lonesomealley

[lonesomealley]

Blinking From Afar

James awoke to his pitch black surroundings, the comfort of his bed encompassing all feelings. His eyes shifted, fingers twitched. Contemplating his capacity to go back to sleep, he shuffled. His hands slid along the wall to a lever, and upon being flipped, the world lit up. Light revealed bland, up against the beige walls laid a desk of notebooks and a painting of mountains. James sat upwards, stretched, and made his way to the window. The blinds concealed a blackened world, but a single red dot blinked in the far distance. His curiosity peaked, and he focused his attention at the frequency of the blinks. The light blinked at a consistent rate, and seemed entirely ordinary. Or it should have been.

James took a peculiar interest in this light, and sought out to identify its source. He snagged a couple things he thought would be vital for his journey like a flashlight, coat, and some granola bars that he all stuffed into his camping backpack. Suited and ready to take on the world, he steadily crept down stairs, making his way towards the back door. One foot in front of the other, the floored creaked. The sound amplified against the deaf sounds of the night, he moved slowly and cautiously. Using his foot to pat spots on the floor to determine the best route, and internally pushing his wait to his upper body. It felt like time had become a sort of gel that James had to push through, and push through he did. The stairs were surprisingly solid, and James assessed that with an entire floor of noise cancellation he’d be able to move quicker. He sped off to the kitchen where he’d pack some extra fruit snacks and bags of chips while thinking to himself, “This will make for a great meal.”

Finally deciding that he’s ready to depart from his comfort zone, he sprang around the corner towards the front door. The deadbolt made a satisfying click, and the door breezed open before him. One step in front of the other, and he was now outside. Initially, the outside world felt harsh, but after some time spent adjusting, it had become ambient. His familiar surroundings were now cast with a new sense of perspective. Where he had never imagined such a world previously, it now confronted him head on. He contemplated what would lie ahead, if he should go back inside, what was at the end of his journey. One foot in front of the other, it pushed him just a little bit closer to his goal line. He sought after the main road, as the streets of his neighborhood zigzagged in a confusing manner. It was the more efficient alternative to walking all the way around the block he thought. However it seemed that every other yard he stepped through had an abundance of dogs ready to sound, and after only a handful of yards, an orchestra of uncoordinated pooches broke the silent, somber atmosphere. Considering the odds of being caught out, James bolted it to a new, more peaceful location.

As he made progress and cleared his way to his destination, he had the worry that maybe he wasn’t going in the right direction, or that he had made no progress; the red dot was nowhere to be seen. Taking a stop at a large, two story home similar to his own, he looked up for his answers. He circled the house, looking for a way up, and found a ladder. Practically dragging it to the left of the house, the outside lights flicked on as James passed them. This put James into fight or flight, and he promptly ran to the neighboring home. After some time the lights turned off, and James made another attempt to run back over, which only prompted the lights to turn back on. It took, what felt like, an eternity before James finally came to understand how these lights operated, only to come to the conclusion that there was nothing to be afraid of. Some moments passed of James reflecting on how silly and naive he had been, and then he went back to business. He fumbled with the ladder, but eventually managed to have it secure enough to where he could climb it. Finally gaining a vantage point on his objective, he found that he had been going the correct direction the entire time, and that the main road was only a couple streets away.

With a new wave of confidence and the drive to continue pushing forwards, he practically jumped down the ladder and began sprinting forwards. He knew that no matter what roads he took, as long as he kept moving forwards he would eventually reach the main road. And so with enough time, and energy spent on letting his excitement set free, he reached the main road. A long, wide road stretched from east to west. On one side, the civilization that he had become so familiar with, and on the other a field of nothingness and trees that stretched towards the blinking light. James swung his head left to right anticipating a car to drive by, but there was nothing. The street lamps that stretched down the road showed pockets of unoccupied land that would typically have some sort of activity. It was at this point that James wondered to himself about why the night was often considered the time to sleep. He thought that it would be cool to see and experience new things during the night, or how his mom wouldn’t have to complain about the terrible traffic they experienced every time he was picked up from school. That’s when he put one foot in front of the other and stepped out towards the middle of the street. There he stood, arms open wide, with the feeling of freedom he’d never previously experienced.

He couldn’t understand his feeling of pure wonderment about the outside world in this instance, but he knew that surely there was something great about all of this. Surely there was something at the end of his journey that would be 10 times better than everything that he’s come across until now. And so he pressed onwards, across the street and taking his first steps into the grassy field. He considered pulling out his flashlight at this point, but his immature mind advised him otherwise. The area was familiar to him, it was the prime spot for all of his social activities and he felt like he knew it like the back of his hand. Grass rustled underneath James’ feet as he wandered a vast, open field. Then another thought came to him, “Hey, maybe the vending building is still open!” The vending building often handed out free gumballs to regulars, and “what a better time to acquire one than right then?” he thought aloud. After some time of aimless wandering, he eventually distinguished the boxy shadow of the building from the rest of the environment.

The building was cold and made from rough concrete. Hands brushed along the side of the building to the location of the front door where, almost as an instinct, James flung himself into the opening of the door frame. It was then that his body smashed into a solid wall. His entire body went limp and collapsed to the ground. There James’ laid, almost as if he was waiting for someone to come over to check on him. When enough time passed for James to understand that he was alone, he began to panic. Anxiety washed over him as he now began to dig through his backpack for his flashlight. His hand clung to it and immediately flicked it on, shining the light at himself only worsened his state of mind: Blood had begun gushing out of his nose all over his blue shirt, his face was warm and surged with pain. Sobbing uncontrollably, he considered cancelling his venture for the night. He turned the flashlight towards his perceived aggressor, only to find a solid, wooden door standing in his way.

It took awhile for James to get back to recover and get back to his feet, and when he did he was faced with the dilemma of spending the next half an hour to get home, or that half an hour to get to why he came outside in the first place. He thought about it for a couple minutes, but ultimately decided, “One foot in front of the other.” Those feet dragged along a vast, open, lifeless field in search of its destination. James could see the tops of the trees contrasting against the rather dim night sky. He was so close, there was no turning back now. Eventually he reached those trees, and officially entered the forest. The leaves above almost covered the night sky above, the flashlight being the only source of light amongst the foliage.

The atmosphere was also a lot more noisy than James had previously encountered. Leaves rustled all around him, it was peaceful yet kept him on his toes. He couldn’t see the blinking light anymore, but he knew that if he just kept moving forward he would eventually find it. It was 10 minutes of walking, however, before he was finally reassured of anything at this point. A light began to appear in the distance, coming from a light post attached to a building. He figured that if he kept moving towards it, just maybe that was the end of his journey. His legs were close to giving out, his mind weary and tired from this night’s events. He kept chanting to himself, “One foot in front of the other,” as a saving grace to keep moving forwards. His efforts were rewarded as the light got closer and closer to him, until he could practically reach out and touch it. And he did. The light bulb was hot and burned his hand after a while, but he could see the world around him again.

James noticed a large, steel tower sitting beside him, locked behind a fence. At the very, tippy top of the tower, was his answer. The red dot he had been searching for, was simply the top of this mysterious tower. He had no one around to ask questions to, he just had to sit there and ask himself what this tower was, what was the light at the very top? He thought about climbing the tower to get a close look on the light, but he couldn’t even get past the fence. Even if he were able to, the tower was simply too dangerous to climb on, he thought. But instead of feeling ashamed or defeated in his efforts, he took comfort in knowing that he finally had an answer to his curiosity, even if he didn’t have the answer to all of them. He could now go home, and in the morning he’d be able to ask about the light and the tower, and perhaps they would know the answers. He pulled a bag of chips and a pack of fruit snacks from his backpack to reward himself for his efforts. Sitting underneath that light, feeling fulfilled in his journey, he now begrudged the walk home, but knew that he wouldn’t have to go through the troubles of discovery again.

That’s when he heard some people chatting nearby. Realizing he wasn’t alone, James ducked down and tried to investigate what was going on. Like at his home, he carefully planned out his foot root to reduce the amount of noise he made. On the other side of the small building, he spotted a truck and 2 adults sitting around, chatting about something incomprehensible. He leaned in to try to eavesdrop on the conversation, practically standing on his tippy toes. But, forgetting he was exhausted from the entire journey to this point, his feet gave out and he rolled into the ground in front of him. The loud rustling caused by James prompted the two over to the sight of the noise. What the men found was a bloodied, disheveled, tired boy flopped onto the ground in front of them.

One of the men called out, “Hey buddy, you alright over here?”

James, utterly terrified, muttered out, “Y-yeah I’m okay.”

“What are you doing out so late, where do you live?”

“Oh, I’m just,” he stuttered, “going on a late night adventure.”

“Uh huh,” the man smiled. “Do you need help getting home? We can drive you there.”

“Yes sir.” James opened up a little bit.

The man turned to his friend and gave him a nod, the other guy chuckled and went to go get the truck ready. The now acquainted one asked if he could pick up James, and gave him a piggyback ride to the truck. The other man, seemingly elated despite the situation, called out, “She’s all ready to go!” James climbed into the back seat, and the two started chatting about their excitement to go home. The truck pulled forwards and began to make its way back to civilization. James, reflecting back on the night, pulled out some granola bars and began munching away. At least now he didn’t have to walk back home, he thought.

-Count_

[lonesomealley]

Risk of Rain 2 Early Access Review and Discussion

Writer’s Note: This review was written after the December update was released. Any opinions and problems with the game are subject to change over time as the game reaches its full release. This review also contains some spoilers? Risk of Rain isn’t really a game that you can spoil, you’re not ultimately losing anything from reading ahead for this type of game.

-=REVIEW=-

Risk of Rain 2 is a game that I’ve played over 200 hours of since I initially bought it on June 5th of 2019. This is important to say outright because it needs to be expressed that Risk of Rain 2 is super into the arcade-y, repetitive, RNG roguelike style that many games before it have fallen into. These games are not for everyone, and if you’re someone who’s expecting runs to be bursting at the seams with new content, you’re going to be left in pure disappointment. At best this game will throw new content at you for the first couple of hours you play, but after that there is a sharp decrease in this content.

However, I have to preface that this review is a positive review, and that Risk of Rain 2 has created a gameplay loop that is very addictive to get into for many (including me). This game can be easily summarized down to the following: You pick a character, kill enemies, get items, kill the boss, go to the next level, kill enemies, get items, kill the boss, etc. There is technically an “end game” to Risk of Rain however it basically involves becoming so powerful that you’re capable of constantly obliterating all enemies instantaneously. And while this system is fun, this review is going to explain why the end game is currently broken and that the game suffers from a bunch of small yet consistent issues that actively bring down the experience of the game.

First let’s talk about all the things that the game does right. All of the characters, while some flawed, are exceptionally different from each other and are fun to play in their own ways. All of the characters are also well balanced in that there is no character that is obviously the best character in the game, and no character is so bad that it is beyond difficult if not impossible to reach the end game with. The vast majority of items are well balanced in the scheme of the game, with only a couple items being overwhelmingly awful to acquire (primarily the lunar items) and one item being a direct detriment to pickup. We’ll come back to these later in the discussion part. The game’s art style is great, and the stages are beautiful albeit some poorly designed. The enemy types are somewhat varied yet become boring to look at with time, and the AI of the game is pretty mediocre but otherwise serviceable for a hoard shooter. And finally the multiplayer is an alright system of peer to peer, however many players have complained about the lack of host migration, meaning that if the host leaves the lobby, the entire lobby will close.

You wouldn’t know that I basically covered all of what you can really talk about from a basic review standpoint of Risk of Rain 2, if I wasn’t so generous as to tell you. So instead of providing a long form critique/review like the one I just did for Borderlands 3, I’m instead going to give you a brief review with the review score ahead of time, before I go into just deconstructing the game. So, here it goes:

Risk of Rain 2 feels exactly what a sequel should strive to do in the face of a game franchise. It takes the original concept of the first game and puts all of it into three dimensions. The way that this is pulled off is almost so flawlessly done that it is legitimately difficult to attempt to go back to the original game’s mechanics. This new focus on 3D gameplay has come with the freedom of movement that was noticeably absent in the first game (shooting while moving, sprinting, faster movement, and versatile movement skills). In some ways certain elements of the game have become dramatically less important or dumbed down, such as drones being next to useless, homing rockets being seen as passive damage rather than a massive game changer, and the introduction of death pits that correspond well enough with certain items or abilities to completely change the tide of a fight.

In many more ways, however, the game has become a much more flexible and skill based game that allows the player to play in a much more expressive manner. Gameplay is a smooth, fast paced, hoard based experience that will push you to cleverly use the resources that you’ve been given to turn the tides of a fight. Initially this game is going to seem very difficult for people who begin playing on the, “Rainstorm,” A.K.A normal difficulty, because what this game doesn’t tell you is that there are a ton of nuances that will completely change how you play the game as you learn them. During your first playthroughs you’re going to find that Stone Titans are a very annoying enemy, and that the laser is a powerful attack that will melt your health very quickly. Then later on you’ll find that Stone Titans are pretty much push overs in small numbers or individually, because you can stand at the feet of the Titan which stops it from ever trying to laser you. There are many little quirks like this in the game that will ultimately change how you handle the hoard based combat, and eventually you’ll come to the resolution that Lesser Wisps, supposedly the weakest enemy in the game, are actually the strongest.

By the time you reach that point though, you may become frustrated with the RNG systems of the game. RNG dictates a couple things in Risk of Rain 2, but most importantly it dictates what items you get and in what order you get them (randomly). On some of your runs you may find a legendary, or two, or three on the first level that essentially renders the difficulty of that run nullified. On other runs you’re going to get a bunch of trash items 3-4 levels in and eventually find yourself fighting a game of attrition until your inevitable demise. Of course, you can theoretically skill your way through the game, and the further into the game you get, the more possibilities you have to find items that will turn the tides of your run around.

The character you choose is also a massive influence on how you learn to play the game. If you’re anything like me or my friends, you’re going to immediately gravitate towards the Huntress, as she’s easy to unlock and has considerably more survivability than the other survivors that you unlock early on. The biggest problem that the Huntress posses to the player’s attitude towards the game is that she provides players with the tools to never properly learn how to position or prioritize enemies. What happens when you begin playing the Huntress is that you find it very difficult to play other characters such as the Commando, Mult, or Artificer. This may result from what pieces of information that Risk of Rain provides about the other characters simply not being clear enough as to how versatile they really are. This was somewhat addressed with the introduction of, “Mastery,” challenges that unlock cool skins for each of the characters (minus engineer :c). However, I don’t believe that players will be driven to try out these new characters or even play the, “Monsoon,” difficulty of the game before they’ve put anywhere from 20-40 hours into Rainstorm/Drizzle.

Given this, Risk of Rain isn’t ultimately a game about becoming the best at its systems. It feels much like a “for fun” kind of game where you just sit down for a couple of hours and have a blast killing enemies. This isn’t how I approached the game, however if you ultimately decide that the game is too difficult, the Drizzle difficulty is going to be just the thing for you. You will be, more or less, consistently overpowered on this difficulty if you have even the most basic understanding of how to play the game. You can totally just play a Drizzle run for 2 hours straight and ultimately understand the purpose of Risk of Rain: Get overpowered and screen wipe enemies consistently. And even though I personally don’t play the game like this, I wouldn’t blame you if this is how you prefer to play it.

This game isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you like arcady, roguelike, third person action this game will probably be right up your alley. I give this game a review score of 7/10. It is well worth the $20 asking price, and is definitely made much more fun with friends (who can manage to get good at the game). When this game receives more content and is completed I imagine that this review score will go up, but for now this game may be lacking in content for many people.

-=DISCUSSION=-

That’s where the review portion of this post ends. If you really only wanted an overview of what the game is and what it does well, then that’s what I have to offer you. The rest of this post is going to be going into a long discussion about why certain systems of Risk of Rain 2 are bland and overall degrade elements of the game. So let’s dive into those core issues, why don’t we?

Items

Firstly let’s hit on the core mechanic of this game: randomized item drops. The method in which Risk of Rain 2 hands out items isn’t heavily biased into giving a player a certain set of items or outright trying to discriminate against items (except of course that item tiers become more rare as they go up). However the problem with this system is the aforementioned frustration that comes along with a game that's far too dependent on RNG. In some runs you will be given just the right combo that will turn your run into a god run, whereas others are doomed from the start. I don’t consider the option of “skilling” your way through the first 7 stages to really be an option, since without damage and effect procing (chance on hit) items, the later levels become an absolute chore to play through. Of course, this is detrimental to the game in the way that it may just be outright impossible to obliterate or reach god run every run.

Now this is going to be a hard change to swallow, but I think this game could benefit from having biases in its RNG distribution of items which, according to Ghor (developer of Risk of Rain 2), has been confirmed to be entirely random.

This system doesn’t have to be a drastic overhaul that makes every item has its own custom probability for drop, but it should focus on making each playthrough feel a little more balanced. My proposal for this is to make a system that attempts to balance out how many damage, healing, and utility items the player gathers throughout their playthrough. Basically, if you have too many damage and utility items, the game should start pushing towards giving you some healing items and etc. But there’s some new problems introduced with the change.

Firstly, how do 3D printers affect this? Well, I think there’s two options for this. One, have 3D printed items have a special tag on them that stops them from affecting the RNG calculations of items drops. Or two, just doing nothing about it. That latter fix doesn’t seem all too appetising, but I think it could lead to some interesting developments and meta games around 3D printing items.

The other major gripe I have with the item system is that items are hitting this level of power creep that has made certain elements of the game almost meaningless. And when I say meaningless, I do literally mean meaningless. For the most part, Risk of Rain’s item balancing is fantastic with most items feeling like they belong in that tier, while others are either way too overpowered or provide next to no benefit. And this is the type of subject that I think is difficult for ROR2 to get right because the ultimate goal of this game is to become overpowered, so it would make sense for overpowered stuff to just exist, right? Well no. While it is important for the game to have kinda meh items and kinda alright items, the extent to which the game has pushed its power creep is really stupid.

Most predictably I will bring up Shaped Glass. This item has been in hot heat from most of the game’s community for making the gameplay really dull and having little to no actual risk in using it, despite being a lunar item which is supposed to be a risk and reward item. For those uninformed, Shaped Glass cuts your health capacity in half while doubling your damage multiplicatively. All is well so far, until you factor in how healing and one shot protection works in the game. When your health is over 90%, you cannot die to a single hit of damage excluding over time effects like burning or sticky bombs. The basic gist is that by cutting the maximum health you have with Shaped Glass, healing items will retain their default stats and hence actually be improved each time a Shaped Glass is acquired. Given that this item works multiplicatively, (2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x damage and health debuff) a run will quickly spiral into a god run with no penalty to the player long term.

But at least that takes some effort to achieve, where as Old Guillotine has outright destroyed the balance of elite monsters. Stack a couple of these bad boys, and elite enemies are now a complete joke. Originally introduced in the Scorched Acres update as a direct counter to malachite enemies (as far as I can tell that’s the only reason this item was added), this item allows the player to kill elites at a percentage of their health instead of just getting their health to zero. So if you collect 1 guillotine, the elite monster will die at 20% of its health instead of 0%. This item is generally an okay item, balance wise, if it wasn’t already piss easy to instantly screenwipe enemies during a god run. But oh god, the flat percentage rates compared with how high these percentage rates are per stack are ungodly. According to the Risk of Rain Wiki, collecting just 10 of these bad boys will allow you to kill elites at a whopping 90% health. Meaning, if you manage to find an Old Guillotine printer in your mid game, elite enemies are no longer a problem. But let’s be real, no one needs that many guillotines when only 3 of these nets you roughly 50% (This piece of information has become outdated, now it's about 40% for 3 stacks and 70% for 10 stacks). This is the stack count that I usually strive for because it's the best blend of economy and effectiveness. As you can imagine, even with 3 of these, elite enemies essentially become pushovers. Seriously, having 50% of elite enemies’ health gone is just that good, I don’t know how else to explain this pretty simple concept, but yes it’s true.

