Internet service switch
You Found Me by FFH
Hi all. Been a pretty quiet month IRL, not even a big family get-together to speak of. About the most interesting thing that happened is that I switched Internet services. What makes even that newsworthy is that my router, which I got back in college and which had been sitting in storage because AT&T makes you use (and pay a monthly fee for) their combined modem/router, conked out overnight after the first evening of resumed usage. Fortunately I did still have a few days of AT&T service left...just enough, in fact, to last me through my usual online game night so I could sort out a new router when I was out and about the next day without making a special trip for it. Convenient.
This month in Forgotten Gates, I jumped into a new area of gameplay: stealth challenges. I've been planning to have stealth in the game from nearly the beginning, and I even implemented an RM2K3 script system for checking if some thing can see the hero, but as with so many things, I needed to reimplement in DynRPG to make it run faster and be easier to work with moving forward. X) Actually, as far as just the vision check, I was able to use someone else's Line of Sight plugin, so that part was easy. What really needed doing at this point was controlling how the guard monsters patrol around.
I have almost nothing to report from RP-land this month. I had a Ninja Burger scenario ready for my game group, but we haven't yet had a night with enough of us attending to make it worthwhile. On Zelda RPG, Tommy and company came within sight of a smoke column, most likely indicating the moblin made camp to cook the trout. Aubrey found out that the whale is plagued with malice (the reddish-purple gunk from Breath of the Wild), so he's preparing to try and stab some evil eyeballs with a stick, for what little fighting capability (especially underwater) he has. c.c;
Horizon Zero Dawn:
For a lot of people, this game was the PlayStation 4's killer app. Eventually, though, it came out on PC, which is how I played it. My brother got it for me as a gift, last...Christmas, or was it my birthday a whole year ago? =.=a But yeah, been sitting on it a while as I churned through other games. Turns out it requires at least Windows 10, so I had to play it on my laptop instead of my desktop PC. X)
The story of the game is that you are in a post-apocalyptic world with stone-age technology...except that there are vaguely-animalistic robots wandering around. c.c Humanity has stories about how their ancient ancestors created the machines and were eventually betrayed by them, but nobody seems to know the full truth. That's not your main concern starting out -- you're a little girl called Aloy who's been an outcast from birth, raised by a man who is also an outcast, and you want to win the proving test of the local tribe so that you can be accepted as a member and make the matriarchs tell you about your parentage, which is a big mystery for some reason. Also, you fell into some ruins and while exploring your way out discovered a little device that fits behind your ear, called a focus. It projects holograms displaying information about the world around you, significantly including insight about machines, so that gives you an important edge.
Well, fast-forward to when the protagonist is a late-teenager ready to run in the proving, and things get more complicated when a group of outlanders show up and attack. Even more surprisingly, it turns out you were their main target. 8o Why? Well, to find that out, you set out on a quest into the wide world, seeking vengeance for the fallen as well as answers about the world's past and your place in it. Along the way you will forge bonds with other tribes, figure strongly in large-scale conflicts, and delve into the belly of the metal bulwarks where the machines are produced.
In gameplay terms, Horizon Zero Dawn is a fairly standard triple-A 3D action-adventure. Fighting machines is a big part of the action, from little vaguely-raptor-shaped things that go down with a single well-placed arrow or sneaky spear strike to two-story behemoths that take a minimum of five minutes' pouring high-calibre weaponry into. This is probably in part because I chose to play on the Hard difficulty level (number 3 out of 5) and also a little bit from using a laptop's keyboard and mouse instead of a more responsive controller (I tried my Steam controller, but it made turning around way too slow), but it seemed to me to be a bit unfairly rough. There's a dodge-roll move for avoiding damage, but you're only invulnerable for a brief part of it, and a lot of attacks can lay down areas where it's hard to avoid at least partial damage. It's also easy to get lost amid the huge bodies lunging at you, especially since the enemies in this game don't seem to have much 'fair play wait your turn' behavior. It got easier once I acquired better gear to get out of Early Game Hell, of course, but there were definitely a few quests that took me more tries than they ideally should've. :P
I don't want to give the impression that I disliked Horizon Zero Dawn -- indeed, it was quite satisfactory for what it was. It's just that what it was is mostly stuff that's pretty familiar nowadays in the triple-A video game world, so it's harder to notice the parts it did well than the parts it did not-so-well. You chase quests around a huge 3D world, you fight baddies, you work through obstacle courses (although those are mostly a matter of 'press the movement button toward the next handhold), and you solve the occasional puzzle. I'm sure such a glib summary doesn't do it true justice, but that's how it feels to me as a player -- yet another action-adventure that I'll gladly chew through, but it's not going to occupy a huge space in my mind going forward.
Bottom line? Not the greatest game ever for its price, but a solid enough one to be worth your time and coin sooner or later.
