#this game really out here making me learn how to draw mech and armor

[teotoffee]

shot through the heart

(happy valentines!)

[ixcaliber]

Top 10 Games I Played In 2023 (Yes I Know What Month It Currently Is)

I barely played anything in the second half of last year and fell out of the habit of making these lists and then adhd kicked in. I’d like to go back to making little monthly media lists and I feel obligated to make some kind of 2023 Top 10 before I can do so… so here it is only five full months late.

10. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

Armored Core begrudgingly gets a spot on the list. Its sort of a frustrating experience for me specifically because while I really loved the fast paced dodge-focused combat a lot of other stuff didn’t click for me at all. I felt completely discouraged from exploration. I straight up did not gel with the equipment system and relied on Forgie to outfit my mech with whatever parts I had acquired. 

The dynamic between 621 and their handler is like so close to what I want from a game, but fundamentally unappealing because… it’s Walter. It’s some guy.

Look. Genuinely if this game allowed me to pick the gender of my handler it’d probably be my game of the year. Overall minute to minute I was having a good time but this is the least I’ve actually connected with a Fromsoft game. The only times I was really able to engage with it on more than a mechanical level was when Carla was on screen which just wasn’t enough of the time. 

9. Pseudoregalia

Pseudoregalia was my favourite Dark Souls game of the year and yeah I know how dumb a statement that is on the face of it (especially given I have at least one higher ranked Soulslike game on this list). But my favourite part of any soulslike game isn’t the combat or the big boss fights, its just the experience of exploring a cool and atmospheric location and Pseudoregalia does a fantastic job of this. 

Also yes I love Sybil and she is very fun to play and move as. 

8. The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog

The only Sonic game of 2023 that actually felt like Sonic. The playful tone and interactions between the characters made this a joy to play through. 

7. Chants of Sennaar

I think the name for this genre of game is ‘information game’. Consisting of games like The Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol and recently Botany Manor kind of does this as well. In these games you are given information that it is up to you to interpret and then asked to use that information, usually with some kind of notebook you can fill in to check your answers. 

I like this genre of game and yeah I like this one as well. While I do enjoy it I don’t hold it quite so highly as the others for kind of a complicated reason. 

In Chants of Sennaar you are climbing a tower, learning the languages of the various peoples who live upon the tower. At any point you can type in a guess as to what you think a glyph means and it will display this guess alongside that glyph whenever you see it. I think this works well as a system, the problem is you intermittently get shown a journal page where there are drawings of all the things that the glyphs you have seen could mean and you assign them to those images to validate them. 

The problem I have is like in comparison to Return of the Obra Dinn where you’re given the entire crew manifest up front, here you’re given word meanings shortly after encountering the glyphs they are attached to. The context of when you get the information changes the feel of the puzzles, makes them more simple to solve given that you’re not choosing from a large possibility space. 

All that said it is a fun game and I don’t know how you would work around the problem of verification without limiting the possibility space and simplifying the puzzles. 

6. Steelrising

There’s just something so compelling about clockwork automata and the trappings of Revolutionary France. I enjoyed the combat. I really enjoyed the exploration. I can’t think of any other Soulslike game that puts you into recognizable real world landmarks, and yeah I just really loved this one.

5. Coquette Dragoon

I need to catch up with Coquette Dragoon. 

The last time I talked about it I think I overemphasized the melancholy of this game. Maybe I was just in a weird headspace but I don’t feel like when I think back on it that that is the tone of Coquette Dragoon. The way I’d describe it now is soft. Soft with an undercurrent of sadness maybe. Soft that can’t escape being set in a real world with all the complications that come from such a thing, but soft nonetheless. 

4. Viewfinder

I wish there was a good term for puzzle games that sort of remind me of Portal. Predominantly first person puzzle games with a strong central mechanic, usually given to you as some kind of glove or gun or something and strong iteration on its mechanics. 

Viewfinder is one of those. The gimmick of this one is that you have a special camera that can reproduce anything it takes a photograph of in 3d space. 

It’s a fun game, the only criticism I would have is that the tool you are given is so powerful that it kind of feels like it trivializes many of the puzzles. Its like. Sometimes it sort of feels like if you were playing Portal but every single surface was portalable; it would be trivial to sidestep around the intended puzzle design.

This isn’t entirely a flaw though. Giving the player such a powerful tool and allowing the flexibility to use it is neat it just doesn’t necessarily lend itself to focused puzzlesolving. All that said, some of the later levels do increase in difficulty such that you can’t just brute force them with the same techniques you’ve gotten used to throughout the rest of the game.

3. Lil Gator Game

Lil Gator Game is a game about a little gator who wants to play a sort of Legend of Zelda LARP with his sister and pretty much every other kid on the island has been recruited into providing quests, monsters (cardboard cutouts) and loot (confetti). It’s a really neat little game that uses its setup not just to provide a fun experience but to say something about the joy of making and playing games.

2. Pizza Tower

Even though I’m bad at speedrunning through the levels as the game would really like me to, I can’t deny how well designed and fun this game is. With a great sense of humour and interesting mechanical variation in almost every level. This game somehow got me to enjoy boss fights with hidden extra health bars, which is saying something.

1. The Case of the Golden Idol (and The Spider of Lanka and The Lemurian Vampire)

I love information games. I love the deductive reasoning necessary to piece together these mysteries. I love the way the game builds some narrative elements in background, allowing you to figure them out at your own pace. 

The Case of the Golden Idol is just extremely good at what it does, its puzzles are pitched perfectly, providing you with enough prompts and clues to keep everything understandable and solvable, but never overdoing it and making it too easy to be satisfying. 

Look forward to Rise of the Golden Idol as my game of the year 2024 probably (unless Silksong actually comes out (it won’t)).

[cloudshoregames]

Your Mech is Different: Inspirations Behind BTE

Hi everyone, Dan here!

