Puzzle rooms
Kirb Your Enthusiasm by Brandon Strader
Hi all. Pretty ordinary month here, except my family naturally had a big gathering on Resurrection Sunday. My back gave me some worrisome pangs the day after...until I realized oh yeah, I gave my neices a bunch of piggyback rides yesterday, it'll pass. X)
My new computer gave me a bit of a scare last Saturday. It had trouble booting up, and when it did, it didn't last for long after logging in before it crashed. It gave error messages about crucial Windows files being missing or corrupted. *.*; I was thinking I'd have to reinstall Windows and was struggling to back up some files first...and then I tried removing one of the RAM sticks, and that fixed the problem right away. It even continued working when I put everything back the way it was, so I guess that stick just needed a reseating. =.= So on the one hand I'm glad it was an easy and no-cost fix, and on the other hand I lost half a day to messing around with it. X)
This month I started in on a new aspect of Forgotten Gates quests: puzzle rooms. As you can probably guess, that means rooms where instead of fighting enemies or trying to sneak past them, you have to solve some sort of puzzle to get a reward, be it a vital quest goal or just an item to make future battles easier. There are some technical hurdles to this on top of the simple challenge of designing the puzzles, since it means I have to create the 'moving pieces' so to speak for the player to interact with. My DynParams plugin has come in handy for this once again; I've figured out a method using it to change an event's appearance to a map tile (ordinarily RT2K3 only allows changing to a charset image).
So far I've completed a simple puzzle of one type, which I call 'match the switch orbs'. It involves switching objects to on/off states until they're all the same, with the caveat that interacting with one object switches it AND the ones near it to make things a little tricky. I refer to it as 'match the switch orbs' after the crystal balls used in Zelda games which serve as switches, but what exactly they look like depends on the current map theme. In the Forest theme, which is the only one I've got so far (and even it I'm still adding to), I use colored flowers. The first example with just six 'orbs' is really quite simple to solve once you understand how they affect each other. If I'm not mistaken, it's impossible to be more than two moves away from a solution at any time, so any move you take from there will put you one step from winning and it should be pretty obvious which is the right move from there. Perfect for teaching the concept. :) Adding more nodes should allow me to make the puzzle a little more complex.
I finally got to run a Ninja Burger scenario I'd been sitting on early this month. The scenario involved visiting the Splatoon world yet again, complete with a prepared arena in Tabletop Simulator. This time instead of fighting Octoling opponents with similar weapons, we dealt with a Salmon Run, which is basically Splatoon's zombie survival mode. Mr. Grizz had talked our phone representative into allowing an order of golden salmonid caviar sushi, although really he just wanted the eggs. We didn't have time to gather as many as I had initially planned, and in retrospect I should've thrown more salmonids at the players (although of course that would've made things drag out even more).
Kirby and the Forgotten Land:
Finally, finally, we have a true 3D Kirby game. X) We've been wanting one since the N64 days. Technically Kirby 3D Rumble from Kirby: Planet Robobot and Kirby's Blowout Blast count, but they're small, sideshow-styled games with limited features, most notably no copy abilities. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a full-sized, triple-A Kirby adventure in 3D graphics AND gameplay.
The story, as usual for a Kirby title, is fairly minimal. One day a time-space rift opens in the sky over Pop Star, sucking Kirby and a bunch of other Dreamland denizens, mainly waddle-dees, through into another world. This world is littered with the grown-over remains of a modern civilization that looks a lot like ours -- cars and roads, city buildings, etc. The primary denizens, though, are beasts, mainly cutesy wolf-like things, and they seem intent on nabbing as many waddle-dees as they can, as well as a weird blue mouse-fox thing called Elfilin whom Kirby rescues shortly after arrival. Naturally, Kirby sets off to rescue the waddle-dees as well, and that's about it for plot until you get to the last couple areas...
The big gimmick they added this time is Mouthful Mode. When Kirby finds certain objects, like a car, he can stretch himself out over them and temporarily 'become' them. This generally makes him able to wipe out groups of enemies more easily (not that most combat is terribly hard to begin with), and also serves as keys to puzzles both required and optional. There are walls and floors that can be smashed only with a Mouthful item, areas that can only be traversed with them, etc. It's basically a way of providing a brief segment of alternate gameplay.
Another thing they added is upgrading of copy abilities. The copy abilities we know and love -- sword, bomb, fire, etc. -- and a couple of new ones are present, but all of them can be upgraded to two different new forms (with a few exceptions having only one, or THREE) by finding a collectible blueprint and spending another form of collectible called rare stones. How this affects the ability varies; some are basically just more powerful, others end up working in a significantly different way. For example, the first upgrade to bombs causes your bombs to link up with each other through an electric tether when they're near enough, and the upgrade after THAT turns them into smart bombs that wheel themselves after the nearest target. It's quite surprising how much stuff they came up with.
