Smash Bros. Ultimate stage
Flood by Jars of Clay
Hi all. This has been a pretty life-as-usual month apart from a multi-birthday celebration get-together in my family. I got to try out Killy Dr. Lucky with the gamers in our family, so that was nice. We also decided to meet online to play the Ninja Burger RPG, and we had our first session of that yesterday. My little brother was the GM, and he arranged a Hollywood-themed delivery mission where we ran into various actors that had abilities from the characters they played (often multiple ones, like Liam Neeson being a Jedi AND a secret agent). We're planning to shoot for doing this every other week going forward, although we might vary the games we play.
In ASCRS development, this month's work has been about creating a Player Panel for viewing and editing information about a Player. This includes which Characters the Player is allowed to control, whether they're a Scene Runner (GM essentially), and whether they're allowed to do various cheats like perform an action their Character doesn't have enough Awesome-Sauce for or resolve an attack in a different way than the dice outcome says it should be. It's a little tricky because changes made to a Player by one user might affect things another user is trying to do at the time. It's mostly done, though.
Also, I decided to try my hand at making custom stages in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. My first project was the Crimson Wolfos Inn from Zelda RPG. At first all I managed was basically a generic wooden building:
I wanted to make it rock back and forth a little since it's floating on the ocean, but apparently platforms that are attached to a rotater can't be jumped or fallen through. I also tried to show a basement full of barrels keeping it afloat, but I couldn't make it look convincing, so I just put that part out of sight. Landmarks like Death Mountain going by in the background would've been nice too, and the editor does provide a second background layer, but it's too close to work well for what should be distant objects.
Afterwards I realized that fine-detail objects could be created by first making them large, then shrinking them down the size you want. It still has some quirks, especially when you try to make things comprised of multiple pieces, but it works pretty well in general. The shiniest new decoration I added was Aubrey's loftwing, which flies by in the foreground every minute or so:
There's also a visual sign on the side of the building to designate it as the Crimson Wolfos:
And I eliminated the downstairs windows in favor of a fireplace, a bar, and stairs:
I don't know that I'll do anything else with the stage editor, although the idea of a rotating diorama in the background intrigues me. Maybe something space-themed.
On Zelda RPG, Daray and Artifa reached Artifa's lab and soon found what Artifa was looking for: a timeshift stone such as is seen in Skyward Sword. They then heard some screeches from mutated lizalfos there in the lab with them, so they activated the stone to disappear from the current time. Artifa also went and found another potentially useful artifact she'd had stored away: the Cane of Byrna.
Somebody also started up a sort of side-plot for fun that doesn't fit with the main timeline (or at least would have to be time-bubbled to when Hyrule isn't flooded). In it, rambunctious little girl Netri and her nursemaid Tika visited the Happy Mask Shop and were provided with a tattered old book which the shopkeeper claimed has all the adventures Netri could ever want within it. Tika started to read the book to Netri, and suddenly they found themselves in another world beside a campfire in the middle of nowhere. The person running the scene made a general call for people to be in the party, and I threw in Royba since he doesn't often get much action. Netri immediately flooded the "rocky man" with childish questions, while Tika asked the more practical question of where they are. Royba of course was as in the dark as they were, and that's as far as we've gotten so far.
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed:
I was going to do Sonic Forces next out of the Sonic Humble Bundle, but it turned out to have a glaring technical issue: once there's a save file, the game fails to start. :P It gets up to the point just before the title screen and hangs there indefinitely. I confirmed this by moving the save file elsewhere, and it was able to start up without it. Obviously it wouldn't be practical to play the game all at one go. It doesn't seem to have this problem on my new laptop, so I may still be able to get through it, but that will take a good while, since I'm keeping my laptop at my parents' place so I have something to use while I'm visiting them.
Anyway, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is unsurprisingly the sequel to Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing. Notice something a trifle odd there? That's right, they dropped the word Sega from the title. This is because they have some guest characters which are not Sega property, like Wreck-It Ralph, a few of the Team Fortress 2 crew, and even a real-life professional racer named Danica Patrick. It doesn't change the gameplay much of course, but it's interesting to note.
