Forgotten Gates demo version 0.2.2 released
Event Horizon by Palpable & OA
Remix of The Day After from Final Fantasy VI
Hi all. Had a good Resurrection Sunday? :) Mine was the usual gathering of family. Got in a game of Flashpoint with my brother and brother-in-law toward the end, although for once we failed (albeit on one of the expansion-pack boards that's supposed to be more difficult).
Forgotten Gates progress was relatively lax this month. I finished up the new version of the demo and released it (downloads page here if you're interested), then got around to implementing a system for having monsters react to what's going on in the combat, changing their behavior for upcoming turns and telegraphing such to the player. I started with a relatively simple behavior case: if a deku scrub takes damage, they'll say "Owie!" in a message box (accompanied by the squeaking sound they actually make when hit in the source game), and their behavior changes to Hide in their next action. I'm tempted to change it so that it immediately hides without waiting for their turn, as that would be a more visceral way for the player to see the consequence of their attack, but it could make deku scrubs super-annoying to fight, since they'll instantly hide after any hit and the player will have to wait for them to come back out to continue hacking at them. e.ea
We had a Ninja Burger mission this month in the Starbound universe. We went to an Avian tomb, tussled with some monsters, dealt (somewhat poorly) with some traps, and fought the cultists in the deepest reaches of the tomb. All this to deliver lunch to Esther Bright, who was there studying the heiroglyphics. Apparently the cultists let her in because her hover-chair made them think she was divine. ;)
Spelunky 2:
My listed play time for Spelunky HD (the commercial remake of the original, freeware Spelunky): 322.7 hours. Much of this is from doing the daily challenge, in which everyone gets the same random seed to generate the stages, until I finally managed to get through the ridiculously tricky 'hell run' WITH ghost-diamond-harvesting to the greatest possible degree ON said daily challenge (I did it once by regular play first). The figure is probably inflated a bit by occasions when I left the game running without actually playing, but still.
I mention this because I do NOT think I'll be playing Spelunky 2 to the same degree. X) It feels very similar to the original for the most part. There are new additions to be sure, new enemies, new level types, even a few new mechanics. You occasionally find animals that can be mounted, providing you with extra movement capability and protection (most hits will be absorbed by your mount, which has its own separate health). There are points where you have to go one way or the other and you'll get a different level type as a result. But at the end of the day, you're still jumping, whipping, and dropping your way through a blocky, procedurally-generated world that will kill you at a rate of about 20% chance per stage even once you git gud at it. :)
The problem is, Spelunky 2's expert-level play goes further than ever before, likely to appeal to the true fanatics. Spelunky Classic had just one secret stage, the city of gold, reachable through a series of special feats throughout the game up to that point, and it would give you the opportunity to bolster your score significantly before returning to the final boss fight. Spelunky HD added several more secret side stages, some of which were necessary to reach the city of gold, and after THAT there's an entire set of optional hell stages after the regular 'final' boss. Spelunky 2 ratchets things up further with SEVERAL possible special quests to pursue, some of them mutually exclusive in a given run, extra bosses, more special items you have to acquire along the way to defeat said bosses, and just a general increase in both the difficulty and the number of accomplishments in a row you have to get through. @.@ I have of course found out about much of this through Internet research, NOT discovering it through personal play. I've barely managed to reach about a quarter of these special quests, the most involved of which was reaching the city of gold (and that one turns out to be the path to ANOTHER secret stage). If it were possible to practice the individual challenges involved without slogging through everything leading up to them first, I might have hope of doing it eventually, but most of them have to be done as part of a full run from the very beginning.
