#one day i will replay on an optimized system!!! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

laurarolla · 7 months ago

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So I started Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut finally (was doing some item cleanup in Elden Ring the last few days so I'm ready for the DLC at launch). I'm in an odd headspace about it, and I suppose I should start with talking about other space fighter sim/shooter games I've played and my feelings on the genre.

See, my first of these kind of games was a demo of the first stage of Colony Wars on PS1, which eventually led me to actually play the game itself sometime later. From the beginning, there was a sort of push and pull in regards to how these games play for me compared to how I want to play them. Space fighter games of this kind ask a lot of the player right from the word go, largely because of a limited degree of mercy provided for you doing something stupid early on. There's a progression to a lot of these games where you focus on dogfighting first, then graduate to defending a capital ship, then move on to taking down capital ships, all while learning the handling of your craft and optimizing your various weapon systems. In a game like this, control complexity is a crucial balancing act, and honestly, Colony Wars is the only one of these games I've played that felt like it nailed the sweet spot for me. Strike Suit Zero is close, to the point that literally swapping two buttons might fix my biggest control issue (thrusters should be A, transform should be R3). I haven't checked that option yet. The thing is that part of why Colony Wars worked as best I can tell is the lack of customization meant every stage needed to be crafted for the player's expected skill level and equipment loadout. Later games I've played such as Project Sylpheed: Arc of Deception and Strike Suit Zero have the ability to replay stages and unlock upgrades, meaning that your limited arsenal and ship capabilities feel like harder limits. Wanna try taking out the capital ships in the early stages? Too bad, you don't have the firepower, shoot incoming missiles and try to take out fighters instead. When you're done doing what we tell you the first time, you can come back with bigger guns and higher skill and do the stuff you want next time.

Maybe the honest reality is the Colony Wars broke my expectations. With only skill and luck to rely on, you had to learn the stages and figure out specific exploits if you wanted to, say, shut down a capital ship to protect your fleet more easily with a specific type of fighter, or you had to acknowledge that your equipment makes capital ship fighting entirely impossible so you need to focus on fighters while your allies deal with the big guns. Stages felt like puzzles you figured out through retries, and the game even allowed the story to keep moving forward if you failed in many cases, just with worse possible endings. Additionally, stages were far shorter and less intense in terms of enemy numbers and such. I guess my issue really is that I'm just not built for these kinds of games, despite genuinely loving the genre. I have something of an allergic reaction to the idea of crawling before walking, in a sense, and I want to feel like I earn the place of being a hero rather than feeling like I'm jammed into the role of The Ace Pilot Protagonist most of the time. We'll see how this eventually plays out, but there's a decent chance that I just won't end up vibing with SSZ by the end of it.

Fun bit of trivia: Call of Duty Infinite Warfare? Perfectly scratches the space shooter itch in bite size chunks. Very surprising to think about all these years later.

#backlog resolution #strike suit zero #colony wars #strike suit zero director's cut #project sylpheed #space shooter #call of duty #infinite warfare #video games #gaming #space combat #space sim

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glassmarcus · 10 months ago

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I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on Sonic Unleashed at this point

*The following is a culmination of playthroughs from 2008 to 2023

When I first played Sonic Unleashed, I didn’t know there was a major difference between the console ports. I didn’t have a Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 at the time so I bought it for the Nintendo Wii. I knew that this was the game where Sonic ran faster than he’s ever ran before, and when I started playing it, that fact was true (unless you’re a freak and used Speed Break in Sonic and the Secret Rings). Sonic does run extremely fast in both versions so nothing seemed awry. I played it, had a great time, but only afterwards did I realize something was off. The level I saw in the first trailer of the game was nowhere to be found in my playthrough. I did some digging and learned that the Wii/PlayStation 2 version wasn’t just a sacrifice in graphics, but an entirely different game created by Dimps, the developers of the portable Sonic the Hedgehog games. I was interested to know what I was missing, so years later, I bought the game again, this time for the Playstation 3 that I at last owned.

This High Definition version of Unleashed developed by Sonic Team themselves was somewhat disappointing. I heard from everyone that it was the superior game, but it just wasn’t hitting the same. I thought it was bias. I truly thought that because Sonic UnWiished was the first version I played, that I was always going to prefer it. That was my theory anyway. But we are now ten years removed from the first time I played Sonic UnleasHD. I have forgotten so much about both games that they are as fresh in my mind as they are ever going to be. I literally purchased an Xbox Series S, just so I can buy Sonic UnleasHD a second time under optimal conditions. And going in with the most charitable lens possible, I have uncovered the unassailable truth that the Standard Definition iteration of Sonic Unleashed is the best version of this mildly mediocre game. I hate to give Dimps any props as developers, as I still have not forgiven them for Sonic Lost World 3DS, but they truly out did Sonic Team here.

In terms of graphics and scale, UnWiished can't compete. Dimps had less time and storage space to make it, so the levels are smaller and there's less of them. The fidelity is on an entirely different level and 6th gen hardware shouldn't be allowed anywhere near that level of detail. Frankly neither should 7th gen hardware. The one technical advantage SD had over HD was a consistent frame rate due to it not trifling with powers beyond its comprehension. Sonic Unleashed barely did its job on the PS3. The frame rate would rarely do a full work day and would some times take Paid Time Off without any notice. Sonic Unleashed is a 9th gen game released a decade too early. But now that it's available on adequate hardware, there is no technical area the SD version can stand up in. HD is gorgeous and taking in that lush scenery at 60 FPS feels like a luxurious dream. Especially during the day stages.

I used to prefer the SD version when it came to the Day Time stages. But now I'm not too sure. In UnWiished, the Day Time stages were good because they valued resource management and perfection. Getting S Ranks adequately rewarded you and the game expects you to replay the levels to get better at them. There's a bigger emphasis on knowing the stages and understanding when and where you should be using your boost. Boosting in UnWiished is not a speed up button that you hold like in every other Sonic game with a boost mechanic. It is a button that effectively teleports you 100 feet forward while also giving you momentum. You are not in control when you press that button so you can't be using it willy nilly. This is why it's a limited resource that you can't spam. Giving that amount of power in these cramped stages is a recipe for disaster. You can tell there was a lot of thought put into the systems of the SD version.

But the HD version just has better levels. Or at least better Sonic levels. Sonic is a platformer and it feels like you are controlling a jumpy scrimblo character here, albeit a very fast one. There is open space and objects to jump on in UnleasHD. UnWiished doesn't really have that. You are not controlling Sonic. You are controlling a car that is shaped like Sonic. In HD, The freedom and control you are given along with the sheer spectacle provided leads to an overall better experience... Initially. Replaying levels is a different story. These levels are far longer and thus aren't as friendly towards mastery due to the ratio of how much time you spend on a run vs how easy it is to mess up that run. I have no motivation to get S ranks in this game because of this. The Dimps levels are feasible to master because you only lose 2-3 minutes if you fuck up. The Sonic Team levels have double that time frame usually, so it’s not as palatable due to how much time you are potentially wasting. Though it might even out a bit more now with the use of the Solid State Drive on modern Xbox consoles allowing for faster level restarts.

At a certain point I came to the conclusion that SD has better levels to master, while HD has better levels to experience casually. When you are running through a level in UnleasHD and you don't have to worry about rankings or medals(don't worry I'll get to that soon) they are the most fun you will have playing Sonic Unleashed. Empire City is the absolute peak between both games. It's the perfect length, there's wide enough platforms, the set pieces are thrilling but don't play themselves, there's a wide array of paths you can take. I replayed that level just because I liked it, no ulterior motive attached at all. The HD levels are intrinsically better. They extrinsically missed the mark compared to what Dimps ended up cooking though. The game is not structured in a way that pushes the player to enjoy it optimally. There's always something in the way. This goes for the whole game.

The handling of progression in UnleasHD is a gross display of self sabotage. It's meant to be a huge game, so the truly great parts of it are spread out and surrounded by medium effort filler. I just want to play levels in these games in a linear fashion, but Sonic Team has other plans. If you want to play UnleasHD, you need to partake in its world adventure aspects more intimately by exploring the hub cities. Hub Worlds aren't the worst thing in video games, I usually like them well enough. Just not in Sonic games. I have zero desire to explore a city as Sonic. It doesn't mesh well with the way the character moves. I didn't enjoy it in Sonic Adventure with Station Square and I didn't enjoy it in any of the 9 times they did it here. The SD version has you visit cities as well, but they take 1 minute of clicking to get through, as the whole of exploration is done through Visual Novel prompts. It's cheap as hell and not as impressive, but it saves time and doesn't break the pace of my adventure. In some cases, less is more, and one of these cases is also seen in the tornado sections. These flight mini games are an enemy of humanity and must be destroyed. They’re just a series of Quick Time Events. Instead of a potentially fun rail shooter, we get a flurry of nondiagetic disorienting button prompts. Stop asking me to press the ‘X’ button! How would I know where that is? It's different on every controller! Quick Time Events are pasted throughout the game as a replacement for actual content and they always suck. Dimps doesn’t have this weird fetish for QTEs. There are only a handful in UnWiished. There is also no tornado section to be found and it ends up being all the better for that.

All I wanted to do was play through these levels so I could compare them to the other version. But I kept getting ambushed by hub world shenanigans, bad mini games, and after I got through those I was turned back because I played the levels wrong. Medal hunting is the quite honestly the most baffling decision in this game. The game blocks you off from the next chunk of the game if you haven't collected enough medals in the stages. If this was Mario Odyssey I wouldn't mind. If this was Banjo Kazooie I wouldn't mind. Because those are games that are about collecting things. Sonic is not about combing the area in an attempt to find Skittles. This game certainly isn't because it's the game where you move the fastest. These medals are well hidden, you will not be able to spot them if you are blitzing through the stage like you are urged to do. So many times I blasted past a medal and then spent a minute trying to back track and get it to satisfy the medal quota. You WILL miss these things, you WILL replay these stages, and if you are as sane as me, you will NOT have fun. Instead of placing little collectibles for the curious sect of players who want to engage with Unleashed in this way, they take these bonuses and turn them into chores.

