Queen-size bed
Deep End by Newsboys
Hi all. There was no big family gathering this month, due to a dearth of birthdays. Probably the most eventful thing that happened was just yesterday, when I acquired a queen-sized bed from my aunt. She'd bought a new one and was just going to get rid of her old one, so I rented a cargo van and moved it to my place with the help of my Dad, my sister, and her fiance. I still need to get a mattress for it, but hopefully it will let me stretch out full-length without putting my feet into the cold zone at the edge.
This month in Forgotten Gates my progress was to finish implementing Xu, create the Octorok monster, and get most of the Guay monster done. Octorok's map behavior is pretty similar to that of the Deku scrub, the difference being that it actually moves around a bit. I ended up making a function for generic projectiles to cover both of the monsters' spitting behavior and hopefully many similar ones in the future. For the Guay, I invented a swooping behavior in which it appears suddenly nearby and flies toward the hero, then arcs away and disappears if it didn't hit and thus start a combat. It still needs some work, particularly since currently if there are multiple swooping enemies, they all show up at the exact same time. e.ea
Zelda RPG activity has picked up a bit, mainly thanks to Fallon-player getting some RL stuff settled and setting herself a goal of at least posting in the main plot scene on Fridays. Princess Ruto floated a bunch of injured Zora warriors to the surface for Aubrey to take care of, and he started dragging them to the island to do medical triage (to the best of his ability as somebody with no real medical training). This included Link-in-Zora-form, who was fighting the whale FROM THE INSIDE and got knocked out in the process of being expelled. Also, a character named Gatu who is supposed to be a TIME-DISPLACED FUTURE DESCENDANT of Link arrived from that other scene that was dovetailing with this one.
Gotham Knights:
I should've reviewed this last month, forgot somehow. e.ea Gotham Knights, as you'd probably guess from the name, is a Batman game, and it's a spiritual successor to the Arkham series. It seems to be set in a different continuity, though, which isn't too surprising if you know how Arkham Knight ended. X) Gotham Knights starts with a cinematic of Batman having a tangle in the Batcave with one of his nemeses, Ra's al Ghul, who rants about some sacrilege Bruce has allowed. It ends with both of them dead. Yes, for reals, although as we all know, in the world of comic books even confirmed death isn't always permanent. >.> Anyway, Batman's protoges -- Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood, and Robin (the third one I think? Real name Tim Drake) -- come together to pick up the last case Batman was investigating. It leads them into the legend of the Court of Owls, a secret society of rich elites who supposedly have controlled Gotham through shadowy means since its founding. Unsurprisingly, it turns out THE LEGEND IS TRUE. OoO Even though we the audience have never heard of it before and they're apparently good enough to have sneaked their activities past Batman et al until now. So yeah, the Bat crew runs around Gotham fighting the Court's minions and various other baddies, including some run-ins with a few of the regular rogue's gallery.
The core gameplay is fairly similar to the Arkham series -- simple brawling with an emphasis on timed counters and crowd control, interspersed with stealthy takedown opportunities. There are some adjustments that take getting used to, though. Instead of doing a counter against potentially multiple opponents in an organized strike, you do evades, and if you leave the evade close enough to an incoming attack, you can follow it with a strong hit against that one opponent. There's also the addition of 'momentum abilities', special techniques that consume from a mana meter built up through successful regular actions and have a cooldown before you can use them again. Momentum abilities are executed by holding the RB button and then either tapping or holding one of the four main action buttons, making for a total of 8 abilities -- PER CHARACTER. I don't have them all memorized myself, in fact I usually forget to even use them at all. X)
Speaking of the characters, here's a quick rundown of the playable heroes. Nightwing emphasizes extra evadability (being an acrobat) and leadership bonuses that only apply when doing multiplayer. Robin is my personal favorite as a stealth expert, able to move faster while still being quiet than the others and eventually unlocking the ability to do stealth takedowns even on hulking miniboss mooks. Red Hood is the ranged expert, since he carries pistols (and yes, they're canonically stated to use special non-lethal rounds). Batgirl is the easy-mode option for the most part, with more health and better damage-dealing than the guys -- doesn't make much sense, but I guess they didn't want to stack too many advantages on the others and they had more defined skillsets canonically. The thing Batgirl has that does make sense to her character is an unlockable ability to be invisible to technology like security cameras, which doesn't matter too often but is quite handy when it does.