And I haven’t seen many people in the ROR community saying this item is a bad game item (please email me) so I will now explain why this hurts the game. Nothing in this game, especially in the later stages or god run, will be difficult if you are on the right track. Elite enemies could’ve and should’ve been the one turning point that kept any resemblance of the game's difficulty outside of the bosses (unless you’re already insta killing them). I can really only qualify this claim by making the point that “elite enemies” are called elite for a reason, right? The following screenshot is Google’s definition for the word “elite.”

However, when I think of the elite enemies in ROR2, I think, “Oh hey more money.” Not, “Uh oh this is bad,” or, “I really need to focus this thing.” To be fair, malachites do manage to pull this off even in the late game due to their (rather bullshit) debuff applied on getting hit by their normal attacks or dispersed spikes (we’ll touch on this later). But this mentality is, most likely, not what the developers intended players to think about their marketed “difficult” enemies. This isn’t to say that elite enemies aren’t dangerous, but even that only comes from the fact that flaming and overloading elites can outright kill you from landing one attack on you in late game. But this isn’t a danger that I’m actively worried about when the elites die in mere seconds at this point anyways.

There are also several items that just outright break bosses. Willow the Wisp turns the Grovetender boss into a free teleporter item. The Halcyon Seed is an item so strong, accompanied by a boss so easy to defeat, that it’s worth getting every time. Previously this item was a pretty meh item because the Aurelionite simply didn’t do much damage or assist you in any meaningful fashion. At some point, though, his laser beam attack was added to his friendly AI via an update, and it just melts bosses. Unstable Tesla Coil makes horde boss fights beyond easy (this item generally makes the game a cake walk). And of course, Chronobauble will transform you into an invincible chad ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

I’m sure there are some items that I’ve missed in this list, I could go into some depth about how 57 Leaf Clover is the best item available, or that some items are useless in comparison and were outright terrible for some time because of the developers’ oversights (H3AD-ST-v2 breaking Artificer’s float and Aegis being worse than the Topaz Brooch.) But you should get the point. Overall the item balancing isn’t awful, the game is still overall playable without an overwhelming amount of this power creep, and to be fair instantly melting the bosses in this game is enjoyable even if I don’t, at all, deserve it.

Stage Imbalance

What is awful then, is the stage imbalance present in the game. Stage imbalance is probably one of the biggest things turning me off from the game right now. Nothing frustrates me more than getting Scorched Acres or Siren’s Call on a shitty run, and basically having to accept my death because I’m unable to grab the Preon Accumulator or kill the AWU with my pitiful damage and healing.

For some unknown, dumb shit reason, Hopoo has stated that this is the way they want to continue developing the game. So this is an issue that isn’t getting fixed, and might get worse over the next three updates. I really hope it doesn’t, because the idea of having the game be more luck based than it currently is might just make me pull my hair out. These tiny, rather inconsequential things in the moment, will eventually build up into a sort of “power creep” among the levels. I’m unsure if this is the right term for this imbalance between the levels, but right now it certainly feels like exactly that. Now, to be fair, there are only 2 levels per stage, however I will now argue that this only furthers the point that this design style is harmful to the gameplay.

Right now, it feels like the most optimal stage path is Distant Roost, Abandoned Aqueduct, Rallypoint Delta, and then Abysmal Depths. While some of these maps have their own issues, the others have issues that pull the maps to be less favorable than the ones described.

Titanic Plains, firstly, is way too big and spacious in comparison to Distant Roost. When you spawn into Distant Roost, you can very quickly identify where the teleporter has spawned due to the compact nature of the map and where the teleporter can spawn. This compactivity also gives you the benefits of an RNG chance at a large supply of items spawning in the center of the map. Titanic Plains is giant, and lacks anything interesting to look at or venture into. It’s an okay map, but has a huge issue with pacing and seems to come from a completely different design philosophy than Distant Roost. Far too many times on Titanic Plains I will get confused on where the teleporter is because it’s out in the open plains area on a bright blue backdrop. And of course, the particles that the teleporter gives off are not prominent enough to stand out from this backdrop.

Other times it’s tucked way too far into a back corner, or obscured by a structure.

The items on this map are also very hit or miss, sometimes I favor Titanic Plains over Distant Roost for how many items this map can really provide, other times I leave the map with the bare minimum for my tastes. This is, however, a problem with the general generation of chests and not strictly an issue with Titanic Plains, but I feel the issue is exacerbated on Titanic due to its size.

I also largely favor Abandoned Aqueduct over Wetland Aspect because of its readability and predictable chest placements. Wetland Aspect has way too many branching pathways with tons of stuff in the way. This is the one map I’ll often ask myself, “Did I miss checking somewhere?” or, “Did I miss it when I was looking through an area?” The teleporter, more often than not, seems to always be tucked away into some obscure corner that I have to go way out of my way to go for. Although I will say this map’s chest distribution is far better than TItanic Plains.

A map that is terrible in almost every aspect however is Scorched Acres. I truly despise this map, and seeing it come up on 50% of my playthroughs makes me want to turn the game off and leave it for good. This map is god awful, where Rallypoint Delta has a circular pathing structure so you can walk all the way around the map and get almost all of the chests (for players who are into that), Scorched Acres is a slow slog up some water geysers and into a park and down some giant structures, ugh. The best place to spawn on this map is at the highest point it generates, because having to look up to find the teleporter’s red specs on an orange background is comparable to making color blind people take color blind tests just so you can laugh at them. And having to get to a specific point on the map in order to jump up a water geyser, for a game about time management, is outright awful design. This map also lacks basic functionality that others ones have like the special TC-280 Prototype (who cares honestly) and the timed chest which contains a free Preon Accumulator (I care). And when I say lacks, I mean it doesn’t have anything else to compensate. Generally how you’d play this map, is you’d locate the teleporter or establish a general area for where the teleporter is, and linearly work your way towards it. If you see an area with a bunch of chests, you sit there and grind up enough money to collect those chests before heading on your way.

Now that final bit might have you scratching your head, “Don’t all of the maps play that way?” Well yes and no, you can play it that way if you want, but most maps are going to have the connectivity to allow you to skip on those chests until after you’ve found some other chests or defeated the teleporter event. You basically cannot do that on this map unless you want to waste minutes of your time or you have so many jumps and so much speed that you can jump from the center of the map to the upper areas with ease. Some characters also have an easier time on this map than others like the Huntress, but that’s generally just amplified because of the shitty map design and not a specific issue for Scorched Acres.

Finally, we come to Abysmal Depths versus Siren’s Call, and. . . Abysmal Depths wins, no big surprise. Siren’s call isn’t really a bad map per se, it’s compact, somewhat easy to navigate, and isn’t a hassle to get the things you need. However there’s one massive imbalance with this map, and that’s the Alloy Worship Unit. The AWU is Siren’s Call’s way of getting a guaranteed red item, and this boss fight is pretty damn tough even after its nerf. This boss scales faster than other enemies, so if you don’t get to him quickly in your early game you’ll be suffering in this boss fight, hell you’ll be suffering anyways. But beyond the boss being a pain to defeat, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with placing a red item behind a boss. Except when you take into account the fact that it is menially easy to get the golden chest on Abysmal Depths. The golden chest on Abysmal Depths always spawns in the same location, and costs a whopping 16 times the cost of a normal chest for the stage. There’s no hooks, no catches, it just requires a decent time investment to get the item because you’ll be grinding out normal enemies. That time investment is the only real contending downside for going for the golden chest on Abysmal Depths, but that also applies to fighting the AWU. If you have a terrible build and you’re gambling for a good red item from the AWU, you could find yourself spending just as long (longer even) fighting this boss. Plus you have the possibility of dying, meaning your run is over. At least now you'd have another chance to get Abysmal Depths.

And sure, as of the December update the AWU has been nerfed pretty drastically. A huge 75% decrease in damage scaling and 20% less scaling in the health department means that this boss is now overall easier to kill. But these changes haven’t ultimately made the boss any more enjoyable to kill when the run just isn’t getting started. Sure, now you can kill it faster, and you now have a more adaptable playstyle where either stage can be more viable than the other depending on your loadout but I still feel myself gravitating towards Abysmal Depths more often than not. This update also added “map variants,” but for the sake of just calling them what they are, they’re basically just additional maps. I’m honestly okay with having more than 2 maps per stage, I think that can lead to a pretty satisfying experience. My only real gripe with these maps is that you can tell these were made by another company and not Hopoo. These maps, especially the Distant Roost variant, incorporate a lot of vertical space into their game play and map flow that at times can be confusing to work around for new players. However I would not be opposed to having essentially 4 different maps for the game to choose from, granted that they’re all balanced well enough.

If Hopoo doesn’t wish to balance the stages with each other, the much simpler system I’d recommend is to have the game force the player to eventually play that stage they missed out on later. So instead of being able to get Scorched Acres 2 times in one run, if the game makes me play on that map for my 3rd stage, then I should know for a fact that I’ll get Rallypoint Delta for my 7th. And of course for Rallypoint Delta I would also recommend putting a second timer on the Preon Accumulator chest just so that it’s an option for players who don’t get it on their first loop. This would scath a good amount of my frustration towards the system because at least then I’d know my run would balance out towards the end.

The stage progression system in this game is currently very awkward. As of writing, you have to run through 7 stages before you can enter a “celestial” portal and obliterate yourself at an obelisk. It seems the way that Hopoo wants to take the game is to have 4 entirely unique stages, and then from there you’d either go to the boss or you may be forced through another loop of the game until stage 7 where the celestial portal will be replaced with the portal to the final boss area. I wish this system was more transparent with where it’s going, and if it is going to do a double looping system I’d honestly appreciate just having 7 unique stages rather than this current system. Again, this problem would be fixed if the game forced you to play the alternative stages on concurrent loops.

Feedback

Feedback was something that was somewhat addressed in this recent December update. The screen now gets dark around the edges when you’re hit and at low health your screen will start graying out. These are absolutely great steps towards integrating more feedback into the game, but it’s still missing the mark with a lot of elements.

Namely, elites have been one of the leading factors in me dedicating a part of this discussion to the feedback of the game, and this is due to the shift towards developing more powerful, end game elites. A lot of the time in Risk of Rain 2, especially end game, you’ll find yourself in situations where you just die seemingly instantly. This isn’t a problem specific to the end game but more a general problem with the lack of feedback that the game gives you when you’re being hurt or have, say, a sticky grenade stuck to you. This recent update has since added some incredible feedback additions to the game, but this system is still lacking. In an ideal universe, I should be able to tell how I’ve been hit and what’s happening to me without having to specifically focus on that. To an extent this game does that well, red lasers appear from Lesser Wisps and shoot very quickly, Golem laser blasts are pretty distinguishable, and so on. But other elements, namely elemental elements, are an area of the game that lack any specific feedback currently.

It would be cool if there were different effects that showed on screen when I was hit by different elements. Such as flames around the edges of the screen when I’m on fire, vines or whatever for the malachite, and some ice for freezing. In the case of the sticky grenades (whatever you wanna call them) it would be cool if they had a Halo-esque sound effect where it would beep for a bit before exploding to give you a very clear indication that, “You’re about to die.” Currently the game lacks this. At best the fire ticking away at your health always means that the screen is darkened, but this is an annoying effect to have on your screen for more than a mere moment. I’d say feedback is the primary reason why malachites are such a massive problem in this game, because more often than not I’ll get the malachite debuff without realizing it and then die shortly after because I wasn’t regenerating health.

More auditory feedback would also be greatly appreciated. Something as simple as a crashing sound (like the Loader’s gauntlet punch) to indicate something like, “You’ve just been melee attacked!” would go a long way to improving the crowd fighting aspect of the game. I would also like to see some more ambient sounds for enemies to emit simply from existing on the map like the high pitched hum of the Lesser Wisps or the burrowing of the Magma Worm. Again, for the most part, the audio is done well, but some enemies are just lacking in any auditory presence. Bosses like the Grovetender and Titan don’t have just a passive sound effect, you’re really only alerted to their presence when you’re close enough to see them or to initiate their attacks. Being able to hear the distant chattering of rocks or the clanking of chains in the distance to signify bosses being around the corner would add a lot to the ambience of this game. It already seems that Hopoo wants to do something great with the game’s audio because of the already existing ambience, enemy sounds, and even the music that all feed into Risk of Rain’s atmosphere. Right now it’s just lacking.

Lunar Bazaar / Lunar Coins

This system, you can tell, is disliked by most people who play this game. Streamers are always talking about how they’re out of lunar coins and a fair amount of the playerbase have just cheated themselves to a couple million so they’ll never run out. In a lot of different ways, I don’t like this system. It encourages players to grind the game instead of playing it for fun. It requires stocking up on coins in down time runs so that players can experience god runs. The system is easily made meaningless by just a simple value change and people who do this are having more fun with the game than those who don’t. And there’s a couple more issues but let’s just begin listing out these problems and going in depth from there.

First, let’s talk about how many lunar coins you can expect to earn from a single round of playing just going from stage 1 to stage 7 and obliterating. On average, I was earning about 6-7 lunar coins on each run, 1 or 2 from random drops and 5 from obliterating which always rewards the same amount. This isn’t factoring in the new secret boss that has the capacity to drop 10 lunar coins, plus the 5 you’d earn from obliterating. So in the best ideal scenario you could earn a profit of 16 lunar coins (Beads of Fealty cost 1, 10 from the secret boss, 5 from obliterating, and assuming you get 2 from world drops). But you probably won’t be able to fight the secret boss consistently from run to run without losing lunar coins in the process, so for the sake of argument I’ll be leaving this new boss out of the equation. All of this math speak demonstrates the upcoming point: You aren’t paid enough lunar coins on a per run basis. Let’s assume that you start off a run with 5 lunar coins from a previous obliteration, and that you’re going to earn 2 more as random drops throughout your progression. The cheapest that you can acquire a lunar item, far less likely one that you actually want, is 1 lunar coin spent towards a lunar pod. The next possibility is that a free blue portal appears and then you find an item you want and can spend 2 lunar coins on it. The scenario after that is that you purchase a blue portal for 1 lunar coin, go in and find the item you want and buy it for 2 to make a total of 3 spent. From here the total amount of lunar coins spent can increase exponentially because, given the rng nature of the game, it’s totally possible to never find the lunar that you want. And that’s a big problem, because ROR2’s rng systems are essentially locking away the player’s potential for success at almost every turn.

And the reason for that is the absolutely abysmal balancing of the lunar items. See, the regular items can get away with a decent amount of imbalance because one, these items don’t negatively affect the player in most instances (Personal Shield Generator cough cough) and two, you’re given the opportunity to 3D print these items away for potentially better items. At best, you can spend more lunar coins at a cleansing pool to have the potential to remove a lunar item that you dislike, but again that’s just more rng on top of the rng and costs lunar coins to use. It’s incredibly easy to lose all 7 of your lunar coins because the game just refuses to give you the item you want, which is most likely going to be Shaped Glass or Gesture of the Drowned. So I suppose I’ll begin with why you’ll most likely want these items over other ones.

Shaped Glass, as mentioned before, doesn’t really have a downside to using it as it’s pretty easy to abuse the game’s mechanics with it. Firstly, if you’re killing more things faster, those things most likely won't even have an opportunity to damage you. This is an okay example of a risk versus reward mechanic, but I’m going to have to lean on this item being more rewarding than risky. That’s because, as also stated before, healing doesn’t scale with this item, hence the lower amount of health you have the faster you can recover back to full. And recovering back to full is important because you restore one shot protection which allows risky players to continually survive even in the most drastic situations by abuse of the mechanic. This item is the foundation for building a god run.

Gesture of the Drowned, on the other hand, has a downside that’s very easy to bypass by simply picking up the right items and equipment. If you pick up something like Preon Accumulator, sure it shoots off 50% more often but now you have to be constantly thinking of what you’re going to be shooting it at and at what time it’s going to happen. Where as if you pick up a Deployable Missile launcher, you don’t have to worry about aiming at all because those rockets are homing and rarely go after the target you’re trying to aim at anyways. Gesture + Deployable Missiles also synergizes incredibly well with Soulbound Catalyst which decreases your equipment cooldown by 4 seconds every time you kill and enemy. So in this scenario, as long as you’re able to continually chain kills with your abilities and the missiles, you will be spewing out missiles constantly with no stopping. So there’s not really a downside to picking this item unless you really want to use something like the Preon Accumulator which, most of the time, isn’t a necessary item for the late game. There are a plentiful amount of other equipment that synergize decently well with Gesture as well such as the Gnarled Woodsprite, Royal Capacitor (due to its short cooldown time), the Back Up, Blast Shower, etc. So odds are that you’ll already be carrying an equipment that synergizes well with Gesture.

Examples of lunar items that are bad would be Brittle Crown, Corpse Bloom, and Effigy of Grief. These items are ones that no rational player would ever consider picking up in their runs (maybe Effigy if you got it from a lunar pod). Corpse Bloom is an item that you’d really only take if you were desperate enough to just get through the rest of the run, but even then it may be detrimental to your healing capabilities. The only situation I can see Corpse Bloom being useful would be in situations where the player has no active healing items and has had to rely on passive healing for the entire duration of the run. Otherwise, in the long run, the item will only restrict the player’s ability to be successful because they’re going to be hard limited to that 10% healing per second. This means that for the player to reach the one shot protection threshold from less than 10% health, they’ll be waiting a whopping 9 seconds and cannot take damage during that time otherwise the player is dead in late game. These kinds of items are embarrassing to see in the lunar item pool and are essentially scams.

Another item that’s entirely a scam is the Brittle Crown. On paper this item seems like a blast. You’ll have about a third of a chance to acquire additional gold simply from dealing damage to an enemy that scales over time, and the only downside is that the player will lose gold equal to the amount of percentile damage taken. What percentile damage means is that if you lose 90% of your health, you lose 90% of your gold. It’s another example of a risk versus reward item, but during the entirety of the run you’re bound to take a lot of damage simply because of the hoard combat. There are a lot of factors to take in when fighting a hoard and not taking damage on just one stage is incredibly difficult. So that means that you’ll be losing gold quite often, and losing this gold (especially while farming) can be devastating to the flow of your run. Especially in the late game where you can lose millions of gold all because you simply got hit once. There is no chance of losing gold either, it’s 100%. So if that isn’t enough to dissuade you from this item, then the fact that this item costs lunar coins to acquire absolutely should.

I’ll skip talking about the Effigy of Grief so I can get back to the point that lunar coins are a limited resource. So how do you stock up on these? Well, since lunar coins are kept between runs, that means the best way to experience the game is to grind out a couple obliterate runs until the player has stocked up over 10 to 20 lunar coins. This will give the player a decent amount of wiggle room for spending and dealing with the RNG of the lunar bazaar. Here’s the issue with this: The player will most likely grind them out over a long period on Monsoon or speedrun Drizzle to maximize how many coins can be acquired in a short amount of time. Grinding, as a game mechanic, is very polarizing for many different players. It has its place in games because why else do we have the massive game titan World of Warcraft, or Borderlands, or Destiny, or just about any mmorpg to hit the market? But introducing grinding to your small, indie roguelike is questionable.