One more thing worth noting is that there's plenty of secrets for the challenge-hungry player to dig up. Each stage has a bunch of optional waddle-dees to rescue (although some of them you'd have to purposely avoid to miss them), in addition to the occasional blueprint or other collectible. It was actually pretty rare for me to find everything in the first run through a stage, especially toward the end. Partly that's because some of the waddle-dees require achievement-like conditions met to rescue them, which aren't revealed until you stumble across them or complete the stage, and some of them aren't things you can necessarily expect to just happen even even with perfect play, like beating a boss using a particular copy ability. Still, I should actually have reason to replay the whole game apart from just fun and nostalgia. :o I'm hoping to do so with a friend, letting them be Kirby and me trying out being Spear Waddle-Dee (alas, the game only supports two players).
Bottom line? Just what you'd expect from a main-series Kirby game, IN THREEEEE-DEEEEEEE! Grab it when you can.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog:
They purposely released this just before April 1 so that the ad videos for it would seem like an elaborate April Fool's prank. X) But no, this is an official Sega game available on Steam, albeit a small, free one made for boosting brand awareness.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is a visual novel-style game with a simple isometric-view runner mini-game interspersed, which I'll explain later. The story goes that Sonic and friends have rented out a special train used for events to celebrate Amy's birthday with a live-action roleplaying murder mystery. You as the player walk in the shoes of a first-day-on-the-job worker tasked with seeing to the group's needs. Shortly after the partygoers have dispersed across the train cars to play out their assigned roles, though, the train suddenly picks up speed, causing Amy, Tails, and your avatar to be thrown into the caboose and trapped there by fallen furniture. After figuring out a way to get free, they return to the next car and find Sonic laid out on the floor. OH NO, SONIC HAS BEEN MURDERED! Only not really, of course...although...he does seem a bit more banged-up and unresponsive than you'd think from mere play-acting...
Anyway, Tails is in the role of detective, and your avatar ends up being his sidekick. You go from car to car, looking for clues and interviewing the partygoers in their roles. Almost all of them seem to be hiding something, although usually it doesn't have much to do with either the fictional murder or the not-so-fictional suspicious circumstances around it, just silly things like last-minute shopping for Amy's birthday gift. You have to select the right piece of evidence or the correct choice from a dialogue tree to get people to cooperate, and also play that isometric runner mini-game to simulate deep thinking. They did include options for making that bit easier, so that people not so great at action games (which you would think most Sonic fans wouldn't have much trouble with, but whatever) can still get through the story.
Not much more to tell really, especially without spoilers. It's a short and easy bit of fluff with an appropriate price tag, free. Play it if you like Sonic characters and/or detective visual novels (although maybe not if you like detective stuff enough to have exacting standards about it).
Click to viewHi all. Pretty ordinary month here, except my family naturally had a big gathering on Resurrection Sunday. My back gave me some worrisome pangs the day after...until I realized oh yeah, I gave my neices a bunch of piggyback rides yesterday, it'll pass. X)
My new computer gave me a bit of a scare last Saturday. It had trouble booting up, and when it did, it didn't last for long after logging in before it crashed. It gave error messages about crucial Windows files being missing or corrupted. *.*; I was thinking I'd have to reinstall Windows and was struggling to back up some files first...and then I tried removing one of the RAM sticks, and that fixed the problem right away. It even continued working when I put everything back the way it was, so I guess that stick just needed a reseating. =.= So on the one hand I'm glad it was an easy and no-cost fix, and on the other hand I lost half a day to messing around with it. X)
This month I started in on a new aspect of Forgotten Gates quests: puzzle rooms. As you can probably guess, that means rooms where instead of fighting enemies or trying to sneak past them, you have to solve some sort of puzzle to get a reward, be it a vital quest goal or just an item to make future battles easier. There are some technical hurdles to this on top of the simple challenge of designing the puzzles, since it means I have to create the 'moving pieces' so to speak for the player to interact with. My DynParams plugin has come in handy for this once again; I've figured out a method using it to change an event's appearance to a map tile (ordinarily RT2K3 only allows changing to a charset image).
So far I've completed a simple puzzle of one type, which I call 'match the switch orbs'. It involves switching objects to on/off states until they're all the same, with the caveat that interacting with one object switches it AND the ones near it to make things a little tricky. I refer to it as 'match the switch orbs' after the crystal balls used in Zelda games which serve as switches, but what exactly they look like depends on the current map theme. In the Forest theme, which is the only one I've got so far (and even it I'm still adding to), I use colored flowers. The first example with just six 'orbs' is really quite simple to solve once you understand how they affect each other. If I'm not mistaken, it's impossible to be more than two moves away from a solution at any time, so any move you take from there will put you one step from winning and it should be pretty obvious which is the right move from there. Perfect for teaching the concept. :) Adding more nodes should allow me to make the puzzle a little more complex.
I finally got to run a Ninja Burger scenario I'd been sitting on early this month. The scenario involved visiting the Splatoon world yet again, complete with a prepared arena in Tabletop Simulator. This time instead of fighting Octoling opponents with similar weapons, we dealt with a Salmon Run, which is basically Splatoon's zombie survival mode. Mr. Grizz had talked our phone representative into allowing an order of golden salmonid caviar sushi, although really he just wanted the eggs. We didn't have time to gather as many as I had initially planned, and in retrospect I should've thrown more salmonids at the players (although of course that would've made things drag out even more).
