#the levels and character customization look and work almost the same and also the UI and item unlock and survival characteristics

[me-ajude]

now that palworld is coming to light again (fuck patents by the way) i can finally make fun of people on twitter who were unironically like "this is a much better pokemon inspired game thats ACTUALLY INDIE and made WITH HEART by real artists and not DISGUSTING PLAGIARISTS" and then they would start posting screenshots of some random phone game that looks exactly like this

and when you go and see how it plays it's either the exact same kind of crap that was in every flash game site + facebook 2014 or literally just a pokemon fangame made the type of person that goes "dragon type? bug type? so fucking stupid lmao" (both have ads, paywalling and a ton of mixels and tweening)

[gertlushgaming]

Akibas Trip Undead And Undressed Director’s Cut Review (Nintendo Switch OLED)

For this Akibas Trip Undead And Undressed Director’s Cut Review, we find out that This suburban Tokyo ward's seen it all, from Japan's post-war reconstruction to the economic bubblegum crisis of the '80s. Always on the cutting edge of progress, with a little something to offer even the most fetishistic of appetites, it was almost inevitable that this singular technocracy of indulgence would give birth to a whole new kind of appetite altogether. Enter, the “Synthisters” – vampires who prey upon the life energy of the town’s unsuspecting figurine-chasers, maid café connoisseurs, and cosplayers. Those victimized by Synthisters take on the properties of their attackers while also withdrawing from society and becoming veritable shut-ins due to their newfound fatal weakness to sunlight.  

Akibas Trip Undead And Undressed Director’s Cut Review Pros: - Anime graphics. - 3.1GB download size. - Has its own in-game achievements. - Text and/or voice can be changed between English and Japanese. - Three difficulty options: Easy,  Casual, and Gamer. - Opening and ongoing tutorial. - Display settings - damage display, experience display, counter guide ui, and map ui. - Auto,  Skip, and fast-forward buttons for cut scenes and conversations. - Eight control layouts. - Basic character creator but you get clothing all the time so it doesn't really matter. - Smartphone wallpaper unlocks. - Excellent voice work. - Invert axis option. - Toy box mode: Here you have free roam of the Akibas and have all abilities and items unlocked. - Toy Box mode has the same 3 difficulty options as the main game. - The entertaining story is loosely based on Vampire equivalents. You can answer and set branching questions and answers.  The answers given affect the story in multiple ways. - Lightening fast loading times. - Smartphone, Your hub contains all the options and menus. Here you can read emails,  read Potter, and change game options like save/load.  The whole phone can be customized with pictures taken from cut scenes etc. - Combat: your aim is to strip your enemies of all their clothes.  you have a high medium and low attack which are used to target specific pieces of clothing. Once that particular piece of clothing is flashing,  You can then rip off the garment. - Unlock and use Fast travel points found around the map. - Random street fights. - Music is a mix of J-Pop meets techno with a layer of nuts to it all. Hear music booming from hops and cars as you stroll the streets. - Huge living,  breathing world. - Pitter is the game in the world social media app where you can get information. - E-mail is a place to get side mission opportunities and hear from certain characters. - defeated enemies drop loot. - marker in the game for main story missions and a few key side missions. - Combat relies heavily on combos and you can actually chain moves together,  Wrapping them into a strip frenzy where you can strip a whole gang in one chain. - get arrested by cops for fighting,  Pay a bailout price penalty. - Save/Load whenever. - A full 3D world with full 360-degree camera control. - Cutscenes are a mix of in-game shorts and character art interactions. - Shops are scattered all over the area and each seller is unique in terms of pricing and stock. - Battle arenas. Fight off against waves of enemies,  Rank up, and earn loot and cash. - Side missions are optional and plentiful. - Fuse (craft)  items together to make new ones, make current weapons stronger, and much more. - Collect flyers from salespeople in the street.  These flyers are for real-world shops that you can visit. - New game features unlock as you go through the main story missions. - Memorable characters. - Ui is clean and bright. - Looks just as crisp as the big-boy console versions. - Weaponry is crazy with such weapons as laptops,  umbrellas, and even suitcases can be used. - Earn experience and level up and learn new moves and gain better stats. - Finishing moves can be performed where you take your opponent's underwear. - The game is very fast-paced but so playable. - Multiple choice encounters. - Full camera photo mode for you but also used for missions. - The definitive version of the game for both looks and performance. - Difficulty affects combat and easier difficulties disable high, mid, and low attacks. - Can skip cutscenes. - Full stats screen with a detailed breakdown. - The visual editor lets you fully tinker and customize the look of the game with - presets, character colors, map color, sky color and contrast, fog, and color offset.

Akibas Trip Undead And Undressed Director’s Cut Review Cons: - The a slight learning curve at the begininng. - So slow to start with as you get so much information and mechanic knowledge. - Fighting is the trickiest part to learn especially with no proper lock-on options. - Very little in terms of character creation. - Watching out for when to strip is hard, especially in group fights. - You can bring up a marker on screen but it's only for main missions,  We could do with one for active side quests. - Very slight slowdown in places. - Picking up items is a pain, especially after fights as you have to quickly grab them all,  Due to the crazy weapons,  some can be crazy small. - Some of the shop fronts in the world look bland,  pixel aged, and dare I say it,  PlayStation 1-era looking. - Pervert,  Sexual tone throughout.  I mean you expect it somewhat from a game that evolves around stripping your enemies but it kicks it up a notch.  You can zoom your camera in on your female party members and actually jiggle their breasts. - Toybox mode disables achievements and it doesn't recognize clear data. - Cannot rebind controls. - An FYI that it doesn't support any sort of save transfer. - The choices you make don't feel that impactful. Related Post: Legend Bowl Review (PlayStation 5)

Akibas Trip Undead And Undressed Director’s Cut: Official website. Developer: 株式会社アクワイア ACQUIRE Corp. Publisher:  Home | XSEED Games Store Links - Nintendo Read the full article

[self-loving-vampire]

Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992)

Ultima 7 was pretty much my introduction to RPGs, and I could not have asked for a better pair of games to ignite a lifelong passion into that genre. There is a real reason why this is still considered one of the best RPGs ever made.

While Ultima 7 is often discussed as a singular entity, it is actually two separate full-length games with one expansion each. For this post I will focus on the first one, Ultima VII: The Black Gate, as well as its expansion: Forge of Virtue.

I recommend playing the game using Exult, which adds some quality of life features (such as a feeding hotkey and a “use all keys” hotkey) as well as the option to use higher quality audio packs, implement bug fixes, and change the font into something easier on the eyes.

Summary

The protagonist of the Ultima series is “the Avatar”, a blank slate isekai protagonist from our world who has previously travelled to the world of Britannia several times and saved it from many threats, also becoming the shining paragon of the virtues meant to guide its people.

In this game, you once again cross the portal to Britannia to save it from a new and mysterious extradimensional threat. As soon as you arrive, you immediately discover two things:

1- A violent ritualistic murder has just taken place.

2- There is suspicious new organization called “The Fellowship” gaining adherents throughout the land.

It is up to you to investigate these developments.

Freedom

In terms of freedom, the Black Gate has plenty overall but there are areas where it is not quite there.

Once you can manage to get the password to get out of the locked-down town of Trinsic you are free to go nearly anywhere in the game right away and have multiple means of transportation to accomplish this, such as moongates or ships.

And there are some very real rewards to exploring like this as well, such as various treasure caches and other interesting findings. 

The world is actually very small by modern standards, especially when settlements occupy so much of it, but both the towns and the wilderness areas are dense with content.

Notably, the game also allows you to perform various activities. From stealing to making a honest living by baking bread (which is something you can do thanks to how interactive the environment is) or gathering eggs at a farm.

Where it falls short is in terms of having multiple possible solutions for quests. Generally there is only one correct option for how to complete them.

That said, there is a bad ending you might be able to find in addition to the canonical good ending.

Character Creation/Customization

This is one of the big minuses of the game. While you can select your name and gender (and with Exult also have a wider selection of portraits) that is about it for character creation.

All characters will start with the same stats and there are no character classes. You can develop your stats through training and specialize through your choice of equipment, but by the end of the Forge of Virtue expansion you will have maxed stats and the best weapon in the game (a sword) regardless, and you will definitely need to cast a few spells to progress the main quest as well.

This can make every playthrough feel much like the last, as there isn’t that much of a way to vary how your character develops or what abilities they’ll end up having. You will always be a master of absolutely everything in the end unless you go out of your way to avoid doing the Forge of Virtue expansion.

Story/Setting

While the game is a bit too obvious and heavy-handed about its villains, there are still many interesting storylines in the game that deal with mature subjects that remain relevant today, such as cults, drug abuse, workplace exploitation, and xenophobia.

However, the setting as a whole is greater than any individual storyline taking place within. With the exception of most guards and bandits, every single NPC in the game is an individual with a name, schedule, living space, and defined personality. This was not the norm in 1992 and even today there’s not many games that really implement this well. The world is also very detailed in terms of things like the services available to you, the general interactivity of the game world, and the sheer amount of things that populate every corner of it.

The initial murder is not only a strong hook for investigation but also a shocking scene in its own right. The Guardian also proves to have a significant presence as a villain, using a mental link to remotely taunt you based on the context of what is happening. For example, if your companions die he may offer you some exaggerated, mocking pity.

Immersion

There is something very interesting and comfortable about just watching the various inhabitants of a town just go about their daily lives. They work during the day, eat at certain times (either at home or at one of the many taverns in the land), and sleep at night. They don’t just strangely repeat one single action during the day either, they may do things like open windows when the weather is nice or turn candles and streetlamps on at night.

In terms of immersion, Ultima 7 is my primary example of a game that does an excellent job of it even if there’s some weirdness going on with the setting. Even after having played so many more games throughout my life, only a few are on the same level as either part of Ultima 7 when it comes to immersion.

Gameplay

There are three broad aspects to the gameplay here that I want to discuss.

The first is combat. It is actually simple enough that you can call it almost entirely automatic. You simply enable combat mode by pressing C and your party will automatically go and fight nearby hostile enemies based on whatever combat orders you have selected for them (by default, attacking the closest enemy).

This is certainly better than having an outright bad or annoying combat system as the whole process is simple and painless, but I still wish there was more depth to it. Your stats, and especially your equipment, still play a role but other than things like pausing to use items or cast spells the whole process is very uninvolved.

I kind of wish there was more depth to it, but at least the other two areas of the gameplay are reasonably good.

The next aspect of gameplay is dialogue, which uses dialogue trees for the first time in the series. Previously, it required typing in keywords, which are retained but as dialogue options you can just click on rather than remember and type.

While the keywords are not really written as natural language most of the time (requiring some imagination to determine the specifics of your dialogue), the system is very easy to use regardless. It definitely lacks depth compared to something like Fallout: New Vegas, but so do most games.

The third and most notable thing is the way you interact with the world in general. It is both extremely simple and very immersive at the same time.

Ultima 7 is a game that can be played entirely with the mouse (though keyboard hotkeys make everything much more comfortable). You can right click a space to walk there, you can left click something to identify what it is, and you can use double left click to interact.

For example, double left click over an NPC to talk to them (or attack them, if combat mode is enabled), double left click a door to open it, double left click a loaf of bread to feed it to someone, and so on.

But there is more. By holding your click over an item and dragging it, you can move it. This has various applications beyond just being how you pick things up and add them to your inventory. For example, sometimes objects may be hidden beneath other objects, or objects may need to be placed in a specific location.

There are some downsides to this system. Particularly, the issue that keeping your inventory organized can be time-consuming when it has to be done by manually dragging objects around, and this can also make looting relatively slow.

Despite this, I think this kind of interaction system has a lot of potential. It just has some clunky aspects to be ironed out.

Aesthetics

Ultima 7 was very good-looking for its time, and although modern players will not be very impressed by how it looks or sounds, it still remains easily legible in a way that some other old games are not. That, and the ability to identify anything with just a left click, makes this a very easy game to make out at the very least.

Some of the music of this game is very distinctive too, and will likely stay with you after a full playthrough.

In terms of style, the Black Gate does have a bit of an identity while still having a very familiar medieval fantasy setting with things like trolls, animated skeletons, dragons, and liches. While there are aspects that help the setting distinguish itself a bit, they are relatively subtle.

If I had to describe the feeling of playing this, I’d call it “open and laid back”. While the main quest deals with a looming threat to the entire world, the game does not follow this overly closely at first, letting you deal with it at your own pace and without having your exploration options limited by the story.

In fact, when I was young I often just ignored that and went to live in a creepy ruin in the swamp.

(Don’t expect many pictures in these reviews, but have one of my “childhood home.”)

I’d say that Ultima 7′s second part (Serpent Isle) has a much stronger and also darker and more isolating atmosphere overall and that has a lot of appeal to me in particular, but the Black Gate is definitely more open and less linear, and I also appreciate that.

Accessibility

It pleases me to say that Ultima 7 remains extremely easy to pick up and play. Even setting up Exult is not complicated in the least.

The gameplay is intuitive and simple, the UI is minimal, stats are basic (and not even that important), and the combat is automatic. I expect that this is not only the easiest point of entry into the Ultima series as a whole but also likely even easier to get into than many modern RPGs!

It does have some aspects that may be a bit clunky, like all the inventory-related dragging, but it’s definitely not obscure or complicated even to someone who has not read the manual (though I’d still recommend doing that). I literally played this game as a tiny child who could barely read or understand English and still got really into it.

The one thing I’d like to point out is that the game uses a type of copy protection where at a couple of story points (including an extremely early one to leave the first town) you will be asked some questions that require using the manual and external map to answer. You can just google the answers for these.

Conclusion

As I write more of these reviews there will be many games that are interesting, but deeply flawed. Games that are worth trying out but maybe not finishing, as well as games that had interesting ideas but that I can’t entirely recommend due to serious problems that will easily put people off.

But I do not think the Black Gate is such a game. I can easily recommend it with no qualifiers despite the fact that it is almost 30 years old. This is really a game that all RPG fans should at the very least try for a few hours, and not only for its historical significance. It is genuinely a good game worthy of its praise.

I will review its sequel, Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle, next.

[vaulthunter426]

Borderlands 3 | What we know...

Just because I’m not sure the best way to present this information, prepare for a long list of new features in Borderlands 3 with my comments because.... well this is my blog. I will not be discussing the two Vault Hunters we’ve seen gameplay of in terms of their action skills and skill trees.

Quality of Life improvements!