The grinding system of lunar coins in Risk of Rain just feels like Hopoo wanted to have a more premium currency for adding depth to the game, but had no clever ideas as to what they wanted to achieve with it. Right now, the system is bland, uninspired, and cumbersome to play with for many legit players. The first thing to get out of the way is that I have the actual data collected in Hopoo’s discord server to back up what I’m saying here. This poll was posted by a moderator from the aforementioned discord server to collect feedback for the developers to work with.

Most players here are saying that they’d like to be paid out more lunar coins because they’re shredding through them too quickly. Personally, I tried to avoid spending lunar coins except in situations where I really wanted to win a run or was trying to shoot for a god run. Before my save file corrupted I had about 180 lunar coins which is absolutely more than enough to keep up consistent runs for a while, but that’s assuming I’d want to be working at a deficit. This is because, for the lunar bazaar, the chance of the item you’re specifically looking for spawning is around 30% according to this video and it's even less for the lunar pods (This piece of information has become outdated with time as more lunar items have been added to the game, dropping the percentage even lower). Using this logic and the knowledge that I’ll be spending at least 2 lunar coins on a bazaar item it’s pretty easy to deduce that i can easily play my runs at a lunar coin loss if I am actively trying to get that one item. All of this, again, creates a down time period where players either won’t be spending any lunar coins or are actively trying to build them up. I do not believe, however, that simply increasing the amount of lunar coins paid out will entirely fix this problem.

I would recommend entirely revamping the lunar system to be way different or just outright deleting the lunar system altogether and allowing lunar items to spawn as world drops. There are a couple ideas that come to mind: Randomized challenges on each run that reward lunar items, making lunar items world drops, or creating more world events like the Void Fields, mountain shrines, or maybe even being able to fight the lunar bazaar shop keeper so that he’ll drop a lunar item. These randomized challenges don’t need to be anything specific, but I do believe they should incorporate a good amount of the environment and gameplay to make each run unique in its own ventures. Something like tasking players to kill Runald and Kjaro (ideally only as the engineer or in multiplayer games), activating a newt alter on a specific stage, reaching a stage within a specific time, etc. These challenges would reward specific lunar items and be cycled out for new challenges upon completion so that the player isn’t limited to their capabilities in late game. A system like this probably doesn’t solve the rng factor of obtaining the lunar items and is contrary to the goal of lunar items (to be risk and reward items) while probably creating a list of its own issues, but at least now players won’t feel limited by simply how many lunar coins are on them.

Hoppo could completely remove the RNG aspect of obtaining lunar items while still keeping lunar coins a viable option in the game by allowing the player to purchase a specific amount of certain lunar items at the very beginning of the game or even in the character select menu. A system like this would completely kill off the rng aspect of the game, while encouraging players to levy their odds of just how far they want to go with their run. A player can purchase 4 Shaped Glasses right at the beginning of the game, but the player is going to have to be able to carry those throughout the entirety of the game if they want to achieve a god run and should they die, they lose whatever they invested into the run. Although I’d have to wager that there would be a limit to how many lunar items a player can buy each run so that the player doesn’t just stock up on lunar coins and Shaped Glasses for easy runs. Of course the issue of down time still isn’t resolved, but given an increase in the amount of lunar coins paid out would ensure the player could somewhat consistently engage with this system on a run by run basis.

Having lunar items drop as extremely rare world drops would also be an interesting spin on the mechanic but is probably far less desirable than the other options. While it would make gathering lunar items more consistent, I imagine the rng chance of obtaining lunar coins would be comparable if not less than red items. Although I imagine having the occasional lunar drop would allow players to quickly restructure their runs assuming they got a worthwhile item. Aside from this minor bonus, this suggestion wouldn’t be capable of replacing the current lunar system that’s in place.

While the lunar system is simple and intuitive, it’s overall harmful to the game and draws many players towards just cheating in millions of lunar coins so that they never have to micromanage this currency. Please understand that the above suggestions are merely suggestions and not tried and true methods for replacing this system. However given that Hopoo doesn’t even seem interested in nerfing Shaped Glass, I suspect that the lunar system won’t be changing any time before release.

World Events

The new optional events included in this December update are absolutely fantastic. The Void Fields are a fun way to break up the monotony of the game, and having a new optional boss to kill is always a joy. Even though I may trash on bosses like the Aurelionite, having these bonus areas to play through does make the game feel more substantial, and I think Hopoo should incorporate more of these deliberate world events and even some procedurally generated ones.

I personally enjoy the small secrets and additions like Kjaro and Runald’s cave, shrine of N'kuhana, etc. But I find these additions too small in scope to really be worth the effort to achieve every run. The Void Fields on the other hand is a substantial enough challenge and provides a large enough scope that I want to see more of in upcoming content updates. It would be cool to have the world be an almost mmorpg-esque world, with multiple side objectives to do along the way to a main objective. The unfortunate thing here is that not all of these side things are worth doing. N’kuhana’s shrine in fact offers nothing to the player outside of the initial unlock of the item, N’kuhana’s opinion. And the cave of Runald and Kjaro isn’t worth visiting for the measly two green items, on top of the caves only being accessible in multiplayer, or as the Engineer, or managing to glitch your way through the door with character abilities like the Huntress’ blink. I believe the Void Fields did it right in this regard by having a decent reward for players to contend for in the form of 8 white/green items and a red item. Perhaps having items that were more easily accessible or simply rewarding more items and incentives to partake in these optional areas (3D printers, boss items, particular shops, etc.) would drive more players to use them in their common routing. Blend these generated areas with the suggested stage progression of playing each stage once throughout a run, and a player would be able to make a reasonable path of execution that they could somewhat reliably depend on as long as rng was on their side.

To keep the more randomized spin on a player’s run, the use of randomly generated events could be used to allow the player to participate in potentially unique events to acquire a little bit more power for a little bit of their time. A system that immediately comes to mind is a hit list: You load into a new map and the game will tell you to kill a specific enemy on the map for a reward. In of itself, having something like this wouldn’t do much to bolster the game for people who can already kill bosses consistently, so instead there would need to be some type of modifier system. Simple modifiers could be used like 2x damage, health, enemy leeches health on hit, etc. But simple modifiers cause a game to lack depth, so I propose different challenges and modifiers: Time limits, hydra bosses (duplicate on death), health gated bosses (to somewhat halt OP players), and maybe even specialized boss elements that are separate from the usual elite elements. That isn’t to say that these randomly generated events even have to be bosses, it could be something to defend, a flag to capture, a delivery drop to conquer, etc. I believe this would be the best way to keep a game like this fresh while maintaining a lot of what the game wants to do.

Randomized events could also be a risk versus reward endeavor through the use of limiting what abilities and items the player has access to. Let’s say in the latter parts of the game, the player can stumble upon an event that will restrict them down to 20 randomized items (while they possibly have over 100 to be chosen from). Although I’d wager that players in this position would just opt to not even do the event as it could possibly end their run, what better way to reward these players for being risky than giving them more of the lunar items they want or even lunar coins? If players are able to be more productive in their runs by taking these additional challenges, I believe it’ll drive those players to accept these events in their late games. Plus these events give the game that feeling of a larger scope without altering all that much about the levels or the gameplay. And really, you only need to put like 2-3 on each stage to make the events system feel substantial enough.

Overall, I think if Hopoo were capable of designing a system like this, and designing it well, it could draw players back into playing the game for hours upon hours on top of what they’ve already invested. For me personally, the game has gotten pretty bland to play with time because each run just feels like it runs through the same loop: Hope for good beginning items, hope for good stages, farm for a red item on stage 4, and then if I’m doing alright I’ll try to get my way to the celestial portal, if I’m doing really good I’ll try to go for a god run. As much as the game tries to hide this gameplay format by having a wide range of RNG systems at play, the overall experience after a couple hundred hours can become apparent and stale as time progresses forwards. That isn’t to say that I think the current game is bad, but I think it could be so much more than what it is currently.

Challenges?

Another thing that would go a long way to making the game feel more expansive and player-progression focused would be the implementation of some good ol’ challenges. Hopoo seemingly doesn’t know how to develop a challenge that doesn’t have something locked behind it, or outright refuses to make challenges without a reward. Like seriously, some of the hardest challenges in the game reward alternative abilities for characters. Some of those being direct upgrades from the character’s normal ability. You really mean to tell me that I have to beat stage 20 without picking up any lunar items just to get a frag grenade for Commando? Alright, I guess. Hopoo has even realized that not all players want stuff to be locked behind challenges, and has added a decent amount of immediately accessible content to the game to appeal to those who aren’t into the challenges system. However they have also stated that they’re proud that players aren't immediately able to unlock the new abilities from the Skills 2.0 update and I just have to wonder, why?

Limiting the players to the degree that Risk of Rain 2 does seems overall harmful to a player’s experience with the game. You don’t unlock the best red item in the game, 57 leaf clover, until you’ve managed to clear 20 stages in a single run, which will probably be a player’s first time getting a god run. When you start up a new save file, you’re severely limited on the items that you can get your hands on because stuff like tougher times, armor piercing rounds, berserker's pauldron, preon accumulator, etc. are just locked away from access completely. That is disappointing because many of these items are staples in developing a good build, and it’s now more difficult for players to understand what items do what and which items are worth the time and effort when they have to unlock the item first and then have a random chance of acquiring it in a future run with a random amount of stacks to be accumulated. It’s even more disappointing that players have to fight a hill of challenges that get progressively more and more steep with its requirements and begin requiring players to either master elements of the game or the characters present.

I understand having hard challenges in your roguelike, but having items and content locked behind those challenges can turn a lot of players away from your game. The only saving grace here is that these challenges don’t have difficulty requirements outside of a couple select challenges, but most of these only offer cosmetic rewards that come from the monsoon obliteration challenges. It seems inexcusable to me that there wouldn’t just be challenges that players could attempt for fun. Instead we have challenges that players are being forcefully drawn to if they want new toys and gadgets to play around with in their future runs. Some of the challenges are understandable to skip, like if you don’t like the Engineer, you probably don’t have to worry about doing his challenges. However I wouldn’t skip any of the item and equipment challenges because items and equipment are the core of the game experience. Being limited in the items available means you’re only experiencing a limited amount of the game, and that’s a big no no.

The change that I’d propose here is just to nerf a lot of the more difficult challenges that have gameplay impacting items locked behind them, and then put those challenges in their own categories that players can try out on their own time for their own enjoyment. With these changes the unlock system would appear less like a grind and more like something for completionists and avid players to use in order to test their skills at the game. Something else that I’d recommend is a little stamp or indicator that tells people what difficulty the challenges were completed on, just as a little extra something for players to work towards. This part of the discussion is relatively simple because, come on, it’s challenges. But hopefully Hopoo changes the way that they handle the inclusion of challenges in the future.

Collectibles

Oh boy the collectibles. The collectibles aren’t terrible and before my save corrupted I was very close to have 100%’d the unlocks and collectibles, but 200 hours in and I still hadn’t unlocked everything. And the reason for that is because the unlocks take way too long to unlock and are way too frustrating to actively chase after. The environment logs became a chore to try and collect, when after spending about 100 hours after the Scorched Acres update I was still completely unable to obtain its environment log. It took me 90+ Grovetender kills to finally get his monster log, and to this date I’ve only had the little disciple item drop for me twice (one was in a multiplayer match). I ultimately gave up on trying to even go for the Aurelionite’s monster log when it once took me 4 hours to get a single gold portal to show up in a god run.

This section of the discussion is going to be short because I have a very simple message here: Increase the god damn drop rates of some of this stuff, seriously. It’s not satisfying to spend 200 hours and still see that there’s some little lore tidbits that I’m missing from my log book. It’s not satisfying to have to stop my flow of gameplay every time I get Scorched Acres just to have a tiny tiny tiny chance that the environment log radio might have somewhere on the map and then having to go hunt for it. And then when I don’t find it after being way more thorough than one should be on any given stage, I then have to question if I simply missed it or it actually didn’t spawn. It’s not satisfying to finally get that environment log or that one item from that one boss that has a random chance to spawn in the 50% chance stage that also has his own fucking chances on whether or not he’s going to drop the monster log and/or the boss item. Stuff like this is absolutely ridiculous and tedious and is making me work way too hard and having me dedicate too many resources just to get some god damn lore text. Little disciple isn’t even that good of an item, so why is it so rare? Just increase the spawns of stuff like the gold portals, monster logs (for bosses), and environment logs. Come on Hopoo, I just want to read your game’s lore.

-=CLOSING=-

So that’s my super long and in depth explanation and critique of many of the systems that Risk of Rain 2 has. I still love this game, and can’t wait for more content updates on it (primarily a fix to the corrupting save files). Please understand that these are just my opinions and whether or not you disagree with me doesn’t mean either of us are wrong or right, it just means I want a different game than you do.

To summarize my review from the beginning of this post: Risk of Rain 2 does it’s predecessor justice and so much more. The jump from 2D to 3D just feels so right that one has to question if this was Hopoo’s original intent before realizing they didn’t have the resources for it. The gameplay loop and gameflow are excellent and you really do feel like you’re overcoming insurmountable odds at certain points to become invincible by the end. It has issues and probably always will be given Hopoo’s unmoved demeanor in even the most balance breaking items in their game. I just hope that they will reconsider some of their design philosophy for the sake of making a much more entertaining video game. As stated before, I overall give this game a 7/10 and depending on the person you may play a few or a few hundred hours in Risk of Rain 2. It’s a fun game to just sit down and play, and you’re given a decent amount of freedom in how you go about playing. And at the end of the day, just having a fun game to play is all that should matter, right?

-Count_

[lonesomealley]

2020 and Going Forward

So another year has come to a close and we are getting closer and closer to that inevitable event of life known as death. With that in mind, I figured I would put out this little update post and give my thoughts on what’s going to happen moving forward.

Firstly I want to tally some progress on some projects that have been happening on and off for some while. A Hat in Time is nearing completion of the recording process, and I’ll get to why this is taking so long in a bit. Bioshock’s video footage files have been recovered and will be going back into production either during or after A Hat in Time’s production. A Short Hike write up came out some time ago. In the background I’ve got a video on Lethal League and the Talos Principle currently in the concept stage. My Risk of Rain 2 review (going on this blog) is going through some rewriting to be more up to date with the December update that came out since I began writing, and also my save file in that game corrupted during the writing process. Other than that, I got some new audio equipment for Christmas and my 6 terabyte hard drive has arrived, meaning I am now able to work on more than one project at once! You may have noticed that I’ve been doing some modding work for Lethal League Blaze, that’s also currently going through development.

I just want to clear up what I’m working on and the progress on some of these things since apparently my A Short Hike video got some outreach and attention that my Beginner’s Guide video didn’t. And with an audience comes a certain expectation that I have to keep working on these, this’ll only get worse with time. A Hat in time is still absolutely the next video to release, and I imagine Bioshock will probably be subsidized by another video at some point due to the projected length of that video. That doesn’t mean that Bioshock isn’t going to ever come out, but that another piece of work may be slid into it to break up the workflow and time investment. I’m thinking about what I’m supposed to be working towards on a daily basis and the fact that I’ve been so limited as to how I could work on the projects has created a massive issue with productivity in general.

My old “media hard drive” seemingly failed sometime back, which was documented in the blog post called, “Hard Drive Failure, Bioshock, and College.” This left me with a measly 900gb of space to keep the entirety of my computer’s files on, meaning my projects files, applications, video games, etc. As you can imagine that’s rough to work with for someone who likes to keep a lot of sentimental files on their computer. At least with my previous hard drive I never had to worry about running out of space because that media drive really only held video projects and a bunch of relatively small files. As the Hat in Time project folder creeps slowly upward (Open Broadcaster Software is taking 20gb for every 1 hour of footage) I had to consider the usability of my computer over the completion of the project. So, eventually I cracked and ordered the aforementioned hard drive that will have so much space that I’ll hopefully never have to worry about it again.

The thing about that old failed hard drive though is that apparently it never failed! When my new hard drive showed up in the mail, I figured, for a giggle, I’d plug in whatever I could and see the results. And lo and behold the magical, frankly garbage, Toshiba hard drive actually booted up and was completely functional, all files intact. Needless to say, I was completely ecstatic and immediately raced to pull all of the files off of that hard drive. And I mean the hard drive is still working with absolutely zero problems, so I’m assuming the SATA cable or maybe the power just wasn’t connected right into the hard drive and I over reacted, but there is no way in hell I’m putting important files on that thing just incase it is on the brink of death. Especially when I have a brand new hard drive that has so much space that I probably won’t have to buy a new one any time soon. That is, unless I want to archive video projects.

Archiving these projects is a tough subject. I briefly touched on it in that same update post as well, and unfortunately that is an expensive venture that will require me to lug a bunch of hard drives around in the long run. Which, frankly, isn’t worth it. Luckily for most undertakings, the actual game footage is what takes up the majority of space. So while I won’t be able to archive the footage files, I will be able to archive everything else that I make along the way. I believe this is a good trade to keep project folders archivable but not take up so much space that it becomes unreasonable. Besides, these little assets are the best part, despite whether or not they even accompany a piece of work. It just seems like the best way to keep these project folders in an “economical” range of space without feeling like I’m missing out on anything too important because I can always just go back and reacquire that footage.

So that’s my current position regarding the storage of my video projects, and with my new 6 terabyte hard drive prepared to take on the world, I’m ready to get a jump start on 2020 with some heavy project work. It’s no secret that I’m lazy and that this year has been all over the place regarding the stuff that I’d worked on. I started so many different things that never saw the light of day since the release of my Beginner’s Guide video back in 2018. That’s not another trap that I want to fall into this year, and I’ll be attempting my best efforts to have something new and fresh out every 2 weeks. That’s a promise I’m going to make, but probably not be able to keep. That said, I’ll at least try to keep that up for the first month or so (before I lose patience). Of course to kick off this year, I’ve already uploaded my Short Hike Write Up that is probably over a month due, but that’s besides the point.

And of course, not all of these posts will be something regarding writing or my videos. This year I really want to try to do a lot more things with my brain cells, like more Lethal League Blaze modding and possibly getting some sort of game in development on either Source Engine or RPG Maker. So don’t expect there to be a consistent amount of content that you enjoy. While I love writing and that’s the reason why I’m working on what I do now, I do have other goals in mind for what I plan to be doing in the future. Just keep that in mind for this year’s stuff. These updates are also going to be slowing down for some time after this post goes up, because it looks pretty bad when you have more update posts talking about your lack of blog posts than actual blog posts.

2019 was a really weird year. Things moved along really quickly for me and there were a lot of hurdles that I’ve been introduced to this year that has influenced how I went about handling things. But now that I’ve got some experience in handling what I’m doing, I’m a little bit more prepared to take the next step to doing what I want to get done. I have a lot of interesting ideas for projects to work on, and I hope to bring some of that innovation forwards.

