's what he does...only there's actually two of him, one from the past and the other from the present. You play as both in turns, with each stage having an act for each of them. Past Sonic's stages are completely 2D in layout, while present Sonic has a mix of 2D and 3D as seen in Sonic Colors. All of the stages are reimaginings of stages seen in previous Sonic titles.
In terms of gameplay, Sonic Generations not only suffers from the usual Sonic blunders, it's even less playable than its close neighbors, Sonic Colors before it and Sonic Lost World after it. Present Sonic uses the dash meter introduced in Sonic Rush, which turns the game's already hectic speed into a nigh-uncontrollable careen. You can refrain from using it of course, but then you won't get through quick enough for top score. Also, this could be an artifact of playing on PC rather than the consoles it was originally designed for, but I often enountered little bits of stutter which caused button presses to be lost.
Bottom line? Take that thumbs-up Sonic was fond of doing way back when and turn it upside-down. :P
Burnout Paradise:
This game was part of the Humble EA Bundle I got quite a while back. I tried it out a bit at the time, but I got distracted by other stuff (don't recall exactly what) and dropped it. Recently it's been feeling like I'm actually catching up to my backlog of games and running out of things I'm greatly interested in, so I took a look through my library and decided to knock this one out. It's a good thing I didn't get too far into it back then, because when I started it up again, somehow I'd lost the save file. :P
The premise of Burnout Paradise is a car-driving game set in a city. You can roam the streets as you please, discovering short-cuts, stunt ramps, and special billboards to smash through. The real meat of the gameplay, though, is challenges. Each intersection in the city serves as the starting point for a challenge, anything from a straight-up race to a time trial requiring a specific car to a demolition derby with other drivers to a stunt run. As you complete challenges, your license upgrades, increasing the difficulty of the challenges (and resetting them all to 'not done'). Ultimately you want to elevate to a Burnout License, and then if you care to do all the challenges again at that level, you can earn a Burnout Elite License.
It's an interesting take on driving games, turning it into something of an open-world experience. There are a few areas where they should've placed in more anti-frustration features, though. First off, there's no fast-travel. Some might argue that this is a good thing since the fun of the game is in part about driving and exploring, and I could perhaps see some merit in restricting fast-travel until a challenge has been done in an area or a certain license level has been reached. Still, it gets annoying to have to drive to the next challenge, especially when the endpoint of the previous one put you way out in the boonies, or you're trying to accomplish a particularly difficult challenge and you have to drive back to the starting point after failing.
Another fail comes with the collect-a-thon of shortcut gates, billboards, stunt jumps, and other stuff. The game tracks which of these you've used and tallies them up toward the total. Sounds kinda fun, right? Well, it is...except that anything you do during a challenge doesn't count. XP You have to roam around on your own time to tick off all the checkboxes instead of being rewarded for spotting and using that shortcut during a race or whatever.
And then there's the simple fact that every license upgrade resets all the challenges. I kinda get why they do that, it allows them to have all of the challenges match up to your current license level (and the cars you've collected so far), but still, it's annoying to have to redo challenges you've done several times before just with a little more difficulty.
Bottom line? If you're especially into driving games, Burnout Paradise might be worth your time and money. I wouldn't call it a must-have for most gamers.
Click to viewHi all. Not a whole lot to report this month. I had a fun Thanksgiving with the family, the highlight for me being that some of us got in a couple games of Flashpoint. Then the following day I came down sick. X) I think I was actually infected before the big get-together, my Mom had been sick two Sundays before and then my Dad had it the next Sunday. Saturday seemed to be the worst point of the sickness for me, I had a runny nose all day and couldn't focus on much. =.= Today I feel significantly better, though not quite symptom-free. And of course, these illnesses often end up having multiple stages, so who knows whether I'm really over it. :P
ASCRS development has been decently productive this month, apart from not getting anything done this last weekend due to the cold. I'm done with the Pending Attack Panel for now, and I've switched over to redoing some of the Action Panel. Before, I wrote the code that handles the Action Panel on the assumption that the local instance of the game app has correct data, and it can send commands directly to other instances for things like adding a new pending attack or defense. Since then, I've worked out a better pattern wherein local instances send requests to the host for certain actions, and it either responds with why that's not allowed (there could in theory be a change like a player's permission to do 'cheat' actions being revoked at the same time that player attempts to do such an action) or facilitates the needed updates for all game instances. Sort of a 'mother may I' approach. It's a bit of a pain since I have to think about the steps and messages going back and forth and all the different cases of what might happen, but it's good practice (or at least, better than what I had before).