Borderlands has aged quite well, BL2 more than BL1 but we can go back to games almost a decade (and actually a decade) old and they still feel great and are tons of fun. After taking about a year hiatus from all Borderlands games, I came back after the Mask of Mayhem trailer and I found myself trying to roll or slide out of the way of charging enemies and merely crouched in front of them. After so long of this, I knew what I wanted out of Borderlands 3...

Sliding, Grappling, Ground Slams - A feature that I was hoping for beyond almost anything else were movement upgrades and boy we got them. The sliding adds a whole new dynamic to fighting a mob of enemies and the grappling opens up a plethora of verticality options. Be sure to be looking up high for hidden chests! The ground slams seem to be an upgraded, more visually appealing version of the ground slams from TPS. Zane cocks back an arm with a Digi-claw before slamming his fist to the ground while Amara leaps into the air slamming both fists to the ground (not to be confused with her Action Skill).

Vending Machines - Instead of manually purchasing each ammo type by spamming our select key on them, we can now purchase the max amount of ammo by pressing a key as we approach the machine, without ever entering the UI.

“Claim Lost Loot” - A new “vending machine” in Sanctuary III collects all the loot we didn’t pick up and store them until we access the machine. Once we activate it, all the loot comes spilling out onto the ground in front of us for us to check out and make sure we didn’t miss anything. No more lost Legendaries!

Sanctuary III is the first hub in the Borderlands franchise that features a unique room for our Vault Hunters! Our room will be tailored to the Vault Hunter of our choice with possible customization options. The wall holds a number of “mounts” where we can showcase our favorite guns as well as a couple spots for a relic, shield, and grenade mod.

Loot Instancing and Level Scaling - Is your buddy ten levels ahead of you? No problem! If you join the game of a friend who is a higher or lower level than you, your damage output will scale accordingly so no one is over or underleveled! Along with this will be loot drops. If you open a chest to a blue and purple rarity pistol, they will be at your level and ready to loot. Your friend will also see a blue and purple rarity pistol, but different manufactures and at their own level. You both can take both pistols from the same chest. All of these options have a toggle feature if you preferred the previous games style.

Claptrap as a General of the Crimson Raiders - It’s nice to know that the Crimson Raiders are continuing on after the death of Roland, but their priorities may be a bit askew if Claptrap is a general... then again maybe his title holds no responsibilities... all about the ego boost.

Lilith as Commander of the Crimson Raiders - Not all that surprising although I was speculating that maybe she had ditched our friends to deal with some of that pent up anger post-Jack. It seems like she has been broadcasting across the galaxy searching for new Vault Hunters, and maybe even “broadcasting” directly into Siren’s minds as a comment by Amara upon meeting Lilith went something like “Oh so you’re the voice in my head.” Sounds like our Guardian Angel...

Marcus - I have no doubt Marcus will be buying and selling us guns, but we do see that in person he will be our go to for SDU’s. This go around the currency used is money opposed to Eridium, similar to our BL1 days.

Moxxi - She still has her bar, this time with four different slot machines, possibly activated by a unique currency each, or rewarding different pools of loot.

Tannis - “Tannis’ Lab + Infirmary” read the sign pointing us toward our old friend, which leaves a noticeable lack of Dr. Zed on Sanctuary III. Was he a fatality of the ill fate that befell Sanctuary 2? Or is he on Pandora?

Ellie - Ellie takes position as our lead engineer / car provider for Borderlands 3, as we no longer have our dear friend Scooter with us (nice decal of him on the outside of the ship though).

Unlockable Vehicles - It looks like we will unlock vehicles as we progress through the story, similar to the Bandit Technical in BL2, but there seems to be World Event / Side Missions that allow us to come across unique vehicles parked across the maps that we can get in and return to a Catch-A-Ride station so that they are available to use any time we like! This means if your vehicle blows up before you can get it registered, you may be out of luck!

Alternate Firing Mode- Initially inthough a couple of gun manufacturers would have alternate firing modes but it almost seemed like every gun during the gameplay reveal had an alternate firing mode.

Hyperion Shields- I’ve been wondering how the shields would work for the Hyperion weapon and it looks like they are ADS activated.

Unique Dialog for our Vault Hunters - A feature introduced during some of the DLC for BL2, as well as through the entirety of TPS was character dialog unique to each Vault Hunter. It is most definitely returning for BL3 and I couldn’t be happier.

Unique Looting for our Vault Hunters? - When Amara opened a chest (really a repurposed car trunk) she punched it open in a similar fashion to Kratos in God of War. Although punching a chest open definitely seems like Amara’s style, I wouldn’t say the same for the other Vault Hunters which makes me wonder if certain chests will have unique opening animations for each VH.

Location: Ascension Bluff - This was the location title card that was on the projection screen after got the initial reveal demo which makes me wonder if the Children of the Vault Propaganda center(?) is on a map called Ascension Bluff. I could be wrong in thinking that, however I’m pretty positive that all of that was on Pandora.

Location: Meridian Metroplex - Some interesting reveals about the city we’ve seen from the trailers! The Meridian Metroplex is on Promethea, and has become an Atlas controlled city. For some this is great, for others not so much. Maliwan seems to be attacking the city with their new ally...

Locations: So far we have Pandora and Promethea listed as worlds we can visit but I believe it was Paul Sage also confirmed an Asteroid(?) map that will feature low-gravity similar to (but not quite the same as) TPS.

Tyreen + Troy Calypso / The Calypso Twins- These two are fucking Borderlands equivalent douche twitch streamers. They’ve leveraged this position (or vice - versa?) into being Cult Leaders for the Children of the Vault.

They have broadcast stations scattered around the galaxy that we can destroy / turn off as a world event style challenge.

Tyreen is a Siren who can leech the life and power out of other living beings. Being a Siren, she’s convinced her followers that she is their God - Queen. Troy is merely piggy-backing off the fact that she has all the influence, or it seems that way to me.

Tyreen has streamed her ability of sucking the life out of beings to her many followers, and to the Vault Hunters who she calls her most loyal follower yet.

What’s a cult without its followers? Instead of our typical “Bandit” enemies, it seems like the main enemy faction of that caliber has been rebranded to Fanatics.

Tyreen has struck a deal with the Head of Mergers and Acquisitions for Maliwan, a guy named Katagawa (some dweeb who hates / envies / is jealous of Rhys, but also makes sense why he wants control of Atlas) and so mobs of both the Maliwan Assault Troopers and the Fanatics will be fighting you at the same time.

Randy Pitchford has let on that Tyreen is using the bandits, and probably her Maliwan allies, as a tool to find the Vaults so that she can gain the power of the Vault Monsters.

Zer0 has left the Crimson Raiders and is working with / for Rhys under the Atlas corporation, at least while the money and weapons are good.

Crimson Lance became the Crimson Raiders after Atlas fell and they joined Roland’s cause in Sanctuary. Now that Atlas is being ran by CEO Rhys, they are called Atlas Soldiers.

New Element : Radiation - Irradiated enemies will take damage and are also more susceptible to other damage types. An irradiated enemy can spread the effect to other enemies surrounding them. Upon death, an irradiated enemy will reach critical mass and explode.

Barrels - Elemental variety barrels can now be melee’d to launch at enemies before shooting them and causing them to explode.

Pipelines -Certain pipelines can be shot to cause radiation spills, or oil slicks that can then be ignited to cause an AOE of damage.

Enemies / Mini Bosses - There will be more mini bosses in Borderlands 3, and the weapons they use against you can be dropped so that you can use that gun on future enemies.

NPC - Certain NPC’s will assist you on missions, like Lorelei and Zer0, and then can also be downed. You can revive NPC’s and they can also revive you.

Paul Sage (Gearbox Developer?) - Paul made the comment about the low-grav environments as well as stating that if you “beeline through the story” it will take around 30 hours. Upon questioning if the guns in the reveal were better than what we will find (because of the basically non-existant recoil) he stated that in the past they’ve worked there way up to really good guns in terms of level progression, but this time they wanted to know if they could “start good, and make it fucking awesome.” So yeah. Guns are gonna be fucking awesome.

And that wraps it up! A nice guide to catch you up on things you’ve missed or to remind you of some things you’ve forgotten. I make no claim to have covered everything we’ve seen, but these were some things that I took note of. Feel free to add your own bits and pieces I missed in the replies! Borderlands 3 looks amazing, happy hunting.

- VaultHunter426

[thomasroach]

Outward Review – A Rough Adventure

The post Outward Review – A Rough Adventure appeared first on Fextralife.

The following post is this author’s opinion and does not reflect the thoughts and feelings of Fextralife as a whole nor the individual content creators associated with the site. Any link that goes outside of Fextralife are owned by their respective authors.

Can you defy the bitter cold, brutal heat, and ravenous monsters that all desire your death? Outward is an RPG that doesn’t hold your hand in the slightest, as you make your way through an open-world filled with adventure and death. Only with careful preparation will you survive the dangers of this world.

Outward Review – A Rough Adventure

Genre: Survival RPG Developed by: Nine Dots Studio Published by: Deep Silver Release date: 26 Mar 2019 Platforms: PC (Reviewed), XBOX One, PS4 Website: https://www.ninedotsstudio.com/outward Price at time of review: $39.99

Outward Features

Play solo or coop in local or online modes

Dynamic defeat scenarios that react to your context

Constant auto-saving means there’s no turning back

Ritualistic, step-by-step approach to spellcasting

Constant auto-saving means you must live with your decisions

Encounter dynamic defeat scenarios

A unique experience with every playthrough

An immersive exploration experience

Creatures will be harder to beat in co-op mode

Single-player, online co-op and local co-op with split screen

Story and Setting

Outward starts you off indebted to your tribe, a debt in which you must try to repay.  In an effort to clear the amount you owe, you embark on an ill-fated voyage to try and earn enough to pay it off. Of course the ship runs aground, leaving you with almost no money and a crowd of angry villagers demanding payment. From here on out, the game opens up into three distinct main quest lines, with a small variety of sidequests you can participate in. Sounds like a good setup, but it is not executed well in my opinion.

This is a good friend, or so I’m told

You are tossed into this town and told someone in your family did something bad, you’re again told this one person is a close friend, you’re told that you are a part of this tribe. Due to the way the story is told, none of this is given adequate time to develop. I’ve poked at one of the main quest lines out of a feeling of professional obligation and I still have no real drive to pursue it. This is fine though as Outward does not advertise itself as a game with an in-depth story, rather the focus is on the story that you make for yourself.

Even with that though, things fall a little flat as I can tell the devs put a fair amount of work into this world, but very little of it comes across to the player. Very few NPCs will talk with you, and many of them are just shopkeepers that have just add a little bit of flavored text.  If there’s books or other written lore entries in this game, I haven’t found them yet. There are ruins scattered throughout the game, but so far I’ve not found much inside any of them so far. To be fair, this is a very slow paced game and I’ve not gotten too deep into the more dangerous ruins, so there might be more if you venture further in. That being said, it’s not very excusable that I’m still so clueless on the world given the amount of time I have spent playing.

And thus starts the legend of the Bird Lady

Gameplay

In my original draft, this section was turning into a small novel as there are a lot of mechanics in this game but two things made me stream-line this section. Firstly, if the mechanics of this game aren’t going to interest you, the Cliff Notes version is all you really need to read.

Secondly, if the mechanics of this are your cup of tea, then all you’ll want to read is the Cliff Notes version. See, a lot of this game is about exploration, discovery, and the story that you create. Going through the game and making decisions based on imperfect knowledge is a major part of what makes this game unique. There is a tutorial, and it is a must for this game, but you’ll really be short-changing yourself if you go in with a complete understanding of the mechanics. This is the same for most things in this title, for some this will sound like heaven and for some it will sound like a complete waste of time.

Avatar customization is limited, but it has a purple hair option so it’s all good.

At its core, this is an action-RPG, while there are plenty of side mechanics, the main thrust is exploring dungeons and beating down the bad guys and monsters. After administering the beat downs you will loot all of their stuff, maybe find an upgrade or two, sell the rest, and move onto the next group of walking loot.

Combat

This brings me to my major criticism of the game, and one that I think will be the proverbial straw for many gamers. The combat is not fun as it is clunky, unresponsive, and it is difficult to use the flashier more complex spells if you’re playing solo. After the most difficult fights have ended, I don’t feel like I achieved a victory, rather I just feel like I cheesed the AI. I honestly can’t tell if this is the result of inexperience or if it was a deliberate design choice. Either way, combat really needs to be better given how much of it you’ll be doing.

As for the rest of the mechanics I’ll just skim over them. Survival is a big aspect of this game, with hot and cold weather, hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep. It might sound like a bother, but the game does a good job of encouraging you naturally to keep track of all your bars. As long as you are mindful, you won’t get in trouble.

That being said, the UI to convey some of the information is lacking. For example as you take damage, you recive ‘burnt health’ which reduces your max HP until you either eat specific foods, drink a potion, or sleep. However, the UI really isn’t very clear on this and I died several times before I figured out what that slightly different color red meant on my health circle.

I mean it’s obvious in hindsight, but it did take a few deaths to figure it out

Death

Speaking of death, you don’t really ‘die’ in this game. If you lose all your health, you’ll pass-out instead. This will cost you one day (which can be a major problem for some quests) and you’ll wake up in a context sensitive situation. This can either be fun, an annoyance, or a really bad situation since the time might have caused some food to rot, which means you can’t eat to get rid of that hunger status, as well as your max HP and stamina is also now reduced. It is certainly an interesting way to handle death, I’ll give the developers that. Something to be aware of is that because you can’t ever die, the game does not allow you to save. There is only one auto-save for your character, and the game is saving almost constantly. Don’t count on ALT-F4 to bail you out of a bad choice either.

Character Progression

Character progression is mostly done by getting new gear, you don’t level up in this game, though you can gain new skills. Some skills are free, some cost silver, and a few require you to spend one of your three skill points to unlock. While skills help, your gear is everything here. Getting a new piece of armor or a better weapon drastically effects how well you do in combat. This also means in certain situations you can lose all your advancement because all your gear gets taken, needless to say that really stings. Though it is always possible to get your stuff back, however it might be pose a big challenge, but as far as I can tell nothing gets destroyed unless you sell it to a merchant and their inventory resets.

Multiplayer/Co-op

Multiplayer is potentially a big bonus here as not only does it have online drop-in drop-out gameplay, but it has split screen co-op as well. I didn’t get to test this feature a lot but from what little I did test out multiplayer worked well. It does seem to make the combat an order of magnitude easier though, which could be a concern. To me this is a non-feature since I don’t have anyone in my house I can play with and I’m not all that interested in playing with random people, but I can see how others would love the ability to play an RPG like this with a friend.

