More busy
This is Aperture by Harry-UK
Hi all. Work continues to be pretty busy, although I'm finding I generally have at least enough time to keep up with log review and similar MU stuff. Progress on Forgotten Gates has been very small. :/ On the bright side, the lab just hired a new part-time tutor for advanced chemistry and got a new volunteer tutor for math, so my workload should be a bit lessened.
On NMR, I ran another scene about recapturing an inmate from Garatsuku Asylum. I ended up with all high-level FC-type characters volunteering this time, so I made the target appropriately dangerous. >) Myoushu, a master puppeteer with a genetic disorder which prevented her from growing into adolescence, and developed an obsession with dolls...living ones being her favorite, of course. ;) She took a number of people in a small town hostage and demanded food and other necessities be provided while she was playing with her "dollies". Two Sunagakure Council Members and the head of the Neutral Medical Center had to figure out a way of getting at her within the storage building she'd taken over and trapped, without harming the hostages. They wound up not really accomplishing that with ideal success; one of them blasted a wall in with explosives and injured some of the hostages in the process. :P Good thing there was a medic on hand to mitigate that damage.
Raili and Aburei got another scene done too. Raili slipped Aburei into the root prison using her underground movement technique, then held the berserk badger lord Hisenkou in a genjutsu while Aburei tried to find out what was causing his enraged state. The prime suspect turned out to be some mushrooms growing on the roots of the bloated tree. Raili slipped in her genjutsu briefly due to finding a mouse in her hair (must've gotten there while she coming up from the ground), and Aburei panicked and fell against the mushroom patch. This released a heavy cloud of spores which redoubled Hisenkou's wrath and broke him completely free of the genjutsu. Fortunately Raili managed to put up a wall of earth between him and Aburei, then yank Aburei back out of the danger zone. Just then the Shinrin Nature Cult returned, and with them was Hoyuusha, the rogue ninja who stole the badger summoning scroll and imprisoned Hisenkou. :o BADDIE CONFRONTATION TIME!!!
Finally, we've had an interesting RP challenge going on: put your character into a major role in a video game. X) There was some interest expressed when I first posted the challenge, but thus far I'm the only one who has done anything with it. c.c I put Sousa in the place of GlaDOS with a journal of his observations of a Portal test subject, and replaced Mega Man with Koseita Man, whose personality changed every time he switched to a different special weapon. I'll have to post a new challenge soon, but this is one challenge I'm determined to eventually fulfill with all of my alts. I keep trying to get a scene going based on Gauntlet, but it's hard to find enough available people to fill the roles of Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard, and Ranger all at the same time. :P
Kirby's Return to Dreamland:
This game is quite a wish fulfillment for Kirby fans. ^.^ It's in the style of Kirby's Super Star, which means powers with diverse usages depending on direction button and context (standing, dashing, in the air, etc.), somewhat more challenge than is typical for a Kirby game, and multiplayer support. Boy howdy, has it got multiplayer support. X) Technically four-player Kirby has been done once before in Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, but that required all players to have copies of the game, GBAs, and enough link cables to connect them all together. This time, it's all on one screen using the considerably more likely case of a single Wii and game with enough controllers for all involved. Also, the extra players have the choice of using multi-colored Kirbies or one of Kirby's (sometimes) friends: Meta Knight, King Dedede, or Waddle-Dee. Each plays like a Kirby permanently endowed with a specific power (sword, hammer, and spear respectively), with maybe some tiny special features like Meta Knight's flapping wings doing damage. Personally, I actually find Waddle-Dee to be the most fun. c.c
Another touted addition is super-powers. Basically, in certain very specific spots, there will be an enemy that gives Kirby a massively boosted version of some other power, like a sword that covers most of the screen with its swing. These super-powers are limited both by time and area (they're always given towards the end of a stage and taken away once you complete it), and the sections they exist in are specifically designed to let you unleash on a bunch of baddies, usually with very little threat to yourself. There's always a hidden portal to a bonus stage in these sections, though, and finding it eventually does come to be a decent challenge. For example, one of the super-powers involves controlling a big energy ball which floats around the screen with oversteering similar to Pikachu's final smash in Brawl, and you must use it to hit several targets (sometimes moving) all in one go. The bonus stages are interesting too, requiring you to navigate an obstacle course using Kirby's default inhale-and-spit powers while a creeping wall chases you. Then you have to fight a mini-boss. Good times.