I've always been a fan of mechs. As a kid I would dream of growing up to be a mech pilot. I would enjoy shows like Gundam Wing, Zoids New Century, Escaflowne, and Big O while also playing PS1 classics like Armored Core and Xenogears. I remember one time explaining to my older brother that I thought I had figured out how Roger Smith piloted the Big O, pantomiming the movements with my hands and feet, only to be teased for being a nerd.  While there was no mech pilot's academy to join, some people could inevitably point out, "Well you could have learned to fly a jet or drive a tank. That's the next best thing." This notion, I have found permeates the mech subgenre of science fiction/fantasy. Mechs are certainly a power fantasy, but one that is very flexible. What they represent in fiction are different for each person and franchise.

What kicked off my journey into developing Beneath Twisted Earth was actually a YouTube video by Josh Strife Hayes, Armored Core - Was It Any Good? This took me on a nostalgia trip to my childhood playing Armored Core, and the various franchises I had enjoyed over the year. It got me thinking about if I were to make a mech setting what core elements would I include for it to be my quintessential mech game?  (I've Game Mastered for a long time, so this is an exercise I entertain often, seeing a thing I like as seeing how I would apply it to TTRPGs.) Most mech tabletop games in my experience were very crunchy, (Mekton & Battletech were first to mind). This is because fans of mechs like the idea of customization, and making their mech. Having that control over building your machine, but I've never been a fan of crunchy systems. I've always found them cumbersome and tedious. "I just want to play the game!", I would say. 

The next day I threw together a three page mech construction system, and jotted down some notes for a dystopian setting that I could use with my house system someday. I was really happy with what I came up with. The mech construction was highly customizable, but not overly complicated (no number sheets needed). The setting was suitably bleak for a game about war machines, but had lots of potential to be tweaked to tell many different stories'. As I excitedly went over it with my wife, she encouraged me to put it out there. After all, when combined with my house system which I used to run games in any assorted setting that there wasn't a game for, it could be fleshed out into a full game. So I did.

Over the next six months, I began fleshing out that write-up and combining it with my house system. At the same time, I immersed myself in mech fiction to draw as much inspiration as possible. I played any mech video game I could get my hands on, I watched lots of anime, I researched every TTRPG I could find record of, I watched lots of YouTube retrospectives/reviews, and for the first time I dove head first into the world of Battletech, reading through several of the core novels.

This encouraged my design of the game to be more diverse. I wanted to any players who sat down at the table to play BTE to think of a mech and to be able to build it. Not in the number crunching, twelve volume, 30 hours of work sort of way. There are players who like that, and there are games that catered to it. I wanted a game that an experienced player could create their pilot/mech in 10 minutes without sacrificing customization or growth for the people who just wanted to get in their big, stompy robot and start living that life.

Something I found compelling about this deep dive is what mechs meant to different people. When it came down to it, in stories, mechs were always analogous to other archetypes. Mechs can represent many things, but I most often found them taking the role of the following:

Tanks

Jets

Suits of Armor

Horses

Cars

Swords (or other weapons)

Depending on what archetype the mech filled, determined things like how important the pilot was to the combat, what sort of stories were told, and what the capabilities of the mech would be. Because there was so much variation, I also found a lot of conflict in the fanbase over what they should be. This only reinforced to me the importance of customization, not because all fans are gearheads, but because mechs represented a flexible archetype. That meant the mech should allow for each player to express themselves/their pilot. While one player might want an oversized gun on crab legs with armor a mile thick, another player wants an angelic suit of armor that allows them to have sword fights in the sky, and still others want a custom grown symbiotes with bone claws and mouth lasers that fire when it roars in anger at their enemies. All have a place at the table as mech pilots in Beneath Twisted Earth. 

Tangented a little there, but allow me leave it there to you followers and future readers. What do mechs represent to you? What is your ideal version of a mech?

TL;DR - BTE's main inspirations are Armored Core, Battletech, and Gundam. Also, mechs mean different things to each franchise/fan so individuality is at the core of the subgenre. Because of this customization and player agency at the two core principles behind the game.

Art by JGD

Preview Book now available at https://cloudshore.itch.io/beneath-twisted-earth

[official-alan-dabiri]

First and foremost, we have some exciting new changes that everyone can get behind. Absolutely nobody has a problem with the new experience globe mechanics. New experience globes are only at full value for six seconds, and after that are worth 25% exp. And then they last for thirty-nine seconds. Nobody finds this objectionable in any way. This change was not on the PTR due to public outcry from Reddit when it was leaked early, but it’s here live with all of its zero problems fixed.

Another change about which we have received zero complaints is a new tag system behind the scenes. People looking for just the right hero for the situation can easily find it by searching for such keywords as “CC” “Silence” “Sustain” and “Double soak” and find extremely useful and not absolute garbage results. Don’t worry about checking it ahead of time, just get right into draft mode and use it to find the perfect pick!

In addition to those minor and unobjectionable changes, we have removed Volskaya Foundry from the ranked queue, and added everyone’s favorite quickmatch map, Warhead Junction. We have also done this simultaneously with an Overwatch-themed event.

Hero changes below the cut, because this patch is another doozy, with fiiiiiive herooooo rewoooooorks, Four buffed assassins, three nerfed offlaners, two nerfed tanks and we also nerfed the looost viiiikiiiings!

Anduin is the first of our reworks and with him taking a more prominent role in Shadowlands we want to be able to welcome WoW players with open arms. He, uh, doesn’t have a new skin or anything, we just want people to play this game. The central goal of the buff is to improve his healing output in line with other heroes without removing the largest strength in Leap of Faith. As such, we’re just touching literally every part of his kit and talent try and praying that it goes the way we want.

People keep mistaking Johanna for the best tank in the game. This is factually untrue, since Muradin exists. As such, we are just gutting the absolute pants off of Johanna’s talent tree and making it weird and clunky.