Crafting

Finally, there is quite the crafting system to explore here. There are no skill points here, you either have the materials to make something or you don’t. There are recipes but you don’t get to read them before crafting, If you look it up on a wiki (or in some cases just take an educated guess) you can craft the item and the recipe will be added to your journal. While you can craft weapons and armor, you’ll mostly be crafting adventuring supplies such as fire rags and potions. Cooking is a major crafting area as well and is very well integrated into the other systems. Different dishes have different bonuses, with more complex dishes providing additional bonuses.

Audio and Visual

There is honestly not much to say here, the visuals are to put it simply, functional. Occasionally you’ll come across some interesting monster designs and much of the gear you can equip is unique in design, but most of the terrain and architecture is very plain looking. There’s also tons of small, tiny errors in the terrain with the occasional prop that just looks out of place such as the giant rib cages that look like they’re made of plastic.

This does not look like weather-aged bone

Another thing about the visuals that ties in with gameplay is lighting. When it’s supposed to be dark, it is dark. Running out of light in a dungeon is not good situation to be in. While this sounds like an interesting mechanic, it really doesn’t work well when you are outside. If you’ve lived your life in the city, you really don’t realize how dark the great outdoors gets. As someone who does a significant amount of camping in his life trust me, this games gets moonless nights perfectly, which ultimately means you can’t see a darn thing. This makes outdoor navigation a massive pain, even if you have a lantern.

I did not doctor this screen shot at all

Audio is a bit of a mixed bag as the actual songs aren’t bad, and SFX are serviceable, but whatever system they are using for dynamic music is a bit wonky. I’ll be on my 17th trip back to town to sell off the two swords I looted and suddenly the music will swell into this epic score, usually spooking me a bit in the process. The voice acting is a bit off as well. It really does feel like they just went around the office and said “Hey, you’re not doing anything. Go get into the sound booth!” I really don’t think you’ll miss much by muting the sound and listening to your own stuff, but it won’t hurt the ears to leave their stuff on either.

Replayability

OK this might be a bit of a controversial view point, but I feel this game has very limited replayability. As I mentioned in the gameplay section, the vast majority of your adventuring effectiveness is in your gear. True, there is the choice of using magic or not, and which of the skill trees you wish to max out, but honestly you’ll probably have a favorite combat style that you’ll want to stick with. The only real reason to replay the game will be to experience all three faction story lines, since once you join a faction, you’re locked out of the others.

As I’ve already stated though, I don’t feel the main quest lines aren’t all that compelling. Certainly not enough for me to want to redo the game from the start. I really feel that whether or not you want to replay this game is going to hang on both how compelling you find the three factions vs how much the gameplay annoys you.

Pricepoint

So despite that fact that I just roasted Outward for a perceived lack of replayability, I still feel this game is a good buy. Assuming again, the mechanics sound like your cup of tea. Due to the pacing and the size of the world, this is going to take you a solid 30-40 hours to finish one of the main quest lines.  It might take you a little less time for additional playthroughs, but not much so for a $40 game, that’s not bad at all.  The devs give an estimate of 40-80 hours to fully experience the game, and I can see someone easily spending 60+ hours in this game if the mechanics happen to click with them. Toss in the fun you can have with a friend or random people on the internet, and Outward will really give you your money’s worth.

Final Thoughts

If I could give this game two scores I would. This game has a target audience and for them this is easily a 7.5, maybe even an eight. For the average gamer looking for a neat RPG experience to tide them over until Elder Scrolls 6 or Cyperpunk 2077 it would not even come close to that. Very slow pacing, unexplained mechanics, removal of modern systems, clunky combat, all of this adds up to an experience that the average gamer is probably not going to enjoy.

But if you are in that target group, those looking for an RPG that absolutely does not hold your hand and allows you to get hopelessly lost if you don’t pay attention, and will rip you a new one if you mess up, then this game is for you hands down. In the end though, I do need to choose a single score, and I’m going to go with the one I think will reflect the experience most people will have with this game.

If you enjoyed this review be sure to read more with our latest thoughts on action shinobi Sekiro Review: Shinobis Die Many Times. Or you can check out what we thought about CD Projekt Red’s upcoming sci-fi action RPG in Cyberpunk 2077 Preview: When Fallout Meets Blade Runner.

The post Outward Review – A Rough Adventure appeared first on Fextralife.

Outward Review – A Rough Adventure published first on https://juanaframi.tumblr.com/

[the-crippled-god]

Steam Next Fest, October 2021

Here’s a few sentences on the demos I’ve played thus far. We’ll see if I get to more...

A=B: Of the genre of 'Esolang programming games' (of which there are many), this might be one of the easiest to get into. However, nearly all the fun is going to come out of weird tricks you can pull off with the new instructions added in each section, which kinda defeats the premise. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised at how clever the game let me be with the the base 'one instruction'. It's not really programming, it's pattern matching and replacing (that being said, folks are starting to work out that well implemented pattern matching is one of the most powerful tools a programming language can have), and a condition that if a rule matches, the instructions start over, rather than continue. I wonder if there's any real world langs that behave like this, but support regex patterns (including capture groups), it might actually be a neat way of building things like custom file renaming rules... Games like this always feel like I'm doing work while not at work, but the simplicity of the base instruction makes this feel more like a puzzle game than something like TIS-100 or Shenzen IO, so provided the extra instructions don't make it feel more like programming (avoid adding branching, don't let me loop beyond the base loop, etc.), I'll probably enjoy this. Verdict: interesting, I'll probably buy it if it's cheap.

Galaxy's Extreme: This is another "Nintendo won't make a new F-Zero game so we'll do it ourselves", and it's... fine. Momentum feels good, and the controls feel good, it's just, too simplistic. I really feel like a spiritual successor to F-Zero needs the strafe and slide turning of GX (or some equivalent), without absurd goofy snaking, it's just, not the same, let alone an escalation of the style. You also only seem to leave the ground and prescribed points, rather than behaving like a hover craft, which doesn't quite feel right. Verdict: I'll probably pass on this one, if it gets rave reviews on release, and has online multiplayer, I could see grabbing it to play casually with friends.

Rayze: There's a good idea here, this isn't a good implementation of it. Momentum feels weird, and the game doesn't use raw mouse input, for some reason. An 'Aim racer' feels like a good idea, but this is more of a puzzle game where you're trying to work out how the level designer wants you to click things. Verdict: pass, absolutely not for me.

Dread Delusion: Open world immersive sim, focused on being weird. Seems alright, demo is a little too limited to tell, and I allocated my stats wrong to be able to see all of it (you seem to need high Lore to get to a few areas), but I enjoyed what was here, and will probably pick it up as just a weird thing to explore. Verdict: neat, be interested to see how the full version is.

Titanium Hound: This one looked cool, but it's really not good. Sounds in the menus are ear piercing, control scheme makes no sense on either the keyboard or controller. None of the attacks feel like they have impact. Controls are floaty and weird, like everything is on ice. Enemy sounds are muted, music is boring. Verdict: Really disappointed in this one, hard pass.

Transiruby: C...Cute... This seems like a fun light hearted metroidvania. Dialogue is witty, Siruby and pals are cute. Music is charming. Controls are tight. Graphics lean a little to simple for my tastes, but otherwise no complaints. Verdict: I'll probably buy this, seems like a good coping game for me.

Gastova: The Witches of Arkana: Meh. Some of the cutscene and character detail art is cute. Writing feels like it has a good premise, but could use an editor to punch up the jokes and quips a bit, since they don't quite land. It's almost like English isn't the writers first language, they have a good grasp of how to put words together so they're coherent, but they're not great at pacing dialogue so it feels natural. Gameplay is, bland? This feels aggressively like a 3rd party SNES platformer, like a Super Adventure Island or something. This is in all respects. It eats inputs randomly, attacks have no impact, enemies take too many hits, basic platoforming requires you stand on the very edge of the platforms, etc. I'm sure there are people who will get a kick out of this, but it's not for me. Verdict: pass.

Ex-Zodiac: It's a Starfox clone! Kinda halfway between SNES and 64. It's pretty good, not really doing anything original, but it plays well. Only weird issue I noticed is that enemies behind you can shoot at you, and there's not really a way to avoid it. Other than that my main complaint is the camera feels a little tight, definitely more like Starfox SNES, and it's a bit annoying. Verdict: I'll wishlist it, purchase is going to depend on the length and price of the full game.

Exo One: Interesting, likely not for me. I dig the movement scheme, though certain aspects of it suffer from the minimal UI/HUD. Manoeuvring through big wide open Unity terrain maps is not really compelling to me, I think I'd really like this if it was a more concentrated experience. Verdict: Pass, but I'll keep an eye on it.

POSTAL Brain Damaged: Hell yeah, this seems good. Think I like it more than Postal 4, at least in its current state. Writing is very Postal, except weirdly more subtle than usual? Dunno, this I like it more than Postal's usual crassness. Weapons are all versatile and cool (in the demo the rocket launcher weirdly feels the worst), and level design and aesthetics are on point. Didn't finish the demo cause I'd kinda rather play this on release, but really liked what I played. Verdict: Wishlisted, to pick up next time I'm in the mood for a boomer shooter.

Hypnagogia: Boundless Dreams: I was expecting something different. This seems to be a mostly linear 1st person platformer set in a childish dreamscape. It's fine for what it is, but at least as a demo, it didn't grab me. I think Anodyne 2 did this aesthetic better, this kinda feels like someone looked at Spyro the Dragon, and decided that's what dreams looked like. Maybe it gets weirder later, but I'm not sure I want to wait around to find out. Verdict: Pass for now, but I'll check the reviews when it comes out.

Cleo: A Pirate's Tale: It's alright, for a one person game, it seems pretty dang good. But, I don't think I'll play it. Everything about it is just a little off. Writing isn't quite funny, voice acting has weird intonation and direction, controls don't quite work intuitively, art style feels a touch unrealized, etc. Definitely give this one a try, especially if you liked old LucasArts games, you might love this, but I didn't. Verdict: Pass, but I have a few friends I'll probably recommend this to.

Hunt the Night: There's a good (potentially great) game here, but it leans just a little too into being difficult/punishing for my taste. You can animation cancel into a dash, except when there's hit stun from contacting an enemy with your sword, so you can't dodge ranged attacks while you're engaged in melee? Sometimes enemies are hit stunned by your attacks, sometimes the same enemies can attack through your hits? There's no stamina bar, but there's like 4 different meters to manage, and they work pretty well at forcing you to use all the options available to you. The weapons I found seemed to only differ in attack speed, melee combos did not change meaningfully, which is disappointing, but I didn't experiment much. Otherwise, for a 'bloodborne but as top-down zelda' it seems pretty great. Story seems interesting enough, if predictable, gameplay has a lot of good ideas, but it maybe needs another round of polish. A range indicator on the dash, and a solid explanation of if I'm suppose to be using it to dodge (and when I can cancel into a dodge and when I can't), along with a clear timer on how long I need to hold the heal button, would go a long way into making the game feel more fair. Verdict: On wishlist for now, because the trailer makes it look really fun, but I'll likely take a look at the reviews on release.

Anuchard: I swear I've seen this main character design before, I think they were a cameo design in CrossCode? Oh wow is English not the writer's first language, grammar issues all over the place. Thankfully, not so bad as to be incomprehensible, but I really hope they get an editor fluent in English before release. Gameplay wise, this seems a little too simple? Combat is satisfying, but you can stun lock the boss? And while the shield/heavy attack system seems like a good idea, it doesn't add much depth. Puzzle solving by bouncing the gems around feels bad. You can't aim in more than the 8 cardinal directions, and even that's inconsistent, and hit detection requires you to be really precise. Art is cute, writing seems like it has potential, if it gets a good proof read, music was interesting to good. Verdict: I think I'll pass, but I'll look into it after release.

Marmoreal: Can you tell this game wanted to be a Touhou fangame, but the art was worse than even ZUNs so they couldn't get the license? Joking aside, ignoring every art asset in this game (except the animation, but we'll get to that), this game is great. Gameplay feels really good, though I feel I need to re-map the abilities buttons a bit, I kept hitting them at inopportune times. And, the animation in cutscenes, along with the writing, make this a stupid ridiculous romp that nearly had me falling off my chair in laughter. This game knows exactly what it is, and I'm here for it. Verdict: Wishlisted, and I'll probably play more of the demo, since it's pretty substantial.

Transmute: A very clearly inspired by Axiom Verge (and maybe Environmental Station Alpha) metroidvania. My biggest complaint is the writing falls flat. Crazy shit is happening to and around the protag, and she hardly reacts (the writing puts more emphasis on her being 'anti-colonialist' than it does on the fact that she'd been in stasis for several years). Game plays well, though not being able to shoot at an angle, or downwards feels weird. Has an augment and retrieval system like Hollow Knight. the augment system even let me combine 2 things I didn't think it would allow me to. Difficulty spikes up after the 2nd boss, so I peaked my head into the 2 areas that open up, but wasn't really interested in banging my head against them when I know I'll have to start over when the game comes out. Verdict: Seems pretty well put together for a metroidvania, I'll wishlist it.

Tunic: This seems so close to brilliance, but it's just not there. The game looks adorable, but here's the issue: There's a massive amount of latency to the controls, you constantly feel like you're manoeuvring through muck. Even the most basic enemy can react to you faster than you can to it, enemies do a lot of damage, healing is very limited, and it has retrieval mechanics on death. This game feels really difficult for no reason. It's clearly trying to look like zelda, why does it play like a wannabe took-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-dark-souls game? If this game played closer to a 2d zelda game, it'd be a lot of fun, but as it plays right now, I have no interest. Verdict: Pass.

[premayogan]

Top 10 UI Trends To Build A Great App in 2019

The mobile user interface (UI) refers to the system-controlled elements that are displayed on the screen and used to interact with the device. As a successful company, you are not only supposed to focus on new technologies but also make sure that you are ready to face new challenges in advance. When creating a mobile application, a company is not certain that it will give good results compared to other established companies like Airbnb and Amazon Research. Statistics show that about 60% of mobile applications end up not being downloaded and even out of the 40% of the downloaded ones, 21% of them have only been used once in 2018. The main reason why most apps end up not being downloaded is due to the fact that they don’t have intuitive User Interface which is a crucial thing that most people look for. It is due to this major reason,that an adept mobile app company should see to it that it updates it’s application time to time so as to stay relevant because there is stiff competition in the mobile applications world In order to make sure that a company stays competitive and in the top position, it can apply some of the following latest trends.