There's only one thing which I felt was missing from Kirby's Return to Dreamland, which is more involved treasure-hunting. Kirby's Super Star featured a sub-game called The Great Cave Offensive which was all about exploring extensive side paths and overcoming obstacles and puzzles (some quite tricky) to collect various interesting treasures. There was also Milky Way Wishes, in which the treasures were actually powers which expanded Kirby's capabilities as he collected them. Kirby's Return to Dreamland does have quite a lot of collectibles, three to six per stage in fact, but they're all simply power spheres for a trans-dimensional ship, and you never have to go far off the beaten path to find them. It felt a little flat by comparison.
Bottom line? Grab it, especially if you have friends you can play it with! I saved my first time playing this for a session with my little brother and his girlfriend, and we had a BLAST! :D
Terraria:
I like to think that Steam's special deals don't often succeed in playing on my impulses, but they do occasionally convince me to plunk down a few bucks on a game I wouldn't otherwise give a chance to. Fortunately it usually turns out to be money decently spent.
The thought that probably comes to most minds upon seeing Terraria in action for a couple moments is, "Minecraft in 2D." Even never having played Minecraft, that was my thought too. You gather resources in a randomly-generated world, you build a house to protect yourself from nightly zombie attacks, you craft tools and weapons of ever-increasing potency to tackle areas of increasing challenge, etc. Again, I haven't played Minecraft, but from what I've heard about it, I suspect Terraria has a broader range of equipment types, monsters, and inherent challenges, naturally made possible by the fact that it's much easier to produce 2D content than 3D content (and of course the code structure for making use of it).
As typical for such "sandbox" games, there is no inherent goal in Terraria, although the implied goals given by the guide NPC graduate from "learn to survive" to "explore and find out what can be crafted with different materials" to "make the best weapons and armor" to "beat all the boss monsters", with varying degrees of interweaving. You could also set self-imposed goals like get a certain outfit, cleanse the creeping "corruption" from the world (way too much work IMHO), or the ever-famous construct elaborate buildings/pixelart/whatever from the game's blocks. I've wondered since "beating" the game whether it might be possible to create a Zelda-like adventure world, but it's a project that'd be pretty low on my priority list, and I'd make it using a world editor, not by trying to put it together "by hand" within the game. X)
The general gameplay is engaging on a low-intensity level, once you get used to exploring and hunting for valuable resources. The possibilities open up immensely once you manage to craft the first major movement tool, the grapple hook, which makes it possible to get back out of large holes without painstakingly building ramps. X) You spend a lot of time underground, exploring the preexisting tunnels and digging new ones to get at that interesting cave over there or that next pocket of ore. I eventually started using a system of signs (fortunately something the game allows you to craft fairly easily and write messages on) to keep track of where I'd yet to explore, which way I was currently delving, and which way was back home. X) It does get a little repetitive, especially if you're a systematic fellow like me who wants to stick to his exploring algorithm rather than pursuing whichever avenue strikes him as most interesting.
One more thing I'll mention is that the "endgame" (the portion where the final bosses are available to fight and the most powerful equipment can be forged) is ridiculously drudging. Getting the third- or even second-most powerful equipment set won't take too long, but to get all of the very best stuff you'll need to defeat the final bosses several times over (two of them 3-5 times and one of them 5-8 times, depending on how much material they randomly drop). These are NOT easy bosses, which I appreciate on a certain level because it compels you to be creative about not only how you fight, but the environment you fight in--you stand a much better chance if you construct an arena to maximize your advantages, which is cool for a game that features that capability. Still, I wouldn't want to have to do it over and over. Personally, after defeating them once, I used a map editor to give myself an abundance of the materials they drop. :P Doing it over and over wouldn't have been that much fun, and as it turns out, the best equipment is barely any better than the second-best anyway. X)
Bottom line? An intriguing title, probably not for everyone, but it does give you a satisfying sense of gradually expanding dominion over your uniquely generated little world.
