A Bluey Thanksgiving
Angels We Have Heard on High as performed by for King & Country
Hi all. Had a nice Thanksgiving? Mine was the usual big family gathering, but I also ended up spending the next two days AFTER Thanksgiving at my parents' place because my cousin came for a visit. My sister and her kids were also there (her husband is busy doing renovations on their home I believe, although he was also present on Thanksgiving proper), and my cousin gave them Bluey: The Video Game for Nintendo Switch as an early Christmas gift. Made it a little difficult to avoid having to tell them they'll be getting the system to run it on when Christmas arrives. X) But they were able to get through the entirety of the game easily using my Switch, so it's not like they're missing out on much in the meantime.
This month in Forgotten Gates I did something I'd been pondering for a while: moving Deccus to 'legacy hero' status and replacing him with another of my own characters, John. Deccus's player disappeared from the Triforce MUCK/Zelda RPG roleplaying community quite a while back, and mechanically Deccus ended up very similar to Link -- a Forest-element sword-and-shield fighter with well-rounded stats. I was reluctant to oust him for my own character, though, because I already have three characters of my own as playable heroes in this game. X) But since I've implemented all of the other playable heroes (well, aside from the Six Sages), it was time to make a decision on it. I discussed the matter with the other players still around in Zelda RPG, and the consensus was Deccus's player probably wouldn't mind even if he somehow came back into contact with us or ran across Forgotten Gates.
So I got started on implementing John as a playable hero. I recycled some of the skill concepts I was planning to use for Deccus, but I also replaced some with new ones, particularly to be a better match with the team I expect John to be on for most of the game.
On Zelda RPG, the Flooding of Hyrule arc has FINALLY been brought to a close! :D It's a little unclear how, Fi just showed Gatu to a fissure at the bottom of LakeSea Hylia and had him stick the Master Sword into it. This apparently dispelled some sort of cursed energy, and the waters receded to their normal level. Aubrey had to climb the tree on his island and cling to the branches to avoid being swept away by the big wave that happened at first. X/ And then the whale, now Malice-free, came to the surface and...flew away. 9_9 Must've been the legendary Wind Fish.
Return to Monkey Island:
Got this one as a birthday gift. I'd heard the general opinion on it was...disappointing, but it's one of those series you just have to give any new entry a shot even if you're not sure you'll like it. It was directed by Ron Gilbert, who was also the lead developer on the first two Monkey Island games.
As far as user experience goes, I'd say Return to Monkey Island is definitely better than previous games in the series. When you select an item from your inventory and go to try and use it with another item or environment object, the game will highlight the item when you mouse-over it only if you CAN do that interaction. That saves you tons of frustration having to select an item and click it on lots of different options looking for things that work. Purists might say that this removes nearly any challenge from figuring out the solution yourself, but let's face it, the sweet spot between an object interaction that's boringly obvious and one that makes no sense at all is very thin and varies from player to player. I'd much rather be able to check for and eliminate possibilities quickly when I'm stuck than be forced to pay a stiff penalty of time and frustration for not cottoning onto the designers' mindset. They also included an in-game hint system that allows you to ask for gradually more revealing hints on a specific puzzle, going from "What even am I trying to do here?" through stuff like "You might need to visit this other location first" to finally "Okay, here's the solution". Most of the times I broke down and consulted this system, I ended up thinking, "Wait, what? I thought I already tried that." -.-a Of course, I don't think this is the first game to do these sorts of things, just the first Monkey Island game.
As for story, this game feels kind of limp. It starts out with a recounting of the end of the second Monkey Island game, which makes it seem like they might be completely ignoring the games that Ron wasn't involved in. OoO But then it turns out that it's actually Guybrush's son Boybrush playing pretend with his friend Chuckie. After a tutorial segment with the kids running around a park, they resort to the narrative device of Guybrush telling his son the story of the time he finally REALLY found the secret of Monkey Island.