Something I’ve been considering for some time is the viability of reviewing games in the VR space. I currently have two concepts that I’m working to flesh out for a video on The Talos Principle and another on Tetris Effect, so maybe prepare to see those one day. Alongside that I have a ton of unfinished free writing ideas and new ones that I’m thinking up all the time that will hopefully push me in the right direction. Needless to say, I’m full of ideas but not the greatest at making them into something tangible. I’m also considering making some write ups on videos that never saw the light of day. This will at least prove that I was working on things throughout 2018 and 2019 and also allow me to give more insight into my creation process. I have a couple projects that I spent way more time than I should’ve that simply didn’t meet my expectations for the YouTube channel, so we’ll see where I can take these.

Hopefully this year I’ll be able to pick up the pace, take what I have so far, and push it in the direction that I aspire to go. I look forward to forcing pushing more stuff out there on a more consistent basis and hope you guys enjoy. Possibly this year I’ll release more than one video.

-Count_

[lonesomealley]

LLU v0.08: Balls, Ballroom, and Revamps

NOTE: THIS IS A MOD FOR THE GAME LETHAL LEAGUE BLAZE. IN NO WAY IS THIS MOD PRODUCED OR ASSOCIATED WITH TEAM REPTILE. PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS NOT THE OFFICIAL GAME NOR IS IT A PIRATE / DRM BYPASS FOR LETHAL LEAGUE BLAZE. YOU NEED TO HAVE BOTH STEAM AND A COPY OF LETHAL LEAGUE BLAZE TO PLAY THIS MOD.

DOWNLOAD THE UPDATE HERE!

BALLFLASH! ...not like that you perv- It's another NEWSFLASH! This update has been kickin' for a while, and that means it's practically a grown adult! I mean, it's only been about a month right? Well that's no issue, because we got a lot of stuff for you today. This update aims to introduce new additions to the game, adjusting existing elements to be less egregious, and revamping/rebalancing character speeds and abilties.

LORE After a couple boring days of just the same ol' Lethal League, Sonata finally sat down and (literally) changed up the game! Knowing the best spot to debut her new toys, she took off towards the royal palace to play a little game of ball.

-=CHANGELOG=- Thank you to Elite for stability testing. Big thanks to B3B3 for percise and extremely helpful insight/feedback! Final thanks to Hang Boy and Mecha for the coding help.

-MISC-

Install process has been massively simplified. 1.09, PLL, and LLU updates all wrapped into one installer that handles the install process.

Mod name changed! Project Lethal League -> Lethal League Union.

Added old PLL team to in game credits.

Decreased default global volume on first time start up / progress reset. 100 -> 50

-NEW CONTENT-

Progressional system has been revamped! ---Decreased max level to 180. ---No shines earned on match completion. ---1 shine earned on level up. ---New modes (strikers and lethal volley) cost 5 each. ---3D maps cost 1, 2D cost 3. You start with 5 maps. ---Characters cost 1 each, only original 6 unlocked by default. ---Skins cost 1 each, statics cost 2, alt models cost 3.

New Stage: Ballroom! *It's a little unfinished, but I thought it'd be a good treat for you guys.

New game option: Ball types! New options to turn on beach, big, and gravity ball on any gamemode.

-STAGES-

Removed match requirement to unlock 2D stages.

Removed submarine from eclipse on Sewers.

Removed flames from eclipse on Stadium.

-GENERAL GAMEPLAY-

Decreased max ball speed. 2000 -> 1500

Decreased speed requirement for high damage (70%). 1600 -> 1000

Increased down throw speed removal. 25% -> 34%

Diminishing returns have been hard disabled again. *This feature is on the list to come back should I learn how to implement entirely new game options.

Powerups are back!

You can now earn XP from offline games.

-CHARACTERS-

Grab displacement is now nerfed, and all characters with special throw offset code have been defaulted and changed. All values -> (0.8, 0) -> (0, 0.3) *You can duck under horizontal throws now.

Characters have been reorganized on character select to mesh characters who play similarly.

All air deacceleration values were transformed to "0.35m * fpixel60_SIZE * 60".

Almost all character acceleration values have been played around with to better mimic LL1's momentum.

Characters are no longer stuck to the ground when landing mid dair animation (cancels dair animation).

Candyman

Decreased ground acceleration. 54 -> 45

Decreased ground deacceleration. 54 -> 45

Decreased air acceleration. 54 -> 45

Decreased min candyball speed. 20 -> minimum ball speed. *This is to allow for low speed Candy chains.

Decreased max candyball speed. 47.5 -> 45 *Let's see where this goes.

Dair frame data now consistent with every other character.

Changed smash angle. 70 -> 60

Dice

Decreased ground acceleration. 3 -> 1.85

Decreased ground deacceleration. 3 -> 1.95

Decreased air acceleration. 3 -> 1.85

Decreased crouch down duration. 0.03 -> 0.01

Decreased crouch up duration. 0.03 -> 0.01

Decreased minimum crouch duration. 0.02 -> 0.05 *Helps make performing super jump smoother.

Back dair angle changed. 110 -> 100

Doombox

Decreased Snipe's remaining hitstun factor. 0.8 -> 0.5

Soundblast readded. ---Pushback increased. ---8 -> 22 ---No more hitbox for players or the ball. ---Consumes half meter. ---*Soundblast has been repurposed as a mobility skill, no longer an offensive/defensive skill.

Decreased minimum snipe speed. 20 -> minimum set ball speed. *Ball control stuff from low speed.

Decreased max ground speed. 6.8 -> 5

Decreased ground acceleration. 115.2 -> 100

Decreased ground deacceleration. 72 -> 50

Changed NORMAL_HURTBOX size. (100, 170) -> (120, 170)

Grid

Decreased maximum move speed. 7.2 -> 6.8

Increased maximum air speed. 5 -> 5.5

Decreased ground acceleration. 60 -> 50

Decreased ground deacceleration. 40 -> 45

Decreased air acceleration. 60 -> 50

Forward dair angle changed. 63 -> 55

Backward dair angle changed. 117 -> 125 *Same as Sonata's dair angles.

Jet

Decreased ground acceleration. 55 -> 50

Decreased air acceleration. 55 -> 50

Decreased ground deacceleration. 55 -> 50

Bubble is now ungrabbable, even by Jet.

Latch

Decreased ground acceleration. 3.5 -> 2.5 *This was causing an issue with tap movements.

Decreased ground deacceleration. 2.2 -> 2

Decreased air acceleration. 3.5 -> 2.5

Wall down angle changed. 120 -> 30

Now keeps climb momentum when leaving wall.

Changed BUNT_HITBOX size. (79, 74) -> (132, 78)

Changed BUNT_HITBOX2 size. (124, 102) -> (132, 106)

Nitro

Decreased ground acceleration. 100 -> 55

Decreased ground deacceleration. 60 -> 65

Decreased air acceleration. 100 -> 55

Cuff launch position changed. (0.7, 0.26) -> (0.7, 0.3) *You can duck under the cuff launch now.

Decreased cuff speed. 36 -> 30

Raptor

Raptor's stitches have finally healed!

Decreased max speed. 7.26 -> 7.25 *For consistency!

Decreased ground acceleration. 2.2 -> 1.75

Decreased ground deacceleration. 2.2 -> 1.95

Decreased air acceleration. 2.2 -> 1.75

Sonata

Zoot Suit Deluxe skin now unlocked by completing arcade mode as Sonata.

Decreased ground acceleration. 2.2 -> 1.75

Decreased ground deacceleration. 2.2 -> 1.5

Decreased air acceleration. 2.2 -> 1.75

Switch

Max speed decreased. 7.1 -> 7

Decreased ground acceleration. 60 -> 45

Decreased ground deacceleration. 60 -> 35

Decreased air acceleration 60 -> 45

Decreased switchflip min speed. 30 -> minimum ball speed. *This is to allow for low speed crouchflip tech.

Decreased kickflip hit-ending lag. 8 -> 2 *More tech!

Switchflip now ends after 0.3 seconds of not connecting in the air. *Creates Switchflip whiff punishment.

Whiffing Switchflip now deducts half energy.

-BUG FIXES-

The game now says the correct version number!

Dice's dairs are mirrored now. (whoopsies)

Turning off "Use HP" no longer emulates health system.

Nitro and Grid now have the proper skin count.

Fixed the game not loading sometimes when choosing random. *Caused by the insertion of some Toxic code.

-THOUGHTS-

I absolutely need feedback for the new acceleration values.

Grid's current balancing is a little weird, if you come up with any ideas let me know.

Is Jet difficult to play / broken without the ability to grab the bubble?

Is Candy / Candyball too slow?

Planning to put Candyman through an entire overhaul to make him play like 0.9 LL1 Candyman.

Still considering revamping Sonata, I'll toss around ideas.

-KNOWN BUGS-

Sonata's charged special bug is back!

Putting your controller on port 3 causes certain parts of the game to freeze.

2D Train may or may not have graphical issues on eclipse.

Powerups cause the camera to move even when the camera is supposed to be stationary.

Big and gravity ball lack custom models.

Pseudo parry extend exists.

Ballroom lacks its own loading screen and stage preview.

Doombox's dash isn't activatable at half meter.

To be continued on. . . v0.09!

[lonesomealley]

A Short Hike - In Depth Analysis and Review WRITE UP

DISCLAIMER: If you haven't seen the video that this write up is based on, I highly recommend you watch that before reading onwards.

This is a video project that, frankly, I didn’t expect to take so long. And I can’t really go into details as to why it did outside of just immense family issues taking place. Sprinkle in a little procrastination, school work, and a part time job, and it’s kind of a miracle I had the space and time to finally put this together. But it’s here, I’m alive, and I can finally do this write up to give a little more insight into the design philosophy of this video.

I stumbled upon A Short Hike sometime back in June or July when I saw that it was in Humble Bundle’s humble trove that you gain access to when subscribing to their humble monthly service. We had subscribed to this service for my girlfriend’s birthday just as a way to give her a large library of games that she can sit down and slowly churn through, while I was all about playing this game. So I sat down and played it, and played it, and played it. This was one of those games that would cause me to zone out and just put all of my focus towards the game while I’m playing it. That sounds like an odd statement to say considering it should be your goal, as the player, to be fully immersed in whatever you’re playing. However that’s more of a fantasy than a reality, at least with me, because I find myself taking many notes or going between tasks while playing video games.

A Short Hike is also just one of those games that really hits you right in the feels with its message. Now I’m not one to be very receptive to emotional ploys or to be hit by the sad music that plays whenever a character dies in a media piece, but this game somehow nailed it. It’s kinda weird, especially given my videos, that the only two games I would attribute with legitimately evoking an emotional response from me are A Short Hike and The Beginner’s Guide. So given all of the blog posts and video ideas that I had failed to really kick off so far, I decided to write up a 3700 word review for the game and put it into full production.

And that brings us to the release of the video, which took about 4 or 5 months to produce. . . Now I have an excuse for this that I stated previously. And ummm, I was hungry? That’ll do it. BUT, it’s here now, and I can write this paper.

This video was relatively simple, and honestly I could’ve (and probably should’ve) completed this a lot faster than I did. During the production of this video, I played A Short Hike 3 times, and 100%’d it. I feel that playing through games multiple times, and 100%ing them when reasonable, is necessary to understanding the more complex or abstract design of the game I’m playing. Hence, this allows my reviews to become in depth and hopefully more worthwhile than the standard review videos.

When it came to writing the script, I was primarily interested in the narrative design and atmospheric setting of the game, because the way the game goes about doing this was quite interesting. As noted in the video, the game puts its purpose right at the end, no hints, no anything, just a big twist right at the end of the game. And that’s a very unique way to design a video game’s story because it breaks typical writing norms. Usually you’d include tid bits here and there of where the game is going or what the underlying tone is, but nope. A Short Hike says, “fuck it,” and gives you a game that is unapologetically and completely invested in itself. And that’s something that deserves to be documented, which is ultimately the point of my channel: To highlight things that deserve to be talked about, that no one else is really covering.

After I had come to a satisfactory amount of thorough analysis with the writing, I decided to write a review for the entire game. This was because the amount of information I had on the relatively simple plot of A Short Hike didn’t make for a long enough video. Something like this may ultimately drown out the point of the video, which was to highlight the anomaly of ASH’s design, however through this medium I was actually able to also convey other points like the effective world design and gameplay.

If you haven’t read through the script yet, you can do it HERE!

Going into the editing, my project folder will often start out as just some footage files of me playing through the game, and as I begin putting stuff together and deciding on what pace I want the video to be, I’ll go out and collect other resources. My final video project folder ended up being about 67 gigabytes (including the files used for this write up.)

I unfortunately don’t have too much to write about with my editing, because it’s super basic. It’s a lot of cross fades, cuts, and key framing. If you know even the most basic stuff about Premiere Pro you can decipher how I did a lot of my edits with ease, so instead of going in depth about them, I’ll just show you how I put together the video and my workflow.

The first screenshot is how my secondary desktop typically looked while I was working, and the second is my primary desktop which features the default look and layout for Adobe Premiere.

I don’t have any real specialized work flow or editing process for how to put a video together, I just linearly piece the video together until I get a finished project. Going into the script I’ll come up with several ideas for how I want certain bits of the video to work, and will either keep a mental note of it or put some [brackets] in the script to signify what I want down there visually. This keeps the pacing of the video somewhat in check, but a lot of it ultimately comes down to whether or not I want to put in the effort to make a video that’s super stylized. I already tried this once with a previously cancelled project and it turned out horribly. So the editing for this video was a lot of just cuts to different gameplay pieces.

My general philosophy when it comes to editing is that I want exactly what I’m talking about to be on the screen whenever applicable and present visual information in a way that will back up the audio. So while my editing style and workflow are pretty free form and otherwise unfocused, I do try to at least have a reason for why I edited something the way I did. As I’ve said this video was designed to be straight to the point and contain just enough information to make a very snappy video. And the goal of these write ups is to explain a lot of the decisions made during the video editing process and things that influenced the video to get made the way that it did. As I continue making these videos, I hope to improve the conveyance of information over time so that what you’re being told is much more concise and comprehensible for many different audiences.

That isn’t to say my design philosophy is flawless though. One major problem with this format comes down to not having the right footage for a certain thing, or not having enough time to properly show it off. There’s one part where I briefly mention the direct shortcuts you can use on A Short Hike’s island and I couldn’t use a piece of footage of me using it because I simply didn’t have enough time. So I compromised with just a brief close up shot of one of the shortcut entrances, this was the best I could do to convey that this was what I was talking about.

I think in many instances the pacing of the cuts is done effectively enough that you can pick up on all of the information I’m trying to portray, but in some others it may fall flat or be convoluted by the use of filler footage. Filler footage is, and will always be, a problem in the medium of video essay because you aren’t going to have an example for everything you’re talking about from gameplay alone, especially if you like discussing hypotheticals. Of course, you can spend a lot of time developing those concepts in your own mediums such as through a game’s development tools, but that takes a lot of extra time and effort that I simply couldn’t afford to put into this video. On this note, let’s talk about the audio quality. This has been something that primarily just comes down to not having the proper equipment to really make my audio sound good. And I can really only subsidize this so much through the use of audio editing to the point where the effort that I put in just isn’t worth it in my opinion. That’s why there’s several moments in the video where my audio cuts out or goes a bit wonky. I want to clarify that in these moments that isn’t me just being terrible at audio editing like my Beginner’s Guide video, that’s actually my microphone just randomly refusing to pick up audio information. This can be worked around if I really sought to, but that would take too much time and effort on my part when I could purchase new audio equipment.

My overall goal with this video was to construct a snappy, well paced video that put all of the game into one convenient roll up. It might be a little strange for a review video to have massive game spoilers (as the point of reviews is to inform customers who haven’t played the game yet) but I feel it was necessary to be able to explain what exactly this game does.

A lot of my external resources and information either came from Adam and Mark, or were just some google images regarding what I was talking about. You may notice that in my video I use screenshots of DMs from Mark but not Adam, this is because Adam said that while I could talk about the information he gave me, I was not to screenshot it. I guess you’ll just have to take my word on that.

The final thing that I’ll really talk about video wise is the part where I play my own remix of a rock song to demonstrate how music affects video games.

This is basically a vaporwave version of an alternative rock song called “Black Domino” created by the band Ozma. And trust me, I really have no rhyme or reason for making this outside of just pure boredom. I loaded this song into Audacity, threw a bunch of effects on top of it like phasers and slow pitching, and it turned into this monstrosity(?). I figured since some people might want to listen to the full thing that I’d include it here. This song is technically part of a full album that I’m working on, that’ll feature a bunch of vaporwave or just weird songs constructed very shottily in Audacity or whatever I feel like working in. If a blog post ever appears about the album, now you know ahead of time.

Next I want to talk about the artwork that I commissioned for the video thumbnail. For this I went and picked out an artist that I already knew somewhat. That artist is Kagu, aka NeroNero, aka Totoaba. . . She really needs to decide on a name. But anyhow, she has fairly exceptional design skills and I saw the potential in her making a good, catchy, and flashy thumbnail that would show another level of effort and philosophy when it came to YouTube thumbnails.

So we started by discussing what I was expecting and how much I was going to pay. That went along the lines of, “Hey I need a thumbnail for a YouTube video and I will pay you at most $50 to make it.” Fortunately for me, she said yes. There was just one issue, however. Kagu was all about character design, and I mean that. There are next to no scenic pieces of art on the entirety of her twitter. Although considering I wasn’t sure how much scenery was really going to be needed for the composition, I went with the most comfortable option and pressed on. For reference, here’s a couple pieces of her art.

Again, please visit her twitter!: https://twitter.com/neru_nero_/

Having to go out and commission art was a really interesting process that I documented as it went along. Going into the commission I didn’t really know what I wanted (don’t be me), but not wanting to be that commissioner who just says, “Surprise me,” I had to quickly assemble a basic composition. However the only drawing program, and access to actual drawing tools, was Microsoft Word on my laptop. What resulted was the below abomination.

However, I feel like I should carry you, the reader, through the commission process so I want you to take a close look at that first sketch and this finished product:

After this first sketch was sent to her she immediately went to work and came back to me with this:

It’s not great, but it’s definitely a start. What may stick out to you immediately is that Claire, a big focal point of the composition, is pretty stiff and otherwise blocky. So she went through a redesign.

And then, deciding there wasn’t enough in the composition, we added a waterfall.

Once we had finalized the composition sketch, the next thing was to make a nice outline for it all so we could start coloring.

I knew from the get go that the background was just going to be some gradient that would mirror the colors and tones from A Short Hike. We used several official art resources and in game screenshots to come to the conclusion of what this gradient looked like.

Now given my standards, that’s about where the thumbnail would’ve ended. Just slap a logo on there and I would’ve been like, “Alright cool here’s some money thanks.” But she didn’t stop here.

I feel the need to point out that Kagu was entirely gracious in trying her own thing and putting her own spin on the rather simple ideas that I gave her. She wouldn’t just stop at adding basic shadows to something, she really went the extra mile to make sure that things aligned and matched. And while she had some communication issues where some of my feedback she would seemingly ignore, we did eventually work through those to produce something that looked better each and she was always willing to adjust something even without my input. An example of this is the clouds.

Initially, I had no idea what I wanted these clouds to look like and how that process of describing it to someone else would go. All I knew was that I wanted the clouds to appear like how they do at the end of the game with their odd flat appearance blended with the use of gradients. (The screenshot was rendered in high resolution for clarity.)

When I sent her that, she took a good amount of time to just experiment and figure out what she was doing. She then came back with clouds that were way above my expectations. And even as we adjusted the background gradient, she was happy to change the tone of the clouds along with it.

And speaking of that background gradient, I believe we spent a good hour making sure that the gradient in the background was just right, and she did it joyfully and productively.

