#outside of only whatever’s directly affecting gameplay

[yellowvixen]

If Sol-equivalent Unleashed events were to happen, would Blaze become a werecat, being werewolf-like like Sonic, or would she become something else, like, for example, a vampire or a mercat (mermaid-like)?

Ooh interesting question!! The main draw of the werehog to me is the fear of losing control and no longer being yourself. We know Sonic never does lose control, that the change is only physical but the fear is still there. Especially as he's now suddenly in a big cumbersome body that can't go fast or do what he's used to—is he still Sonic if he can't run fast?

So that could be directly translated into Blaze being a werecat, I've seen a lot of cool designs for that before. BUT. The other ideas you've mentioned are very cool and I want to explore them! Also I don't think being specifically a werecat would affect Blaze mentally the same way being a werehog effects Sonic, so I'd want to find a change that does.

This got kinda long so I'm putting my explorations of the different ideas under the cut gjgjdhdg

First off: vampire Blaze! From the outside, physically not much would change. Blaze is a cat after all, she's already got sharp teeth! But inwardly, Blaze would no longer have her fire powers and would be a lot colder, and ofc have weird urges. If this is a similar case to Dark Gaia or whatever the Sol equivalent is, possibly her vampiric nature would lead to her wanting to consume others' energy rather than blood lol. So the fear of losing control would definitely still be there! What if she hurts someone that way! However it does lead to the question of is she being changed too much? Sonic was virtually unchanged aside from his looks, but giving Blaze vampiric urges is changing how she acts. So, not my first choice for a Blaze Unleashed scenario! Sick idea for another au though.

Second: mercat Blaze! Love love love this idea!! Confining her to water means again she can no longer use her fire powers, and it links in nicely with the Sol dimension being more ocean based than Sonic's world. It gives rise to the implication that the Dark Gaia (or whatever) creatures are all sea monsters too! I do wonder what would happen if Blaze is on land when the sun sets, does she just flop around? Maybe it works differently, and instead of it being tied to the day night cycle it can be tied to her proximity to water. But then she could just stay away from water... Unless for plot reasons all the sol emeralds are underwater or smth sjffdg. However! I think the fear factor would be gone. Mermaids aren't exactly beastly (of course you can change up the design, but it's more obviously just a physical change) so it would be more of just a minor set back for Blaze, she wouldn't have any fear of losing her identity. The opposite problem of vampire Blaze!

SO. I have an idea that I think merges all the good bits—ghost Blaze! Design wise, she would look similar to a mercat where her bottom half is like a tail, like Lah, Su and Uh! Possibly she would properly leave her body at night and float off while she's sleeping. Without her body she'd once again have no fire power and potentially be invisible to those around her, so that fear of losing herself would definitely be apparent! Maybe Marine (and others) are able to see her after realising what's going on, and can convince Blaze that body or not, she's still the Blaze they know and love. Also, in terms of gameplay I think it might be cool if the day and night levels are actually the same, but during the day you need to use Blaze's fire powers to finish and during the night you need to phase through walls. Essentially making the levels completely different! Her being a ghost kinda keeps in line with the Halloween theme too, and the Dark Gaia monsters can still float about scaring people.

A lot of rambling here hfjgjdhdg but tl;dr I really like the concepts of vampire and mercat Blaze, but I think for an Unleashed scenario specifically I would go for ghost Blaze!

[remembercomic]

The Gods Behind The Curtain

In many roleplaying games, players have the option to pledge their service to a fictional deity in exchange for boons and guidance. In the case of tabletop games, the role of the deity in question is typically handled by the game master, who observes the noted personality, ideals, and influence of the god and acts their role as expected.

However, in video games it tends to be that the god serves as little more than a set of effects and values and then may occasionally spit out some pre-planned declarations and questlines. This makes the gods much less mysterious, as players can expect them to act the same way each playthrough even with multiple players representing the same god.

To that end, I’m going to pose the question of how to implement deities with regular properties whilst preserving the mystique of an unseen ultra-powerful entity whose opinion you must consistently worry about.

Step one: They need to be invisible.

Though players can occasionally contact their respective gods, under normal circumstances they never actually see them and almost never speak to them directly at length. They’re unseen and unheard, with even the most divine of classes such as clerics and paladins getting only the occasional message from them.

Keeping the gods outside of player’s sight helps to hide their motivations and viewpoints, as long as they retain the vital values that setting and lore requires. It also greatly assists us by reducing the necessary complexity of their AI.

Step two: They need to have personality.

Whenever a player chooses a god, they have some expectation of how that god will behave and respond to their actions. This means that whatever system is used to represent the gods, it has to be reliable and consistent.

However, if we choose to keep the gods hidden and their direct influence with players minimal, they don’t actually need to be very thorough. We can seed them with specific known values (alignment, domains of belief, gripes, etc.) to give them reliable outputs in those matters, but everything else can be nearly random.

The final implementation of this system can be a number of different possible architectures. The most obvious is the neural network, which we can generate from a genetic algorithm using the seed variables as the genes.

As long as the vital questions give reliable answers, the players will naturally ascribe meaning even to the random answers regardless if there isn’t any intentional meaning actually present. A god of water needs to reliably respond appropriately to water contexts, but everything else can be arbitrary.

Step three: They need to seem to care.

Whilst actual miracle events could be made to randomly occur, like a momentary buff or incident of seeming divine intervention, with enough hidden information it’s possible that the influence of a player’s god could simply be inferred rather than evidenced. However, if players don’t think the gods are intervening at all, then their association with their god will seem meaningless.

Therefore, on the grounds that the gods are actually a seeded random output, it’s best to make their influence equally random and let the players attempt to draw connections. A meaningless “Miracle” status effect for instance will prompt players to question what it affected and, more importantly, what they need to do to provoke its appearance.

Additionally, in the case of player classes most directly tied to their chosen deity, such as clerics and paladins, the gods could be made to “whisper” to them in vague terms. The occasional on-screen message, devoid of context but describing the god’s view of some arbitrary matter, would be enough to prompt the player to reconsider their present course of action in order to better appease their god, under the assumption that doing so will improve their likelihood of miracles and their performance in gameplay.

Again, nothing actually needs to change, only the player’s perception of their relationship to their chosen god. If the player receives a message from the divine that sounds disapproving, they will most likely decide against whatever they are currently doing, even if they can’t necessarily identify why it would be bad or even what the god is specifically referring to. The messages themselves can be extremely limited in tone, only 2-3 are needed.

If players believe that their god is watching them and that they can and do make actual interventions into gameplay, then the god themselves doesn’t actually have to materially intervene at all.

Conclusion: A god is what the player imagines a god is.

The ultimate goal of this approach is to minimise the actual complexity of gods by hiding them from direct view and giving the players just enough interaction with them to allow them to infer their personalities and ideals. As long as the players believe that their behaviour reflects on them to the gods, and that the gods will then choose to intervene on their behalf, they will naturally conclude that whatever information they have on the gods is representative of their influence on their standing.