They added an RPG layer to the game with experience levels, skill trees, and craftable armor and weapons. For the most part, you can pretty much gather way more than enough materials to craft whatever equipment schematics you pick up, although I say that as somebody who tended to mop up all the available side-quests and such. It's easy to forget to upgrade your kit, then realize later on that part of the reason you're struggling is that you're using equipment a few hours behind what you're expected to have. =.=
I suspect the changes are mainly in service of the fact that this is an online-multiplayer-capable rendition of the game. With four playable heroes, you can have up to four people playing together at once. In fact, there are options for how open you want your game session to be: totally offline, invite-only, friends-only, or open for random strangers to drop in. I decided to make it open myself to see how it went. I only had a few occasions where somebody popped into my game, but they were largely positive experiences, if a bit shallow. I think it would probably be pretty fun to play it with friends you actually know and can do voice chat with as you go, although that would be difficult to set up since this is a big-ticket game and like its predecessor is merciless to older computers. My gaming laptop couldn't really handle it, and it's only approaching four years old. I wasn't able to play this game until I got my new desktop PC.
Bottom line? It's a little less satisfying than the games it succeeds, but Gotham Knights is fun enough to be worth your time if you've got a beefy enough system for it.
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun:
Got this for free as one of Epic Games's weekly giveaways. It was enjoyable enough that I want to purchase it now, to support the devs who made it -- although it's old enough that who knows how many of those involved will still profit from sales made today. Also not sure where would be best to purchase it. X) Epic Games is the obvious first choice since their giveaway is what allowed me to play it and I kinda want to reward them for that behavior, but since it's already in my library with them I'd have to make a secondary account to buy it. My brother is also a bit scornful of Epic Games because of a different practice of theirs: making exclusivity deals to have games available only on their platform, at least for a good time at first release.
Anyway! Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is a real-time tactics game with a strong focus on stealth, similar to (in fact inspired by) the old DOS series Commandos. You may recall that I acquired that series and really liked Commandos 2, but that was the only one I could manage to get into, and that just barely. It required memorizing a bunch of keyboard commands for the huge number of actions possible -- most of which are rarely used, so you mainly just need to know the common ones, but still, it takes a lot of getting used to. Shadow Tactics is far simpler, with about half a dozen actions for each character, and all of them are available from a GUI bar at the bottom of the screen, with a close cluster of keys (around the familiar WASD) available as shortcuts.
As you'd probably guess from the name, Shadow Tactics takes place in feudal Japan. You start out controlling one character, Hayato, a mercenary ninja hired by the Shogun to infiltrate a fortress in the middle of a battle and open the gate to let his forces in. Partway into said mission Hayato encounters Mugen, a samurai who is the sole survivor of the assault on the first gate. Mugen is less capable than Hayato in terms of stealthy movement and climbing ability, but he can carry heavy loads, defeat enemy samurai in one-on-one duels, and even take out knots of lesser enemies in a dash-in ambush. A little later they join forces with Takuma, a wily old gunpowder expert who developed his own personal sniper rifle with a relatively quiet report. In later missions they pick up Yuki, a teenage thief who can set a deadly trap and lure enemies with her birdcall, and finally Aiko, a silk-hiding-steel kunoichi who can disguise herself (after acquiring appropriate clothes) to walk unsuspected past all but the highest-ranking enemies. Together, they investigate the mysterious 'Kage-sama' who is gathering forces to usurp the Shogun's rule.
While Shadow Tactics is definitely easier to pick up than Commandos and involves smaller, more straight-forward missions, it's in some ways more challenging. In particular, if you want to get through the missions without killing anybody (which in some cases is possible and even earns you an achievement badge), you're going to find it much trickier. In Commandos, you could non-lethally neutralize an enemy by knocking them out, tieing them up, and squirreling them away someplace where they won't be found by their comrades. In Shadow Tactics, however, tieing them up isn't an option. KO'd enemies will eventually wake up and raise an alarm. There are places where you can toss a KO'd enemy to shut them up permanently without it counting as a kill, like a well or for some reason inside certain pot-like things, but they're few and far between. I eventually gave up on the technical pacifist challenge, at least for my first run, and contented myself with only sparing enemy civilians. There was one mission where the team has been framed as traitors and must infiltrate to the Shogun's tent to clear their names, which meant the guards were good guys. X) I had to look up a video of a tricky no-kills run on that one, not because the game won't allow you to shed innocent blood, but because I really didn't want to do so. There was also a mission where I couldn't manage to avoid raising alarms from bodies being discovered early on, and had to take the tedious strategy of hiding away and waiting for the enemies to settle back to their regular routes.
One more interesting thing worth noting is that the game has a 'shadow actions' mode. It basically allows you to queue up an action for each character, then execute them all at once by pressing Enter (or individually with other shortcut keys, if you want to stagger the timing). This is handy for taking out foes simultaneously, so that one of them doesn't find the body of the other. Of course, the mere fact that such coordinated strikes are possible allows the game to throw tricky situations requiring the usage of it at you. X)
Bottom line? Tricky and frustrating, but typically for much better reasons than the Commandos games, and very satisfying to conquer.