For too long has Raynor been the scourge of draft play. Too good to skip, but not scary enough to ban. Perfect macro contributions, with respectable hero damage. Enough self-sustain to take weight off your healer, and self-peel for when tanks are bad. The perfect killing machine. As such, we’ve nerfed his damage into the ground. Start playing Greymane, bitches.

Stitches has proven to be a mediocre bruiser in the eyes of the community. After all these years, I think I know why. We accidentally categorized him as a tank. As such, he needs some serious changes to make him fit that label. This whole time we’ve been balancing him as a bruiser and nobody said anything? This is as much your fault as it is mine.

The average damage output of a ranged assassin has been steadily climbing for a while now. As a result, for a hero to actually be a glass cannon, they need some serious firepower. Valla now has the gunpowder to match her glass. And she’s the glassiest cannon there is. Don’t get me wrong, she still evaporates like a drop of water in California when an enemy hero looks at her. But when she has a solid tank and three healers behind her, the world is your oyster.

Oh my god they didn’t break down the heroes by category. Jesus Christ what the fuck Blizzard? You just decided that this is the line? This is the day you stop caring? Well, congratulations, you’ve made reading your patch notes mildly more inconvenient. I’m still doing this. Ya bunch of jack-offs.

Mei has been grossly overperforming, and we have no idea how that happened. We certainly didn’t buff her over and over again for an entire year. Anyway, we’re just going to roll some stuff back. Definitely probably fine.

It turns out - and bear with me here because this might be hard to follow - Hogger, D.va, and Sonya were all overtuned? For six months? So we’re just gonna tippy tappy them down the smallest little bit. And then slap them around a little for good measure. D.va’s mech form is no longer indomitable, Hogger can no longer solo any merc camp in the game in 12 seconds, and Sonya is now... Basically fine still, honestly. We kinda gave her just a slap on the wrist in comparison. But honestly after gutting Hogger like that, I just didn’t have the heart. One of the benefits from being a little later, alphabetically.

After riding the TLV train up through the ranks, I think it’s about time to recognize that I’m not actually good at them. They’re just overtuned. So it’s time to come back to earth, Icarus. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly-small HP nerf, though. The real nerf is buffing Longboat Raid. People are going to have to pick it to test it and it’s gonna murder their winrate.

Someone told me that Lucio is a problem and needed to be addressed this patch, but my cat came into the home office being adorable so I didn’t hear exactly what they said. So we had to kinda wing it. Hopefully these minor adjustments to his talent tree will solve whatever they were talking about!

Even we know Uther is a problem. Being first pickable and filling three different unique roles was what we wanted to do with Varian not Uther. So we’re going to try and make him incrementally worse at tanking until he just goes away. First up: Shaving off some of that personal armor.

AFK splitpush trash Azmodan is dead. Long live teamfight artillery mage Azmodan. Really glad I made the last HotS Content post about Nova instead of Azmodan because boy howdy do these changes invalidate the entire playstyle that post would have discussed.

W build Falstad has obviously become a problem. Not only was he riddled with bugs after the rework - don’t worry, we learned from our mistakes and made sure there were no bugs with our new reworks - but also he had the ability to point and click on an enemy hero and force them to run all the way to the next lane over in order to stop taking buckets of free damage. It turns out that ability was more powerful than anticipated, and required adjustment.

Q build Falstad has obviously become a problem. Not only was it completely overshadowed by a build that did more damage in every situation with less skill requirement, but we overestimated the value of macro power on a build that demands PvP for stacking. As such, we’ve doubled the amount of power each stack gives him! That’ll do.

AA build Falstad... Stay the course, buddy. Doin’ fine.

Junkrat has been underperforming, which is surprising for a hero with his level of power. As such, we’re going to make a few small buffs to hopefully draw attention, and then we can roll things back once the pickrate reflects his actual power. Hopefully then WE CAN FINALLY MAKE THE MANDATORY CHANGE I PUT IN EVERY MEMO. TYRE. WITH A Y. THAT’S HOW THEY SPELL IT IN AUSTRALIA. KAEO I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU- wait, did Kaeo leave? Who the fuck is still here? Kinnabrew? Adam? Jason? JASON! JASON!?

Tassadar has also fallen off a lot without us having done anything at all whatsoever to nerf him. Entirely undeserved treatment. I’m disappointed in all of you. As such, we’re going to tweak his numbers up just a little tippy tap so that you all remember who killed the Overmind. It wasn’t James Raynor or Sarah Kerrigan. It was Tassadar... Tassadar Bassadar. That’s his last name. Don’t look it up, just trust me.

In the bug fix department, we’ve had a nice sit-down with the Mountain Giants on Alterac and told them that if they have time to lean, they have time to clean. Reaching the end of their lane and expecting the core to come to them is putting undue stress on an already overtaxed position. The core is a very stressful job, and if the mountain giants could just do their part to walk into the core pit when they arrive, that’s a huge load off their shoulders. Drek’thar and Vanndar really needed this expectation taken off them right now, and I’m hopeful it will lead to a better work environment.

[barbosaasouza]

Hearthstone: Boomsday Project - The Dr. Boom, Mad Genius Design Interview

This has been quite the morning for Blizzard, particularly the Hearthstone team. Earlier today, Hearthstone Game Designer Peter Whalen jumped on stream with HCT caster/streaming personality Brian Kibler to reveal a handful of new cards for the upcoming Boomsday Project expansion. The biggest of these card reveals was the expansion's new Hero Card: Dr. Boom, Mad Genius.

Dr. Boom, Mad Genius was originally teased back during the initial Boomsday Project reveal video. On Monday, the new Warrior Hero Card was revealed in full:

(7) Dr. Boom, Mad Genius Type: Hero Class: Warrior Rarity: Legendary Battlecry: For the rest of the game, your Mechs have Rush. Source: The Boomsday Project Card Reveal Livestream

(2) Big Red Button Type: Activate this turn's Mech Suit power!