Back to the Future:
No, not the infamously awful NES title. ;) I'm referring to the episodic graphic adventure by TellTale Games. It continues the time-traveling escapades of Marty McFly and Doc Brown after the events of the movies (of which I've only seen the first, for reference). The basic plot is that Marty finds the Delorean returning unpiloted to Doc's home with a recorded message saying basically, "Marty, if you're hearing this, my automated return system is a success and I must be in big trouble -- come rescue me!" So Marty heads back in time to find that Doc has been framed for burning down an alleged speak-easy, and according to a newspaper from the present, he'll be gunned down by gangsters on the courthouse steps before his trial! So Marty must find a way to spring Doc out of jail...and who should he turn to for help but Doc's younger self, frustrated court-clerk-who'd-rather-be-an-inventor Emmett Brown? ;) Of course, the events of the rescue end up causing other unintended consequences in the time stream, and Marty is left scrambling all over the timeline through five episodes trying to resolve everything from the Tannen family becoming a major mafia to Doc turning out as the slightly unwitting social scientist behind a big brother-esque, clinically sterile Hill Valley.
As gameplay goes, it's the usual TellTale fare of finding useful objects and applying them to various situations. The puzzles are generally not very difficult, which could be regarded as good or bad according to your taste and level of expertise. The game is humorous, but not to the degree of goofiness I typically find in TellTale offerings, probably because the fictional universe is supposed to be close to reality.
Repeating what may have become an unfortunate pattern (though it's only been two of the seven TellTale titles I've played that I've seen this in), the final episode of Back to the Future feels a bit stretched. It comes to a dramatic climax after a relatively short series of challenges, then throws yet another time ripple into the equation and sends the player jumping through time to fix it. It's as if they couldn't think of enough material for what was supposed to be the finale and had to tack on an extra mini-episode. I guess that's better than episode five of Sam & Max: Season Three, though, which just plain felt too short.
Bottom line? Not their best creation, but still fun for graphic adventure aficionados, and probably refreshing for fans of the movies to finally have an expansion to canon.
Click to viewHi all. Work continues to be pretty busy, although I'm finding I generally have at least enough time to keep up with log review and similar MU stuff. Progress on Forgotten Gates has been very small. :/ On the bright side, the lab just hired a new part-time tutor for advanced chemistry and got a new volunteer tutor for math, so my workload should be a bit lessened.
On NMR, I ran another scene about recapturing an inmate from Garatsuku Asylum. I ended up with all high-level FC-type characters volunteering this time, so I made the target appropriately dangerous. >) Myoushu, a master puppeteer with a genetic disorder which prevented her from growing into adolescence, and developed an obsession with dolls...living ones being her favorite, of course. ;) She took a number of people in a small town hostage and demanded food and other necessities be provided while she was playing with her "dollies". Two Sunagakure Council Members and the head of the Neutral Medical Center had to figure out a way of getting at her within the storage building she'd taken over and trapped, without harming the hostages. They wound up not really accomplishing that with ideal success; one of them blasted a wall in with explosives and injured some of the hostages in the process. :P Good thing there was a medic on hand to mitigate that damage.
Raili and Aburei got another scene done too. Raili slipped Aburei into the root prison using her underground movement technique, then held the berserk badger lord Hisenkou in a genjutsu while Aburei tried to find out what was causing his enraged state. The prime suspect turned out to be some mushrooms growing on the roots of the bloated tree. Raili slipped in her genjutsu briefly due to finding a mouse in her hair (must've gotten there while she coming up from the ground), and Aburei panicked and fell against the mushroom patch. This released a heavy cloud of spores which redoubled Hisenkou's wrath and broke him completely free of the genjutsu. Fortunately Raili managed to put up a wall of earth between him and Aburei, then yank Aburei back out of the danger zone. Just then the Shinrin Nature Cult returned, and with them was Hoyuusha, the rogue ninja who stole the badger summoning scroll and imprisoned Hisenkou. :o BADDIE CONFRONTATION TIME!!!
