Last Christmas in Virginia?
Tuning In by Newsboys
Hi all, happy new year. As usual, my family went to visit my grandmother and aunt in Virginia for Christmas. It's looking like this may have been the last year for that, though -- they're gearing up to sell that place and find a new one near my parents. Who knows how we'll handle the celebrations from now on, without the gigantic house PLUS guest house we affectionately called "the barn" my grandfather built. On the positive side, I don't think I'll miss the all-day drives to and from there. X)
Meanwhile, there was a fair bit of manual labor involved this visit. In preparation for the move, we helped haul some stuff down from the loft of the barn and did some rearranging in the garage area. We also took down a whole lot of wall hangings in the main house (my grandma and aunt are quilters) and patched and painted the resulting holes. Sanding down the patched spots was the toughest part, I had to keep taking the sanding sponge outside and knocking the dust off it so that it could continue to function efficiently.
We did have our share of fun too, though. We played several rounds of Flashpoint, the cooperative board game about firefighting, including expansions which some of us got as gifts for my brother-in-law. I also got plenty of board/card games as gifts: Pandemic, Pun Intended, Munchkin Quest, and Kill Doctor Lucky, although we only found time to try the first two of those. I also got my brother-in-law to try out Starbound, which I've been trying to do for a while; he's big into Minecraft and also a Star Trek fan, so I figured that would be a good fit for him. Thanks to my little brother temporarily providing me with access to his Steam account, I was able to play along with my brother-in-law, and we got through the introductory phase and the first mission together. Good times.
In ASCRS development, I've pretty much finished reworking the action-performing part of the system. Not a whole lot to say about that, as it's just completing what I described in the last post.
Since I didn't have the ASCRS project handy while I was in Virginia, I got a goodly amount of work done on the DynDatabaseOverride plugin instead. I finished writing code for exporting and importing Actor (AKA Hero) data, then started in on Class and Monster data, which are very similar. Then I realized I'd left out the parts for working with save states, so I backed up and implemented that so that it would be included in any new areas of data I worked on. It's coming together nicely.
On Zelda RPG, things have been pretty slow; I think folks have been busy with the holidays. The cats + fox scene has made a tiny amount of progress. Back at Gerudo Fortress, the boy with the Fear saw his mother being taken in for treatment, which knocked a lot of the strength out of the Fear since she's still alive, but didn't dislodge it entirely since she's still in critical condition. Now the critters have a chance to beat it.
Sonic Mania:
Yup, another Sonic game. Sonic Mania is an attempt to return quite closely to the roots of the series. It's a completely 2D game (well, except for the chaos emerald challenges which are inspired by those from Sonic CD, and arguably the blue sphere special stages from Sonic 3) with graphics that appear to come straight from Sonic 3, except perhaps a touch richer in colors and of course with some new stuff added in but following the same style. Apart from a few special oddities (for example, the boss of stage 2 is to play an easy round of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine), the gameplay is also very much in the old style, specifically that of Sonic 3.
There's very little attempt at story-telling, only some brief dialogue-less cutscenes at the beginnings and ends of stages. It starts with an intro that's practically identical to that of Sonic 3 except that instead of Knuckles ambushing Sonic to take the chaos emeralds, Sonic runs into Eggman and a troop of his more distinctive robots in the middle of excavating something. This being a cutscene, you watch helplessly while Sonic stares dumbly at the excavation proceeding until Eggman comes into possession of yet another mysterious gem, which he uses to warp Sonic away...to Green Hill Zone. Yep, they're reusing the stages from previous Sonic games yet again. From there you zip through stages as usual, some carbon-copies, some familiar but with new layouts, and some (as far as I can tell not having played all the Sonic games all the way through) completely original. Eventually you catch up to Eggman for a final fight from which he will not flee after being beaten, and the world is saved yet again. Except of course you probably didn't collect all seven chaos emeralds along the way so there's an after-credits cutscene implying you haven't really won. :P
At first, I felt like this game actually had some promise. The gameplay felt fluid enough, and while there were frequently points where the only way to grab a special reward or take a shortcut path was to know it was coming and jump at just the right time, it was easy enough to at least reach the end of the stage. But of course, this turned out to be just the early stages. :P The game soon displayed all the typical foibles of the Sonic series, unsurprisingly since half the stages are rehashes and the other half designed by die-hard Sonic fans (or so I presume). On top of that, some of the original stages had some truly over-the-top foreground special effects, like colored spotlight cones sweeping over areas. It was like the creators looked at the classic games and said, "I'll see your untrackable speed and raise you eye-blurring visual effects!" As a side note, the pre-game loading screen features logos from several entities involved in the development. One of these was Christian Whitehead, "Friend to pixels and polys alike"...and in the credits he's listed as the game director. So yeah, sort of makes sense that graphical wow might be prioritized above playability. c.c
Can't think of too much else to say about it. Bottom line? If you're a Sonic fan, this game will give you exactly what you want -- a nostalgia trip with some fresh stages that are faithful to the old style. I'd even go so far as to say I did enjoy this one more than most of the other games I acquired in the Sonic Humble Bundle. But that's not a terribly high bar to jump. c.c
Shadowrun: Dragonfall:
This game might be quite literally a mission pack sequel, especially considering Shadowrun Returns was designed to allow adding campaign modules. There are plenty of new assets as far as characters and settings and such to be sure, and it's possible some tweaks and new features were added to the engine itself without me being able to recognize it. For all I can tell, though, Shadowrun: Dragonfall could theoretically have been sold as an expansion rather than a stand-alone game. It even has the same theme music in the main menu and a lot of other situations.