Guybrush begins his quest back where it all began -- on good ol' Melee Island, home of strangely law-abiding 'pirates' -- where he intends to gather financial support and a crew for an expedition to FINALLY root out the secret of Monkey Island. Unfortunately for him, the old pirate leaders seem to have retired, and the new generation of captains aren't very friendly toward him. >:P Furthermore, LECHUCK HIMSELF is docked in the harbor! O.O; Strangely though, he seems to be just peaceably gathering supplies and crew this time...for his own expedition to go after the secret. So eventually, Guybrush hits on the idea of sneaking in amongst LeChuck's crew and using his rival's expedition as his own...
A lot of the characters you meet are familiar faces, especially on Melee Island. It felt like people in general were friendlier and more helpful toward Guybrush than in most of the other games -- Carla and Otis in particular, since last we saw them in Escape From Monkey Island they held a bit of a grudge against him for getting them stuck on Monkey Island. Elaine feels strangely off too. Sure she's Guybrush's wife and she loves him, but in previous games she's never been slow to call him out on his blunders and shenanigans. In Return to Monkey Island she takes an almost mothering tone toward him. There's even what seems like a buildup toward a serious threat to their relationship as she has cutscenes in which she discovers the unintended consequences of Guybrush's actions, but they end up being blown off after just a mildly awkward conversation about them.
And then there's the ending...I don't want to spoil it just in case, but yeah, there's a reason a lot of fans were dissatisfied with it. It made the whole story feel like a big waste of time.
Bottom line? Whether you should get this game depends on whether you're a Monkey Island fan, and if so what sort. If you're a "I want to be able to say I've played all the Monkey Island titles no matter how good or bad" fan, then go for it. It's by far not the best entry in the series, but it's still enjoyable enough and has some nice user experience improvements. But if you're a "I want to remember the series for being as good as what I've already experienced" fan, then maybe just pretend this one doesn't exist. X)
Pawnbarian:
Another Humble Bundle random offering. Pawnbarian is a procedurally-generated puzzle (or more accurately problem-solving) game based on Chess. Instead of having a bunch of different pieces with their own movement capabilities, you have a single piece, but draw several cards each round that allow you to move that piece like various Chess pieces. The cards may also have extra attributes like giving armor against damage until the next turn or letting you use the card for free and drawing an extra one (referred to as a cantrip). The enemy pieces, which always far outnumber you of course, have their own peculiarities, like leaving damaging blight on the spaces they pass through, triggering special effects when you use a cantrip, or being immune under certain conditions. Often there's a "champion" piece that's immune until you kill all other enemy pieces. Fortunately they don't move much (typically following the rules of a King piece, one space in any of the cardinal directions) and they deal damage by striking without moving to any space within their threatened area (which doesn't always match their movement capability). You're rewarded with gold based on how quickly you clear the board each stage, and you can spend that gold to upgrade your cards with extra attributes or increase your maximum health.
...And at a high level, that just about describes the game. X) There are three different zones to defeat, each emphasizing different enemy types: nimble goblins that dodge your first attack each turn if they can, golems that react to your cantrips, and blight enemies that make the map increasingly poisonous with time. There are also a whole bunch of different playable characters with different card decks, some of them ranging outside traditional Chess pieces. The toughest one used Shogi pieces instead -- they're generally much more limited in their movement capability, especially for going south. @~@ And if you REALLY want a challenge, you unlock further difficulty levels for each character whenever you beat all the zones at the previous difficulty. But the core gameplay is a very tight loop -- beat all the enemies on the board and move on to the next one.
Bottom line? If you'd like a Chess-based brain-teaser-generator and don't mind simple production values for a low price, go for it. It would be especially nice as a mobile game to play in spare moments.
