delcanprobably

[delcanprobably]

Several words regarding Black Mesa and Half-Life and stuff

For me, Half-Life is my 'classic' game of choice. It does so many things with the linear FPS right, and I'm yet to find another game that does some things the way Half-Life does. Games from its era either still have too many leftover shit from Doom/Quake, and modern games never have the purity that HL has. Sure, there are some fantastic modern FPS games, but playing HL shows you just how much bloat even the greatest modern shooter has. Half-Life is an old-school FPS with action and shit, obviously, but the way it tells a story through gameplay and exploration is unparalleled. There's a subtlety to it that you rarely see. It's a game that is neglected a lot when talking about old-school shooters because usually everyone is too busy talking about guns and fast-paced action to remember it. As an immersive, atmospheric shooter, it's in my mind the closest you could get to perfect. If you know me it might seem odd on paper that I appreciate it because I'm usually the type to mostly base my liking of a game on the gameplay, but what makes Half-Life so drastically different for me is that it actually takes advantage of the medium instead of trying to be a movie with some dialogue options. It's not about the characters and lore and shit, it's about you playing through the game to solve the game's mysteries and find the story yourself. It's in my opinion a near-perfect merging of gameplay with the story.

I consider Half-Life a must-play. And if you are the kind of person who can get immersed in a game despite its age and graphics, play the original. If not though, your best option is Black Mesa. I've just replayed it for the first time since they finished the last chunk of it. There are things about it which as someone who has played the original, I find kind of weird, but I think if you haven't played the original then you won't have the same feeling. There is definitely some clunkiness what with it being made in the Source engine. Physics can be a bit infuriating and the AI is at its best not as good as the original. But also, apart from heavily modified stuff like Apex Legends, this is the best looking Source game I can think of. Ignore the texture quality and it's really quite good. Oh, also they cranked the music wayy too damn high so if you do play it then turn it down to like 30-40. One weird side-effect that comes with it having such a massive graphical upgrade is that it doesn't get away with some of the corniness as well as older games can. Some of the more arbitrary bits of the story are made especially obvious, and while there are obviously new dialogue lines recorded, the reuse of the same voice actors repeatedly is more off-putting than quaint.

But yeah, if you are yet to play Half-Life and you want to know what all the fuss is about, put aside a week or two and play Black Mesa. Or if you can handle the original then play that. The two games are kind of quite different really, though they're obviously the same ideas, very similar level designs, and so on. Half-Life takes a more subtle approach while Black Mesa is a bit more dramatic. Don't even think of bothering with Half-Life Source though, it's awful. Also if it isn't obvious, don't approach it like you're playing a shooty-shooty bang bang Doom-style game. It's more of an action-adventure with a focus on shooting kinda thing, and if you just bunny-hop sprint through and shoot all the things then you'll very quickly miss stuff, get frustrated, and start looking up walkthroughs. Also, I didn't find Black Mesa that hard? Like it's not a walk in the park but outside of certain key arena-style areas, it's not a massive challenge.

Spoiler(ish): Some thoughts on the new Xen

In all honesty, I didn't completely hate the original Xen, but I do think BM's interpretation was overall an improvement. It is just so incredibly different to the original that I struggle to compare the two in my head. I barely recognised any specific area in Xen from the original game (while in the rest of the game I could recognise close to every area). Honestly, I think Half-Life's version is more subtle and fits the game a bit better, but is a bit of a drop in quality when compared to the rest of the game. Black Mesa's Xen is more epic and dramatic but maybe feels a bit disjointed from the rest of the game atmospherically. I also found BM's version to be a bit more generic-feeling than the original. The final boss fight especially is just a bit uninspired compared to the truly unique boss fight of the original. Though it may be that they tried to make it more obvious what to do for new players. But yeah overall I think Xen highlights the point that Black Mesa isn't *the same* as Half-Life. It's not a remaster or a remake, it's a reimagining.

[delcanprobably]

Several words regarding The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (1998/2011)

originally written 20th of june

This isn't really gonna be a proper review, just some random thoughts. It's about as long as a review though so idk.

The world and atmosphere and shit was the highlight for me, exploring was really fun. It's actually not aged too bad in that regard. I found it really cool how, when you think about it, the world is pretty tiny, but they just made each area distinct enough so you still feel like you're travelling a much larger world.

Dungeons were okay. Again, the atmosphere was great, but I felt less like figuring out clever puzzles and more performing basic pattern recognition. Like 90% of it boils down to "door closed, now you must figure out which thing opens this particular door". Everything basically felt like a more abstracted version of "push button to do next thing", and I got a sense of going through the motions in some dungeons. A notable exception was when the hookshot was involved though, that was pretty fun. In later 3D Zelda games, I think they somewhat improved this issue (I remember liking the leaf and the swingy rope thing in Wind Waker), but it's a very present issue in this one. So for me at least, most of the difficulty of dungeons came more from frustration than challenge, unfortunately, and the big thing that got me was annoying parkour. I know this is in most Zelda games, but the jumping system drove me nuts, cause sometimes I just wanted to like drop down a wall, and I'd instead leap into a lava pit and other times I'd want to jump across, but I'd be at slightly the wrong angle and go the wrong way and blehdgdsj. I just found it a bit of an awkward system. It's not that the jumps are hard at all, it's just the system is clunky and borderline unpredictable. Another random note that didn't fit in any other paragraph: I did have to quickly check things in walkthroughs a few times, usually when something was a bit obtuse or there wasn't much clear direction going on.

The combat I surprisingly didn't find that bad though. Considering this game basically invented its now-ubiquitous style of combat, it actually holds up quite well. The only really clunky bit was how it's a little hard to predict whether a hit is gonna land or be blocked with some enemies. Other than that though like backflipping and hopping around and shit holds up pretty well, and like yeah at times it can get laborious, but it still works quite well I reckon, and it's simple in a good way. The only major problem was when it clashed with the aforementioned parkour bits. I had Z-targeting on hold so there were some fights where holding the L button got a bit tiring lol.