So, having established that the essential gameplay is identical to before, about the only thing that remains to describe is the story. As before, you make up your own protagonist (I did Shemri as an Ork Physical Adept this time, which was a little off-putting since Orks are ugly and ungainly-looking, but it fits Shemri's character archetype to be from an outcast race and you have to be willing to adapt your characters to the setting more than vice-versa). You start off as the newcomer in a shadowrunner team in Germany, although you've apparently worked with the leader of said team before. In fact, said leader names you as the backup leader when a militaristic team member insists on having one. This turns out to be a wise precaution when the leader hacksdecks into a system on what should have been an easy run and gets her brain fried by a feedback trap. X.X
After escaping that scenario, the team starts looking into why that supposed milk run turned out so deadly. It turns out the place you were breaking into was a front for a facility that has something to do with Feuerschwinge, one of the great dragons and the only one to have been supposedly killed by metahumanity in the current age (an event known as the "Dragonfall"). Now it's looking like maybe she's not dead after all, and her agents are after your team. So you have to track down the truth and bring the fight to your enemy before they figure out where your hideout is...which involves raising a whoooole lotta dough to pay a best-of-the-best information broker. Time to pull off some serious shadowrun gigs.
One thing that's significantly different from Shadowrun Returns is that you have a core team that's big enough to fill all the slots on every mission in the game. You can still hire other NPCs to fill in positions, but that's expensive and I have to imagine it makes the story less rich (I didn't actually try it) because your true companions aren't there to give their dialogue bits. The team members also have their own side missions that you can go with them on, filling out their backstories. It makes things a bit more character-driven.
Bottom line? It's about the same as Shadowrun Returns, a decently engaging tactical RPG with a gritty story and a reasonable price tag. Get it if you enjoy that sort of thing.
Click to viewHi all, happy new year. As usual, my family went to visit my grandmother and aunt in Virginia for Christmas. It's looking like this may have been the last year for that, though -- they're gearing up to sell that place and find a new one near my parents. Who knows how we'll handle the celebrations from now on, without the gigantic house PLUS guest house we affectionately called "the barn" my grandfather built. On the positive side, I don't think I'll miss the all-day drives to and from there. X)
Meanwhile, there was a fair bit of manual labor involved this visit. In preparation for the move, we helped haul some stuff down from the loft of the barn and did some rearranging in the garage area. We also took down a whole lot of wall hangings in the main house (my grandma and aunt are quilters) and patched and painted the resulting holes. Sanding down the patched spots was the toughest part, I had to keep taking the sanding sponge outside and knocking the dust off it so that it could continue to function efficiently.
We did have our share of fun too, though. We played several rounds of Flashpoint, the cooperative board game about firefighting, including expansions which some of us got as gifts for my brother-in-law. I also got plenty of board/card games as gifts: Pandemic, Pun Intended, Munchkin Quest, and Kill Doctor Lucky, although we only found time to try the first two of those. I also got my brother-in-law to try out Starbound, which I've been trying to do for a while; he's big into Minecraft and also a Star Trek fan, so I figured that would be a good fit for him. Thanks to my little brother temporarily providing me with access to his Steam account, I was able to play along with my brother-in-law, and we got through the introductory phase and the first mission together. Good times.
In ASCRS development, I've pretty much finished reworking the action-performing part of the system. Not a whole lot to say about that, as it's just completing what I described in the last post.
Since I didn't have the ASCRS project handy while I was in Virginia, I got a goodly amount of work done on the DynDatabaseOverride plugin instead. I finished writing code for exporting and importing Actor (AKA Hero) data, then started in on Class and Monster data, which are very similar. Then I realized I'd left out the parts for working with save states, so I backed up and implemented that so that it would be included in any new areas of data I worked on. It's coming together nicely.
On Zelda RPG, things have been pretty slow; I think folks have been busy with the holidays. The cats + fox scene has made a tiny amount of progress. Back at Gerudo Fortress, the boy with the Fear saw his mother being taken in for treatment, which knocked a lot of the strength out of the Fear since she's still alive, but didn't dislodge it entirely since she's still in critical condition. Now the critters have a chance to beat it.