Supraland:
Yet another Humble Bundle game, although I'd heard enough about this one that it wasn't exactly random. Supraland is a puzzle-heavy first-person action game. The story is that you are the prince of a village of little red stick figure-ish people living in a child's sandbox. One day the village's water supply trickles to a halt, and after a brief underground investigation that doubles as a tutorial segment, you discover that the water supply is being shut off (from a point you can't reach) by the blue people who live on the other end of the sandbox. OoO So your father the red king sends you to talk with the blue king and find out why they're doing this. Of course, getting there isn't going to be as easy as you'd think it should be...
Supraland is often described as a Metroidvania, and that's an apt enough label. You spend most of the game acquiring new abilities and using them to solve puzzles/traverse terrain you couldn't before. For example, the first big ability you get is to summon a purple cube into existence a short distance from yourself wherever you're pointing. Summon it under your own feet and it'll pop you upward, a little farther than you could reach by standing on top and jumping. :D It isn't too long before this particular application is made obsolete by double and even triple jump abilities, but the cube is still used throughout the game for things like holding down buttons, being an anchor point for a tether line, and being a purple element in color-based puzzles. And of course, there are plenty of other abilities, some of which have some interesting synergies with each other. The designers did a good job of creating environments that are challenging to traverse at first but become much easier to get through once you have more abilities, without even making it obvious that there'll be alternative pathways later on. I don't want to spoil too much, but it eventually becomes important which objects are made of wood or metal. ;)
One area that Supraland is light on compared to most Metroidvanias is combat -- not that combat is really vital to what makes a game a Metroidvania, but most of them do have it pretty central to the gameplay. You start out with just a wooden sword, and you run into little skeleton baddies whose presence goes largely unexplained. Eventually you get an energy gun, and the enemies branch into varieties that can shoot at you and such. Still, dealing with them is usually fairly simple, and the areas with complex puzzles rarely have much in the way of combat distractions. There are only a couple of boss fights in the game, and the second one is more of puzzle-solving-under-intermittent-fire.
Can't think of too much else to say about the game. It's a good-quality indie effort that's probably worth your coin and time as long as you don't mind having your brains challenged.
Webbed:
Aaaand another Humble Bundle game, this time from a bundle about platformers. Webbed is a charming little game about being a charming little spider. 8} You start out doing a mating dance with your mate, with the game teaching you the basic movement mechanics as you romp along. Then suddenly your mate, whose abdomen resembles a shiny blue rock, is STOLEN by a huge bowerbird and flown away to its sky island nest. 8O In pursuit, you meet a friendly moth, who mentions that the ant colony beneath its tree has long been contemplating building an airship so they can fight the bowerbird. They'll need some assistance to complete their design, though, along with aerial guidance from the bee colony to the east, and fuel from the dung beetles to the west...
The main appeal of Webbed is its movement mechanics, and they are AWESOME. 83 Use the right joystick and shoulder button to fire off a string that will stick to most surfaces, and you'll be pulled toward it, gently at first but with swiftly increasing speed. Soon you'll get the hang of yanking yourself around, letting go to hurtle through the air, and grabbing onto the next available web-hold. It's a lot like the ninja rope from the Worms series, but simpler and more intuitive.
The other big mechanic is that you can build permanent webs, which is interesting, but not near as much fun in general. There are places where it helps a little to send a web line between two grapple points so that you have a safety net of another available place to latch onto or land on, but it's generally faster and more fun to be a daredevil about it, especially since this is a Death Is a Slap On the Wrist game. In other places, you're downright required to build webs, usually to manipulate other physics-active objects. For example, in the ants' nest you'll often have to put a gear into place in a mechanism, usually on a wall or even a ceiling. This means attaching strands from the object in question to the walls until their natural tension pulls the object where you want it to go. I feel like I was missing something about how these puzzles are supposed to work, because the obvious solution of attaching strings directly between the object and its destination takes a TON of strands to get it there, and the closer they get, the harder it is to put strands between them. e.ea
Bottom line? A very nice little indie gem that I definitely recommend, though be prepared to do a bunch of physics fiddling in between the real fun of swinging around.