Finally, we've had an interesting RP challenge going on: put your character into a major role in a video game. X) There was some interest expressed when I first posted the challenge, but thus far I'm the only one who has done anything with it. c.c I put Sousa in the place of GlaDOS with a journal of his observations of a Portal test subject, and replaced Mega Man with Koseita Man, whose personality changed every time he switched to a different special weapon. I'll have to post a new challenge soon, but this is one challenge I'm determined to eventually fulfill with all of my alts. I keep trying to get a scene going based on Gauntlet, but it's hard to find enough available people to fill the roles of Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard, and Ranger all at the same time. :P
Kirby's Return to Dreamland:
This game is quite a wish fulfillment for Kirby fans. ^.^ It's in the style of Kirby's Super Star, which means powers with diverse usages depending on direction button and context (standing, dashing, in the air, etc.), somewhat more challenge than is typical for a Kirby game, and multiplayer support. Boy howdy, has it got multiplayer support. X) Technically four-player Kirby has been done once before in Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, but that required all players to have copies of the game, GBAs, and enough link cables to connect them all together. This time, it's all on one screen using the considerably more likely case of a single Wii and game with enough controllers for all involved. Also, the extra players have the choice of using multi-colored Kirbies or one of Kirby's (sometimes) friends: Meta Knight, King Dedede, or Waddle-Dee. Each plays like a Kirby permanently endowed with a specific power (sword, hammer, and spear respectively), with maybe some tiny special features like Meta Knight's flapping wings doing damage. Personally, I actually find Waddle-Dee to be the most fun. c.c
Another touted addition is super-powers. Basically, in certain very specific spots, there will be an enemy that gives Kirby a massively boosted version of some other power, like a sword that covers most of the screen with its swing. These super-powers are limited both by time and area (they're always given towards the end of a stage and taken away once you complete it), and the sections they exist in are specifically designed to let you unleash on a bunch of baddies, usually with very little threat to yourself. There's always a hidden portal to a bonus stage in these sections, though, and finding it eventually does come to be a decent challenge. For example, one of the super-powers involves controlling a big energy ball which floats around the screen with oversteering similar to Pikachu's final smash in Brawl, and you must use it to hit several targets (sometimes moving) all in one go. The bonus stages are interesting too, requiring you to navigate an obstacle course using Kirby's default inhale-and-spit powers while a creeping wall chases you. Then you have to fight a mini-boss. Good times.
There's only one thing which I felt was missing from Kirby's Return to Dreamland, which is more involved treasure-hunting. Kirby's Super Star featured a sub-game called The Great Cave Offensive which was all about exploring extensive side paths and overcoming obstacles and puzzles (some quite tricky) to collect various interesting treasures. There was also Milky Way Wishes, in which the treasures were actually powers which expanded Kirby's capabilities as he collected them. Kirby's Return to Dreamland does have quite a lot of collectibles, three to six per stage in fact, but they're all simply power spheres for a trans-dimensional ship, and you never have to go far off the beaten path to find them. It felt a little flat by comparison.
Bottom line? Grab it, especially if you have friends you can play it with! I saved my first time playing this for a session with my little brother and his girlfriend, and we had a BLAST! :D
Terraria:
I like to think that Steam's special deals don't often succeed in playing on my impulses, but they do occasionally convince me to plunk down a few bucks on a game I wouldn't otherwise give a chance to. Fortunately it usually turns out to be money decently spent.
The thought that probably comes to most minds upon seeing Terraria in action for a couple moments is, "Minecraft in 2D." Even never having played Minecraft, that was my thought too. You gather resources in a randomly-generated world, you build a house to protect yourself from nightly zombie attacks, you craft tools and weapons of ever-increasing potency to tackle areas of increasing challenge, etc. Again, I haven't played Minecraft, but from what I've heard about it, I suspect Terraria has a broader range of equipment types, monsters, and inherent challenges, naturally made possible by the fact that it's much easier to produce 2D content than 3D content (and of course the code structure for making use of it).