It's not just that it forces you to replay stages that's the problem, It's that it forces you to replay them in a woefully counter intuitive way. Nothing about how this game is put together suggest you should be slowing down to pick up trinkets, but they made it a requirement anyway so they could pad run time in the most obvious of ways. UnWiished has medals. But you don't find them. You earn them. The better your rank for a stage, the more medals you get. And if you don't have a lot, you aren't gated from the rest of the game. You only miss out on side puzzle rooms that hold bonus content and extra lives. It's the complete inverse. You aren't punished for playing the game in the intended way, you are rewarded for it.

The theme here is that while HD has more to offer, that more is rarely good. It offers more bad ideas, more padding, more progression gates, more pace breakers. SD doesn't have a lot to offer. So it has to be smarter to compensate. The structure of UnWiished is consistently intuitive and player friendly. Dimps is that weird nerd in school that you don't like talking to, but you know it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to be paired up with them because they will carry that group project. Sonic Team is conversely, a stereotypical jock. Few elegant things that come out of their mouth, but it's okay because they're hot. Both have short comings, and I don't think either are better than the other. Sometimes I'll prefer a jock over a nerd. Other times I won't. It all comes down to preference really.

If that sounds like it's too diplomatic and clean of a conclusion, that's because it is. There is another 60% of the game I haven't even touched on. It's time to talk about the big hog in the room. The real reason Unwiished still holds my favor. The Werehog.

Nobody liked the Werehog when these games came out. It was the major complaint everyone had. You could move so fast as Sonic during the day and it was exhilarating, but come nightfall, you're forced to play as the comparatively far more sluggish Werehog. And you play as the Werehog for most of the game. It became the default example of how hard Sonic had fallen off. And who could deny it at this point. The Werehog sucked. It was a shallow God of War clone used for blatant padding. Even me, a shameless Sonic shill, didn't like the Werehog. But something profound happened during the end of my first playthrough. I started to understand what they were getting at with this gameplay style.

The Werehog seemed like a nightmare when I first picked it up. The platforming was unreliable and the combat was punishing. I struggled far more than I thought I would. But then it all started to come together when I realized you can hold down the grab button with no consequence. Any pole or ledge that the game expected me to grab while I loomed over a bottomless chasm wasn't terrifying once I started holding down the grab button and removed timing from the equation. Once I had that safety net, I started getting far more reckless with my movement. I was progressing through the levels cautiously before, but with the threat of death lessened, I summoned enough gumption to start dash jumping over gaps and leaping from pole to pole. The secret of Sonic Unleashed is that the Werehog is slower than regular Sonic, but only actually slow if you're a pussy. This applies to enemy encounters too. I used to approach them slowly because the enemies hit hard. But once you get your combos and start using the objects around you, you do just as much damage. It's all about getting the first hit. The The brevity of these enemy encounters after you master the game is exactly what a Sonic action game should strive for. It's not mind blowing or anything, but it's good at being what it is. A simple 3D Beat Em Up Platformer. There aren't a ton of moves, but the ones you do have feel good to use and are easy to execute. There aren't a ton of level ideas, but each one is used to its fullest. As long as you are open to learning it's mechanics, the Werehog is a fun time with no reservation.

But for the HD version. It doesn't matter how much you learn about the mechanics, it still sucks ass.

Sonic Team’s Werehog is some doo-doo. It's like it's dedicated to making you feel as weak, slow, and cringe as possible. This feels so much worse to play, it’s staggering. First, the Werehog attack animations have zero weight behind them, despite all the wind up they have. It looks embarrassing. I bumped attack way up at first because of how little damage I was doing. After I gathered sufficient strength, I decided to invest exp into new moves. This was a bad idea. Every attack in this game is functionally the same and there are too little enemies for any variety to matter. The game gives you this big tool box and nothing to use it on. I ended up using the same attacks in the beginning of the game as the end, because there was no advantage to using the new move. Yea that new dash attack I got 80% into the game looks kinda decent, but it's so hard to control and does so little damage that there's no reason for me to touch it. This new attack does big Area of Effect damage, just like the other 5 attacks I have that I can pull off easier. It's not complex, it's convoluted. While I get people want to use a lot of moves in these game, there effectively still not a lot of moves here. And it doesn’t help that I dislike how flaccid the attack animations usually end up being.

Fights take soooooooooo fucking long and I felt like a loser the entire time I was playing. The idea is that you are supposed to handle enemies using the QTE prompts that take them out in one shot. If the QTE animations were snappy and clean and the inputs were intuitive, maybe that would work, but the reward never felt worth the risk. I get that it's hard to balance a level curve, but it's not just in combat where you feel profoundly lame. It takes like 5 hits to break down a wooden boarded passage way. Some real life humans can do that in less attempts. And some real life humans can jump higher too. The vertical for the Werehog is tragic. Like Knuckles in Sonic 2 levels of tragic. Despite Sonic's new found melanin, his hops are more pathetic than ever and it's a damn shame. It doesn't feel like you are playing as some super strong monster, just some above average dude whose default walking speed is on Crowded Grocery Store settings. What's the fantasy supposed to be here? I don't want to be a guy who can only grab onto ledges at seemingly random points. It's not a dream from me. The game feel for this character is a net negative. The controls of the Werehog feel like an adaptation of my battle with depression. It just takes so much effort for what it gives you, that it becomes near impossible to summon the will to go on.

Lastly, this camera is deplorable. You have very little control over what the camera angle is. This isn't inherently a problem as the early God of Wars have mostly fixed cameras. But UnleasHD just decided to give you bad camera angles for reasons I don’t quite understand. I can usually extrapolate why things are designed the way they are but here I’m baffled. The designated angles obscure so much of the screen half the time, making platforming a nightmare and off screen attacks a common occurrence. Being aware of your environment is vital to both platforming and combat, yet it is treated as optional here. This is a combat platformer, it should be one of the most important things aside from jumping and hitting feeling good to do (which it doesn't).

The Sonic Team Werehog does just about everything it can to be worse than the Dimps version. Unwiished is simple but it's good at being simple. UnleasHD is bad at being complex. It gives you a big move set without the fun enemies or a secure environment to use them in. Large droning levels that run out of ideas half way through. Insane gimmicks and spectacle that waste your time after the novelty wears off. HD is a game I'm impressed by, but will never truly like due to how sloppy it is. SD earned my love through tight design and not having a final level that retriggers anxiety disorders that have lain dormant for years (Eggman Land HD is evil, and the final boss isn't even a good cap off for it). And when I think about it. When I get to the core of the matter. It becomes clear what the dynamic between the two games represents.

Unwiished is 6th gen gaming. 6th gen games did the best with what they had. It was such a large leap from the previous generation and the hardware was regularly pushed to the max. But games were allowed to not be the best game of all time. They could be massive slabs of content, or marvels of performance, or mechanically innovative, or graphical milestones. But they weren’t required to be all of these at once. I think that’s why there aren’t a ton of embarrassing 6th gen blunders that come to mind.

UnleasHD is 7th gen gaming. It belongs to an era defined by doubling down on bad ideas and biting off more than you can chew because being impressive is more important than being good. So much of this game is poorly planned out and it’s all in the name of being the next big video game. And my affection for UnWiished makes it clear than I much would have preferred it to be smaller. Because even if it wasn’t as much bang for my buck, there would likely be less things the game ends up tripping over. The tech has caught up. We can see the game in its highest quality. We can see the game at it’s intended framerate. We can go between levels with nearly no load times. But none of that matters. Because not matter what hardware you play it on, UnleasHD is still a mid ass 7th gen game.

#sonic unleashed

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crowes-nest · 1 year ago

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Been working on the game a lot more recently, and wanted to talk at someone about it. So here's a way too long explanation of a cool optimization I made, like, five months ago.

You know how in old-timey cinema they had those rolls of film? Each cell in that film is a static image, but if you put the roll in front of a projector and spin through it fast enough, it doesn't look like you're viewing a series of static images, it looks like a continuous movie.

Video games do something similar. Many times a second, your computer updates the game state by computing the next "frame" of gameplay, and re-draws the screen to reflect the updated game state. These days, computing sixty of these "frames" per second is the standard.

Sixty frames per second can sound like a lot, though, especially for more complicated 3D games. I recently tried to go back and replay Nier: Automata, but my computer was chugging and lagging too much to be able to play it. Dropping the graphics settings can help, but my computer must be getting too old for that shit because it wasn't enough. Dropping the number of "frames" computed per second (the "framerate", if you will) can also help -- this is how Zelda is able to run on the switch's limited hardware, for example, but I quit out of the game before thinking to mess around with that.

Now, the game I'm working on is a simple 2D platformer, so I could technically get away with less optimized frame computation, but this kind of situation happening to one of my players is still worrying enough to me that I wanted to take the time to optimize things.

Each frame is split into two halves -- there's the Update step, where the game-state is computed (has the player changed their position since the last frame, have any enemies taken damage since the last frame, has the player entered a cutscene since the last frame and needs to change state, etc.) and the Draw step, where the game-state is drawn to the screen so the player can see the updates. Of the two, the Draw step is typically the more computationally expensive one. There are exceptions (loading in new areas being a huge one), but during typical gameplay this is where a lot of the computations happen.

So, let's talk about drawing.

My game looks like this while you're playing it.

The player moves around in different rooms. When they move between rooms, the camera slides over to that room.

Behind the scenes, all rooms in a "level" are loaded into local memory at the same time. This is why the camera slide effect is smooth, and why there are no load screens between rooms (but there is a load action between levels, and a pretty intensive one at that -- I may make a post about that later). These particular images show me moving between these two rooms.

So here's the question -- how should I draw the level to the screen? The naïve way to do it would be to tell the game to draw the entire level to the screen every frame, even the parts of the level that aren't currently on the screen. This would mean that, while the player is in the room labeled "Beginning", the game is still trying (and failing) to draw "Hop, Skip, Jump" to the screen.