In many ways, this reflects how religious faith actually functions in the real world, as adherents draw connections to random events and outcomes to make their own conclusions as to their standing amongst the faithful under their chosen theology. We are therefore taking advantage of the human nature to see patterns in random noise to fool players into perceiving a highly-complex system of AI behind the scenes where there isn’t one.

[beardedhandstoadshark]

Some random stuff I noticed in Twilight Princess (Wii) , Castle Town Edition

-people start recognizing you as the sword wielding guy when you get further in the game

-the torches flick on with a loud "whoosh“ if you’re standing near them when night hits

-the guards come in different body shapes (all the other NPC‘s always did, but the guards are new)

-almost every single NPC you can talk to has their own daily routine

For example: on the market street of southern castle town, meat stand guy and fruit stand lady only show up at noon, while northern apple stand guy is already there earlier, but his customer he interacts with only appears when the other shop owners do as well.

Like. They put peak shopping times into this environment.

-there’s so many different designs for the non-approachable NPC‘s and you can follow them all doing their own daily routines.

(Honorable mention: This guys‘ outfit in particular giving me heavy Twilight Realm Giant Floating Hand of Doom flashbacks:

-some of the lines from the market street suggest that Link likes to go on shopping strolls, or at least is a food enthusiast

The flower shop text suggests that Link would buy flowers if the owner weren’t absent, the tasty breads’ too expensive, plus the very fun "this apple looks great! But the ones from the other shop somehow look better“ textboxes. He‘s literally going shopping for fun. (And him being a food enthusiast would also fit nicely with the whole accidental soup making that happened in the Ice Dungeon.)

-the two musicians playing string instruments actually move their arms and hands in time with the music they’re playing (the singing guy doesn’t, or just barely)

Plus when it’s night they vanish, but only once they’re out of the frame. So when you manage to go away, but still keep one in the frame, then that guy will be the only one still hearable. All the street sellers‘ clapping sounds are synced to their movements as well.

-sometimes NPC‘s will stand in front of not-Tingle‘s tent and peek inside. They might even go inside! (You can’t follow them, though.) Depending on which NPC it is, their animation will even look different.

-Once Malo Mart establishes itself in Castle Town, a solid 2/3 NPC’s will start running around with these shopping bags:

Also the old lady that shops at the fruit stand will start talking about how utterly adorable Malo is, so that’s cute

-there’s a second good boi with white fur waiting in east castle town, in the middle of the side street that leads to Telmas bar, way behind one of the two guys who always show up at night think the other one across the street wants something from them. I named him Richard III.

-The doctor is mostly just the local dentist? His place has multiple posters depicting teeth, and a few to many jars filled with sets of teeth. (He‘s also got a few filled with frogs and what looks like super small miniature versions of Deku Baba‘s.)

-I never noticed there’s a cafe here on the main plaza right to the right of the southern entrance (or left for non-Wii versions)

-going further right (left) leads to a gate, inside is a giant staircase. The Gorons chill here and sell stuff. On the very top you can see over the entirety of Castle Town (and even use first person mode!)

-Agithas Castle/house has a second floor. You can go up there via ladder. Her house is gigantic. Her bed is gigantic. She‘s got giant sheets of purple fabric just lying around. Her claim to be royalty might not even be that far off.

And the rest is just super known stuff that keeps appearing in every YouTube top 10 list, like not-Tingle being allergic to Wolf Link, the fortune teller lady probably being a Sheikah (or related) because she‘s got their symbol on her forehead, and so on

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Design Theory: FFXV

For a class I’m taking, I’ve been asked to perform a thought experiment. At first I did this with XIV, but once we got into the “make improvements” section I decided I’d have an easier and also more satisfying time pondering a game that isn’t quite so critically acclaimed.

And I decided I’d rather blog it out than write it on notepad paper.

So. FFXV. One Final Fantasy With the Lads.

The MDA Framework - Mechanics, Dynamics, Affect (Aesthetics is the original A here, but for a game dev class we’re broadening it to include more things that evoke emotional responses) - translates into Mechanics being the rules, Dynamics being the play experience itself, and hopefully the play experience then produces an Affect of “fun.”

An example I’ve touched on before, where Mechanics produce Affect by way of Dynamics: In FFXV they have a very clean sense of being Injured. If you get down to 0 hp, your recoverable hp starts bleeding out. Get first aid or a potion and you stop bleeding out and recover some. But your “current max hp” remains lower than your true max hp. If you’re down to 1 hp and not injured and you get out of combat, you’ll be back at full hp in 10 or 20 seconds. If your “current max hp” gets down to half, you’re in a bad spot and it’ll take multiple minutes (current max hp recovers by 1 every 3-4 seconds, orders of magnitude slower than your normal health regen outside of battle). This mechanic produces a dynamic where during gameplay the player is heavily pressured to fight only when strong and run when weak. After all, you only die if current max hp hits 0, and getting to the state where you’re bleeding out is the full length of your health bar if you’re uninjured but could be much lower if you’ve already just barely survived a few fights. Emotionally this makes situations where you really can feel how much smaller the four of you are than the enemy army, especially when you get in a nasty cycle of them dropping more enemies on you just as you’re finishing up the prior fight. It ramps up tension, and makes you seek out safe havens and places the army can’t reach.

The storytelling angle on the MDA Framework sees the Designer’s Story as the Mechanics, the Storytelling (or play experience) as Dynamics, and the Player’s Story (aka the stories they tell themselves about how the game session went) as Affect. This is where FFXV loses a lot of people. It’s broadly panned by critics for how the Designer’s Story snaps from a freeform open-world game to being 100% on rails until shortly before the final boss, at which point it attempts to sell you on its open world again.

From a gameplay perspective, I don’t think XV gains much from its open world. There are a few counterexamples - the experience I had of encountering an Iron Giant at night, just kind of driving around the middle of nowhere is a good emergent gameplay moment - but I think similar experiences could be replicated in instanced content and meanwhile a lot of bland tromping across open plains could be removed.

Meanwhile because it’s so firmly about brotherhood and the fraternal bond between four young men, a lot of the moments that resonate most strongly with its themes are scripted to match appropriate story beats.

Ironically I think the better way to improve FFXV would be to strengthen its rails, not to take it off the rails. FFX was extremely on rails! Until basically the final boss, there wasn’t any way of going back to prior zones at all! The rails, clearly, weren’t the problem. I think a lot of the problem was in the expectation of freedom owing to the first portion of the story being so wide-open and choice-oriented. Because of the existing themes of Noctis entering adulthood, I like the idea of the nature of his options changing somehow. Maybe add in factions he can befriend in the political landscape, each with a specific flair and style. This gives the adult message of his actions now having consequences on people outside his immediate social circle, but also continues to expand options for self-expression. The idea that options for self-expression being constrained is part of the fundamental nature of adulthood is...perhaps one with cultural resonance for a lot of Japanese people, but a lot of people - Japanese people included - just plain hate it as an idea. So I’d make sure whatever options were present early in the game, there might not be the same kinds of choices but there would be just as many that felt meaningful. Perhaps the early game includes exploration and poking aimlessly at sidequests, but once the physical location gets on rails you get into a Mass Effect style of branching narrative tree instead, or that’s when the characters suddenly get access to a job system that lets you customize your play style itself like crazy.