And so we eventually came down to the final product.

This piece was well smoothed out, and I used my eye as an observer to catch all of the little details and errors that she made along the way, and she was entirely happy to clean them up. In the end we settled on $50 for me to own the rights to the art, and the money was promptly sent through PayPal.

Something that my brain didn’t quite register in time is that I’d possibly want to have a logo-less version of this piece polished and available to be put up here. So unfortunately I don’t have the most polished logo-less piece in the world, and I deeply apologize for this. However if you’re able to look over some of the rough edges that the logo was previously covering up, then you are entirely free to download and use this however you please.

I have a download link to the full resolution (1920x1080) pictures (plus some little bonuses) HERE!

In retrospect this video write up wasn’t as impressive and as grandiose as I had previously hoped for, and this will hopefully resolve itself with time as I build up a fan base and figure out more things to talk about with these write ups. But hopefully what I’ve put out so far gives you a little bit of insight into how I develop my videos and I plan on continuing these for every single essay video that I put out there. If you have anything you want me to talk about in the next video write up, please send me an email at countunderscore@gmail.com.

-Count_

[lonesomealley]

PLL v0.07: Nitro’s Crackdown

DOWNLOAD THE UPDATE HERE!

FLASHNEWS? That's right, NEWSFLASH! Another update is ripe for the picking, and Nitro's coming down hard on the gang. This update focuses on nerfing/toning back gameplay elements and fine tuning new gameplay concepts introduced last update.

LORE Nitro's always had a feeling that something was up. So he's taken it upon himself to stake out some key leads he's obtained! If this type of unregulated play is allowed to continue, we'll just end up another another casualty under our belt... With the law and his trusty handcuff by his side, he's willing to come down hard on the gang! Lethal League cannot continue to be this unruly bloodfest.

-=CHANGELOG=- Hang boy made most of the major changes in this update, if I could give him all of the thanks in the world I would. Another thanks to Elite for helping me stability test this update!

-GENERAL GAMEPLAY-

You can no longer get hit while crouched.

Ball now deals 70% damage when over 1600 ball speed.

Grab now comes out instantly! Wind up frames: 4 -> 0

Decreased grab frames. 20 -> 14 *This was causing an animation error.

Speed modifier option now off by default. *You can toggle it now!

-CHARACTERS- *Most characters are seeing an air speed reduction, this is to make bunt combos easier to perform. *Character speeds are being curved to lessen the speed creep.

Candyman

Max speed increased. 6.3 -> 6.5

Max air speed reduced. 6.3 -> 5.5

Reduced Candyball max speed. 50 -> 47.5 *This was a difficult change, but it's the best compromise between nerfing candyball while keeping it usable.

Dice

Dice can no longer change what corner his special releases from. *Special cancelling hitlag will remain in the game for now.

Doombox

Max speed increased. 6.6 -> 6.8

Increased fast fall speed. 15 -> 20

Doombox lost his soundblast. *This was an annoying alt-special that was being used as a trolling tool while being an effective option for displacing player's positions.

Grid

Grid now has access to bunt and all of his dair angles out of special!

Increased max speed. 6.93 -> 7.2

Decreased max air speed. 6.93 -> 5

Increased air deacceleration. 12 -> 1000 *Yeah I have no idea wtf I'm doing.

Increased maximum gravity. 13.8 -> 20

Increased extra jump power. 10.9 -> 12

Jet

Max speed reduced. 7.8 -> 7.4

Air speed reduced. 7 -> 6.8

Latch

Wall climb speed reduced. 8 -> 6 *I'm assuming at some point I removed fpixel60_SIZE scaling from this, and it caused Latch to be incredible fast on the wall.

Wall up angle changed. 322 -> 340

Max speed reduced. 8 -> 7.6

Air speed reduced. 8 -> 6.8

Nitro

Air speed reduced. 7.25 -> 6.5

Raptor

Raptor can now special out of dair.

Air speed reduced. 7.26 -> 6.5

Switch

Switch can now only activate switchflip from hitting F and doing an overhead smash.

Max speed reduced. 7.6 -> 7.1

Air speed reduced 7.6 -> 6.4

-BUG FIXES-

Grab animation bug was due to their being more hitbox frames than there were animation frames. *Please let me know if you want higher grab frames, I'll see what I can do.

Speed modifier fixed! *Unfortunately this comes at the cost of not being able to activate powerups.

Robots on Construction no longer fling wheelbarrows around.

No more Latch phantom ball!

Ball now turns purple when in bunt state. *I basically redid the entire last update to fix these last 3.

You can now crouch grab!

-KNOWN BUGS-

Sonata's charged special bug is back!

Putting your controller on port 3 causes certain parts of the game to freeze.

Nitro and Grid have 11/9 skins unlocked. . .

The game reads version 0.05 when it should be 0.07.

2D Train may or may not have graphical issues on eclipse.

Dice's back dair isn't mirrored with his front dair.

-THOUGHTS-

Candy got a bit shook, give me feedback.

Tone back the air speed restriction on Grid?

Remove Sonata's third jump?

Jet's bubble had some coding issues, but I'm still looking to renovate how it plays.

Replacing speed modifier game option with the ability to turn powerups on?

[lonesomealley]

PLL v0.06: Raptor’s Leg Day!

DOWNLOAD THE UPDATE HERE!

NEWSFLASH!!! The now defunct mod, Project Lethal League, is receiving an update! This update aims to bring the mod that much closer to the snappy, fast paced action of LL1.

LORE Years after the events of the first Lethal League, Raptor and the crew have found themselves putting on tons of weight and incapable of performing to the same degree as before. Raptor has become absolutely fed up with how the LLGang has been acting lately, it seems all they wanna do is sit around and play this game “casually.” But he's regained that spark for visceral action and has decided to put everyone through a rigorous workout routine! You can check it out in the comic below.

*Comic was done by Kagu.

-=CHANGELOG=- Massive thanks to imadethis_ and Mecha for helping me figure coding stuff out. Another thanks to Boog and Mango for testing and basic feedback.

-NEW STAGES?- Yes that's right, new stages! But hey, these look familiar?

Seven new stages, it's a surprise!

-GENERAL GAMEPLAY-

Grab hitbox frames increased. 14 -> 20

Diminishing returns have been hard disabled. *Will hotfix "speed modifier" to be off by default so that you can reenable diminishing returns, but for now I don't know how to accomplish this.

Ball only does 10% damage when under 30 speed.

Ball does 34% damage, no matter the speed, equal to and over 30 speed.

Default stocks decreased 5 -> 4

Ball's maximum speed severely reduced. 1000000 -> 2000

All unlocks available on launch.

-CHARACTERS- *Dair angles have been simplified to be easier to combat, with some exceptions. *Most characters have had their speed upped to better emulate LL1's speed, and to indrectly nerf and buff certain characters.

All characters

Fast falling increased. All values > 20 -> 20. *Excluding Doombox. *Grid's fast fall is already at 25.5.

Candyman

Forward dair changed. 25 -> 75

Dice

Movement speed upped. 10.75 * fpixel60_SIZE -> 7.25. *fpixel60_SIZE is some different scaling the game uses, but is entirely arbitrary.

Ground/air acceleration/deacceleration upped. 2.5 -> 3. *The lines of code for most of these character's move stats is confusing as shit.

Air deacceleration upped. 0.4 -> 0.5. *fpixel60_SIZE.

Special speed upped. 34 -> 37.4.

Double jump removed. *This was done because Dice felt way too flexible and overpowered with the additions made to his moveset.

Jump power upped. 13.8 -> 14.5. *He feels hard to play without his double jump, hopefully this addresses the issue.

Doombox

Back dair angle changed. 160 -> 121.

Grid

Movement speed upped. 6.3 -> 6.93.

Ground acceleration upped. 60 -> 66.

Ground deacceleration upped. 40 -> 44.

Air acceleration upped. 9 -> 12.

Forward dair angle changed. 32 -> 63.

Jet

Movement speed upped. 7.3 -> 7.8.

Max air movement upped. 6 -> 7.

Ground/air acceleration/deacceleration upped. 50 -> 55.

Air deacceleration upped. 9 -> 12.

Bubble speed upped. BallInSpeed: 5 -> 6. BallOutMinSpeed: 32 -> 35. BallOutMaxSpeed: 70 -> 77.

Latch

Movement speed upped. 10.5 * fpixel60_SIZE -> 8.

Climb speed upped. 7 -> 8.

Ground/air acceleration upped. 3.2 -> 3.5.

Ground deacceleration upped. 2 -> 2.2.

Air deacceleration upped. 0.3 -> 0.5.

Back dair angle changed. 110 -> 246. *This change is to mimic the angle in the current version of Blaze.

Nitro

Movement speed upped. 6.5 -> 7.25.

Ground/air acceleration/deacceleration upped. 90 -> 100.

Ground deacceleration upped. 54 -> 60.

Air deacceleration upped. 9 -> 12.

Nitro's cuff speed reduced. Min: 40 -> 36. Max: 70 -> 63. *I plan on lowering this should Nitro's cuff prove to still be easy to cheese.

Raptor

Movement speed upped. 10.75 * fpixel60_SIZE -> 7.

Ground/air acceleration/deacceleration upped. 2 -> 2.2. *fpixel60_SIZE.

Air deacceleration reduced. 0.4 -> 0.5.

Sonata

Movement speed upped. 10.75 * fpixel60_SIZE -> 7.

Ground/air acceleration/deacceleration upped. 2 -> 2.2. *fpixel60_SIZE.

Air deacceleration reduced. 0.4 -> 0.5.

Back dair angle changed. 195 -> 125.

Switch

Movement speed upped. 6.9 -> 7.59.

Ground/air acceleration/deacceleration upped. 54 -> 60.

Air deacceleration upped. 9 -> 12.

-KNOWN BUGS-

Robots on Construction hold a bunch of shit in their hands.

The ball goes invisible when bunted out of special by Latch.

"Speed modifier" game option does nothing.

Sonata's charged special bug is back!

Animation bug when spamming grab input, this is cosmetic.

-THOUGHTS-

Nitro's cuff may still be easy to cheese hits with, planning on nerfing.

Candyman is still super strong, even given being the slowest character in the game. Give me feedback.

Jet's ability is rather weak compared to the rest of the cast, remove the ability to grab it?

Let Raptor special out of dair?

Character's air movement seems to be way too nutty for the stage sizes, I'm considering restricting air speeds while keeping ground speeds the same.

To be continued on. . . Nitro's Crackdown!

[lonesomealley]

[OBSOLETE] PLL: Introduction and Installation

What is Project Lethal League(PLL)?

Project Lethal League was a mod that focused on improving several aspects of Lethal League Blaze that left long time, dedicated fans of the game disappointed. It's now being revived and placed back into active development so that players who refuse to touch Blaze will now have a reason to.

What did PLL change?

Instant turning.

Air turning.

LL1 Style Parry. (Grabbing a parry puts the ball back into your serve state, and also makes a funny noise letting you know you did it.)

Serves now unstick sooner.

3 Speed is added when you parry (to stop parry spamming in the corner, please refer to Minecraft Steve).

Camera is now stationary.

Successful parry on gives 2 meter.

Successful grab now gives full meter.

Convenience options for tech given the more flexible movement.

Option to hold up to superjump as Dice (as opposed to down).

And more!

-=How to install PLL?=-

-STEP 1: BACKUPS-

Firstly, should you feel inclined, you're going to want to take full game back up of Lethal League Blaze and your save data.

The game can be found in steam\steamapps\common\LLBlaze.

Your save data can be found in steam\userdata\[your steam ID]\553310.

WARNING: Back porting and installing this mod will be making you start your save data all over again. Because Team Reptile is awful at game design, Steam is unable to differentiate between two different LLB save files. This means steam will only be able to find conflicts in your save data between your computer and steam cloud when there outright isn't a sava data file in the above folder. Disabling cloud saves won't save you, just put your save files in different folder or make sure to mark them for when you want to transition across versions.

-STEP 2: STEAM CONSOLE AND DEPOTS-

Fortunately for us, Steam keeps every single game version of your application that you publish on Steam, so we can back port with ease.

We're going to need access to steam's console. If you're on Windows (sorry Mac and Linux) hit Ctrl + R, or windows search "Run", to bring open a small run window. You then want to input the following command: steam://open/console and hit okay.

When you open your steam browser, you'll notice a new tab next to your profile named "Console".

Open steam's console and in the bottom input box, input the following command: download_depot 553310 553311 9050992776188261859

You'll know that it's been done right if your console window prints out this text:

Now you just wait. . .

Eventually, your console will print out another line of text saying that it's finished:

So now that you have version 1.09, you'll need to locate the download location and move (or more preferably copy) all of the downloaded files into Blaze's steamapps folder.

To find the downloaded depot, go to: steam\steamapps\content\app_553310\depot_553311

DO NOT START THE GAME FROM HERE!

Before you do, you will need to disable automatic updates.

In your library, right click on Lethal League Blaze and go to properties:

Under the "Updates" tab, set automatic updates to, "Only update this game when I launch it." This will give you the opportunity to back up your game or prepare for having to replace files should an inevitable LLB update hit. The following screenshot also has steam cloud synchronization circled if you wish to turn it off.

Once you have done this, you should now launch Lethal League Blaze to see if the game has accepted the 1.09 version files. If the game launches, check underneath the "Options" button for your player information, the version number is the bottom line, make sure it reads "v1.09".

Once this reads "v1.09", you're done installing the base game!.

-STEP 3: INSTALLING PLL AND UPDATES-

Finally, here you are! Now all you need to do is just install Project Lethal League and any update you need.

Firstly you'll need to download the INSTALLER

Once downloaded, open the installer and you'll be prompted with a window like this:

Set the file location to your Blaze folder located in Steamapps ([install location]\Steam\steamapps\common\LLBlaze).

Then hit install.

You'll want to start the game to make sure it downloaded correctly, if it did you're background will color as you move through the menus and look like this:

Now to grab the update.

You'll need to go to the tumblr post for the version of the mod you want, all of these are located in RESOURCE MUSEUM.

Find the download link for the CAssembly.dll in the update posts, and download the .dll file.

Once downloaded, cut and paste the file into steam\steamapps\common\LLBlaze\LLBlaze_Data\Managed.

Now I would fully recommend that you backup either base version 1.09 or the patched 1.09 because any updates that Team Reptile pushes out may or may not override your PLL files, meaning you'd have to start this process over again.

But besides that, you're done! If you want a reliable source to play other people, you can join the following server: LL1 STRONGHOLD.

[lonesomealley]

Atom Roller Coaster

“I feel the sudden urge to combust. I want to explode into a collection of atoms and compounds and, out of all of those, I want to become a helium atom. Then maybe one day, I might fill a balloon that will then be let go and I can finally reach the top of the Earth’s atmosphere. At this point the balloon will pop and I will be free. Free to leave the world behind, and travel through space. And if I’m lucky, I will find a group of other people just like me, but also not like me. They might be hydrogens or oxygens, but we will all share the same ambitions. Our commonality will bring us together, closer and closer: we will turn into a star. Our star will shine bright across the infinite blackness, I will become the light that others search for, we will become a mass of life far more comprehensible than I ever was. And then I will be important, maybe not to you but to me. That’s all I ever wanted, nothing less, nothing more.”

These are the words of a man who was on his deathbed, passing by the final moments of time that he had left. Maybe from his perspective, he did explode into helium and live out his own prophecy. However, to me he lay cold and motionless for the rest of time. How do you love a man who is so content on being completely isolated in his perception of reality? How did I spend years with someone who I felt utterly detached from? How come I never got to see the world the way that he did? He saw the world in a very specific way that was all but attainable if you didn’t think like he did. He was the kind of man who would wake up every day and talk to the birds, or sit in the middle of the living room floor and talk to our bird who he’d have let out of its cage. One day he’d be entirely content with just sitting around and thinking of what he wanted to do tomorrow, and then tomorrow he’d be doing exactly that. You couldn’t stop him from doing it either, he was so determined to do things whether that meant leaving you behind or forcing you into it.

One time he told me that tomorrow he would climb up the tree in our backyard, and then tried to convince me to do it. When I told him no, he carried me out to the tree and began pushing me up it. And when that didn’t work, he tethered us together with rope and began climbing the tree as far as he could before the rope started pulling. He then told me, “If you always say no, you're just going to hold other people back.” And every time, no matter how bizarre the request, I always complied. Once we got to the top of the tree, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a paper airplane. And somehow managed to throw it in such a way that the wind carried it in a circle before falling right into my lap. On top of the plane it read, “Open me,” and inside it concealed a ring that was tucked into one of the back wings of the plane. I looked up to see him just looking at me, which a certain look that meant exactly what I thought it meant.

And in two weeks, we were married. The marriage itself was something right out of a children's book. He had made our bird the best man, and our cat a flower bearer. How he managed to convince a church to allow this entirely beats me. After the wedding, instead of taking me to a luxurious restaurant or making something fancy, he bought us burgers from the local fast food joint and spent the money we saved on a giant teddy bear. He was never a frugal person, but someone under the mindset of not spending money on things that were, what he saw as, “too temporary.”

He wanted to leave a legacy behind for people to remember who he was. But in trying to do this, he neglected the people who really cared about him. He spent so much time working on his own projects, that he pushed everyone away. And the projects he left behind no one knows about, so ultimately, what was his purpose? Well I think his purpose was to demonstrate how a relationship is supposed to work. You put so much time and energy into someone, and then what happens? You neglect them, you drift away from them, you may even become bitter towards them with time. So ultimately, what is the point of a relationship then? If you’re going to put so much effort into someone just to end up angry and bitter, then what was the point in the first place?

The point is, that despite how unintuitive and flat out weird he was, he left me with something that no one else has. He left me with the experiences and the changes that I went through being able to see even a glimpse of the world that he did, and I can say to myself that it wasn’t for nothing. And you don’t remember the bad times with them, where he was locked away in his office working on god knows what, or refused to schedule events, you remember all the times when he was the person that you became invested in. Relationships aren’t a fast paced, constant excitement, joyous event of your life, they are a rollercoaster the slowly reaches the peak hopefully forever. He was a rollercoaster that never peaked, but kept life moving forwards.

They say that life has its highs and lows, but I say that as long as you’re going forwards, you’re never losing. Look back now on your fondest memories, and let your mind reach singularity with the moments both ahead and behind you. Goodbye John.

-Count_

[lonesomealley]

A Short Hike - In Depth Analysis and Review SCRIPT

POSTER'S NOTE: This script may have been slightly edited when doing the voice over for the video. Apologies about any inaccuracies.

A Short Hike - Indepth Review

By Count_

Big spoiler warning right off the bat with this video, I do not know how to talk about this game without spoiling either massive parts of what the game is trying to convey to you or what the game wants you to experience. I know this sounds really cheesy but this game works at its absolute best when you know nothing about it aside from the surface level screenshots. If you want a spoiler free overview of what the game is, it’s an open world exploration game that’s essentially a walking simulator. The game contains no real “gameplay” like fighting or difficult platforming, it is a casual experience. And you absolutely should not be going into this game expecting it to be something more than that. My overall opinion for this review is that this game is an absolutely fantastic experience that you should play. The only actual gripe I have with the game is that the price point is going to be a little too high for some people’s standards, especially if you like to get the most mileage out of your money. I would say the best way to legally get ahold of this game would be to subscribe to Humble Monthly and pick this game up from the Humble Trove. You essentially get access to this game for free alongside all of your Humble Monthly games, so getting it through this service is probably the best way to go for most people. Okay that’s all the spoiler free information I can give away, I highly recommend you go play this game before you watch this video because I will be spoiling what the game wants to convey and how the game goes about doing that. This video will not be going anywhere, have fun.