That's quite a powerful evil genius, but as one would expect, perfection doesn't come overnight. The bad doctor had to spend a lot of time in the lab to reach this point. In fact, Dr. Boom underwent quite a few changes on the road to becoming the big, bad, mech-riding explosives expert he is today.

Prior to Monday's livestream, Shacknews reached out to Whalen (still recovering from his time as a chicken) and Hadidjah Chamberlin to discuss certain elements of the Boomsday Project. But before long, the discussion turns to Dr. Boom himself, as we walk through some of his early iterations and his early art stylings before talking about the fearsome Hero Card he is now.

Shacknews: Tell me about the origins of the Boomsday Project. How did you come up with the theme and what made Dr. Boom the perfect choice to be the face of the expansion?

Hadidjah Chamberlin, Visual Effects Artist: Overall, for the Boomsday Project, we're going into the Netherstorm, where Dr. Boom has been working in his new, bigger, better, secret-er lab since GvG. He's there, he's got nine different labs running there, one for each class and each with its own Legendary scientist heading up the lab. Dr. Boom is, of course, heading up both the Warrior lab, and as you might guess, Boom Labs, with the giant "BOOM" sign on it. He's styled himself the big boss of the whole thing, with a whole bunch of new mechs and a whole lot of irresponsible science rolling around in there.

Shacknews: This is a bit of a fun question for me, because I'd like to know the origins of Dr. Boom himself. Hearthstone has taken so much from the Warcraft universe, but I believe Dr. Boom is a more original creation and I'd like to learn about how he came to be.

Peter Whalen, Hearthstone Game Designer/Ex-Chicken: He's not, actually! He's a Quest Mob in World of Warcraft!

Shacknews: Ooh!

Whalen: There's a Netherstorm quest associated him, he's the bad guy of it, you have to fight him and his Boom Bots. But he showed up in GvG and took on a life of his own. In the Hearthstone community, he really is the great villain. He was a great villain in the community, he was a super powerful card and is really a cool character that in the Hearthstone zeitgeist is this overwhelming figure. So when we were going to make the science deck, it made sense to harken back to Dr. Boom and have him be the one that's running this crazy lab.

Shacknews: Speaking of GvG, there seems to be a renewed emphasis on Mechs, which tells me that the Boomsday Project will not only add to the Wild decks, but it'll also offer extra synergies with a lot of those Wild decks. Was that one of the goals of the expansion, giving that extra appeal to Wild players?

Whalen: It was mostly a top-down design, and by that, I mean, it was a story-driven decision. We want to make the science deck and our most science-y minion type is definitely Mechs. So we wanted to bring Mechs back for this expansion and if we're doing that, we wanted to do that in a cool new way. So what was the thing we could add onto it? How has Dr. Boom modified his Mechs to be extra cool? That brings us to the Magnetic mechanic.

Magnetic means either you can play this Mech on its own or you could play it next to one of the other Mechs, to the left of another Mech, and they'll fuse together, granting all of its Attack, Health, and abilities. An example is Beryllium Nullifier, a Warrior Mech that's a 3/8. It can't be targeted by spells and Hero Powers and it's a giant Mech. You can either play that on its own or you can play it next to one of your Mechs and they'll attach together to grant that Mech +3/+8 and it can't be targeted by spells or Hero Powers.

Shacknews: Next, I want to talk about Stargazer Luna. Her effect is all about card positioning. Is this an idea that the team has wanted to implement for a while and will future cards also take that kind of card positioning into account?

Whalen: We like playing with a lot of different things. This being the science deck, we're experimenting with a ton of different mechanics. Luna is all about looking out into space and hoping that good things happen and trying to figure out the positions of the stars. So when the stars align and your rightmost card is playable and you can keep drawing your rightmost card and keep playing it, she's amazing. She does some really cool things and you can build your deck to play around that.

It's a lot of fun dealing with hand positioning. It's very different from minion positioning, because the way you control it is different, with the rightmost cards being the most recently drawn ones and the leftmost cards being that ones that have been there the longest, the ones that tend to be high cost situational stuff. There's a lot of interesting gameplay that comes from playing left or rightmost cards in your hand, so I definitely think it's design space we can explore in the future, as well.

The final version of Dr. Boom, Mad Genius

Shacknews: Now I want to move on to Dr. Boom, the Hero Card. This is a card that has clearly went through several iterations. How did the team decide on this final version?

Whalen: Because he's awesome! This is Dr. Boom in a giant mech suit! When we were thinking about what the fantasy for Boom is, we saw him in GvG standing on his own… how has he spent his time, what kind of science and research has been doing? Warriors are all about mechanical engineering in this expansion. And how has Dr. Boom done that? He's built himself the coolest suit of all-time.

But he's Dr. Boom and he's a goblin… so he doesn't quite know how it works? So he realizes he has this one Big Red Button and he jams it! And every turn, it's going to do something a little bit different. He fiddles with some dials and knobs over the course of the turn, but then you hit that Big Red Button and you hope it's something really cool.

The way Dr. Boom's Hero Power works is that every turn it changes into something different. And it changes on your opponent's turn, so they can see what it's going to be and they can react to it. And then on your turn, you can opt to use it. Whether you use it or not, next turn it'll be something different. So there's five different ones that it switches between and they're a lot of fun to use, but it's also a really cool story of Dr. Boom in his uber-suit, that he doesn't quite know how all the pieces work.

Shacknews: I want to touch on the Hero Power, because if there's one thing I remember from cartoons and kids shows, it's that there's always a big red button and that means it's something dangerous. Can you go into detail on what those five different abilities are?

Whalen: The abilities are Summon three 1/1 Mechs, Discover a Mech, Deal 3 Damage, Deal 1 Damage to All Enemies, and Gain 7 Armor. The Summon three 1/1 Mechs is especially interesting because of his Battlecry, which gives all your Mechs Rush. So that lets you deal 3 damage however you want among enemy minions, so you get to attack with those Mechs as soon as they come out.