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to do it and they can come at the problem from fundamentally different angles. I think the truth of XV is that the design problem was financial; They’d have made the whole game this freeform romp through the countryside if they’d had the scratch, but they ran out of money so they had to focus on getting the story told. Some of the lazier late-game assets (detailed in various reviews, such as this one from Super Eyepatch Wolf) indicate the same. I expect if I got into that situation I’d take the same approach. To my eye it beats the Lord of the Rings Cartoon approach, where they did production front-to-back and therefore released a movie that’s a really cool first 2/3 of a movie and then it literally just stops without the last 1/3 happening. I think I also prefer it to kicking the can down the road and trying to call it “Part 1 of 2,” because the odds of a satisfying Part 2 getting made are never good in that kind of situation. Once they were in that pickle, they did the best with what they had.

But if I could catch things just a little bit pre-pickle, those are the changes I’d make: I’d take the focus off of the open world - particularly I’d remove most of the real-time travel in favor of environments I could pack more densely with interactions. From a production standpoint I think I’d use a hex map “quadrant design” system, where design teams would make individual hexes of content for a world map and then we’d design the world map to fit the number of encounters we were able to get done, rather than making a world map and hoping we could fill it up with stuff. I’d ABSOLUTELY avoid constraining the player agency, especially in association with Noctis’ journey to adulthood. That just...seems to imply a really shitty theme, and I’m not here for it. To combat this directly, I’d probably add in another cool system associated somehow with adulthood in the second half of the game. There’d be a direct statement from the game that you might lose some choice about some things but you have SO MUCH more choice about others!

So yeah. Those are the Mechanics I’d add to FFXV and how I think they’d change Affect by way of the Dynamics of play.

[kareofbears]

take this as a free card to ramble about the walking dead 👉👈

oh anon, there’s no one i love more than you. 

shoving this under the cut because i don't really think a lot of people would care what i have to say about this, since this isn’t really what my blog is about at the moment but wow is the walking dead a brilliant game that's mastered the art of story telling

just throwing this out there, i am currently listening to “Louis’ song” because he is my third favorite character in this whole game and also “Clementine’s suite” because its killer 

okay okay so, why am i suddenly so up in arms about this game? let me tell you! 

i first became interested in this game right when it came out, sometime in 2012. i was 11 at the time, and my family was pretty poor so i had to rely on YouTubers to watch this game and i absolutely fell in love with it. loved the characters, the twist and turns. but i only watched the first season. 

and coming back to it now, as someone who’s consumed a lot of media, who avidly criticizes games and story telling, this game has the absolute best story telling I've seen from any game I've ever seen before. 

this isn’t a new statement--people talk about telltale, revere telltale even now that their characters and storytelling is untouchable, and its true. you can tell that its about the story the minute you see the graphics of this game: a comic book. this isn’t about the gameplay at all, or the mechanics of killing walkers, no. its a story. a simple story of a girl who had to grow up in the world of a zombie apocalypse. 

season 1 is a prequel to the rest of the game. it introduces us to a man named lee--lee who killed his wife in a fit of rage and was going to prison when hell breaks loose. and season 1 is brilliant because in a typical survival game like this, people go ape shit. they'll kill whoever they need to, steal whatever they need in order to survive. but the fact that they introduce clementine into this, a young girl who thinks the world of you, it holds you back. it reminds you that there’s actions to your consequences, that even in this lawless world, there are still things that we should keep and treasure and preserve in order to want to live in a world like this. and when lee dies? it teaches you, the player, to love clem as he did. because we are now in charge of clem. not lee. 

in season 1, i killed lee

season 2 rolls around and honestly its kind of my least favorite season. the characters made me mad and it felt like my choices were weightless. but hold on, i think telltale actually did that on purpose. if season 1 is to show you that you need to preserve good and heart in order to fight in a horrible world, season 2 shows you how to fight in a horrible world--what you need to survive, who you need to be to gain allies, how to be strong. its purpose is to show you the underbelly of this nasty apocalypse, to show you that the world is shit and clementine had no choice but to grow up and catch up to speed with people four times her age. its not a happy season. pretty much everyone dies depending on your choices. as the player, there’s visibly no consequences to your actions: everyone’s an idiot and you’re the only competent one. there's no lee to watch you, no clementine to take care of. and that was done on purpose because that shit, as james put it, breaks you as a person. you don't come back from that. and she didn't. 

in season 2, i killed jane and went with kenny and refused to go into wellington without him

season 3 is everyone's least favorite and for that, screw yall because i loved season 3. season 3 introduces the character to the consequences of what we put clem through in season 2. it shows an outside perspective of who clementine has become, who she needed to be in order to survive. it introduces the concept of having a family and a group that stuck with you from the very beginning rather than finding people along the way--this created a new group dynamic that we haven't seen before in this game. it also introduces conflict for the player: as javi, the player has to juggle whats best for his literal blood family and having to earn clementine’s trust. its a hard thing to do. season 3 has incredible characters, concepts, and it does something new by having little to no walkers--if anything, it’s a character study on how people react to an apocalypse without actually being directly affected by the apocalypse in that moment. (id talk about this more--i literally debated whether or not i should talk about what i learned in my English class about pandemics lmfao--but this post would get too long and its one am). season 3 is the cementation of who you chose clementine to be. there's no changing clementine at this point. whats done is done. 

in season 3, i went out to look for aj rather than staying in Richmond 

season 4 is incredible. characters were the best they've ever been, the plot was amazing (if not a little too grandiose sometimes). season 4 is a direct homage to season one, except instead of having to protect a sweet girl in a zombie apocalypse by teaching her how to survive, its having to teach empathy to a boy who knows nothing but violence and survival. its brilliant, i don't even know what to say about this. aj is obviously an amazing addition to this game and i think its what telltales been leading up to this entire time (even with their shut down). the idea of having no adults for a base is brilliant since these kids don't have the hesitation and beliefs and feuds that adults have from their days of norm. i thought i would hate it but both of clementines love interests have no right being so amazing. honestly i would love to make a separate post about season 4 in order to break it down, but the gist is its amazing. its the perfect end for clementine as a character. 

in season 4, clem was romantically involved with and saved Louis 

twdg might be my second favorite game of all time? right under p5r. 

quick lists i wanted to make because i love making lists

favorite seasons

1. season 4 (but tomorrow this might change, since season 1 is just so brilliantly contained and simple and holds a lot of nostalgia for me)

2. season 1 

3. season 3

4. season 4

top four favorite characters

1. clementine (shes probably my favorite female fictional character of all time)

2. lee (truly, he is my second favorite comfort character next to ryuji, so do with that info what you will)

3. my main man louis (god i love him so so so much) 

4. javi (look i love him okay) 

thank you anon for giving me an outlet to yell about this amazing game!!! i could just talk about this game forever and ever because there is soo much to say about it

[morshtalon]

Shin Megami Tensei

(Definitely part 3 of a series of posts on the entire franchise)

For the end of MegaTen II, Atlus pulled out all the stops in terms of who you'd meet and what their importance to the lore was. While the ending arguably did leave some room for further escalation, by choosing to continue the story as it was, they'd be agreeing to keep being derivative works in relation to the books that originated their backstory. Sure, it was hardly the case anymore, what with the extreme departures MegaTen II took from the novels, but still. I guess the relative corner the writers got themselves backed into, combined with the clamor to have a more independent franchise on their hands, prompted them to scrap their established continuity and kick off a new one of their own. Whatever the real case was, it was definitely a smart choice, and thus was born Shin Megami Tensei, a way for them to keep their profitable series going. Also probably a much better game than a MegaTen III would have been.

