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parin-gurumin · 2 years

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I started doing these, like, lists of “what media I indulged in this year” in 2021, I love talking about the things i’ve dove into and expressing my thoughts on them in great detail. The first time I did this was on Twitter so the text limit was frustrating to articulate my thoughts in as few rampant replies as I could muster. I no longer have to worry about being annoying as hell with dominating people’s timelines because I can just totally isolate it all in this one post and just let people read it at their own leisure if they so please.

With the introductory and some backstory out of the way I will now talk about all the media I indulged in throughout the year. I will be giving my honest opinions on these things so please keep in mind that my opinions are my own and you might possibly not share the same ones as me. Your opinions are important and you’re free to think about things however you want. (monkey’s paw kind of thing when I say that)

THE MEDIA CAN BE: SHOWS, MOVIES, GAMES, ETC.

Since the year isn’t over yet I will keep adding on to this, so check back if you want to.

In no particular order, other than the order in which I remember.

moon: Remix RPG Adventure

Developed by Love-de-Lic* and released in 1997 for the Playstation, but never got to release worldwide until 2020 where it was released for the Switch then later on PC in 2021.

Ever since Chibi robo I’ve always been a fan of LDL* and getting to play the games they made prior to Chibi robo is a refreshing experience. I have to return to this game because I haven’t beaten the game yet, however the time I've spent playing the game thus far has been pleasant. The game is very vague and hands off with having you collect the animals, and I personally find that fun and engaging. Though there are some animals that are legit so vague and precise that you essentially have to look up how to obtain them. I love the music, art, design, environments, etc in Moon and everything feels so lively and full of love so I eagerly await my return to the game.

Murder by Numbers

Developed by Mediatonic and released on Switch and PC in 2020.

Let it be known that I have never played a picross game and at the moment I am too stupid to figure it out still. Whenever I think I’ve figured out how this kind of game works I always find out that I’m still painfully wrong. For a beginner it is very simple looking from the outside view but when you start playing it makes you feel dumb. I like the game’s art and visual novel story style, in addition to the investigations incorporating the picross aspect very cleverly. I need to return to this game; but I'll need to figure out how to properly play first.

Subway Midnight

Developed by Bubby Darkstar and released on PC in 2021.

For me this game is all about the visuals and not so much about the story because that was always what I was drawn to from the outset. A short and sweet game with many colorful and fun visuals to be had. I like to lump this game in the same category as YUMENIKKI DREAM DIARY for the similarities they share in gameplay and visuals, not at all the stories they convey. The most standout character for me was Benson as a human, because I relate to that kind of character.

Terraria

Developed by Relogic and released on PC in 2011.

Look, man. I’ve had this game for so many fucking years and never played it “properly” until this year. As a kid I always just played it how I saw fit, I used any weapon I wanted to use and same goes for the accessories because I didn’t think that the gameplay could possibly have complexity to it because of Minecraft numbing my brain. With my newly acquired enlightenment I jumped back in, playing as a designated class of my choice making sure to acquire the optimal accessories for said class that suited my play style as well as actually….utilizing the potions and buffs. Eventually I grew weary of the lax normal difficulty so I made the leap into Expert and it made the game far more engaging along with all the difficulty exclusive items that I could now use. I started getting some of the fun visual mods that the steam workshop has to offer and even made my own Yume 2kki music pack. Eventually I got tired of the vanilla Terraria experience so I turned to Calamity, I felt so refreshed. I could really feel that I had truly improved at the game at this point but now with the inclusion of Calamity I had a new world ahead of me.

I’m a fuckin addict when it comes to Terraria, I initially had about 300 hours or so in the game from years prior but I managed to add 200+ more hours on to the game in a stupidly short amount of time. I FIRMLY prefer Terraria over Minecraft.

Grub house lol

Team Fortress 2

Developed by Valve and released on PC in 2007.

SO, from Terraria to TF2 the theme is: Returning to games I used to play as a kid. Originally I dropped TF2 simply out of boredom because I didn’t have anyone to play with, but I think I returned to it again in 2019(?) temporarily because I now had friends (at the time) to play with; but that was short lived because eventually we just stopped playing together altogether. I started playing Apex in 2021 for a few months but dropped it due to my growing concerns with the developers’ employees rapidly leaving and it overall having a lot of strain on me when playing with my friends and/or my boyfriend. Ever since then I was assbroke and craving an FPS game to play but have no interest in/don’t want to play any of the modern release ones. This year I finally went back to TF2 and while yes I do not have any friends to play with I still have a lot of fun anyway.

I used to play as Pyro when I was a kid, but now I play as Engie, Medic and Heavy sometimes Soldier or Demo. But honestly if I’m looking to fuck around I’ll play as anyone even if I suck at someone like the Spy, fun is fun.

Also fun fact, when I would play as a kid I only had a trackpad. A FUCKIng trackpad and no mouse, but I somehow had the balls to play like that. I could only freely look around when I was standing still but I eventually figured out that as long as I was walking I could eventually unstick the camera by jiggling my cursor around. I’d have to repeat this any time I died or stopped moving, so I think it’s obvious why I played as Pyro LOL.

Also initially the game I fell back on after Apex depressed me was playing Titanfall 2’s multiplayer, but always the harvester gamemode. After TiF2 went to shit I REALLY had no FPS games to play, I miss my wife. (Titanfall 2)

Wobbledogs

Developed by Animal Uprising and released on PC in 2022.

Because my computer is 6 years old it’s not the best at dealing with modern games like this when too much is happening at once on screen. The game runs extremely well but it WILL have frequent spurts of just lagging my whole computer to shit and ultimately hindering my ability to truly enjoy the game more.

BUT, my computer aside…I had a lot of fun with this game and wish to return to it whenever I get a new computer. Wobbledogs is what I would call a mix up of Viva Pinata and Cubivore and that rules. I love my doggies.

AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES - nirvanA Initiative

Developed by Spike Chunsoft Co., Ltd. and released in 2022.

I have not been so disappointed in my liiiiiiife, I AM SO SAD ABOUT THIS GAME. I loved the first game when I played it in 2019 and still love it to this day. I was ecstatic to see that it was going to get a second installment, but I was overall confused with how they were going to expand on the story. I’m no newbie to Uchikoshi’s works and LOVE the nonary games series, specifically VLR. I was somehow hoping for the same treatment like 999 to VLR with taking a good game and making it a MASTER CLASS game but I was let down.

This game was way too easy, I know people had problems with the somniums in the first game being tedious but that’s the point of them. Dreams are nonsensical in real life, a majority of your average everyday dreams won’t make sense, they may even contain subjects and people whom you met/experienced THAT day but they’ll become perplexing utter nonsense. The somniums in the first game had so many red herring interactables that it made the time so much more cut throat especially when you don’t know what to expect from the cast. Aini greatly downsized on interactables and made them so blatantly obvious to notice with the labels that oftentimes I had so much time left over that I questioned why the time limit was so high still. Outside of the fact that I knew that that’s just the function of somniums with that being the final time limit every time in canon but also because a huge advertisement point was how this SEQUEL was beginner friendly so I can see why it turned out this way.

I was so…so…so unhappy with the game being beginner friendly because it made everything from the first game seem so irrelevant that it actually pisses me off to think about. A huge issue I have with the game is that the game just feels like it doesn't care if you played the first game or not because the “spoiler mode” was so insignificant that you’re essentially not missing out on anything whether or not you have it toggled. Outside of the characters making a different comment about a certain subject, that was also in the first game, in spoiler mode the only other thing “worth” mentioning is the anecdotes Tama or Aiba leave on the top of the screen for you to read. They’re…I guess neat to have there at all but otherwise completely unnecessary had they actually done anything substantial in the spoiler mode.

Look, I get the gimmick of this game with the whole pairs of two and the flowchart being in the shape of dna, but come on. The concept of the flowcharts containing many endings with different characters as the highlight of them has been extremely integral for enjoying both the stories and characters as a whole. The removal of that very system made so many of the characters into one trick ponies that are just there to be there until they’re relevant for all of 5 seconds and then someone else gets their time in the spotlight. Each character has their own internal struggles, secrets and motives which is why the multiple character ending system was SO important. The characters in this game are all over the place and you can’t get a very good read on them outside of what their entire purpose of carrying the plot on for Mizuki to obviously then take over. I hated that so much, the thing about Uchikoshi games is how cast forward they are especially with giving even the unexpected seemingly unimportant character the spotlight and getting to be fleshed out. I have practically no attachment to any character from this game as a result, because everyone BUT the main focus characters (protagonists and antagonists, but a few friends as well) for the most part don’t have too much going for them.

I could go on and on and on about how disappointed I am with this game and how had I known that this game would be how it was I would have just chosen to keep the first game as a one off but I’ll rein it in with this last thought. I am greatly worried about the future of the series because of this game and how it’s confirmed to be getting a third installment. Also, it doesn’t surprise me that a majority of the people who love this game are Persona 5 lovers, FUCK.

Placid Plastic Duck Simulator

Published and developed by turbolelento games and released in 2022.

From talking about a game I am so utterly disappointed in to talking about a nice and peaceful game. Although it WILL do the same thing that Wobbledogs does to my computer I still loved the fuck outta sitting idle waiting for my next duck to spawn. I loved watching the day to night cycle with the weather system, random encounters off in the horizon and music adding to the atmosphere. I cry thinking about the propeller hat duck escaping the pool and flying away every time. (that is a joke about being moved to tears but the propeller hat duck WILL escape pool containment) I also love water as a whole so just chilling out watching the ducks idly float by in a pretty pool is very :) for me.

I love the little mini baby ducks that eventually spawn given that enough ducks are currently in the pool.

Should have won GOTY.

#not art #wrenchspeaks

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foggypainterstudentfmp · 7 months

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Independent Research #1 (Games like mine either art, mechanics or both)

Rayman Legends:

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Rayman Legends is a very popular example of a platformer turning to 3D design as 3D art and design has become more of a modern gamers expectation in newer titles. I personally believe this happened because Super Mario decided to go 3D so all other platformers decided to follow as Super Mario is arguably the ring leader of the platformers.

Anyway before Rayman went 3D it was a 2D platformer game in 1995 when it was released. Rayman was popular for its unique art style as most of it was all hand drawn and it was very different for the reason of the character design for example Rayman has no legs his body just floats above his feet and the same thing happens with his arms. This made the game have a really unique and cool art style.

Also Rayman is very content heavy; meaning it's quite similar to my idea game mechanic wise as I want mine to have power ups like in this game as there are so many like helicopter power and punching and running. This is similar to what I want my game to be like as I want lot of varied and different power ups.

Rayman is also like mine for the fact that it has numerous ways to get through levels like climbing on vines and having random floating pieces of ground to jump on and berries to bounce on. This is similar to my plan of map design as I would like 2 routes for the player to be able to take; an easy and a hard route. I would like to include different ways of getting around though like Rayman can climb on vines. Although this isn't the highest priority on my list as I would rather have a functioning game first.

The game is also similar to mine in the design format as it is a very overly happy themed world with lots of fantasy features which would suit my world well for example the dancing flowers and the big pink toadstools and little jumping mushrooms in the backdrop. I will like to add this level of detail to mine but I am unsure whether It will be animated like Rayman or whether it will be a very decorated still background.

The game is also similar to mine in the game-play aspect as well as it has lots of different paths and obstacles which is something I want my game to have in it makes the experience more fun and gives the player some choice on routes they take and how they get around certain obstacles like enemies or gaps using their surroundings like launchpads.

Rabbids travel in time 3D:

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Rabbids has always been a 3D design so my game doesn't link to this at all in that aspect although Rabbids has always been a popular game and later on down the line a TV show using all the same art design. It is so popular that if you show someone just the face of a Rabbid they will know what it is. Originally their first appearance was in Rayman and then they got their own singular games from there.

I am going to research into a game like mine in this case their only platformer game in the rabbids series: Rabbids Travel in Time 3D. This game uses features that I would like to have in mine for example this game uses traps and it makes them move for example there are stationary blade wheels and there are the ones that move and the arrows on the linear moving towers are a good idea I quite like which I may incorporate into my game so I can have the same traps but make them different so they have a slightly different gameplay experience so instead of 5 traps I could have 5 stationary traps and then 5 of the same but moving. This game also features enemies which is something that I want in my game. I quite like that there are different looking variation of enemies which is something that I might do but only if I have time to.

Celeste:

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Celeste is a game I chose to research for the gameplay mechanics POV as it hass some really complex levels and areas. I found in the game from watching this video above that there is a focus on precision platforming. This is shown by the game having to have a dash feature allowing you to go further to make jumps actually possible. For example in this level:

the game makes you be very precise with your movements and jumps as the platforms are so thin and small. There is also an extra collectible floating right above some spikes on the floor which you could try to get; this is another example of this game using precision platforming.

This game uses lots more techinical mechanics than what you would usually find in a sidescroller for example: wall jumping/climbing, dash, wall sliding and being able to break through walls in the level to reveal more of the level. These are mechanics you wouldn't usually find in platformers as they are just too complex but Celeste is a game very much built around having modern mechanics to it so it can keep up in the modern games market.

Another thing that Celeste does that I just think is cool and deserves some recognition is that it has a different gameplay style for example it takes levels and splits them up into parts on the screen and they need to all be completed/solved like puzzles. I just thought this was a really interesting way of doing level design so I included it in my research.

I have also decided to throw in my opinion on the art while I'm here as Celeste uses a very unique style. I like the art design and texures for example on the bricks which form the level or the snow/ice or the textures in the background. I think the texturing is done really well although the colour pallete isn't particularly one I would like to use or use one similar to as it wouldn't match my theme as it is too dark and dingy and dungeon themed. I also do not like the character design as it is just too simple in my opinion as it contasts what they were trying to do for example they made a really detailed game and art and then when it came to character design they just didn't give them faces. But then they make it obvious that the characters hould have faces as in cutscenes there is a higher resolution drawing of the characters face with all these features on it next to their speech.

E.g:

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justpeachyyyyyyyyyyyy · 9 months

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The Clangen Challenge...

Before I begin posting, I wanted to put forth a Clangen challenge that anyone could potentially do if they wanted to. It's a little complicated, and a little Dungeons and Dragons-esque in a way... But I wanted this to be the sort of challenge where many things have the potential to happen, and can make your challenge more story-driven if you so chose to create a story of your own.