The 'Infamous' Dr. Boom (first design iteration)

Shacknews: I'd like to talk about some of the earlier iterations of the Dr. Boom Hero Card. The first one is a bit of a curiosity. It's 30 Mana, but gets subtracted by any Mana spent on Mechs. But it doesn't have any other effects. Was the idea that the Big Red Button would carry him all the way through?

Whalen: So he had a Hero Power… I think his Hero Power was "Summon two 2/2 Kaboom Bots." And Kaboom Bots meant "Deal 4 damage to a random enemy" or "random enemy minion." I don't remember exactly. So it was like a Boom Bot, but it would always hit for 4.

The 'Infamous' Dr. Boom (second design iteration)

Shacknews: Now I'd like to get into the second iteration of Dr. Boom and that one looked a lot closer to classic Dr. Boom, which basically summoned a pair of Boom Bots. But while he was cheaper, he didn't come with the 7/7 body. So what made the team decide against this version of the card?

Whalen: Boom Bots have a lot of variants in them. This one was pretty cool, there's a lot of fun that's going on in Boom Bots. His Hero Power, again, I believe was "Summon a 1/1 Boom Bot," rather than the Big Red Button. The Big Red Button came later, along with the Battlecry.

This had some good things and some bad things. It wasn't really a buildaround. We like it when, especially our cool Legendary cards, are buildaround cards that can drive new archetypes that allow you to experiment with your collection in different ways. So the current Dr. Boom design that gives all your Mechs Rush is a lot better if you have Mechs in your deck. You could take advantage of that, this card becomes much more powerful, so you're inclined to put different cards in. But make sure that this only goes in some of your decks, rather than… every single deck is playing Dr. Boom. That's something that might have happened in the past at one point, so we wanted to make sure that wasn't going to be the case here.

In this case, the "Summon 1/1 Boom Bots" effect was interesting, but it didn't really drive you to build your deck in a different way. Either we could balance that so it's on the weak side, make it so strong that you're putting it everywhere… it's a little bit trickier and it's just not as interesting. Giving your Mechs Rush was just a lot more fun and the Big Red Button Hero Power is insanely fun. I actually really enjoy this, it's one of my favorite cards in the set. So once we hit on the story of "You have a giant button and you don't understand what it does," it blew the old designs out of the water.

The first three art iterations of Dr. Boom, Mad Genius

Shacknews: We've gotten very excited about Dr. Boom's mech suit and now I'd like to talk about how his art has evolved over the course of the set, especially juxtaposed with Dr. Boom's original look in Goblins vs. Gnomes. Tell me about how Dr. Boom's look has evolved leading up to the card's final reveal.

Whalen: Early on, we're trying to figure out what Dr. Boom is going to look like in this expansion. Finally, we settled on he's going to have a giant mech suit. He's going to be in this really cool powerful thing, he's going to feel like a Warrior, he's got the big, smashy claw, it's going to be really cool. So the question is, what's the best version of that?

In early concepting, we got pretty close to where he ended up. He's got the big, smashy claw, he's got the laser arm. Some of the stuff we wanted to evolve with was we got rid of the glass dome over his head, so that he was more "out there" and a big piece of the art. We fiddled with how many tentacle claws and drill arms and cool things are going on with his back and how many extra arms he has. It's a little over-the-top, maybe a lot over-the-top, because he's Dr. Boom and he's a mad genius.

A few color changes later and here's the final art for Dr. Boom, Mad Genius

Shacknews: Lastly, what makes Dr. Boom work best as a Warrior, as opposed to a different class or even a Neutral card?

Whalen: We talked a lot about what the best place to put Dr. Boom is. We asked around the team and some other Hearthstone players in the company and everyone had sort of a different vision for him. Some said, "Oh, he makes sense as a Hunter, because his Boom Bots are his pets and he really loves those Boom Bots." Other people thought, "Well, he's pretty evil, he was really the nemesis in Goblins vs. Gnomes, that makes him a Warlock." And other people put him in Mage, because Mage was a very Mech-y class in Goblins vs. Gnomes.

To me and to the majority of the people we talked to, Warrior made the most sense. He was this giant imposing figure, he would smash your opponent, he had these Mechs that he would throw around and there were explosions. It really made sense to us and felt like the Warrior fantasy.

We didn't want to do a Neutral Hero Card here. Having Neutral Hero Cards, especially while all the classes still have Death Knight cards in Standard, it's a lot. That's a lot going on with overlapping Hero Cards that are replacing each other. So restricting it to one class made the most sense to us, so it was just a question of figuring out, fantasy-wise, where he made the most sense. Having Dr. Boom in Warrior, who is really focused on giant Mechs in this expansion, made a ton of sense. And it fits in with his giant mech suit, which is a cool concept for him.

Hearthstone: The Boomsday Project is set to release on August 7. Shacknews isn't quite done with Dr. Boom, Mad Genius just yet, as we'll be giving him our full analysis shortly. Also, be on the lookout for our latest round of card breakdowns and analyses over the coming weeks, leading up to The Boomsday Project's release date.

Hearthstone: Boomsday Project - The Dr. Boom, Mad Genius Design Interview published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

[thelongestdamnreviews]

Shadow Complex Remastered

I bought Shadow Complex Remastered as part of a Humble Bundle and according to my final stats, it took me 4 hours and 22 minutes to finish the game at just 45% items found, Normal difficulty.  I used the Xbox 360 controller the entire time.  

Hiking with your new girlfriend is pretty fun, except the part where she gets separated from you while exploring the cave, and it turns out she's been taken captive by this group of people operating in this hidden facility in the mountains.  Naturally, it's up to you to rescue her and figure out what's going on.  There's a section at the very start of the game where you play as someone else with a taste of what to expect, though it's over pretty quickly.  