Anyway, with a new continuity, possibilities were endless. They could better retread grounds they had already covered in the previous two games (well, really just MTII, since the first one barely even had anything going on), and expand upon ongoing themes while not having to worry about the usual expectation for a sequel in terms of magnitude and impact. Given that, it's unsurprising that, in comparison to MTII, this game dials things down a notch, relegating most of the more classical power fantasy stuff to the third act and preferring to engage in more character-driven events while leading up to it. None of the final enemies in SMT are as powerful as the ones in MTI and II (in story terms, actual battle stats notwithstanding) and the influence of cosmic forces that would have been enemies fought directly in the titles so far takes on a distant, more psychological approach (for the most part), unable to be challenged by the player. This helps build them as respectable overarching threats, and keeps the setting more subdued and the stakes higher, since it feels like characters are acting under the banner of things so powerful the player shouldn't even think themselves able to scratch them. It's good not to stat things sometimes, and it's quite impressive that they exercised this restraint way back in 1992.

For the demons that ARE fought, though, the artists really put their all into it this time. Even compared to games in the series's near future, I think this is the best looking they would be for a while. I mean, sure, Majin Tensei later on would have more detailed graphics, but I feel the art itself was worse there, with some weird proportions and a lot of palette swaps, while this game keeps things more consistently good overall.

Naturally, one longstanding tradition of the franchise introduced in SMT was the philosophical axis of Law vs. Chaos and the branching story that allowed the player to sit in any one point of the spectrum, with a modified final act depending on your decisions up to a certain point and where in the axis they would leave you once this point is reached. This system was partly a logical progression of the two endings from MTII and partly a way to integrate gameplay significance into what was already the grand point of SMT's storyline. While a good idea on paper and certainly innovative for its time and context, the warring faction-based story meant that as far as the plot is concerned, Law vs. Chaos pertains more to which of the factions you're appeasing with your decisions rather than any particularly lawful or chaotic behavior. There are some things that shift your alignment that have to do with being lawful or chaotic, but those lie mostly outside of the plot, in small actions that only serve to bring things one way or the other on infinitesimal increments and are meant more as an extra level of thought put into the system to label certain actions that were always there. The parallelisms between one faction and the other (i.e. temples that are identical in functionality; quests that consist of killing the other faction's quest-giver or vice-versa), together with certain easily exploitable ways to shift the alignment variable any way you want (so that you can play the game being entirely chaotic up to the crucial point where your alignment is locked, then right before that, exploit the mechanics to bring yourself to Law without having done anything lawful throughout the rest of the game), make the whole alignment system feel arbitrary, or at least the actual coded-in gameplay layer of it. I feel like maybe having only the unrepeatable story decisions actually affect alignment could help mitigate this somewhat. Then again, as I said, the story stuff doesn't feel much like the player being lawful or chaotic, so... I don't know.

Regardless of which path you take, you are going to get into a lot of fights. The game plays basically exactly like MTII, with an overhead top-down overworld and first-person dungeon crawling once you enter an area. This time around, very few areas are safe from enemy encounters, which makes sense since you're mostly just walking around Tokyo and a lot of first-person areas are just sections of the city that are populated (and besides, all of Tokyo is under threat from the demons). It made me realize that it's actually the typical RPG that opts to be nonsensical about the no-monsters-in-towns rule, but I'd be damned if that's not a smart choice on the part of the typical RPG. There are so many random encounters in this game, it's a common occurence for you to get several 1-step fights in a row. When I play an RPG, there's usually a point where I get really bored of always fighting enemies, then I finally escape the dungeon I'm in or go into a town and it's a big relief, like I can finally walk around and talk to people without having to stop dead in my tracks to fight the same enemy I already proved I can beat five hundred times before. Not so much in this game, and you'll definitely be crying out for an Estoma or a Fuma Bell most of the time. If you even know these two things act like repels in Pokémon and realize how useful they are.

If you don't know, however, you're going to need a lot of patience, because once again the game is very easy. Aside from, once again, a difficult earlygame, especially if you didn't put the right stat points into your protagonist (read: vitality and speed), the same basic problems from the previous two games' core concept of walking around and fighting dudes can be found here, but this time guns have ammo. Ammo doesn't actually count how many bullets you have left, it's just an extra thing you can equip that gives your gun attack an extra property such as more damage or a status effect. Thing is, status effects have an absurdly high hit rate in this game, work on most bosses, and there's a type of ammo that causes the "enthralled" status effect, which makes the target attack their own allies. Once you've got your hands on it, the game has been effectively turned into an interactive movie, even easier than the NES ones. Even without it, magic always seems to go before physical attacks, and both lightning and ice spells can stop an enemy for the current turn, so you'll likely always find a way to trivialize encounters within your disposal if you're just playing the game normally, even if you didn't realize it. With good speed, lightning or ice spells at your disposal and some status effect ammo, nothing will ever be able to stop you, no matter how hard they try. Once again, it's a preparations game, and that auto-battle button will get an intense workout this time around. I actually cleared the entire final dungeon under the effect of consecutive Fuma Bells, because of the combined effect a high encounter rate and the knowledge that the bosses could not stop me had on my brain. It's all about knowing which things are actually useful and which aren't, so it's actually just about struggling until the point you figure it out, then blazing through the game's fights half-asleep.

Still, battles notwithstanding, I think the exploration is more masterful than ever this time around. There isn't any significant portion of the game where you're clearly going after McGuffins, the whole story is pretty tightly paced and the balance between open-endedness and plot progression is well kept. There is a clearly evolving status quo for the entire setting of the game, and each time a major change happens new areas are made available while others are locked away. You can feel the effect the events of the narrative are having on the whole scenario, and the progression creates a bit of a disorienting effect as you attempt to find your way to the next significant location (which can and very well may cause you to get hopelessly lost on occasion, but that's part of the experience, I think). It's a pretty admirable blend of elements working together to create a continuous experience. This bleeds over into the characters themselves, who have evolving arcs and, for the most part, continue to be relevant and to have all sorts of crazy things happen to them through the course of the game. Consider it a much more mature attempt to do the sort of character-based revolving scheme that Final Fantasy IV also tried to do.

Overall, this is a game that further plays around with story concept brought over from MTII, experiments somewhat with new ways to go through some of its story beats, and creates a character-based narrative that goes through admirable amounts of change, to the point you can feel the whole cast working through their arcs as things escalate and reach a fever pitch. The gameplay is significantly less refined, though, and, admittedly, even the respectable things in SMT have struggled to stand the test of time, especially when you consider what later SMTs and SMT spinoffs would go on to do. I think this earns the original a 6.5 out of 10, my first non-integer score. It's damn respectable and admirable for 1992, but it has so many outdated things in it that it's hard to actually get oneself into the proper mentality to admire it unless you actually make the conscious decision to play the series in chronological release order. But who would be masochistic enough to do that, right?