Another thing I found frustrating was how god damn slow everything is. So many slow camera pans, unnecessary cutscenes of a door opening because you decided to cough near a button, boring dialogue, "You got Bombs!", etc, it really started to drive me nuts by the end. Again, every Zelda since has a bit of this but it's a lot rawer here.

Overall, it does a lot of new stuff for the time and it holds up quite well (granted I was playing the 3DS version, but there's not really that wide a gap from the N64 version). One feeling I'm left with is the opposite of what I felt with Link to the Past. With that game, I initially found it a bit of a slog, but then towards the end, I really got into it and started appreciating a lot of the little details and stuff, and really felt this sort of warmth about it. However, with Ocarina, I at first really enjoyed it (esp. exploring like I said), and then towards the end, all its little quirks started to get really grating. I personally prefer aLttP (though they're not comparable what with having a different number of Ds) and I think I found Wind Waker leant into the exploration thing a lot, so I liked that more. If you're into Zelda, you've probably already played it, but if you're into playing classics, OoT is an obvious must-play, and it really hasn't aged all that poorly either. Although, I think the people who say Ocarina is the greatest game of all time are a bit crackers. It's pretty great, though, and I don't think I'd put it a tier below the other Zelda games or anything like that.

I rate it a number out of a different number.

[delcanprobably]

Several words regarding Fallout 3 (2008)

A kinda random, rambly comparison between NV and 4, especially for people who have played those games but not 3.

originally written 23rd of july

If you liked both New Vegas and 4 then it's definitely worth a shot. The main story sucks ass but the thing that I really liked was just exploring the wasteland and shit (and the sidequests are usually more well-thought-out than the main plot). It does kinda feel like it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. Like it's meant to be an action RPG, except the shooting mechanics suck ass (excluding VATs, without which I probably wouldn't have bothered playing as long as I have because the real-time shooting is that borked), and the RPG mechanics are kind of shitly implemented. New Vegas is a much better RPG where your skills etc. actually allow you to craft your own storyline and play the game your way, and 4 is a much better action game where shooting feels like shooting and not suggesting that perhaps at some point the gun could possibly fire maybe. 3 is also quite solid in that it feels like a full package, where New Vegas felt like a spin-off (not sure how to explain that, it's just kind of a feeling I got). It also takes itself a little bit more seriously than 4 and perhaps in some ways is more immersive if you can get over the classic 2008 fuck-someone-sneezed-on-the-camera filter.

If you just wanna switch the radio on and clear out some raider camps and shit then Fallout 4 is better, and if you want to make your own path through a complex story then New Vegas is probably one of the best for that period, not just in Fallout. But 3 has this fat atmospheric exploration thing, and 4 continued that but it's a slightly different, less gritty vibe. It's got that thing all Bethesda games seem to have where despite the bugs and clunkiness, you can tell that each area has been handcrafted with its own backstory and stuff like that, and it's quite potent. Also, all the DLC ranges from good to great (vs. 4 which as far as I can tell has one good DLC and everything else is meh) so if you do like it then you've got a lot of worthwhile content. If I continue then I will repeat myself once again. So, I will leave it there, as if I continue, then I will repeat myself once again.

Actually, one last thing, getting it to run can be a bitch, to the point that I was worried it wouldn't work on my new computer so finished it on my old computer before bothering to try transferring it over. In reality, it took like 10 minutes (no idea if it crashes heaps or anything yet). But if you're not prepared to tinker a bit to get it to run properly then maybe don't bother you lazy shit.

verdict: game 4/6 in the fallout franchise

[delcanprobably]

Several words regarding The Ball (2010)

written 10th of September

The Ball is a first-person puzzle game by Teotl Studios, a small team who originally built the game as a mod for some game idk a ajhioj blah blah.

Basically, you're stuck in an ancient tomb and have a giant ball that you can move around with a swanky vacuum gun thing to solve puzzles. The puzzles themselves remind me a lot of Portal, which is obviously a big positive. You might wonder, right, okay, so I've got a big ball, but what do I use it for? And in response, The Ball throws a metric buttload of different ideas at you. However, therein lies the main issue I have with the game's puzzles. See, the ideas that the game has are mostly great, but they're rarely taken to a great deal of depth before the next idea is pummeled at you. Also, a few of the ideas were pretty bland, the game could maybe have benefited from some more focus. Due to the lack of depth, I wasn't majorly challenged even in the last few levels of the game. I had some puzzles where it took a little to connect the dots and have the "a-ha" moment, but I was never left questioning my own intelligence like with the hardest of Portal's levels. Portal also expertly manages to level-by-level build up your understanding of its elements, which is missing in The Ball; each puzzle feels mostly self-contained, without much of a progression between them.

For some reason though, the one mechanic that they decided to throw at you over and over again was combat, which does nothing but demonstrates the clunkiest elements of the game's controls, that for the most part, I have no issue with. It works way better than you'd expect dragging a massive physics-based ball twice your height in first-person to. They've also made some smart design choices like making the ball go transparent when you're rolling it through narrow hallways. I never found myself frustrated aside from in the aforementioned combat sections, and even then they weren't that bad.

In fairness, the combat is pretty light, and gives some added tension and new puzzle concepts. There are also some boss fights that come up towards the end of the game, but they're a bit hit-and-miss. My biggest issue with them is that they're usually based on a mechanic you've just been taught, and in one case you had to use a brand new mechanic. It's missing that Zelda dungeon trope where you grow comfortable with a mechanic over the course of a dungeon and then make use of it under tension in the boss battle. Otherwise, though a lot of the levels were reminiscent of Zelda dungeons come to think of it.

The atmosphere in The Ball is also pretty great. The Tomb Raider-esque aesthetic is maybe a little overdone but I think especially by the end of the game, I definitely felt like it had its own unique flavour. I really liked how each area has a subtly different visual orientation, and it gives a good sense of progression. There's a story but it's mostly based on a lot of confusing lore and I really tried but I couldn't follow it at all. Thankfully it's very light on story content so this wasn't a huge problem.

Overall I liked The Ball, and it's pretty short (around 6 hours) so I'd definitely give it a look if you'd be interested in a puzzle game in a similar vein to Portal (with a splash of Zelda dungeon puzzles).