So how about the Transformed bit tacked on? The concept there is that your vehicle changes modes in different parts of the courses. Usually you start out in a car, and it might turn into a boat or a plane for various sections. On rare occasion you even have a bit of a choice, by taking a fork in the road that leads to a parallel section or doing a jump that turns you into a plane a little earlier than you otherwise might have (advantageous both because the plane mode is faster and because you're harder to hit in the air). Some of the tracks also transform as you progress through the laps, with roads being destroyed and forcing you to take to the air or the water level rising and taking you to different sections. It's an interesting conceit that keeps the repetitions of course laps a little more interesting, although it also makes the courses harder to learn.
Regarding the overall gameplay, this game is significantly harder than the first, and it feels rather unfair about it. :/ Actually it could be (in some ways at least) that the game is actually more fair than most similar games regarding how their AI opponents play -- after all, if you were one of ten competitors that are roughly equal in skill and have even advantages, you'd expect to lose more often than win -- but if so it's still not much fun. Many of the weapon pickups in this game fire at lightning speed, so you can be hit out of nowhere with no chance to dodge or block with an item of your own. It's again hard to be sure, but it also feels like getting hit affects you a lot more than AI opponents. Finally, something that definitely works against you is that you always start at last place, even in a grand prix where most games would base your starting placement on how you finished in the previous race. This means you always have to fight your way up, literally, through the entire pack, and the AI opponents are ruthless with their items. XP
The main single-player mode is a collection of event challenges, with three difficulty levels which give one, two, or three stars for completion. The more stars you have, the more stuff you can unlock along the way, some of it optional, some of it required just to keep progressing. Naturally, I figured I might as well play everything at the highest difficulty level from the start, so that I get the maximum stars and don't have to repeat anything. Well, turns out that wasn't the best strategy after all. e.e Once you finish the fifth "world" of events, you unlock a SUPER-hard difficulty level for all events, which bumps up the star potential to four. x.x As far as I can tell, the super-hard difficulty is the same as hard, but on mirror tracks. Anyway, if you were to beat all events up to that point on normal difficulty, it would net you just enough stars to unlock super-hard. If you really want to 100% this game, it would be more efficient to skate through on normal difficulty, then repeat on super-hard. I don't think I'm going to bother myself, even though some of the events are still locked behind star amount requirements I can't get up to without repeating some missions. =.=;
A few tips in case you want to play this game yourself. Sonic is far and away the best driver for most things, especially general racing. The boat mode is very hard to control and will lose a lot of speed for any turn besides very slight adjustments, unless you use drift, so get used to always doing that. The trick to getting a boost at the start of the race is to press the accelerator button when the screen turns black just before each of the numbers in the "3, 2, 1" countdown. Yes, each one of them, you can get three levels of boost depending on how many of those you succeed with.
Bottom line? Not as fun as the first one, which wasn't quite as good as Mario Kart to begin with. Still might be worthwhile if you really like racing games and are up for an often-frustrating challenge, but most gamers can give this one a miss.
Mysterium:
This is a "psychic mystery game" that started in the tabletop realm, but I have a Humble Bundle which provided me with the PC and Android adaptations. The basic idea is that a group of psychics are trying to solve a murder mystery by consulting the ghost of the victim. One player takes the role of the ghost and must provide clues to each psychic by giving them cards to indicate the suspect, location, and weapon they should pursue. The cards involved show dreamscape-like illustrations that might mean several different things in context. For example, you might use a card with a picture of boats on a lake that looks like fried egg to indicate that the crime was committed in the study with the model boats, or that the perpetrator was the chef, or even just that the color yellow is important. The psychics have several rounds to try and guess their suspects, locations, and weapons, then the ghost will give three more cards to try to indicate which combination is the correct one. Yup, each of those psychics was chasing a different potential combo, but only one is the actual truth. If enough of the psychics guess correctly in the end, everybody wins.
For a party game where everyone's trying to achieve a common goal with a limited and intriguing form of communication, I imagine this could be a good bit of fun. For a single-player experience where you're trying to interpret clues chosen by the AI (or choose clues from amongst a limited draw that you think the AI will count as correct), it's not quite as engaging. It's frustrating when you guess wrong or you can't get the AI to follow your meaning in a solitaire experience. For actual multiplayer as well, I predict that it would start to become a little rote as players start memorizing what associations are possible between the cards and maybe even getting to know how their fellow players think. Still, it's an interesting mechanic that I don't think I've seen elsewhere.