[wakraya]

SBURB - The Board Game

Hey guys! Since the post I made yesterday got some traction and you all seemed super interested in this concept, I decided that, fuck it! Even though I don’t have all of the cards made and I’ve still got to refine the rules, I may as well share what I have, right?

This is something I’ve been doing on my free time! While I’ve given some thought to it and would totally love to make it into a functional game, maybe with one of those Tabletop Simulator things online, it’s still pretty much amateurish and untested. So with that out of the way:

How To Play

The game is at its core, a turn-based Card Game. You will have certain randomly-chosen characteristics that will shape how you interact with the others in the Session, but generally, most people’s objective is going to be completing a successful SBURB Session. There are 10 different decks of Cards with different kinds of Cards.

Character: Character Cards, they determine your Health and Aspect Vial count, as well as some special ability you may be able to use in your game!

Role: These determine your scoring conditions. Most people will get the SBURB Player, but there are other roles as well. No one but you should see your Role until the end of the game.

Land: Land Cards are... Well. Your Lands. Each half of a Land will have some special attribute only the person in the Land can benefit from, or they may have negative effects or special events that require some sort of activation.

Loot: Your basic Item Rewards, everything from Classpects to Weapons and Consumables.

Treasure: Advanced Item Rewards, usually powerful and can change the tide of a game.

Action: Your basic Actions, these will allow you to stop other character’s Actions, buff or debuff enemies other people encounter, and do things like Prototype or Ascend to God Tier.

Miracle: Just like Loot have Treasures, Actions have Miracles. These may allow for some dramatic effects like un-prototyping something or spawning a boss.

Strife: These are encounter cards, they may have an enemy you have to fight/flee from, or they may have some immediate reward/debuff for exploring your Land.

Boss: Agents, Royalty, Denizens and the like.

Doom: Dramatic, Session-Wide Events. These will be flipped over because of Miracles, or after a set number of turns. Something like, something awfully powerful falling on a Sprite and buffing every enemy and the Royalty, Jack stealing the Ring and becoming the Boss instead of the Black Queen, and such. The Reckoning can be either set to appear after X number of Turns, or you could just draw Doom Cards until The Reckoning appears, at which point you’d have 5 Turns until the Tumor Detonates and ends the Game.

Now that the Card Types have been explained, lets continue with the Gameplay! The SBURB Board Game is divided into three distinct parts.

The Set Up

This stage is basically a preliminary round before starting the game so that everyone gets the cards they need to begin everything. In whatever order they want, the Players will take a Character and Role Card. Everyone can see the Character, but no one can see the Role, of course. Everyone will also pick either 2 Action Cards, or 1 Action Card and 1 Loot Card.

They will also have to take 1 Land Card and add it as one half of their Land Title. They may choose to have it one the first or second slot without restriction, except for the ‘Frogs’ part of the Land, which will always go at the End. Drawing the ‘Frogs’ Land also instantly makes your Aspect be the Space Aspect. Similarly, equipping the Space Aspect immediately makes your Land the ‘Frogs’ Land, no exceptions. If any event gets rid of your Space title, your ‘Frogs’ Land goes with it, and vice-versa, they’re linked cards and cannot exist separately. Unless there’s more than one Space Aspect card I guess? In which point... just one Frogs Land. I’ll see about that.

The number of rounds before the Reckoning, having or not having the Reckoning show up mandatorily, that’s still stuff I’ve got to work out when the game is in a more advanced state. Right now the idea is that every X rounds (5 maybe?) you flip over a Doom Card that makes your Session more and more fucked up, so if you want to win you’ve gotta hurry up.

The Bulk of the Game

This is the stage most of the action will happen in. Once everyone has the cards they need and they know their Role in the Session, the game is divided in Rounds. Everyone has 1 Turn per Round, in order, and they can do any and all of the following during their Turn:

Draw an Action Card: Self-explanatory, everyone draws an Action Card at the start of their turns.

Use an Action Card/Equip Loot: You may only Equip new items during your Turn. While some Action Cards are restricted to use in your Turn, there are other Actions and Consumables that will be labelled as Instantaneous. If someone, say, tries to attack you, you may use an Action Card that nullifies this Action and prevent the Strife. Or you may use an Instant Action that powers up an enemy someone’s Strifing at any point. The idea right now is that you can use any number of Instant Actions to respond to things happening to you outside of your Turn, but you can only use 1 Instant Action to directly affect another Player per Round. We’ll see how this goes though.

Buy: You may access the Consort Shops of your Land at any point during the game. If a Land has a bonus for the shop, only the owner of the Land can get the bonus. You may also spend your Currency to buy things for other people. You can buy a variety of things from the Shops- A Loot Card (At the cost of 5 Currency), Treasures (Exchanged for 5 Loot Cards), Miracles (Exchanged for 5 Action Cards), Gates (Bought for 10 Currency each. Until you have both halves of your Land Title, you can only buy one. They allow you to interact with the next Player and their Land, and work the same as in Homestuck- 2 Gates will let you access the Player 2 turns away, if you have 1 Gate and the next Player also has 1 Gate, you can effectively reach the Player 2 turns away too. You need 7, or the ability to fly, to go face the Denizen), Dersite Transportalizers (A one-time purchase for the whole Session, it costs 50 Currency and allows travel to Derse to face off against the Black Queen. Derse can also be accessed with Flight), the Genesis Machina (Only available for the Space Player’s Land. A one-time, 50 Currency Purchase too, representing the Frog Breeding, Battlefield Drill and the Grist Rigs to shoot the Hoards into Skaia. May be only available after Stoking the Forge? Still gotta parse how this would work), and the Alchemy Sigil (Each Sigil costs 10 Currency. It allows you to stack weapons and equipment on top of each other to become more powerful).

Explore your Land: You can draw a Strife Card and see what the encounter has in store for you. It may be a positive or negative effect, like falling down and getting damaged or finding loot randomly, but it could also be an enemy! If an Enemy appears, a Strife is initiated. So far the combat systems I have in mind is a simple dice roll. The enemies will have power and buffs from Sprite Prototypings, and you will have power from the equipment. Both you and the Imp roll a d8. Whoever has the highest roll + power deals 1 unit of damage. If the roll is twice someone else’s roll, you deal 2 damage. If it’s three times as high, it’s an instant KO, Overkill (To prevent low-level enemies from being a nuisance). Repeat the dice rolling until the Enemy or the Player are dead. I may have to make it be triple and then quadruple if I see that’s a bit too OP. You can also Flee at any point by taking 1 unit of damage.

Fight Another Player: If you can reach their Land, you can Fight another Player. But unlike a normal Strife, a Strife with a Player will be just a turn of a Strife, to prevent someone from immediately killing someone else at the start of the game. You can also likely not Overkill a Player, that may be unfair too.