1. Using Functional Animations

As 2019 is approaching, since animations are a crucial part of the UI designing process, designers should ensure that they use more communications and functional animations so as to symbolize images, catches, and fonts.

They should make sure that they put more focus on coming up with decent and simple patterns for the UI designs. We will observe more changes and additions that will be primarily done to this feature in the form of micro-association, which will make this feature even more interesting.

2. Making Sure That You Use the Overlapping Impacts Wisely

The use of overlapping in colors, illustrations, and fonts is one of the mobile app designs that will continue to be outstanding coming 2019. This will not only provide a feeling of space but also embellish the Ul design.

As a matter of fact, this component is being used widely by most app designers. It would even be better if designers went an extra mile and combined this feature with that one of shadows as this would enhance the UI designs even further and make the function better and more competitive.

3. Swiping

Swiping came as a game changer when it was brought in 2012 by Tinder when it came up with an app that was almost completely based on swiping. Mobile apps have since then grown to introduce even more interaction since many apps have made swiping the main feature.

Swiping is being used by designers to replace the delete button in messaging and in mail apps in 2018. Music applications too have added it as a feature to change music swiping makes your app clean, and navigation becomes easy when a user is navigating between web pages, so, making this feature more interactive would enhance the UI in 2019. Swiping is a very engaging feature so if it is well designed in a more interactive way, it could make an app scale higher in the competition.

4. Flawless Design Interface

This is a crucial feature that should be top in the list when it comes to trends. A company should aim at providing a perfect mobile application that provides the greatest experience to its target audiences.

Designers should make sure that the page loads comprehensively and the user is in a position to access the page’s content just by looking at the first page. This feature, though in prevalence for some time now, is going to be an integral factor in designing great UI. These annual changes help in promoting the brand of the mobile app hence attracting more users, which is a significant benefit.

5. Implement the Illustrations That Are Customized

One of the trends that will continue to dominate in 2019 is the interface (custom-illustrated) that gained fame in 2018 as a UX/UI fashion trend. The design of the app is like illustrations, as it offers several shapes, styles, and figures to the mobile app.

This helps in making the mobile application more appealing and have an identity that is unique and distinct. This is an excellent trend if implemented as it can help make the mobile app face the competition in the mobile app word quite well and stand out even more.

6. Utilizing the Full-screen Background Pictures

As years are going by, a new trend that is in a position to appeal a high number of audiences instinctively has been made on the forefront. This UI design component comprises full-screen background images when using any unique rendered specifications or a particular model.

This feature has the potential to make a user more engaged and hence making him/her spend more time browsing through the available different pages. This feature works its magic since it makes the user feel more refreshed when going through the various splendid images.

7. Adopting the Self-explanatory Illustrations

Trends have changed, and gone are the days when one would engage the users with content. These days, many methods have emerged that are used to illustrate the functionalities and features of an application.

Going for the storytelling technique with the use of meaningful videos and images is one of the best ways to illustrate an app’s features and functionalities. In fact, designers should depict characters that are human like to ensure a productive interaction with users. By doing this, the app would be more competitive and vibrant.

8. Use of Dynamic Colors Intelligently

It is quite obvious that color plays a great role when it comes to Ul design. Actually, designers can use colors as a major tool in exhibiting their designing skills and level of creativity. Colors serve almost the same purpose as background images.

This is because they tend to invoke the emotions of the users by catching their attention. It should be noted that even big players in the application market such as Instagram and Snapchat, keep revamping the color combinations in their apps so as to ensure that they change the mood of their users. So, as a company that is proficient, you should not be left behind when it comes to this feature and ensure that you enforce it in your app as it even helps to set the artistic tone of the app which is a great plus.

9. Opacity

Adding the opacity feature is one of the major assets that designers can use to boost the User Interface of their applications to surge the transparency of the application.

This feature enables the user to set up varying transparency settings like illustrations or the color so as to achieve a vibrant glass surface for the interface segments of the app. It is actually used to design the logos of applications too. So, as designers get their apps ready for 2019, they should focus on how they are going to set the elements of opacity and see to it that they get the best out of it at the end of it all.

10. Establishing a User-interface Assisting Voice

As we come to 2019, voice-assisted interfaces are becoming a very important trend in the mobile applications world. It is more like Siri where a user is required to sign in a voice-actuated app and wouldn’t have to enter security key after that.

This feature really helps a mobile application stand out and make it unique as it is not common to find such an application, so if designers worked on making the feature more interesting, this would do wonders and would win more users come 2019.

Conclusion

To conclude, the mobile application development process is evolving as time goes. The UI trends of mobile applications will keep on being updated with the latest technology in the mobile applications world. There are many trends that designers can use to get their apps ready coming 2019, but if they can adhere to the ones we have discussed, this would lead to them getting much better results and impress many users. Read the full article

[thelongestdamnreviews]

God Eater Resurrection

I bought God Eater Resurrection with God Eater 2 Rage Burst off of Gamestop for about $18 some time ago.  I decided to do every mission up until the grand finale, so I clocked in almost 39 hours to get to the end of the God Eater content, 67 total hours to get to the end of the God Eater Burst content, and about 84 hours to get through God Eater Resurrection's content.  I used a controller the entire time, and I stuck with Short Blade/Assault Gun/Tower Shield for most of my playthrough.  I didn't do multiplayer at all, so this is all based on going it solo with the AI to help me. 

Not the most robust but you can actually finely edit hair colors at least.

Life on Earth in the 2070s sucks.  The world's population has been decimated by the arrival of Aragami, violent beasts with an insatiable hunger, and they're immune to conventional weaponry.  The only way we've been able to fight back is to develop weapons using Aragami cells--God Arcs--and injecting the cells into compatible people so they can control the God Arcs--the titular God Eaters.  You're a New-Type God Eater capable of using a weapon that can shift between gun and sword form.  Will you be worth a damn or will you just be dinner?

No, they weren't bombed.  They were eaten.  Aragami eat everything.

I haven't played much of Monster Hunter (Freedom Unite on PSP ages ago and not for long at that) so I can't make many comparisons between the two series.  This is the third iteration of the game and I think it was actually made after Rage Burst so I'm technically playing them out of order, but whatever.  God Eater has an actual storyline and there are cutscenes and tropey anime characters and so on, and the anime influence carries over into the gameplay.  You can zip around enemies in short bursts, you can double jump in your super mode, there's a super mode even!  Your scrawny teenager is able to carry massive weapons with no difficulty and you're able to get beat up by monsters the size of houses without even a bruise.  The animeness might turn off some people but I didn't mind it.  There are actually very few animated cutscenes, with the game instead going for in-engine ones from the looks of it, so that was a pretty nice touch. 

Gee, thanks guys.  

You have options when it comes to gear, and the options really open up the further you advance.  Pick from six different melee weapons (three of which hail from GE2), pick from four different guns, and three different types of shields to make your character's loadout.  You're later able to find Abandoned God Arcs after battle that allow you to install their generic skills to matching types (Abandoned Assault Guns only work with Assault Guns, etc.) and you can fit and stack those with skills the gear already came with.  Because your Defense value is tied solely to your shield, you're able to wear anything you like to combat, provided it's unlocked and you have the materials to make it.  Want to wear a bikini set to the snowy temple area?  Knock yourself out! 

Your equipment has three physical elements and four elemental elements for offense, and of course the Aragami have their own resistances and weaknesses to all seven.  The handy Database will tell you the elemental weaknesses, but to learn the physical effectiveness, you need to look up the wiki.  Shields defend against only the four elementals and naturally Aragami use none or one or several.  It makes sense to take the best elements for what the next mission will pit you against, but then you may not have essential skills on the most effective gear.  The stuff I used the most was Divine element, but the skills helped with getting materials so the tradeoff was worth it to me. 

Nice to have side-by-side comparisons too. 

Unique to this game is Devouring, or literally taking a bite out of the enemy to power yourself up and enter Burst mode.  While in Burst mode, your stats increase for a while and you gain Aragami Bullets that you can either fire back at enemies or pass to your allies to induce Burst into them.  Because the animation is relatively slow and you get nothing if you get knocked out of it, there's some strategy in knowing when's best to take a bite.  You're later given different methods of Devouring through Predator Styles such as a quick dash->bite->backdash, an airdash that carries you through the enemy, or a quick slash that can combo with itself for example.  Each different Predator Style has its own stats for how much of the Burst gauge it fills on a successful Devour, how many Aragami Bullets you earn, and which rank Control Units you can use with it.  Control Units buff you even further in specific ways, set to one of the five ways you Devour.  So you could for example have an Air Devour that carries you through the enemy and makes you immune to status effects when you take a bite, but you can't have that same Air Devour regenerate your HP slowly because its rank is too low for that Control Unit. 

It sounds pretty complex on paper, but the game thankfully slowly introduces these new concepts as you advance through the difficulty tiers. 

Since you have a fancy gun, the game's decided you haven't had enough options and has a Bullet Editor feature.  I stuck with honestly simple bullets but you're able to make some pretty ridiculous combos if you have the patience (or just read the wiki).  There's a testing dummy right in the interface so you can quickly give it a test run, but you're able to adjust things like angles the bullet exits the barrel, timing (does this effect trigger on impact, or seconds after, etc.), and where in the order of things it lies.  You have to edit basic bullets bought at the shopkeeper, but some of them can give you ideas, like Rocket Shell: Blaze being a simple combo of a Homing shot with a Bomb explosion on impact. 

You'll get comfortable with the firing range pretty quick unless you hate ranged combat for some reason.  

Your allies are able to be customized too.  While everyone has their default passive skills, everyone also has four slots that you can set any skill you buy with their AP, such as HP Up II or Enemy Calm I, and this somewhat makes up for being unable to alter their equipment.  Most characters are Old-Types and are stuck either with a melee plus shield or gun only, but you eventually encounter other New-Types who can pass Aragami Bullets to you to enable Burst Lv2 or Lv3, and you are able to fire leveled-up versions of the Aragami Bullets back at the monsters too.  The story missions usually lock your team so you're somewhat encouraged to level everyone, but you can take any combination of three in most free missions.  Problem is that during the story, certain characters are removed from duty for story reasons and you still can't take them along for free missions. 

It's funny now but she actually has skills that make her hit allies with her flamethrower bullets.  

Maps are relatively small compared to what I remember of MH and there are only six real maps so you'll learn the layouts pretty quickly.  There are still lettered zones but since the map is one wide area instead of several small blocks, there are no loading screens once the mission starts.  Calling up the map will show where all of the Aragami are, with the mission-critical targets being red dots with crosshairs and the riff-raff being smaller red dots.  Some Aragami are noted to have exceptional sight or hearing, so there is some strategy in trying to take out specific targets first before you wind up aggroing the entire map. 

You can't hit your allies in melee, but you can with your gun if shoot when they're in the way (and they can do you the same!).  At least nobody loses HP in either case.  You're able to make healing bullets so you can help your friends out when they start getting beat up, and the ones with guns can learn skills to do the same when you get hurt.  I don't think I saw the AI heal other AI allies, though.  When anyone's HP hits zero, they drop out of Burst and they lose Endurance, and when they run out of Endurance, they're removed from the mission entirely.  You're given several seconds to go administer Link Aid by giving your HP to them, but if they 'bleed out' they'll lose more Endurance and respawn at the mission start.  At least the AI will try to revive the others then too, and there are several skills that affect how reviving works like sending the downed ally into Burst or boosting attack power for several seconds. 

I took more pictures of events than gameplay or UI, so here, have some fanservice.  

Combat's pretty simple.  Aragami telegraph their attacks, so you have to mind your own attacks to slip between them.  There are specific body parts you can hit to inflict more or less damage, and you can break off parts to get materials after combat and to create weak points.  They build up hatred as they get damaged and when they reach a certain point, they 'activate' and enter an enraged state, attacking faster and sometimes gaining new attacks entirely.  Sometimes they become more vulnerable to status effects when angered, so you can use their rage to your advantage. 

Wounded Aragami will retreat to resource points and these never change location, so you should pick up materials while you're moving to engage or during battle if you're so inclined.  Several maps have monster-only shortcuts clearly designed to bleed away your Burst meter, but that can be a blessing when you're overwhelmed and need your own breather.  When the monsters die, Devour them one last time to get their drops (but no Burst gauge).  When the last target dies, you're given a short scene of its death throes and you're given 40 seconds to pick up any materials on the field before the game kicks you to the results screen, or you can Return to Base early. 

After the battle, you're able to pick a bonus based on what passive skills your team has.  Kota for example has Get Consumable Items, so picking his card means that you'll get restoratives after the mission.  Soma has Bond Break Rewards Up, so any monster parts you broke off will have a few extras on the results screen, and so on.  The fifth member of your team sits on Backup duty and they learn all of these post-combat skills since they don't actually fight on the frontlines with you.  You'll then be given a letter rating, a review of everyone's Endurance, time taken, number of Incapacitations, and then the rewards as well as the extra credit rewards such as "break 3+ bonds" or "finish under 5 min".  You're able to check the rates of rewards at the mission counter before you leave, too.  

You usually only get to pick one card, so choose wisely.  There's also a chance that you'll get a short bonding scene with you and the selected character, but there are no relationship values so they're just nice little scenes and nothing more.  

Okay, so that's features.  What did I think? 

I had a blast with the game.  Story wasn't the greatest but it helped bind the game together better than "oh, here's a monster, go kill it pls" and it didn't grate on me any.  Combat was really fast-paced with the gear I took and I still found myself getting the crap beat out of me because I'd play a little too recklessly.  Difficulty-wise, the game was just about middle-of-the-road.  A team of four against a single target was usually nothing but the hairiest fights were against multiple targets.  You get sent flying with a majority of attacks and that breaks up your rhythm and positioning and can break a Burst chain at the worst of times.  I never had anyone run out of Endurance and the maps all have a generous 30 or 40 minute timer, with my longest fight being a bit more than 20 minutes because I had to run it with one AI ally and the monster had ridiculous offensive power, so I actually played it safe for a change. 

What's that?  You wanted another bonding scene screencap?  You're lucky I'm glad to oblige.  

There aren't many Aragami, even taking into account the 'Fallen' types that use different elements.  This can be good or bad since you have fewer patterns to learn in exchange for less variety, but later missions tended to keep things interesting by upping the number of targets or making you fight different species together.  Perhaps that's one way to get you to try different gear without you going back to a prior difficulty tier. 