Bottom line? If anything, I'd recommend getting the actual board game version or a smart device adaptation, so that you can play it portably with actual people.
Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure
I'd never heard of Tex Murphy before getting this in a Humble Bundle, but apparently it has a bit of a cult following. From what I've read, the format of the series has changed a bit over the years, but the current trend is graphic-adventure with live-action videos, a bit like Myst. The story is set in a not-too-distant future, post World War III in New San Francisco. It stars the eponymous Tex Murphy, a somewhat bumbling and unlucky private investigator with idealistic principles on the mean streets.
In this particular game, Tex wakes up on the floor of his apartment with a goose egg on his forehead. When he looks around, things seem different than he remembers -- more furniture than he used to have, and a briefcase full of high-value bills in the corner. c.c Asking around the neighborhood, Tex finds that seven years have gone by since the last thing he can remember. Furthermore, he has a reputation for being a much harder, more unsavory man than he was back then. Following clues to find out what's going on eventually leads to a conspiracy about the secret inventions of the famous Nikola Tesla, which Tex was apparently involved in himself...until somebody erased his memory.
The gameplay involves wandering 3D environments in first-person view, finding objects to pick up or interact with, and occasionally having conversations with NPCs that consist simply of clicking option buttons and watching the videos that result. Most of the puzzles are pretty trivial, largely obvious use-this-on-that stuff. Later on you encounter some more self-contained logic puzzles. The main difficulty lies in making sure you don't miss any little tidbit that's needed, especially later on. Some of the environments to explore are huge.
The feel of the story is a weird mix of grittiness and goofball. The city is dark and dirty, there are mutants and otherwise disfigured people, and you're dealing with criminals and cultists, yet the game indulges in such slapstick as Tex chewing on a piece of prank gum that blows his head off (then shows that this was him imagining ahead and thinking better of it) or trying out an out-of-order golf simulator and getting whacked in the noggin by the ball when it rebounds off the sign. Frankly, the humor falls a bit flat for me.
Bottom line? If you're a huge graphic adventure game fanatic this might be worth your while simply because there aren't that many options in the genre, but for most folk I'd say give this one a pass.
Click to viewHi all. This has been a pretty life-as-usual month apart from a multi-birthday celebration get-together in my family. I got to try out Killy Dr. Lucky with the gamers in our family, so that was nice. We also decided to meet online to play the Ninja Burger RPG, and we had our first session of that yesterday. My little brother was the GM, and he arranged a Hollywood-themed delivery mission where we ran into various actors that had abilities from the characters they played (often multiple ones, like Liam Neeson being a Jedi AND a secret agent). We're planning to shoot for doing this every other week going forward, although we might vary the games we play.
In ASCRS development, this month's work has been about creating a Player Panel for viewing and editing information about a Player. This includes which Characters the Player is allowed to control, whether they're a Scene Runner (GM essentially), and whether they're allowed to do various cheats like perform an action their Character doesn't have enough Awesome-Sauce for or resolve an attack in a different way than the dice outcome says it should be. It's a little tricky because changes made to a Player by one user might affect things another user is trying to do at the time. It's mostly done, though.
Also, I decided to try my hand at making custom stages in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. My first project was the Crimson Wolfos Inn from Zelda RPG. At first all I managed was basically a generic wooden building:
I wanted to make it rock back and forth a little since it's floating on the ocean, but apparently platforms that are attached to a rotater can't be jumped or fallen through. I also tried to show a basement full of barrels keeping it afloat, but I couldn't make it look convincing, so I just put that part out of sight. Landmarks like Death Mountain going by in the background would've been nice too, and the editor does provide a second background layer, but it's too close to work well for what should be distant objects.
Afterwards I realized that fine-detail objects could be created by first making them large, then shrinking them down the size you want. It still has some quirks, especially when you try to make things comprised of multiple pieces, but it works pretty well in general. The shiniest new decoration I added was Aubrey's loftwing, which flies by in the foreground every minute or so:
There's also a visual sign on the side of the building to designate it as the Crimson Wolfos:
And I eliminated the downstairs windows in favor of a fireplace, a bar, and stairs:
I don't know that I'll do anything else with the stage editor, although the idea of a rotating diorama in the background intrigues me. Maybe something space-themed.