This isn't as bad of a solution as it sounds. I don't quite know how MonoGame handles situations like these, but I have gathered enough to feel that it probably has some system in place to detect whether the thing you're telling it to draw is actually on the screen, and it can abort drawing it once it figures out that it's a waste of time.

The bigger issue with this is that it doesn't scale. Here's an image of what the second level looks like. For reference: the three levels at the bottom are the same size as the two levels we were just talking about.

This is a lot to be drawing to the screen every frame for sixty frames per second. True, most of those will be aborted draw calls, but that's still a lot of draw calls. Even if aborting is very quick. It adds up.

What's more is that the level isn't drawn just once -- it's drawn four times. There are four layers being drawn each frame, two in the foreground ("in front of" the player) and two in the background ("behind" the player). My theory of computation professor would probably yell at me for caring about constants here, but in the real world that 4x multiplier can really impact performance.

So let's optimize this.

What we want to do is compute which tiles are on the screen, and draw *only* those tiles to the screen, with the caveat that our method for computing which tiles are on the screen has to be more efficient than just drawing everything to the screen all the time -- so we can't just loop through every tile and check them one by one.

Simple, right?

Here's the function I currently use to draw one of those layers to the screen, in its entirety. Notice the "4 references" in gray at the top -- no bonus points for figuring out why I run this function four times ;)

There's a lot in here, so let's go line by line. I'll be skipping over things that I think are self-explanatory, but there's not a lot of that in here, so don't worry, I'll still be explaining most of it

First, this function takes in five arguments. A SpriteBatch is what MonoGame uses to draw things to the screen, a TiledLayer is a data structure that holds information about the level, a TiledData is a custom data structure that holds positional information about the level, a Texture2D is an image (in this case, it's the tileset -- the assets we want to draw to the screen), and the camera.

Next, it's time to do some math. Tiled (the software I use to make my levels) stores its data in an array. If the level is a 2D grid of tiles, then Tiled stores it as a 1D array where each row in the grid is placed one after the other.

That's a little confusing, so here's an image.

What we want to do is translate the camera's (X, Y) position into an index in this array.

We're going to draw these tiles left-to-right, top-to-bottom. The way this is going to happen is by finding a series of X-based indices to draw (in the above example, the last three columns) and a series of Y-based indices to draw (the first two rows).

Because we know the camera is a rectangle, the top-left corner is a good starting point.

This code converts the camera's X and Y positions (measured in pixels) into the left-most X index and top-most Y index of the array that we want to draw (measured in tiles).

(Ignore the bounds_xoset and bounds_yoset, it's code that allows me to link up multiple Tiled files into the same level. All the levels in the game so far are built from just one file, though, so the oset is always zero right now).

Let's make sure we know what these variables are talking about.

For the X, all we have to do is divide by the TileWidth. This is because the 1D array is just every row one after the other, so finding the left-most column is easy. If, for example, the camera's X position is 11, and the tile width is 8, then the left-most column will be the column that has index 11 / 8 = 1 (remember that these are integers). We haven't computed the Y component yet, so we don't know whether the first index we actually want to draw is 1, 5, or 9, but we have at least identified that it's the column containing index 1.

For the Y, things are a little more complicated. We start with a similar process to the X, dividing by the TileHeight. Remembering that the 1D array is just every row placed back-to-back, we can multiply by the width of the level to "hop over" every row that we don't want to draw. For example, if the Y position is 11 and the tile height is 8, then the top-most row we want to draw has index 11 / 8 = 1 * 4 = 4.

By combining the information computed for the X component and the Y component, we know the top-left-most tile we want to draw is in the column containing index 1 and the row containing index 4. The only index that meets that requirement is index 5, so that's the top-left-most tile we want to draw.

Phew!

But, arriving at index 5 took actually drawing a whole grid and lining up the rows and columns. Surely the computer can't compute this as easily as we can, right?

Sure it can! As it turns out, all you have to do is add them together!

Ignore the loops for a second and just look at the case where i = 0 and j = 0. Isn't that so cool how the numbers line up like that? Revel in it for a moment.

Okay, back to work.

The screen is 320 wide by 240 pixels tall in my game. I added an extra 8 to account for situations in which the camera's position isn't an even multiple of the tile size, then divided by the TileWidth and TileHeight, respectively, to convert the number of pixels on screen into the number of tiles on screen.

From here on, you'll have to remember that j represents the Y component and i the X component.

When computing the indices to draw, we start at i = 0 and j = 0. In other words, this is the top-left-most index we computed outside the loop. Because the i loop is the inner loop, we then increment the i. Remember once again that the 1D array is just every row one after the other, so to compute the next index in the top-most row, we don't have to do any extra math to i. Once we run through the entire row and the inner loop finishes, the outer loop ticks up and we start again, this time at j = 1. We use the same multiply by map.Width trick we used before to "hop over" the indices we don't want to draw, and keep on trucking.

From here it's just academic. We have all the indices of the array that are on screen, all we have to do is draw the right tiles to the right spots. Next we grab the tile at the index...

("0" means there isn't a tile there -- so there's nothing to draw)

...then we convert that tile into an index in the tileset...

...then we compute the location we want to draw that tile to...

...then we draw it!

repeat 5,083 more times, and you've now drawn a single frame of the level to the screen. Epic!

Okay, that was a lot of math. If you've stuck with me so far, stick with me just a little longer -- I'll make it worth your time at the end.

First, you might be confused how I can say that this is more efficient than doing it the other way. After all, it *looks* like a lot of math. And... it sort of is! In the case where the level is about the same size as a single room, doing this is technically more work than just drawing everything to the screen all the time.

But there are some things to keep in mind.

First, the case where this is slower isn't the case that I care about. If the level is really small, then drawing it to the screen will never take much time. It won't be the reason people's PCs get really slow and they have to quit out. It'll be the bigger levels that cause that to happen.

And in those bigger levels? Well, this algorithm scales insanely well. Look back at those for loops. It doesn't matter if my level has one room in it or 10,000, I'm only ever drawing a constant 5,000 thing to the screen each frame -- no more, no less. In computer science terms, I took this from an algorithm that scaled with the size of the level (O(n)) and turned it into one where the time it takes to compute does not depend at all on the size of the level (O(1)). This gives me the freedom to make levels as big or as small as I want without having to worry about performance.

Okay okay, I promised I would show you something cool at the end.

Because I'm using MonoGame, I have more control over a lot of things. Something new that I can do is dynamically adjust the "zoom" of the camera. It's not really something I intend to do in the final game because pixel art gets kinda weird when you change size on it like this, but it's handy for debugging.

Speaking of debugging, check this out.

Mission "draw what's only on the screen" status: success.

Note that things that aren't tiles (like the checkpoint in the other room or the breakable blocks that let you in there) are still always being drawn all the time, but there's only a handful of those compared to thousands of tiles, and I'm not entirely sure computing whether they're on screen would be more efficient than just always drawing them.

Still, leads to some funny images in debugging. This guy's sitting on thin air.

I'm learning a lot from making the game this time around, and a lot of the stuff I learned in college feels like it's actually finally making sense to me for the first time. Object inheritance is a big one that I'm really happy I decided to go all-in on early on in development, it really does solve a lot of headaches before they happen. Maybe I'll make another one of these posts in the future, maybe not. Who knows.

That's about it. I mostly wrote this for me, but it's kind of pointless to keep something like this in a place where nobody can see it. If you read all of this and tried to understand whatever I'm talking about, thanks, and I really appreciate it.

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sidestcriies · 1 year ago

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@more-than-a-princess

"Chiaki-chan!" Sonia called, knocking twice before waiting for an answer that never arrived. It was the right dormitory room, she was sure, considering how much time she spent there in Chiaki's company. However, she, and the rest of Class 77-B for that matter, hadn't seen Chiaki Nanami in a week and a half. Some of the more sarcastic members of the class were sure the Ultimate Gamer was likely passed out on her keyboard or a console, but Miss Yukizome had pulled Sonia aside after class that day and gently insisted she draw her friend out of her room.

After all, being the Ultimate Princess alongside the Ultimate Best Friend, Sonia had the best chance at negotiation for Chiaki to, quite literally, pause her game and touch grass (and drink water. Sonia strongly suspected she'd been hydrating with far too much caffeine lately).

"Chiaki-chan, it is me, Sonia!" She called again, knocking three times, this time with a firmer grip. "Yukizome-sensei and the rest of the class are concerned for you! You have missed quite a few days now, and whilst this school does not exactly frown on such things, everyone is quite worried about you. Surely you might pause in favor of a walk? Or something warm to eat?"

Tucked away in one of the many rooms within the Hope’s Peak Academy dormitories was the Ultimate Gamer’s room. From the outside it seemed innocuous, even a little too quiet, and it was for a reason: while some games are best appreciated with headphones for the optimal awareness of the surroundings, there are some titles that are best appreciated in mono, stereo or surrounding sound systems…And because of that Nanami had the brilliant idea of soundproofing her room ! That way she wouldn’t bother her dorm mates ! Of course it doesn’t look too nice, aesthetically-speaking, so she also added some shelves so she can store some of the games she had at home. A few miniatures here and there and the perfect setup for any gamer was finally complete ! Just in time for a brand new release : between Street Fighter 6, Etrigan Odyssey Origins, System Shock remake and having the opportunity of replaying some of her old favorites she simply lost the track of time.

It took her a few moments to realize there was a knock on the door and not one of SHODAN’s mutant cyborgs skulking around the corner. Standing up from her computer, she actually tumbled a little from not walking for too long, colliding against her Snorlax bean bag chair. Maybe she overdid it a little… Still, she managed to traipse enough towards the door and open it. ❝ You travel within the glory of my memories, insect. I can feel your fear as you tread the endless expanse of my mind. Make yourself comfortable... or something. ❞ she tried to sound cool like the villainess of the game was playing but Chiaki knew it failed. Badly. It was Sonia, it would take a Red Pyramid Thing or a Terror Mask --- no, she would relinquish in them. ❝ …What day is today ? ❞

#more than a princess #x nanami

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rsrandomthings · 2 years ago

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I’ve come to realize that I’m a very romantic person. The things i like, the characters i make, they’re all romantic. I write poetry. I write short stories almost formatted like poetry. I like romantic songs.