The God Eater base game content covers Difficulty 1 through 6, God Eater Burst 7 through 10, and Resurrection 11 through 13, with an extra Difficulty 14 of challenges, an actual Challenge tier, and then the two Predator Pack tiers for postgame.  There are a lot of missions though you can probably run through the game pretty quickly if you stick to just the story missions with the white outlines.  Probably better to do story missions and then whatever extras just for the drops you need, right? 

I don't really have much to say about the audio.  Music was all right, though the music during the short scenes that sometimes pop up when you pick a character's card had really loud music despite my settings for some reason.  Maps had an ambient audio track and then another track that kicked in when you entered combat, I think.  Voice work was fine but you'll run into repetitive lines pretty early in.  The game at least lets you set what category is voiced and comes up in text, one or the other, or not at all, so things like weak Aragami status or the notice about your Burst timer running low, things like that.  I left it all on because why not.  The second operator you unlock had some serious issues, like citing an Aragami dead when it was just knocked down, and cutting herself off when addressing another character to address you.  "Alisa--Alpha One, you're taking a beating out there!" and all.  Pretty jarring.  And during the last last mission of the story proper, your silent protagonist talks and mine had the voice of the legion working for her because her voice was joined with several others, which I'm pretty sure isn't supposed to happen.  Weird that was the only place it did. 

I still think it's weird to have your protagonist be pretty vocal in combat with even voiced lines, but then be mostly silent for the story.  

Controls were mostly fine, and I wound up assigning Guard to LT and Devour to RT to get around the button combo (that still works anyway).  I had a good degree of difficulty with the camera.  It always felt like it was just too close, which made fighting multiple monsters at once pretty dangerous.  I might've set the camera swing speed wrong but I had ridiculous vertical movement despite all settings being on Slowest, so sometimes I'd aim way up high when using my gun.  And using the gun was a bit of a chore too because of how the Aragami are positioned in the world.  You need to aim up for most monsters to hit specific points and that sets your camera low to the ground, so you'll be blinded by the grass on the plains map.  And I had an issue with the particles generated when you spam shots like I did.  Even with setting the particles graphics option to as low as I could go, I'd still end up in a fog.  Kinda dangerous when you need to see the enemy to know when to get the hell out of Dodge.  

I can't see shit; can you?  The visual indicator explosion for when you hit an Aragami weak point is nice, but then it also obscures your view...

The game randomly didn't recognize my controller on startup too, happening no more than seven times of the probably hundred times I started it up.  It's happened to other people and the solution is apparently to sleep your computer and plug the controller back in when you wake it up.  Just a minor annoyance, but other people had serious issues like the game only booting to a black screen. 

The AI did okay as backup but I guess the idea was to give you decent allies to make playing with other humans that much more significant.  Because Aragami Bullets can only be equipped to Y, I wound up keeping some form of heal bullet on X so I'd be able to spam heal shots anytime to keep people from going face-down in the dirt.  They'd rarely get out of the way of obviously-telegraphed attacks like the Borg Camlainn's tail spin, but at the same time they'd actually keep their shields up if they couldn't get out of the way with some others. 

But yeah.  I had a lot of fun with the game and there are several missions if you're crazy like me.  Lots of options too and I imagine no two people are going to have the exact same loadout when they finish the game, and that's pretty cool even though it relies on random rolls for the Abandoned God Arcs.  I only had to repeat a couple of missions to grind out drops, but then given I hit every other mission, that's probably not applicable for the typical player.  I'm looking forward to the sequel when I get around to it!  

Sorry little girl, you've just caused Undertale to happen.  

[dreamharvestgames]

Dev Blog - June 2017

Justin - Creative Director

Hi lovely readers, I hope you've been enjoying the summer weather we've been having.

This month I've been working on wire-framing our menu and game systems. This is everything that happens outside of matches including our contract system.

What's the Contract system you say? Well, this is something that's very much still in the concept stage, but in theory, it’s a mission system that allows us to deliver both narrative-driven objectives for each of the levels we'll be launching with, training missions for each of the scripts, daily/monthly events and more. It’ll be wrapped up in a cool narrative package that will hopefully envelope you in the world of Failure: NeuroSlicers and your role as an unstoppable Slicer in the NeuroNet.

With this system, we'll be able to give you a constant flow of evolving narrative, cool progression based rewards for completing contracts that allow you to customize your avatar and scripts and allow you to grow your character as you spend more time in the network, but most importantly will allow us to expand on the game even after full release in super interesting ways.

We'll have lots more to share in regard to this system and more down the line, but for the time being, here are some amazing fun to look at wireframes (I promise, they're fun to look at 😊)

Until next month…

PS. Don’t forget to join our Discord Channel if you want to discuss anything about the game with us; we'd love your input.

Sven - CTO / Lead Programmer

Yay, another time to forget what I did last month.

From what I can remember, I mostly focused on porting our game server from C# to Java. In case that seems like a stupid idea to you (because you think C# is much nicer, which I agree) let me elaborate a bit why this was necessary.

First, the original server was never really intended for production use and was mostly a prototype to test the network functionality, so it had to be redone. This open question is why do it in Java instead of C#. There were a few reasons for this:

The rest of the backend systems are already written in Java which was mostly done because a lot of frameworks only exist for Java.

After doing some benchmarks comparing Netty and DotNetty I concluded that Netty was performing a lot better than DotNetty (with the same load Netty used 10% CPU vs. DotNetty which used 25% CPU and quite a bit more ram). While this would, in many cases, this doesn’t really matter that much in most server applications, our game server is meant to handle a lot of concurrent games, therefore, network performance was really important.

<bias> I assume it’s easier to run Java than .net on servers. I should mention here that I worked as a sysadmin for a long time and I’m used to running Java applications. So, I’ve got a lot experience doing that but very little running .net applications. </bias>

To annoy Milcho.

Slightly off-topic: does anyone know a good Raspberry Pi alternative (or some other cheap computer) with a lot more ram (something like 4GB+)? I was trying to find something simple/cheap where I could install the whole server backend + game server for testing and having something we can easily take with us when going to events. If you have any good suggestion contact me on Twitter: @i_gamedev

Milcho - Lead Designer / Gameplay Programmer

Salutations, “I am here, ready to enlighten you, but are you ready to be enlightened?” 

I don’t know why you thought this might be an actual quote, but it definitely isn’t. I make up things all the time. In any case, let’s go over what’s been happening in the gameplay department of Failure for the last month. 

First, we’ve always been planning this massive meta-game on top of the RTS that’s we’re making to add a whole different layer on which you can focus on. The first few weeks of the month involved figuring exactly how that system might work and how it would integrate with our other systems. We got pretty far, but as game development often goes, we’ve put that on holds since it was too awestriking and dangerous for the rest of the team. We’re going to revisit it in a few months and prototype a few versions to get the best out of it. 

The rest of the time I spent thinking about how much I like doughnuts and how to get them in my diet without my dentist going after me with a stick. During that time, I also started prototyping a new and improved resource systems for the game, which was a huge task. We’re talking about changing something that has been fundamental for a game that has been around for almost 3 years and making sure that everything works in the aftermath. The main reasons for this redesign is to reduce the effect of snowballing, making sure that players that are losing a match have a chance to come back from possible defeat, though we also want to make sure that our matches stay within the 5 - 10-minute length. So far, it’s going great though and we’re definitely on the right track. I’ll update you on its progress next month. 

Speaking of next month, I guess that’s when I’ll be talking to you again. Until then, make sure to keep your doughnut intake healthy (whatever that means for you).

Loïc - Art Director / Designer

This month I’ve been focusing on polishing our UI and feedback, along with work on the new deck system.

In term of preproduction, I wrote and sketched concepts for all our nine environments and subsequent levels, tying the specific objectives of each level to the themes of the environment it takes place in. 

These are just quick prototypes of possible levels and are in no way the final look, layout or colour/theme scheme, but this is all part of our process.

Kelvin - VFX Artist / UI Artist

Yo! More UI going on this month! We really had to figure out a type of UI frame/theme to use. We wanted it to be modern, stylized, and minimal. Both Loic and I had to work together, throwing sketches back and forth, to get to the iteration that we are at now.

There were tons of iterations beforehand but we got to this. We've designed a pattern for the background of the frames also that connected organically but with strong and strict lines.

Another exciting thing we added is the notification system! There are times you're focusing on a part of the map and you don't notice your buildings being attacked. DO NOT FRET! I worked with Milcho on this system that will notify you when something is being attacked and which direction it's in! It's extremely helpful and will really help you on your game.

Adding to the notification system, we added a very, very simple change that shows feedback on your units being attacked. When a unit is attacked, it should flash white now. Simple, but awesome 😊

I also worked on an FX this month! Woo! It took a bit to get it right, but once you spend tech, the tech fragment will shatter in this cool flash of glitchiness! It's a very small part of the screen, but it turned out very nice.

Amelie - UX Researcher / Writer

So, what happened on my side since the last time, well, mostly to be honest holidays 😊 I drafted some wireframes for the deck builder and some other menus before leaving and while I was gone Justin polished those and the guys discussed it, made some improvements and I came back only to have to say "Wow that's awesome! Let's put this all in and test it!" So, Georgia was really cool, I encourage everybody who likes mountaineering and good wine to visit, trust the French girl even just the wine is worth it! 

In Georgia every time you drink, someone makes a toast, it's tradition and if it may seem a little funny to us (especially because the toasts can be really long) they take it really seriously. And then, if you drink often I mean, you get used to it and you learn to enjoy it, you know to learn to be grateful for something in your life every day (or 4 times a day depending how much you like their wine...) so here is my toast, despite Creative England really not getting how video games work and putting us in a really shitty position, and our boss being really rather britishly cross you know... the team is still there 😊

Everybody is still super motivated to make a good game, we're not here for the money we're here for the passion of creating an experience that we really hope you will enjoy and remember. So, to passion and to the sleepless nerds in this team who make this game come to life! Cheers bros!

Writing wise I had made a good start on the faction’s motivations and identity, I also worked on our main character background, started to imagine what brought him to become a slicer...

So now that I'm back I have loads of testing to do, and my objective for the next week will be to take the time to read the mountain of level design the team has produced, see how the maps objectives can fit into mission stories and last but not least nail the first version of our intro narrative!

Daniel - Composer

Coffee shops. Who would have thought that the music of Failure NeuroSlicers would sound like coffee shops?

Now, re-read that first sentence in the voice of Christopher Walken and you begin to enter the rabbit hole of strange that I've entered since the last newsletter. While 'the rabbit hole of strange' sounds like a particularly psychedelic category of pornography, I'm in fact referring to a world of sound that surrounds most of us each and every day: the inner workings of our electrical goods.

By using an induction coil pick up (a device similar to the pick-ups on an electric guitar), I've been able to record the electronic signals of just about the entire contents of my house and — to the concern of some patrons — most of my local shops. It transpires that many of our electrical goods are host to wonderful, bizarre and, sometimes, frightening sounds; many of these sounds can be very rhythmical and full of unusual accents and musical phrases. By 'frightening' I don't mean that our devices are low-key telling us to worship Satan, but that they create sounds you wouldn't expect (particularly the payment terminal at my local coffee shop). If you happen to have an induction coil mic and nothing better to do, try recording a PS4 while you turn it off from the system menu — it really is hours of fun for all the family.

By recording all of this information with the coil pick up, I've been able to transcribe the rhythms of some electrical items and assign those rhythms to different musical instruments to create sonic fragments that cross the boundary between natural and man-made — much like the Neuro Net. For some of the less rhythmical recordings, I've been able to alter, distort and pitch the electronic sounds in Pro Tools and create some interesting instruments (my favourite so far is the synth I've created from my beard trimmer). It is this blend of natural and un-natural, of 'above the line' and 'below the line', that will form the music of Failure NeuroSlicers and, sometimes, that will even include the sounds of my local coffee shop.

Until next time.

Bobby - Communications Manager

I'm used to being the behind the scenes guy for Justin and the team and, on occasion, the doting fanboy of Failure: NeuroSlicers as it evolves. Watching the team work, extremely, hard makes you want to try and do more and one of my tasks is to try and identify community opportunities, specific to the game, and connect with a wider audience; not just from game genre perspective, like RTS, but think about the style and story of the world that will pull fans from all areas of the gaming community to keep them up to date with what's going on within the game.

I'm hoping those already reading this will be subscribed to all our various communication channels, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and our newsletter but sometimes these can be dependent on, you, the community to scroll by it in your news feed, which, if you're like me subscribe to a lot of feeds, and will sometimes miss content as it becomes, what I like to dub, a complacent channel we go into autopilot when using.

How to prioritise communication channels? It's a daily thought for me. How many users are subscribed to each channel, what to publish to first can be difficult as it's a changing landscape but recently Discord is becoming more and more popular with the gaming community because of its real-time forum nature. The younger generation these days, the millennials, are used to instant messaging, they don't want to wait for emails or a post reply, they want to know someone is on the other end of the window ready to engage and that's why we're going to start pushing a ton of content there on a daily basis.

It's a great platform with so much control, not only with chat but voice too. We get asked about Alpha testing all the time and one of our recent meetings play testing came up. As you can imagine we're a small team and everyone getting time together across multiple time zones can be tricky so if it's something you'd love to get involved with please come and join our Discord group. We'll be approaching active users who really want to get their hands on an early alpha build, help playtest and provide valuable feedback to continue to evolve the game leading up to its release.

Also, share, it's so important to us we get the game out there and you're all instrumental in helping us do that.

[wall-hax]

CheatHappens Review

CheatHappens Review (2020)

Does CheatHappens actually match up to the hype? Find out in our in-depth review below.

Getting Cheat Trainers For The Latest PC Games

If you're looking for cheats for the latest PC game you're playing, you've probably spent some time looking around the internet for the best places to download trainers. It can be tricky, as many free sites are untrustworthy and you risk infecting your PC with a virus when downloading .exes from sites like GameCopyWorld.

CheatHappens is one popular trainer website which offers a level of professionalism and quality not found at the free trainer download sites. They have a dedicated team that codes and updates new trainers day in and day out, with tons of cheat features to customize every element of your gameplay experience.

The downside to this is that most of their trainers require a membership at their site. In this review we'll cover whether the CheatHappens membership is really worth it, and what you can expect as a paying member.

CheatHappens Membership Tiers

At CheatHappens you can choose from a number of different membership tiers. You can start off with a free membership that lets you download the trainer manager or download their free game-hacking tool, CoSMOS. You can also post on the board and get a sense for their community.