[delcanprobably]

Assassin’s Creed II Review

i finished assassin’s creed ii (2) and now i will write a thing about it

visuals and gameplay (which i normally wouldn’t group together but for this game it makes sense)

It’s from the era where everything is a desaturated shade of murky brown or sewerage green but once you get past that, it’s really a beautiful game. I think some areas get less desaturated as you play, but that might’ve just been time of day or me getting used to it. Having finished the game, I’ve reached the point where I’m not taken out of it by the visuals, and I actually appreciate the views a lot. I certainly liked it early on, but it took a while before I took it in that much. I feel that everything fits together really well, hard to explain exactly, but it’s just very solid and quite immersive. I didn’t learn the map very well, there are landmarks, but most of the cities are so samey that they don’t have many memorable areas. They’re distinct from each other, but internally, they feel pretty much the same wherever you are. It’s probably historically accurate, but it sometimes feels like you’re just running through what might as well be a procedurally generated series of tiled rooves. Overall though, the world looks good and serves the parkour system pretty well, and that’s what’s important. The parkour system gives the whole freedom thing but is also a bit unpredictable at times. It doesn’t magnet you into things as perfectly as newer games do, so I pretty regularly missed jumps (though I do kinda suck on a controller). It’s especially frustrating when you’re trying to do a leap of faith (super high jump into a hay bale indicated by a flock of birds and birdseed) and you somehow miss, like 99% of the time you go in, but if you don’t you make a complete fool of yourself. I started checking some of the less obvious ones, which kind of defeats the point of the whole system. NPCs are fairly primitive (maybe good for the time considering the crowd density?) but for whatever reason, I found that in tandem with the world, it was enough to be pretty immersive. In typical Ubisoft fashion, the world tries to be immersive while also being very gamey, as in there are all these consistent, familiar setups that you learn and can use as tools. Of course, this does mean in missions you sometimes find many conveniently placed solutions nearby, but rarely was it annoyingly blatant, and it kind of fueled the whole badass thing. The main thing that took me out is that there are a bunch of bugs. Visible spawn-ins (a couple of times I sprinted full pelt into a squad that spawned like a metre in front of me), parkour bugs, odd NPC behaviour etc., are pretty prevalent. It’s not Cyberpunk 1468, but it’s pretty meh. Money is fucking dumb. For the first hourish you’re barely able to afford anything. Then you get access to a town that generates shit-tonnes of money for you, and then you start getting thousands of florins when you so much as cough impressively and money becomes an entirely empty system. It’s honestly kind of comical. It’s good because you don’t have to worry about a stupid economy system, but it’s also obviously a bit dumb. I see what they went for, like you’re meant to build up this place to have a higher value and generate more money that you can then spend upgrading it and stuff, but I was more than comfortable with the amount of money I was getting in when I’d done like 10% of the upgrades. Oh, and then there’s this retarded system where you can buy artworks to add value to your base, but you never see them, they don’t add much value, and they’re really cheap. So honestly they’re just kind of there for the sake of being there, and near the end I started just going to the town’s art shops and bought all their artworks with the billions of florins I’d saved up. Also, to max out your base’s value, you have to buy every armour piece, even if it’s weaker than the one you’re up to (and the best armour is unlocked in the story anyway). And you can’t change which armour/weapons you have equipped without going back to your base. Not that it matters because it’s so easy that it doesn’t matter what you have equipped, more on that later. The classic issue that’s plagued AC forever is the repetitive fetch-questy bullshit missions, and yes they are there, but they honestly didn’t annoy me much at all. There are probably less than one for every story mission, so it honestly becomes a nice way to break it up. The exception is the assassinations, but they’re basically just cool bonus missions. You can do them whenever you want, and they have the gameplay of the main assassination missions. So they’re almost like missions distilled to their best bits without much backstory or polish. Oh yeah, and then there are the towers, but they’re kind of fun. You have to figure out how to get to the top (usually relatively straight-forward), the parkour to get up can be pretty fun, and then you get a nice view at the end. Honestly enjoyed them a lot for what it’s worth.

A major problem I had is that the game is just too damn easy. Yes, it’s meant to be a badass simulator to some extent but even if you don’t touch the controller for a whole fight, by the end of the game it’d take several minutes for enemies to knock your health down close to zero and then you have a gazillion health potions that start you all over again. More and more I felt very little risk in anything, and if I failed to do a cool plan for an assassination, then it usually wouldn’t matter and I’d be better off just going with it than I would waiting to die to try again. Fights with a small group are fun and break things up but it becomes a chore quickly and you start running away just out from fear of boredom. The best moments for difficulty were the forced stealth sections where you can’t get caught, but the problem with those were that if a guard becomes alerted then you instantly lose, even if they went from zero to alerted as you fall into an air assassination. The most fun with stealth outside those missions was the slim margin moments where you kill a guy just barely before they alert everyone, but you can’t even do that in stealth only missions. The ‘hidden in plain sight’ approach to stealth is pretty neat though so I’ll give it that.

It’s action-stealth but very action-oriented. It isn’t like a stealth game that you can jankily do some action stuff in, it’s easy to do things guns-blazing and a bit awkward but possible to be stealthy. I usually took the route of staying relatively hidden until I was in a good spot to assassinate my target and then got them and ran off, and I’m pretty sure this is how they want you to play based on the trailers and such. Coming with the easiness thing is that there are so many ways to kill people. You have a radial menu with around eight different weapons, and I can tell you that I used only three - two of which have quick access on the d-pad - outside of some very specific cases. I could’ve finished the game with just the hidden blade, sword, and throwing knives. It’s honestly absurd, for instance, there’s a knife that does less damage than your sword and is maybe slightly faster(?) Not only do you rarely need something between the sword and hidden blade, but there’s also no quick button for it on the d-pad, so it just never gets used. The excessive number of weapons include a couple that are meant to be tools for stealth, but it’s such a faf to go into the menu and select them that I rarely could be bothered.