On Zelda RPG, Daray and Artifa reached Artifa's lab and soon found what Artifa was looking for: a timeshift stone such as is seen in Skyward Sword. They then heard some screeches from mutated lizalfos there in the lab with them, so they activated the stone to disappear from the current time. Artifa also went and found another potentially useful artifact she'd had stored away: the Cane of Byrna.
Somebody also started up a sort of side-plot for fun that doesn't fit with the main timeline (or at least would have to be time-bubbled to when Hyrule isn't flooded). In it, rambunctious little girl Netri and her nursemaid Tika visited the Happy Mask Shop and were provided with a tattered old book which the shopkeeper claimed has all the adventures Netri could ever want within it. Tika started to read the book to Netri, and suddenly they found themselves in another world beside a campfire in the middle of nowhere. The person running the scene made a general call for people to be in the party, and I threw in Royba since he doesn't often get much action. Netri immediately flooded the "rocky man" with childish questions, while Tika asked the more practical question of where they are. Royba of course was as in the dark as they were, and that's as far as we've gotten so far.
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed:
I was going to do Sonic Forces next out of the Sonic Humble Bundle, but it turned out to have a glaring technical issue: once there's a save file, the game fails to start. :P It gets up to the point just before the title screen and hangs there indefinitely. I confirmed this by moving the save file elsewhere, and it was able to start up without it. Obviously it wouldn't be practical to play the game all at one go. It doesn't seem to have this problem on my new laptop, so I may still be able to get through it, but that will take a good while, since I'm keeping my laptop at my parents' place so I have something to use while I'm visiting them.
Anyway, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is unsurprisingly the sequel to Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing. Notice something a trifle odd there? That's right, they dropped the word Sega from the title. This is because they have some guest characters which are not Sega property, like Wreck-It Ralph, a few of the Team Fortress 2 crew, and even a real-life professional racer named Danica Patrick. It doesn't change the gameplay much of course, but it's interesting to note.
So how about the Transformed bit tacked on? The concept there is that your vehicle changes modes in different parts of the courses. Usually you start out in a car, and it might turn into a boat or a plane for various sections. On rare occasion you even have a bit of a choice, by taking a fork in the road that leads to a parallel section or doing a jump that turns you into a plane a little earlier than you otherwise might have (advantageous both because the plane mode is faster and because you're harder to hit in the air). Some of the tracks also transform as you progress through the laps, with roads being destroyed and forcing you to take to the air or the water level rising and taking you to different sections. It's an interesting conceit that keeps the repetitions of course laps a little more interesting, although it also makes the courses harder to learn.
Regarding the overall gameplay, this game is significantly harder than the first, and it feels rather unfair about it. :/ Actually it could be (in some ways at least) that the game is actually more fair than most similar games regarding how their AI opponents play -- after all, if you were one of ten competitors that are roughly equal in skill and have even advantages, you'd expect to lose more often than win -- but if so it's still not much fun. Many of the weapon pickups in this game fire at lightning speed, so you can be hit out of nowhere with no chance to dodge or block with an item of your own. It's again hard to be sure, but it also feels like getting hit affects you a lot more than AI opponents. Finally, something that definitely works against you is that you always start at last place, even in a grand prix where most games would base your starting placement on how you finished in the previous race. This means you always have to fight your way up, literally, through the entire pack, and the AI opponents are ruthless with their items. XP
The main single-player mode is a collection of event challenges, with three difficulty levels which give one, two, or three stars for completion. The more stars you have, the more stuff you can unlock along the way, some of it optional, some of it required just to keep progressing. Naturally, I figured I might as well play everything at the highest difficulty level from the start, so that I get the maximum stars and don't have to repeat anything. Well, turns out that wasn't the best strategy after all. e.e Once you finish the fifth "world" of events, you unlock a SUPER-hard difficulty level for all events, which bumps up the star potential to four. x.x As far as I can tell, the super-hard difficulty is the same as hard, but on mirror tracks. Anyway, if you were to beat all events up to that point on normal difficulty, it would net you just enough stars to unlock super-hard. If you really want to 100% this game, it would be more efficient to skate through on normal difficulty, then repeat on super-hard. I don't think I'm going to bother myself, even though some of the events are still locked behind star amount requirements I can't get up to without repeating some missions. =.=;
A few tips in case you want to play this game yourself. Sonic is far and away the best driver for most things, especially general racing. The boat mode is very hard to control and will lose a lot of speed for any turn besides very slight adjustments, unless you use drift, so get used to always doing that. The trick to getting a boost at the start of the race is to press the accelerator button when the screen turns black just before each of the numbers in the "3, 2, 1" countdown. Yes, each one of them, you can get three levels of boost depending on how many of those you succeed with.