If you want a trainer for a particular game however, you'll probably want to upgrade to a paid membership to get full site access. You can start off with a monthly membership for $14.95 to get access to most of the trainers, but the real value is with a Lifetime membership.

CheatHappens Member Perks

Over 25,000 Trainers for 6,000+ Games

Included Trainer Manager Application

1-Click Download & Update Trainers

Trainers Updated Every Day

Virus-Free Software

Active Game Cheating Community

Software To Make Your Own Game Cheats

Lifetime Membership For $99.95 USD you can get lifetime access to CheatHappens and all of their professionally developed trainers. This is a long term investment that can really pay off as you almost never have to look for a game trainer when you know you can check CheatHappens and find a brand new trainer for a game that just released the same day. This is the membership level we recommend, but keep reading to see what we think of the rest of the service.

Access or update your trainers from the FREE trainer manager.

Software: The CheatHappens Trainer Manager

The trainer manager is one of the stand-out features of CheatHappens. With access to this software you can download the latest trainers in a single click without having to even open up the website, as well as update all your existing trainers if there's been an update.

The trainer manager software makes cheating in your favorite games easier than ever, since it makes it simple to keep your trainers up to date with the latest game patches and versions. This is the kind of convenience that makes the membership worth it.

Feature-Loaded PC Trainers

CheatHappen's advantage over other trainer sites really shows in the features that they include in their trainers. You can expect to find features like teleporting to waypoints, invisibility, character stat editing and much more. Of course you'll also see the usual cheats like unlimited money, infinite health and unlimited stamina, but those are the the common cheats found in many trainers. The more advanced features are much rarer to see in free trainers.

CheatHappens also uses the same interface and control scheme for all trainers, so once you get used to using their cheats, you'll know exactly how to quickly toggle on features and control the cheats. With a modern UI their trainers are easy to use and include plenty of documentation of how each feature works.

Daily Updates & New Trainers

Say goodbye to out-of-date trainers when you start using CheatHappens. The team there works tirelessly to keep their trainers up-to-date and working with the latest game updates. Unlike with free trainers where you have to go and find a new trainer every time there's a game patch, CheatHappens is very responsive and in the case of an outdated trainer it's easy to request an update through their website.

They're also always adding new trainers, and you'll usually find whatever the hottest new game releases are on the front-page of their website with a feature-loaded cheat available. If you're interested, you can see all the daily updates they release on their website.

A Massive Collection Of Trainers

Unlike many cheat websites where you'll find they don't support some games, CheatHappens supports pretty much every new game that's released, and also has years of back-catalog of trainers for games released in previous years. 

With trainers for over 6,000 games, you'll be hard pressed to find any semi-popular title they don't have a cheat for. 

The CheatHappens Community

While we didn't originally expect to include this in our review, we found ourselves pleasantly surprised by the community that's been built up at CheatHappens. Every game has it's own board where you can share tips, ask questions, or make requests for features for the trainer for that game. They also have other areas of the board for general discussion and other topics.

There's also the ability to earn credits for being a member of the community or contributing, and those credits can go towards various on-site customizations, as well as the ability to redeem them for games or merch!

Create Your Own Game Cheats

If you're interested in learning how to make your own cheats and trainers, CheatHappens even has you covered here. They have a free software called CoSMOS which you can use to hack games, as well as learn how to create cheats. With step-by-step video tutorials you can learn how to change values like your health or money in a game, and advance to more complicated game-hacking. The CoSMOS software makes this possible with no coding required, so you don't have to spend months or years learning a language like C++.

Review Summary

We were very impressed with CheatHappen's trainers and service, and convinced after trying it that it's far superior to relying on downloading random trainers off the internet for the latest game you're playing.

Not only were their trainers better and loaded with features, but knowing that the software is safe to run on our PC and it only took a click or two to update our trainers really won us over. CheatHappens is our #1 recommended PC trainer website for 2020.

Join CheatHappens And Get Access to 25,000+ Trainers For Your Favorite Games! 

Get Your Trainers At CheatHappens

from Wallhax https://wallhax.com/trainers/cheathappens-review/ via https://wallhax.com

[terryblount]

Borderlands 3 – Review

Borderlands arguably kicked off the looter-shooter genre. And in the current console generation, there’s plenty of those to go by. Now five years (or three if you count The Pre-Sequel) since its latest outing, Borderlands 3 is here.

With smart changes, upping the content load, and retaining most of the core gameplay almost to a T, Borderlands 3 is like what you’d expect: more Borderlands. Though saying only that is underselling it how great it is still.

Presentation

Borderlands 3 carries the same signature cel-shaded-ish design it is so famous for. The colourful characters and the drab wastelands do get some nice pop with all the black outlines and dashes on them. Yet, the game still suffers the same issue of textures loading too slowly.

The UI is tidier and with a nice font choice. If only there’s a way to increase the small font size.

The guns overall look even better. The different gun manufacturers have even more pronounced styles based on what brand it is. And it still lends a nice surprise seeing from a super angular Hyperion to the old-school Wild West-style of a Jakobs gun in your very frequent loot drops.

Not only do the guns look distinct, so are the sounds. You can hear the sci-fi-ness of the Maliwan guns spooling before it wreaks havoc. Some Tediore models deteriorate into an 8-bit gun noise as the magazine empties. The explosive sticky pellets from a Torgue shotgun pops in a satisfying crackle.

While you’ll be hearing the guns blazing through the speakers most of the time, the soundtrack that hums diligently in the background of Borderlands 3 is sublime. Each planet you’ll travel to has a different vibe, genre and composer. Which results in some nice variety in the soundtrack. I particularly adore the ambiance in the high-tech Promethea, where it feels a dash of cyberpunk and a swathe of synthwave being used lavishly.

Not to mention, the song on the main menu is so good I spent way too long idling on it.

Gameplay

In Borderlands 3, you play as one of four Vault Hunters. Your goal is to open the Vaults before the Calypso Twins. The villains are bratty streamers that have amassed a literal cult following and aspiring to be gods. The story takes place after Tales From The Borderlands, with characters from Telltale’s adventure game being part of the plot here.

The writing is, depending on how you look at it, is as good or as bad as the previous games. It follows a bit too formulaic to Borderlands 2 with its plot points. The early 10 hours feeling rather weak. But it does come together nicely into its own near the end.

The jokes, which still involves contemporary meme and references that may or may not age well in the next few years, are as what you would expect. I don’t know if it’s good or bad that the in-game characters (and possibly, the writers) are self-aware of how crude the “jokes” can be.

They are a few good ones, including one where resident punching bag Claptrap was not the butt of a joke. Though you must really love low-brow humour to be laughing out loud throughout the game.

Loot And Shoot

Borderlands 3 is all about two things- the looting and the shooting. And those two core pillars of the gameplay loop remain stalwart as ever.

You may notice the word ‘mayhem’ is being thrown out of a lot in the game’s marketing, and they were not kidding. Each fight and combat encounter feels more intense and hectic than past titles. The areas are bigger with a lot of cover spots and vantage points. There are more elemental hazards other than just barrels, including puddles you can electrify.

Enemies flinch when you shoot them, and even flop off and go ragdoll on bigger blasts like from a shotgun. They can also gib and explode in a pool of gore, adding more visceral-ness to the already chaotic combat.

You can now slide after sprinting and mantle on objects but so are the AI enemies. The enemies will scuttle around to flank you, throw grenades to flush you out of cover, and more often than not carry similarly zany weapons as you are. At times it is utter chaos where you cannot even discern where the enemies are because too many effects are popping off left right and center.

At its best, you don’t feel the enemies being extravagant bullet sponges as you control the chaos being unfolded with your guns and skills, exploiting the environment to your advantage.

This is most evident in the improved boss fights. Named boss fights with big health bars on top will have phases where they attack differently. On normal difficulty, it’s still a case of circle-strafing and dealing consistent DPS to beat them, and the patterns are not as wild or difficult. Yet it beats the boring bullet-sponges of the previous games, so a good step forward.

Glorious Guns

The bazillion of guns you get as loot gets some nice overhaul across the board. Each weapon manufacturer brings even more pronounced characteristics than ever and it’s really fun to experiment with. Maliwan weapons now have wind-ups but it’s satisfying to see it splurge in sci-fi bullets, for example. The alt-fire addition brings new wrinkles to gunplay, and makes the already huge pool of procedurally-generated guns even more diverse.

And it goes without saying that each of those guns overall just feels good to shoot.

As per tradition, each new Borderlands comes with a new set of four Vault Hunters, the playable characters. Borderlands 3 tweaked a bit on how the action skill works and make each character plays even more differently. Zane gets to equip two action skills instead of one, while Moze’s two equippable action skill determines what guns her Iron Bear mech has. Other than that, most of the passives divided into three skill trees are as expected. It seems straightforward at first but there are some wicked synergies and potential for interesting builds.

Also, Gearbox improved the car handling, and made you care more of those Catch-A-Ride vehicles with custom parts to find and unlock.

(Questionable) Quality Of Life

With five years and a bunch of looter-shooters on the market these days, Borderlands 3 brought a lot of quality of life changes. you now have a one-number gear score for quick comparisons of gear stats. The map is so, so useful now that it is in 3D that shows elevation. Ammo, health and cash pickups automatically after opening boxes. If you are in the range of a collectible, an icon pops up to show you it’s there. No need to worry if you and your mates have the right character level as there is an option to enable level scaling to the party leader, and have loot instanced for each player so no loot stealing. You can fast travel from anywhere now. Ally AI sometimes will accompany you in fights and will help revive you.

Though it could still do more. The UI when bringing up the ECHOCast (the player menu) is horrendously slow to load. With the map being so huge why isn’t there an option to highlight each of the markers immediately so you don’t spend minutes trying to find where your objective is at?

On that note, Borderlands 3 really needed another pass on polish. While I personally don’t find framerate to be an issue during the hectic combats, reports of performance issues from all platforms, especially in split-screen, are pretty much true. I also found the AI getting stuck at geometry, and some side missions not spawning the enemies (the one about a ratch in Promethea, in particular). And the player menu sometimes just give up loading the skill trees when you load it straight after a level up.

Content

Borderlands 3 is amazingly girthy in content. It is still designed to be a full-packaged game with a campaign to beat. Not a games-as-a-service like other looter-shooters. And that campaign can take you more than 30 hours. I finished my first playthrough at 40, doing as much side missions and exploring the map as much as I can.

There are plenty of these side missions, and as you’d expect most of the questionable humour and references come from here. These take place in parts not seen in the critical path so at least it’s worth seeing the areas where you wouldn’t stumble upon naturally.

The collectibles this time are much more gratifying to collect. The three Typhon DeLeon audio logs on most maps not only give some good lore, but a great reward in the form of a loot cache, with a bigger chance to spawn rare loot. It’s worth going for them.

Circle Of Slaughter, the series’ Horde mode, returns again. And there’s a new mode called Proving Grounds where you push through a few combat areas and then face a boss, which plays closer to the usual gunplay in the story. Both of these are available normally within the story. But now it has separate matchmaking so you can play these as if they are an entirely different game mode.

After finishing the story, you will then get access to True Vault Hunter mode, the New Game+. On top of that is the Mayhem Mode modifier that adds wacky status effects and make the game even tougher. These two modes offer better loot drops, so that’s a good incentive to go back for another round. And of course, going through the game as another Vault Hunter and try out different builds is always on the cards.

Guardian Ranks (previously Badass Ranks) will now only unlock after beating the game. So all the extra passives are strictly for your next playthrough. Again, more reason to keep going after the 40-hour mark.

Gearbox has promised an event for all players and there is already a season pass of DLCs. If it follows what the previous titles did, expect a long tail of content, free and paid.

With Borderlands 3, the game dabbles a bit more on cosmetics. The skin variants don’t have palette swaps, colours can be customised separately. On top of the skins and head variants, you can now add emotes and also put on skins and trinkets on weapons. Honestly, it’s not that compelling and this feels like the game is playing catch-up with its genre peers. But it doesn’t hurt anyone, there’s no micro-transactions of sorts. Hopefully it will continue that way.

The Twitch integration is excellent. Not only can viewers of Borderlands 3 streams peruse the streamer’s inventory and skill trees, but there are also cool events that can show up, with opportunities to mess them up by buffing badass enemies or reward them with goodies. Plus, you can nab a piece of loot from the red chests they open for yourselves too.

Personal Enjoyment

When the first Borderlands arrived, I was already a fan of Gearbox’s output from the Brothers In Arms days. So I have a personal bias of loving this franchise from the start.

Borderlands 3 is the Double Down burger of video games I feel. It’s excessive and loud. It’s indulgently good. The ultimate comfort food if you, like me, love crispy greasy chicken patties. But it’s not just one burger, playing through Borderlands 3 is munching through a platter of these Double Downs non-stop. Instead of meat on meat on meat, it’s guns on guns on guns.

But boy, I am not gonna lie, it can be a bit overwhelming. During the early 10 hours, I feel like there were too many excessive combat sections. And with not much of a strong plot thread for me to cling on to.

Proper stakes in the story do get set up after that initial hump. And the pacing gets better with heavy combat sections sparsed out a bit. The shooting shines and getting rare loot, even if it is just minor variations of a gun archetype you’ve seen before, is rewarding.

And the soundtrack has synthwave. So, big points for that.

That said, those quality of life issues does affect my enjoyment. I didn’t spend time comparing weapon stats as much and hated the times I need to sort my backpack because of the chugging menu. Those need to be snappy and I hope it’s one of the things to be rectified, alongside the performance issues.

I have a feeling that once these issues are sorted in the months to come, it would make an already great experience even better.

Verdict

With more chaotic gunplay and many small improvements, Borderlands 3 proves that the pioneering looter-shooter series still has a place in 2019.Though it still carries the same low-brow writing and the performance issues cannot stand as is.

That said, if you’ve used to the series, Borderlands 3 is like grabbing a huge platter of your favourite comfort food. Clear some time, get your mates if you can and sit down. It’s time to dig in and get those orange drops.