Click to viewHi all. Been a pretty quiet month IRL, not even a big family get-together to speak of. About the most interesting thing that happened is that I switched Internet services. What makes even that newsworthy is that my router, which I got back in college and which had been sitting in storage because AT&T makes you use (and pay a monthly fee for) their combined modem/router, conked out overnight after the first evening of resumed usage. Fortunately I did still have a few days of AT&T service left...just enough, in fact, to last me through my usual online game night so I could sort out a new router when I was out and about the next day without making a special trip for it. Convenient.
This month in Forgotten Gates, I jumped into a new area of gameplay: stealth challenges. I've been planning to have stealth in the game from nearly the beginning, and I even implemented an RM2K3 script system for checking if some thing can see the hero, but as with so many things, I needed to reimplement in DynRPG to make it run faster and be easier to work with moving forward. X) Actually, as far as just the vision check, I was able to use someone else's Line of Sight plugin, so that part was easy. What really needed doing at this point was controlling how the guard monsters patrol around.
I have almost nothing to report from RP-land this month. I had a Ninja Burger scenario ready for my game group, but we haven't yet had a night with enough of us attending to make it worthwhile. On Zelda RPG, Tommy and company came within sight of a smoke column, most likely indicating the moblin made camp to cook the trout. Aubrey found out that the whale is plagued with malice (the reddish-purple gunk from Breath of the Wild), so he's preparing to try and stab some evil eyeballs with a stick, for what little fighting capability (especially underwater) he has. c.c;
Horizon Zero Dawn:
For a lot of people, this game was the PlayStation 4's killer app. Eventually, though, it came out on PC, which is how I played it. My brother got it for me as a gift, last...Christmas, or was it my birthday a whole year ago? =.=a But yeah, been sitting on it a while as I churned through other games. Turns out it requires at least Windows 10, so I had to play it on my laptop instead of my desktop PC. X)
The story of the game is that you are in a post-apocalyptic world with stone-age technology...except that there are vaguely-animalistic robots wandering around. c.c Humanity has stories about how their ancient ancestors created the machines and were eventually betrayed by them, but nobody seems to know the full truth. That's not your main concern starting out -- you're a little girl called Aloy who's been an outcast from birth, raised by a man who is also an outcast, and you want to win the proving test of the local tribe so that you can be accepted as a member and make the matriarchs tell you about your parentage, which is a big mystery for some reason. Also, you fell into some ruins and while exploring your way out discovered a little device that fits behind your ear, called a focus. It projects holograms displaying information about the world around you, significantly including insight about machines, so that gives you an important edge.
Well, fast-forward to when the protagonist is a late-teenager ready to run in the proving, and things get more complicated when a group of outlanders show up and attack. Even more surprisingly, it turns out you were their main target. 8o Why? Well, to find that out, you set out on a quest into the wide world, seeking vengeance for the fallen as well as answers about the world's past and your place in it. Along the way you will forge bonds with other tribes, figure strongly in large-scale conflicts, and delve into the belly of the metal bulwarks where the machines are produced.
In gameplay terms, Horizon Zero Dawn is a fairly standard triple-A 3D action-adventure. Fighting machines is a big part of the action, from little vaguely-raptor-shaped things that go down with a single well-placed arrow or sneaky spear strike to two-story behemoths that take a minimum of five minutes' pouring high-calibre weaponry into. This is probably in part because I chose to play on the Hard difficulty level (number 3 out of 5) and also a little bit from using a laptop's keyboard and mouse instead of a more responsive controller (I tried my Steam controller, but it made turning around way too slow), but it seemed to me to be a bit unfairly rough. There's a dodge-roll move for avoiding damage, but you're only invulnerable for a brief part of it, and a lot of attacks can lay down areas where it's hard to avoid at least partial damage. It's also easy to get lost amid the huge bodies lunging at you, especially since the enemies in this game don't seem to have much 'fair play wait your turn' behavior. It got easier once I acquired better gear to get out of Early Game Hell, of course, but there were definitely a few quests that took me more tries than they ideally should've. :P
I don't want to give the impression that I disliked Horizon Zero Dawn -- indeed, it was quite satisfactory for what it was. It's just that what it was is mostly stuff that's pretty familiar nowadays in the triple-A video game world, so it's harder to notice the parts it did well than the parts it did not-so-well. You chase quests around a huge 3D world, you fight baddies, you work through obstacle courses (although those are mostly a matter of 'press the movement button toward the next handhold), and you solve the occasional puzzle. I'm sure such a glib summary doesn't do it true justice, but that's how it feels to me as a player -- yet another action-adventure that I'll gladly chew through, but it's not going to occupy a huge space in my mind going forward.
Bottom line? Not the greatest game ever for its price, but a solid enough one to be worth your time and coin sooner or later.