And the Rounds keep going as people plan their next move- Maybe someone’s a Horrorterror Emissary that’s been helping their friends all game, but now that someone’s about to die they use an Instant Action to power up the Underling and get them killed! Or maybe the Space Player is a Lord English cultist and refuses to buy the Genesis Machina, forcing someone else to spend their hard earned Currency to buy it themselves so that the game can be completed! The idea is that, not knowing other people’s Roles, their Goals are obscured and you have to trust others or rely on trickery and betrayal to attain what you want.

By default, you can die Once, with your Dreamself counting as an Extra Life. Whether you have to be kissed by another Player or not to wake up as your Dreamself though, we’ll see if it’d make the mechanic dumb or not.

A few things of note: There are three special kinds of Action Card that may help make or break a Session.

Prototyping Action: Everyone loves Sprites in Homestuck! Prototyping Actions are required to Prototype your Kernelsprite. Your First Prototyping will affect the Underlings, your Second won’t- Unless someone plays a ‘Double Prototyping’ Action, which will have both Tiers affect Underlings and Royalty. The Sprite’s power is added to your Character’s Power, and they count as an Extra Life- If you die, the Sprite will sacrifice itself for you. I’m thinking you may also be able to toss a Dead Player in a Sprite, bringing them back into the game with the bonuses of whatever was prototyped, but we’ll see how viable is that. Using 1 Prototyping Card will let your Prototype some Loot in your hand, or take the first Loot card on the deck (That’s prototypable) and Prototype it. Using 2 Prototyping Cards will let you look at the first 5 Cards on the Loot Deck and choose which one you want to Prototype. It will also let you Prototype someone’s Sprite, as long as you can reach their Land, with a card on your hand. Using 3 Prototyping Cards will let you prototype a Treasure to any Sprite you can reach, including your own, or toss a dead Player into a Tier 2 Slot of any Sprite, effectively nullifying that Player’s Sprite but bringing the dead Player back into the game.

Terraforming Action: The same as Prototyping Actions, but for your Lands. Using 1 Terraforming Card will force you to get the first Land Card on the deck and use it to complete your Land. Using 2 Terraforming Cards will let you draw the first 5 Cards of the Land Deck and get whichever you want, or force the first Card of the Land Deck onto an adjacent Player’s Land. Using 3 Terraforming Cards will let you go through the entire Deck and choose the Land you want, or to force the First Land on the Deck on any Player’s empty Land slot.

Ascension Action: Similar to Prototyping and Terraforming, but for going God Tier. You can only use the Ascension if you’ve found and equipped a Class and an Aspect. Going God Tier will give you benefits listed on the Class and Aspect Cards, and Deaths to anything other than other Players or Bosses will simply end the Strife and keep you with 1 Health. Using 1 Ascension Card lets you ascend to God Tier, as long as you have an Extra Life to spare. Ascending will get rid of this Extra Life, of course. Using 2 Ascension Cards will allow you to Ascend in the Moon Crypt, letting you reach God Tier even if you don’t have Extra Lives. You can also use 2 Cards to bring a Dead Player to their Quest Bed- As long as you can reach their Land and they had 1 Life to Spare (This may be changed if the Kiss Mechanic is not implemented). Using 3 Ascension Cards will let you Ascend a Dead Player you can reach, even without the Spare Lives. You can also hold onto them after Death, and use the 3 Ascension Cards to get back into the Game after everyone thought you were Dead for good. If someone tries to loot your body, you may Ascend and prevent this from happening.

The Endgame

After messing around, betraying, Ascending and Descending and facing off against the bullshit your friends are pulling on you, the game will eventually End. There are Four Ways for the game to End.

Tumor: If the Reckoning happens and the Game isn’t won before it ends, the Tumor will detonate and end the Session. No Card or God Tier can prevent this. There may be a Miracle that lets you steal the Tumor though, at which point the Tumor will be a Hot Potato Bomb that will kill whoever’s holding it for good. I may not implement this if it’s too easy to get rid of the Tumor though.

Last Man Standing: The game may end if there’s only one Player left alive, and they decide to end the game then.

Everyone’s Dead: Likewise, if no one survives a Boss Fight and can’t come back in any way, the game obviously ends.

Successful Session: This should be the Ending most Players want to attain. The Black Royalty must’ve been defeated- The Black King to save the Battlefield, the Black Queen to get the Rings. The Genesis Machina must’ve been bought. And whoever is holding the Rings must have access to the Space Player Land, and be willing to toss them into the Forge. Only then will the Genesis Frog be created, and the Game end for good.

To face off against the Black Queen, you need the Dersite Transportalizer, or Flight. To face off against the Black King, you need to have defeated at least Half of the Denizens of the Session, either Strifing them, or doing their Choice, and maybe he can only be reached by those who are God Tier or have Flight? I will have to iron some stuff here.

To face off against the Denizen, you need 7 Gates, or Flight. With Flight or after getting 7 Gates, you may go confront your Denizen at any point during your Turn. This will count as ‘Exploring your Land’ and prevent you from Exploring. The first time you face against the Denizen, you will draw it from the Boss Deck to see what Denizen you have. You may choose to Fight him, to Do the Choice if you’re able to, or Leave. Leaving has no penalty except for certain specific Denizens, other than having wasted your Land Exploring this turn, so you can just visit your Denizen to know what you have to do in order to Choice their ass. Anyone can face off against anyone’s Denizen- But they cannot do their Choice. 

Denizen Battles and Battles with Dersite Agents are 1v1s. Fleeing one of these Fights will always leave you with 1 HP- Unless you already only had 1 HP left, in which case you cannot flee (Or you will die).

The Black Queen and Black King fights are Session-wide, though. Everyone capable of Fighting them can choose to enter the Strife. These fights cannot be fled until either the Boss or everyone fighting the Boss is dead. Everyone will roll and add their power together to fight these Bosses. If even combining everyone’s power, the Boss rolls higher than them, whoever rolled the lowest (Multiple people in case of a tie) will get damaged.

Fighting Bosses, powering up enemies, refusing to fight certain bosses, attacking other players, hoarding Treasures and Miracles, drawing Doom Cards, the idea of the SBURB Game is to build up that sense of trying to win a Session and become Gods of their own Universe, while also adding the many ways a Session can go utterly and absolutely wrong, and with the card drawing being random, it really gives that sense that every Session is unique in their own way!

Obviously, once the Game ends, everyone rolls their Roles over, and check who won. Who knows, maybe the Lord English Cultist sabotaged the Session- But it was the Horrorterror Emissaries that managed to score higher. Or maybe the Session was won, just barely, but it’s the Megalomaniac that got everything to go just how they had planned, winning in the process. Or maybe it will be the Wildcard, who no one even knew what they were doing during the Game, who scored the highest just by being a whimsical asshole.

I’ve got a lot more to work on, and I don’t even know if it will be fun! But. Yeah these are the rules I have set up so far.

[chiegaming]

Press X to Not Die (XBLIG/Steam/itch, 2015)

Following me beating Not For Broadcast last time on where I used to log these, I wanted to look into more FMV games, at least the less known ones. Enter me finding a notably well-received indie game at a lowly 75 cents and one half-hour playthrough later and here we are! I'm, really not sure what I was expecting.