Let’s start with some of my characters.

Keirth and Asinir. They’re a dichotomy, light and dark, so similar and yet such opposites. That’s romantic. They’re gods, time travellers, able to rewind and replay time, making changes. They’re shapeshifters, powerful. But that’s not what’s romantic. The two are both immortal. They’re trapped together. Even if they split apart, sometime in their infinite lives they’ll meet once again. They’re in love. They’ve set up a system, where older non-important memories eventually get deleted, so the two never get bored. They always remember how they met, though. And the really good times. But i just think it’s romantic. Two beings of near-infinite power, in an intricate circling dance. Every few quadrillion years, the cycle starts anew, and they start revisiting the timelines and stories they’ve forgotten. They’re in love, forever, even when their day of meeting stands oh so far in the past. And it keeps getting further.

Let’s take the clockwork’s friend. He’s trans. And not the original. The original clockwork’s friend was human, and never satisfied with his body. Unable to properly medically transition due to living in isolation, he builds an ideal body for himself, and a brain scanner. Perhaps out of desperation, or out of hopeless optimism, he believes (or perhaps more accurately, wishes) that when he loads up the brain scan, his soul and consciousness will transfer over too, and his original body will die. It doesn’t. He’s stuck with a clone in the body he so wishes he could have. He’s jealous, but like a kind older brother, never shows it. The current clockwork’s friend, the robotic “clone”, knows the original is jealous. And he’s guilty. Even past the original’s death, the clockwork’s friend never takes the original’s name. Perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of respect. Even after centuries pass, he will never forget the original’s name, and he will never take it.

Last two characters, this time more of an aesthetic romance. The lone traveller is a, well, lone traveller. Exploring hillsides, with storms rolling in and nothing but a cloak, scarf, map, and compass. They’re happy with it. They’re pale, like old faded photographs. They’re a mythical being of sorts, no one sees them for more than a week, and no more than twice a year. It’s beautiful, but oh so lonely. The other, garden deer. He’s a watchman in the night, silver-embroidered cloak flowing behind. He stares at the stars. There’s no one around. It’s peaceful, but yet again, oh so lonely. Hmm… i feel like that’s a theme in my romance. A light loneliness. Like the romance of a lone lighthouse keeper, doomed to maintain the light in even the stormiest of weather.

Now for media. Night in the Woods. It’s just a small town life, but oh so romantic. It’s normal. There’s none of the worries i worry about. There’s no future, nothing to look ahead to. Just the next day. One of the most prominent songs is about just wanting to die somewhere else. Anywhere else. Just not in the dying coal town, with no opportunities. No chance for growth. Everyone knows everyone, and in a way, that’s lonely. There’s effectively nothing else but the little town. And the people inside, and the history of the town, soon to be lost to time.

A song that i like. “Expert in a dying field”. About a dying friendship, being the expert about all the inside jokes, their mannerisms. And it’s fading. They’re growing further apart, slowly, slowly. Lonely.

A short story I’m writing. About an automated world, that suddenly loses all its technology. The inhabitants work together, learning once again what their ancestors knew, but forgot. It’s not lonely, but the way it’s written, is. It alienates the reader. It alienates the narrator. You are not a part of this. This world is doing just fine on it’s own. You’re just watching. You’re watching them make friends, support each other. No matter what you do, you can’t do the same. You’re stuck watching the party from the corner, and you know every single person, you just can’t talk to them. They can’t see you. And they’re having fun.

It’s lonely. It’s romantic. There’s a romance in loneliness.

And i think…

I think that’s alright.

#rs rambling #long #keirth browben #Asinir #clockwork’s friend #lone traveler #garden deer #night in the woods #TDoEMS

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t045tbr0t · 10 months ago

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Disclaimer: I have seen some of these on „best games“ lists by people with exceptional taste.

Rez: This is a (successful, IMO) attempt to make Synesthesia, a condition where your senses merge (seeing sounds, tasting colors, etc.) into a video game. It takes the form of a rails shooter a la Panzer Dragoon, but what makes it special is that the soundtrack builds up in direct response to your gameplay. Don’t sleep on its spiritual successor, Child of Eden, either (though that’s really hard to play these days). See also: Everyday Shooter, which did a similar thing, but more indie and as a twinstick shooter. It's really hard, too!

Absolute Drift: An indie, top-down drift racing game. This one is all about learning how to perfectly control the car, with minute adjustments to throttle, brakes and steering. Leaderboards give an otherwise pretty zen experience a nice competitive tang.

TIS-100 / Opus Magnum / Shenzhen IO ("Zachtronics games"): Speaking of leaderboards! These games are so distinctive that "zachtronics" has almost become a genre unto itself: They make you do engineering tasks, like programming a weird computers, building assembly lines to do alchemy, or plugging together electronics modules. After you're done, they show you a set of leaderboards so you can see how much room there is to optimize. Someone finished this task twice as fast? Someone else only used 5 blocks to do it? Surely, I can do better too! (best with a group of friends who are about as competitive as you are)

Yoku's Island Express: Adorable Pinball Metroidvania. If those three words haven't sold you on it, I'll add that it has some of the smoothest controls I've experienced.

Dust: An Elysian Tail: Another sort-of Metroidvania, with beautiful graphics and a deep combat system. Would be amazing either way, but it’s also a solo dev project, which just blows my mind.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes: A turn-based competitive puzzler, with the lush hand-drawn graphics you’d expect from a Capy game. There’s not too many games like it, and it’s one of my favorite ways to introduce people to competitive video games - there’s all the time in the world to decide your next move, but the decision space isn’t as huge as something like Civilization

Flower: This was what thatgamecompany did before Journey. It’s one of the few games I replay semi-regularly, a beautiful, emotional experience. You play the wind, guiding flower petals around to revive a barren world. The final level is some of the most cathartic gaming I’ve seen.

Split/Second: My favorite arcade racer, bar none (eat it, Burnout). Some madmen have set up tracks filled with bombs and setpieces, and you can trigger them once you drift enough. You haven’t lived until you’ve dropped a 747 onto four other cars, watching the wreckage in your rear view mirror.

Marlow Briggs: The quintessential 360 era AA game. We have God of War at home, and it rules, actually!

Strike Suit Zero: Space dog fights with a transforming mecha. This was a kickstarter project, and the result is really really good!

Sayonara Wild Hearts: Another game that’s actually an EP, this takes you on a rhythm gaming quest to reconcile with all of the protagonist‘s exes. Awesome soundtrack, tight gameplay, and some really inventive stage gimmicks.

Every time I read a “Top 100 Best Games Of All Time” list:

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slashbitch2 · 3 years ago

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Extra Complications PT3

Previous Chapter

"Don't bother coming back into work tomorrow."

Her words had been replaying in your mind since the final encounter, bouncing round like a taunting echo. It'd only been a week since you'd stopped working at Alchemex, yet had felt like a lifetime of boredom and fatigue. With no job or persistent villain to chase after, if you could even call Liv a villain anymore, there was no reason to get out of bed in the morning, nothing to stop you from moping around your apartment. The days blended into what felt like one long sick day, disregarding the occasional break to rescue a cat stuck in a tree.

Although, your only sickness was of the mind. Whenever you attempted to get some rest, your thoughts would inevitably drift to Liv; the cold, distanced tone to her voice, the look of betrayal in her eyes, how empty the week had felt without her. By the third night plagued with insomnia, you were starting to accept that your feelings towards her may be more than a simple crush. On the eighth night, you decided you ought to do something about it and began to formulate a plan.

Entering the building like you were still an employee would be almost impossible since anyone who left their job was rarely welcomed back with open arms. It'd also be better to avoid the security and CCTV cameras, which you'd learnt used face recognition technology. And finally, locating a security card would pose a potential problem, as walking round the facility until you happened to stumble across a janitor to steal from was unfortunately no longer a possibility. So, what was the solution to all your problems? Vents.

Which is how you found yourself scouring over blueprints like a cliched protagonist from a bygone age movie, but at least the irony hadn't escaped you, and thankfully laboratories generally required a great deal of ventilation, so you had multiple routes memorised by the time the bus had arrived at Alchemex. You'd spent the entire journey on edge, fearful that any fellow passenger might accost you for looking so suspicious. But apparently an agitated figure buried beneath a pile of blueprints wearing a spider-suit underneath a jumper was normal enough to be ignored.

Nonetheless, stepping onto the concrete ground of the car park was a relief which inspired a tad more optimism. Moreover, leaving the burdening stacks of blueprints behind further alleviated some of your anxiety. It felt like a final confirmation that this was your one and only chance, and you weren't about to mess it up. Even as the building loomed over you casting a shadow of uncertainty, nothing could discourage your determination.

There was the remarkable sense that you didn't belong here, though it was a familiar sensation. One that persuaded you to tug the mask over your head before darting toward the edge of the car park. It was your belief that as long as you stuck to the outskirts of the facility, few would pay you any attention while you were out in the open. Therefore allowing you to manoeuvre into position and take the quickest passage straight to Liv's office. Which is exactly what you did.

The first stretch of the vent system was a straight drop, a narrow plunge that went on for longer than anticipated. Like a slide with no angle of inclination and a lot less fun. You hit the metal base with an ungraceful clang, certain that your legs would've buckled upon impact had it not been for the lack of space to do so. Overall an uncomfortable start. The remainder of the journey was a lot of crawling and muscle cramps, your only incentive being the occasional grate to peer down which reassured you that your destination was drawing nearer. Everything was going to plan.

Until you heard her.