Bottom line? Not as fun as the first one, which wasn't quite as good as Mario Kart to begin with. Still might be worthwhile if you really like racing games and are up for an often-frustrating challenge, but most gamers can give this one a miss.
Mysterium:
This is a "psychic mystery game" that started in the tabletop realm, but I have a Humble Bundle which provided me with the PC and Android adaptations. The basic idea is that a group of psychics are trying to solve a murder mystery by consulting the ghost of the victim. One player takes the role of the ghost and must provide clues to each psychic by giving them cards to indicate the suspect, location, and weapon they should pursue. The cards involved show dreamscape-like illustrations that might mean several different things in context. For example, you might use a card with a picture of boats on a lake that looks like fried egg to indicate that the crime was committed in the study with the model boats, or that the perpetrator was the chef, or even just that the color yellow is important. The psychics have several rounds to try and guess their suspects, locations, and weapons, then the ghost will give three more cards to try to indicate which combination is the correct one. Yup, each of those psychics was chasing a different potential combo, but only one is the actual truth. If enough of the psychics guess correctly in the end, everybody wins.
For a party game where everyone's trying to achieve a common goal with a limited and intriguing form of communication, I imagine this could be a good bit of fun. For a single-player experience where you're trying to interpret clues chosen by the AI (or choose clues from amongst a limited draw that you think the AI will count as correct), it's not quite as engaging. It's frustrating when you guess wrong or you can't get the AI to follow your meaning in a solitaire experience. For actual multiplayer as well, I predict that it would start to become a little rote as players start memorizing what associations are possible between the cards and maybe even getting to know how their fellow players think. Still, it's an interesting mechanic that I don't think I've seen elsewhere.
Bottom line? If anything, I'd recommend getting the actual board game version or a smart device adaptation, so that you can play it portably with actual people.
Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure
I'd never heard of Tex Murphy before getting this in a Humble Bundle, but apparently it has a bit of a cult following. From what I've read, the format of the series has changed a bit over the years, but the current trend is graphic-adventure with live-action videos, a bit like Myst. The story is set in a not-too-distant future, post World War III in New San Francisco. It stars the eponymous Tex Murphy, a somewhat bumbling and unlucky private investigator with idealistic principles on the mean streets.
In this particular game, Tex wakes up on the floor of his apartment with a goose egg on his forehead. When he looks around, things seem different than he remembers -- more furniture than he used to have, and a briefcase full of high-value bills in the corner. c.c Asking around the neighborhood, Tex finds that seven years have gone by since the last thing he can remember. Furthermore, he has a reputation for being a much harder, more unsavory man than he was back then. Following clues to find out what's going on eventually leads to a conspiracy about the secret inventions of the famous Nikola Tesla, which Tex was apparently involved in himself...until somebody erased his memory.
The gameplay involves wandering 3D environments in first-person view, finding objects to pick up or interact with, and occasionally having conversations with NPCs that consist simply of clicking option buttons and watching the videos that result. Most of the puzzles are pretty trivial, largely obvious use-this-on-that stuff. Later on you encounter some more self-contained logic puzzles. The main difficulty lies in making sure you don't miss any little tidbit that's needed, especially later on. Some of the environments to explore are huge.
The feel of the story is a weird mix of grittiness and goofball. The city is dark and dirty, there are mutants and otherwise disfigured people, and you're dealing with criminals and cultists, yet the game indulges in such slapstick as Tex chewing on a piece of prank gum that blows his head off (then shows that this was him imagining ahead and thinking better of it) or trying out an out-of-order golf simulator and getting whacked in the noggin by the ball when it rebounds off the sign. Frankly, the humor falls a bit flat for me.
Bottom line? If you're a huge graphic adventure game fanatic this might be worth your while simply because there aren't that many options in the genre, but for most folk I'd say give this one a pass.