Click to viewHi all. Had a nice Thanksgiving? Mine was the usual big family gathering, but I also ended up spending the next two days AFTER Thanksgiving at my parents' place because my cousin came for a visit. My sister and her kids were also there (her husband is busy doing renovations on their home I believe, although he was also present on Thanksgiving proper), and my cousin gave them Bluey: The Video Game for Nintendo Switch as an early Christmas gift. Made it a little difficult to avoid having to tell them they'll be getting the system to run it on when Christmas arrives. X) But they were able to get through the entirety of the game easily using my Switch, so it's not like they're missing out on much in the meantime.
This month in Forgotten Gates I did something I'd been pondering for a while: moving Deccus to 'legacy hero' status and replacing him with another of my own characters, John. Deccus's player disappeared from the Triforce MUCK/Zelda RPG roleplaying community quite a while back, and mechanically Deccus ended up very similar to Link -- a Forest-element sword-and-shield fighter with well-rounded stats. I was reluctant to oust him for my own character, though, because I already have three characters of my own as playable heroes in this game. X) But since I've implemented all of the other playable heroes (well, aside from the Six Sages), it was time to make a decision on it. I discussed the matter with the other players still around in Zelda RPG, and the consensus was Deccus's player probably wouldn't mind even if he somehow came back into contact with us or ran across Forgotten Gates.
So I got started on implementing John as a playable hero. I recycled some of the skill concepts I was planning to use for Deccus, but I also replaced some with new ones, particularly to be a better match with the team I expect John to be on for most of the game.
On Zelda RPG, the Flooding of Hyrule arc has FINALLY been brought to a close! :D It's a little unclear how, Fi just showed Gatu to a fissure at the bottom of LakeSea Hylia and had him stick the Master Sword into it. This apparently dispelled some sort of cursed energy, and the waters receded to their normal level. Aubrey had to climb the tree on his island and cling to the branches to avoid being swept away by the big wave that happened at first. X/ And then the whale, now Malice-free, came to the surface and...flew away. 9_9 Must've been the legendary Wind Fish.
Return to Monkey Island:
Got this one as a birthday gift. I'd heard the general opinion on it was...disappointing, but it's one of those series you just have to give any new entry a shot even if you're not sure you'll like it. It was directed by Ron Gilbert, who was also the lead developer on the first two Monkey Island games.
As far as user experience goes, I'd say Return to Monkey Island is definitely better than previous games in the series. When you select an item from your inventory and go to try and use it with another item or environment object, the game will highlight the item when you mouse-over it only if you CAN do that interaction. That saves you tons of frustration having to select an item and click it on lots of different options looking for things that work. Purists might say that this removes nearly any challenge from figuring out the solution yourself, but let's face it, the sweet spot between an object interaction that's boringly obvious and one that makes no sense at all is very thin and varies from player to player. I'd much rather be able to check for and eliminate possibilities quickly when I'm stuck than be forced to pay a stiff penalty of time and frustration for not cottoning onto the designers' mindset. They also included an in-game hint system that allows you to ask for gradually more revealing hints on a specific puzzle, going from "What even am I trying to do here?" through stuff like "You might need to visit this other location first" to finally "Okay, here's the solution". Most of the times I broke down and consulted this system, I ended up thinking, "Wait, what? I thought I already tried that." -.-a Of course, I don't think this is the first game to do these sorts of things, just the first Monkey Island game.
As for story, this game feels kind of limp. It starts out with a recounting of the end of the second Monkey Island game, which makes it seem like they might be completely ignoring the games that Ron wasn't involved in. OoO But then it turns out that it's actually Guybrush's son Boybrush playing pretend with his friend Chuckie. After a tutorial segment with the kids running around a park, they resort to the narrative device of Guybrush telling his son the story of the time he finally REALLY found the secret of Monkey Island.