Sonic Mania:
Yup, another Sonic game. Sonic Mania is an attempt to return quite closely to the roots of the series. It's a completely 2D game (well, except for the chaos emerald challenges which are inspired by those from Sonic CD, and arguably the blue sphere special stages from Sonic 3) with graphics that appear to come straight from Sonic 3, except perhaps a touch richer in colors and of course with some new stuff added in but following the same style. Apart from a few special oddities (for example, the boss of stage 2 is to play an easy round of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine), the gameplay is also very much in the old style, specifically that of Sonic 3.
There's very little attempt at story-telling, only some brief dialogue-less cutscenes at the beginnings and ends of stages. It starts with an intro that's practically identical to that of Sonic 3 except that instead of Knuckles ambushing Sonic to take the chaos emeralds, Sonic runs into Eggman and a troop of his more distinctive robots in the middle of excavating something. This being a cutscene, you watch helplessly while Sonic stares dumbly at the excavation proceeding until Eggman comes into possession of yet another mysterious gem, which he uses to warp Sonic away...to Green Hill Zone. Yep, they're reusing the stages from previous Sonic games yet again. From there you zip through stages as usual, some carbon-copies, some familiar but with new layouts, and some (as far as I can tell not having played all the Sonic games all the way through) completely original. Eventually you catch up to Eggman for a final fight from which he will not flee after being beaten, and the world is saved yet again. Except of course you probably didn't collect all seven chaos emeralds along the way so there's an after-credits cutscene implying you haven't really won. :P
At first, I felt like this game actually had some promise. The gameplay felt fluid enough, and while there were frequently points where the only way to grab a special reward or take a shortcut path was to know it was coming and jump at just the right time, it was easy enough to at least reach the end of the stage. But of course, this turned out to be just the early stages. :P The game soon displayed all the typical foibles of the Sonic series, unsurprisingly since half the stages are rehashes and the other half designed by die-hard Sonic fans (or so I presume). On top of that, some of the original stages had some truly over-the-top foreground special effects, like colored spotlight cones sweeping over areas. It was like the creators looked at the classic games and said, "I'll see your untrackable speed and raise you eye-blurring visual effects!" As a side note, the pre-game loading screen features logos from several entities involved in the development. One of these was Christian Whitehead, "Friend to pixels and polys alike"...and in the credits he's listed as the game director. So yeah, sort of makes sense that graphical wow might be prioritized above playability. c.c
Can't think of too much else to say about it. Bottom line? If you're a Sonic fan, this game will give you exactly what you want -- a nostalgia trip with some fresh stages that are faithful to the old style. I'd even go so far as to say I did enjoy this one more than most of the other games I acquired in the Sonic Humble Bundle. But that's not a terribly high bar to jump. c.c
Shadowrun: Dragonfall:
This game might be quite literally a mission pack sequel, especially considering Shadowrun Returns was designed to allow adding campaign modules. There are plenty of new assets as far as characters and settings and such to be sure, and it's possible some tweaks and new features were added to the engine itself without me being able to recognize it. For all I can tell, though, Shadowrun: Dragonfall could theoretically have been sold as an expansion rather than a stand-alone game. It even has the same theme music in the main menu and a lot of other situations.
So, having established that the essential gameplay is identical to before, about the only thing that remains to describe is the story. As before, you make up your own protagonist (I did Shemri as an Ork Physical Adept this time, which was a little off-putting since Orks are ugly and ungainly-looking, but it fits Shemri's character archetype to be from an outcast race and you have to be willing to adapt your characters to the setting more than vice-versa). You start off as the newcomer in a shadowrunner team in Germany, although you've apparently worked with the leader of said team before. In fact, said leader names you as the backup leader when a militaristic team member insists on having one. This turns out to be a wise precaution when the leader hacksdecks into a system on what should have been an easy run and gets her brain fried by a feedback trap. X.X
After escaping that scenario, the team starts looking into why that supposed milk run turned out so deadly. It turns out the place you were breaking into was a front for a facility that has something to do with Feuerschwinge, one of the great dragons and the only one to have been supposedly killed by metahumanity in the current age (an event known as the "Dragonfall"). Now it's looking like maybe she's not dead after all, and her agents are after your team. So you have to track down the truth and bring the fight to your enemy before they figure out where your hideout is...which involves raising a whoooole lotta dough to pay a best-of-the-best information broker. Time to pull off some serious shadowrun gigs.
One thing that's significantly different from Shadowrun Returns is that you have a core team that's big enough to fill all the slots on every mission in the game. You can still hire other NPCs to fill in positions, but that's expensive and I have to imagine it makes the story less rich (I didn't actually try it) because your true companions aren't there to give their dialogue bits. The team members also have their own side missions that you can go with them on, filling out their backstories. It makes things a bit more character-driven.
Bottom line? It's about the same as Shadowrun Returns, a decently engaging tactical RPG with a gritty story and a reasonable price tag. Get it if you enjoy that sort of thing.