At the core of A Short Hike, the game isn’t even about the hike. The title straight out lies to you. The game begins with a dialogue between the protagonist Claire, and her mother as they drive out towards where Claire, and the player, will be residing for the rest of the game. Claire then appears outside of her cabin amongst a bright and sunny day, where the first character you meet: Ranger, or Aunt May will inquire about why she has been inside all day. To which you, the player, will promptly learn that you’re expecting a phone call, and there’s no service on any part of the island, except for the summit of Hawk Peak. And from there you’ve been given your first quest, get to the summit and get your phone call. Just as a little break off, it is possible to wholly avoid this part of the game by simply diving into the ocean and going the opposite direction. However, assuming you take the natural progression path, when you begin walking down the pathway and receive a small tutorial dialogue on how to glide, you’ll find Jen sitting by the beach. Talking to her provides you another quest: bring back 15 sea shells. Now sea shells aren’t hard to find, you just need to scout out the beaches until you’ve collected enough of them, however there’s a catch and I think you know where this is going. By going out to collect these sea shells you will stumble upon new things to explore and new people to talk to, and those people are also going to give you new quests or tasks to do.

This is the foundation for which the game is built on, because before you know it, in an almost Skyrim-like fashion, you will be far off from the main quest doing all of these different little side gigs. And what started as a short hike, turns into a one to two hour adventure where you do everything else except the hike that you’re told to do. The game even meta-mentions that this would happen by having one of the characters ask Claire if she feels “lost and directionless,” and then give you a compass. There’s two other ways to interpret this off the top of my head: one, is that this is just a joke to introduce the compass, and yeah that’s pretty much it. Or two, which can be tied to the end of the game, so we’ll come back to this. But through these little micro quests, you are actually experiencing the game the way that it’s intended to be played. You run around, meet all these people, do all these tasks for them, go fishing and gliding, and look through binoculars to see if you missed anything below, and this all has a narrative purpose.

You’re never told why you come to this island besides just, “It’s nice to get out of the city.” And you never learn anything about that as you continue playing the game, just that you’re waiting for a phone call. It’s a well wrapped scheme of omission that aims to recontextualize, the entire game. Because when you get to the summit of Hawk Peak, Claire finally gets that phone call, at what couldn’t be a more convenient time. Claire has actually forgotten that this was supposed to happen, and she has a heartfelt conversation with her mother where you learn that her mother has gone through surgery and that she wasn’t told anyone about it until after the fact. It’s never specified when this surgery happened, how Claire found out, or how long she has even been on the island, you just have to assume that she’s been there long enough that people know her name. But that information isn’t important, what’s important is that Claire’s mom probably brought her here to make her forget about the surgery or the worries that encompass it. The player is never told this information because the game wants you to feel the same way Claire does where you can just forget about your worries and have fun. It’s quite obvious how this information is introduced and then very quickly swept under the rug with no impact as you travel the Hawk Peak updraft back to your cabin. You’ll also speak with Aunt May and Claire will tell her that the surgery went okay and that things are fine, and then Claire will recount the experiences that both her and the player have gone through during the game. And that’s where this final interpretation of the line “lost and directionless” comes in because that could be Claire’s mental state in response to the news about the surgery. The hike is a metaphor for getting over worry and you don’t need to know that because it’s not relevant to the player’s overall experience.

That’s where I was primarily impressed with this game, the writing is almost too good for a Humble funded indie project made by one guy with help from a musician. And I’ve dedicated three paragraphs just to talk about the writing and I could write so much more about the animal crossing styled characters and humor, the side stories that these characters have that you can actively follow. On my first playthrough I came across these guys climbing up some play rock walls and I was told to acquire a golden feather and come back, but when you get a golden feather you’re already told how to climb and so I did just that. I climbed around and used my feathers for jumps and forgot about those guys back there. But they actually have dialogue if you come back and climb up these walls, infact through doing this you learn that they’re actually training to climb Hawk Peak and you’ll be able to spot these guys climbing the mountain later on through triggering this dialogue. And there’s so many more examples of this throughout the game like an artist suffering from creative blockage, or someone’s relative wanting you to remind them to hydrate themselves and take breaks. It all makes the world feel really expansive and it’s actually packed so full of content that even though I was pretty thorough in trying to explore and do everything I could, I still missed stuff. I didn’t even get the achievement for collecting all of the golden feathers, and when my girlfriend played she’d tell me about things that I had forgotten about or outright never found and experienced. It’s an exploration sandbox that leads to everyone having their own journey with the game. And that ending? You can complete that as early as you want, the speedrun for this game is 3 minutes and they completely bypass the minimum recommendations that the game gives you. You don’t even have to explore the world outside of just getting enough golden feathers to get to the peak. In a way it’s a game that feels personalized for everyone that plays it.

*ugh* I haven’t even gotten to the gameplay, graphics, or music. The biggest elephant in the room here is the retrograde graphics. Pixel art as an artform is often overdone in indie games because, let’s face the facts, many indie developers are not artists. Well actually Adam is, but we’ll get back to this. There’s something different about the way that the pixel art is incorporated in this game. You can tell because you’re able to swing your camera around in the game and the only way this would be possible is if everything was actually modeled and some form of pixelation was thrown over the visuals. Which means that this art style is entirely deliberate, and actually means something to Adam, the developer. A different art style could’ve been used for this game and still would’ve achieved the same general effect. In fact, the game features a cheat code that completely removes the pixelation, and it looks great! Some of the models are a little scuffed and everything is generally low poly, but with a little bit of polishing this art style could’ve worked. It turns out that this pixelation effect comes from a Unity package called GBCamera which essentially renders the visuals of the game at a small resolution, and has optional bit coloring, classic to the gameboy. At first I thought this was a mere visual effect just put over the game because the Itch.io description isn’t too descriptive on how it actually works. So I decided to ask Adam himself, and I also asked why he decided to use pixel art as the pivotal piece in his art style. And I actually got answers. GBCamera is essentially just a renderer that is capable of rendering in small resolutions that then can be blown up to the resolution of the player’s monitor. For why he used this for his game, he said he simply likes pixel art and that it allows him to make assets faster.

But something caught my attention with the way he worded his response, he thinks the art style is interesting and unique. Now while pixel art in of itself is not at all unique as it’s been pretty common throughout the history of gaming in many different forms, it’s not been quite used in this form before where a fully 3D game is pixelated. The only games that really cross my mind on this is Devil Daggers and DS games. Yeah you heard me right, DS games. The DS, much like A Short Hike, was capable of rendering 3D environments and models, the problem was that the DS had a limited resolution meaning that everything on screen was always very pixelated unless the assets were already based on pixel art. And that, in a way, drove the artistic direction that many DS games took. If things were small, they had to be distinguishable. If things were a fully detailed 3D world, it had to be simplified to avoid being noisy or ugly. The best overall analysis I can give of Adam’s opinion on the style is that he thinks games that are proactively retrograded is unique, and I have to say I agree. It’s a fresh breath of air, and Adam even had the foresight to include an option in the game to select how much the game is pixelated, because it can be an eyesore. My only gripe with this style is that there’s no option just to turn the pixelation off. There’s all of these other options like shadows, color corrections, image quality, etc. but there’s no option to just turn it off. As of the date of this video going up, it has been commented on that Adam has at least thought about adding this option, and if it is in the game by the time this video goes up I’ll leave a little message on the screen. It should also be noted that Adam has used this style in some of his other games, notably You’re Dead in Space and The Night That Speaks so clearly Adam has experience with this art style and he likes it enough to continue using and innovating on it. The somewhat ironic thing here is that You’re Dead in Space is very comparable to Devil Daggers in the sense that they are pixelated hoard shooters where you are expected to eventually die.

Let’s take a couple steps back to when I said that Adam was an artist, and the biggest piece of evidence that I’m going to use for this claim is Adam’s upcoming “Untitled” RPG. Comparing this RPG to Adam’s other games, even A Short Hike, immediately gives off the vibe of, “This was not created by the same person.” But when I sent Adam some questions, one of those asked if Adam was the leading artist for A Short Hike and if he was the lead artist for his upcoming RPG. Basically, he said that yes, he does most of the art assets, most because he does get help from some of his friends. And I just want to point out just how good his upcoming RPG looks. It appears pretty based on Paper Mario but it seems to be adding some more depth to that art style. It looks really good, and so does A Short Hike, and Adam should get the credit that he deserves.

Something else that is really good is the gameplay. Outside of just walking around and jumping, as you progress through the game you will earn the ability to sprint, do multiple mid air jumps, climb, dive, glide, speed glide, and you’ll find special feathers that give you the ability to jump higher and use less stamina while climbing. All of these features make the game feel much like a metroidvania and after you spend a couple hours in the game you’ll be jumping halfway up the map and doing speed glides everywhere you want to go. You’re given all the tools you need right from the beginning and everything you pickup is just upgrades that let you use those tools better. And you’re given a lot of freedom and versatility with those tools. And I would chalk that up to the world design. Everything is very compact and close together, and sometimes just stacked on top of each other in a way that makes traversing the island simple, time efficient, and just exciting. You don’t need to spend five minutes walking in one direction to get to a certain area when everything is pretty much just right next to each other with shortcuts, bounce flowers, and even an updraft to make traversing even easier that will continually get easier as you play the game. An example of this is the, what I’m going to call, Breath of the Wild climb that Claire is suited with. You’re able to climb up any slope or building granted that you have enough feathers left, collecting more feathers or even collecting the silver feathers allows you to climb for longer. The same goes for your jumps, collect more feathers to do more jumps, collect silver feathers to jump higher each time.

Another central piece of Claire’s moveset is her gliding ability and the potential you have for drastically improving how you use it. There’s a hidden island you can travel to that will teach you how to dive into a speed glide, and when you get the technique down you find that the game becomes very open. Your methods of travel will basically revolve around using speed glides to travel the longer distances around the island because it is just that fast. And while we talk about openness and speed, we should talk about speedruns. It’s natural for a game that can be completed at any time to be easy to speedrun, but speedrunners have, naturally, found a way to beat the game with less than the recommended amount of golden feathers. This is because of two methods, one being a bug and the other a feature. The first one is, what I’ll deem, chest jumping where you jump off of a chest while it’s opening animation is playing. And the other is these bouncy flowers that you provide water to in order to unlock shortcuts around the island. Whether intentional or not speedrunners have been able to use these methods to cut the game’s length down to less than three minutes. That might not sound like that incredible of a feat, but it highlights just how many different ways you can play and navigate A Short Hike. If you don’t want to be on your feet for the duration of the game, then you don’t have to. If you want to play the game by finding and doing the least amount of things possible, then you can even if it may defeat the purpose of the game. In these ways A Short Hike is comparable to a sandbox in the way that the game is very open with very little limiting rules or mechanics and in fact promotes the free use of what it provides you. That is what makes the gameplay effective at allowing the player to access the contents of its game.

Finally, I want to address the music, and I’m not a music guy so I can’t provide very complex insight on it, so it’s all going to be pretty basic. And in just one word, the music is good. The soundtrack contains exactly the type of music you’d expect from a game like this, while having a somewhat Celeste-y vibe to it as you progress up the hiking trail. I contacted Mark Sparling, the composer, and asked him some questions about what direction he was given and what his inspirations were. He actually gave a pretty drawn out answer to my questions which I can summarize down to: Adam and Mark discussed what type of music to use and reminisced on similar music that had the same tone such as Animal Crossing, Legend of Zelda, studio Ghibli’s music, as well as music artists and bands such as Sufjan Stevens, Punch Brothers, and Nickel Creek. Mark then produced Beach Buds along with an assortment of different tracks. However Beach Buds ultimately stuck and the rest of the game’s soundtrack fell into place.

The game features a simplistic, yet dynamic music system where certain parts of music tracks or different tracks altogether play in corresponding areas that gives the game a sense of progression. It should be noted that this was Mark’s idea. This system works well in correspondence to how varied the music is and how the music has been produced in the way that one music track holds different “stages” of music. As a system designed to derail players from feeling like the music is too monotonous, it’s pretty good at doing just that despite its simplicity. There wasn’t one time where I thought, “Man I don’t want to listen to this anymore,” over my three playthroughs.

It should also be pointed out that the music is well diversified. It’s a mixture of banjo, chiptune, electronic beats, piano, synth, etc. that’s played in an order throughout the game that is all about something that you don’t understand until you’ve beaten the game. And that’s Claire and the emotional baggage she carries throughout the game as you climb up her personal mountain. Music adds so much to video games, especially ones like this, that people often don’t think about or fully comprehend. And it’s important that the music is done right and it fits the settings and encourages players to be immersed in their experience. Just imagine if the game had no music, or... [rock music] But seriously, I can surely say that the music for A Short Hike does exactly the former, it’s simple yet effective in doing what it needs to do while adding and strengthening the narrative and setting. And while this video isn’t a review for the soundtrack, five dollars nets you the game’s music that comes in long and short versions so that you can listen to either the commercial releases intended for listening audiences or experience the full amount of effort that went into the music.

A Short Hike is a game that tells you everything you need to know right in the title. However it’s a game that’s simultaneously about a short hike while also not being about the hike at all. This is one of those, “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” kind of games because the way that it’s structured ensures there will be distractions among every step of the way. Whether that’s being asked to find an item, collect a certain amount of feathers, even just being exposed to the beautiful scenery of the game and wanting to see more. A Short Hike is about taking your time to explore and climb a beautiful, lively environment full of inhabitants that might just remind you of certain games you’ve played in the past with retrograde graphics comparable to the DS days. Barring external factors such as pricing, length, distribution platforms, etc. If I had to give a review score for this game, it would easily be, at the lowest, an 8/10. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, and if you’re willing to put $8 down for the game I’d highly recommend purchasing it through Steam or Itch.io.

Thank you for watching.

[lonesomealley]

A Short Hike - In Depth Analysis and Review

It’s a new video! Over a year since I made one of these, and this one came through to get me back into the swing of things. I promise I’m going to start trying to make more of these.

Write up available with this link: https://lonesomealley.tumblr.com/post/190000036676/ash-writeup

[lonesomealley]

Borderlands 3 Review

*Writer’s Note: I played this game when it came out and have based my review on the version of the game that I played then. Some of this information may become outdated with time. 

DISCLAIMER: This review is going to contain a lot of spoilers for Borderlands 3, if you don’t want that then this is not the review for you. My overall opinion of this game is that it’s… okay. It entirely depends on what you value out of a video game. Borderlands 3 is, at heart, just another Borderlands that’s been somewhat dumbed down, and if you don’t like the Borderlands series’ base mechanics (i.e. farming, constantly throwing away weak gear, getting stomped on for being underleveled) then this is not the game for you. If you value storytelling in your video games, this game is absolutely not the game for you. However if you’re someone who just wants to shoot some guys and already like, or think you’ll like, Borderlands’ looting systems then this game is going to range anywhere from okay to good. It should be kept in mind that this review is meant to take into account many of the different aspects of the game, hence why this review is going to have a far lower score than many other reviewers/media publications seem to be rewarding it.

I don’t really know if Borderlands 3 is worth the $60 asking price, and I would ultimately say to either wait for the game to go on sale or at least wait for it to go up on Steam. This is because the game really is just a dumbed down Borderlands entry, you could easily just go buy the Handsome Collection for $60 (if you haven’t already) and have just as good, even better, of a time. Also that Steam has more laid back refund policies than the Epic Store (which can be blamed for this review existing in the first place). But this is where the spoiler free section ends, anything past this point will contain heavy spoilers for the sake of in depth discussion. You have been warned.

When the Borderlands 3 reveal trailer came out back in March I was entirely skeptical that the game would be anything good. The story looked like a mess, the guns looked like complete shit, and overall it appeared that a lot of the things they were promising on were too good to be true or would end up simplified. Also, at the time I had just played through the entirety of the existing Borderlands series (excluding Tales From the Borderlands), so this new game was going to have to spike a certain chord with me. This definitely wasn’t helped by the “additions” that they tried to make to those games such as second game’s graphics enhancements, and the Borderlands 1 remaster. The former, while making the game look prettier, had the problem of cutting off cross platform play (across PC, Mac, Linux, etc.) which left a small crowd of people very disappointed. And the latter had the issue of being a complete load of garbage with many of the same bugs, new performance issues, clunkier menus, new menus not working, and of course Gearbox’s patented golden chest. They pulled a BL2 and just gave you OP guns at the beginning of the game as to make the beginning area more trivial than it already was. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they suited you out with 75 golden keys for connecting your shift account, meaning that you could destroy any sense of value the guns originally had.

There was also the new BL2 dlc that was meant to tie the game into BL3’s story. However I can safely say that after having played through BL3, this dlc’s campaign in no way whatsoever connects these two games together. I guess at best it explains how Sanctuary fell, but that in of itself has a lot of problems. You get attacked by some Dahl commander (who has never been brought up in the story before) where he infects Sanctuary, and by further extension Pandora, with this plant virus. Your job is to kill this guy and stop the plant virus. There is no motivation established for this guy besides that he wants to make Pandora into some paradise, and the story has absolutely no effect on BL3 at all. The crew was already set on going to outer space, this invasion only served to speed up this process. To further this claim, there is no mention of this dlc’s events in BL3 and Pandora is still the same sandy hell scape that it normally is.

Which finally brings us to Borderlands 3. A game that feels surprisingly devoid of passion and love despite how much effort went into it. A game that feels like there wasn’t enough time to flesh out ideas. A game owned by a company who sold out to Epic for money- let’s get a couple of things out of the way first. 1. Borderlands 3 isn’t an entirely bad game per se. 2. I have relatively no issue with the game being an Epic exclusive and my opinion is not biased or soured due to Randy Pitchford’s constant fuck ups.

However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t outright despise Gearbox and 2K for their actions. They take an exclusivity deal with Epic which actively disrupts consumer convenience and confidence in purchasing their product (not a big deal). But then they have the audacity to push this game out in the buggy, unpolished, and unoptimized state that its currently in (kind of a big deal). The menus are buggy on a basic, functional level, the performance tanks constantly, and items would quite literally disappear out of thin air from my inventory. All of these made Borderlands 3 just that much more of a painstaking experience to play through.

It was the unpolished game and the Borderlands’ trademark shitty introductory area that made me want to refund the game. And believe me, I tried to refund the game. Unfortunately I got denied my refund because I had accidentally played over 2 hours of the game, when the Epic client doesn’t even show your playtime. So ultimately I had no choice but to play this game in order to get my 60 dollars worth. In that time I learned that this game is exactly like the other Borderlands games. Right down to the pacing and the disappointing endings. The beginning of Borderlands 3 is a complete slog. You’re just slapped down on Pandora and have to suffer through Clap Trap’s “hilarious” writing and get formally introduced to the mechanics of a Borderlands game for the 4th time now. Gearbox has apparently never figured out that people really hate playing through the beginning of their games because it refuses to give the players a skip tutorial option or a way to just outright bypass the introduction. Now I will say that this introduction isn’t as bad as BL2 or The Presequel, but it's certainly nowhere near good either.