I will go into more detail in a document that I will be posting the link to in the future. In the document you will find the different options that you roll for. The journey will be 100 moons long, the challenge will be over if your entire clan dies - even if the leader or one clan cat is the last one standing, you can consider that winning the first portion of the challenge. There is no way to really play this accurately in the clangen game in the way I'd like to, HOWEVER you can still play this challenge within the game if desired.

DND-esque journey: This is a difficult roleplaying run, and can be complicated. If you want a quicker way to play, this is not the option for you. Have a number picker give you a randomized number from 3-12. This is the amount of cats you will start with. At a minimum, you will have 1 leader, 1 deputy, 1 medicine cat. They still have the potential to get killed off during gameplay. You roll a d20. Depending on the results of the rolled dice, there are 20 different scenarios that can be the possible reason why you clan is leaving their home. This is only meant for story driven purposes, "lore" of sorts before the game begins in clangen. I love lore and creating stories for my characters, and I love dungeons and dragons, so I felt incorporating dice rolls for randomized scenarios and events would be enjoyable. After that, for the next 100 moons, you roll a d100. Dependent on the dice roll, an event occurs. The journey is supposed to be treacherous and potentially fatal for your cats, and the goal is to try and survive - these encounters range from anywhere from light to potentially very fatal. You can create options of your own, or you can use the list I'm making for myself, and if 100 options is too much to keep track of you can make the list smaller. There will be instructions for each scenario, this will be included in the more in depth document. Again, this way of playing is optional and I wanted to have a way to give myself an added challenge and increased possibility of storytelling and lore. If a cat dies during this portion of the challenge, they get killed off in your clangen game. Again, the goal is to at least end up with 1 cat after 100 moons. Preferably you'd want to have more cats, since this increases the likelihood of finishing the challenge more quickly and successfully.

2. Clangen journey: This is a quicker way to play, and not necessarily the "wrong" way for this challenge. I don't want to play this way, but I also really like making things complicated for myself because I feel like that makes it more fun for me personally. There is no wrong option. You pick all of your cats, name your clan like normal. Roll a d20, this is for the purpose of creating a story- this is optional. This is simply the scenario that is driving your cats out of their home and forcing them to find a new home. Mass extinction events must be turned on, because again this is meant to be a challenge. Choose a randomized number from 3-12. At a minimum, you will have 1 leader, 1 deputy, 1 medicine cat. They still have the potential to get killed off in the game. While on patrols, you must be hostile towards any other cats. If in the events section a cat ends up joining the clan, you must exile them - you cannot add to the cats you already have. During a trial of survival where you don't have a stable territory and things are very uncertain, it would be very unusual and unhelpful if you added on mouths to feed. If cats in your clan have kits, you have the option to randomize the choice for them to either live, or die. This is a harsh environment afterall, and it can be hard to take care of a kit when you are fighting to survive yourself.

Other things: If the original leader dies, and the deputy takes over, they only have 1 life. They have no way to convene with Starclan at this time - and so they have no way to get their 9 lives. If they die once, you kill them off. If the medicine cat dies, you are left with no healer for the remaining portion of the challenge. If someone gets sick and there is no healer, you must randomly choose a number 1-2. If playing the DND-esque version, you choose 1-3. 1, they get better, 2, they continue to be sick, and 3 they die. You keep rolling this until you roll a 3 or they die. In clangen, you roll until they get over the illness in the game or die in game, or if you roll a 3 before they recover you must kill them off.

AFTER 100 MOONS: You win the first part of the challenge if you are able to have at least 1 cat standing, regardless of who the cat is. You can get away with winning if you end up with just 1 kit, but you can determine that rule for yourself in your run. Next, you must rebuild your clan. You finally found what could be a suitable home! Great - roll a d20 to determine what environment you are now living in. This has no impact on the game since you can't make your own custom setting for your clan, and this is really just a story-building portion of the challenge. It's what makes your clan's story unique if you decide to share your clan's journey throughout this challenge. If you played the DND esque version, kill off any of the cats that died in the beginning portion that you had chosen in game before you start playing. This time, there is no time span- your goal is to try to reach 20 cats, ideally in the shortest amount of time possible. For the first 50 moons, you have to be hostile towards outsiders - no letting cats in, no being nice to them on patrols either. After 50 moons you can choose to continue being hostile to outsiders or you can be friendly, depending on how challenging you want this challenge to be for yourself. This isn't a competition, this is just a way to make the game a little more fun for yourself- especially if you like lore building.

#clangen #clangen challenge #Rebuilding clangen challenge #Clangen WIP #Warriorcats clangen #warrior cats

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la-llama-sims · 3 years

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The Sims 4 Marvel Legacy Challenge

In my search for a new challenge to play to spice up my gameplay, I thought “hey, I love Marvel! Let’s make a challenge!” To make sure I wasn’t ripping anyone off, the only other similar challenge I found was CheetahAlyssa’s MCU Legacy Challenge (so definitely check that out if you’ve only seen the mainstream Marvel movies!). I, however, still developed my own challenge as an excuse to drag the X-Men into this (because they’re so cool!). At the moment, this is a 10 Generation Legacy Challenge, but I’m not opposed to adding more optional generations later on that incorporate other Marvel characters (ie. The Fantastic Four, Eternals, Spider-Man, etc.). So for starters, I’ve included some of my favorite characters/characters who’s stories I felt could work together and build off of each other. I was also inspired by the Not So Berry Challenge to structure my challenge in that this is an experience challenge– doing things out of the norm of your gameplay! Let me know if you have any further suggestions to build this challenge and if you end up playing, feel free to tag me in your screenshots (or use the hashtag, #LLS4MarvelLegacy)!

Rules are below the cut! 💕

@sims-4-challenges-ideas @sims-4-challenges

Starting Out

Create a Young Adult sim (see Generation 1 for Aspiration and Traits)

Turn on Aging (Feel free to choose the Lifespan length, but Aging must be turned on. If you want more of a challenge, choose a shorter Lifespan).

For more of a challenge, move into an empty lot and set funds to §0 (aka, play Rags to Riches style). However, at the end of the day, it’s your game (so if you don’t want to play Rags to Riches, use starting funds to move into a starter home).

Generation 1: ⚠️Wolverine⚠️

Although many details of your past are fuzzy, all you know is that you’re alone. But everyone has to start somewhere. Living a simple life, your survival instincts set in, making you weary of others and focused on staying alive.

Aspiration: The Curator

Traits: Loner, Hot-Headed, Loves Outdoors

Live Off-The-Grid

Do not have a formal career; make money from foraging, fishing, etc.

Complete Aspiration and max Gardening and Handiness skills

Have 4 enemies (fight often)

During Young Adulthood, only reach “Friend” level with other sims. In Adulthood, begin developing further relationships.

In Adulthood, find love (getting married is optional) and have only one child (For extra drama, try falling in love with a sim who’s already married/in a relationship. We love a Jean/Scott/Logan love triangle lol).

Generation 2: 🎆♠️Gambit♠️🎆

Growing up, you didn’t have much, but you had enough to survive. Like your parent, you always felt like luck was never on your side, but you want to do something to change that– to make a better life for yourself. Although you may make mistakes along the way, fate will guide you to the place where you belong.

Aspiration: Chief of Mischief

Traits: Romantic, Kleptomaniac, Goofball

Start working in the Criminal Career (towards the Boss Branch); also make money from stealing. Eventually, stop stealing and join the Culinary Career (Chef Branch) (yes I based Gambit’s secret love for cooking off of that one scene from the 90s cartoon lol).

Complete aspiration and max out Mischief and Cooking skill

Own a card-playing table and use it often

Have a “Friends with Benefits” relationship with partner; eventually become Soulmates and get married (I stan Rogue and Gambit).

Have only one child (you may adopt more if you’d like)

Generation 3: 🧢🇺🇸Captain America🇺🇸🧢

Seeing how your parent turned their life around, you’ve always strived to fight for what’s right. You’re all about helping others and supporting the greater good, even if that means making the sacrifice play.

Aspiration: Neighborhood Confidante

Traits: Active, Good, Gloomy

Complete aspiration and max Fitness and Dancing Skills

Reach max level of the Military career (Officer branch)

Become Best Friends with another sim (preferably one also in the Military career). Eventually have a falling out with Best Friend (or have friend die prematurely for more ✨accuracy✨)

Find “the one.” Date, but break up. Eventually get back together then get married. Have 2 children.

Generation 4: 🕸🩸Black Widow🩸🕸

You idolized your parents’ relationship growing up, but never felt you deserved love yourself. You make a lot of mistakes and you’re your own worse critic, but you constantly work towards doing the right thing as you were taught from a young age. Even though you start with a lot of red in your ledger, you learn from your mistakes.

Aspiration: Friend of the World

Traits: Unflirty, Perfectionist, Outgoing

Reach max level of Secret Agent career (Diamond Agent Branch)

Complete Aspiration and max Charisma skill

Have 3 enemies during Young Adulthood and resolve relationships in Adulthood (get rid of the red in your ledger)

Have one constant Best Friend

Have a falling out with your sibling as they move out, but reconnect in Late Young Adulthood/Early Adulthood

Getting married is optional, but have only one biological child and adopt at least one other child

Generation 5: ⚡️Thor⚡️

You’ve spent your life searching for your place in the world, even if that meant not living up to the expectations of others, including your parents. While you have a good head on your shoulders, you can’t help but want to live your life and see where fate takes you until you finally find your purpose.

Aspiration: Party Animal (its Party Thor lol)

Traits: Cheerful, Adventurous, Clumsy

Have an adopted sibling; have a poor relationship until Teen years. Resolve differences starting in Young Adulthood.

Complete Aspiration and max Comedy skill (Entertainer Branch)

Party often as Young Adult and become more career-driven as Adult

Use odd-end ways to make money in Young Adulthood (ie. part-time jobs, foraging, etc). Discover passion in Adulthood by joining the Entertainment Career (Comedian Branch)

Eventually get married and have children (preferably in Adulthood)

Generation 6: 🩺🌀Doctor Strange🌀🩺

Your parent had a late start in life when it comes to their career, but that changes with you. You want to be the best and learn all that you can, but little do you know that it comes at the expense of the relationships in your life.

Aspiration: Renaissance Sim

Traits: Self-Absorbed, Noncommittal, Ambitious

Reach max level of the Doctor Career

Complete Aspiration and max Writing skill

Become enemies with at least one co-worker

Have a long-term relationship in Young Adulthood (preferably with a co-worker), but break up when entering Adulthood (because you’re always so focused on work, your relationship is strained)

Either have a child before breaking up with long-term partner or have a child with a random hook-up; never get married.

Generation 7: 🧲Magneto🧲

Although your parent had a successful, lucrative career, you can’t help but want more for yourself. You feel you have the potential to make a real difference in the world– that the world is in the palm of your head and only you have the power to take it, doing whatever it takes. But perhaps that determination will cloud your better judgment.

Aspiration: Successful Lineage

Traits: Jealous, Self-Assured, Snob

Max Politician Career (Politician branch)

Complete up to Stage 3 of Aspiration (because you’ll have a falling out with your children)

Max Research and Debate and Logic skills

Get married early. Have 3 kids (preferably at least one set of twins. Also shout out to my girl Polaris), then get divorced.

Have at least 5 enemies and a somewhat strained relationship with your children (the extent of how strained you want that relationship to be is up to you).

Generation 8: 🔮💥The Scarlet Witch💥🔮

Despite having a rocky relationship with your parent in their pursuit of power, you’ve always been really close to your siblings. Living a relatively lavish life, you never felt like it was right for you and pursue to see a different side of the world. While partially disheartened because of your past, you choose to live a life that brings you happiness through family (because that’s what brought you the most joy growing up), instead of through power.

Aspiration: Big Happy Family

Traits: Erratic, Family Oriented, Creative

Become a Paranormal Investigator (Optionally, become a full level Spell caster)

Complete up to Stage 3 of Aspiration (if you have enough time in your sim’s Lifespan, then you can try completing Stage 4) and Max Logic and Medium Skills (or if Spell caster, work towards learning all spells and potions)

Become Best Friends with siblings

Get married and have 2 kids (preferably twins). Have spouse die prematurely. Do not remarry.

Become enemies with 2 sims after spouse dies

Generation 9: 🌟☄️Captain Marvel☄️🌟

While you had a happy upbringing, things changed when your parent died as the other was consumed with grief. And while that experience numbed you to some emotions, your happy place lay beyond the stars, where you knew you could escape the reality you faced on Earth.

Aspiration: Nerd Brain

Traits: Proper, Geek, Insider

Reach max level of Astronaut career (Space Ranger Branch)

Complete Aspiration and max Rocket Science and Charisma skills

Build a Rocketship and go to space often (optionally, visit Sixam)

Own a telescope

Adopt a cat (preferably an orange-looking one named Goose 😉)

Have at least one enemy and one best friend to start. Eventually, become enemies with former best friend and best friend with former enemy.

Join a club with other space enthusiasts! (for extra fun, have rival club with opposite interests to yours, aka Kree vs Skrulls).

Get married and have children (for extra fun, optionally marry an alien sim)

Generation 10: 🛑💰Iron Man💰🛑

Thanks to your parent, you’ve been both equally intrigued and terrified at what lies beyond the stars. However, sometimes you can be too smart for your own good. You make a name for yourself as a master inventor, but you tend to put your relationships on the back burner as you’re drowned in the spotlight. Nonetheless, you want to build your legacy and be known for your contributions to the world, just as those before you and you refuse to fail them.

Aspiration: Fabulously Wealthy

Traits: Genius, Materialistic, Paranoid

Max Engineer Career (Mechanical Engineer Branch; you can also pursue the Business Career through the Investor Branch)

Complete Aspiration and max Robotics and Mixology Skills

Create an ExoMech suit

Gain Fame and become at least a 3-Star Celebrity

Become Best Friends with a sim

Have no serious relationships in Young Adulthood (only flings). Find “the one” and get married in Adulthood. Have children (that you love 3,000).

#ts4 #ts4 challenge #sims 4 challenge #marvel #ts4 marvel challenge #the sims 4 #LLS4MarvelChallenge

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prof-peach · 4 years

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If you could cross over two of your favorite games, which would you choose? Please explain, why that crossover would be a good match.

Oh you’re going to regret asking this one, I’m bout to GET SERIOUS.