Review based on version 1.01 played on the regular PS4. Review copy purchased by the reviewer

Borderlands 3 – Review published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[mikermontoya-blog]

Trove Codes

{Certainly, this is certainly additional voxel code. By using the whirlwind journey of the dragon's lair. |{They are designed sufficiently, and they also almost always grant every one group in becoming a reservoir, healbot, and destroy dealership all folded away into it, but bear in mind this limit implies that code carry out unavoidably evolves recurring as time passes. my very small Chocolate Barbarian, but bear in mind, the familiarized dance of bouncing and undertaking a whirlwind assault to enjoy spine health and fitness fed up me previously I'd even reached rate 8. Naturally, with examples of the better courses (for example the Chocolate Barbarian), they really are practically a tale. 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I post Meer’s Normal discontent the fact that the greatly multi-person tend to attempt Minecraft could so actually miss the actual benefit of the 1st even though cashing around the lowest standard denominator by jamming the loot hook to the frontal lobe and creating solution to eternally reel. entirely. inconceivable to It’s whole shtick is “Look at me, I am Minecraft but Diablo 3 also!” To be certain, there's a couple of things Minecraft and Trove Voucher Codes incredibly post, voxel craft (several level trainers have this) and establishing (several level trainers have this) internet marketing stunned he didnt say something about Legos. publish. I dunno, throughout my skills evaluation made an appearance to condition many goal specifics together with his experiences. and many others. evaluation, except if |evidently you tell them, but he carries on to have to surface inside a business way, free of becoming any experiences roughly. I am just dealing with they jogged that code within the ground and mistreated the crap from persons competitors that presented them dough. Some of them make use of the precise broad structure, with mild transitions, but new dungeons are included pretty much every repair. about it's at no cost. IDK and that's why I am questioning. 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Also, really the only aspects you can find are cosmetic products, which just change the visual appeal of the character or maybe your position, as pretty much every position (other than the beginning it) have very same movement tempo (90). So almost all the attires and mounts i have to disagree using Statement farmville is much like minecraft is centered on as genuine as mentioning Amazing is incredibly comparable Reverse reach go given that they have comparable craft patterns. Still , your cornerstone isn't prolonged. You're assigned your own instanced portion of market to see one of the groups, that has been effectively a guild, and you may size and shape it into what you want. Rather, they're able to opt for given that they go, creating equally as much or minimal of the specialized biome given that they assume accommodate. |a good In a lesser exact perception, Trove Voucher Codes isn't invest-to-win whatsoever. To farm Pinata Intruders, make use of a cornerstone. 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There are particular just a little obtuse models and 2 heads are better than it. {}internationally really like the sport in fact it is two expansions, Trouble of Dark areas and Specter of Torment, when an deposition of the 3 within a download in the Swap was proclaimed, i had been fairly stoked. Jewel Trove Voucher Codes also gives a number of new plans, for example the capacity to sex exchange the game's primary amounts, coming up with a fairly many types of narrative, while not in almost any substance way. 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As a result of patiently waiting to login for your more effective associated with one hour or so I eventually picked up a few minutes with at no cost-to-carry out voxel establishing MMO, Trove Voucher Codes. A lot of fun was suffered with by all, followed by high in volume cursing.

[gman-003]

From the Archives: The Nintendo Niino and Super Smash Bros. N

I have a rather large folder of ideas I'd come up with, liked enough to bother recording, but didn't or couldn't actually pursue. Some of them are worth looking at again, particularly when intervening events cast it in a new light. (And if this post is received well, it might become a regular feature.)

In this case, it's an idea for a Nintendo console, which turned out to be surprisingly similar to the Switch, even though, with a timestamp of September 27, 2014, it predates any public knowledge of the Switch, and possibly even predates the Switch development project. While I rewrote it into a more readable format, I have not changed any of the actual details - preserving the state of the idea as it was when I conceived it. It's not a detailed plan, more an executive-summary proposal.

2014 was a lackluster year for Nintendo - sales were plummeting, the Wii U had fizzled, and the New 3DS was flailing. Even fans could tell the company was struggling.

I made a key insight, though I don't claim it was a unique one: the gaming console market is under pressure from two directions. Going back to the 90s, the cheaper handheld consoles served as the entry point for new gamers, with home consoles offering a superior experience at higher cost, and gaming PCs being yet more expensive. But the rise of smartphones has devoured the low end - an iPhone or Galaxy or Nexus is an objectively worse gaming platform than any handheld console, but since they're essentially free as gaming devices (since consumers will be buying a smartphone anyways for communication), they offer the cheapest entry point. The rise of cheap gaming PC hardware (itself an effect of slowing desktop sales) has pressured the high end, driving home consoles to lower price points. This prediction turned out to be fairly true, although I also thought "nanoconsoles" like the Ouya would contribute to the demise of the two-tier console market, which completely failed to happen.

The logical conclusion was that handheld and home consoles will need to merge or displace each other. Sony simply gave up on their portable line, focusing their in-house developers on the home console. Nintendo could easily have given up on their home console line, throw everything onto the 3DS or its successor, and hope to compete with Sony and Microsoft on the merits of portability and game design rather than technical specifications.

But that's only the obvious way to do things. There are problems with that approach - Nintendo has a much longer history than Sony of maintaining both form factors, and there are many Nintendo fans who would be angered if Nintendo chose to abandon one or the other. A non-obvious solution is needed - and a non-obvious solution is what we got, with the Switch. But let's take a look at the idea I came up with, because it took a third approach.

The console I came up with was to be named the "Niino", punning off "Nintendo", "Nano", and the double-i pattern used in the Wii, Mii and Amiibo. The name is kind of dorky, I'll admit, but it's better than "Wii" and that thing sold like hotcakes.

The core principle was that you couldn't make a handheld that worked as a home console as well as a dedicated home console would, and vice versa. The two need to be fully software-compatible, but even just making an ergonomic controller fights against being able to put it in your pocket. So I didn't go as far as Nintendo ultimately chose to - I still had different hardware for home and handheld use. But they were to be different SKUs of the same console, not separate consoles - all games would run on both, down to using the same cartridges.

I called the two versions the "Niino Home" and "Niino Pocket". I specified that both were to use the same architecture. An eight-core ARM-64 CPU was specified - either K12 or Denver, depending on whether AMD or Nvidia was offering a better deal. I further specified a fully-unified memory architecture, with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. (I will note that I also wrote that it would be released in 2020, so my use of stuff that doesn't even exist three years later isn't completely groundless). Games would be stored on internal flash memory (512GB on the Home, 128GB on the Pocket), or on removable cartridges. As a minor twist, the cartridges would be partially-writable - patches would get downloaded and stored, and your game saves would be on the cartridge itself, in a special R/W memory segment.

The Niino Pocket was spec'd with a 4.5" 1920x1080 screen, featuring capacitive touchscreen capabilities (aka multitouch). The Niino Home was specified to target 3840x2160 output resolution (fed over Mini-DisplayPort or HDMI), with an expectation that it would normally downscale to 1920x1080 (getting some free antialiasing in the process). To give the Home enough processing horsepower to render the same game at quadruple resolution, I gave it twice as many GPU compute units, running at twice the clockspeed, and bumped the CPU clocks up by 50% (while keeping the CPU core count the same). That math checks out if the CPU on the Pocket spends 25% of its time on controlling the GPU, and game logic does not scale with resolution which are generally reasonable assumptions.

For controls, I didn't do much unusual. Two analog sticks - full thumbsticks on the Home controllers, smaller PSP-style "nubs" on the Pocket. A D-Pad. Four main face buttons, presumably A/B/X/Y. Four secondary face buttons, two per side - Plus, Minus, Home and Share. I had two analog triggers, with a digital "click" at full travel, like the Gamecube did, as well as two bumpers. And to finish it off, I listed dual accelerometers - they aren't all that useful, but they're so cheap now, why not include them?

Games would be required to run well on both the Pocket and Home, as part of certification. Thanks to the identical architecture, OS, and even screen aspect ratio, the programming to support both would be minimal. Assets could be authored for the Home, and downscaled for the Pocket, or authored for the Pocket and simply reused, not taking advantage of the extra power. Some UI elements might need to be redesigned to work better on the Niino Pocket's physically smaller screen, or more particles might spawn on the more powerful Niino Home, but I was aiming for it to be easier than developing a smartphone app that runs well on multiple screen sizes. I even mandated that the cartridges themselves be the same - if you for some reason buy both a Home and a Pocket, you would still only buy the game once, and play it on both. With savefiles being stored on the cartridge itself, that could be a very useful way to play - almost as seamless as the Switch ended up being, although significantly more expensive if you want that capability.

That unified architecture would allow Nintendo to stop splitting their development resources across two consoles, which would in turn allow Nintendo to develop a more robust library of first-party games. As Nintendo would offer the only viable handheld console, it would make them a more attractive target for third-party devs.

But Nintendo consoles sell because of Nintendo games, so that's what I had plenty of. I listed two pack-in titles, four additional launch games, another four titles within the first year, and five in the second year, as well as as many third-party titles as possible. My third-parties list is amusing from today's viewpoint - I correctly predicted that there would still be annual Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, and Monster Hunter titles, but I seriously missed the mark by listing "Sonic Boom 3".

The Niino would have two pack-in titles. Nintendo Sports was supposed to be a deeper follow-up to Wii Sports, adding campaign modes, character customization and even some map-making (on the Golf game). But that was really just there for the sake of having a "complete" pack-in game. In retrospect, this was a horrible idea - it would either miss entirely what made Wii Sports a system-seller, or would require compatibility with Wiimotes, which makes it a horrible way to show off the new system.

The other pack-in game was "Super Smash Bros. N", which was a free-to-play Smash... kind of. The pack-in version would include only a minimum of characters, items, and levels (I listed Mario, Link, Donkey Kong and Pikachu, along with a Mii-based custom fighter). But any Niino game could add more - first-party or third-party. That game's developers would be responsible for all the assets and initial programming, although balance patches would come from Nintendo's Smash team, and certification would make sure it worked right and at least came close to being balanced.

So when you bought the obligatory Mario launch title, you automatically get (for example) Peach and Luigi, along with a stage and some items, added to Smash. Spla2oon (I am still surprised that's not what Nintendo's actually calling it) would add Inkling. Metroid: Paralysis would add Samus (don't ask for details on the games themselves, I was just making up titles and one-sentence concepts). Call of Duty would presumably add one of the Captains Price. Even Virtual Console games could get in on it - some people would totally spend another $15 to buy Final Fantasy VI again if it gave you a Terra assist trophy (I think full playable characters are too much to expect for a VC game).

As additional ways to get that content (it is kind of scummy to lock it behind a game you may not want, if you're just a hardcore Smash player), they could also be sold separately, as normal DLC, or bundled with an Amiibo, assuming those continue to sell.

I really, really like this idea. It solves two problems with the Smash series - first, it makes it possible for characters from games released after Smash to appear in the current version, instead of waiting for the next console, and second, it allows the game to eventually have the kind of mammoth size that made Brawl such a wonder. I remember the Brawl spoiler season - the hype was unimaginable. Just when you thought they were done, they dropped more on you. And it will even have more good effects - it acts as a portal to game discovery, and gives a bump to the Niino version of multiplatform games. If you're playing Smash, either at a party or online, and you encounter a character you've never seen before, that might spark an interest in the game they came from. And if you're a hardcore shooter player looking at which new console to buy, maybe the free Smash characters would be enough to tip you towards the Nintendo platform.

Would the Niino have been a better console than the Switch? Maybe. It probably wouldn't have sold as well, because the messaging would be more complicated. And is one do-it-all console better than two single-purpose consoles that do their job better? That would depend on how much better the specialized hardware works, which could only be determined by actually building the things.

Would Super Smash Bros. N have worked well as a system-seller? I think it would, although it would require a permanent support team at Nintendo, something they don't seem to do. It might anger the hardcore Smash fans at first, but it would make for an overall larger game (for free!), and half of them are still playing Melee anyways.

What are your thoughts?

[mbaljeetsingh]

Universal Web Components

Applications built from web components can be easy to understand, grow, and refactor, because they are easy to break up into modular and declarative pieces. They work well in the browser, but I believe there is far greater potential as they begin to spill out of the browser, into the desktop, server, and even embedded applications. Let us explore.

If you would like to stay in touch as the project progresses, join the email list.

Declarative Code

Let's talk about the power of the declarative. Declarative code has powerful advantages, which all boil down to hiding complexity and exposing it simply. With declarative code, we tell the computer what to do, not how to do it. That makes declarative code easier to understand and therefore to create. Anyone can tell someone what to do. Telling someone how to do it can be much harder. What's more, describing programs in chunks of what is not only easy, it takes less code. You don't believe me? Here is the HTML code for an input element, which I would describe as declarative:

<input type="text">

Here is some JavaScript code for the same input element, which I would describe as imperative:

const input = document.createElement('input'); input.type = 'text'; document.body.appendChild(input);

As you can see, the declarative HTML is much shorter and easier to understand (1 line and 19 characters versus 3 lines and 101 characters). Whenever we want an input to appear on the screen, we just have to tell the computer what we want by almost literally writing the word input. Whenever we are trying to understand a program, seeing <input type="text"> is a lot easier to understand than going through the step-by-step process of creating an input and adding it to the DOM as shown in the JavaScript code.

Having short code that is easy to understand can bring powerful benefits. According to Steven Pemberton in his presentation The Power of the Declarative, there was a company that needed to create very demanding user interfaces, traditionally needing 5 years and 30 people to complete. With XForms, a declarative XML format for building web applications, similar in capability to what we have today with HTML and web components, a certain user interface took only 1 year with 10 people. Assuming that story is accurate, then declarative code saved that company a lot of time and money.

There are also more altruistic benefits.

Declarative code opens up the world of programming to more people, and helps those people do more while expending less time and effort.

Think about how much more productive software developers have become over time as newer and better abstractions have been created. It takes much less code, time, and knowledge now to do things that only computer science experts used to be able to do. Imagine if we had to write web apps in Assembly or C. Each time these better levels of abstraction are introduced, many more people are able to join in the development process. I don't have the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if orders of magnitude more programmers joined the workforce at each major abstraction jump, from machine code to Assembly, from Assembly to C/C++ and similar languages, and from there to most of our garbage-collected higher-level languages.

History shows that abstraction is important, and good declarative code is well-abstracted code.

HTML

Based on the amount of currently used HTML code in the world (pretty much every website), HTML is one of the most successful declarative languages ever created. It's instructive to think about why it is has been so successful. HTML breaks up GUI complexity into well-defined, semantic, and somewhat composable pieces. Because of tag names that describe themselves simply, and the ability to visually create hierarchy in the source code, HTML can make it easy to visualize the structure and functionality of your application at a glance. It is easy to see parent, child, and sibling relationships between different pieces of GUI. All of this has made HTML relatively easy to work with, and has lowered the barrier to entry for creating web applications.

All kinds of people who would not be considered programmers can and do work with HTML code.