So Press X to Not Die prides itself on being this ode to 90s FMV games but in a weird twist of fate or, whatever, it feels a lot closer to being representative of the micro-niche Xbox Live Indie Game FMV games or just most of XBLIG in general. Only, it managed to slip through the cracks and get a PC port so as to not let it fade into obscurity with all the other stuff that was being dumped on there.

This might need a bit more context actually. XBLIG was a service for the Xbox 360 that saw a lot of very, particular kinds of jank games.

remember what they took from you... I almost want to compare it to a weird fusion between Newgrounds Flash games and the bootleg asset flips that seemed really prevalent on mobile services during the 2010s, it's such a particular vibe that really hasn't been replicated anywhere since, even just for the sake of a gag.

note: none of these are the X button.

So Press X to Not Die really stands out to me from the perspective of someone that grew up watching YouTubers playing these things that seemed to be created in complete isolation by amateurs. It's almost surreal to be actively playing something that actually started from there (that isn't by Silver Dollar anyway) The button prompts are the same kinda gross looking X360 buttons, most of the dialogue is so ludicrously outdated, I had sincerely thought the game was originally made in 2013. These guys were really out here making Hunger Games and Twilight jokes in 2015, it really feels like it was written by a redditor that got frozen in time. Even the protag is just this really average dudebro, there's dialogue choices on occasion but there's nothing to really dictate his behavior outside of the occasional chance to get 'lolrandom' with it.

The changes between shots are super rigid and it gets particularly bad during 1-on-1 fights that take more than a couple prompts to proceed. Not that I can really blame the devs because the first-person nature of the filming and how it's being used was going to make it very shaky regardless.

Pictured: this game's attempt at a Punch-Out!! fight. Now imagine this but violently shaking I dunno if it's enough to lead to motion sickness or anything but it does make scenes where anyone's up close to the camera incredibly awkward (as I hope you can tell). Aside from one choice that is Very weird, the game's not offensive or anything, it just tries really, really hard, harder than even most XBLIG games I remember. Half the time I couldn't help being kind of enamored by it because it's just so desperate, the Awesome Sauce is just leaking from it like a gross, oily sludge.

The plot's at least kind of interesting. Most of the population becomes incessantly violent (so vaguely zombie-like but not really) as a result of a government science experiment gone wrong and it's only the Gamers of the world that aren't affected (yes really) It ties directly into the core gameplay loop which is literally just pressing whatever combination of buttons it demands at the given moment. It's easy to assume it was just an excuse to justify the game's existence but it does get pretty close to almost being commentary on the perception of games as a whole. It's the absolute minimum of what can be considered a game to a lot of people, there's fail states, quite a few, actually. They're even neatly categorized in the extras menu after you beat the game to ensure you this is not just a movie that you gotta press buttons to resume!

But yeah, this was certainly an uh, experience? Writing this did lead me to discover there's actually quite a few XBLIG games that have made it to Steam so that's pretty cool. Aside from that uhh, yeah, I dunno. I'm gonna go back to playing Tekken or something. Steam itch

[tb5-heavenward]

DISHONORED AU

continued from previous post

WARNING: NOT A HAPPY AU. A SAD AU. A SAD AU IN WHICH MANY BAD THINGS HAPPEN.

Alan describes his dream, but poorly. He doesn't feel like he can explain the immensity of it, the sheer magnitude of how badly it made him feel, but Scott/John seems to understand. Both will make mention of the fact that their family's always wrangled with big things, and with the end of the war looming, it's natural that Alan might feel a little unsettled. In spite of himself, Alan feels a bit better for talking to his older brothers, and changes the subject to ask how the night's finding them both.

Sitting beside the courtyard fountain with his little brother, Scott will go on to talk about how he misses the front, and can't seem to get settled in the palace. He talks regretfully about the fact that people seem to have come away with the idea that he's bloodthirsty for wanting to go back, but really he just wants to help put a proper end to it all. He misses home, but he can't feel like he belongs here until he knows that his home and everything their family worked for are both safe. He'll ask what Alan thinks of him, and Alan will reassure him that he's never thought of Scott as anything but a hero. He goes on to talk about how he's glad the war is ending before Gordon ever got the chance to really be a part of it, and that hopefully their brother can make his naval career out of protecting merchant ships from piracy. He mentions that the last he heard, Gordon was headed to some rendezvous with some noblewoman.

Sitting in the rooftop pavillion with a cup of tea, John will talk about the fact that Alan's always known more about the world around him than he gets credit for, despite his reputation for being the spoiled baby of the family. (Alan takes that one a little personally.) John goes on to say that it's impossible not to hear things, living in the palace, and that Alan's probably heard more than he realizes. He speaks a little bit cryptically about how Alan's got good instincts, and that maybe he's not wrong to be a little bit unsettled. He suggests that Alan should learn to listen to the whispers he hears, wherever he hears them, if maybe not necessarily to trust them for truth. He talks about the idea of having two natures, and uses Virgil as an example, talks about their brother's hidden studio, somewhere in the arts district, because he doesn't think he'd be taken seriously as an engineer if people knew the sort of work he did as an artist.

In either path, Scott and John talk to Alan for a little while, and the conversation is significant and contains some contextual meta about the ways each of their influence will affect gameplay going forward. Scott will put Alan on a combat based path, John will put him on a stealth based path. At the end of each conversation, the option will be presented to go talk to the other brother, so they each get an equal airing.

After hearing both conversations, the option will be presented to say good night to either Scott or John, and either option will return you to their respective locations. The implication is given that this choice will weight Alan's abilities in one direction or the other, though the other option will always exist, it'll just be less immediately accessible. The game can be played pure stealth or pure combat, but the ideal path probably balances both of these influences. There are people who need to be killed, but there are also innocents being used as pawns, and killing indiscriminately will do more harm than good. Conversely, the refusal to mete out justice to the people who deserve it will result in your opponents being stronger than you are when there is no option except to face them directly.

Both Scott and John have unique items to give to Alan. The opposing item will always exist and it’s at your discretion whether or not you choose to pursue it, but getting it will be challenging and require completion of an optional path.

A cloud passes in front of the moon. The night suddenly grows much colder.

In the courtyard, as their conversation closes, Scott and Alan are joined by a handful of people in servants garb, though Scott's immediately suspicious and says he doesn't recognize any of them. One of them says that this is because he's been too long away at the front with his father, getting his citizens killed. But Alan doesn't recognize any of them either. Scott's still got the twin-bladed knife in hand. A fight breaks out before Alan realizes what's happening, and shouts for the palace guards go unanswered. Scott keeps Alan behind him, kills three out of four of these people easily, but the fourth deals a mortal blow. Scott drops the knife, Alan picks it up, and kills the fourth assailant before returning to his brother. Scott bleeds out in his arms, but not before he speaks to someone that Alan can't perceive, and tells Alan he needs to run, to get out of the palace, and to kill anyone who tries to stop him. He insists that Alan take the bronze knife. For the first time Alan notices a black brand on the back of Scott's hand, but as he holds it, it burns into his skin instead, and then Scott's gone. Alan runs.