The problem with these introduction areas is that they aren’t engaging or really even play into the story in any meaningful way. In BL3, you arrive out of thin air on Pandora and are forcefully met up with Lilith and the Crimson Raiders so that you can prepare to take off into space. Between meeting up and going into space you’ll be doing menial tasks such as fixing Marcus’ shops, getting a basic vehicle, and doing some really boring boss fights. Your motive for killing these bosses is because Lilith is on the hunt for the vault map. That thing that they had in BL2, how did they lose it? Nevermind that because it’s just sitting with Mouthpiece, a painfully easy boss that expects no brain power out of you other than just avoid the giant speakers that go boom. Apparently it was in Vaughn’s possession before he was betrayed by his Sun Smasher clan in return for good boy points from the Calypsos. Why the Crimson Raiders thought it would be a good idea to leave the map with Vaughn beats me, but I can safely say that this theme of Vaughn being a complete fuck up is consistent throughout the entirety of BL3.

Vaughn at best feels like a comedic relief character, and at worst feels like padding. This character has no important role throughout the story, just plainly isn’t a funny character, and comes across as a complete waste of space. He could literally just disappear from the entire game and nothing would change. You (luckily) don’t even see him for most of the game because his ass is left back on Pandora to do…  something. I’ve heard that Vaughn is a far better character in Tales from the Borderlands, however as I haven’t played that game I cannot say for certain whether or not Gearbox really just dropped the ball on this one. Vaughn also isn’t the only character I have this opinion of, however as I am still discussing the game’s intro I feel that I should hold off until later.

So after you acquire the vault map and experience a “high stakes” encounter with the Calysos, Lilith loses her siren powers. I feel like this was supposed to be some big, “Oh shit,” moment but I have to express that I simply don’t care for Lilith’s character and people who are new to the Borderlands series won’t care either. Lilith is not necessarily a “good guy” in Borderlands. She has done some fucked up things that have drastically changed the overarching plotline and a lot of people’s perception of her both in the story and by players experiencing it. In The Pre-Sequel, she is framed as being the reason for Handsome Jack’s insanity as Lilith literally branded a vault symbol onto his face. In the epilogue of TPS she actively commands a firing squad to gun down Athena after she tells her story in its entirety, completely against the judgement of her colleagues. And she makes incredibly rash decisions in BL2 that causes detrimental results for the crimson raiders such as being captured by Handsome Jack after being explicitly told not to come to Angel’s prison that greatly changes the dynamic of the story. These are only a couple examples, and I could keep going, but the point is that I don’t value Lilith as an entirely productive or a beneficially proactive member of the Crimson Raiders. And new players who have never played Borderlands before literally won’t even know who Lilith is or why she is even important. Hence when Lilith loses her siren powers after a pretty pathetic fight with the Calypsos, I can really only roll my eyes and just go with it.

From here the story relatively picks up and becomes a bit more bearable (but not really), however I don’t want a couple thousand words of this review to be about the story. Overall it’s trash, and I’m going to try my best to summarize just why it’s trash. Firstly is that the Borderlands writers might be writing for way too many characters. Seriously you have: ProZ-oh I mean Flak, Amara, Zane, Moze, Vaughn, Lilith, Brick, Mordecai, Tiny Tina, Ellie, Tannis, Marcus, Zero, Rhys, Lorelei, Aurelia, Hammerlock, Typhon Deleon, The Calypsos, Katagawa, Bosses also have some writing with them, Ava, Rhys, holy shit I could just keep going. This isn’t to mention that the the only returning vault hunters from BL2 are Zero and Maya. And then factor in that the writers had to write up a ton of audio logs, some Typhon logs, Eridian logs, side quest dialogue for meaningless bosses, etc. and you have just this disaster of a story that churns everyone out to be really shallow characters. There aren’t any truly good characters in this game. Some of them are passable but that’s because they either aren't main characters or they have some somewhat funny writing and redeeming qualities.

Characters like Ava and Maya (and Vaughn) are completely devoid of any purpose within Borderlands outside of being fuel to the drama fire or just outright being an obnoxious brat. It’s pretty obvious that Ava is just a spoiled teenager who has no idea what she’s getting into, but even in the context of Borderlands her character doesn’t fit at all. For example, after the player kills the first vault monster (Rampager) and returns from the vault, you’re suited to a cutscene where Ava and Maya go pants on head retarded. Ava, a defenseless, tiny, teenager with no powers whatsoever, tries to tell Maya that, “We should be kicking [the Calypsos’] asses!” after the Calypso twins show up to absorb the powers of the vault monster. Mind you, this is after her and Maya debate about how Ava is a piece of shit that’ll get herself killed if she sneaks off to more vaults. Ava then has the audacity to tell the vampire sirens that eventually she’s going to be a siren and she’s going to, “Mop the floor with assholes like you.” These actions ultimately gets her put in her place, and Maya killed. Bottom line: She’s an obnoxious character that makes playing through the story of BL3 worse the more you’re exposed to her. And speaking of Maya, her character in Borderlands is completely useless. She introduces Ava, and then gets killed so that the players can go grrr at the big baddies. Her only significance to the story is that Maya is a siren so that the Calypso twins can steal her powers. Otherwise she is an absolutely useless character that now we’ll never get to see again without Gearbox pussying out on their own writing.

I’ll be completely honest here in saying that Typhon Deleon was the best written character in the game, and you hardly get to hear anything from him outside of backstory and the final couple hours of the game. If Typhon Deleon was a main star of BL3 I think the story would’ve went in a much more favorable direction. However I can’t discount the good writing moments within the story. Even though I absolutely hate Flak’s character even down to his voice, he does have some lines that made me chuckle. Rhys’ entire gag about Rhys ball had me laughing for that entire section, especially the line, “Suck on my big ball, Katagawa.” In fact I think most of the jokes that I laughed at were sexual jokes. I frankly don’t think a lot of these sexual jokes make the cut in a lot of games nowadays outside of obvious fanfare or really out there stuff like Grand Theft Auto 5. This was really unexpected and pulled off well in BL3 as weird as a compliment this is.

I also just want to express my disappointment for how the old vault hunters were treated in this writing: Axton, Gaige, Krieg, and Salvadore aren’t present in this game outside of some echo logs. It could be plausible that Axton and Gaige will come back for a future dlc, but I’m not holding my breath. We ultimately got Maya and Zero, and oh god these characters are bad. Maya dies only a couple hours after you meet her and Zero is comparable to a boomer dad trying to be hip with the kids. Maybe that’s the joke, in which case all I can say is, “Wow, they pulled it off really well and I’m not laughing.”

And finally, the Watcher. What the hell happened to this dude and why isn’t he in BL3? He appears at the end of TPS and is like, “You’re gonna need all of the vault hunters you can get,” however, not only do we have a very restricted roster of vault hunters, the Watcher is literally never mentioned again. Unless the Watcher is the Eridian that left all of the audio logs laying around, but what a disappointment.

I could keep going a good while if I wanted to, but that’s reserved for my videos. The next part of the game that should be brought up is the world design. Most of the world design is okay, I wish Pandora wasn’t just set in desert hell ala BL1, but other than that they seem to have enough content and discoverable areas to make them interesting to explore. My ultimate problem with the world building comes in when considering the planetary system in the game. Now this point can be entirely perceived as me just being an ass but when I think “planets” I expect a lot more than the world hubs in BL3. The planet’s levels are relatively small scale for being on, you know, a planet. And this isn’t just a problem with BL3, many other games that have incorporated planets like this, such as Destiny and Warframe, ultimately fail at capturing the scale of planets. A planet is often scaled down to a simple level within a video game, and it’s somewhat shameful to see a game boasting, “tens of planets to travel to” and then those planets have the same (and even less) scale as their previous title entries that were based on a singular world. Now I perfectly understand that this is a hard request to answer to, and having to build and construct one world is difficult on its own. Despite this, if a development/marketing team wants to promote their usage of a planetary system in their video game, it’s implied that the levels are going to be gigantic. It’s not at all impressive to see planets being used in BL3 because BL2 had the same, if not more, level variety and the same, if not more, amount of levels without the pseudo use of large scale.

This isn’t to say that the levels contained in the game are bad, just that I wish they weren’t pushed into a planetary system. Generally speaking, the levels aren’t bad. I hadn’t ever reached a part of the game where I thought, “Wow this level is trash,” or found levels that were broken. In fact, the gameplay and level design seem to be the real highlights of this game. Gameplay this time around has been modernized and sped up. Players are suited with a slide, ledge grabbing, barrel throwing, and melee slams. Sliding in of itself is important because of how non-committal it is as you can cancel a slide instantly by jumping. These additions ultimately make combat faster and more varied in how you approach the game. See Borderlands 1, 2, and TPS (while it tried) suffered from each fight encounter being basically the same shootout with basic cover systems. This time around, while you can still use the basic playstyle from the older games, you’re provided the methods to really make your gameplay interesting. Personally I never used the melee slam or the barrel throwing, and the new ledge grabbing system only serves to add verticality in map exploring from my experience. However I did use a lot of the slide, and given the right gun (especially shotguns) it became very satisfying to slide into an enemy and pop them into the air with a shotgun.

On this note, I feel like I have to express how much I disliked the feel of the guns. And clearly I am on the contrary opinion here because I have heard everyone on the planet say that, “Wow the gunplay is soooo good omg!!!” but I’ll be honest in saying that I didn’t see it here. Sure, the gunplay now feels more weighty and the new animations and stuff are nice to making the player character good gameplay feel. But the guns themselves, despite apparently having tons of funding behind making the guns sound good and being completely reworked, still have the chronic floaty-ness issues of the previous games. Some guns (primarily early game Hyperion SMGs, Maliwan guns, and some shotguns) just felt so awful to play with that I put them down and never touched them again. I’m not too sure what I was expected as I slid into an opponent and shot them in the face with my shotgun, only for them to fly away a couple feet and just get right back up only having lost about half or less of their health. Jakobs guns were consistently the best weapon, feel wise, despite me always wishing they had a bit more of a kick to them.

One of my major issues with the guns is that they are way too sci-fi and not enough like guns on wastelands and battle driven hell hole. Seriously for how terrible a place Pandora is, you don’t get weapons that reflect this attribute, Instead you get these futuristic Hyperion smgs that will project a shield out in front of you or a Torgue gun that will home into your target when thrown. This is a consistent theme throughout the game where guns won’t aesthetically match the environment. I could understand if you found futuristic guns on Promethea, or even that you find technologically advanced weaponry in the form of Hyperion leftovers on Pandora(given that they’re consistent with the styling of BL2). This would 1. Appease me, because I am the only person worth pleasing, and 2. Would allow the Gearbox developers to create more variety with their weapons so that the game actually feels like it’s hitting its promise of, “Billions of guns.”

Another issue I have is the sound design for these guns, which is probably the point I’ll get absolutely grilled for but: Using actual sampled gun sounds apparently does not work for video games. Seriously every time a game tries to improve the sound of its guns, the new sounds somehow turn out to be worse. This can easily be explained off as having a bias against change, but let's talk about it. Firstly, the guns are way too quiet in Borderlands. And they seem extra quiet in BL3, like worse than BL1 quiet. Maybe it’s a difference in subtlety, because let’s face it: It’s not like a microphone was stuck right next to an actual gun. In reality the sound designers probably had the microphone a good many feet away. This gives the gunshot more of a subtle popping sound rather than the huge blast that the person holding the gun actually experiences (hence why you wear earplugs when shooting guns in real life). But I’m going to put in my take on this matter: Guns need to have an impact in their noise. Now this doesn’t mean that guns sounds even need to be based on real guns or realistic in any shape or fashion. Borderlands is a game with a unique artstyle, so why can’t Borderlands have unique sound design?

It seems that every game nowadays wants the best sounding or most realistic guns to boot, however what happened to all that stylistic choice? Some of the best examples I can think of are Counter Strike’s western inspired whiff sounds for its older titles, Enter the Gungeon’s wide arrangement of different gun sounds, the cartoony gun shot effects for Wasted, and even Borderlands unique sound designs such as The Bane and the beam guns from TPS. These unique sound designs are missing for BL3’s guns and, despite Gearbox making an algorithm to suit one gun sound to thousands of guns, they all really sound the same. Not like you can’t tell the difference between what you’re shooting but in that all snipers sound like a generic sniper, all pistols sound like pistols. Of course you have to discount certain weapons like the Occultist that don’t even shoot the bullets respective of its weapon type. But the point is: this is a missed part of the game. I don’t necessarily like or dislike the realistic approach to the sound design of weaponry, but in a game that feels anything but realistic, the sounds aren’t doing it for me here.

But let’s reel it back to the game again, and get into the basic looting mechanics for this game. Upfront: It’s dumbed down, and takes little effort to get good gear. This is the part of the game where I fall out of my element (if I haven’t already), because I don’t really appreciate Borderlands for its RPG mechanics. It feels nice, and the act of finally getting something you grind out for hours if exhilarating (4 times magic missile), but it is far from how I prefer to play my games. Given this though, even I feel that legendaries drop way too often. Over my playthrough of just the main game content (I did 6 side quests on my first playthrough, and we’ll get to this) I collected tens of legendaries. When I was finished with the game I had 10 legendaries just sitting in my inventory that I was either actively using or keeping as a memorial item. This isn’t to mention that you literally get a chest at the end of the game that contain 4 legendaries in it. The loot dropping system is no longer satisfying at this point. And this isn’t just a matter of, “Oh they buffed the loot drops a little bit,” it’s a matter of the looting system becomes a complete joke when bosses can literally drop multiple legendaries without Mayhem, and will consistently drop multiple legendaries with Mayhem.

Assemble this with a forgiving leveling system, and now it’s just a dumbed down Borderlands experience. In previous Borderlands games, you couldn’t just do the main quest from start to finish. At some point you would eventually become underleveled, and paired with Borderlands’ trademark unforgiving and shitty rpg mechanics, meant that being 3 levels beneath an enemy granted you 10% damage reduction. This is no longer a worry, you can now play the main quests from start to finish with zero leveling hiccups. Or at least from my experience. Some reviews that I indulged in have said that they did have troubles with the leveling system, to which I rolled my eyes and had to immediately question what the hell they had done wrong. On normal mode I finished the campaign having only completed 6 side quests in total. One of these, to tie back to the looting system real quick, gave me a legendary elemental pistol that melted enemies for the next couple of zones. I also asked someone about their experience playing Borderlands 3 so far, only to learn that he had been doing every single quest that he was given and was massively overleveled come time for the first vault boss (he was level 21).

The bosses of Borderlands, this time around, were the best and the worst that the series has ever gotten. They’ve been massively revamped from the older system of AOE insta-kill moves to having actual attack patterns that you can skillfully avoid. To compensate for this, the bosses have been relatively tuned up to be more aggressive, throwing out more attacks. These new bosses range from very good to very, very bad. Some of my favorites were the Graveward, the Penn and Teller styled boss (Pain and Terror), and Troy Calypso. The bosses that I ultimately ended up hating were Katagawa, the Rampager, the Warden, and the Anointed. These bosses either suffered from boring attack patterns, bullet spongy-ness, or a lack of direction on what you’re supposed to be doing to beat the boss. Katagawa and the Warden fit into this last category. For Katagawa I was confused by him taking inconsistent damage (he loses a ton of health on shield break) and the Warden I couldn’t figure out whether or not I was allowed to kill him early. This is because the Warden is styled around the Goliath from BL2, so whenever he kills one of his teammates he gains all of his health back and then levels up. It turns out that you can kill this boss early, I just had garbage guns for this fight. So to answer your question, yes I did get the Warden to max level, and what pursued was a 20-something minute boss fight where you run the boss around in circles and turn around to deal damage when you can, and then he would kill a minion and level up. The only way I managed to kill him was that when he did eventually hit max level, he would stop focusing his minions when on low health.

The bosses that were truly good were the ones that kept the player busy, while not being too spongy or time consuming. It should be noted that the spongy factor of a boss can be easily biased by what type of weapons you enter a boss fight with. Some of the bosses I thought were easier may have actually been harder for you or another player, and vice versa. However, I will speak more of a general design philosophy and less of a, “This guy had too much health,” philosophy. I loved the Graveward (while admittedly being underwhelming for a vault monster) because of his unique battle area and clear attacks that would make his weak point exposed. Having the entire floor tilted to the side while you’re spamming jump to save your life was a fun mechanic to work with, especially when you factor in dodgeable acid balls. This was a simple boss fight that had a unique spin on an FPS boss. Terror and Pain I loved for stylistic reasons and the meta-humor around putting characters themed around Penn and Teller in a game made by a company with a CEO who is super into magic. This boss is comparable to Mouthpiece, but actually just a straight upgrade. The arena you fight Terror and Pain in is far more interesting, the boss itself looks cool, and while I have honestly forgotten the attacks that the boss had, it was still a fun encounter. One of the attacks I do remember though is the floor lighting up to indicate that fire was going to shoot up to incinerate you, and felt far more fitting than getting blasted by a speaker turned up too loud.

Something that I disliked across the board with these bosses, and this is a massive opinion piece, is that the bosses were too easy. Sometimes I honestly wished I was playing Borderlands: The Bullet Hell. I really wanted a boss that wasn’t just going to engage my attention, but make me feel like, “Holy shit, holy shit, oh my god, I am going to die.” Actually, the entire game was pretty damn easy. Although this can come down to a lot of reasons such as ally NPCs now being able to revive you, and the upped pacing of the game causing players to need to rely less on cover.

And I mean, it’s not like the game stays easy forever right? After you complete the campaign on normal mode you then unlock True Vault Hunter Mode (TVHM) and the brand new, super cool, “Badass-,” oh whoops I mean, “Guardian Ranks.” The end game is perhaps the most disappointing thing is this game for hardcore veterans of the Borderlands series. Firstly, that “reworked” end game comes in the form of the new badass ranking system, only this time you can’t disable it (This pieceo of information has become outdated with time, a future update has included the option to turn off these gaurdian perks and the passive bonuses). I mean, this time you get some rewards for using the guardian ranks? Meh. Otherwise the game still revolves around making you play it multiple times in order to get to the level cap. The only real reworked thing here is the new mayhem difficulties, annnnd they’re bad. So what the mayhem system is supposed to do is make the game more difficult while incentivizing you to play it by giving you consistently better loot rewards (more blues, purples, and legendaries). This system would otherwise be okay if not for just one problem: Mayhem 2 added no difficulty to the game, while Mayhem 3 felt typical to Borderlands end game difficulty (It should be noted that the Mayhem system has been revamped to include 10 Mayhem levels). Again, this may be because of my own personal experience with the game, see apparently Flak is outright broken when it comes to crits (Future updates have severely nerfed Flak). So this could be influencing my opinion greatly on this difficulty switch. But I’ll say that I had no reason not to play Mayhem 2, because for essentially no difficulty increase, the game started commonly dropping me blues, purples, and legendaries, while rarely spitting out a green.

At this point I had essentially had enough with the game, as my terrible, clunky inventory was constantly filling with valuables, and I had to make constant stops to dump stuff out of my inventory. Given this, the fact that Mayhem gave you a ludicrous amount of XP for very little difficulty on Mayhem 2, and a quick Google search about the raid bosses in the game, I’ve ultimately put the game down. I went from level 39 to 44 in the span of an hour, was being drowned in good loot, and the biggest sting of all: There are no raid bosses in the base game of Borderlands 3.