So Pokemon, obvs, I love the whole world it’s built in, but the games imo are REALLY boring, I haven’t enjoyed one a lot since gale of darkness, the main ones just are a little too linear obvious plots, pretty standard setups for story and style. Speaking of style, the games lack personality, the models aren’t animated well, moves have no dynamic energy or visual difference at times, and the turn based battle style just feels kind of, I don’t know, old? Slow? Just doesn’t suit what I enjoy personally, gives me a FInal Fantasy vibe and I just cannot stand the speed at which things happen in those games, plus not into 3rd person ‘let’s build a team of people’ much, but that’s a problem for another time. With this all in mind, the game I wish would happen is like gen20 Pokemon, far future sadly, I doubt I’d see it in my lifetime but god I’d be happy if I did!

Ok so take the newest Zelda graphics, the visual treat that was BOTW, open world, puzzles, not JUST combat, you got side missions, hunt the chickens, find missing pets, parcels, items, whatever. Love it! The horse taming?! Amazing you funky little game. Now take the bad guys and beasts from that. And put Pokemon in instead. Give them the diversity, the life and believable natures that BOTW gave the animals, I followed a frog in BOTW for 15 minutes, and it was a great experience, it felt like it was believable. Above world spawning, ACTUAL difficult gameplay, rare spawn rates, make dragons hard to get again, cmon, it’s too easy now, make it so we need a certain set of Pokemon for certain tasks. Water types big enough to carry you will be able to get you to new areas, rock types that can help you climb mountains faster, or break through blocking boulders. Actual towns with more than 4 houses in them, shops, barns, farms, homes. Like little link with the heat, maybe ice types would struggle in volcano areas, or bug Pokemon not be so comfortable in gale force winds. Give the weather more of an effect on your partners. Mounts, don’t even get me started that Pokemon Let’s go had you able to ride any of the larger species, but swsh did not???? Bitch please, give me my rideable Pokemon. The wild area too was far too closed, limited, online was laggy and a mess, camping is limited, let me do more with my team. Pokemon for me is all about the actual creatures, how they live with humans, and the many wonderful things they’re capable of. Yes of course it’s cool they can fight, but like what else you know?

I’d love a game that lets me buy a plot of land, maybe plant things, custom build things. I’m a sucker for the fallout4 settlement builds when they’re modded to hell and back, they’re fun! It can be a really calm and creative process. If I could do that and skip the main campaign and all the battles for a bit? Amazing, it sound perfect for me. I am that distracted hoe collecting flowers while the kingdom burns in the background. Side quests are everything to me. Let me give homeless people enough money to get them in a home? Let me adopt Pokemon that are stray around the town? Plz oh plz bring me a Pokemon game that allows me to work WITH my team to do more than KO other species. I want to save and buy a plow for my buddy gogoat, and grow amazing foods to sell to get currency to spend in decorations, to spoil my team. Give me actual game consequence, if I ignore that sick and injured Pokemon I find in the wild, later maybe it’s family don’t want to help me out with a different problem, too stricken from grief. I am all about the average bits, the old women who need help, the lost pets board in town, the general day to day stuff. Let me get cosmetic items for the Pokemon I keep, cute outfits, special gemstone items, let me actually live with them, or even feel remotely like they’re realistic.

Ok so in game, if it’s looking like BOTW it’s pretty beautiful but also stylised, I’d have it so you can send out a maximum of 3 Pokemon from your 6, using bumpers and such to throw them out. If you hit the trigger you switch from controlling the human trainer, to the Pokemon you’ve targeted with a standard lock on targeting system. You then can be the leader, but be the Pokemon. You could technically defeat the game without a human if you wanted, which incorporates the mystery dungeon games I think, and caters to that crowd. I’d love to see the use of attacks out of battle, things like using water gun to grow plants, using ember to start a campfire faster and stave off the cold. There’s no consequence to Pokemon anymore, and I think that’s where it’s lost me. I have to admit I miss the days of a poisoned pokemon fainting if you don’t heal them soon enough, I miss gym battles that were actually tough, damn, try picking charmander in red and beating brock without grinding in viridian forest first, it’s not easy. And I loved that. Yes it’s a child’s game, it will never be difficult again, but god it’d be nice to have a bit of a challenge, or maybe a difficulty setting, so some could play it with hostility turned off, great for kids, or you can be n adult like I know so many Pokemon fans are, and play it on expert mode and ACTUALLY have to work hard to beat the game. Alternate skill trees anyone? Train gun a fire type to ACUTALLy combat water moves?? Please! Cmon! It frustrated me that every challenger has pretty much a systematic set of moves to use to win. Grass opponent? Fire attack spam until you win. It’s dull, so at least with very difficult tricks to either find or learn in game would make it more achievable if you can send that fire type in and I don’t know, train them so much the heat evaporates the water mid-battle and you suddenly have a shot at winning. Pokemon has taught me that if you work hard enough you can achieve something, but the games just have such strict ways to win. Feels wrong.

In terms of battling, let us BE the Pokemon, let us learn to dodge, train our speed, train our defence, make a team of truly tough Pokemon instead of just, average? Some species have a cap on their skills, a squirtle has lower stat points than a Charizard, but you can’t ever change that? Let me choose the Pokemon I believe in, and let me work with them until they’re just as good, if not better than the game tanks. This would also make online battles more interesting. Everyone picks the top trio. Fairy, dragon, legendaries. And yknow what? It’s boring. That one IRL fight with the monster Pacharisu that won in the world tournament with follow me and the situs Berry? Unbelievable, I love that little rat so much because of this, so let us all have a chance to build a team that’s strategically viable, strong, and potentially a winner formula, even if they aren’t fully evolved, or the biggest Pokemon in the world. Yeah maybe you have to grind way harder with your unevolved Pokemon, but you get to the end game and win, because you put love and time into species that you enjoy, not just good fighters.

Unfortunately I am beholdent to Todd-idiot-Howard, and I love the Eldrescrolls and fallout games (before they got dumb, not that I don’t play the new ones. 76 I’m looking at you, you big asshole game.) honestly I hate online games, so none of that junk, just a good old fashioned open world sandbox game is plenty. Games for me are an escape from others, not an invitation to socialise. To each their own of course, and I do play online games sometimes, just pretty short lived ones, over watch and rdr2 for example. Would they be sometimes better on private servers? Yes of course, fallout76? Want to play with others? No. I do not. Please leave me alone. And if you buy a private server you’re feeding the monster that is Todd Howard, the man the myth the asshole, then we’ll get more bad games like 76. I just so desperately want the Pokemon company to see what a beautiful potential game they’ve got on their hands, that could be suitable for far greater audiences, but instead they’ve focused on the kids. It’s fine, it’s functional, but it’s lost to the fans from day 1, that are all 20+ years old now and want something meatier to play, something far more broad and inclusive. I also hate that there’s no wheelchair option in any Pokemon game. Like cmon, it’s not hard to include that.

In short, BOTW + Pokemon, with a sprinkle of open world sandbox to it, less fighting, more fun. Or, at least both options. Sure, go fight everything, great, but I want to farm carrots over here with 6sunflora, plz let me have some peace.

Edit: I forgot about harvest moon, chuck some of that in there too.

SECOND EDIT: someone in the comments mentioned to put this in Unova? Plz love yourselves, this game would be ALL MAPS. Stuff one singular location, this is the ideal game, put every map in it, join them, put islands in, make them more explorable, more detailed!

#pokemon #not peach #OOC

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rpgchoices · 2 years

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Sometimes I really want to read a short summary of what to expect from a game… and thankfully people can also submit their summaries of games they played and help me (and others) find games that cater to their interests!

submitted by @lairofsentinel

(click here for other videogames)

what to expect from THE BARD'S TALE IV: Director’s cut

Dungeon crawler RPG with a nice linear story. It also allows you to explore towns and cities to find lore details, collect objects, talk with NPCs or solve puzzles that will help you with your quests.

It uses a first person camera, but it offers a clean movement, so I would suggest that even those with motion sickness could give it a chance.

You can play a woman or a man, with no customisation of their design.

You can pick to play one of the following four races; human [with four different ethnics] plus the classic ones: dwarf, elf, and trow [similar to a human-sized goblin]

There are four classes available: bard, practitioner [mage], fighter, and rogue.

You have 5 companions in the first part of the game, two additional ones are added in the second part, and in the third part you get another one. In total, 8 companions. They talk during your exploration. Through their banter you learn about their background. They interact with one another in these moments as well.

You can also hire mercenaries [create your own followers] that you can customise to fit your needs in combat.

Magic in the form of spells, potions, and songs are incorporated alongside a system of crafting items and brewing potions.

Level up system that gives you skill points that can be used on a very diverse tree that allows you to have sub-specializations depending on your class.

Combat is turned-based and happens in a grid of 2x4: two rows [frontal and back] with 4 places each.

The difficulty of a fight can be seen before you decide to engage it or avoid it. There is a coloured outline that will appear around the enemies as you approach, displaying their power level: green means easy, yellow a bit tough, orange very tough, and red almost impossible.

There are several logic puzzles of low-medium difficulty, which offer a break from serial combat scenarios

It has no teleports beyond the main settlements, which makes it a real bummer.

The game is set in a real life ancient village called Skara Brae on the West Mainland, Orkney [Orkney is an archipelago off the northeastern coast of Scotland]. Therefore, this game has a strong connection with Scottish heritage and specifically with the Orkney folklore.

This game has a lot of local folk music from Scotland.

There is a lot of work with the language as well. There are complete parts of the game spoken or sung in Scottish Gaelic [with subtitles, of course].

Fully voiced, with Scottish voice actors in their majority.

Aesthetically speaking it is beautiful to explore, the landscapes are excellent.

This game carries a strong and elaborated “made in Scotland” signature. It makes it a fresh-air game, considering how many Scottish elements are always cheaply incorporated in mediaeval epic fantasy.

——- Plot? ——-

The story takes place in Skara Brae, where the current Bishop of the Church of the Swordfather (a church militant and now the predominant religion in the land of Caith in which the games are set) has moved the faith to a more extreme and radically xenophobic outlook: Magic-users, non-humans (dwarves, elves, and trow), as well as anyone associated with the Adventurer’s Guild are now persecuted. In parallel, heinous crimes have been framed to various dwarves, elves, and trow in order to force the population against them. This situation forces you and your companions to uncover who is behind this foul plot and to fight back against the bishop’s downright racist regime.

——- Gameplay? ——-

Typical turn-based party-based dungeon crawler role-playing video game with gameplay experienced from a first-person perspective.

——- Characters? ——-

Many, from your companions to some NPCs; all of them have a decent degree of development.

——- LGBT? ——-

One of your companions is a lesbian rogue and she tells you her sad story.

——- Sadness level? ——-

Low. It’s a game with its own sense of humour.

——- Happy ending? Deaths? ——-

There is only one possible ending, but you need to sacrifice someone that you can pick.

#the bard's tale iv #what to expect #lairofsentinel

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daleisgreat · 3 years

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30 Years of Super Nintendo - Flashback Special

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) recently celebrated its 30th anniversary of the North American launch, so it seems the perfect time to post a Flashback Special honoring it! Suppose you have not perused a past Flashback Special of mine (all linked at the bottom of this entry). In that case, they are essentially my history with the platform over the years, with a little bit of history thrown in, and recounting all my favorite games, accessories, memories, and moments with the system.

Odds are for the average gaming enthusiast reading this, and you probably are familiar with the core details of the SNES launch stateside (if not, then I highly recommend CGQ’s video on it for a quick breakdown). The SNES launched in 1991 when I was eight. I did not have a subscription to any gaming magazines yet, so I most likely first found out about the system around that time from classmates at the time at school, the infamous Paul Rudd commercial, and the fourth season of Roseanne that transpired from 1991-92. I vividly remember the Roseanne episode with her son, DJ, pleading with his parents for the brand new SNES for his birthday gift and how his parents dreaded not being able to afford the system. I covered that episode when I did my Roseanne complete series re-watch here in the year leading up to the relaunch of the show several years ago. It brought back memories of how that was the story with my parents also denying me the much sought-after SNES, saying it cost too much and that I already have an NES to tide me over. ”But mommmmm, the SNES is 16-bits!!!!” Yeah….playing that angle got me nowhere. Kiosks & Friends The first couple of years for the SNES, I mostly remember playing at store kiosks. Super Mario World blew me away from the brief time I played it with it being such a leap from the NES installments. I always ate up the precious few minutes I could procure at a store kiosk if no one were playing Super Mario Kart. One last store kiosk memory was eye-gazing over the impressive WWF Royal Rumble. I loved WWF WrestleFest in the arcade, and for a couple of years, it was the only WWF game that offered up WWF’s marquee over-the-top rope elimination match, the Royal Rumble, and it was endlessly fun to play in the arcade. Fast-forward to playing it on console kiosks around its 1993 release, and I could not eat up enough of that game’s Royal Rumble mode either, and at the time, the graphics seemed like a huge step up from the wrestling games on NES. One of my favorite issues of Nintendo Power is the 50th issue that did a several-page spread on WWF Royal Rumble that I must have thoroughly re-read at least a dozen times.

I read this NP spread of WWF Royal Rumble many times, and it was one of my initially most desired SNES games! Around 1993/94, a couple of friends and classmates started to get the Super Nintendo. An early SNES memory that stuck with me all these years is my grade school friend, Jon-Paul, having me over for his birthday where he rented a SNES console and Street Fighter II: Turbo from the video store, and we played it for several hours straight. Another is spending a lot of 1994 at my neighborhood friend’s place, where we played countless sessions of NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat II. Both games were big on codes and secrets and perfect two-player games. I was just regularly getting into video game magazines at this time and ate up issues of Tips & Tricks, Game Players, and Electronic Gaming Monthly to see what kind of hidden character and other much-rumored codes were making the waves each month for both of these games. Mortal Kombat II especially dominated the code-fervor that season with trying to uncover how to face off against secret characters like Jade, Noob Saibot, and Smoke, and trying to memorize all the input sequences for the game’s infamous Fatalities. Fast forward to late 1995/early 1996, and I still did not have a SNES, but a new neighborhood friend, Rich, just got one and the next several months at his place introduced me to so many SNES games. Rich kind of got me somewhat into RPGs at the time, and while it may not sound fun on paper, there were many times I recall just kind of embracing the role of “armchair gamer.” I did this for games like EVO: Search for Eden, and Eye of the Beholder while keeping an eye out during gameplay to offer whatever suggestions seemed viable.