There are also some more subtle changes to the controls and such, which I tend to dislike probably mainly because I'm used to the old way than for their own merits. e.e For example, the climbing glove item which causes you to be able to stick to walls now requires you to press a direction against the wall the whole time you want to stick; before, once you were stuck you would stay there until you performed an action to let go, essentially the same as though you were hanging from a ledge. The new way is, I suppose, more intuitive for new players -- why WOULD you be suddenly stuck after touching the wall? -- and it gives finer control over how far you fall after letting go if you press against the wall again...but I don't WANT fine control, I want to fall a predictable short distance instead of having to control it with finicky timing. :P
The really big change for an expert player is with the ghost that shows up after you've been in a stage for a certain amount of time. While the ghost's primary function is as a deadly hazard to chase you out of the stage, it also turns any gems it passes over into much more valuable diamonds. Purposely waiting for the ghost and maneuvering around it to collect diamonds is a practice known as 'ghost-running', and it makes the score ceiling of the game far higher (and things like buying out the entire black market possible). The downside is, it adds HUGELY to the amount of time needed to clear a stage if you're trying to harvest as many diamonds as feasible. Well, they fixed that in Spelunky 2...sort of. e.ea First of all, each stage now has a curse pot item which contains a diamond, but which immediately summons the ghost when broken. Sometimes the curse pot is rather hard to get at due to being buried in the wall or whatever, but still, in theory you can summon the ghost whenever you're ready instead of waiting for the timeout. I regard that as a step in the right direction, but I still would've preferred to just be able to signal the game to hurry up and send the ghost without any special conditions. More importantly, the ghost is now harder to evade. Originally, the ghost moved at a set speed on the X and Y axes separately, producing movement that was pretty strictly at 45 degree diagonals or a wavering along the axes once it drew level with you. Once you got accustomed to this movement you could use it to guide the ghost in ways that allow you to slip around it through narrow passages. Now, the ghost always comes straight at you, regardless of the angle. This results in much less ability to work around. On top of that, after a minute the ghost will split into TWO smaller ghosts, one of which will pursue in the same way as before while the other, faster one will circle around you once it catches up, providing a moving barrier that will force you to move slower. And THEN, if you STILL don't leave the stage after another minute, they'll split again into four ghosts with even more complex behaviors. @.@ The upshot of all this is that ghost-running is now a far riskier prospect, especially in terms of trying to completely clean out a given stage. One could argue that this is an improvement; certainly I recall ghost-running in the HD version being an arduous and very time-consuming process that usually ended in failure anyway, so I'm sort of glad they're discouraging it beyond a quick few easy gem snags. But it's a soft barrier, one which still leaves an inkling that you could get it all if you tried hard enough.
Bottom line? If you're an absolute Spelunky fanatic, you might love it more than Classic and HD, but in that case you probably already have it. ;)
Echo:
The next entry from the Humble Stealth Bundle. Echo is the only game created by a Danish studio that was called Ultra Ultra. The story involves a young woman called En exploring a palace-like structure that covers an entire planet. Her aim is to bring the remains of a man who rescued her from her grandfather's cult, named Foster, to a machine which can restore him to life from the red cube he was 'translated' into. Her mission control is the cynical AI of Foster's ship, called London. Their bickering dialogue as En delves deeper into the palace gradually reveals the backstory about her grandfather's cult, the 'Resourcefuls', and the events which led up to their mission.
What makes Echo unique is the way the game uses your own actions against you. As the uninhabited palace awakens, it starts producing clones of En -- the titular 'echoes' -- which will chase her down and choke her to death if they spot her. Every so often the palace's ancient systems will fail, resulting in a period of blackout, then a sudden reset. The clones are restored with each reset, so you can't permanently take them out. Furthermore, any actions you take during one cycle will be mimicked by the clones during the next cycle. If you vault over low obstacles, open and close doors, or splash through shallow pools, the clones will be able to do those. If you sprint or crouch to hide for any significant time, the clones will do those in their patrols. And if you make use of En's very-limited-ammo gun, you better make VERY sure you're not spotted during the next cycle. C.C;
The visual style of Echo is very stark and almost monochrome. The palace is constructed from modular pieces, individually intricate and fancy-looking, but collectively producing a samey-ness about any given area. That fits with the fiction about a gigantic arcology for secretive aristocrats and probably helped to keep the art development costs for the studio low, which may well have been the correct decision for them. The price they pay, though, is that it's very easy for the player to lose track of where they have and haven't been, especially after having to deal with a pursuer. This gets even more frustrating if you're a completionist, as there are optional collectibles scattered around to increase your gun ammo and reveal some lore. Thorough exploration of a visually repetitive environment in a stealth game...and they don't even tell you how many collectibles there are to be found. e.e
I do think the way they reset the hostiles makes for an interesting consistency of challenge that other stealth games tend to lack, but other than that, I didn't greatly enjoy this game. I didn't much care for the lite-horror feel they were going for, and without spoiling too much, the difficulty takes a HUGE spike in the last chapter. If you really like stealth games, you might like this, otherwise, give it a pass.
Golf It!:
I have a regular online game night on Saturdays with some family and friends, and one of them recently chose this when it was his turn to pick a game. It was cheap enough that those of us who didn't have it were okay with grabbing it, and as it happens I already had it -- from a Humble Bundle or some other event that made it free or nearly so, I forget exactly what. e.ea I'd tried it briefly once before and found it interesting, but not compelling enough to distract me from the other games I was chewing through at the time. Turns out it's one of those games that's a lot more fun when playing in a group, especially if you've got voice-chat going on. ;)
In case it's not clear enough from the title, Golf It! is a miniature golf game. It's online-capable so you can play it with a bunch of friends, and unlike real golf, you can all play simultaneously (ball collisions optional). Not having to spend the vast bulk of the time waiting for others to take their shots goes a LONG way toward keeping things engaging, and you'll soon have balls plinking all over the courses and frequent laughter at everyone's misfortunes and occasional lucky break.