This is a massive review for a game that probably doesn’t deserve it. Borderlands 3 has a lot of ups and downs. It’s not a game that many people will enjoy for the story. Veteran players may have a distaste for the lack of an interesting end game. All in all, if you’re playing Borderlands 3, you’re probably playing it for the gunplay and the loot, which still, somewhat, hold up. I didn’t see how the game had a billion guns, but you know what, that’s alright. And after all of the controversy, and now that Gearbox is releasing patches, performance fixes, and balancing to the game, it’s not that bad of a game. The game just doesn’t strike me as the godlike triple A, return to Borderlands that many had hoped for. Overall, I would give the game a 6/10.

EDITOR'S NOTE: There used to be a video here demonstrating a supposed XP glitch that had occurred to me while playing through True Vault Hunter Mode while using Mayhem. It turns out that, at the time, this was an intentional mechanic for Mayhem to give you massive XP gains. To correct for this error, the video has been pulled from Youtube and this paragraph has been written, as well as all mentions of the XP glitch being pulled from this article.

-Count_

[lonesomealley]

Cube World’s Release

Okay so, just uh, holy shit. Firstly, I actually made another blog post in the span of a month. And then, Cube World is actually coming out! This is a game that I have been waiting for since I purchased it back in 2013 at the ripe age of 11 years old. I’m now a teenager in college, and the fact that I finally get to play something that I’ve been waiting for since I was a child is pretty mind boggling. However the thing that really stings about this release is the fact that I said I was going to be doing a Hat in Time video after A Short Hike.

Yeah fuck that

I might be doing an entire Cube World video given just how ready I am to play this game. I have pretty strong confidence that it’s going to be good (given how the alpha was already good, just basic). And the fact that I am going to get a steam key for this game means that I will be able to play it from day 1. But I cannot entirely guarantee that I will put out a video on Cube World as that mostly comes down to how much I have to say about the game. I also don’t know what kind of video it’s going to be, it could be a review or a critique, or it could be an entirely different video altogether. We’ll simply have to see, and if it comes down to the worst, I can always write a blog post about my opinions.

Seeing as it’s coming at the end of this month or sometime in October, I still have plenty of time to put my Short Hike video together and push it out to youtube. That is still in the works, I’m currently in the audio cleanup/editing stage (the worst stage in my opinion) and once that is finished I believe the editing process should go by quicker. A problem with these videos is my audio quality and while it’s something that I’ve tried to clean up a bit, it’s not going to be perfect and frankly it would be too strenuous of a task to make it so. The better audio will be coming around Christmas time, which could be before or after my next video.

The biggest problem about talking about this stuff however is that my mind is always bouncing from one place to another, and so something could come up that puts my Short Hike video on hold or possibly pushes me to work on another project. Hell Cube World has entirely pushed me away from the idea of making my Hat in Time video. I could tell you that I have several ideas for blog posts I could put together, but then there’s a certain level of commitment to it that I don’t always have towards my projects. I’ve also been contemplating whether or not to make more relaxed gameplay/highlight videos for my second channel just so that I can feel a little more productive than I actually am. However I don’t really know if these videos would pay off or even be worth making. These are some of the problems I’m currently facing. But things are coming together, and that’s just the compromise that I have to make in order to put this video out in a timely manner.

As for Cube World, I will be playing a lot of that and will make a point to put something together for that. I’m really hoping that Cube World becomes more goal oriented so that players can better direct themselves in the game. In the alpha there was no quests or really even direction for what to do which doesn’t exactly get the brain going for those who want to play the game. In fact, looking back on it, the alpha was really bare bones with only so much to do before you just got bored. You geared up to raid or kill spirit bosses, actually did the raid or spirit boss, then you geared up for the next venture, etc. for infinity. Outside of that there was basic item trading and pet taming, but frankly I found pets outright useless in the alpha due to their rather lackluster AI. It was generally a game you could only play for a couple of hours before just putting down. Alongside that I found it somewhat difficult to leave the starting biome due to the slow leveling process and really just being afraid of straying too far from safety due to the lack of fast travel. Fast traveling appears to have been added in the full release however, and hopefully quests will encourage players to really explore the environment. Ultimately I really hope Cube World is a game that I’ll be putting a significant amount of time into.

I really fear trying to chime in with what the game should and shouldn’t have because having certain expectations can really kill your mood for a game. And while I believe that Wollay is in good faith (since he spent 6 years finishing Cube World) there is always the possibility that Cube World could be complete crap. It happened with Destiny, it happened with Lethal League Blaze, it happened when I realized that I wasn’t getting another update for the alpha. So I’m going to try my absolute hardest to keep my brain clear of any anticipation, hype, or extravagant expectat-AAAAAAAAA. Okay. Okay I’m fine, I think. We’ll get there. Only a couple more weeks, maybe a month… Maybe it’ll get delayed…

Until then I have a video to edit. There is almost no reason why this video shouldn’t be out before Cube World releases, and if it is, I guess I’m not playing it until then. So yeah, over a year after my last video, several projects down the drain, it has come full circle and I will hopefully have more videos to come. I’ll also, uh, try to post more stuff here.

-Count_

[lonesomealley]

Hard Drive Failure, Bioshock, and College

Just some good news first, there’s a new video coming out. . . soonish. Okay look the video is a relatively “small” review on the indie game: A Short Hike. I’ve recently taken an interest in it and it seemed to be a good gateway into getting back into the swing of editing videos. The video is going to be slightly shorter than my last video but it’s going to still discuss some of the in depth values that the game carries. Alongside that I’ve got a bunch more ideas for videos that I want to produce and some blog posts that are kinda in the work but I plan on rewriting. Because, and you’ll have to believe me, I have worked on several things over the span of the year that I’ve wanted to put out but they either became half baked or fell apart during the later processes. So I’ve got all of that going for me and I think I’m going to finally take the time to produce some of those so I have a little more to show than the one video I uploaded over a year ago and some random spurts of blog posts.

So that’s that, now comes the bad news. My “media” hard drive, the hard drive I kept project stuff and a bunch of odd job textures, game ideas, etc. on, recently failed on me while I was working on my upcoming Bioshock Critique. So until my broke ass is able to afford a new hard drive, that video is going to be put on hold, and it could be for even longer. Simply put: I don’t enjoy playing the Bioshock games multiple times. That info on its own should propose a vague description of the type of attitude that I’m going to be holding in my critique. And due to that attitude it may be harder for me to keep my attention on the video. As for how long the video is going to be and when it’s going to come out, try 2020 and I’m assuming it’s going to be over an hour long. However everytime I assume how long a video is going to be I always overshoot that about half way into the script, so it’s currently up for discovery.

Alongside that college starts in a couple days, and that’s going to be the moment of truth as for how much free time I’m going to have and how much dedication I’m going to be putting toward this stuff. My current schedule looks pretty promising, and assuming I have the time management skills to get my stuff done in a timely fashion I believe I might be able to scrape by. My only current problem is that I’m having a difficult time finding a job considering that I’m 17 and no place seems to be interested in trusting someone like me to have any semblance of a brain. However if I can get money and begin investing it into these projects, I’d like to hopefully have a lot more freedom over how I compile together projects and have the ability to archive them. Once upon a time I tried to work on a script for the little screen save game “Mountain.” That took up like a third of my hard drive until I had to cut my losses and delete the 300gb of video footage that I had saved up of a mountain just rotating in place (riveting stuff). While I still have a bunch of the more interesting stuff such as some animations, voice over, rendered transitions, etc. it’d be nice to be able to store projects in their entirety in the future.

After my first semester of college I’m going to have a lot of financial aid money left over (to the tune of $3000) that I plan on using to purchase some stuff like a somewhat decent microphone, a VR headset, and do some basic maintenance to my computer such as new hard drives and a new case. I’m hoping that these investments will allow me to have more plausible games to play, increase the quality of my videos, and simply allow me to not have to worry about file size and managing project files as much. Generally speaking I’m not spending all of this money and I plan on putting a good amount of it into savings. Hopefully I’ll be able to score a job soon that will allow me to pay off this debt as it comes in so I don’t have to worry so much about it in the future.

With that general life stuff out of the way I suppose I can provide some brief information on my video and some of the stuff going forwards. Firstly, the video is just now leaving the scripting stage where I have written the script and collected video footage, so what’s left is narration, editing down that narration, and then editing the video together. I plan on having the video be a lot more direct where it’s just me talking over gameplay footage instead of trying to be stylized in any meaningful fashion. This video should be relatively easy to put together and will be out soon enough if I put my mind to it. The next thing is that I’ve got a little Trello board that you can watch to keep up with progress on different projects and which ones are currently floating around. Some projects might not be put up on the board depending on whether or not I want them to be secretive or have a surprise element to them. I’ve decided to declassify some information on there (yes, even the video I’m currently working on) should you want to see what’s happening.

Finally is this blog, all I can really say about this is that I plan on uploading more stuff here, however I don’t know exactly what I want to put here yet. Like I said, I have been working on a lot of stuff that ultimately hit the cutting block or has been put on indefinite hold. That said it may be possible for me to put out write ups for scrapped videos and finally push out some of the blog posts I had been working on, most of which fall under my Writer’s Block section.

This is a short one, just felt like I should write down some stuff so I can look back a year later and be like, “Wow, I really didn’t keep my promise to post more stuff.” We’ll just see what happens. Oh yeah, my next video, after A Short Hike, is going to be on A Hat in Time.

-Count_

[lonesomealley]

Busy But Not Busy Enough

Alright so I’m going to kickstart a little update section where I’ll be talking about things that are going on and where the blog and/or my projects are heading. This isn’t to be confused with the “free writing” section in Writer's Block because that one is still focused on telling a story where as these updates are just me talking about things that are going on and what I’m thinking.

And one thing that’s been on my mind a lot lately is work/life balance. As of writing this I am about to graduate high school (I’m graduating a year early because I’ve filled out my credit requirements) and plan to be heading off to college as soon as I can. The thing that I’m concerned about is whether or not college is going to be easier or more difficult than high school, from either a workload or actual smarts stand point. I’ve read some information and the basic summary I’ve composed is that, “College is easier and more relaxed than high school, but also requires a good work ethic and motivation to do the work.” Also the thought of having the freedom to schedule my classes in tune to my wants and living by myself with the opportunity to meet new people make me hopeful that things will work out favorably. So the thing about college is that, if I have more free time than I do in high school (going to school from 7:30 to 2:30, and then only having a couple hours of free time because of homework unless I cut into my sleeping time) then I plan on turning up the output for which I work on my little (not so little anymore) passion projects. But why is free time important for this?

Because I am a human who has psychological needs and wants, and my needs involve having the time to waste on enjoyable activities such as video games, friends, relationships, or just getting more sleep in so that I can make my life feel a little more lively. I fully admit, whether I have a bad work ethic or am lazy, that I cannot turn my entire life into a juggling act of time management. I read things such as Elon Musk working 80 hours a week and think to myself, “Wow this guy is really killing himself,” because it doesn’t feel natural, in my opinion, for people to dedicate all of their time to performing one activity. Back in the old-old-old days where human beings were still nomadic hunter-gatherers, their daily responsibilities came down to hunting enough food to eat and taking care of children. Then they got to spend the rest of the day doing whatever they saw fit. And over time industrialization and a strive for efficient innovation drove people to work in factory settings for hours and hours on end. Then eventually, when we realized that people are people and need to not kill themselves in factories, the time was pushed down to a more reasonable (however still questionable) 40 hours a week. Even 8 hours can feel a little frustrating to work around, but with the inclusion of an average 2 days off weekly, sick days, and vacation, I suppose the time is made up for.

But with my current situation, time spent on school work can soar up to 10 hours a day on top of the other lively responsibilities that I have. Factor in the over looming stress of academics and some more personal family issues, and life is kind of hell occasionally. Which begs the question: Where do I have the time to do passion projects? Well obviously the answer should be simple, just fill in my free time with passion projects. Yes and no, because passion projects still require brain power in order to perform and sometimes I just don’t have the energy. Or I feel like my time is wasted because the things I’ll make won’t ever live up to the imaginary standards of my imaginary audience. Or sometimes I just can’t figure out something and just give up, and then maybe eventually I’ll come back to it and fix the problem before drifting away from the project again. And on top of this there are the nagging worries that, “I’m not busy enough,” “I could be doing much more right now,” “I can’t work at the same pace as other people,” “Wow this person’s stuff looks way better than mine from comparison.” These are among some of the concerns following the a current video that I’m working on.

Without spoiling too much, the video is a critique on a video game that follows the same long form formula of my previous video on The Beginner’s Guide. However when I first started this project I told myself, “This will be done in a month and be about the same length as the last video, easily.” Well fuck was I wrong. I posted a screenshot of my progress on Twitter where the word count was in the 7,000 word range, and the script is now currently 10,000 words and going through a rewrite. So this video is shaping out to be about an hour long, and I haven’t even started the editing process which at this point will be lazily done (that’s to say it won’t have many if any fancy editing effects). The one big thing about this video however is that I’m not entirely confident on my opinion on it, because the video is heavily opinionated and comes from a certain perspective. There are a lot of people who won’t agree with my opinion and it’s pretty harsh towards the game, which might stir up some controversy for a little bit if anyone cares at all about the project.

So the video won’t be out for a while, I might (just might) push to get it out during summer break or even as a one year anniversary thing, but who knows at this point. So this is the current situation I’m in, on the flip side I also want to put more attention toward this blog which, unlike video editing or trying to make a game, doesn’t require long periods of effort from me and rotates between different fields of expertise. These blog posts are so easy to write if I have something I want to talk about, and can be done at anytime, in fact most of this post was typed up in my Creative Writing class. Right now I have several planned posts that I’ve started and just need to finish up, rewrite, or get edited. I’m also sticking with this whole long form writing thing outside of a couple exceptions such as video posts. Posts are generally going to stay over 500 words with a push towards a couple thousand.

You’ll also notice that I’ve stripped out some of the social media functionality of my Tumblr blog, and that’s because I frankly just don’t care for Tumblr as a social media platform but rather as a way to make a little website. Because who would seriously consider using a Wordpress website for hobbies when it costs money to use an html editor, Tumblr just gives you that for free and much more. There’s also the problem with Tumblr posts being generally incompatible with posts being written in html that contain image and video embeds or special formatting. There is nothing I can really do about this besides just not using html code to embed stuff. And I don’t entirely care about fostering an audience at the moment, I am more focused on just building a back catalog of good works and doing this stuff for fun. Posts on this blog or on my first youtube channel will be generally devoid of things that would otherwise make them dated but possibly pull more people in such as sponsorships, talking about trendy news, or putting update information in posts that aren’t in the updates section of Writer's Block.

And that’s everything I wanted to put out there. Things will come out eventually, but I’m either lazy or just too tired out, pick your poison. If I do end up less stressed and with more time in college I definitely plan on putting more of that additional freedom into producing this type of stuff because I enjoy doing it, it’s just that I’m not particularly good at it.

If you have any reason to contact me about things, you can do so at countunderscore@gmail.com as I won’t read anything you try to send me over Tumblr or Twitter. As for usage of the things that I make, I fully endorse the use of my content in the creation of new projects given that I am accredited and that the work isn’t plagiarizing or outright stealing my works. What I deem to be “stealing my works” will be at my discretion in accordance to fair use laws, if I have a problem with how my work is being used I will attempt to use any contact means possible to get the problem sorted out. Should this prove unsuccessful I will use full power to take down the concerning content.

-Count_

[lonesomealley]

Critique on Pop Culture

The influence of culture upon people: inflections of character surrounded by fabrics and clothes that sag half way down legs and hair bands with cat ears by people who are just as charismatic as he or she may be. Hands on phones that scroll through music, information, videos, fantasies that seem impossible however probable to live in, and chat features that allow one to never reveal true intentions. Friend groups that band together based on common interest, impossible to interject for only the unfortunate or those who wear cat ears among the wrong people. A system that encourages you to “be yourself” yet is contradicted by any observation of human interaction. Relationships that only exist to open up common relatability, never to have deep discussions, and people who will never care about the center of the universe. Unintentionally limited and prohibited. Intentionally put on defense and told to not indulge in yourself; silent complexities, pretentions, depressions, senses of pseudo accomplishment.

These are a handful of the systems that form the conception, perception, and lack of deviation from what is deemed correct from the majority: Sub communities with little sense of unity all considering having a family to be the goal of life. And people who are denied their character, happiness even, leave the scene from functions of loneliness, suicide, and abandonment. Perfection that is achieved by everyone except for you, yet always dreamed of. The challenge in thinking that happiness is never enough. Imposturous pretentions among complex thoughts of hobby-hood and person; unmotivating decorations. Festering idealism that consumes the mind and hard work that gets thrown by the wayside

It all becomes too much for the mind, thinking that it’s owed something or trying its hardest to insert itself into the culture ring. And if you’re on the outside, you’re an outcast with no outlast swimming around trying to pick up the rubble of meaning and seeing through projections of exaggerated characters and people that are trying just a little too hard. It’s all a game of who can get the most amount of validation while being sung lullabies of love and true fortune, by people who want to act like they are on top of the hood, the food chain while complaining that life is too hard because they’re missing nothing but true affection. It’s never about loyalty but simply how long to keep interest in an audience that will never care about you, never for the satisfaction of doing your job.

Yet no one sees the mess of life up at the top, it looks easy for anyone up there from the outside, but on the inside it’s a pandering act of pleading with audiences not to make them “irrelevant.” Why would anyone want to be like them, complaining about their past and how anyone can do what they’re doing? Because simply, you can’t unless you’re lucky. You have to be lucky in order for people to see your work unless you already have the money to get the audiences rolling. And let’s face it, the center of the universe is already at such a disadvantaged position simply because its allowance is just a little bit short or it doesn’t have any deeper friends. It’ll blame the universe and maybe even their parents for giving birth to them, but at the gist of it, it’s simply because it isn’t lucky enough. This concept can be manifested into a couple billion sided dice, if it lands on those magical chance numbers then everything is okay unless the center of the universe did land on those numbers then magically things are terrible.

This is because the things that pop culture is missing are modesty, positivity, and longevity. At the core of it all, the goal to life is to be happy. Yet pop culture thinks that happiness is at the top with everything one could imagine. With girls lining up one after the other who will find the next hot new person in the matter of days, and expensive cars that everyone envies you for, people who you can win over with money, thievery and backstabbing just so that someone new can reach the top, people who no longer care for who you are but the symbolism that evolves with what you produce. Your deadened personality replaced with someone who only wants more fame and less responsibility. No appreciation for anything that you may have had back when you did have modesty.

The way to beat the systems of pop culture is simply not to play and take up modesty (and perhaps write an editorial with a pseudo academic and intellectually critical tone about the topic). Take up a life of modesty and put your own meaning into what you do; become self validated. Don’t rely on external validation, because it only leads to perfectionism (whoops), and more importantly focus on being motivated independently of other people. These are the things that pop culture doesn’t understand, and through achieving such feats, you allow a more fulfilling sense of happiness and self positivity than the millions of likes ever will produce because it all lacks longevity. Even if it may seem contradictory, modesty leads to positivity that leads to longevity, and that, that leads to grandiosity.

-Count_

[lonesomealley]

The Beginner’s Guide as a Proper Beginner’s Guide

So these posts are currently out of order, just working on throwing this stuff up. Typical schedule will be: Video, Script, then Write Up. But here's the video by itself, gonna be sorting all of this stuff into The Studio Apartment directory.

After you've watched the video, if you haven't read the write up I did detailing some explanatory stuff, you can get to it with this LINK.