Olivia's voice rung clear as if from a dream. It stood out from the general ruckus, initially leading you to believe you were hallucinating, that it was some kind of audible mirage. Yet you refocused your senses and it didn't go away. She was almost directly below you, separated simply by a thin layer of metal. With renewed ambition, you crawled toward the nearest grate as quickly and quietly as possible, frantically lowering your head to find the perfect angle, all just to catch a glimpse of her.

"What do you mean the program hasn't worked?" Liv pinched the bridge of her nose, her words laced with an an uncharacteristic anger. You'd never known her to be an irritable person, she loved her job and every challenge that came with it. Was she uptight? Sure. Passionate? Undeniably. But never angry.

"I've tried rerunning and rewriting parts of the code. And it just doesn't work!" Some poor employee (Mark, if you remembered correctly) was fighting for his dignity below. You could see he was flushing, wildly flailing his hands around as he tried to justify his mistake.

"You've rewritten part of it?!" She repeated, volume rising in frustration.

"I- I thought I knew how to fix it."

"I told you not to mess with my work." She growled, stepping closer.

"With all due respect," He didn't back down, clearly caught off guard and unsure how to deal with an irritated Liv. "it's actually Y/N's work."

Upon hearing your name, you ducked out of view as if you'd been seen. Although, it was evident that this was not the case, so slowly you edged forward to peer down at them once more.

Liv's face had dropped at the mention of your name. But by the time you'd settled back in place, anger was already seeping into her expression, then was suddenly smoothed into disturbingly sweet smile. "Well, Y/N isn't here anymore. So I suggest you keep your incompetent hands off of things you don't understand."

Judging by her vague wording, you guessed she hadn't told anyone the real reason you'd been fired. A fond appreciation flooded your mind. Despite everything that had happened, she still respected your secret enough to keep it. You begun to consider that maybe Liv cared about you as much as you did her. Why else would she lie on your behalf?

Mark muttered an ashamed. "Ok." Then left to try and atone for his mistake.

Liv stayed where she was for another minute before taking a deep breath, shaking off her annoyance, and setting a determined path. You assumed she was heading for her office and were about to follow, but then paused. Was this really the best time for a reunion? She obviously wasn't in the best mood, and if you had to guess, it was likely due to your betrayal. Was it too soon to reappear in her life? You'd arrived here with the intention to apologise and make amends, however, you had no idea how Liv would react or what would happen after. If there would even be an after. She could attack you on first sight for all you knew.

No. You'd come too far to turn around now. You continued along the vent before you could overthink the decision. It would be foolish to turn around now: the end was in sight, and rapidly growing closer.

Reaching the final grate, you were greeted with the familiar yet new aerial view of Liv's office. It'd remained mainly the same since your departure. She hadn't even bothered to remove your lab coat, which was still carelessly thrown over the chair you'd frequented everyday. And Liv herself hadn't changed much either, disregarding the seemingly permanent anger lines upon her face. She was sitting at her desk, head in hand, mindlessly flipping through a folder. It occurred to you at that moment that she didn't look irritated, rather sad. Another unexpected emotion for her to display.

After a minute, she sighed, tossing the papers to one side and bringing her other hand up to crash forward into. She looked defeated, seeing her this way felt wrong. You honestly preferred the anger because it showed she'd maintained at least some of her usual intensity.

You sighed. It was time to fix this. With unsteady hands you delicately unscrewed the bolts holding the grate in place, careful to make as little noise as possible. It was as you were removing the final screw that you realised something: you had no idea what to say to her. No planned speech or prepared apology, you'd resigned to hoping for a spontaneous burst of thoughtfulness in the moment. You sat there for a minute, fidgeting with one of the screws while attempting to come up with what you would say. Should you start by apologising for breaking in, or for lying to her, or for applying to the job in the first place? You had a lot of things to apologise for.

And unfortunately, the chance to think it through any further was taken from you as the screw slipped out of your hand. You gasped watching it fall, hitting the ground with an faint thud. Although quiet enough for most people to ignore, you knew Liv was too thorough to not investigate. And as expected, following your sharp intake of breath was the sound of a chair scraping against the floor, then footsteps gradually approaching.

Liv appeared below you, bending down to inspect the screw before glancing up. Her eyes locked with yours through the mask and widened in shock.

"Hey." The casual tone to your voice sounded forced and you grimaced. But rather than dwelling on it, you dropped from the exposed hiding place and pulled off your mask. You smiled awkwardly, eyes scanning and overanalysing her reaction.

Liv stepped back to lean on the desk for support. Her mouth was agape, but otherwise her face was worryingly blank.

"If this is a bad time I can come back later."

Still no response. The room was drowning in a tense silence.

"Well, actually I probably can't come back." With no social cues to interact with, you began to ramble aimlessly. "I'm guessing you'll find a way to patch that particular security breach." You gestured up to the gap in the ceiling and laughed lightly. "Sorry about that. I didn't know how else to-"

You're cut off as Liv moves impossibly fast, grabbing your shoulders and shoving you backwards against the wall. A thousand different thoughts run through your mind at once, all wondering what she's about to do. The majority are focused on the possibility that she's going to hurt you in some way, although, even if she did have the intention to cause harm, you wouldn't fight back. You were tired of conflict, especially when it involved Liv.

She was standing close, breathing heavily and saying nothing. You couldn't help but let your eyes flicker down to her lips, the temptation to kiss her becoming increasingly vehement. So instead you forced your attention up to her eyes, which held an air of confusion.

"What are you doing here?" Her voice was deep, full of unvoiced emotions.

You licked your lips, glancing at her mouth one last time. "I came here to apologise. I didn't mean for any of this to go so far."

"You're lying." She backed away slightly and you immediately missed the proximity.

"I'm not! I just-" You stuttered, then admitted in a quieter voice. "I never meant to hurt you."

She inhaled shakily and swallowed, your eyes tracing the movement of her throat. "And?"

"And because I care about you too much to let you think I did any of this on purpose." You lowered your head, her invasive glare becoming overwhelming.

Soft fingers firmly gripped your chin, compelling you to look up. Her eyes displayed distrust, confusion which you suddenly feel the need to wipe away. You wanted to make your affection for her clear, but found yourself annoyingly speechless. All the recurring thoughts and confined confessions that had been plaguing you for a week suddenly gone from your mind. You were infuriatingly at a loss for words. Although, the warmth of her fingers against your skin reminded you that actions speak louder than words.

You leant in slowly, giving her sufficient time to stop you. She didn't move so you kissed her lightly at first, searingly next. Your arm shifted to wrap around her back tentatively and she moaned faintly in response. Although, it wasn't until you allowed her to take control that any remaining anger dissipated. At that point the kiss became bruising, her hold on you tightening as a wave of shared desperation rolled over the both of you. Before the desperation could reach its peak, however, you separated from her.

Liv was almost panting, her cheeks tinged pink and hair a mess. She promptly attempted to kiss you again, though you dodged the advance and she whined. Her mouth latched onto your neck, sucking at the skin there.

Your head fell back against the wall, dizzy from lust. "Does this mean I can have my job back?" You quipped, running a hand through your hair.

"Depends." She murmured in between kisses. "Do you have anymore secrets?"

"None that I can think of." You smiled, the prospect of returning to what you'd come to consider as normality was an appealing one. Of course there were things you would need to work through with Liv, and many, many extra complications alongside having a relationship with your boss. But nothing easy was ever worthwhile, and Liv was living proof of that.

"Alright. You're hired."

#olivia octavius x reader

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hopeymchope · 3 years ago

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Parascientific Escape: The sci-fi “escape room” visual novel-style series nobody talks about

I can’t help thinking that Parascientific Escape would probably have an active fandom somewhere on the Internet if it wasn’t TRAPPED ON THE 3DS ESHOP.

I mean, it’s an escape room-centric visual novel-style sci-fi Japanese game that is clearly inspired by Zero Escape and very anime in its style. There are endearing characters, including optimal waifus/husbandos, plus a gradual buildup of an interesting fictional world full of political intrigue, its own countries, its own companies, and of course... psychic powers. Because you can’t have a trilogy of Japanese visual novel-style games featuring escape room puzzles without mental powers, now can you?

But as I said... they’re trapped as download-only titles for the 3DS. That’s fucking brutal.

Even so, there’s a pretty big 3DS/2DS user base still in existence. It’s not like they’ve never been translated or something, so at least we have the capability to play them. So if you look into them, what are you getting?

A basic overview: Parascientific Escape is a trilogy of anime-style games about solving escape room mysteries and tracking down evildoers via the use of psychic powers (obvious Zero Escape influences). There’s an overarching plot about a mysterious mastermind who believes it’s time for the recently emerged psychics of the world to take their place as the next evolution of humanity and get their own nation (obvious X-Men influences).

They don’t work very well as standalone stories; each story relies on information from the last one, culminating in a game that stars the protagonists of both parts 1 and 2 together as they finally unravel the motivations behind the events of the whole series and face off with the people behind everything. In addition, the escape room puzzles start out pretty easy in the first game build to be pretty frustratingly obtuse by the tail end of the third. And on top of all that, each game taken on its own only contains about 3-4 escape rooms. So when you bundle all three together, that’s when it all works as a single satisfying package.

Don’t worry about burning a lot of cash to play the whole series, however. The three games are $5.00 US each on the 3DS eShop and are usually on sale for $2.50 each these days. I got the entire trilogy for $7.50 US!

So let’s break down the gameplay and setup in a little more detail. Don’t worry; I won’t give any spoilers that go beyond the first five minutes of any game in the series. The twists and turns are part of the fun here.

The first game is Parascientific Escape: Cruise in the Distant Seas. You play as Hitomi Akeneno, a high school girl (because of course she’s a high-schooler) with the dual abilities of mild telekinesis and a type of clairvoyance that lets her peer past barriers or into the insides of objects. She finds herself trapped on a sinking cruise ship where some mastermind keeps systematically locking her into isolated sections while she’s trying desperately to escape.