Shadow Complex is a 2 1/2D sidescroller exploration game in a genre called "Metroidvania" referring to the 2D Metroid games and many of the 2D Castlevania games post Symphony of the Night.  In order to rescue your girlfriend and stop what's happening, you need to explore this facility, finding new tools which will help you advance deeper in and will often have to return to previously-explored areas to use said tools to open up new routes.  But you're just some guy as opposed to a bounty hunter in a techno-magic suit of armor or a vampire or vampire hunter.  You don't even start with a gun!  

There's a boss battle here where you need to use the pillars below to hide from their gunfire.  

The game still manages to do things a bit differently despite its inspiration.  There's some stealth elements.  Not akin to "get through undetected or game over," but you can sneak up on enemies and dispatch them with a silent melee attack as opposed to gunning them down at range and drawing the attention of everyone in the room.  The game extensively uses all three dimensions to allow enemies to operate normally in the background, requiring you to aim and fire upon them and sometimes allow you an opportunity to take cover.  And given how almost every enemy in this game is capable of ranged attacks, I found myself making use of cover an order of magnitude greater than I have in other Metroidvania.  Special weapons still are limited by ammo, but so is your primary gun--you have a magazine you can empty and reload, but even though you have infinite magazines, you need to be mindful of how many shots you have left when you initiate a fight.  Enemies need to reload too, so there is some strategy in waiting them out to have a safe moment to attack and then hide again.  

The game strikes a mix of scenery, from the rocky forests on top of the facility to the lakes both above and below ground, to a cavern system, to the narrow hallways, to large cargo bays, to even a massive factory.  You don't have sectioned-off areas like "lava area" or "underwater area" akin to other Metroidvanias, so it's possible that places will end up looking pretty samey after a while.  Due to the movement system, you'll be spending quite a bit of time in airvents because there's just no other way into areas.  There isn't a very large variety of enemies, which can help for learning what each is capable of.  There is a small number of bosses too.  Map is pretty big, though it doesn't follow the "one square is one screen" idea I've seen in other Metroidvanias, so it can be a little tricky when your radar shows an item nearby.  There are two options for assistance, being a blurb about your current objective and also a blue line that passes through the facility to show you where said objective is, though the blue line does not update in real time with your current position.  

I somehow bugged out this mech, which made it an effortless but tedious fight since it could not attack me.  I never managed to expose its weak point properly, so I just wore it down with constant gunfire instead.  

The game's flashlight serves as a quasi X-Ray Visor, highlighting destructible objects in the environment with colors for what destroys it, like yellow/orange for the basic gun, green for grenades, red for missiles, and so on.  Even though it can't stay on forever, it recharges very quickly, so it's a wonder why there was even a need for it to be timed to start with.  You can aim your weapon and the flashlight in 360 degrees around you with either stick (left to aim and move, right for stationary), and while that sounds extremely useful, it was something I had great issue with and part of why I wound up not really liking the game in the end.  

Aiming at a structure to see what destroys it?  Great!  Aiming at enemies who are firing at you while you try not to get hit in return?  Somewhat problematic.  And that especially came to light in regards to dealing with enemies attacking from the background.  It felt like there was no way to predict if I would aim straight up or into the background, wasting precious time.  I left the auto-aim option enabled and that didn't seem to help much.  Because there's no mercy invincibility on being hurt (except contact damage?), enemies with automatic weapons are capable of burning through your health extremely fast, which further makes survival difficult.  If you have nowhere to take cover and fire back on enemies who might be off-screen, you'll need to bounce around like a rabbit on crack to avoid gunfire, and good luck with that because regular gunfire travels very quickly.  You are invulnerable during the melee takedown cutscenes, but you're helpess if you attract the attention of an enemy and are in no position to evade his gunfire when control is returned.  

I had severe slowdowns during the game too, which I thought was due to playing it on a regular hard-drive--after finishing the game, I loaded it onto my SSD and it still suffered from slowdowns and there were still times where the game hung entirely for a second.  There are no black screen transitions between doors like in Super Metroid, so the game likely streams all the data as necessary.  I know my rig isn't the best but this is still a very common and noticeable issue, especially given there's a Speed Booster-esque upgrade in the middle of the game.  I also had more than a few crashes, though those thankfully weren't very common.  Just having the game crash on trying to load your save is pretty disheartening.  

Saves happen instantly and there is no prompt or anything, just enter the room and it'll happen on its own.  There are recovery items in each that disappear on use, but I didn't actually run into scenarios where I was left in a bad state after a save I couldn't opt out of.  I didn't run out of special weapon ammo except for one case where I tried to solve a puzzle wrong.  Enemies do drop restoratives, and thankfully they'll pop out in the playable area even if the enemy was in the background.  I didn't have much luck keeping myself topped off by enemy drops, though.  

Story takes place in pretty much modern times America with an impending invasion from within.  There are a few cutscenes and some voicework by a pretty small cast.  You can thankfully skip the proper cutscenes but sections where you sneak through an area and overhear mooks talk can't be skipped.  Ignoring that there are two books about this universe written by Orson Scott Card, there's not really much story but it doesn't get in the way either.  And speaking of audio, I didn't really find the music memorable.  There was one nice piece during a section you flood that had to have been a reference to the crashed frigate Orpheon in the first Metroid Prime, but nothing else really stood out.  

True to Metroidvania form, you don't need all of the upgrades to finish the game. 

 It's not a terrible game, I just didn't really have fun with it.  And the problems I had really got in the way of enjoying what there was.  It does things a little differently from the formula but it's still a Metroidvania through and through.  Go find items and solve puzzles using your weapons!  Shoot a bunch of mooks!  Even if the flashlight gives away the solution most of the time.  I just don't see myself coming back to this one.  It's really a shame too since this was another begged-for port that I was looking forward to, and it just didn't do it for me.  

Mission results.