Click to viewHi all. There was no big family gathering this month, due to a dearth of birthdays. Probably the most eventful thing that happened was just yesterday, when I acquired a queen-sized bed from my aunt. She'd bought a new one and was just going to get rid of her old one, so I rented a cargo van and moved it to my place with the help of my Dad, my sister, and her fiance. I still need to get a mattress for it, but hopefully it will let me stretch out full-length without putting my feet into the cold zone at the edge.
This month in Forgotten Gates my progress was to finish implementing Xu, create the Octorok monster, and get most of the Guay monster done. Octorok's map behavior is pretty similar to that of the Deku scrub, the difference being that it actually moves around a bit. I ended up making a function for generic projectiles to cover both of the monsters' spitting behavior and hopefully many similar ones in the future. For the Guay, I invented a swooping behavior in which it appears suddenly nearby and flies toward the hero, then arcs away and disappears if it didn't hit and thus start a combat. It still needs some work, particularly since currently if there are multiple swooping enemies, they all show up at the exact same time. e.ea
Zelda RPG activity has picked up a bit, mainly thanks to Fallon-player getting some RL stuff settled and setting herself a goal of at least posting in the main plot scene on Fridays. Princess Ruto floated a bunch of injured Zora warriors to the surface for Aubrey to take care of, and he started dragging them to the island to do medical triage (to the best of his ability as somebody with no real medical training). This included Link-in-Zora-form, who was fighting the whale FROM THE INSIDE and got knocked out in the process of being expelled. Also, a character named Gatu who is supposed to be a TIME-DISPLACED FUTURE DESCENDANT of Link arrived from that other scene that was dovetailing with this one.
Gotham Knights:
I should've reviewed this last month, forgot somehow. e.ea Gotham Knights, as you'd probably guess from the name, is a Batman game, and it's a spiritual successor to the Arkham series. It seems to be set in a different continuity, though, which isn't too surprising if you know how Arkham Knight ended. X) Gotham Knights starts with a cinematic of Batman having a tangle in the Batcave with one of his nemeses, Ra's al Ghul, who rants about some sacrilege Bruce has allowed. It ends with both of them dead. Yes, for reals, although as we all know, in the world of comic books even confirmed death isn't always permanent. >.> Anyway, Batman's protoges -- Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood, and Robin (the third one I think? Real name Tim Drake) -- come together to pick up the last case Batman was investigating. It leads them into the legend of the Court of Owls, a secret society of rich elites who supposedly have controlled Gotham through shadowy means since its founding. Unsurprisingly, it turns out THE LEGEND IS TRUE. OoO Even though we the audience have never heard of it before and they're apparently good enough to have sneaked their activities past Batman et al until now. So yeah, the Bat crew runs around Gotham fighting the Court's minions and various other baddies, including some run-ins with a few of the regular rogue's gallery.
The core gameplay is fairly similar to the Arkham series -- simple brawling with an emphasis on timed counters and crowd control, interspersed with stealthy takedown opportunities. There are some adjustments that take getting used to, though. Instead of doing a counter against potentially multiple opponents in an organized strike, you do evades, and if you leave the evade close enough to an incoming attack, you can follow it with a strong hit against that one opponent. There's also the addition of 'momentum abilities', special techniques that consume from a mana meter built up through successful regular actions and have a cooldown before you can use them again. Momentum abilities are executed by holding the RB button and then either tapping or holding one of the four main action buttons, making for a total of 8 abilities -- PER CHARACTER. I don't have them all memorized myself, in fact I usually forget to even use them at all. X)
Speaking of the characters, here's a quick rundown of the playable heroes. Nightwing emphasizes extra evadability (being an acrobat) and leadership bonuses that only apply when doing multiplayer. Robin is my personal favorite as a stealth expert, able to move faster while still being quiet than the others and eventually unlocking the ability to do stealth takedowns even on hulking miniboss mooks. Red Hood is the ranged expert, since he carries pistols (and yes, they're canonically stated to use special non-lethal rounds). Batgirl is the easy-mode option for the most part, with more health and better damage-dealing than the guys -- doesn't make much sense, but I guess they didn't want to stack too many advantages on the others and they had more defined skillsets canonically. The thing Batgirl has that does make sense to her character is an unlockable ability to be invisible to technology like security cameras, which doesn't matter too often but is quite handy when it does.