I've also started going through some tutorials which came with a Unity Humble Bundle I picked up. The first tutorial is a space shooter game, which is pretty similar to the first one on the official Unity website. Most of it is stuff I already know pretty well, but I've been burned before by being too hasty to skip over stuff, so I'm forcing myself to go through it. I have learned one useful thing from it so far: if you tag a private variable as a SerializeField, you can set its value from within the Unity editor. I always thought that was only possible with public variables.
On Zelda RPG, Majora decided to come from Termina and take the Triforce of Power from Ganondorf. :o He pushed back the waters that were sealing Ganondorf just enough for them to have a fight arena, then Majora and Ghirahim (who had decided Majora was closer to his master Demise than Ganondorf) got into a big magical brawl. It ended with Ganondorf being cast into the void between dimensions, but he still has the Triforce of Power.
To get out of this predicament, Ganondorf sent a think-o-gram to his most reliable agents, the turncoat Sheikah Daray and Artifa. Daray was in the middle of raiding Lon-Lon Ranch along with the small group of Yiga trainees he had with him, after they barely survived the flooding of Hyrule. Artifa showed up and said she had an idea for how to get Ganondorf back, but she would need access to one of her labs -- which of course is underwater now. Daray's fine with that goal, but first order of business is recovering from the long swim and gathering together the needed supplies and materials to go rafting. So now they're looking through the ranch...and as a couple of Yiga have found out the hard way, the ranch hands are apparently no slouches at ambush. c.c
Sonic Generations:
The Sonic Humble Bundle continues. The story of Sonic Generations is that a literal time monster starts tearing through Sonic's world and displacing various locations (plus Sonic's myriad friends) within an endless white void. Somehow, Sonic running through these locations seems to restore their vitality, so that's what he does...only there's actually two of him, one from the past and the other from the present. You play as both in turns, with each stage having an act for each of them. Past Sonic's stages are completely 2D in layout, while present Sonic has a mix of 2D and 3D as seen in Sonic Colors. All of the stages are reimaginings of stages seen in previous Sonic titles.
In terms of gameplay, Sonic Generations not only suffers from the usual Sonic blunders, it's even less playable than its close neighbors, Sonic Colors before it and Sonic Lost World after it. Present Sonic uses the dash meter introduced in Sonic Rush, which turns the game's already hectic speed into a nigh-uncontrollable careen. You can refrain from using it of course, but then you won't get through quick enough for top score. Also, this could be an artifact of playing on PC rather than the consoles it was originally designed for, but I often enountered little bits of stutter which caused button presses to be lost.
Bottom line? Take that thumbs-up Sonic was fond of doing way back when and turn it upside-down. :P
Burnout Paradise:
This game was part of the Humble EA Bundle I got quite a while back. I tried it out a bit at the time, but I got distracted by other stuff (don't recall exactly what) and dropped it. Recently it's been feeling like I'm actually catching up to my backlog of games and running out of things I'm greatly interested in, so I took a look through my library and decided to knock this one out. It's a good thing I didn't get too far into it back then, because when I started it up again, somehow I'd lost the save file. :P
The premise of Burnout Paradise is a car-driving game set in a city. You can roam the streets as you please, discovering short-cuts, stunt ramps, and special billboards to smash through. The real meat of the gameplay, though, is challenges. Each intersection in the city serves as the starting point for a challenge, anything from a straight-up race to a time trial requiring a specific car to a demolition derby with other drivers to a stunt run. As you complete challenges, your license upgrades, increasing the difficulty of the challenges (and resetting them all to 'not done'). Ultimately you want to elevate to a Burnout License, and then if you care to do all the challenges again at that level, you can earn a Burnout Elite License.
It's an interesting take on driving games, turning it into something of an open-world experience. There are a few areas where they should've placed in more anti-frustration features, though. First off, there's no fast-travel. Some might argue that this is a good thing since the fun of the game is in part about driving and exploring, and I could perhaps see some merit in restricting fast-travel until a challenge has been done in an area or a certain license level has been reached. Still, it gets annoying to have to drive to the next challenge, especially when the endpoint of the previous one put you way out in the boonies, or you're trying to accomplish a particularly difficult challenge and you have to drive back to the starting point after failing.
Another fail comes with the collect-a-thon of shortcut gates, billboards, stunt jumps, and other stuff. The game tracks which of these you've used and tallies them up toward the total. Sounds kinda fun, right? Well, it is...except that anything you do during a challenge doesn't count. XP You have to roam around on your own time to tick off all the checkboxes instead of being rewarded for spotting and using that shortcut during a race or whatever.
And then there's the simple fact that every license upgrade resets all the challenges. I kinda get why they do that, it allows them to have all of the challenges match up to your current license level (and the cars you've collected so far), but still, it's annoying to have to redo challenges you've done several times before just with a little more difficulty.
Bottom line? If you're especially into driving games, Burnout Paradise might be worth your time and money. I wouldn't call it a must-have for most gamers.