story and stuff idk The story was pretty great, but I think some people exaggerate it a bit. Yes, the writing is pretty good, and Ezio is a great protagonist as far as video games go. What compelled me the most in the story was uncovering the conspiracy, not the characters’ story arcs. Even then, I got a bit lost halfway through. That’s not to say the characters are bad, they’re A-tier as far as video games go, but there’s no interesting development or real emotional thing behind anyone other than Ezio, and even then, it’s a kind of. He has some character development, but it’s pretty much done in the first third of the game. I will say I definitely cared a lot and was never annoyed by the story, and that’s rare for me. There are some dumb plot points when you think about them for a bit though, and there’s a retarded twist near the end. There’s the standard moral ambiguity thing you get in video games though. You learn about how you need to respect who you kill and only kill people for the common good and blah blah, but then you regularly kill half a dozen guards to go pick up a few hundred florins out of a box. And then there’s the fact guards instantly get sus if you’re on the rooftops (fair enough), which gives you an incentive just to kill them so that you can keep using the more fun method of travel. Whatever though, video games be video games. (story spoiler for people who have never played assassin’s creed, skip the italic bit if you wanna avoid) Oh yeah, the modern-day bits. Almost felt like there weren’t enough, to be honest. Like, I’m more interested in Ezio’s story, but there is so little closure in the modern-day stuff. Felt a tad underdone. The conclusion of the game gives a pretty intriguing ending for the like the lore of the modern-day story, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered for both Desmond and Ezio’s story, and honestly, overall, it kind of feels like a massive cock tease for the rest of the Ezio trilogy. The last level is here and there. Very out of place and comes out of nowhere, but also pretty epic I guess. The final boss is pretty meh though; they’ve built a system where it’s impossible to make it actually difficult, so it’s basically just another fight.

Small note: the DLC is basically two extra chapters before the final chapter. So you end up hitting that, and you get voice lines that are kinda confusing (cause they’re written like you’ve finished the game and come back), and then you have that thing where you can tell that it’s DLC and not the main game. Kinda takes steam out of the tension built up to the second-last chapter of the main game, but whatever. The DLC itself is pretty great, but I’d maybe not be saying that if I’d explicitly paid for them and it wasn’t just included with the PC version. Oh yeah, there’s one mission that I loved the premise of but hated in practice, and it’s pretty much the peak mission in the whole game (it’s even the one depicted in the trailer). Basically (major game spoilers, minor story spoilers, skip the whole paragraph), you have to win a series of games at a carnival to get a ticket into a party hosted by your target. Once you’re in, the guards start to catch on, and you have to blend in while they swarm the party. Then your target shows up on a boat for a speech, and you have to kill him, preferably without having the entire city guards notice you. So conceptually, that’s pretty sick really. But there are so many issues with it that completely took me out of it. First, the carnival games. Instead of being bothered to program a whole new system to make this make any sense, you just have to “win” all of the games, two of which are basically just standard side-quests where you’re just competing against a clock or not dying. It completely took me out how the whole concept doesn’t make any sense, like you only get the ticket if you *win* all the games? What if you came second in one? I’m competing against no one though, so there is no second. It just makes zero logical sense. Then there’s the party. It’s pretty good up until the bit where you actually have to assassinate the guy. A character you’re with suggests that you don’t swim across, and instead you shoot him with the gun you just unlocked and do it in time with the fireworks that are going off, so that no one notices, and it’s given in that typical video game character giving gameplay directions kinda way. Great, except the fireworks are just a background sound, and there’s no difference whether you time it right or not. Also, guards get alerted the second you start charging up your shot if you’re not entirely hidden, so it doesn’t even matter. You still get the guards chasing you if you do the suggested method. However, I realised that there was a convenient tower nearby and thought maybe I was meant to sneak to the side of the party and climb the tower and “snipe” him! But no, because the game doesn’t let you target him from that high up. As far as I could figure out, there’s no particularly elegant way of taking him out, especially not without getting the guards on you. It was just so unsatisfying to have this great setup, probably the best in the game, but have it feel rushed and broken. Other than that I rarely had a problem with the story missions, other than the standard few “oh great a tailing mission” moments, but come on man, that’s such wasted potential. [spoilers over]

conclusion What I loved about this game was the atmosphere and jumping around exploring 15th century Italy. That’s followed by the aforementioned badass simulatorage and some aspects of the story. There was very little about this game that I proper disliked other than what I’ve mentioned. It’s an easy game to get lost in, and it’s not as stupid long as most open-world games, so if you’re a little interested, it can’t hurt to give it a shot, I guess. You have to appreciate exploring worlds a lot though, which I do. Zero challenge, so avoid like the plague if that’s an issue. If you want an actual stealth game in a similar setting with far more choice and challenge, you want Dishonored (which imo is the better game, but it’s a different type of game). This game is more jumping around buildings and taking in the world, and oh yeah also you’re meant to be a sneaky assassin. Also would highly recommend using a controller. Avoid playing the Xbox 360 version on backwards compatibility though, because I did that, and apparently, it’s a common problem for your entire save to get wiped at one specific bit. How d’you reckon I found that out? Thankfully, my old PC save was at the right point. Also, Ubisoft protected sexual predators for years :). Thanks for listening to my TEDx Seatle talk.

[delcanprobably]

Arturia Pigments Review

note: i am moving a bunch of reviews from a google doc of my gear to here cause idk deal with it bitch

The easiest and funnest softsynth to patch. Great sound, a couple of odd limitations, but overall very worthwhile and potentially best-in-class.

A great fully-featured soft-synth which somehow takes a fairly typical soft-synth workflow and makes it way more inspirational. It has some bizarre limitations though, like you can’t set release tension on envelopes other than making them it be the same as the decay tension, and as far as I can tell there’s no way to randomise unison phase offsets in the wavetable synths, so the attack is super harsh with unison on (hence I still make my progressive house plucks in FL default stank Sytrus). Nevertheless, compared to other soft-synths, Pigments makes it far less laborious to make deep and complex-sounding synth patches. The way everything is visualised without you having to click through tabs makes it super easy to keep track of what’s going on, and while settings for modulation sources are often hidden behind tabs, there are so many different modulation sources that I’m not sure there would’ve been another way. When that great workflow is applied to three excellent sound engines (wavetable, analogue modelled, granular sampler), a decent effects section, the analogue modelled filters from the vintage synth remakes Arturia is renowned for, a fairly deep sequencer/arpeggiator, some powerful modulation sources including a fairly deep random section, you end up with a very nice package. There are also a crap-tonne of great factory presets and they’re great for getting something decent to start off with even if I will never use them in a proper track.