Kirby and the Forgotten Land:
Finally, finally, we have a true 3D Kirby game. X) We've been wanting one since the N64 days. Technically Kirby 3D Rumble from Kirby: Planet Robobot and Kirby's Blowout Blast count, but they're small, sideshow-styled games with limited features, most notably no copy abilities. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a full-sized, triple-A Kirby adventure in 3D graphics AND gameplay.
The story, as usual for a Kirby title, is fairly minimal. One day a time-space rift opens in the sky over Pop Star, sucking Kirby and a bunch of other Dreamland denizens, mainly waddle-dees, through into another world. This world is littered with the grown-over remains of a modern civilization that looks a lot like ours -- cars and roads, city buildings, etc. The primary denizens, though, are beasts, mainly cutesy wolf-like things, and they seem intent on nabbing as many waddle-dees as they can, as well as a weird blue mouse-fox thing called Elfilin whom Kirby rescues shortly after arrival. Naturally, Kirby sets off to rescue the waddle-dees as well, and that's about it for plot until you get to the last couple areas...
The big gimmick they added this time is Mouthful Mode. When Kirby finds certain objects, like a car, he can stretch himself out over them and temporarily 'become' them. This generally makes him able to wipe out groups of enemies more easily (not that most combat is terribly hard to begin with), and also serves as keys to puzzles both required and optional. There are walls and floors that can be smashed only with a Mouthful item, areas that can only be traversed with them, etc. It's basically a way of providing a brief segment of alternate gameplay.
Another thing they added is upgrading of copy abilities. The copy abilities we know and love -- sword, bomb, fire, etc. -- and a couple of new ones are present, but all of them can be upgraded to two different new forms (with a few exceptions having only one, or THREE) by finding a collectible blueprint and spending another form of collectible called rare stones. How this affects the ability varies; some are basically just more powerful, others end up working in a significantly different way. For example, the first upgrade to bombs causes your bombs to link up with each other through an electric tether when they're near enough, and the upgrade after THAT turns them into smart bombs that wheel themselves after the nearest target. It's quite surprising how much stuff they came up with.
One more thing worth noting is that there's plenty of secrets for the challenge-hungry player to dig up. Each stage has a bunch of optional waddle-dees to rescue (although some of them you'd have to purposely avoid to miss them), in addition to the occasional blueprint or other collectible. It was actually pretty rare for me to find everything in the first run through a stage, especially toward the end. Partly that's because some of the waddle-dees require achievement-like conditions met to rescue them, which aren't revealed until you stumble across them or complete the stage, and some of them aren't things you can necessarily expect to just happen even even with perfect play, like beating a boss using a particular copy ability. Still, I should actually have reason to replay the whole game apart from just fun and nostalgia. :o I'm hoping to do so with a friend, letting them be Kirby and me trying out being Spear Waddle-Dee (alas, the game only supports two players).
Bottom line? Just what you'd expect from a main-series Kirby game, IN THREEEEE-DEEEEEEE! Grab it when you can.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog:
They purposely released this just before April 1 so that the ad videos for it would seem like an elaborate April Fool's prank. X) But no, this is an official Sega game available on Steam, albeit a small, free one made for boosting brand awareness.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is a visual novel-style game with a simple isometric-view runner mini-game interspersed, which I'll explain later. The story goes that Sonic and friends have rented out a special train used for events to celebrate Amy's birthday with a live-action roleplaying murder mystery. You as the player walk in the shoes of a first-day-on-the-job worker tasked with seeing to the group's needs. Shortly after the partygoers have dispersed across the train cars to play out their assigned roles, though, the train suddenly picks up speed, causing Amy, Tails, and your avatar to be thrown into the caboose and trapped there by fallen furniture. After figuring out a way to get free, they return to the next car and find Sonic laid out on the floor. OH NO, SONIC HAS BEEN MURDERED! Only not really, of course...although...he does seem a bit more banged-up and unresponsive than you'd think from mere play-acting...
Anyway, Tails is in the role of detective, and your avatar ends up being his sidekick. You go from car to car, looking for clues and interviewing the partygoers in their roles. Almost all of them seem to be hiding something, although usually it doesn't have much to do with either the fictional murder or the not-so-fictional suspicious circumstances around it, just silly things like last-minute shopping for Amy's birthday gift. You have to select the right piece of evidence or the correct choice from a dialogue tree to get people to cooperate, and also play that isometric runner mini-game to simulate deep thinking. They did include options for making that bit easier, so that people not so great at action games (which you would think most Sonic fans wouldn't have much trouble with, but whatever) can still get through the story.
Not much more to tell really, especially without spoilers. It's a short and easy bit of fluff with an appropriate price tag, free. Play it if you like Sonic characters and/or detective visual novels (although maybe not if you like detective stuff enough to have exacting standards about it).