FFVI was eye-opening to me at the time of what video game narratives were capable of, and I devoured the latest secrets for FFVI discovered in the latest issue of my Game Players subscription that was delivered. The RPG I felt like that I contributed something to was the game that was originally released as Final Fantasy III. That game featured two-player support for battles only, so it was refreshing to help Rich with progressing through the game finally. My two favorite characters to use were Sabin and Cyan. That game especially blew me away with its larger-than-life story with two different game worlds, the momentous opera scene with Celes, the dazzling mode-seven graphics when traveling via airship or Chocobo, constantly getting irked at Shadow whenever he deserted the party, and so many other priceless moments. Over the years, I tried restarting the GBA version on a couple of occasions and regrettably have yet to finish it. Finally Owning a SNES….in 1996

Growing up with divorced parents put me in a unique childhood when it came to gaming. I lived with my mom, who provided for us as best as possible for the three siblings I grew up with, so we only had an NES for us for the longest time. However, when visiting my dad on weekends, he would always be big on hitting up as many garage sales and second-hand stores as possible and would acquire whatever he thought seemed like a bargain. Games-wise, this usually meant he lagged behind a generation because everyone was offloading their Atari VCS/2600s at garage sales for cheap when the NES was king, so I could have a great couple of years to become familiar with the pioneering-era of games on Atari. He then got into the NES scene when the SNES hit in 1991. Sure enough, the same month the N64 launched in America in September 1996 was when he bought a Super Nintendo for the family used at our local Premiere Video. The game we picked up with it was Street Fighter II: Turbo. My dad instantly remarked upon booting it up the noticeable jump in graphics. We played nothing but Capcom’s second Street Fighter game on SNES for a few weekends. I could only finish that game by button mashing into a victory against the final boss, M. Bison, once….with M. Bison. I still have a lot of love for this era of Street Fighter - whether it be for the roster, every character’s stage and theme music, and receiving Nintendo Power’s strategy guide for the game for Christmas and studying it regularly to improve.

After a few weeks, we realized we needed something else than a fighting game, and after another trip to Premiere Video, we came home with Super Mario All-Stars. It felt like the easy choice to go with 16-bit remakes of all four 8-bit versions of the core Mario Bros. games. Every game felt like a whole different game with all-new graphics and sound, and more importantly, being able to save progress midgame. This was a bigger hit with the entire family, and it provided many days of taking turns in its alternating two-player mode to see who could get the farthest in the four Mario games included.

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Make sure to have some tissues by your side as you witness FFIII/VI's infamous "opera" scene. Seriously, this was mind-blowing stuff to 13-year old Dale in 1996. 16-bit Sportsball Fun

After playing a lot of those first two SNES games, I went into this stretch for the next several years, where most of what I played was sports and wrestling games. I attribute this to many multiplayer sessions with Rich, my brother, Joe, and my dad. I know my dad was not all that into sports other than a passing interest in rooting on hometown Minnesota pro-sports teams. Still, I have to give him credit for spending as much time with us and taking the time to learn and become a pretty solid player at teaming up with me in many sports games. It is worth noting that I feel the 16-bit era is probably the last-gen where most of its library of sports games had a relatively simple pick-up-and-play feel that NES games had. That changed a little bit in the final SNES years, where it was usually EA’s games that started to incorporate more realism in their sports games and make use of most of the buttons of the SNES controller. For football, Madden NFL ‘97 was the one I played the most. I played plenty of the Genesis version at Rich's place, so much so that I noticed too many little differences with the SNES version to make it stand out on its own. For 16-bit sports nuts that want to know, the Genesis version had the better playing version, but the SNES had a better overall presentation and more popping audio and visuals. I was part of a small slice of sports gamers big into NES Play Action Football, and the 16-bit version played almost exactly like the NES version, but with a 16-bit upgrade and also has a nifty feature to play games at the high school, college, or NFL level.

NBA Jam and NBA Hangtime dominated my 16-bit sports lineup. The code scene for these games were so intense at the time I had to keep my own binder of notes on them all that I still have today as seen above! As I alluded to earlier, when it came to hoops, I played way too much NBA Jam the first year it was out at my friend’s place. However, the arcade hoops game I played the most on SNES was NBA Hangtime, which was developed by the same people who made Jam. I got that game new for Christmas in 1996 and must have played it regularly with Rich for nearly a year straight. I do not hear that game receive the same level of praise as Jam, but it added a few new fun layers to freshen up the gameplay, like being able to do co-op dunks and earn “Team Fire,” and being able to create players. For more simulation-focused hoops, I played a lot of NBA Live ’96 with my dad, in addition to Nintendo’s NCAA Basketball which appeared like a technical marvel to me that was ahead of its time with the mode-seven camera allowing constant 3D rotation whenever possession of the ball changed and foreshadowed what would become the go-to camera perspective for the next-gen of basketball games. Finally, I will cherish my time with Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball for it being the only hoops game I ever had to consult a guide to figure out how to shoot the damn ball….and for its surprisingly rocking soundtrack. Find out all about it when I broke that game down with the Your Parents Basement crew on their penultimate podcast.

Nintendo incorporated the same camera style into its hockey game, NHL Stanley Cup. Its graphics also impressed me, but it was rather challenging to score a goal, and I did not have as much fun with it. I played EA’s hockey games more on Genesis than SNES, but EA’s baseball game, MLBPA Baseball, was the hardball game I spent the most time with on Super Nintendo. Many years later, I picked up Nintendo’s Ken Griffey Jr. Presents: Major League Baseball, and had some fun with it, but already played the Game Boy version of it to death by the time I picked up the SNES version, and thus did not invest as much time with it as I did with EA’s game. Wanna Wrassle!?

I must have read through this review of WWF RAW countless times in my youth, and seeing how this essentially is a bigger and better version of Royal Rumble only increased my desire to one day own a SNES! The North American wrestling library was a significant step up from the bottom of the stairwell where most of the NES games hung out….but on the SNES, it only made it roughly halfway up the stairs. The aforementioned WWF Royal Rumble provided many hours of fun for its day, but it has not stood the test of time with the button-mashing grapple meter it featured that will obliterate thumbs on the normal difficulty level! Its sequel, WWF RAW, was noteworthy for having more match types available and being one of the first games to have a selectable female wrestler in Luna Vachon, but it too used that same ill-fated grapple meter that has not aged well. WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game is a fun little hybrid of Mortal Kombat and wrestling, but the SNES version is notorious for lacking two wrestlers compared to all other home versions.

For non-WWF games, WCW SuperBrawl Wrestling is rather unremarkable….except for its exceptional wrestler select screen.There were a few interesting unlicensed wrestling games in America. Natsume Championship Wrestling featured a solid wrestling engine but removed/altered the AJPW wrestlers from the Japanese version of the game. Hammerlock had a promising concept of having part of the screen dedicated to nonstop Tecmo-esque cinematics. In contrast, the other half of the screen featured 2D gameplay, but the cameras constantly flipped on screen, to which half was dedicated to cinematics or gameplay. It resulted in it being a jarring mess. Saturday Night Slam Masters is no such mess, however, and is a better hybrid of fighting game meets wrestling game, with this one done by Capcom. It features larger-than-life character sprites, full-on ring entrances with laser lights, and is a fun-playing combination of wrestling and Street Fighter. To top it off, Slam Masters has Final Fight’s Mike Haggar on the roster to boot!

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Joey Pink does a fine job detailing why Capcom's "Street Fighter" in a wrestling ring should not be missed! Ensuring RPGs are here to Stay Aside from watching Rich play some of the RPGs I listed above, and of course, playing Final Fantasy VI with him, I did get a chance to play a few other RPGs on the SNES over the years, and it was not until the last few years that I finally finished a couple of them. In the late 1990s I first started two RPGs that stood out to me at the time because they broke out of the medieval fantasy mold most other RPGs at the time took place in. Shadowrun on the SNES was drastically different from the Genesis version I first encountered at Rich’s. This one still had the same futuristic cyberpunk world setting and terminology, but there were many more dialog options with NPCs that were pivotal in asking the right questions to progress the story. Additionally, the hacking games played out differently and had more of a puzzle theme to them than the action-oriented ones in the Genesis version, and the combat had kind a PC interface where a cursor had to be dragged across the screen on which target to aim at. I still wound up being totally into it and became stuck in the back half of the game before my save data became corrupted. I thought that would end my days with Shadowrun…

SNES Shadowrun remains one of my all-time favorite RPGs as of this writing! The final gauntlet tower was an ordeal and a half to work through, only to face off against a dragon as the final boss! …until nearly two decades later in 2016. I mentioned on past flashback specials how I occasionally guest host on the Your Parents Basement podcast, where they cover a random retro game per episode. In 2016 they asked me if there were any games I had in mind to cover, and Shadowrun felt like worth revisiting and possibly knocking off the “must beat this game” bucket list. I progressed until about a little over halfway through by the time we all met to record and broke down the game, but by that point, I just started to make further progress than my last effort and was determined to see this one through! I was playing on actual SNES hardware and was surprised that the battery still held a save but ran into trouble in the final tower with a gauntlet of enemies on each floor to overcome before the final boss. I looked up a walkthrough and discovered an exploit to grind experience to beef up my character. Eventually, I managed to persevere and finally conquer the final boss, a fire-breathing dragon, to cross finishing Shadowrun off my bucket list! I had a riot podcasting with the YPB crew about it too, so please click or press here to give it a listen if you want to know more about this under-the-radar 16-bit RPG.

Fast forward three years later in 2019, and the awesome YPB hosts of Steve, Huell, and Todd helped me once again restart and finish another SNES RPG that I came close to finishing in the late 1990s before evil corrupt save data reared its ugly head again. This time the game of choice is the uber-expensive Earthbound. Like Shadowrun, that game stood out to me because its setting went against the grain of fantasy settings and instead took place in modern times as grade school kids. The opening levels felt like getting lost in your neighborhood and using childlike items as weapons like Yo-Yos and baseball bats. I do not own that ridiculously expensive game, but by 2019 I did own a SNES Mini (more on that in a bit) that I made sure to abuse the save state and the rewind functions it provided to overcome some troubling bosses in the back half of the game. That final act of the game certainly goes places with its sci-fi twists and feels like an entirely different game, but I still loved it all the same! It felt exhilarating to finally knock this one off my “to do” list as well, and I had just as much fun dissecting it to pieces with the YPB crew that you can check out by click or pressing here. Unfortunately, this is where my extensive hands-on time with SNES RPGs comes to an end. I played a lot of FFIII/VI, and finished Earthbound, and Shadowrun. Sure, I dabbled in several other games but did not put more than an hour or two into them. One of those games is the much-heralded, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and I have no excuse for never sticking with it because I loved the NES original. It was the GBA re-release I played, and I think I was spreading myself thin while playing and reviewing too many games simultaneously. Lufia and Breath of Fire II were another pair of RPGs I put a couple of hours into that both left me with promising first impressions, but there was a whole other reason why I did not go back to those again, and that is because then I was waist-deep at the time in….. Discovering Emulation Right around the time my family acquired its first computer in the fall of 1997 was when I found out about emulation. It seemed way too good to be true to easily download and play games right on the computer, especially when factoring in the SNES was at the tail end of its lifecycle, and there were still new games releasing for it. As an unemployed 9th grader at the time, I sampled countless 8- and 16-bit ROMs with the SNES games I was the most curious about. A few of the RPGs in the previous paragraph being prime examples of the ones I invested the most time into. It proved to be overwhelming with so many choices, but I took a long sabbatical after a year or so of taking in the emulation scene after the family computer crashed and I lost all the save data I had amassed in so many games.

It has been interesting to see how emulation has evolved over the years from programs like SNES9X and Retroarch to being incorporated into machines like the MISTer, RetroPi, and Retron 5. Nintendo has learned to embrace official, legal emulation over the years with purchasable digital classic games on systems such as the Wii, WiiU, and 3DS. Having a stable income as an adult now many years later, I feel guilty for embracing the emulation scene so hard in my teenage years, so much so that whenever Nintendo re-releases one of its classic hits several times over, I choose to purchase it again (well…usually at a sale price) to redeem myself. Keeping SNES Alive Today

Over the years, I find myself diving into retro games versus the latest and greatest coming out. I am a fan of the various SNES hardware updates/clones, both officially from Nintendo and unofficially from other companies, which has kept my SNES and other retro game fandom blood flowing over the decades. I am unsure if it feels right to lump it in here, but the Super Game Boy lead to me getting a lot of extra life out of my SNES. Playing Game Boy games on the big screen was a big deal to me back then, considering it was always a pain to make out what was happening on the non-backlit handheld. For some reason, those special border screens that would eventually have funny animations after being left idle for so long made an impression on me. Game Boy games with the “Super Game Boy Enhanced” logo on the front of the box usually have their own exclusive border and special color palette. I loved the Mole Mania and Donkey Kong Land borders the most! I thought it was rad that around 15-20 special enhanced Super Game Boy titles featured multiplayer support with two SNES controllers. They consisted almost entirely of Bomberman and fighting games, but it was still a cool feature nonetheless. The handheld Hyperkin SupaBoy is the unauthorized SNES take on the Sega Nomad by having a portable SNES. It is a bit on the bulky side, but it has a rechargeable battery, and its support has been flawless with my entire SNES library. Another Hyperkin product I got a lot of use out of is the Retron 5. I know that particular clone system is controversial with retro game enthusiasts based on the unauthorized emulators it implements. However, the user interface and emulation support made it possible for me to make record progress in many SNES games by taking advantage of save states and its optional Game Genie-esque cheats library. The SNES Classic Edition is an excellent official piece of hardware from Nintendo that has the pint-sized SNES pre-installed with 21 SNES games, one of which is previously unreleased Star Fox 2. It has an adorably intuitive interface and supports game rewinding and save states, which made it the way I was finally able to finish Earthbound. It was also surprisingly not-so-difficult to plug into a PC and import a bunch of SNES ROMs into. Other companies like 8bitdo made that system extra convenient by making their recommended wireless controllers compatible with it!