[barbosaasouza]

Hearthstone: Boomsday Project - The Dr. Boom, Mad Genius Design Interview

This has been quite the morning for Blizzard, particularly the Hearthstone team. Earlier today, Hearthstone Game Designer Peter Whalen jumped on stream with HCT caster/streaming personality Brian Kibler to reveal a handful of new cards for the upcoming Boomsday Project expansion. The biggest of these card reveals was the expansion's new Hero Card: Dr. Boom, Mad Genius.

Dr. Boom, Mad Genius was originally teased back during the initial Boomsday Project reveal video. On Monday, the new Warrior Hero Card was revealed in full:

(7) Dr. Boom, Mad Genius Type: Hero Class: Warrior Rarity: Legendary Battlecry: For the rest of the game, your Mechs have Rush. Source: The Boomsday Project Card Reveal Livestream

(2) Big Red Button Type: Activate this turn's Mech Suit power!

That's quite a powerful evil genius, but as one would expect, perfection doesn't come overnight. The bad doctor had to spend a lot of time in the lab to reach this point. In fact, Dr. Boom underwent quite a few changes on the road to becoming the big, bad, mech-riding explosives expert he is today.

Prior to Monday's livestream, Shacknews reached out to Whalen (still recovering from his time as a chicken) and Hadidjah Chamberlin to discuss certain elements of the Boomsday Project. But before long, the discussion turns to Dr. Boom himself, as we walk through some of his early iterations and his early art stylings before talking about the fearsome Hero Card he is now.

Shacknews: Tell me about the origins of the Boomsday Project. How did you come up with the theme and what made Dr. Boom the perfect choice to be the face of the expansion?

Hadidjah Chamberlin, Visual Effects Artist: Overall, for the Boomsday Project, we're going into the Netherstorm, where Dr. Boom has been working in his new, bigger, better, secret-er lab since GvG. He's there, he's got nine different labs running there, one for each class and each with its own Legendary scientist heading up the lab. Dr. Boom is, of course, heading up both the Warrior lab, and as you might guess, Boom Labs, with the giant "BOOM" sign on it. He's styled himself the big boss of the whole thing, with a whole bunch of new mechs and a whole lot of irresponsible science rolling around in there.

Shacknews: This is a bit of a fun question for me, because I'd like to know the origins of Dr. Boom himself. Hearthstone has taken so much from the Warcraft universe, but I believe Dr. Boom is a more original creation and I'd like to learn about how he came to be.

Peter Whalen, Hearthstone Game Designer/Ex-Chicken: He's not, actually! He's a Quest Mob in World of Warcraft!

Shacknews: Ooh!

Whalen: There's a Netherstorm quest associated him, he's the bad guy of it, you have to fight him and his Boom Bots. But he showed up in GvG and took on a life of his own. In the Hearthstone community, he really is the great villain. He was a great villain in the community, he was a super powerful card and is really a cool character that in the Hearthstone zeitgeist is this overwhelming figure. So when we were going to make the science deck, it made sense to harken back to Dr. Boom and have him be the one that's running this crazy lab.

Shacknews: Speaking of GvG, there seems to be a renewed emphasis on Mechs, which tells me that the Boomsday Project will not only add to the Wild decks, but it'll also offer extra synergies with a lot of those Wild decks. Was that one of the goals of the expansion, giving that extra appeal to Wild players?

Whalen: It was mostly a top-down design, and by that, I mean, it was a story-driven decision. We want to make the science deck and our most science-y minion type is definitely Mechs. So we wanted to bring Mechs back for this expansion and if we're doing that, we wanted to do that in a cool new way. So what was the thing we could add onto it? How has Dr. Boom modified his Mechs to be extra cool? That brings us to the Magnetic mechanic.

Magnetic means either you can play this Mech on its own or you could play it next to one of the other Mechs, to the left of another Mech, and they'll fuse together, granting all of its Attack, Health, and abilities. An example is Beryllium Nullifier, a Warrior Mech that's a 3/8. It can't be targeted by spells and Hero Powers and it's a giant Mech. You can either play that on its own or you can play it next to one of your Mechs and they'll attach together to grant that Mech +3/+8 and it can't be targeted by spells or Hero Powers.

Shacknews: Next, I want to talk about Stargazer Luna. Her effect is all about card positioning. Is this an idea that the team has wanted to implement for a while and will future cards also take that kind of card positioning into account?

Whalen: We like playing with a lot of different things. This being the science deck, we're experimenting with a ton of different mechanics. Luna is all about looking out into space and hoping that good things happen and trying to figure out the positions of the stars. So when the stars align and your rightmost card is playable and you can keep drawing your rightmost card and keep playing it, she's amazing. She does some really cool things and you can build your deck to play around that.

It's a lot of fun dealing with hand positioning. It's very different from minion positioning, because the way you control it is different, with the rightmost cards being the most recently drawn ones and the leftmost cards being that ones that have been there the longest, the ones that tend to be high cost situational stuff. There's a lot of interesting gameplay that comes from playing left or rightmost cards in your hand, so I definitely think it's design space we can explore in the future, as well.

The final version of Dr. Boom, Mad Genius

Shacknews: Now I want to move on to Dr. Boom, the Hero Card. This is a card that has clearly went through several iterations. How did the team decide on this final version?

Whalen: Because he's awesome! This is Dr. Boom in a giant mech suit! When we were thinking about what the fantasy for Boom is, we saw him in GvG standing on his own… how has he spent his time, what kind of science and research has been doing? Warriors are all about mechanical engineering in this expansion. And how has Dr. Boom done that? He's built himself the coolest suit of all-time.

But he's Dr. Boom and he's a goblin… so he doesn't quite know how it works? So he realizes he has this one Big Red Button and he jams it! And every turn, it's going to do something a little bit different. He fiddles with some dials and knobs over the course of the turn, but then you hit that Big Red Button and you hope it's something really cool.

The way Dr. Boom's Hero Power works is that every turn it changes into something different. And it changes on your opponent's turn, so they can see what it's going to be and they can react to it. And then on your turn, you can opt to use it. Whether you use it or not, next turn it'll be something different. So there's five different ones that it switches between and they're a lot of fun to use, but it's also a really cool story of Dr. Boom in his uber-suit, that he doesn't quite know how all the pieces work.