Guybrush begins his quest back where it all began -- on good ol' Melee Island, home of strangely law-abiding 'pirates' -- where he intends to gather financial support and a crew for an expedition to FINALLY root out the secret of Monkey Island. Unfortunately for him, the old pirate leaders seem to have retired, and the new generation of captains aren't very friendly toward him. >:P Furthermore, LECHUCK HIMSELF is docked in the harbor! O.O; Strangely though, he seems to be just peaceably gathering supplies and crew this time...for his own expedition to go after the secret. So eventually, Guybrush hits on the idea of sneaking in amongst LeChuck's crew and using his rival's expedition as his own...
A lot of the characters you meet are familiar faces, especially on Melee Island. It felt like people in general were friendlier and more helpful toward Guybrush than in most of the other games -- Carla and Otis in particular, since last we saw them in Escape From Monkey Island they held a bit of a grudge against him for getting them stuck on Monkey Island. Elaine feels strangely off too. Sure she's Guybrush's wife and she loves him, but in previous games she's never been slow to call him out on his blunders and shenanigans. In Return to Monkey Island she takes an almost mothering tone toward him. There's even what seems like a buildup toward a serious threat to their relationship as she has cutscenes in which she discovers the unintended consequences of Guybrush's actions, but they end up being blown off after just a mildly awkward conversation about them.
And then there's the ending...I don't want to spoil it just in case, but yeah, there's a reason a lot of fans were dissatisfied with it. It made the whole story feel like a big waste of time.
Bottom line? Whether you should get this game depends on whether you're a Monkey Island fan, and if so what sort. If you're a "I want to be able to say I've played all the Monkey Island titles no matter how good or bad" fan, then go for it. It's by far not the best entry in the series, but it's still enjoyable enough and has some nice user experience improvements. But if you're a "I want to remember the series for being as good as what I've already experienced" fan, then maybe just pretend this one doesn't exist. X)
Pawnbarian:
Another Humble Bundle random offering. Pawnbarian is a procedurally-generated puzzle (or more accurately problem-solving) game based on Chess. Instead of having a bunch of different pieces with their own movement capabilities, you have a single piece, but draw several cards each round that allow you to move that piece like various Chess pieces. The cards may also have extra attributes like giving armor against damage until the next turn or letting you use the card for free and drawing an extra one (referred to as a cantrip). The enemy pieces, which always far outnumber you of course, have their own peculiarities, like leaving damaging blight on the spaces they pass through, triggering special effects when you use a cantrip, or being immune under certain conditions. Often there's a "champion" piece that's immune until you kill all other enemy pieces. Fortunately they don't move much (typically following the rules of a King piece, one space in any of the cardinal directions) and they deal damage by striking without moving to any space within their threatened area (which doesn't always match their movement capability). You're rewarded with gold based on how quickly you clear the board each stage, and you can spend that gold to upgrade your cards with extra attributes or increase your maximum health.
...And at a high level, that just about describes the game. X) There are three different zones to defeat, each emphasizing different enemy types: nimble goblins that dodge your first attack each turn if they can, golems that react to your cantrips, and blight enemies that make the map increasingly poisonous with time. There are also a whole bunch of different playable characters with different card decks, some of them ranging outside traditional Chess pieces. The toughest one used Shogi pieces instead -- they're generally much more limited in their movement capability, especially for going south. @~@ And if you REALLY want a challenge, you unlock further difficulty levels for each character whenever you beat all the zones at the previous difficulty. But the core gameplay is a very tight loop -- beat all the enemies on the board and move on to the next one.
Bottom line? If you'd like a Chess-based brain-teaser-generator and don't mind simple production values for a low price, go for it. It would be especially nice as a mobile game to play in spare moments.