Used in: like everything i’ve released since i got it

[delcanprobably]

Teenage Engineering PO-20 Arcade

note: i am moving a bunch of reviews from a google doc of my gear to here cause idk deal with it bitch

Cheap, great for chiptune jams, not really much else it can do. 

If the PO-12 is very adaptable to a bunch of different styles, this is very much the opposite. It does one style very well, and in tandem with the great performance features, even if you’re only kinda into that chiptune sound, it’s great fun. But as a result, it definitely feels more like a toy than something I could sample and put into a track. It’s terrific for jamming on its own, and its sound set also works way better than you’d think when you hook it up to other gear. That’s really the focus of this model, jamming. The FX are mostly for making fills or B-sections from the pattern whilst it’s playing, and you can do some pretty nifty stuff with parameter locks even during playback. Being limited to 16 patterns is a little frustrating on this one because it means that you have to delete your old jam sessions, and it’s kind of hard to record and save a loop to use later thanks to the focus on chord progressions. I paid about A$100 for this, which isn’t a terrific deal of the same magnitude as the PO-12, but due in part to how portable it is, I do use the PO-20 about enough to justify that price. If you can find it for ~US$50 like it was at launch then that’s probably a perfectly reasonable price.

Used in jams:

https://youtu.be/aM3FtshXHv4

https://youtu.be/bQOVUDeibzs

[delcanprobably]

Teenage Engineering PO-12 Rhythm Review

note: i am moving a bunch of reviews from a google doc of my gear to here cause idk deal with it bitch

Cheap, great sounds which are all quite tweakable, imperfect sequencer though.

This thing sounds so incredibly good, if I didn’t know any better and you played me a decently programmed pattern, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were something 3-4 times the price (e.g. Arturia Drumbrute Impact). But instead, it’s literally the most affordable drum machine on the market, AND it’s extremely portable. What you lose with the PO-12 is the controls, but even then, for what it is, it’s quite intuitive to use. There are some minor annoyances with sequencing; it’s hard to do complex stuff with parameter locking (which this thing amazingly has by the way) on the fly, and it ends up very much a pause, edit, play kinda thing. They basically fixed this in the newer POs though. The sound set is great, it has 16 different sounds which is already about 10 more than the competition, and they each have two controllable parameters which make them modifiable enough for you to shape them to whatever style you’re going for. The thing is though, yes there are some dud sounds, and yes 16 patterns is a bit restrictive, and yes it would be nice to be able to change pattern length or have longer patterns or whatever, but it’s cheap, portable, adaptable, relatively intuitive, and most importantly, it sounds good. I can chuck it in a DS case and dick about on the train with it, but at the same time, it’s also very usable as a legitimate music production tool, and I’ve sampled it in a number of tracks. In my opinion, this is definitely the most usable PO before the 30 series. I got it for ~A$100 but I think it’s gone up since then. Even with the massive Australia tax, I’d say that for the price I bought it at, it was worth it.

Used in: 2, Snakes

Also used in this jam:

https://youtu.be/bQOVUDeibzs

[delcanprobably]

Review: Tycho - Dive (2011)

I wrote this randomly for some reason idk

Dive is a chillwave electronica album with a sound saturated with a thick nostalgic atmosphere, and a focus on and lush synths and smooth bass guitar melodies. Almost every sound in the record is smothered with reverb in a way that makes everything have a pad-like ambience, and together with the overall filtered sound, gives the record a melancholic but overall comforting tone which is easy on the ears for background listening and yet has enough complexity to its composition that a detailed listen is still pleasing to listen to. The mixture of organic and electronic instrumentation is handled well. Throughout the album, there’s a strong presence of the bass guitar underneath the higher synths. The synth sounds tend to be the ones manipulated to sound more organic, while the guitars are generally left drier, which in my opinion gives a more interesting sound than the opposite. Unlike many ‘lo-fi’ styles, Tycho’s use of lo-fi elements doesn’t sacrifice the complexity of the tracks and is subtle enough that the fidelity of the record overall isn’t distracting. Every track on the album feels like it belongs to the same world, and thanks to some standout set piece moments sprinkled throughout the album, there are still some very memorable tracks.

The opening track ‘A Walk’ is excellent, and without a doubt the best on the album, starting with a slow groove which gives a feel of the most intimate parts of the album to come, before building and doubling tempo into a crescendo of airy synths and guitars. The title track also stands out with its driving-yet-erratic percussion contrasted with a greater sense of stillness in the ambience than perhaps any track on the album. The rising and falling filter on the background pad keeps this track moving along, although as by far the longest track on the album, it does feel like it has used up a bulk of its ideas and starts to repeat itself around the midpoint. ‘Ascension’ is the darkest track on the album (although that isn’t saying much); after pushing through a moody pad in the intro we are eventually interrupted a bold synth lead which plays as the defining sound of this track. ‘Melanine’ then pulls us out to a soothing ambient guitar interlude, which despite being a great complement to the adjacent tracks, doesn’t really stand out that much outside of the album’s narrative. Other highlight moments include the atmospheric pad in the intro of ‘Hours’, and ‘Epigram’ with its distorted IDM-style drum timbre.

However, despite these flagship moments, there is definitely a problem with the album feeling quite similar in some areas. There is a chunk of the album which all kind of blends together, and not necessarily in a good way. Every track on the album is good, even great, but many tracks repeat the same ideas, and after listening to the album, it doesn’t really feel like we’ve gone far, although the closing track ‘Elegy’ does give us a brief trip from an ambient, almost psychedelic sounding section, to a place which is more grounded in reality. Every track on the album is quite dynamic compositionally; while many melody lines and phrases will be heard many times throughout a track, there are often subtle change ups and shifts in the sound, especially in the bass patterns. While this is great for keeping tracks interesting, there is rarely much tension built, although when there is a bit of tension introduced, like in the opener, it results in a very satisfying resolution into something which is familiar whilst also being totally different to other parts of the track. The changeups for the most part however instead just allow tracks to cling on to your attention instead of grabbing it.