Shacknews: I want to touch on the Hero Power, because if there's one thing I remember from cartoons and kids shows, it's that there's always a big red button and that means it's something dangerous. Can you go into detail on what those five different abilities are?

Whalen: The abilities are Summon three 1/1 Mechs, Discover a Mech, Deal 3 Damage, Deal 1 Damage to All Enemies, and Gain 7 Armor. The Summon three 1/1 Mechs is especially interesting because of his Battlecry, which gives all your Mechs Rush. So that lets you deal 3 damage however you want among enemy minions, so you get to attack with those Mechs as soon as they come out.

The 'Infamous' Dr. Boom (first design iteration)

Shacknews: I'd like to talk about some of the earlier iterations of the Dr. Boom Hero Card. The first one is a bit of a curiosity. It's 30 Mana, but gets subtracted by any Mana spent on Mechs. But it doesn't have any other effects. Was the idea that the Big Red Button would carry him all the way through?

Whalen: So he had a Hero Power… I think his Hero Power was "Summon two 2/2 Kaboom Bots." And Kaboom Bots meant "Deal 4 damage to a random enemy" or "random enemy minion." I don't remember exactly. So it was like a Boom Bot, but it would always hit for 4.

The 'Infamous' Dr. Boom (second design iteration)

Shacknews: Now I'd like to get into the second iteration of Dr. Boom and that one looked a lot closer to classic Dr. Boom, which basically summoned a pair of Boom Bots. But while he was cheaper, he didn't come with the 7/7 body. So what made the team decide against this version of the card?

Whalen: Boom Bots have a lot of variants in them. This one was pretty cool, there's a lot of fun that's going on in Boom Bots. His Hero Power, again, I believe was "Summon a 1/1 Boom Bot," rather than the Big Red Button. The Big Red Button came later, along with the Battlecry.

This had some good things and some bad things. It wasn't really a buildaround. We like it when, especially our cool Legendary cards, are buildaround cards that can drive new archetypes that allow you to experiment with your collection in different ways. So the current Dr. Boom design that gives all your Mechs Rush is a lot better if you have Mechs in your deck. You could take advantage of that, this card becomes much more powerful, so you're inclined to put different cards in. But make sure that this only goes in some of your decks, rather than… every single deck is playing Dr. Boom. That's something that might have happened in the past at one point, so we wanted to make sure that wasn't going to be the case here.

In this case, the "Summon 1/1 Boom Bots" effect was interesting, but it didn't really drive you to build your deck in a different way. Either we could balance that so it's on the weak side, make it so strong that you're putting it everywhere… it's a little bit trickier and it's just not as interesting. Giving your Mechs Rush was just a lot more fun and the Big Red Button Hero Power is insanely fun. I actually really enjoy this, it's one of my favorite cards in the set. So once we hit on the story of "You have a giant button and you don't understand what it does," it blew the old designs out of the water.

The first three art iterations of Dr. Boom, Mad Genius

Shacknews: We've gotten very excited about Dr. Boom's mech suit and now I'd like to talk about how his art has evolved over the course of the set, especially juxtaposed with Dr. Boom's original look in Goblins vs. Gnomes. Tell me about how Dr. Boom's look has evolved leading up to the card's final reveal.

Whalen: Early on, we're trying to figure out what Dr. Boom is going to look like in this expansion. Finally, we settled on he's going to have a giant mech suit. He's going to be in this really cool powerful thing, he's going to feel like a Warrior, he's got the big, smashy claw, it's going to be really cool. So the question is, what's the best version of that?

In early concepting, we got pretty close to where he ended up. He's got the big, smashy claw, he's got the laser arm. Some of the stuff we wanted to evolve with was we got rid of the glass dome over his head, so that he was more "out there" and a big piece of the art. We fiddled with how many tentacle claws and drill arms and cool things are going on with his back and how many extra arms he has. It's a little over-the-top, maybe a lot over-the-top, because he's Dr. Boom and he's a mad genius.

A few color changes later and here's the final art for Dr. Boom, Mad Genius

Shacknews: Lastly, what makes Dr. Boom work best as a Warrior, as opposed to a different class or even a Neutral card?

Whalen: We talked a lot about what the best place to put Dr. Boom is. We asked around the team and some other Hearthstone players in the company and everyone had sort of a different vision for him. Some said, "Oh, he makes sense as a Hunter, because his Boom Bots are his pets and he really loves those Boom Bots." Other people thought, "Well, he's pretty evil, he was really the nemesis in Goblins vs. Gnomes, that makes him a Warlock." And other people put him in Mage, because Mage was a very Mech-y class in Goblins vs. Gnomes.

To me and to the majority of the people we talked to, Warrior made the most sense. He was this giant imposing figure, he would smash your opponent, he had these Mechs that he would throw around and there were explosions. It really made sense to us and felt like the Warrior fantasy.

We didn't want to do a Neutral Hero Card here. Having Neutral Hero Cards, especially while all the classes still have Death Knight cards in Standard, it's a lot. That's a lot going on with overlapping Hero Cards that are replacing each other. So restricting it to one class made the most sense to us, so it was just a question of figuring out, fantasy-wise, where he made the most sense. Having Dr. Boom in Warrior, who is really focused on giant Mechs in this expansion, made a ton of sense. And it fits in with his giant mech suit, which is a cool concept for him.

Hearthstone: The Boomsday Project is set to release on August 7. Shacknews isn't quite done with Dr. Boom, Mad Genius just yet, as we'll be giving him our full analysis shortly. Also, be on the lookout for our latest round of card breakdowns and analyses over the coming weeks, leading up to The Boomsday Project's release date.

Hearthstone: Boomsday Project - The Dr. Boom, Mad Genius Design Interview published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/