I really liked how you could look inside of an object with clairvoyance and then use her telekinesis to manipulate the various switches and levers within, gradually pulling some object you need out from within a maze. I also thought it was clever how the solution to a new escape roomight require you to backtrack to a previous escape room to investigate some object or area that wasn’t relevant to that previous room’s original puzzle.

(One of the things I found most fascinating about this one is the ethical debate raised by Hitomi’s friend Chisono regarding how Hitomi got herself involved in all this. Chisono offers a perspective that is extremely unusual to see in most fiction. You can even say it’s pretty cold, but it’s not without having some merit to it. I don’t want to say too much about what I’m talking about, though; it’s better left as a surprise.)

The second title, Parascientific Escape: Gear Detective, almost seems standalone at first. You play as Kyosuke Ayana, a private detective and actual adult (!) who is 22 years old. A young woman shows up at his office and asks to hire him for protection. See, there’s a serial killer on the loose, and she believes she’s the next target.

We are swiftly told that Kyosuke was once in an accident that necessitated the replacement of his left arm and right eye. He volunteered to be a guinea pig for some very special prosthetics that granted him artificial psychic powers. As such, he now has “chronokinesis” — to the power to look back in time. However, he can only look back for five days, and he only has limited ability to move or manipulate the things he sees in the past.

Naturally, Kyosuke’s investigation winds up trapping him within some escape rooms that require use of his unique abilities to solve. Some of the hints at the proper timestamps or exactly where you should be looking when you peer into the past are a little vague, though, which can cause momentary frustration. Because I like to always be making forward progress, I actually preferred Hitomi’s telekinesis/clairvoyance powers from the first game. Still, Hitomi had some pretty basic puzzles in her rooms. I can’t deny that these puzzles took more thought.

Outside of the escape rooms, everything is undeniably a huge improvement. The first game presented strictly linear segments of storytelling between the rooms, but this one is more of an adventure game. You can choose where you go, select from a limited menu of things to do when you get there, and do all of it in any order you like. There’s usually a correct sequence order to progressing the story, but it’s typically pretty clear what the next step is, so it’s not like you’re just flailing about and trying a bunch of locations blindly. Besides, there’s no way to get stuck, so don’t stress it. There are even a lot of actions you can take that have no impact on story progression at all — they’re just there to generate additional dialogue that further develops the characters.

The tradeoff is that you actually get fewer escape rooms overall. The first game had four, but the second only contains three. This is also the first game in the series to introduce multiple endings; you get a number of dialogue choices throughout, and unfortunately, it’s far too easy to trigger the “bad” ending. There are guides online to help you trigger the Gold Star “true” ending, however. Just hit up GameFAQs. You might want to use the guide on your first playthrough, because I can say from experience that it’s annoying to have to replay all the dialogue sections just to make the correct choices. (Luckily, you can skip over any irrelevant sections of each chapter — including the escape room puzzles.)

In spite of my above whining, the second one is probably my single favorite story in the Parascientific trilogy. It’s a lot of fun.

The final game in the trilogy is Parascientific Escape: Crossing at the Farthest Horizon. Mysterious characters who were plotting offscreen for the previous two games are finally given faces, locations that were talked about extensively in both are finally visited, and the two protagonists of the first couple games finally meet and team up. It’s absolutely a culmination of what they set up in the first two.

The narrative jumps around from the perspectives of many different characters, but the most time is undoubtedly spent with Hitomi and Kyosuke. Sadly, there is no gameplay usage of Hitomi’s powers this time; the escape rooms are all done with Kyosuke, and they are more devious now than ever before. Personally, I found the next-to-last one to be incredibly obtuse and frustrating. I ultimately had to consult a video playthrough on YouTube for that. (The YouTuber in question didn’t seem to have the same issues figuring things out that I did. So I guess your mileage may vary.)

The “adventure game” segments make a return here as well, although they’ve also become a bit tougher to figure out. There are a couple of times when you might find yourself wandering the various location options, clicking on every possible action to try and progress. Luckily, there aren’t so many default options that you’re left flailing for very long. Even the longest period of clueless wandering lasted me a maximum of 15 minutes.

Once again, you have to make the correct dialogue choices if you want a positive ending. And once again, GameFAQs is your friend and co-pilot.

Ultimately, even the gated endings and occasional puzzle frustrations did little to curb my enthusiasm. I really had fun with these characters and their stories, I greatly enjoyed the majority of the escape rooms, and I was pretty satisfied with how it all wrapped up. The character designs/artwork get better and better as the series goes on. The selection of music tracks may be the same throughout the whole series, but I really dug on them, so I can’t complain. Do I have any other misgivings? Well, just one; the English localization is pretty sloppy. There are a pretty large number of typos, and the dialogue can sound stilted and awkward at times due to being a direct translation. It’s actually at its worst at the start of the first game. Luckily, after about 30 minutes of playtime, it settles in and finds its voice.

Seriously, they should really figure out a way to re-package these games for another system that doesn’t use the the dual-screen setup. Put all three of them together, and it’d easily be satisfying as a full retail release!

But for now, if you have a 3DS/2DS, they’re only $7.50 in total most of the time (and $15.00 at the worst). Do you like adventure game-style mysteries and visual novel-esque progression and, of course, escape rooms? You should give these a shot! And I hope these devs get to make games with bigger budgets and better localizations in the future.

#parascientific escape #parascientific escape: gear detective #parascientific escape: cruise in the distant seas #parascientific escape: crossing at the farthest horizon #3ds #2ds #3ds games #2ds games #video games #visual novels #Kyosuke Ayana #hitomi akeneno #escape room games

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tsuzuruchipalace · 4 years ago

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I love Obey Me, but unless I’m playing the events super wrong, I have to say I really dislike its events’ point/reward system.

There’s no way for f2p players to rank even remotely close to the top half tiers. In the latest event, to get the ranked memory SSR, which is the “easiest” non-SR you can get, you have to be one of top 1500 people out of over 167,000 players. Which sucks because that’s somewhere between 0.0075% to 0.009% of all players (my assumption is that they are about 200,000 who have played the event to get at least 1 point). And SRs are useless by Lesson 12? 10?, give or take. So it’s essentially not giving us anything.

I did the math for my specific cards this event, and if I played as much as the event allows me per day (entirely f2p without using demon points to redo battles because I need to save them for nightmares), I would still end up in the sub-6000th place, which is the 4th tier from the bottom and 10th from the top. And that’s not even accounting for the ranked memory and demon URs that are much harder to receive. (which are, respectively, about twice and three times as much points)

Other than getting the cheat cards from the Event Nightmare, I don’t see how I can get better at events without using demon points (and at that point, I think it’s no longer casual play). And the cheat cards barely help imo. In most other gacha games I’ve played, I feel like ranking improved as long as you constantly play the game, due to upgrading cards/getting better cards/actively playing the event more/learning how to optimize the game better, before it plateaus. However, insanely strong cards do not help you in the events. After you beat all the lessons, it doesn’t matter how strong your cards are since it just matters how much you can replay the levels.

Since I’ve started playing this game, I’ve been constantly ranking in the 2nd tier from the bottom, because every time I try to rank, I start out playing a lot, then slowing down exponentially when I calculate that it’s literally impossible for me to get certain cards. It’s super disheartening. I was so pumped when Satan’s birthday event came out that I tried my strategy of playing as much as I could per day. Then when I calculated that it was literally impossible for me to get his UR, I got super disappointed and stopped trying.

I also dislike how the pop quiz awards work. Once again, if I grinded as much as I could without using points (since I have a lot of AP saved up), I could get the demon SSR, but it would take multiple trips to Lonely Devil to even think about getting the memory SSR, the memory UR, and the demon UR. And it takes a while for events to show up on Lonely Devil, if they ever come back at all.

I get that Obey Me is mostly trying to make money. So they want you to shell out money so you can buy vouchers and points to get good cards for events and the main story, but I wish it was a least a little less p2w in the event so that it’s more enjoyable for casual players. I’m grateful for the UR chance boost from the anniversary, at least. That was a very nice update. Since it’s a gacha game, I didn’t expect them to be nice about that. I’ve played so many gacha games that I don’t mind low UR/SSR rates. I’m used to it. It’s mostly just the event rewards system and the difficulty curve I don’t enjoy.

If there’s something I’m missing about the meta of Obey Me!, feel free to object to my rant. Because I feel like I’m doing something wrong to be this bad at events. Or am I right about it being a p2w thing?

#mod tsuzu talks #not a3!#long post #game meta #i wish i could put this in the main tag but i don't wanna be annoying #i was so heated about this that i actually calculated the percentiles of each block of 'similar' tiers #i'm gonna follow this up with a suggestion for how to balance the tiering rewards a little bit

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dumbwaystodeviate · 5 years ago

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One Good Turn

CW for character death and a human consciousness being put in an android body.

It was a well known thing that Hank would lazily pull his gun at Gavin if Gavin was being an ass. He often got reprimanded for it but nothing really changed. It wasn’t like Gavin minded, he knew Hank would never shoot him and if it helped with some of Hank’s pent up emotions then that was fine by him. What Gavin didn’t anticipate was to find Nines defending him.

A little while earlier, Nines and Hank had disappeared into the archives room, something about finding a case file which, it turned out was actually on Gavin’s desk. He scoffed, Nines was better than that, could keep track of all the files. Once upon a time, Gavin would have gleefully marched after Nines, waved his failure in his face. However, times had changed, Nines was a deviant and Gavin actually cared for him. So, instead, he picked up the file and wandered down towards the archives.

There were many things Gavin expected but definitely not the sight of Nines pissed off and snarling at Hank. It was pretty obvious they were arguing and, if Gavin’s ears were to be believed, it was about the fact that Hank had yet again pointed his gun at Gavin the previous day. A warmth flushed through Gavin, not used to having someone actively protect him.

“If you don’t have common sense around a gun,” Nines was saying as he pulled Hank’s gun from its holster grimly. Of course, Hank snatched after it but Nines moved it away and slammer it onto the console behind him without thought.