The control scheme is mouse-based, and it's important to note that there are two variants with the group consensus (at least in my group) being that the default scheme is MUCH harder to work with. :P Said default is that after lining up your shot direction, you pull back the mouse, then shove it forward to hit the ball. How hard the ball is hit depends on how fast you're shoving AT THE MOMENT IT HITS. Naturally, this makes it rather finicky -- which is arguably a realistic representation of golfing, but hey, how many of us really want that in a video game? :P The other scheme is similar, but instead of shoving the mouse, you simply click when you've pulled the putter back as far as you want, and the strength of your hit is proportional to that distance. MUCH more precise, although it's still a little tricky to judge your shot strength -- the appearance of the putter in relation to the ball depends on the vertical angle you were looking at it with when you set up your shot, and there's no pixel-exact meter or anything to judge against. Again like real golf, you just have to get a feel for it.
The courses are creative and get more and more fantastic, both in theme and in challenges. It starts with a standard mini-golf course, only they get much more openhanded than a real course could with things like ramps, hills, and even a loop-de-loop. Then you have to deal with a slippery-slidey winterland course. Then you visit an underground mine with lots of curving wooden structures and eventually moving minecarts. Then there's a spooky-themed course with plenty of moving obstacles like knives stabbing across the green and cauldrons that serve as warp holes. Next you're treated to a pirate bay where you load your balls into cannons and shoot them, and frequently have to send them with hard whacks through expanses of water (fortunately it doesn't chaotically redirect the ball like real water would, just bobs it up and down as it goes and significantly slows it). Finally there's a Japanese garden course that demands HUGE shots along bridges and the occasional flight off a ramp to strike a gong instead of falling into a hole. Real mini-golf course designers wish they could get this zany.
Bottom line? If you can find a group of friends who wouldn't mind plunking down a little cash to play together, go for it! :D It's about the same cost as what you might pay for a round of real mini-golf, and you get a half-dozen courses that you can play over and over anytime you want.
Remix of The Day After from Final Fantasy VI
Click to viewHi all. Had a good Resurrection Sunday? :) Mine was the usual gathering of family. Got in a game of Flashpoint with my brother and brother-in-law toward the end, although for once we failed (albeit on one of the expansion-pack boards that's supposed to be more difficult).
Forgotten Gates progress was relatively lax this month. I finished up the new version of the demo and released it (downloads page here if you're interested), then got around to implementing a system for having monsters react to what's going on in the combat, changing their behavior for upcoming turns and telegraphing such to the player. I started with a relatively simple behavior case: if a deku scrub takes damage, they'll say "Owie!" in a message box (accompanied by the squeaking sound they actually make when hit in the source game), and their behavior changes to Hide in their next action. I'm tempted to change it so that it immediately hides without waiting for their turn, as that would be a more visceral way for the player to see the consequence of their attack, but it could make deku scrubs super-annoying to fight, since they'll instantly hide after any hit and the player will have to wait for them to come back out to continue hacking at them. e.ea
We had a Ninja Burger mission this month in the Starbound universe. We went to an Avian tomb, tussled with some monsters, dealt (somewhat poorly) with some traps, and fought the cultists in the deepest reaches of the tomb. All this to deliver lunch to Esther Bright, who was there studying the heiroglyphics. Apparently the cultists let her in because her hover-chair made them think she was divine. ;)
Spelunky 2:
My listed play time for Spelunky HD (the commercial remake of the original, freeware Spelunky): 322.7 hours. Much of this is from doing the daily challenge, in which everyone gets the same random seed to generate the stages, until I finally managed to get through the ridiculously tricky 'hell run' WITH ghost-diamond-harvesting to the greatest possible degree ON said daily challenge (I did it once by regular play first). The figure is probably inflated a bit by occasions when I left the game running without actually playing, but still.