Think about it, there are over 1 billion total websites in the world today, and probably a couple hundred million active websites built with HTML. That is well more than all of the apps on all of the major app stores combined. That is powerful.

Web Components

Web components inherit all of the benefits of HTML, while adding more.

Web components give us the power to augment HTML, allowing us to create the syntax that we need, at the level of abstraction that we deem necessary.

We get to create our own HTML elements, custom elements, and we can assign any behavior we want to those elements. This is powerful. Frameworks like React, Angular, and Ember have for years been providing a similar capability in the form of custom composable components. Web components will bring all of this as a standard to the web platform. When programming with these components, building programs becomes more like playing with Legos. Complex functionality can be composed from smaller declarative pieces, and it is easy to see at a glance the high-level structure and functionality of your application.

Web components work well in the browser, but I believe there is far greater potential if they can begin to spill out of the browser, into the desktop, server, and even embedded applications. Why not?

There is nothing inherent to HTML and custom elements to stop them from being used in non-GUI applications.

In fact, people keep talking about how great web components are for creating UI components and applications. UI stands for user interface, and there are many kinds of user interfaces, graphical user interfaces (GUIs) being just one type. There are also hardware user interfaces (buttons, sensors, motors, etc) and network user interfaces (HTTP/TCP endpoints). Web components can help us build them all.

At the most basic level, you can think of HTML as a way of representing structure and its associated functionality in a declarative fashion. Up until this point in time, HTML has mostly been used to structure visual functionality, with a sprinkling of non-visual. Just look at these HTML elements: <img>, <input>, <textarea>, <canvas>, <h1>, <p>, <header>, <footer>, etc. All of these are visual, and many of the custom elements available now are visual, but not all.

For example, take a look at these: <script>, <audio>, <base>, <head>, <link>, <meta>. These aren't visual, but they are extremely useful. Developers have been creating their own custom elements with non-visual functionality: <iron-ajax>, <app-route>, <firebase-app>, <firebase-auth>, <firebase-document>, <firebase-query>, <redux-store>, <docker-create>, <docker-commit>, <docker-ps>.

We have discussed both visual and non-visual elements, but so far all of the elements we have discussed (besides <redux-store> have one thing in common: they are built with the assumption of a browser-based application.

What if we moved web components out of the browser? What if we built other applications besides web apps?

Express Web Components

Imagine elements like the following: <express-app>, <express-middleware>, and <express-router>? Could we build an Express server application with these? Absolutely. We'll use the Express Web Components project.

The first thing we need is to create an Express application, running on the port of our choice:

<express-app port="5000"></express-app>

There we go. Now let's prepare to serve up an index.html page on the main route. We'll hook up a callback now but define it later:

<express-app port="5000"> <express-middleware method="get" path="/" callback="[[indexHandler]]"></express-middleware> </express-app>

Excellent! Now when anyone goes to our main route we'll call the indexHandler function, which we'll define later. Our application is going to do some API calls, so it would be nice to group all of those under the same router:

<express-app port="5000"> <express-middleware method="get" path="/" callback="[[indexHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-router path="/api"> </express-router> </express-app>

Now let's put some more middleware inside of our router. They'll all automatically be served under the /api route:

<express-app port="5000"> <express-middleware method="get" path="/" callback="[[indexHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-router path="/api"> <express-middleware method="get" path="/running-since" callback="[[runningSinceHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="get" path="/source-code" callback="[[sourceCodeHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="get" path="/cat-photo" callback="[[catHandler]]"></express-middleware> </express-router> </express-app>

When we hit /api/running-since, we're going to return the amount of time this server application has been running. When we hit /api/source-code, we're going to return the server's main source code, and when we hit /api/cat-photo, we'll return a nice photo of a cat. Now to hook up the handlers, we'll be using Polymer 2, but any JavaScript library or framework that allows full DOM interaction should work. Also note that the JavaScript could easily be moved to a separate file and included with a <script> tag:

<express-app port="5000"> <express-middleware method="get" path="/" callback="[[indexHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-router path="/api"> <express-middleware method="get" path="/running-since" callback="[[runningSinceHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="get" path="/source-code" callback="[[sourceCodeHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="get" path="/cat-photo" callback="[[catHandler]]"></express-middleware> </express-router> </express-app> <script> const path = require('path'); const runningSince = new Date(); class ExampleApp extends Polymer.Element { static get is() { return 'example-app'; } constructor() { super(); } indexHandler(req, res) { // send up the client app to interact with the API res.sendFile(path.join(__dirname, '/../client/index.html')); } runningSinceHandler(req, res) { res.send(runningSince); } sourceCodeHandler(req, res) { res.sendFile(path.join(__dirname, '/../server/components/app/app.component.html')); } catHandler(req, res) { res.sendFile(path.join(__dirname, '/../server/cat-hunting.jpg')); } } </script>

And there you have it. We just built a server with web components. I've left out some boilerplate, but this is based off of a real example that actually runs, and you can clone it and run it yourself or see it working here.

We've declared the structure of our Express application. We can visualize the hierarchy of routes. Think of what is now available to us! We could package up all of the middleware under our /api router into its own custom element, and then use those routes as a child element elsewhere. We could also put this entire application into its own custom element. It's also easy to manage multiple Express applications running on different ports by just including them together in the same HTML file.

Well that's all fine and good, we’ve moved out of the browser and into the server. Can we move farther? What about smaller computers, and interacting with hardware? Could we potentially build robots with web components? I think we could.

JFive Web Components

What if we had elements like <jfive-motor>, <jfive-led>, and <jfive-button>? We'll use the JFive Web Components project. Let’s build a rudimentary quadcopter!

First, we'll need four motors:

<jfive-motor></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor></jfive-motor>

We'll want to control when the motors turn on and off, so we'll add data binding to the on property through the on attribute:

<jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]"></jfive-motor>

We'll want to also control the speed, so we'll add data binding to the speed property through the speed attribute:

<jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]"></jfive-motor>

Now let's hook them up to the appropriate GPIO pins. We're using a popular 3-pin H-Bridge to control the motors' direction, so we need to hook up three pins per motor:

<jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO12" dir-pin="GPIO23" cdir-pin="GPIO24"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO18" dir-pin="GPIO20" cdir-pin="GPIO21"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO13" dir-pin="GPIO27" cdir-pin="GPIO22"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO19" dir-pin="GPIO6" cdir-pin="GPIO5"></jfive-motor>

Remember how web components are modular and composable? We'll put those properties to good use by embedding an Express server with the motors to allow for some simple remote control over a local area network:

<jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO12" dir-pin="GPIO23" cdir-pin="GPIO24"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO18" dir-pin="GPIO20" cdir-pin="GPIO21"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO13" dir-pin="GPIO27" cdir-pin="GPIO22"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO19" dir-pin="GPIO6" cdir-pin="GPIO5"></jfive-motor> <express-app port="5000"> <express-middleware method="get" path="/" callback="[[indexHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="post" path="/turn-on" callback="[[turnOnHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="post" path="/turn-off" callback="[[turnOffHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="post" path="/speed-up" callback="[[speedUpHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="post" path="/slow-down" callback="[[slowDownHandler]]"></express-middleware> </express-app>

And finally we'll add all of the methods to finish our data binding and various logic:

<jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO12" dir-pin="GPIO23" cdir-pin="GPIO24"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO18" dir-pin="GPIO20" cdir-pin="GPIO21"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO13" dir-pin="GPIO27" cdir-pin="GPIO22"></jfive-motor> <jfive-motor on="[[motorOn]]" speed="[[speed]]" pwm-pin="GPIO19" dir-pin="GPIO6" cdir-pin="GPIO5"></jfive-motor> <express-app port="5000"> <express-middleware method="get" path="/" callback="[[indexHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="post" path="/turn-on" callback="[[turnOnHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="post" path="/turn-off" callback="[[turnOffHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="post" path="/speed-up" callback="[[speedUpHandler]]"></express-middleware> <express-middleware method="post" path="/slow-down" callback="[[slowDownHandler]]"></express-middleware> </express-app> <script> const path = require('path'); class ExampleQuadcopter { static get is() { return 'example-quadcopter'; } constructor() { super(); } indexHandler(req, res) { // send up the client app to control the motors res.sendFile(path.join(__dirname, '/../client/index.html')); } turnOnHandler(req, res) { this.motorOn = true; res.end(); } turnOffHandler(req, res) { this.copterOn = false; res.end(); } speedUpHandler(req, res) { this.copterSpeed += 50; res.end(); } slowDownHandler(req, res) { this.copterSpeed -= 50; res.end(); } } </script>

And we have a rudimentary remote-controlled quadcopter. Check out the video of the project this example is based on:

And here is the more detailed complete project if you want to take a look and try it out for yourself: http://ift.tt/2mwvml6

Scram.js

Currently, universal web components are possible because of Electron and Scram.js, which work together outside of the traditional browser to render custom elements and run their associated JavaScript. This is possible because Electron combines Chromium and Node.js into a single runtime, allowing us to use Node.js code from our custom elements. Scram.js hides the details necessary to load an HTML file with a web component application into Electron.

Because universal web components rely on Electron as their non-browser platform, the system that they run on must be relatively powerful. Eventually we need web components to work on systems with very little resources. I'm currently exploring ways of doing this. For example, jsdom would allow us to drop the Electron dependency (and therefore the Chromium dependency) by allowing us to render our web components directly in Node.js. Then we would only need our system to support Node.js. IoT.js, JerryScript, and dukluv could all help in that respect. Please contact me if you would like to help web components work on less powerful systems.

Conclusion

I want to reiterate some words that Rob Dodson wrote in his post, The Case for Custom Elements: Part 2:

Custom Elements are such a flexible primitive, once you start to see all of the possibilities they become really compelling! I’m excited to see what the next few years will hold as more teams begin rolling out their own element suites and we move to an era of high quality, interoperable, UI components.

And remember, UI means user interface, and there are many kinds of user interfaces, graphical and non-graphical alike.

I'm really excited to see the future of web components. I believe they will help lower the barrier to entry for building complex applications of all kinds, and that their many benefits will prove them to be one of the best ways of building software applications. Let’s Think Outside the Browser, lower the barrier to entry for building servers and hardware, and change the world.

P.S. Join the email list if you would like to stay in touch as the project progresses.

via Scotch.io http://ift.tt/2mXpajk

[paytonmeyer-process]

Metal Gear Solid 2 & 4 Documentaries

Hideo Kojima’s action-adventure game series Metal Gear Solid has received universal acclaim for its gameplay, graphics and extreme attention to detail. Watching the MGS 2 & 4 documentaries gave me an intimate look into the production process of the games, the various struggles for the development team, and Kojima’s passion for creating innovative products.

A couple of things stuck out to me from the MGS2 documentary that I’d like to incorporate into my own workflow. Daily Idea log. Kojima encouraged his design team to write down at least one idea daily into their sketchbooks, reviewing everyone’s ideas nightly and incorporating the best ideas into the game. I’d like to take on this challenge of jotting down daily ideas that I can later review and use as inspiration. I have lots of ideas throughout the day that I never do anything with. Documenting my ideas for products in a daily idea brain dump will allow me to have a comprehensive look at all my ideas and pick the best ones to move forward into actual products. Bringing life experience into the product. Hideo Kojima drew from real life experience when writing the dialogue between characters. This made the work more meaningful and personal for him. I believe users can tell if a subject was really personal to the designer, and I’d like to bring my own personal experiences into my artwork and product design more.

The MGS 4 doc went into more detail about the production process of the game. Beginning at the three month to launch date, this doc illustrates what it takes to make the final push in game development out the door. While watching these two documentaries I noticed a sharp contrast in the overall stress levels of the two production teams. The introduction of new hardware in the PS3 console created a much bigger workload in the production of Metal Gear Solid 4. The shear volume of the game with nearly 8 hours of cut scenes and 100 characters throughout made it a much larger scale project overall. Introducing new features and gameplay created more bugs in the software.

One of the most interesting scenes for me was when they were discussing players not utilizing OctoCamo during user testing. This new feature in the game allowed players to become fully camouflaged in order to hide from enemies. People on the team naturally use it, but they realized they had never described this feature to new users. The UX design challenge was explaining in the early stages of gameplay this new feature and how to use it. After many solutions were presented they decided to add a new “OctoCamo” icon that led users to an instructional booklet describing the feature. The MGS 4 team faced challenges implementing this feature at such a late stage in the production cycle. Adding new UI elements to an almost fully realized product can be very frustrating, but the team felt it was necessary to enable users to use the product as they had originally intended. These types of problems only arise during user testing but can bring to light crucial oversights rendering a product unusable. “Its a back-and-forth” Kojima remarks about the iterative process of user testing.

I’ve experienced this in the past when observing users using applications. During UT sessions on banking app that I designed I was able to spot several flaws. Users were unaware that they could issue refunds and send receipts to customers via email. I met the same dilemma that Kojima and his team did in users completely missing out on features because it was poorly communicated to them during the app experience. Kojima said “It requires patience, but its a fun part of the development process” when discussing the process of product iteration. I had never thought about it like that and it shifted my outlook. I’ve always looked at UT as a way to point out the mistakes you made. Hearing Kojima talk about his pain points on MGS 4 and seeing the smile on his face while discussing them made me realize that I’ve had the wrong attitude about iteration. The goal with application development is perfection but you can never get there on the very first try. User Testing IS a fun part of the process as it allows you to see users actually interfacing with your product with little to no guidance. Iteration is the act of improving your app so that its usable.

Kojima also remarks that the development can only take the game so far and that its the players that put the finishing touches on the product as there are different ways to play the game. This was another enlightening moment for me. Designing apps is an extremely personal process for me. It takes months of design, testing and iteration. I become so obsessed with my sense of ego and ownership over a project that its almost like the product becomes apart of me. Kojima’s statements made me realize that when a product is released they become the user’s product, as ultimately they are the one’s who will make the app apart of their lives and interact with them in unique and individual ways. I love the idea that the user is the one who will put the finishing touches on a product.

I related to Kojima’s perfectionism and wanting to polish the product looking at every small detail and correcting its flaws. “It’s hard knowing the deadline and not being satisfied enough to release something.” I can totally relate to this sentiment. Up against an aggressive timeline with the Noggin app at the moment, I often find myself going over animatics at night studying them for their timing and jotting down notes about tweaks that I will make the following morning. I become obsessed with getting every detail perfect before it goes into development and have even been thinking about the Noggin app while watching these documentaries.

Kojima doesn’t offer any remedy for this state of obsession.