If you did not grow up with the SNES, then both of these options are great entry points for those looking to move on beyond emulators. The Analogue Super NT may have been pushing it too much price-wise. When it comes down to the nuts and bolts of emulation tech, I am not a wizard by any means, except that by all sources, it sounds like the Super NT offers the best hardware emulation with its FPGA technology. It makes SNES games appear as pristine as possible on an HD/4KTV without any or as minimal of the fuzziness that happens whenever I try plugging in the composite/RCA cables from a base SNES system into a 4K/HDTV. For those unfamiliar with the Super NT, this video from the My Life in Gaming crew does a thorough dissection of everything it has to offer. The list of options in there is intimidating to mess around with, but this sounds like the way to go if one wants to keep playing their cartridges……although I have to admit I am pretty satisfied currently with the Retron 5 and SNES Classic Edition.

Odds are some of you are quite a bit younger than me and grew up post-SNES lifecycle. Not interested in going down the pricey road of hunting down old cartridges and hardware, and do not want to dabble on the dark side of illegal emulation? Then a terrific alternative is if you have a Switch with Nintendo’s $20/year online service membership and taking advantage of the Nintendo Switch Online and Super Nintendo Switch Online digital game portals. It has unlimited access to the slate of games on there, along with save points as long as your membership remains active. The implementation of save states and the user interface has also improved noticeably over the emulation used for NES & SNES Classic Editions. More importantly, it adds the feature to play online with a friend. Last year I played online SNES games with my nephew, who was wrapping up 6th grade at the time, and this was his first time playing SNES games. He loves Mario Kart 8 on Switch, and so when the first game we played was the original Super Mario Kart, I could not help but crack up when he instantly remarked, “Dale, this looks old!” He eventually came around, and then we had some fun playing co-op , Joe & Mac . A couple of years ago, on my Genesis Flashback Special, I made sure to reminisce of my fond memories of the summer I spent playing nonstop Sega Channel. These NES/SNES Switch portals are essentially the Sega Channel, but far better because it does not cost $15 a month (in 1994 dollars which equals $27.63 today per Google), offers multiple save states, and ability to play online for only $20 a year!!! Kids, get your parents to hook you up now!!! Miscellaneous Quick Hits

SNES games were the most common denominator on six of the 13 episodes I guest hosted on the retro game podcast, Your Parents Basement. Check out their full archives by click or pressing here. -Turns out I did quite a few guest hosting spots on Your Parents Basement Podcast for SNES games. For those that are podcasting fiends and dug the three episodes I linked to already, then I will link you to three more SNES themed episodes I appeared on where I breathed in the Mode 7 skies of Pilotwings, embraced Capcom’s action-platformer prowess in X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse, and made sure not to miss any Gatorade and Wheaties health pick-ups in Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City.

-The SNES controller is my favorite pre-disc console era controller. It kept the similar button layout of the NES controller but rounded off the edges into its iconic “dog bone” feel so the controller no longer cramped in your hands! Throw in the two extra face buttons and two additional shoulder buttons, and it opened up all kinds of deeper gameplay possibilities! It made it perfect for most fighting games that used almost all the face and shoulder buttons. I found the shoulder buttons were also smartly implemented in NBA Jam/Hangtime for being assigned to use for turbo speed functionality. As far as other SNES controllers/peripherals go, since I loved the NES Zapper, I always wanted to try the Super Scope, but as a kiddo, its bazooka-sized proportions were kind of intimidating. It still kind of bums me out all these years I never got to experience it with epics like Yoshi’s Safari, T2: The Arcade Game, and Tin Star. I never had an opportunity to use the SNES mouse either, which I kind of regret all these years later after seeing all the marvelous creations from experts at Mario Paint, and it was cool to see some PC ports like Civilization, Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D take advantage of SNES Mouse compatibility.

-The 16-bit era was when fighting games exploded, and as you can tell above, I spent a lot of time with Street Fighter II: Turbo, and the first two Mortal Kombat games. Other than that, though, the only other fighting game on SNES I put significant time into was TMNT Tournament Fighters. It was released at the tail end of the TMNT-mania when the cartoon peaked at its popularity. The game itself was a surprisingly competent licensed fighting game from Konami, and tried its best to feel like a solid Street Fighter-clone. Speaking of them pesky turtles… -…TMNT IV: Turtles in Time was the only beat-em-up brawler I put considerable time into on the SNES. I have vague memories of trying others out once or twice like The Peace Keepers, and Super Double Dragon, but Turtles in Time was the one I frequently revisited over the years. It is a superb rendition of the arcade game, with SNES-exclusive levels like the Technodrome that had a fantastic first-person boss fight against Shredder, where lowly Foot Soldiers had to be chucked right at him to defeat Shredder. The soundtrack is one of my favorite SNES scores, so much so that I went all-in to get the for it! I have so many great memories of this game, with the highlight being my friend Matt and I revisiting this for complete runs of it once every year or two for about a dozen years.

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Turtles in Time and FFIII/VI are my favorite SNES soundtracks, but Turtles in Time I own on vinyl so I will embed it here in all its glory for you to enjoy as well!

-The SNES library had a quality slate of racing games. Super Mario Kart quickly rose to the top of the ranks and was always fun to bust through a GP with a friend. Street Racer was one of the first kart-clones to hit in 1994, and for some reason, that one always stuck with me. As did it being one of the few games to have four-player split-screen support with all four screens being horizontal! Rock ‘n Roll Racing is another killer arcade racer on SNES; think of a more beefed up RC Pro-AM, but with a good dose of heavy metal mixed in. This past year saw it re-released as part of the Blizzard Arcade Collection for everyone to experience it! I remember trying out F-Zero at a store kiosk around SNES launch, but was too young at eight years old at the time to fully grasp its style of futuristic racing (or that the name was a riff on F1 racing until a couple of years ago). I was more into a game similar to its style that was the trilogy of Top Gear titles. Uniracers was a quirky racer I enjoyed with its unique aesthetic and one-wheeled racers taking advantage of their nature in races filled with jumps and loop-de-loops….too bad about Pixar holding a grudge against Nintendo and legally forcing them to yank it off shelves. Nintendo’s other racer, Stunt Race FX, was ahead of its time with the polygonal FX-based graphics running pretty chunky on the SNES. Still, it is a commendable piece of 16-bit tech they were just barely able to keep running at a passable-enough framerate. Another FX-chip game that did not originally gel with me was…

-…the original Star Fox. Being 10 when it released in 1993, I thought those polygonal graphics looked blocky and horrendous and would have none of it! Many years later, I would revisit it and rightfully come around on it! -Another Nintendo-published game that received a lot of hype was Donkey Kong Country with its cutting-edge 3D models. They were plastered all over gaming mags at the time. I briefly recall trying out the first and second of the three Donkey Kong Country games on SNES. However, I did not put more time into them because I beat Donkey Kong Land on Game Boy before our family got a SNES, which was just a watered-down port with some remixed levels for the handheld. I enjoyed my time with it, but its disappointingly blunt “congratulations” ending left a bad impression on me, and I never felt like giving the other entries a serious go all these years.

-Some may be wondering why there has yet not been anything dedicated to the pair of Super Mario World titles and Super Mario RPG? Super Mario World was probably one of the first SNES games I tried when I visited my older brother at his first apartment in the early 90s. I think the heavy-duty graphics and trying to comprehend attacking with Yoshi proved to be too much for eight or nine-year-old me at the time. I played it a few other times in my 20s, hanging out with coworkers on retro game nights, and had fun with it, but I think since I was exposed to the NES trilogy more and played the hell out of All-Stars, that those were the versions I preferred more. I appreciated how Nintendo stepped up to Sega’s edgier marketing at the time with Nintendo’s “Play it Loud” marketing campaign. Unfortunately, I think their ad for Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island was a bit too extreme for 12-year old Dale at the time. That ad (click here for it if you are feeling daring)was forever planted in my subconscious and always crossed my mind and indirectly caused me to avoid Yoshi’s Island for all these years. I did pick up Super Mario RPG and it is on my “bucket list” of games to play as well. I am holding off on it all these years because I was hanging out with Matt one day, and he explained how he was having a tough time with the final boss, Smithy. Well, he wanted to give me a quick demo to show how unforgiving of a challenge the boss was….but for some reason his clutch gaming skills kicked in right then, and he beat Smithy and was exposed to the ending right then and there!

-As far as other tough SNES games go, the two most challenging for me are easily Contra III: The Alien Wars and Zombie Ate My Neighbors. Contra III is like the first two games on steroids. I love the boss battles and intense walk-n-shoot chaos, but do not love constantly dying in one shot! Zombies Ate My Neighbors is another fun action-platformer that is also equally tough to make it farther than a few levels in unless you seriously dedicate yourself to it. Hey, both of these games also saw re-releases this past year on current consoles with the Contra Anniversary Collection and Zombies Ate My Neighbors & Ghoul Patrol set for those wanting to experience 16-bit nail-biting difficulty (but with save state support!).

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I hope this excellent video review from the quintessential retro video game source, Jeremy Parish, suffices for my lack of any meaningful Super Mario World memories here. -In 1997, I was hyped for a late SNES release, the original Harvest Moon. The farm/life/dating-sim series is still around today from publisher Natsume (as well as the original developers parting ways with Natsume and delivering their own competing Story of Seasons series). During the SNES era, I spent several summers out on a farm. I appreciated rural life's solitude and free spirit lifestyle, and that first Harvest Moon game perfectly encapsulated that. Trying to determine the best way to spend the day tending to the fields, livestock and managing a social/family life was surprisingly fun and engaging! Harvest Moon remain one of two games that I submitted a blurry Polaroid photo to Nintendo Power’s “Arena” high score section. I cannot recall if my score got posted or not.

-The original Sim City port on SNES received a lot of love around the SNES launch window, with Nintendo giving it a unique makeover with bonus Nintendo characters in it and an exclusive tutor in the form of Dr. Wright to ease everyone into the simulation gameplay. I never played too much of that version, but one night at Rich’s, the game we decided to rent that night was Sim City 2000. That one was released way late into the SNES lifecycle and lacked any Nintendo extras the first SNES game had. Still, we stayed up all night playing it and looking at our daily news recap and mayor approval ratings and trying to figure out where to stop underwater pipe blockages! It ran slowwww on the SNES, but we tolerated it fine enough at the time because I had yet to play the PC version. Eventually, I would check out the PC version and came away surprised with so much I had to put up within the SNES game. -For those wanting to dare the Super Famicom scene, there are a plethora of great games that never made their way stateside, and better yet, a hearty chunk of them have received English fan translations. I am partial to the FirePro wrestling games that never made it here that are vastly superior to all the American wrestling games I broke down above, BS Out of Bounds Golf is an addicting take on miniature golf, the original Star Ocean, and the Back to the Future platformer that was not a five-star classic by any means, but blew away the poor NES and Genesis games that did release here. If you are not that familiar with the Super Famicom library, this top 50 list from RVG Fanatic is a great place to start your research and very much helped clueing me into a bunch of Super Famicom games I had little-to-no knowledge of. Conclusion

If you are around my age reading this, you may be wondering why I have not gone on about the fabled “16-bit Wars” by now. Rest assured, I experienced it in the lunchroom and at recess and in gaming magazines at the time. I devoured all the side-by-side screenshots in gaming mags of dual-platform releases to see if I could spot which version was better. I want to say back then, I sided with the SNES because I grew up with the NES, but that does not seem like a fair choice since I did not own a SNES until 1996. Reflecting on it, although I experienced a fair amount of RPGs and other games on SNES with Rich, I primarily played endless hours of Genesis games with him back at the time. So whenever I hung out with Rich, I considered myself a Genesis fan, and when I finally got a SNES and grew my SNES library, I considered myself a SNES fan and avoided a lot of the “console wars” trash talk. For younger readers here who want to learn more about the fervor of the 16-bit wars, the book, Console Wars, and its corresponding documentary (which is currently only available on Paramount+/CBS All Access sadly) are my recommended ways to absorb all that hoopla. I will cherish all of the past 30 years of SNES memories and hope you have enjoyed reminiscing with me for the last several thousand words. If you want to hear more of my SNES memories in podcast form, I have a few SNES-centric episodes of my old podcast I recently un-vaulted and have embedded below for your pleasure. They have some of the friends I repeatedly mentioned above as co-hosts that share their SNES experiences and memories, so please load up a random SNES “podcast game” and boot one of these podcasts up for fitting background noise….

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10 years ago I did a 20th anniversary SNES special with Matt!

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Here is the history of RPG series episode dedicated to the 16-bit era.

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Finally, here is Matt and I hosting the 16-bit installment of our history of comic book games series. Bonus Overtime

It would not be a Flashback Special without one random oddball bonus story to wrap it up with. The only Kirby game I ever finished receives that honor. One day, my brother and his friend Jake were over at my place. We were discussing SNES games at some point, and Jake mentioned how Kirby Super Star is his all-time favorite. I said how I never played it and did not think anything of it at the time, but the next time I met up with him and my brother, Jake had the copy of that game with him and insisted on borrowing it to me and said not to give it back until I finished it. I felt this sudden obligation to play through it as a priority, so I did not feel like I was keeping his game hostage. Luckily, Kirby Super Star is a damn fun game, which the front of the box labels as “8 Games in One!” Most of the games are abbreviated-length adventures of only a handful of missions in their unique theme of levels, and a few of the games are mini-games like a race against King DeDeDe. Regardless, almost every game provided that trademark Kirby lighthearted fun and was hard to put down! Kirby’s Dream Course is also a lot of fun on SNES, and is an interesting take of Kirby meets miniature golf! With that anecdote, I will wrap up yet another Flashback Special. Thank you for sticking with me this far, and If you dug reading about my trials and tribulations with Nintendo’s 16-bit machine, please take a look at the other Flashbacks I have linked below!

My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary NES 35th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PS2 20th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th and 32-X 25th Anniversaries Xbox 360 15th Anniversary

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jake-marshall · 3 years

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TGAAC: Adventures thoughts

So I finished game 1 last Saturday, and took a brief break from continuing so I could write a fic centered around it (won’t mention what character because ~Spoilers~), and will now continue on to game 2 starting today (albeit, I did start a little of game 2 last week but was so burned out from having marathoned Case 5, I didn’t really vibe with it so I’ll probably just start over). Here are my, as well as my wife @morpheusdreamt ‘s (who watched parts with me) thoughts on the DGS/TGAAC 1, under the cut. LOTS OF SPOILERS INCLUDED! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!