The loud bang made Gavin jump and icy pain made it difficult to breathe. Looking down, his shirt was rapidly turning red and he staggered, not quite understanding.

“Why would you shoot me?” he looked at Nines, pained and confused even as his legs gave out. People were shouting around him, his stomach hurt and he whined through tears. All he could think of was that Nines had shot him. He had trusted Nines. Those were his last thoughts.

Waking up usually meant an alarm and eyes springing open while Gavin’s heart pounded. It had never included seeing a weird boot-up sequence confirming all systems are online and operational. Or a note about thirium levels being optimal. He opened his eyes.

Of all the places to be, Elijah’s lab, on a rig was not one Gavin ever could have guessed. He wanted to shrug out of it and give him a bollocking for such a stupid prank. Only, when he tried to move, a solid red wall stopped him from even twitching, panicked, Gavin tried to thrash but nothing happened.

“Gavin,” a familiar voice caught his attention and he turned to look at Elijah. “Can you hear me?”

The angry “of course I can fucking hear you” didn’t come out of Gavin’s mouth. Instead, he was given two option to choose from like the world’s most awful choose your own adventure story. He could go with “I can hear you, Elijah” or “my auditory processors are functioning” neither of which really appealed. However, a timer to urge a response ran out in the corner of his vision and a choice was made for him.

“I can hear you, Elijah.” That was not at all what he wanted to say but it was what came out of his mouth. He tried to scream in frustration but he could only scream in his mind.

“Is he awake? Gavin? Is it you?” Nines appeared with Fowler and Connor behind him.

As much as Gavin wanted to scoff, he was horrified when his mouth opened without his permission, “I am a GV200, registering Gavin as assigned name.”

The faces around him fell but Gavin didn’t see it, he was too busy cursing and ramming against the red wall to no avail. He was in a body, one that wasn’t his, made of plastic and metal. All his senses were sharper, he could see into the distance with greater clarity than ever before. But that didn’t make up for his imprisonment. Memories were hazy, there were patches of coding he couldn’t quite interpret, a faulty component warning flickered in his vision of he thought too much about it, like a phantom injury that was never there. In that moment, Gavin realised he couldn’t feel things like pain. There was a disconnect between his body and his whatever it was they stuffed into this android body.

Eventually, Elijah let him out of the rig and presented him with clothes beyond the underwear he had been wearing until then. They were android clothes, marking him as a machine rather than a human or even a deviant. There was sadness permeating the room and Nines reached for him, hand white. The connection of the interface was there but Gavin shied away from it, feeling as Nines pushed coding into him but it didn’t take hold, Gavin was a human, he wasn’t some code to be patched up and changed. Fuck it, Gavin was a unique human being, he wasn’t going to let anyone fuck that up.

Which was all well and good except he wasn’t a human anymore. He couldn’t even behave like that. Mission objectives filled his vision, gave him orders, there was some choice in how he responded to questions and requests but he was an obedient machine for all intents and purposes.

“Gavin, I’m so sorry,” Nines said to him in the precinct when Gavin was released back to work.

All Gavin wanted to do was shake Nines, demand to know why he was sorry, why Gavin had woken up in an artificial body. Instead, he could offer Nines a polite smile and a bland “I’m a machine, whatever you think you did wrong, it doesn’t matter. I hold no grudge or feel any ill will towards you.”

Seeing Nines’ face fall was awful, it made software instabilities rise and Gavin raged behind the red wall. He wanted to wipe that look from Nines’ face, make him smile like he used to. Wanted to kiss him like he used to. Instead, Gavin got to watch Nines’s eyes fill with tears.

“Gavin, I killed you! And I can’t even apologise because you’re a machine. I couldn’t save you. Elijah couldn’t save you.”

Staggering away from the red wall, Gavin landed hard on his mental ass. He’d been killed. It was always a possibility he would be killed on the job but Gavin couldn’t remember any active case they were out on. The last thing Gavin remembered was going to the archive room. Feelings of pleasant surprise, a warmth of being loved. Then...the glitch of a faulty component and Gavin clutched at his stomach.

Outwardly, Gavin was passive. He didn’t move when Nines approached him, leaned down to press a kiss to his lips. It all felt so final, like a goodbye.

“I’m sorry Gavin.” Nines turned on his heels and marched out, back too straight and too machine like. He had only got like that when upset and overwhelmed.

Gavin replayed the kiss in his mind over and over again. He could feel the pressure, the dry rub of synthetic lips against his. The urge for more was strong, there was something more there, Gavin reached for it desperately but he couldn’t break the red wall which kept him prisoner.

Work carried on, Gavin was assigned cases, completed tasks in his HUD. People around him avoided him at first until they grew used to his obedience. If Gavin thought the lack of friends in the precinct before was bad, it was nothing compared to how he was actively avoided. His sharper hearing picked up murmurs of “uncanny valley” and “creepy mannequin” as well as “a mockery of who Gavin used to be”. It hurt. The nights he was left to charge either at the precinct or Nines took them home. There was only one charger in Gavin’s flat, it was the one Nines used sporadically but now they shared it.

As time wore on, even Nines took him home less and less often. Dejected, Gavin had given up on slamming into the red wall until he felt battered even if nothing hurt. Well, nothing hurt except the screams on anguish told a different story.

Eventually, Hank came back to work, he didn’t even look at Gavin. Avoided him at all costs, only throwing guilty glances at him every now and then. Whispers went up about anger management and grief counselling in his wake. There wasn’t a gun near his person though and while he retained his rank, Hank wasn’t sent out on active cases.

Life carried on. Gavin stopped crying against the red wall and slumped against it, letting the machine coding run its course while he languished. He had no desire to do anything anymore. Nothing broke the wall, anger, longing, love, nothing worked. He got to watch Nines slowly pull away from him, retreat from interactions outside of cases. After all, a machine had nothing to offer a deviant. And all Gavin was was a painful reminder of all the Nines had lost and by his own hand at that.

Beyond the red wall, Gavin could sometimes see dialogue options which were what he wanted to say. They were tauntingly out of range. He’d given up trying to reach them. Until he was summoned to Fowler’s office.

Inside, there was a transport box and redeployment papers on the table.

“Gavin,” Fowler greeted him, Nines stood next to him with an unreadable expression. “You’re being reassigned to a precinct down in Florida. Your work here has been invaluable but in the interest of everyone’s well-being, it has been deemed best that you continue serving elsewhere. As a non-deviant android, you will be given a clean slate and a new start in a different precinct.”

Standing up behind the red wall, Gavin watched in horror, feeling his head nod in acceptance.

“No! No no no! NO!” He screamed and beat against the red wall in a panic. If he was redeployed, they might wipe his memories, he won’t ever see Nines again. He wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop on Tina’s latest stories which she used to tell him before he was killed. Gavin didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to be a machine. Florida could suck on his sweaty balls, he was not going there.

Despite his resolution, his feet carried him to the box, protocols were gearing him up for a shut down. Taking a few steps back, Gavin bodily charged the red wall.

“Please don’t send me away!” he screamed and rammed the wall again. Tears streamed down his face. “Please. I don’t want to go.”

He stumbled as the wall gave way, all but falling out of the box and begging as he slammed into something solid, words tumbled from his lips. Gavin’s shoulder hurt from the impact but he could only clutch at the fabric in front of him as he sobbed.

“Don’t get rid of me. Please don’t make me go.”

Solid arms wrapped around him, held him upright.

“Gavin?” Nines had never sounded so shocked, disbelief and hope tinged his voice.

“I don’t want to go to Florida,” Gavin cried.

“Then you won’t.” Nines said simply. He looked at Fowler who readily agreed, relief in his voice.

“Welcome back, Gavin.”

#reed900 #dbh gavin #dbh nines #android gavin #dumb ways to deviate #drabbles #cw: character death

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duker42 · 5 years ago

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Levi finally proposing to his s/o but she says no, leaving him very heartbroken. Over the course of a few days, he's pondering why she said no, thinking that he's not good enough for her. One day he finds her looking at the ring box in their room. He couldn't take It anymore and asked why she rejected him. His s/o breaks down saying that she thinks she's not good enough for him and thinks she won't be a good wife. He immediately makes her understand that she is worthy and that he wants to be-

***I think I cut you off Anon when I closed the Ask Box. If I didn’t get what you were looking for, shoot me a message. But Poor Levi!!! Poor Y/N. Clumsy in love people! 😟😟😟😟

💜Not Good Enough💜

Levi started the rapidly retreating back of his lover. Looking down at the box in his hand, he wondered how he had misread her and their relationship so badly. The ring laying in the velvet box mocked him. extremely glad that he hadn’t made the proposal a public affair, the humiliation of being turned down was a bit less painful since it was seen by everyone they knew.

His heart sank. He had always know that he wasn’t good enough for the dazzlingly passionate girl. His sullen manner and cold looks no match for the warmth of her being. He had hoped that she had thought him good enough, she had supposedly loved him. She had shared his bed and brightened his days. Her refusal had just confirmed his fears…he was destined to be alone.

~~~~~

Y/N brushed away tears as she sat in her old room. After rejected Levi’s proposal, she couldn’t face him, couldn’t sleep in their bed. So she had hidden out, curling up on the bed as she wallowed in her pain.

~~~~~

He tried to bury himself in work. Two days had passed since that horrible night. He hadn’t slept, being kept awake by reliving his worst attributes. Every time his tone had been harsh, or his manner dismissive had replayed in his mind. Those had to be the reason she had said no. Why would she want to build a life with a man who had no time for her, or spoke to her as rudely as he sometimes could.