As typical for such "sandbox" games, there is no inherent goal in Terraria, although the implied goals given by the guide NPC graduate from "learn to survive" to "explore and find out what can be crafted with different materials" to "make the best weapons and armor" to "beat all the boss monsters", with varying degrees of interweaving. You could also set self-imposed goals like get a certain outfit, cleanse the creeping "corruption" from the world (way too much work IMHO), or the ever-famous construct elaborate buildings/pixelart/whatever from the game's blocks. I've wondered since "beating" the game whether it might be possible to create a Zelda-like adventure world, but it's a project that'd be pretty low on my priority list, and I'd make it using a world editor, not by trying to put it together "by hand" within the game. X)
The general gameplay is engaging on a low-intensity level, once you get used to exploring and hunting for valuable resources. The possibilities open up immensely once you manage to craft the first major movement tool, the grapple hook, which makes it possible to get back out of large holes without painstakingly building ramps. X) You spend a lot of time underground, exploring the preexisting tunnels and digging new ones to get at that interesting cave over there or that next pocket of ore. I eventually started using a system of signs (fortunately something the game allows you to craft fairly easily and write messages on) to keep track of where I'd yet to explore, which way I was currently delving, and which way was back home. X) It does get a little repetitive, especially if you're a systematic fellow like me who wants to stick to his exploring algorithm rather than pursuing whichever avenue strikes him as most interesting.
One more thing I'll mention is that the "endgame" (the portion where the final bosses are available to fight and the most powerful equipment can be forged) is ridiculously drudging. Getting the third- or even second-most powerful equipment set won't take too long, but to get all of the very best stuff you'll need to defeat the final bosses several times over (two of them 3-5 times and one of them 5-8 times, depending on how much material they randomly drop). These are NOT easy bosses, which I appreciate on a certain level because it compels you to be creative about not only how you fight, but the environment you fight in--you stand a much better chance if you construct an arena to maximize your advantages, which is cool for a game that features that capability. Still, I wouldn't want to have to do it over and over. Personally, after defeating them once, I used a map editor to give myself an abundance of the materials they drop. :P Doing it over and over wouldn't have been that much fun, and as it turns out, the best equipment is barely any better than the second-best anyway. X)
Bottom line? An intriguing title, probably not for everyone, but it does give you a satisfying sense of gradually expanding dominion over your uniquely generated little world.
Back to the Future:
No, not the infamously awful NES title. ;) I'm referring to the episodic graphic adventure by TellTale Games. It continues the time-traveling escapades of Marty McFly and Doc Brown after the events of the movies (of which I've only seen the first, for reference). The basic plot is that Marty finds the Delorean returning unpiloted to Doc's home with a recorded message saying basically, "Marty, if you're hearing this, my automated return system is a success and I must be in big trouble -- come rescue me!" So Marty heads back in time to find that Doc has been framed for burning down an alleged speak-easy, and according to a newspaper from the present, he'll be gunned down by gangsters on the courthouse steps before his trial! So Marty must find a way to spring Doc out of jail...and who should he turn to for help but Doc's younger self, frustrated court-clerk-who'd-rather-be-an-inventor Emmett Brown? ;) Of course, the events of the rescue end up causing other unintended consequences in the time stream, and Marty is left scrambling all over the timeline through five episodes trying to resolve everything from the Tannen family becoming a major mafia to Doc turning out as the slightly unwitting social scientist behind a big brother-esque, clinically sterile Hill Valley.
As gameplay goes, it's the usual TellTale fare of finding useful objects and applying them to various situations. The puzzles are generally not very difficult, which could be regarded as good or bad according to your taste and level of expertise. The game is humorous, but not to the degree of goofiness I typically find in TellTale offerings, probably because the fictional universe is supposed to be close to reality.
Repeating what may have become an unfortunate pattern (though it's only been two of the seven TellTale titles I've played that I've seen this in), the final episode of Back to the Future feels a bit stretched. It comes to a dramatic climax after a relatively short series of challenges, then throws yet another time ripple into the equation and sends the player jumping through time to fix it. It's as if they couldn't think of enough material for what was supposed to be the finale and had to tack on an extra mini-episode. I guess that's better than episode five of Sam & Max: Season Three, though, which just plain felt too short.
Bottom line? Not their best creation, but still fun for graphic adventure aficionados, and probably refreshing for fans of the movies to finally have an expansion to canon.