The Adventure of the Great Departure - discounting the fact that it’s the first case and therefore also a super-hand-holdy tutorial, I felt this was one of the stronger first cases in the whole series. I really enjoyed Jezaill and Hosonaga, and just Kazuma and Ryuunosuke’s dynamic as a whole, even though I knew what was coming. My complaint about this case was that it felt way too long for a first case - which, I mean, I get in hindsight because of needing to include the right amount of development between Kazuma and Ryuunosuke to make Kazuma’s death effective and to make it more believable that Ryuunosuke takes over as the main lawyer. But also, it wasn’t satisfying to out Jezaill as the murder (even though I know she has a role in the second game) and then come to find out she probably won’t be punished for it. This lack of satisfaction became a sort of prevailing theme for me throughout the game. The Adventure of the Unbreakable Speckled Band - again, another tutorial case that felt way too long. I’m pretty sure I was drinking the whole time I played this case, with Sholmes being the one to drive me to do it. As with the first case, the characters stood out for me way more than the case itself. My favorite part of this was watching the bond form between Ryuunosuke and Susato. As much as I also like Nikolina, I found this case overall to be fairly forgettable. The Adventure of the Runaway Room - first of all, I haven’t replayed this since completing the game (and therefor completing case 5) but I feel it’s almost necessary to do so to fully grasp this case? Which is, after having completed the game, something I really like about this case in particular. I thought McGilded was a fantastic character (and not just because of his resemblence to Handsome Jack :p), and I knew we’d meet Gina and Van Zieks in this case, but I was still thrilled to have it happen. Upon first playthrough, this case was like the others, extremely frustrating in the sense that I wasn’t really getting anywhere? That the plot wasn’t going anywhere? I mean, at least for me, I really had no clue as to how involved McGilded was in Mr. Mason’s death, so kudos to the writers in keeping me guessing. Overall, this felt like a filler case until you get to the end and realize, oh shit. It’s not, is it? And then I wished I would’ve paid more attention to some details, so it’s definitely worth a replay. The Adventure of the Clouded Kokoro - But no, this is the filler case! And I know some of the characters show up in the 2nd game, but oof. There was very little I enjoyed about this case on an individual level, and I’m not one to get super salty about ~this is problematic~ but the consistent inclusion of joking about domestic violence made me uncomfortable. Soseki was a fun character, but the Garridebs and Beates felt over-the-top, and, again, the fact that the attack was actually an accident just made this case feel like, ??? It made me wary of starting the 5th case. I felt, there’s nowhere I’m going to come away from the game liking it more than “just alright”. The Adventure of the Unspeakable Story - Let me start by just saying that this is one of my favorite cases in the entire series. So the only things I knew about this case going in was that Gina was the defendant and that Ashley was the killer, but I didn’t know anything regarding motive or his background, or Gina’s whole ordeal with McGilded. Both of their arcs spoke me to quite profoundly. I thought Gina’s development and her fears and insecurities surrounding trust were so relateable, her self-loathing and resignation to never having anything in life go her way just because of her class. Of her needing to look out for herself because no one else will, at least not without wanting anything in return. Like dude, I was crying when she finally accepted Ryuunosuke’s offer to defend her. I don’t really see it brought up (and maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough) about how heavily it contrasts with Ashley’s story, of them both coming from a poor background and both clearly suffering from abandonment issues and how it’s molded them and their perspective on the world and the people in it. I thought Ashley was so compelling, even though he starts off as a sort of caricature (which I gather was the intention). His absolute contempt towards McGilded (and clearly at himself, by the end) was so palpable for me, and left me thinking about him and the case for days after completing it. I liked too, that for as many AA cases where the killer will be like “I’m so much ~smarter than you~”, Ashley actually does a pretty good job of backing it up, that it’s more show than tell (his making the deal with Gregson and the fact that what broke most of his testimony was the Skulkins and not things he himself said) as it tends to be the other way around. I still want to know what went down in the bus between his dad and McGilded. I have this terrible feeling that Mason went there to tell McGilded to leave his son alone and that he wouldn’t sell the disk. Which would make it all worse, lol but I’m fine with that. Unless Gina undergoes some sort of terrible devolvement in the 2nd game, I can safely say that she and Ashley have become Top 10 all time AA characters for me, and that’s saying something considering how long and how deeply I’ve loved my faves from the original games. Anyway, getting back on point to the actual games and not just meta on the characters, I liked the pace that Case 5 progressed at, and how it had some expected twists and turns (like Sholmes’s appearance) that weren’t made any less enjoyable by being predictable. And I didn’t find it terribly difficult but it was still outrageously fun (minus the stereoscope mechanic which I know is just a fucky misfortune given the game was originally designed to incorporate 3DS functions, which are obsolete on the Switch). I just thought that Case 5 felt like everything that was right in the original series, both gameplay wise and story/character wise. Despite the fact that it hangs on a massive cliffhanger -__- But luckily i don’t have to wait two years to play the 2nd game, lol. Maybe my opinion of this game will change after I play the 2nd game, but overall my feelings are that it’s enjoyable enough and if you like Ace Attorney, and you’re more invested in the main characters/their development you’ll like it/probably even love it. For me, the fifth case and it tying together with the third case, specifically the affects it had Ryuu, Van Zieks, and Gina makes the rest of the game worth playing, but the rest of the cases are not as individually satisfying as many of the other cases in the AA series. I would still recommend this, however, based on how eager it’s made me to want to play the second game opposed to just feeling like I went through all that for nothing (which is sort of my experience when I replay AJ or DD now, not that I still don’t love them).

#the great ace attorney #tgaac spoilers #ace attorney #leanne plays aa

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polkscastle · 3 years

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New Pokemon News-Drop Today (My Thoughts

Pokemon is back at it again with more info on the upcoming Gen 5 remakes, as well as, Arceus: Legends. These were my thoughts on what we were shown: - Unite, Cafe ReMix, Masters, and GO: There's not much I have to say about these updates on Pokemon's running titles, mostly because (besides Pokemon GO) I don't play any of these. Unite holds no interest for me, with the option to dress up your pokemon as the only reason I'm slightly tempted to look at it. I played the original Cafe Mix for a week: thought it was cute but, disliked the puzzle gameplay. And, I just never looked into Masters. Maybe if I find some friends who really, really love these titles and want me to play with them, I'll consider playing these. But for now, let's get into why I woke up early just to see these announcements live... ----- - Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl: YES! YES!! YYEEESSSS!!!! I am SO HAPPY!! Maybe the choice of visual design threw people off at first but, these look so good. The style remains perfectly cute and charming. Plus, they are indeed changing things up and adding new elements to the remakes. My biggest concern when I saw the first announcement for these games was that (especially with another company in charge of development) they would stick too close to the design of the originals. It may only a few little touches that we know of so far, but I'm excited to see if there's more to come. My thoughts on each individual element: - Your Pokemon Follow You: You heard here, folks. The Pokemon Company is once again giving us partner Pokemon that follow you around in the overworld. You'd think such a detail wouldn't be that important but, it really does add to the experience of a Pokemon game. Done well, it helps you see your own Pokemmon as living partners rather than pawns in combat - Ball Capsules and Stickers are Back: WooHoo! It honestly isn't a surprise to see them here, but I'm still happy to see these back again. I don't remember fiddling with the ball capsules too much as a kid playing the Gen 5 games, yet I was still sad to see them go in later games. I thought it was such a cool idea to be able to personally edit the entrance effects of your Pokemon. - Updated Contests: Contests were not a big interest to me when I was playing the originals as a kid. However, I was hoping that they would update them in these remakes. So far, I like what I see. The dance and battle showcase portions of the original games seem to have been merged into a new rhythm mini-game, which is fine by me. I do hope to see the dress up accessories come back into play, especially if these can be worn by your Pokemon outside of the contests. I don't know, I think it'd be fun ^^ - Trainer Styles: Not the full avatar customization of the later generations, but still a nice addition. Good on you, Pokemon - Expanded Underground: Now, this is interesting. I was excited to be able to travel the Sinnoh Underground again, and now they've made it even better. The Pokemon Hide-aways look like a fun addition. And, (from what I've seen so far) these could be another solution to the whole Fire-type issue that Sinnoh was so infamous for. In summation, I was already set to get Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, and these announcements only have me more stoked to see what they have in store. (Side note: My currant status on withholding myself from buying that new Switch Lite when I have a functioning Pokemon-themed Lite and am saving up for the full OLED model is... ...failing miserably. IT LOOKS SO COOL, YOU GUYS!!! T-T ) ----- - Legends Arceus: The perfect little cherry on top to this buffet of news. SWEET MERCY! This game is looking so GOOD! I want it so badly! Everything we saw in the initial announcement is so much more polished and breathtaking here. I can't wait for it to come out. And to put this out there, I love the addition of Action Order battle mechanics. I don't play many action rpg's but, I am excited to try this one out. The idea of using different styles really does seem to add a whole new layer of strategy to Pokemon's base battle mechanics, especially if I can set up combos without taking a hit in-between moves. Maybe if it does well, they'll try incorporating that into the main series games ^^. New Hisui Pokemon: - Wyrdeer: *Flashbacks to Princess Mononoke* Stantler may be a favorite of mine, but I do adore him getting more love and attention like. Wyrdeer just looks like a boss! - Basculegion: Again, not a favorite Pokemon of mine, actually something of a personal ire for me, now given a really boss looking evolution. But, that backstory ... O-O - Hisuian Braviary: Not much to say, he just looks cool - Hisuian Growlithe: *GAAASSSPPP!!* PUPPY!! LOOK AT THE PUPPER!! GIVE ME THE FIRE-ROCK PUPPER!! I'LL TAKE TWENTY!!! New Human Characters: - Prof Laventon: Don't know what to think of you just yet so, we'll just wait and see how things go down with you. - Captain Cyllene: (first reation: "Wait... that's a woman? Well, don't I have egg on my face right now ;P) That said, I am intrigued by this character. Her design reminds me heavily of Tilda Swinton (just saying). Though, with her being this game's parallel/possible ancestor for Cyrus, it seems a bit too obvious to make her the big bad of our adventure. Perhaps they'll do something more interesting with her story but, we'll have to wait and see - Commander Kamado: Oh, my... W-well, it seems we have our Prof. Rowan parrallel/possible ancestor. And he looks very tough, and s-strong, and commanding... ...and handsome, and... O///O ...w-w-will, you excuse me for a sec. ----- TL;DR - I may not care for the running events of the current present, but I am more than excited to see the treasures and legends of generations past

#pokemon #pokemon brilliant diamond #pokemon shining pearl #gen 4 remakes #pokemon legends arceus

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chloebenningtonfmp · 3 years

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Japanese styles

Okami

Ōkami is an action-adventure video game developed by Clover Studio and published by Capcom. i really love the design and look of this game and all the concept art with it. i think its. beautiful game with really detailed art work but the game itself looks super simple which is a really cool contrast. i actually quite like the quality of the game, i know it doesnt look good at all but i think it really goes with the theme of the game and style. i am really glad i have looked at this because it has given me many ideas and i will have it to look back on when i need more ideas.

junko Mizuno

Junko Mizuno is a Japanese manga artist. Her drawing style is often termed as Gothic kawaii or kawaii noir style. i quite like her style and the composition of all her art work, its very different to the normal manga but its very unique, i like the colour pallets and how they are quite mutual. her work is also very detailed and intricate, as well as being very funky and unusual with her style.

with Junko Mizuno’s work its very detailed and has a very adult looking design that wouldn't be suitable for the younger audience, there is also always a lot going on within her art work and its very busy. this wouldn't fit my style as much as some other designs would like mini ninjas for example. i feel like this wouldn't attract as many people as a simpler and cuter design would. as much as her designs are amazing its just not my style and not the aim i am going for.

Red steel

Red Steel is a first-person shooter video game, this was published in 2006 so the gameplay doesnt look very good, but the art work that goes with this game looks really cool and is the style i kinda want to go for in my fmp. i think the colours and the art work style go really well and it really adds the japanese style.

with red steel it is a very adult based design, and has a specific style. as much as these designs are really good and i would love to have this as my style i don’t think it would fit with what i’m wanting to do because of the adult looking design. i want my game to be more appealing to the younger audience, whereas this game could have an age rating. there is parts of this game designs i could take like the colour schemes and the scenery around it and change it slightly to fit my style.

Kena: bridge of spirits

Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a 2021 action-adventure video game, this video game looks reall pretty and magical it has a small hint of japanese style within it but i also love the character design and the outfit that she wears. the magical forrest aspect i really like and i could use this slightly and incorporate something like this within my fmp. i also love the whole look of this game, for example the animation style and quality really just makes it. it is a very neat and put together game, which adds to the quality and style of it.

kena: bridge of spirits has a very stylised look about it as you can see in this image above, i really love the look and style of it and how colourful and playful this game looks. i really want to aim for a stylised look like this in my final game design because i think it has a good design look that would attract many different audiences which i want for my game.

Kubo and the two strings

Kubo and the two strings is a family fantasy film released in 2016 and its about Kubo, a young boy, along with Monkey and Beetle, must find and wear his father's legendary suit of armour in order to defeat an evil spirit. i have looked at this because it relates to the style i want to make for my fmp. i really like the art work and colours from this film, it really makes it feel like youre in japan and it gives a really good feel.

mini ninjas

mini ninjas is a 2009 action adventure game, i loved this game when i was growing up and i would play it all the time, i love the art work style within this game, one thing i like within this open world adventure concept is that the background is 2d and the foreground is open world, it makes it look the world is much larger than it actually is and it gives it a simple design and doesnt make the world look over busy. i really lik the art designs within this and i want to take inspiration from these and make something of my own.

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emersonfreepress · 4 years

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okay so is there content that you had planned for the ROs and story in general but then scrapped cause there wasn’t a good place in the story to stick it in? and if so, can you share what it was? 👀 👀 👀

yes, definitely. *rubs hands together* oh man, you done asked THE question today xD I can't wait to get into this 😁

Academics. I almost decided to have classes and grades be a minor part of gameplay, but the more time I spent designing it the more I realized I wanted nothing to do with it 😂 I haven’t really enjoyed academic gameplay in other interactive fiction because I 1) hate having to choose between studying and interacting with awesome characters, 2) have terrible short term memory, and 3) hate school in general!! So instead I just opted to have the MC be really good at school, point blank period so I could focus on social drama and relationships instead! 😆

Physical skills. I spent literal months crafting the catering scene around setting up stats for stamina/endurance, dexterity, and strength instead of just magnetism, confidence, and persuasion. They had their own backstories with the MC’s parents being overly invested sports parents instead and I think the background choices were like... martial arts, gymnastics, and track? But yeah, I ended up scrapping it all because I was spending hours on research about those individual sports so I could integrate them into the MC’s narrative organically but like... when I tried to think of what use they would be in the actual story, I came up blank. Best decision yet, esp since it means a lot less coding!