Overall an excellent album which is a great listen and can be enjoyed over and over, although it does risk becoming sonically boring if played as anything beyond background music.

Favourite track: A Walk

Least favourite track: idk none cause there are a bunch which are kinda as less good as each other

[delcanprobably]

oh hi

idk why but i'm back on here apparently

[delcanprobably]

The Turing Test (2016) Review

The Turing Test is a first person puzzle adventure game where you play as Ava Turing (heh heh get it? Turing test?), an engineer who has been sent to a base on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moon, to discover the reason behind the sudden disappearance of the ground crew there. When you arrive, however, you find that the crew has converted a set of rooms into puzzles that only a human could solve, as to keep robots out (theoretically, I’ll get to that in a bit).

This review is going to avoid blatant spoilers of anything major.

Gameplay

As aformentioned, The Turing Test is a first person puzzle game. I probably will draw a lot of similarities to games like Portal and other games in the same genre. Anyway, the main way you interact with puzzles is with your ‘Energy Manipulation Tool’ (their quotes not mine), which is essentially just a gun that allows you to sudck up power core thingies which act as batteries to power elements of the environment. You can only hold three at once and you can’t change the order they’re stacked in, so in other words if you suck up a new core, you’ll need to stick that core somewhere before you can use the other cores you’ve previously sucked up. On paper, this sounds pretty well and good, and even in the game for the most part it’s a pretty intriguing concept. There are different types of cores that you can find, some of them alternate on and off, some are only on for a short while after they’ve been placed, and it works well. Usually the puzzles are a matter of getting what is effectively a door open so that you can get through to the next puzzle, with there being 70 puzzles in total and 7 extra optional puzzles. I have some issues with the puzzles. By the end of the game, puzzles start to end up feeling like a chore. The puzzles don’t become challenging to get through like near the end of the Portal games, instead they just have so many bits tacked on that you have to take a minute or two to actually figure out what the hell is going on. And the inability to change which orb you fire out quickly becomes obsolete as you can always expect there to be three power sources for you to sort things out with. The middle of the game is where the puzzles really peak, and even then they’re not super difficult, just kinda clever. There are a lot of times where I felt like I wasn’t supposed to solve the puzzle how I did. Like how Portal speed runners sometimes do little tricks where they shoot a portal at just the right angle at just the right time so it goes through a tiny little gap and hits a wall right at the end of a puzzle. Except that seemed like the main way to solve some puzzles near the end of the game. Nevertheless, the puzzles are worthwhile, and you’ll have fun with them. The puzzles are the game’s strong point, and honestly if you just want a first person puzzle game for the intent of doing nothing but playing through puzzles, you can basically stop reading now because you’ll probably like it. It only took about 5 hours to 100% it for me, but I don’t feel like I wasted any of those five hours.

Performance and visuals

This game is made on Unreal Engine 4. As you can imagine, it looks pretty excellent, albeit most of the game does take place in sterile test chambers. Except occasionally there’s a little section in some ice, or sometimes you’re in a laboratory with lots of props and the like, and visually it really shines in those areas. And it runs great too, although the graphics menu has some questionable choices. For instance, it has these lens flares that go over a chunk of your view sometimes which I’m absolutely fine with personally, but I know that there are people who would hate them. The issue is that you can’t just disable them. You’d need to lose them along with bloom and that brightness adjustment thing where everything gets darker if you’re looking at something bright all at once. It’s only a minor thing, but it’s not that hard to put some check boxes in your menus. Everything is on a slider from Low up to Ultra, and while there’s a lot you can modify, I’d still like to be able to manually choose specifically what I enable.

Overall it’s pretty well optimised for PC.

Story

This is where everything goes to shit. The story at the start stays intact, but as you go it tries to be more and more clever, then starts being pretentious, and then everything bursts open. At the start, you’re flown onto the moon base and you go inside and “Woah!” you say “It looks like they’ve transformed the base into a series of puzzles!”. Or at least you would if it weren’t that the base’s AI, T.O.M. hadn’t of already said it. Lots of puzzle games have a robot that tells you stuff, except generally they either start off knowing as little as you do (think Weatley from Portal 2), or they start off knowing everything except they don’t have a real relationship with the player character so they don’t tell you anything (think GLaDOS from the original Portal). T.O.M is a weird mix between the two, and it just doesn’t work as well. Anyway, so T.O.M explains that he thinks the puzzles are some sort of Turing Test type thing to keep any robots and AI out, and explains that they’re too lateral for an AI to handle. That’s hilarious, considering AI would be much quicker to solve that type of test if anything. Now you’ve got that little hole in the story which is questionable, but really they didn’t do too terrible of a job explaining why there are so many puzzles on a space base for some reason. The issue comes up later, when this whole robots-can’t-do-puzzles thing contradicts itself when the writers start trying to be more clever than they actually are.

But then you get to the optional puzzles. These simply aren’t likely to ever exist in a situation like this, but for some reason, the people who built the puzzles thought “Hey, why don’t we put some audio logs behind more difficult puzzles for no apparent reason?”. It seems fine on the surface, seeing as though they wanted to include some story bits that you need to work for. Except then you go back to Portal, and remember that there’s a whole subplot you could skip hidden around the puzzles. Granted, these are a slightly different concept; they’re less direct story telling moments, but my point stands that it makes more sense in Portal.

You can ignore that, but then you’ll find that every 10th room, the people who built the puzzles thought “Hey, why don’t we keep a small section of the base with all our stuff still in it, and always put it at exactly every 10th puzzle?”. It just makes no sense, if the base was actually still being used after they built the puzzles, you’d need to go through 60 puzzles every single time you wanted to cross the god damn base! But the last 20 you probably won’t be doing, because they literally make zero sense if you think about it. To put it spoiler free, you need to start taking advantage of robots and AI to get through a set of puzzles designed to keep robots and AI out.