I mention this because I do NOT think I'll be playing Spelunky 2 to the same degree. X) It feels very similar to the original for the most part. There are new additions to be sure, new enemies, new level types, even a few new mechanics. You occasionally find animals that can be mounted, providing you with extra movement capability and protection (most hits will be absorbed by your mount, which has its own separate health). There are points where you have to go one way or the other and you'll get a different level type as a result. But at the end of the day, you're still jumping, whipping, and dropping your way through a blocky, procedurally-generated world that will kill you at a rate of about 20% chance per stage even once you git gud at it. :)
The problem is, Spelunky 2's expert-level play goes further than ever before, likely to appeal to the true fanatics. Spelunky Classic had just one secret stage, the city of gold, reachable through a series of special feats throughout the game up to that point, and it would give you the opportunity to bolster your score significantly before returning to the final boss fight. Spelunky HD added several more secret side stages, some of which were necessary to reach the city of gold, and after THAT there's an entire set of optional hell stages after the regular 'final' boss. Spelunky 2 ratchets things up further with SEVERAL possible special quests to pursue, some of them mutually exclusive in a given run, extra bosses, more special items you have to acquire along the way to defeat said bosses, and just a general increase in both the difficulty and the number of accomplishments in a row you have to get through. @.@ I have of course found out about much of this through Internet research, NOT discovering it through personal play. I've barely managed to reach about a quarter of these special quests, the most involved of which was reaching the city of gold (and that one turns out to be the path to ANOTHER secret stage). If it were possible to practice the individual challenges involved without slogging through everything leading up to them first, I might have hope of doing it eventually, but most of them have to be done as part of a full run from the very beginning.
There are also some more subtle changes to the controls and such, which I tend to dislike probably mainly because I'm used to the old way than for their own merits. e.e For example, the climbing glove item which causes you to be able to stick to walls now requires you to press a direction against the wall the whole time you want to stick; before, once you were stuck you would stay there until you performed an action to let go, essentially the same as though you were hanging from a ledge. The new way is, I suppose, more intuitive for new players -- why WOULD you be suddenly stuck after touching the wall? -- and it gives finer control over how far you fall after letting go if you press against the wall again...but I don't WANT fine control, I want to fall a predictable short distance instead of having to control it with finicky timing. :P
The really big change for an expert player is with the ghost that shows up after you've been in a stage for a certain amount of time. While the ghost's primary function is as a deadly hazard to chase you out of the stage, it also turns any gems it passes over into much more valuable diamonds. Purposely waiting for the ghost and maneuvering around it to collect diamonds is a practice known as 'ghost-running', and it makes the score ceiling of the game far higher (and things like buying out the entire black market possible). The downside is, it adds HUGELY to the amount of time needed to clear a stage if you're trying to harvest as many diamonds as feasible. Well, they fixed that in Spelunky 2...sort of. e.ea First of all, each stage now has a curse pot item which contains a diamond, but which immediately summons the ghost when broken. Sometimes the curse pot is rather hard to get at due to being buried in the wall or whatever, but still, in theory you can summon the ghost whenever you're ready instead of waiting for the timeout. I regard that as a step in the right direction, but I still would've preferred to just be able to signal the game to hurry up and send the ghost without any special conditions. More importantly, the ghost is now harder to evade. Originally, the ghost moved at a set speed on the X and Y axes separately, producing movement that was pretty strictly at 45 degree diagonals or a wavering along the axes once it drew level with you. Once you got accustomed to this movement you could use it to guide the ghost in ways that allow you to slip around it through narrow passages. Now, the ghost always comes straight at you, regardless of the angle. This results in much less ability to work around. On top of that, after a minute the ghost will split into TWO smaller ghosts, one of which will pursue in the same way as before while the other, faster one will circle around you once it catches up, providing a moving barrier that will force you to move slower. And THEN, if you STILL don't leave the stage after another minute, they'll split again into four ghosts with even more complex behaviors. @.@ The upshot of all this is that ghost-running is now a far riskier prospect, especially in terms of trying to completely clean out a given stage. One could argue that this is an improvement; certainly I recall ghost-running in the HD version being an arduous and very time-consuming process that usually ended in failure anyway, so I'm sort of glad they're discouraging it beyond a quick few easy gem snags. But it's a soft barrier, one which still leaves an inkling that you could get it all if you tried hard enough.
Bottom line? If you're an absolute Spelunky fanatic, you might love it more than Classic and HD, but in that case you probably already have it. ;)
Echo:
The next entry from the Humble Stealth Bundle. Echo is the only game created by a Danish studio that was called Ultra Ultra. The story involves a young woman called En exploring a palace-like structure that covers an entire planet. Her aim is to bring the remains of a man who rescued her from her grandfather's cult, named Foster, to a machine which can restore him to life from the red cube he was 'translated' into. Her mission control is the cynical AI of Foster's ship, called London. Their bickering dialogue as En delves deeper into the palace gradually reveals the backstory about her grandfather's cult, the 'Resourcefuls', and the events which led up to their mission.