Skin tone customization. For one, I noticed that a lot of my favorite IFs don’t offer that customization and it hasn’t impacted my experience at all. For two, I originally realized I might as well not implement it since I am striving real hard not to introduce any customization that won’t actually be mentioned in interesting or meaningful ways in-story. I don’t think it’s really all that common for real life friends (esp in high school?) to comment or compliment each other’s skin and like... when it comes from someone who doesn’t share a similar complexion or ethnic background, that type of commentary gets... d i c e y. So then I wanted to be sensitive to that but what’s the pay-off? An RO mentioning how they love your skin tone once? Awkward sentences with the MC referring to their own skin color? Idk, just wasn’t vibing with it. I’m open to revisiting it in beta or something but for now it’s scrapped.

Singing, Rapping, and Gaming as Hobbies/Talents. I feel bad about scrapping these, honestly 😂 They’re great and I really wanted to incorporate them but it just came down to already having a lot of stuff to code. Plus, I know I can write the Hobbies/Talents I stuck with far better. And for Book 2 purposes, as well!

Leo. as @sourandflightypeaches asked me about a long while ago, I had to scrap an entire RO 😢 His name is Leo, he was the nephew of wealthy west African diplomats residing in Emerson, and I love him dearly! His backstory was largely based on my mother’s childhood and the circumstances she lived through after immigrating to America. and... ok, i’m about to go on one hell of a tangent so buckle up and bear with me if you can 😅

my intention with this story, aside from writing things that I personally enjoy (graphic violence, spooky woods, social drama, romance, conspiracies 😚), is to explore greed, wealth, and how the ways people and families interact with those two things influence young people and who they grow up to be. here i go sounding pretentious af 😝 and here’s where I apply a cut for those who want to preserve a little mystery to the main characters!

With Gabe, we’ve got someone who grew up with very little stability or financial security but who has found unscrupulous methods to gain status and money, with both noble and selfish motivations.

Kile has some of that childhood experience in common with Gabe, having been in the foster care system since infancy, but they lucked out when they were adopted into massive wealth by a caring, loving couple—a couple that uses their wealth and privilege to be far more lenient and protective of Kile than is actually reasonable or responsible.

Jack comes from a prestigious wealthy family on his dad’s side who he loves dearly but there’s no getting around the fact that they love him back as much as they despise his working class mom.

Jessie is a spoiled sweet heiress (being the baby of her family and the only girl) and while she lives blissfully ignorant of the harmful source and impact of her father's income and career, she bears the weight of the expectation to fulfill very traditional gender roles, including her behavior and appearance, but also extending to her career and life plans.

Rain's wealth led to them growing up sheltered and isolated but also extremely accommodated, giving them maximum freedom and opportunity to discover and develop their personal talents and interests. However, they have almost no positive relationship with their parents who have essentially decided to give up on a kid that couldn't be exactly the accessory they tried to mold them to be—both in terms of their identity and personality.

Rupan/Rohan, at their very core, rejects everything about conformity, self-importance, and excessive luxury—which means they have never, ever truly fit in with their peers. Going full non-conformist, however, has resulted in them becoming alienated from much of their family, as well, despite them all loving each other very much. Their history with false friends and betrayals has led them to over-indulge in their vices and reckless behavior to compensate for that isolation. Sometimes, they just get in over their head and many times, they know better. Every time, it's just that the feeling of finally belonging is utterly intoxicating.

Vivian/Vincent has two extremely successful parents who didn't inherit but instead built up their wealth and they aspire to be just like them, to a degree that is well and truly unhealthy. Their mother specifically is an over-achiever and applies mountainous pressure for them to follow in her footsteps, especially academically. Vi is completely capable of achieving what their mom expects of them, but they were already an extremely sensitive perfectionist so this has made them intensely critical of themself. This is a large part of why they are such a rigid, no-nonsense person and that in turn has made them one of the most disliked people among their peers—which is a huge personal failure to them since their father is a very well-liked and socially successful person in town.

And the Emersons are peak privilege: inherent high social status, brains, looks, charisma, athleticism, and massive wealth. They could never have been anything less than extremely popular, just by virtue of their last name and the nature of the town's social dynamics and politics. And they do enjoy that privilege (esp Curt lol). However, it should go without saying that being so high profile, even (or maybe especially) just in the isolated scope of your hometown, isn't always a boon. Their family's and their own perceived failings are widely discussed and privately mocked and/or celebrated. Real friends are scarce while fake ones and snakes are plentiful. Plus their dad is a gigantic dickhead who sees his kids as extensions of his own status and reputation and not much else. Public shortcomings make for an unbearable time at home and the world outside the estate is at once overly accommodating, full of assumptions, and even subtly hostile at times—all unrelated to their own actions or character.

And with the MC, I think the narrative will make it clear there are several ways that story can go. You start off with irresponsible parents that have lost their wealth due to their own mismanagement and material ambitions—how that affects any individual MC should differ based on choices and consequences!

So why bring any of that up when I was supposed to be talking about my cut OC? 😂😂

Leo was going to be the unwelcome recent addition to his uncle’s household, the son of a brother his aunt hates for (petty af) Reasons, and she took that resentment out on him directly by restricting his access to nearly every aspect of the family's wealth. Especially material goods and living conditions. He was basically treated like the help, tasked with playing nanny for his many younger cousins and burdened with doing the homework and providing academic cover for his dumb as rocks cousin in the same grade as you all. To sum it up, he was basically a victim of trafficking at the hands of his own family with his uncle out of town enough to feign ignorance to how bad his wife was treating his nephew and his aunt going out of her way to keep him busy, at home, and isolated. This is sadly a super common form of trafficking in Francophone African cultures (although I don't think most people view it as trafficking. and I’m sure the same is true of other cultures but I don’t want to speak outside of my purview). And like I mentioned above, it’s how my own mom's (and idek how many cousins') child/teenhood went.

It’s a perspective on modern wealth, privilege and greed that I really, really wanted to tell. I am confident in saying it hasn't been explored in interactive fiction yet (though correct me—and direct me 👀—if I'm wrong) and out of all the wealth/greed explorations I came up with, it's the one I have the closest personal ties to and the strongest feelings about. The characters and plans I had for it were detailed and I'm proud of them but at the end of the day... I just couldn't find a place for Leo in the story at large.

Leo was, in fact, the last main character I came up with, when I had already designed and fleshed out the larger story and started crafting the timeline of major events. I think the worst thing I could have done for a story and perspective that I care about this much is shove it into a plot that didn't have room for it at the very base level, regardless of how well the character or his story is written. Shoe-horned characters always stick out. I didn’t want to disservice Leo by having him be the character that did nothing or could be removed from the main plot without affecting it at all, y’know? That’s so much worse than just forgoing the indulgence, imo :((

ugh.... Leooooo 😭 I'm so sorry bb, I failed youuu 😥

#lovely anon #answered #hotmess #ok I am truly so sorry for going on and on like this #writing #ch design #ty for this question it was really nice to revisit this stuff 😃#and a nice reminder to not look back lol #scrapped

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lakemojave · 4 years

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Supergiant Games: Same Bones, Different Skeletons

I just finished a retrospective of all 4 games by Supergiant on my twitch channel, and I have a few thoughts I wanna connect and questions I wanna explore. My love for these games is real strong and i could write a whole essay just gushing about them, but I wanna give some thought to what makes them so compelling: not just to me, but to damn near everyone I’ve talked to on their discord who feels the same. I myself rank Bastion among my favorite games ever, and Hades is climbing that list at a clip. And even though I could take or leave Transistor or Pyre, they keep pulling me back.

But I could talk a whole lot about each game’s appeal and waste a lot of time. I’ve gushed enough to my friends about how Bastion and Pyre’s rugged, apocalyptic atmospheres draw me in with their incredible vibrance to contrast. I could talk about how Ashley Barrett’s vocal tracks carry Transistor on their shoulders, or what makes Hades so much goddamn fun that the game doesn’t really need to be much else. But I realize that if the Supergiant library is so universally appealing to me, there must be some sort of connective tissue between them--some sort of fundamental similarity that makes them work. After thinking about it for more than five minutes, it turns out there are many; some are pretty obvious, and some less so. This brings me to the conclusion that the Supergiant library, with its four wildly distinct and different games, still follow a noticeable formula--one that is flexible enough to allow such completely different games.

Game Design

The Supergiant library are all essentially top down action rpgs, Transistor having the most elements of the genre. This is still a pretty weak connection, given how different they all play from each other. The only two that have much overlap in the most basic sense are Bastion and Hades, with the same general fast paced, real time combat. On closer examination, the two games have enough differences in the variety of mechanics at play, (Bastion with its multiple weapon slots and a shield, Hades with its sheer number of commands) that even they are hard to compare.

There are, however, several mechanics that the library loves to use. The first that comes to mind are the difficulty conditions: idols in Bastion, limiters in Transistor, titan stars in Pyre, and the pact of punishment--and arguably Chaos boons as well--in Hades. Their function is simple: increase your challenge for a little extra reward. Bastion and Pyre go the extra mile by fixing in world building elements to this mechanic; Bastion’s idols inform about the game’s pantheon, while Pyre informs about its, well, evil pantheon. The use of these conditions is indicative of Supergiant’s game design philosophy as a whole--you, the player, can make the game as hard or easy as it takes for you to have fun. The inclusion of infinite lives in Bastion or god mode or hell mode in Hades further builds on this point. This library is designed for all sorts of audiences, whether they want to be challenged by their games or simply immersed in the story.

Another repeating mechanic in these games are the use of challenge rooms, which started in Bastion as the training grounds and, to a lesser extent, Who Knows Where. In Transistor they are the sandbox test rooms, and in Pyre they are the beyonder crystal’s scribe trials. They appear in Hades a little more ambiguously; the infernal troves or Erebus rooms are not quite the same, but they serve a similar function. This function is a momentary break from the gameplay loop for a little extra reward, much like the previously discussed conditions. Transistor and Hades’ challenge rooms offer relatively negligible rewards; the sandbox rooms simply offer xp and unlock tracks for the jukebox, while the Erebus tiles offer double the reward for any normal tile. Bastion and Pyre go the extra mile by giving specific, long term rewards for their challenges. In Bastion’s training grounds, the Kid earns weapon specific abilities that are among the game’s most powerful; in Pyre’s scribe trials, exiles can earn character specific talismans that feed their specialization. For the most part, these rooms give the player a low stakes opportunity to practice, hone their preferred playstyle, and reward the effort, all while being completely optional.

Akin to these breaks in the game loop are designated resting areas/hub worlds. The Bastion, the Sandbox, the Blackwagon, and the House of Hades each offer a moment to interact with characters and lore, goof around with the environment, buy permanent upgrades, or just take a break. Transistor utilizes this function the least of the library, since it never once requires the player to enter the space. Pyre utilizes it the most since it has the most breaks in both frequency and number. In a way, this decision is both a game design and storytelling choice. Between all four games, perhaps excluding Transistor, this is where the majority of story beats take place. It is where the player can read up on some fresh lore or meet the ever growing cast of characters, and eventually grow to cherish them (as I often do playing this library). Without little breaks like these, the climactic or world/story shaking events that take place out in the actual playable space have no impact or narrative weight. The fact that all these sort of interactions are completely voluntary also rewards the player in the storytelling sense; by choosing to engage with the figures of the story rather than having that choice decided for them, the player feels as though they themselves have agency in the story unfolding.

Style

Perhaps the most distinct part of the Supergiant library, (and perhaps what I personally love most about it) is its aesthetics. There are few games that look, feel, and sound the way these games do. Yet, the four of them hardly resemble each other. Bastion is a rugged, frontier-esque sci fi apocalypse, Transistor is a sleek, cyberpunk apocalypse, Pyre is a high fantasy purgatory space, and Hades is simply stylized Greek mythology. It is a shock to remember, then, that these four games are all designed by the same artistic team.

I confess I don’t know much about art, so I don’t have anything too profound to say about Jen Zee’s art style, besides that I like it a lot. It is also worth noting that despite her spearheading art and character design for the whole library, each game still looks visually distinct, and not just in their overall aesthetics. Take the character design of the library, for instance. Bastion’s human figures tend to be short, stocky, with exaggerated facial features. Their colors are highly saturated, with a soft, almost blurry quality that gives a level of warmth to the fatalistic atmosphere. Transistor’s characters, barring Red, tend to be based around palettes centered around a single color, such as the Camerata red and the spectrum of the function character profiles. Pyre is the first of the library to use talking portraits, which contrast robed figures with stark color palettes and simple designs with unrobed figures with much noisier details. Hades is easily the most distinct of all four, using simple colors and thick outlines on all its characters. The most consistent feature of all their designs, as usual, is how wildly different they are. For Hades, Zee makes sure that characters only look alike in any way if they have some relation to each other, such as the Furies, Achilles and Patroclus, or Zagreus and his parents. On the whole, the versatility and variety in the character design is impeccable.

What I most enjoy about these games is Darren Korb’s soundtracks, which continue to vary wildly. From the closet-recorded Bastion soundtrack to the whole two and a half Hades score, Korb’s scoring keeps improving and changing in the 10 years Supergiant has operated. His music, which adds and changes motifs as each game progresses, contributes to the atmosphere just as much as the visuals do. Whenever he teams up with Ashley Barret to add vocal tracks to certain parts of the game, they always manage to place them at critical narrative or emotional beats, turning them into the games’ most memorable moments. The team goes one step further every game by incorporating a musician or source of music into each game, giving the music just as much character as the one performing it. It also sneaks its way into the aforementioned hub worlds by providing the player a means to play their favorite tracks whenever they want (except in Hades, where they have to pay in game for that privilege). In essence, Korb makes sure to give each game a distinct feel through its music, but familiar enough to connect the library in the player’s mind.