And then the game starts asking that you show some emotion for the characters near the end, even though they’re all mentally retarded. They want you to think that the robot is mean and heartless and other bad things, but really he’s the only one thinking logically out of all of them. So when the inevitable moral choice comes around, it’s not at all warranted, and you don’t feel like you’re actually doing anything. It seems that every time this game throws another interesting concept into the mix, it breaks everything else and weakens the story.

Overall, the story tries some interesting things, but constantly fails to execute them all that well.

Music and Sound Design

Eh, it’s alright. Nothing amazing, but it’s alright. The music is pretty good, but it’s not the sort of music you’d listen to outside the context of the game. A majority of the music is classical style piano based stuff, usually with the same melody which changes slightly to reflect the mood of the story. The sound is alright, but sometimes it feels slightly off to what’s happening on screen. Voice acting isn’t bad either. Nothing is bad in this department, but nothing is really anything more than average. Not bad, just not amazing.

Steam Controller Support

For this review onward I’ll do a grade system for this bit, just so I don’t waste your time.

Grade: A

Simultaneous mouse and keyboard works fine, although there are as always some issues with changing button prompts. Overall though, basically flawless in this area. Works best with either a mouse and keyboard or Steam Controller, entirely up to you.

Tidbits

Price to length

As I mentioned earlier, this game took me about 5 hours to 100%. It costs $19.99 on Steam. That’s just too much, especially when you consider that there’s almost no replay value. They needed something like the challenge maps in Portal, or a time trial mode, or just anything to give it a bit more content and replay value. I’d pick it up for $10 or less, preferably around $5. There are some games, like The Witness, which deserve this price point, but The Witness actually has $20 worth of content.

The Verdict

Gameplay - 8/10 Visuals - 8/10 Performance - 7/10 Story - 2/10 Music & sound - 5/10 Tidbits (incl. SC support) - (-0.5)

Score out of 50 = 8 + 8 + 7 + 2 + 5 - 0.5= 30.5/50 Final score =

62%

(Above averaqe) (6/10)

A great puzzle game which has its head up its own ass when the story sections come around.

TL;DR: Definitely consider this game, but don’t expect a great story, and wait for a sale.

[delcanprobably]

Devlog - August 2017

I just can’t do one of these on time can I?

Note: Another change in the way GIFs/GFYs are handled, but this should be the last one. You should be able to now get a high quality .gif version as a preview, but it’s still recommended that you view the GFYCAT version linked under each gif for higher quality playback.

Keep reading

[delcanprobably]

INSIDE Review

DISCLOSURE: I received this game in a Humble Monthly bundle for $12 (bundled with about 5 other games).

Gameplay

You play as a boy with no real backstory, who you move to the right until you can't move right, in which case you either go left a bit and figure out how to solve the thing that prevents you from going right, or stopping every now and then so you don't die a horrible death in your attempts at running to the right. Similarly to LIMBO, you can move left and right, jump, climb things, swing on ropes, and grab things, all pretty standard. There are sections where suddenly you're in a submarine and you have two more directions to move in, but apart from that, there's not a lot new in the way of controls. The puzzles have the same Playdead charm that they did in LIMBO, what with the dragging around of things to help you solve a thing. Overall, the controls are good, puzzles are pretty excellent, although there's not a lot new here. That's not necessarily a bad thing though, making the gameplay any more complex than it already is would more than likely detract from the game's experience. I don't think it's all that important to have cutting edge new gameplay, especially not in an indie game, as long as it's done well.

Performance and visuals

Graphically, this game is gorgeous. I would happily have any frame of this game as my desktop wallpaper. It's dark and gritty, but everything you need to see can be seen very easily. The character animations are excellent, I'm amazed how they could keep the boy moving in such a lifelike and realistic way and still have such tight controls. It's really something where you need to be playing to understand, everything from the way you fling your arm out to push buttons as you run past to the way that he leaps and lands is so perfect and smooth. The game has an effect that you don't see used too often: TAA, a.k.a. Temporal Anti-Aliasing. Unlike most forms of AA, TAA smooths the difference in frames, as well as the actual frame itself. This adds a bit of motion blur - although it's a very nice motion blur - as well as smoothing out the actual game heaps. On a single frame basis, you won't see any jaggies, it smoothens everything so well, without having the vaseline effect that FXAA has. Performance wise, the game runs pretty perfectly, I never saw it drop lower than 55FPS ingame on my GTX 860M at 'max' settings 1080p. Don't know how it scales though because it doesn't have much in the way of performance options.

Story

I want to say this game's story is excellent. It definitely is excellent, except it also doesn't have much of a story. What I'm trying to say is, while I can think in my head all the great bits of this game's story, I also don't know what the fuck happened. It's the sort of game you need to play to understand, and it leaves an awful lot of the story to the imagination. I can't say much, but I will say the story is exceptional and needs to be played through.

Music and sound design

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a game where the distress in the protagonist's breathing constantly changes to reflect the situation. If you're calmly walking along in the woods, he'll breathe normally, although a little distressed because you know, alone in the woods and stuff, but then if a van's headlights flash up and people are scouting the area, he really starts panicking and you can really hear it. That was one thing which really stood out to me at first. Other than that, the sound is pretty minimal (in a good way). The music is used in a very interesting way, in that it usually is directly related to the gameplay. Without spoiling much, there's one section where x and you need to go through a platforming section, and the music goes to the x so you know when you can safely x. People who have played will know what I mean. While x does make noise in of itself, the music sort of nudges you forward like it's saying 'Come on! Just a little more! You're almost there!'. There's not music playing all the time, which really helps the game out an awful lot.

Steam Controller Support

Works best with a controller Has native support for the Steam controller, the base setup is pretty perfect for if you're using the stick. I use the left pad, but it wasn't much of a problem to go in and set the left pad to movement. I recommend upping the inner dead zone a touch, especially in the submarine area. I didn't experiment with simultaneous keyboard and controller inputs, but there's no need since the game never uses the mouse.

Tidbits

Price $20? No. Don't pay $20 for this, you'll 100% it in 6 hours, and there's not much replay value here after you've done all the little secrets. Maybe if you're going to find all the secrets on your own (which I'd say is doable but you'd need serious patience for a few of them) then maybe it's worth it. I wouldn't pay more than $10 for this though, and even then that's a bit much. While it's an excellent game, I really think they're asking for way too much, put it on your wishlist and wait for a sale.