They added an RPG layer to the game with experience levels, skill trees, and craftable armor and weapons. For the most part, you can pretty much gather way more than enough materials to craft whatever equipment schematics you pick up, although I say that as somebody who tended to mop up all the available side-quests and such. It's easy to forget to upgrade your kit, then realize later on that part of the reason you're struggling is that you're using equipment a few hours behind what you're expected to have. =.=
I suspect the changes are mainly in service of the fact that this is an online-multiplayer-capable rendition of the game. With four playable heroes, you can have up to four people playing together at once. In fact, there are options for how open you want your game session to be: totally offline, invite-only, friends-only, or open for random strangers to drop in. I decided to make it open myself to see how it went. I only had a few occasions where somebody popped into my game, but they were largely positive experiences, if a bit shallow. I think it would probably be pretty fun to play it with friends you actually know and can do voice chat with as you go, although that would be difficult to set up since this is a big-ticket game and like its predecessor is merciless to older computers. My gaming laptop couldn't really handle it, and it's only approaching four years old. I wasn't able to play this game until I got my new desktop PC.
Bottom line? It's a little less satisfying than the games it succeeds, but Gotham Knights is fun enough to be worth your time if you've got a beefy enough system for it.
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun:
Got this for free as one of Epic Games's weekly giveaways. It was enjoyable enough that I want to purchase it now, to support the devs who made it -- although it's old enough that who knows how many of those involved will still profit from sales made today. Also not sure where would be best to purchase it. X) Epic Games is the obvious first choice since their giveaway is what allowed me to play it and I kinda want to reward them for that behavior, but since it's already in my library with them I'd have to make a secondary account to buy it. My brother is also a bit scornful of Epic Games because of a different practice of theirs: making exclusivity deals to have games available only on their platform, at least for a good time at first release.
Anyway! Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is a real-time tactics game with a strong focus on stealth, similar to (in fact inspired by) the old DOS series Commandos. You may recall that I acquired that series and really liked Commandos 2, but that was the only one I could manage to get into, and that just barely. It required memorizing a bunch of keyboard commands for the huge number of actions possible -- most of which are rarely used, so you mainly just need to know the common ones, but still, it takes a lot of getting used to. Shadow Tactics is far simpler, with about half a dozen actions for each character, and all of them are available from a GUI bar at the bottom of the screen, with a close cluster of keys (around the familiar WASD) available as shortcuts.
As you'd probably guess from the name, Shadow Tactics takes place in feudal Japan. You start out controlling one character, Hayato, a mercenary ninja hired by the Shogun to infiltrate a fortress in the middle of a battle and open the gate to let his forces in. Partway into said mission Hayato encounters Mugen, a samurai who is the sole survivor of the assault on the first gate. Mugen is less capable than Hayato in terms of stealthy movement and climbing ability, but he can carry heavy loads, defeat enemy samurai in one-on-one duels, and even take out knots of lesser enemies in a dash-in ambush. A little later they join forces with Takuma, a wily old gunpowder expert who developed his own personal sniper rifle with a relatively quiet report. In later missions they pick up Yuki, a teenage thief who can set a deadly trap and lure enemies with her birdcall, and finally Aiko, a silk-hiding-steel kunoichi who can disguise herself (after acquiring appropriate clothes) to walk unsuspected past all but the highest-ranking enemies. Together, they investigate the mysterious 'Kage-sama' who is gathering forces to usurp the Shogun's rule.
While Shadow Tactics is definitely easier to pick up than Commandos and involves smaller, more straight-forward missions, it's in some ways more challenging. In particular, if you want to get through the missions without killing anybody (which in some cases is possible and even earns you an achievement badge), you're going to find it much trickier. In Commandos, you could non-lethally neutralize an enemy by knocking them out, tieing them up, and squirreling them away someplace where they won't be found by their comrades. In Shadow Tactics, however, tieing them up isn't an option. KO'd enemies will eventually wake up and raise an alarm. There are places where you can toss a KO'd enemy to shut them up permanently without it counting as a kill, like a well or for some reason inside certain pot-like things, but they're few and far between. I eventually gave up on the technical pacifist challenge, at least for my first run, and contented myself with only sparing enemy civilians. There was one mission where the team has been framed as traitors and must infiltrate to the Shogun's tent to clear their names, which meant the guards were good guys. X) I had to look up a video of a tricky no-kills run on that one, not because the game won't allow you to shed innocent blood, but because I really didn't want to do so. There was also a mission where I couldn't manage to avoid raising alarms from bodies being discovered early on, and had to take the tedious strategy of hiding away and waiting for the enemies to settle back to their regular routes.
One more interesting thing worth noting is that the game has a 'shadow actions' mode. It basically allows you to queue up an action for each character, then execute them all at once by pressing Enter (or individually with other shortcut keys, if you want to stagger the timing). This is handy for taking out foes simultaneously, so that one of them doesn't find the body of the other. Of course, the mere fact that such coordinated strikes are possible allows the game to throw tricky situations requiring the usage of it at you. X)
Bottom line? Tricky and frustrating, but typically for much better reasons than the Commandos games, and very satisfying to conquer.