What makes Echo unique is the way the game uses your own actions against you. As the uninhabited palace awakens, it starts producing clones of En -- the titular 'echoes' -- which will chase her down and choke her to death if they spot her. Every so often the palace's ancient systems will fail, resulting in a period of blackout, then a sudden reset. The clones are restored with each reset, so you can't permanently take them out. Furthermore, any actions you take during one cycle will be mimicked by the clones during the next cycle. If you vault over low obstacles, open and close doors, or splash through shallow pools, the clones will be able to do those. If you sprint or crouch to hide for any significant time, the clones will do those in their patrols. And if you make use of En's very-limited-ammo gun, you better make VERY sure you're not spotted during the next cycle. C.C;
The visual style of Echo is very stark and almost monochrome. The palace is constructed from modular pieces, individually intricate and fancy-looking, but collectively producing a samey-ness about any given area. That fits with the fiction about a gigantic arcology for secretive aristocrats and probably helped to keep the art development costs for the studio low, which may well have been the correct decision for them. The price they pay, though, is that it's very easy for the player to lose track of where they have and haven't been, especially after having to deal with a pursuer. This gets even more frustrating if you're a completionist, as there are optional collectibles scattered around to increase your gun ammo and reveal some lore. Thorough exploration of a visually repetitive environment in a stealth game...and they don't even tell you how many collectibles there are to be found. e.e
I do think the way they reset the hostiles makes for an interesting consistency of challenge that other stealth games tend to lack, but other than that, I didn't greatly enjoy this game. I didn't much care for the lite-horror feel they were going for, and without spoiling too much, the difficulty takes a HUGE spike in the last chapter. If you really like stealth games, you might like this, otherwise, give it a pass.
Golf It!:
I have a regular online game night on Saturdays with some family and friends, and one of them recently chose this when it was his turn to pick a game. It was cheap enough that those of us who didn't have it were okay with grabbing it, and as it happens I already had it -- from a Humble Bundle or some other event that made it free or nearly so, I forget exactly what. e.ea I'd tried it briefly once before and found it interesting, but not compelling enough to distract me from the other games I was chewing through at the time. Turns out it's one of those games that's a lot more fun when playing in a group, especially if you've got voice-chat going on. ;)
In case it's not clear enough from the title, Golf It! is a miniature golf game. It's online-capable so you can play it with a bunch of friends, and unlike real golf, you can all play simultaneously (ball collisions optional). Not having to spend the vast bulk of the time waiting for others to take their shots goes a LONG way toward keeping things engaging, and you'll soon have balls plinking all over the courses and frequent laughter at everyone's misfortunes and occasional lucky break.
The control scheme is mouse-based, and it's important to note that there are two variants with the group consensus (at least in my group) being that the default scheme is MUCH harder to work with. :P Said default is that after lining up your shot direction, you pull back the mouse, then shove it forward to hit the ball. How hard the ball is hit depends on how fast you're shoving AT THE MOMENT IT HITS. Naturally, this makes it rather finicky -- which is arguably a realistic representation of golfing, but hey, how many of us really want that in a video game? :P The other scheme is similar, but instead of shoving the mouse, you simply click when you've pulled the putter back as far as you want, and the strength of your hit is proportional to that distance. MUCH more precise, although it's still a little tricky to judge your shot strength -- the appearance of the putter in relation to the ball depends on the vertical angle you were looking at it with when you set up your shot, and there's no pixel-exact meter or anything to judge against. Again like real golf, you just have to get a feel for it.
The courses are creative and get more and more fantastic, both in theme and in challenges. It starts with a standard mini-golf course, only they get much more openhanded than a real course could with things like ramps, hills, and even a loop-de-loop. Then you have to deal with a slippery-slidey winterland course. Then you visit an underground mine with lots of curving wooden structures and eventually moving minecarts. Then there's a spooky-themed course with plenty of moving obstacles like knives stabbing across the green and cauldrons that serve as warp holes. Next you're treated to a pirate bay where you load your balls into cannons and shoot them, and frequently have to send them with hard whacks through expanses of water (fortunately it doesn't chaotically redirect the ball like real water would, just bobs it up and down as it goes and significantly slows it). Finally there's a Japanese garden course that demands HUGE shots along bridges and the occasional flight off a ramp to strike a gong instead of falling into a hole. Real mini-golf course designers wish they could get this zany.
Bottom line? If you can find a group of friends who wouldn't mind plunking down a little cash to play together, go for it! :D It's about the same cost as what you might pay for a round of real mini-golf, and you get a half-dozen courses that you can play over and over anytime you want.