Verdict

Gameplay - 8/10 Visuals - 9/10 Performance - 10/10 Story - 9/10 Music & sound - 9/10 Tidbits (incl. SC support) - (-0.5)

Score out of 50 = 7.5 + 9 + 10 + 9 + 9 - 0.5 = 44.5/50 Final score =

89%

(Excellent) (9/10

A must play, but probably not for $20

TL;DR: Definitely pick this game up, but wait until it goes on sale $10 or less.

[delcanprobably]

Just played Quake Champions Closed Beta a bit.

It’s brilliant. Full early impressions video coming eventually.

[delcanprobably]

Overwritten devlog for early March

Everything we’ve done for the last month and a bit.

Keep reading

[delcanprobably]

In game mouse cursors

A ramble on mouse cursors that gets a little over technical in bits, and is really just me stating an opinion on how all game devs should do them, even though I’m a tiny little developer who doesn’t deserve to have a say in the matter.

I’m not sure on my opinion of in game mouse cursors. If you don’t know, most triple A game developers (It’s in Dishonored, DOOM, basically every Ubisoft game) don’t actually use the system cursor. Instead, they get the position of the mouse, stick a UI sprite in that position, then make the mouse invisible. They also often move the image based on the mouse’s momentum (I’m looking at you Bethesda). “Why would you do this?” I hear you ask, and to be honest, there’s no catch all answer. Maybe it’s so you can do more complex mouse animations? Maybe it’s because some engines don’t change the mouse cursor visibility particularly well, so instead they just disable and enable a sprite? I don’t know, but the point is, it’s usually a disadvantage. In Dishonored, the mouse cursor never changes, let alone play an animation. Same goes with Ubisoft’s games. The best you can do with an ingame mouse cursor is a single frame delay. So in other words, moving the mouse takes a 60th of a second to actually work, assuming you’re running at 60fps and excluding hardware based delays (wireless signal transimissions, monitor update rate, etc).

If you didn’t know, I’m making a game. In the main menu, I made it so clicking things applies a cinematic-bloom-lens-flare-fish-eye-thing, as seen in this video;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W26w9E9Nntg

Now, I decided that it looked a bit jarring to have the cinematic-bloom-lens-flare-fish-eye-thing (hereby named the CBLFFET) happen when the mouse was just sort of there. When using the system cursor, you can’t apply any sort of gamespace animations to it. You can change the sprite the cursor uses, but you can’t actually animate it in the way you can animate the rest of the menu. So what I did was, I made the simplest possible in-game mouse cursor I could. I got the mouse’s location, got that relative to the canvas, and moved an image to the location of the mouse. I also changed the anchor point of the image so it’s origin (the spot where it’s position actually relates to) was at the tip of the cursor. This results in the best in-game cursor you can get - the one frame delay cursor. This means that I can apply the CBLFFET to the mouse. This is what it looks like;

(mp4 version)

This looks pretty good. It’s hard to see from the gif how smooth it is, but please look at the mp4 to see the higher framerate. This doesn’t actually move the mouse, so you can spam a button and not have to worry about realigning afterwards. Because of this, I decidesed to set up whole number sliders (sliders that click into different options, i.e. an Antialiasing slider which just goes 0, 2x, 4x, 8x, as opposed to a sensitivity slider which goes into 8 decimal places on the backend.

I then figured, if you’ve got a low framerate, the mouse is going to move jittery and sluggishly, which overall just provides a painful experience as you go through the options and turn everything to bare minimum. Of course, this shouldn’t be a problem on the main menu with no 3D rendered stuff, but preparing for the pause menu is probably a good idea.

So then I figured, maybe that’s not enough for some people. Maybe there are people who, unlike me who simply has mixed feelings and doesn’t really care if a cursor is ingame or not, actually have severely negative opinions on it. Perhaps a childhood incident causes ingame cursors to trigger flashbacks of the war. Point is, I put a button on the options screen to allow people to change it. Case in point;

(mp4 version)

You can see here that when the system cursor is on, it’s a bit more convienient to move the cursor out the window. I have set it up so the cursor reappears outside of the window, but in Unity itself this doesn’t work well. I’ve also set this button up so it saves a registry key so the game remembers what the player has set this as. Video games provide this wonderful thing called choice, use it. This (this being the button) was unbelievably simple to code. There’s no excuse why big game companies need to omit such an option from the menus, nor is there a reason why big game companies need to make the cursor be ingame anyway with the way they use it. I decided to show what having an ingame cursor can actually do aside from the style of animation I’m doing;

(mp4 version)

Okay, so maybe not the most useful thing in the world to have the mouse cursor spin, but how about this;

(mp4 version)

It’s simple, it’s smooth, it’s informative, it’s plain, and most importantly, it’s actually using ingame cursors in a good way. Without an ingame cursor here, you’d need to make a frame for every shade of red you want the cursor to be. So if you’re running the game at 60fps, you’d need to have 30 frames of this 64x64 image minimum (white to red, then play in reverse to make it go back to white).

With an ingame cursor, I needed to make three frames. Keyframes though, not normal frames;

Then all I needed to do is loop the animation, a task not made as simple as you’d think with Unity’s mechanim (instead of just making the animation end and loop, Unity think “Oh, why don’t we make a transition so it smoothly changes from white to white!”).

There’s not just aesthetic things you could do with this. You can also use this to make the mouse cursor actually effect things. You could give the cursor a collider, move it into a 3D environment, and have it physically move objects. You could make a game out of a similar concept. You could make clicking an item in an inventory disables the system cursor and just moves the item, making it much smoother and fluid to drag and drop items. You could do more advanced aesthetic changes like, for example, applying vector based motion blur to the cursor.

Or you could do what I did and put it behind a 3x3x3 cube array, applied some TAA, Depth Of Field, and a twist distortion, and ended up making the user experience generally unenjoyable;

(mp4 version)

Point being, if you’re going to use an ingame cursor, use it well (oh hai Pony Island).