Just as Supergiant gets so much mileage from Korb and Zee alike, they also manage time and time again to make use of Logan Cunningham’s top notch voice over work. Originally the sole voice actor at Supergiant Games, Cunningham continued on from famously narrating Bastion as Rucks to remaining a ubiquitous voice throughout the library. His role as the Transistor in the game proper drives the emotional core of that game, and his role as the Voice/Archjustice proves to be a solidly effective, yet distant antagonist. In Hades, his roles are somewhat overshadowed by Korb’s performance as Zagreus, (which I’m still blown away he still had time to do) but his performance as Lord Hades is still excellent. Supergiant also uses Cunningham in Hades to sort of satirize how often he narrates for them by casting him as the narrating Old Man, then allowing Zagreus to break the fourth wall and acknowledge him. It is as if the team at Supergiant knows how much they use the same stylistic team, then mocking that same choice.

To other studios: learn from Supergiant

I’m running out of things to say and my ball of yarn that connects all these newspapers and polaroids on my wall is running thin. I would talk more about Supergiant really knows how to end a game and frequently does so in similar ways, or that their library is a masterclass in character-driven stories, but this little essay is long enough.

Instead, I wanna talk about how Supergiant does something right which so many AAA developers and publishers don’t seem to understand. To contrast with the Supergiant library, consider Assassin’s Creed, another franchise I have spent an embarrassing amount of time playing. This franchise releases a game almost every year, and in my experience, when a company does this, you tend to get the same pig with a different paint. From the original Assassin’s Creed to their most recent release, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the differences seem to be night and day. Combat and free running are far more complex than they once were, rpg elements to story and gameplay have been introduced, composers, writers, voice actors, and cast members have changed with each release, and the sheer size of the game has become staggering. Yet, in the 13 years and 11 main releases in the game’s history, (plus spinoffs) any change has not only felt incremental over time, but fundamentally insignificant to the skeleton of the game. Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2 play and feel differently, but the differences are subtle. The bones are different, but every year they assemble to form a vaguely Assassin’s Creed shaped thing. People who play games tend to hate this and frequently berate companies for this practice; Bethesda and GameFreak receive the same criticism that their games are so formulaic that their new releases might as well be carbon copies of the ones before it.

Yet, Supergiant Games, with its four games over ten years, has used essentially the same team and building blocks to make games that can hardly be considered interchangeable. Whether its the passion of this humble little indie studio or the sheer talent of this team, Supergiant takes the same pile of bones and assembles them in a different shape each time with care and attention. They are proof that a formula doesn’t need to be tweaked or altered or given a different coat of paint in order to be accepted; instead the formula needs versatility, the means to produce a fresh result each time. It also works best when we adore the result every time.

#thank you for coming to my ted talk #got shit to say #bastion #transistor #pyre #hades #hades game #supergiant games #supergiant tag

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scottymcgeesterwrites · 4 years

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Final Fantasy VII Review

Year: 1997

Original Platform: PlayStation One

Also available on: PC, PlayStation Store

Version I Played: PlayStation One

Synopsis:

The Shinra Electric Power Company rules over the city of Midgar, and the eco-terrorists AVALANCHE stop at nothing to try and prevent the life essence of the planet from being used as energy. Barrett, leader of AVALANCHE, hires a mercenary named Cloud Strife for their bombing mission on a Shinra Mako Reactor. Cloud doesn’t care much for the greater cause and only wants his pay. But then, after a mission goes awry, he meets Aerith, a flower girl who is the descendant of the Ancients. He quickly finds himself wrapped up in the greater conflict against Shinra.

Gameplay:

Final Fanatasy VII utilizes magic spells via Materia – little orbs that come in a variety of colors pertaining to the natural elements. You can mix and match them on your weapons and equipment, which gives you access to different spells and stats. All your equipment varies with the number of slots for how many Materia orbs you can put in. Leveling up not only upgrades the character but the equipped Materia as well.

Final Fantasy VII also uses an ATB system but is known for introducing Limit Breaks – finishing moves that build up after the character gets hit over time. Final Fantasy VI had a prototype called Desperation Attack – but it was very rare as it only appeared when your character had 1/8 of their total HP, and there was a 1 in 6 chance of performing the Desperation Attack after selecting Attack. I actually had no idea that was a thing until long after I finished the game, and never experienced it when I played Final Fantasy VI.

Graphics:

Out of all the Final Fantasy games, I have to say that this one has not aged well. It has the worst graphics of the entire series. The battle and cinematic graphics are passable.

(Most of the graphics power seemed to be put in Tifa’s, uh, bosom.)

But the characters in towns, the overworld, and in-game cutscenes are incredibly blocky. PC versions are supposedly sharper, but the PlayStation One version makes it nigh impossible to see any facial expressions.

The graphics are definitely a product of its time. I always say that the beginning of 3D gaming was essentially like puberty – awkward and full of zits. It wasn’t yet at that stage where it could be aesthetically pleasing. We marveled about it when it was first released, yes, but then we cringed in retrospect.

The environment backdrops however are probably the strongest points, where they capture the industrial nature of Midgar, the reactors and other such buildings.

Story:

Final Fantasy VII became legendary the minute Square released it. Every aspect was memorable. Part of it could be due to the fact that it was the first Final Fantasy game to enter the 3D realm. Another part was Tetsuya Nomura’s character designs, which hit the cool meter to the point of sub-zero.

The cinematics blew our minds. The opening action scene with Cloud, Barrett, and the rest of AVALANCHE attacking Shinra’s mako reactor is the most memorable opening to a Final Fantasy game. Period. Final Fantasy games really do know how to start at the right spot, no matter how good or bad the overall game is. The opening is always the best part.

Then there was the motorcycle chase. Cid’s airship. The gun fights. Battles with Sephiroth. The extra stuff to find, like summons and extra bosses. So much was jam-packed into the game.

But the story was the primary factor in making VII famous. It’s definitely one of the better ones. Man, the story became so famous that even gamers who haven’t touched a Final Fantasy game knew the major spoilers. It is the equivalent to knowing Darth Vader’s line, “I am your father” without having actually watched Star Wars.

Aerith (Aeris in the English releases) Gainsborough – the innocent flower girl who holds the secrets of the Ancients – develops a romance with Cloud and fucking dies at the end of Disc 1 by the main villain – Sephiroth. The scene shocked everyone and practically made headlines. Everybody has seen the horrible image in one way or another.

It seems to me that since Final Fantasy V, the stories have gotten more and more used to main character deaths, ultimately transforming into a heavy-hitting TV series rather than simply a video game series. In other words – it matured. Looking back, Final Fantasy IV appears to be child’s play and a prototype of later dramatic storylines with fully realized worlds.

Final Fantasy VII was also the first Final Fantasy game to create a world much like ours – one with cars and trains and airplanes and machine guns and even cellphones. The main city of Midgar reflects industrialization at its worst, with miles of slums and claustrophobic cities. Shinra Electric Power Company is a reflection of capitalism at its worst - a single entity in charge of so much that it’s pretty much the government. For the first time in a Final Fantasy game, you play as characters who dance between the morally ambiguous line of terrorism and activism. Funny enough, the theme of neglecting the planet resonates with us now more than ever. This game ended up being rather prophetic about the uncontrollable growth of corporations.

While the story is memorable with many intriguing elements, the plot itself is a tangled web. In my opinion, they really hashed in so many things that it’s easy to forget crucial details. It’s not straightforward, but at the same time everything does connect by the end. While Shinra is the driving force as a whole as the villain, Sephiroth takes over, then you learn about his backstory and then with the evil scientist Hojo and the extra-terrestrial Jenova and then “Weapon” and then the planet’s history and this and that and the other thing.

If I were to put Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII together and contrast them, as many gamers do, I would find that Final Fantasy VII is the summer blockbuster and Final Fantasy VI is the Oscar winner. Final Fantasy VII started introducing the sappy romance subplot to the series. A love triangle forms among Aerith, Cloud, and Cloud’s childhood friend Tifa. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with having a love triangle, the writing is like watching middle schoolers trying to express their feelings. Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy IV treated any romance with dignity and realism.

But maybe I’m being a bit harsh. After all, Cloud Strife did go through some suffering as an adolescent. His backstory clearly drives his antisocial behavior, so that becomes a good arc.

The goofiest but memorable part of the story deals with Don Corneo and Wall Market and running around store to store doing tasks in order to free Tifa from Don Corneo. It ends with Cloud needing to cross-dress as a woman to get inside Don’s mansion. Because, you know, it’s not like Cloud can just break in with his sword and Aerith’s magic or anything like that. But whatever. It’s anime.

The recent Final Fantasy VII Remake for the PS4 seems to streamline the story, and actually enhances the emotions they were trying to deliver in the original. I will be talking about the remake in a separate post altogether since I’m almost done with it at the time of this writing. But there’s a lot that I want to say about comparing and contrasting the remake and the original.

The latter half of the plot takes a couple weird turns. At one point, Cloud became catatonic and confined to a wheelchair.

That part of the game became the sluggish part for me. Sephiroth also tries to confuse Cloud, which confused me. Cloud apparently suffers from some alternate subconscious mumbo-jumbo and like. . .ungh. I get an aneurysm thinking about it sometimes.

Complicated plotlines like Final Fantasy VII start showing up from here on out in the Final Fantasy series. The trend of bishonen characters also begin here, bishonen being the Japanese term for “beautiful boy.” Cloud and Sephiroth have that look. The series starts hashing in sappier romances and much more of an anime feel.

Final Fantasy VII ultimately marked the start of a new era for the series – introducing both cool and overused tropes.

Music:

Hands down the best Final Fantasy soundtrack of all.

The entire soundtrack of this game is memorable. The opening tune, with its light twinkle when the stars show up, is enough to make any gamer know exactly what that’s from.

With a story set in a more modern world, we have music that is more modern. After Final Fantasy VI had a more serious and operatic score, Uematsu displayed his love of progressive rock here. The motorcycle chase incorporates a lot of synth, which was fitting for zipping through the streets of Midgar. However, Final Fantasy VII is the first Final Fantasy game without that familiar starting bassline for the battle them. The battle theme is instantly recognizable but also radically different from its predecessors. It’s dramatic and displays danger.

Meanwhile, the boss theme is one of the best boss themes in the series, or any video game really. It’s an electrifying progressive rock piece, and it’s my personal favorite boss theme.

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The more instrumental pieces are somber, given the dreary atmosphere of the planet. The world map music is very different from its predecessors. It’s romantic one moment, soaring the next, and then dips into foreboding terror. I guess that sums up the story of Final Fantasy VII.

And we cannot leave out One-Winged Angel, which I will talk about below.

Notable Theme:

Without a doubt, One-Winged Angel – played during the terrifying final battle against Sephiroth – is the most memorable piece of music in Final Fantasy VII.

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It may very well be the most popular song of the entire series. Nobuo Uematsu was inspired by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It’s a whopping 30 something minute classical piece. If you look it up on YouTube and browse through it, you can definitely note the similarities. However, Uematsu didn’t want some boring classical introduction to the piece. He wanted to add the destructive impact of rock. The theme has a very distinct stamping-your-foot-down quality to it.

I had noticed a certain piece-by-piece feel of the song and that’s exactly how Uematsu composed it. This is the only song that Uematsu has composed where he created several tunes in his head and then rearranged them to make a single comprehensive song.

If you want to get technical, One-Winged Angel is the first Final Fantasy song with lyrics. The chorus sings in Latin about Sephiroth’s burning anger, with some lyrics actually taken from the medieval poem Carmina Burana. It sounds fantastic when fully orchestrated.

In Advent Children, the animated sequel to Final Fantasy VII, the music is accompanied by hardcore metal. This new rendition really illustrates the destructive power of Sephiroth. Uematsu changed the lyrics for Advent Children. They are more original now. I specifically noticed the lyrics “Veni, veni, mi fili”, which translates to “Come, come, my son.” Sephiroth is inviting you so he can kill you.

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Uematsu has stated that the original orchestration didn’t sit well with him. As I suspected, Advent Children’s hardcore metal version is the one he preferred, the one he would have composed had he the technology at the time of Final Fantasy VII.

Verdict:

Another must-play for any RPG fan, even if you think it’s overrated. It’s a must-play because of its popularity, in the same way that people are wide-eyed when you say you haven’t seen Star Wars or such-and-such other popular movie. It’s a whole lot of fun, especially in the scenes that involve other forms of gameplay, such as the motorcycle chase and even a battlefield strategy game in protecting Fort Condor.

Direct Sequel?

Yes – first there was the CGI movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.

I actually watched Advent Children before playing Final Fantasy VII. I had already known most of what happened in the game and Advent Children became a monumental craze when it first came out. Everybody was talking about it. Watching the sequel before playing the game skewers your interpretation of things. My first impression of Cloud was that he was always whiny and angsty, and meanwhile Tifa kept nagging him to move on. I felt really bad for Cloud losing Aerith.

Then when I actually played Final Fantasy VII, I saw that Cloud starts as this badass mercenary. Tifa is spunky and clearly is the better choice (IMO) but Cloud is enamored by Aerith after only meeting her briefly. WHAT? Cloud. Bro. Make a move on Tifa, you nitwit. Tifa is AMAZING.

Square Enix then continued the story with Dirge of Cerberus – Final Fantasy VII. This video game sequel focuses on Vincent Valentine, a fan favorite of the original game.

Let me remind you about something – the original game revealed Shinra’s inner deep secret experiments, namely with Sephiroth and Jenova. Dirge of Cerberus introduces an even deeper research team within Shinra called Deepground. I don’t know about you, but it already sounds like the start of a terribly redundant string of sequels, like how the Jason Bourne movies keep revealing an even deeper level of conspiracy theories. Vincent’s mysterious background is now fully revealed. He is defined by – guess what? – another angsty lost lover story, this time with a woman named Lucrecia. Now, okay, look, maybe I’m just being a dick about these types of love stories. But when it keeps popping up within the same series in the same manner, I start asking if you have anything else to offer on your menu.

Lastly, there is the prequel for the PSP – Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. Of all the games in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core has received the most positive reception. If anything, play that after playing Final Fantasy VII before bothering with anything else.

Oh, and of course there is the Final Fantasy VII Remake, which we thought wasn’t going to happen for the longest time but they finally released it in April 2020. More on that later after I finish it, and after I post my entire series of Final Fantasy reviews!

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