Sighing he got up to go make himself some tea. He had dealt with loss before. He would just have to figure out to deal with the biggest loss of them all. In losing Y/N, he had lost his own heart.

~~~~~

When he returned he found the door to their, no...his, bedroom slightly opened. He knew that he had shut it tightly, not want to see the bed where he had spent so many hours wrapped up with Y/N. Not wanting to see the image of her flushed excited body spread out, waiting for his touch. Her sleepy smile as she kissed him good morning.

Setting his tea on the desk, he approached the door slowly, afraid he might find all of Y/N’s things missing. Really confirming he had lost her for good. When he pushed the door open, he found her sitting on the bed, holding the ring box. She was gingerly tracing the ring with a finger as tears slipped down her cheeks. Odd for someone who had turned that same ring away.

He couldn’t stand it. He had to know what he had done to make her reject the common dream he thought they had shared. Clearing his throat quietly, he asked one word. “Why?”

Y/N’s head shot up and she leaped to her feet. “Levi! I…..” She looked at his exhausted face, the pain of her refusal evident in his eyes. She needed to tell him. “It’s me. I don’t deserve you.”

“Huh?” His startled grey eyes demanded more information from her.

“I’m not good enough to be your wife Levi! You are so….you and I’m nobody! I don’t think I can be a good wife. I won’t make you happy. You can have anyone you wanted. There is someone out there way better for you than me.”

Relief flooded his system as he shot her an incredulous look. “Are you stupid? You are better for me. I couldn’t do better if I searched for the rest of my life.”

He pushed her back on the bed, quickly covering her with his body. Silencing her cry of surprise with his mouth, he poured every emotion he had into that kiss. He held her tightly against him as if afraid she would disappear. He drank from her lips as if he were dying of thirst and she was his oasis.

Pulling back, he saw the cautious optimism in her passion misty eyes. Looking at her softly, his tone was slightly forceful from his emotions. “Never let me hear you say your not good enough, Y/N. Now, marry me.”

Y/N smiled at the order and pulled her lover down for another kiss.

#captain levi #levi ackerman #snk levi #levi aot #shingeki no kyojin #aot fanfiction #attack on titan #levi ackerman x reader #snk x reader #aot x reader #shingeki no kyojin fanfiction #shingeki no kyojin x reader #levi x reader #levi heichou #captain levi x reader

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warsofasoiaf · 5 years ago

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Hi again, just a friendly reminder for you about Disco Elysium. I played it myself 2 weeks ago and I thought it was a wonderful game, looking forward to hear your opinion.

Here’s the weekend reminder about disco elysium: at some point I’d like to hear your thoughts about Kim and the deserter, but I’m sure you have a lot of first thoughts about the game’s narrative and styles at large and the overall themes ?

Yep, I’ve got many thoughts on Disco Elysium. Overall, I found it an incredibly enjoyable throwback to the classic role-playing games of the old Infinity Engine in a good way. It’s dialogue-driven in the way Planescape: Torment was, but was confident enough to avoid the pitfalls of combat that punctuated the D&D games in favor of a mechanical challenge of skill checks. All conflict is done through dialogue, either through picking a dialogue choice or engaging in a skill check. The game also helpfully gives you feedback, not only in your skill totals, but in how your actions influence the choices you’ve made. Did you take the corrupt union boss’s check? He has you over a bit of a barrel so it’s harder to resist him. Did you impress Cuno with your marksmanship by shooting down the body? You have a bonus to impress him since you’ve already done it before. This sort of openness with the mechanics of the game helps smooth over understanding of the functions, as well as reinforce the themes. Since everything you do is in the dialogue trees, and all of these choices occur in dialogue, it stresses careful reading of the dialogue box as opposed to something you just blow through to get quest markers or goodies.

Alright, let’s talk about the plot. Since there will be spoilers and it’s a relatively recent game, I’m going to throw a cut in here.

One of the chief themes of the game is sadness and loss, it’s written all across the setting. Heck, it’s even written into the name. Disco is the archetypical music genre that is dead, despite its followers wishing that it could come back. Elysium, the afterlife of Greek mythology. It was a failed communist revolution followed by a failed monarchist rebellion followed by a capitalist invasion, and now exists as a pit of corruption, crime, and plenty of people within Martinase look back to the lost days by cleaving to the old political systems as a source of comfort. Communists and monarchists look back to the old communes that were established, capitalists look to the successful Coalition and the ability of capital to absorb its naysayers and failures into itself for success, and the moralists look at the other three and say “you extremists are absolutely insane!” and hold to their own centrist platform and the path of incremental caution. This is hardly unusual in our own history, with far too many historical examples to list here. There’s a longing there for something that is lost, the people you meet in the game are lost, even what seems to be simple comedic beats have their own secret wishes, like Cuno who ends up helping you in the final act if you lose Kim, and can even become a junior police officer once out of the thumb of Cunoeese. Harry can sing the saddest song about the littlest church, and it’s a perfect expression of his regret, as his reptile brain lets him know. The deserter is lost in regret, albeit an incredibly negative sort. He curses those who are not ‘committed’ like him, who aren’t willing to murder like him. He looks at the Rene, the old monarchist with his boule, and wishes only to pull the trigger and silence him.

The main character you inhabit is a great twist on the blank slate character that dominates the ‘western RPG.’ The main character starts the game passed out in his own drug-fueled excess. Where most RPG’s either expect reading a large lore dump (this was the case with the Forgotten Realms Infinity Engine games, which expected people to know who Cyric or Auril was) or largely wave it off with bland exposition, this was a game that made what happened an integral part of your character. What drives such a man to try and destroy himself so completely? Going through the game reveals the answer: it’s Dora, your ex-wife. Before, your obsession with your job (your case load, as noted by Kim, is exceptionally high), seemed to be at odds with your character’s penchant for substance abuse and overall instability, but exploring the failed relationship with Dora sheds new light on Harry DuBois. Dora was a wealthy woman, and your character was clearly a member of the lower classes given his demeanor and salary. Your character tried to immerse themselves in the work perhaps to earn more money, or simply to earn prestige to help alleviate the mismatch. It didn’t work, Dora left six years ago, and the detective has been alone ever since. By calculating the ‘cop tracks’ that the character can be on, the game can populate dialogue with references to the behavior, allowing the character to fill out aspects of themselves in a character-driven way. Tyranny did this with its campaign character generation, and Disco Elysium does it here. Such things are always going to be niche in RPG’s, the driving trend these days is instead make a completely blank character and have them be built out from actions taking place in the game world, but this typically leads to characters who rationalize performing optimal paths and who do everything the game offers in the world, which translates either into a lot of time doing repetitive content (in order to built up other character builds to the same level of mastery to the original build) or leads to ludo-narrative dissonance at the ease of which the character plows through the content, like becoming the Arch-Mage in Skyrim without being able to cast a single adept-level spell.

However, that isn’t to say that Harry is alone. Instead, the detective is quite a crowd is his own head, with the 24 various skills that he has developed largely advising, suggesting, yelling, and talking over each other. This was almost certainly part of the reason the original name of the game was “No Truce with the Furies.” The Furies, in Greek mythology were embodiment of vengeance, primal feelings that sought out their goals. These 24 skills in your head almost cannot be compromised with, only accepted or rejected. They’ll yell inside your own head to listen to them. Electrochemistry wants its next fix, Volition is certain that Klaasje is trying to manipulate you and wants you to slap cuffs on her right now, Physical Instrument wants you to show everyone who’s boss with fists while Authority wants the same with words. This was almost overwhelming at first, 24 characters to figure out in addition to my own character as well as Kim, Cuno, Joyce, Everett, and the Hanged Man made me wonder what exactly I was going to do. What was the difference between Volition and Composure, or Shivers and Inland Empire? It helps on a replay once you figure out what the skills actually mean and can help shape your character into your preferred vehicle for exploring Revanchol West. Dealing with these characters can be fun, insightful, and incredibly heartwarming, as the player can understand when they finally find out that Reptile Brain and Limbic System are simply trying to help Harry out with the loss of his ex-wife by trying to get rid of the sad feelings as best they can.

What helps with this though, is that failing skill checks is not a death sentence. One of the most annoying things in games comes when you depend upon success after success that is out of your control, it encourages save-scumming behavior. This isn’t to say that failure isn’t a valuable learning experience or that difficulty is something to be avoided; the enduring popularity of the Soulsborne genre suggests that difficulty is not itself a bad thing. But failure typically has to be fair. If instead a game drops you in a room with 25 gorgons, forcing you to roll 25 checks against petrification or die immediately, that’s not challenge, that’s just padding the length of the game by forcing repeat content. Disco Elysium instead makes failure, particularly of red skill checks, either entertaining or allowing alternate paths. I laughed with absolute glee when my character took off from Garte yelling at him about the trashed hotel room which ended up becoming a full sprint while flipping him the bird, causing me instead to run over the nice wheelchair-bound old lady, in true black comedy fashion, or that you can get into a nodding war with Kim that’s so intense that you actually break your neck. That the game offers so many different methods to the same path helps elevate the role-playing elements.

Similarly, one of the best moments of game design was when you looked at the billboard to find out where Ruby could have gone. It’s a difficult Shivers check, which might force people into an insurmountable wall if they haven’t upgraded their Shivers skill. However, doing stuff in the fishing village, from going on a date with the harpoon girl to tracking down what went on with the body on the boardwalk, gives you bonuses to the check, encouraging the character to perform the side quests and explore the bonus content.

The game’s side content really does reward some more of the Dirk Gently type of character that sees connectivity in anything. The old lady reading outside the bookstore doesn’t have a missing husband only to later be the wife of the man who died on the boardwalk, or that a grounded character won’t walk out into the water to speak with the apparition of Dora as the mythical Dolores Dei (another great reference to what was lost, the lost wife seen as the lost mythic Moralist conqueror and crusader) means that the more grounded character does have the more grounded, less intense story. But the short length encourages replayability, and the idea that a grounded character has a more grounded story is in it’s own way a commitment to the game’s overall vision, even if it means you miss out on a key insight the first time around.

I’m incredibly impressed at how the developers stuck to their visions and the finished product that they developed. My hat is off to them.

Thanks for the question, Khef, the multiple Anon’s who reminded me, TBH, and everyone else who was looking forward to this essay.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

#disco elysium #video game reviews

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