Supraland:
Yet another Humble Bundle game, although I'd heard enough about this one that it wasn't exactly random. Supraland is a puzzle-heavy first-person action game. The story is that you are the prince of a village of little red stick figure-ish people living in a child's sandbox. One day the village's water supply trickles to a halt, and after a brief underground investigation that doubles as a tutorial segment, you discover that the water supply is being shut off (from a point you can't reach) by the blue people who live on the other end of the sandbox. OoO So your father the red king sends you to talk with the blue king and find out why they're doing this. Of course, getting there isn't going to be as easy as you'd think it should be...
Supraland is often described as a Metroidvania, and that's an apt enough label. You spend most of the game acquiring new abilities and using them to solve puzzles/traverse terrain you couldn't before. For example, the first big ability you get is to summon a purple cube into existence a short distance from yourself wherever you're pointing. Summon it under your own feet and it'll pop you upward, a little farther than you could reach by standing on top and jumping. :D It isn't too long before this particular application is made obsolete by double and even triple jump abilities, but the cube is still used throughout the game for things like holding down buttons, being an anchor point for a tether line, and being a purple element in color-based puzzles. And of course, there are plenty of other abilities, some of which have some interesting synergies with each other. The designers did a good job of creating environments that are challenging to traverse at first but become much easier to get through once you have more abilities, without even making it obvious that there'll be alternative pathways later on. I don't want to spoil too much, but it eventually becomes important which objects are made of wood or metal. ;)
One area that Supraland is light on compared to most Metroidvanias is combat -- not that combat is really vital to what makes a game a Metroidvania, but most of them do have it pretty central to the gameplay. You start out with just a wooden sword, and you run into little skeleton baddies whose presence goes largely unexplained. Eventually you get an energy gun, and the enemies branch into varieties that can shoot at you and such. Still, dealing with them is usually fairly simple, and the areas with complex puzzles rarely have much in the way of combat distractions. There are only a couple of boss fights in the game, and the second one is more of puzzle-solving-under-intermittent-fire.
Can't think of too much else to say about the game. It's a good-quality indie effort that's probably worth your coin and time as long as you don't mind having your brains challenged.
Webbed:
Aaaand another Humble Bundle game, this time from a bundle about platformers. Webbed is a charming little game about being a charming little spider. 8} You start out doing a mating dance with your mate, with the game teaching you the basic movement mechanics as you romp along. Then suddenly your mate, whose abdomen resembles a shiny blue rock, is STOLEN by a huge bowerbird and flown away to its sky island nest. 8O In pursuit, you meet a friendly moth, who mentions that the ant colony beneath its tree has long been contemplating building an airship so they can fight the bowerbird. They'll need some assistance to complete their design, though, along with aerial guidance from the bee colony to the east, and fuel from the dung beetles to the west...
The main appeal of Webbed is its movement mechanics, and they are AWESOME. 83 Use the right joystick and shoulder button to fire off a string that will stick to most surfaces, and you'll be pulled toward it, gently at first but with swiftly increasing speed. Soon you'll get the hang of yanking yourself around, letting go to hurtle through the air, and grabbing onto the next available web-hold. It's a lot like the ninja rope from the Worms series, but simpler and more intuitive.
The other big mechanic is that you can build permanent webs, which is interesting, but not near as much fun in general. There are places where it helps a little to send a web line between two grapple points so that you have a safety net of another available place to latch onto or land on, but it's generally faster and more fun to be a daredevil about it, especially since this is a Death Is a Slap On the Wrist game. In other places, you're downright required to build webs, usually to manipulate other physics-active objects. For example, in the ants' nest you'll often have to put a gear into place in a mechanism, usually on a wall or even a ceiling. This means attaching strands from the object in question to the walls until their natural tension pulls the object where you want it to go. I feel like I was missing something about how these puzzles are supposed to work, because the obvious solution of attaching strings directly between the object and its destination takes a TON of strands to get it there, and the closer they get, the harder it is to put strands between them. e.ea
Bottom line? A very nice little indie gem that I definitely recommend, though be prepared to do a bunch of physics fiddling in between the real fun of swinging around.