On the rooftop, John's teacup shatters on the stone floor of the pavillion. He tries to stand, but falls and as Alan goes to help him, all he can do is watch as his brother has a seizure. This has never happened before, and Alan doesn't know what to do but stay with him until it passes. When it does, John's left weak and disoriented and dying, and he talks to someone who isn’t there and who isn’t Alan. Despite the fact that Alan's holding him, John can't seem to see his face. When Alan says he's going to get help, John pulls himself together enough to stop him, and tells him that he can't, it isn't safe. He makes it clear that he's been poisoned, that it's too late, and Alan needs to run, to get out of the palace. Another seizure interrupts him. It's shorter, but leaves him struggling to breathe. He manages to tell Alan that there's a back stairwell accessible from the roof, which will lead down to the palace walls and into the city, but it's all he manages to say. The last thing John does is give Alan a telescope lens he's always worn on a watch chain, ringed around with strange white gems. He presses it into his brother's hand as he succumbs to a final seizure, and a black brand burns into Alan's skin as John dies. Alan runs.

Depending on whether Alan's in possession of the sword or the lens, the path he's presented with will be different. Both items serve as guides through Alan's escape from the palace, and seem to resonate with the black brand on the back of Alan's left hand.

From the courtyard, the sword will guide Alan to the most direct path out of the palace, straight through the main gates. As Alan heads out of the courtyard and back into the palace, he'll encounter the guards who didn't come when he first called, and they will draw their weapons on him, cementing the fact that this is a coup against the royal family. The sword in Alan's hand resonates and suddenly the entire world goes grey and dark and strange, and still. The distant voice from Alan's dream will tell him that he has been taken outside of time for the span of a moment, and that he may do with this ability whatever he chooses---though the best choice now would be to cut the throats of the men who are trying to kill him, and in this instance, this is the only way to exit this time-stop. This is functionally a bullet-time style combat buff, and will be available to Alan on a cooldown as long as he has the twin-bladed knife equipped. It stretches one second into ten seconds, everyone and everything around him will move at 1/10th speed. He can use it to get past enemies, or to score critical hits on them quickly. After dispatching of the first two guards, either by killing them or simply seeming to vanish, the rest of Alan's path will present him with several more combat scenarios, in which he can either engage or choose to avoid a fight. Eventually he reaches the main palace gate, having left a bloody trail in his wake.

From the roof, Alan knows that the outer wall is most easily accessible to the north, though the north wall of the palace is a sheer face down to the top of the the battlement. The lens in his hand will resonate with the brand, and a voice will tell him to hold it against his eye and to look where he wants to go, and then blink. From the edge of the roof Alan does so, and blinks to the place he had seen atop the outer wall. Blinking via the lens is essentially a short distance teleport on a cooldown, and will allow Alan to quickly transverse spaces and obstacles that would be otherwise impassable. On the top of the outer wall he'll find a hatch that leads down into a passage, running the entire length of the wall. It's cramped and narrow but it runs straight. At places along its length, through barred gaps in the wall, occasionally Alan will hear voices, and if he stops to listen, he will hear the palace begin to wake up as it becomes apparent that two out of three members of the royal family have been killed. He'll hear some people talk about needing to flee the palace before the Churchmen arrive. He'll hear servants weeping. At one point, he'll hear one of the guards kill someone else. Eventually the path will lead to a gate out into the city.

His options now are to go find Virgil or go find Gordon.

[thesffcorner]

Dishonored Retrospective Part 5: DLC Changes and the Knife of Dunwall

The first four parts of this retrospective covered the base game. Part 5 will look at the DLC, specifically its changes in the first installment, the Knife of Dunwall. 

Dishonored got two story expansions: The Knife of Dunwall was the first, followed by the Brigmore Witches. Both are set in Dunwall, and in both you play as the assassin Daud.

The expansion starts a lot of trends and improvements that become staples of the latter games, like the villains, the inclusion of some sort of gang conflict, the introduction of corrupt/black bonecharms and favours/contracts.

The first and most notable one is that we no longer have a silent protagonist. I like this change a lot, not least because it would have been incredibly weird to have Daud voiced in the original and not in the expansion. Michael Madsen reprises his role and he’s even better in this DLC; he gets more lines and more time to shine and develop Daud’s voice and character.

There is a lot of debate surrounding voiced vs silent protagonists, but personally I prefer the latter. It helps cement the character’s personality, and actually allows for dialogue and real interaction. Instead of pressing 1 of two prompts in response to someone just standing in front of you and talking at you, you can have an actual ‘scene’ with dialogue and personality and ‘gasp’ character development.

The change from Corvo to Daud marks another improvement. While you technically can still play as Corvo in Dishonored 2, it’s clear that Emily is the intended protagonist, which makes each instalment have a different lead through which we experience the world and story.

Speaking of, let’s quickly go over that!

Story:

The Knife of Dunwall (KoD) takes place right after Jessamine’s murder. Daud is already having second thoughts, not helped by a visit from the Outsider who mentions the name Delilah. He starts trying to figure out who or what Delilah is, and this quest takes him from the bowels of the ports to the glittering streets of the Financial District.

Brigmore Witches (BW) takes place directly after and sees Daud go on the offensive, for his final confrontation with Delilah, now that he knows who and what she is.

Unlike the original, the story here is more of a mystery rather than a revenge, which I really like. Daud has already done the deed; not only has he killed Jessamine, he has had an entire lifetime of killing that he can’t easily (or at all) make up for. So figuring out who Delilah is and how she ties in with Hiram Burrows and Jessamine isn’t just for the player’s convenience of having a plot; it also literary is about saving Daud’s soul, whether you chose to play a redemptive or destructive path.

Gameplay:

The chaos system is the same from the previous game, but the extremes have slightly changed. In the original, doing a non-lethal playthrough earned you an achievement called Clean Hands, whereas here it’s Cleaner Hands. It’s fitting, both because Daud is after all, as assassin, but also because from what I know you can’t do an entirely non-lethal playthorugh.

On the flip-side, high chaos still allows you to destroy everyone and anything, and gives you a different ending. I don’t know how different the ending is, since I’ve never played on high chaos, but I do know that the ending is already hard on low chaos so I don’t need or want an extra challenge.

In terms of gameplay, there are a lot of small changes that I found really improved the experience. First off, Daud has more weapons that are non-lethal. He has his chokedust, and his electric bolts, and his shock mines, which are ironically, more options than what Corvo had. Additionally he doesn’t have a crossbow; he has an Assassin’s Creed style launcher in his sleeve.

Daud, like Corvo is marked, but his abilities are slightly different. His Void Gaze combines Corvo’s Dark Vision and the heart, highlighting both enemies and runes; Blink teleports Daud in a slightly different way, by slowing time; and Summon Assassins which again, similarly to an ability in Assassin’s Creed summons Assassin helpers.

Like Corvo, Daud also can upgrade his abilities with runes and bonecharms, except this is the first time the developers include corrupt and black bonecharms. These give advantages but also have downsides, like wasting more mana or depleting health or generally having some downside that the player has to balance out. I personally don’t find bonecharms that useful outside of a collector standpoint, so I’ve never had an issue with the balancing, but I do think it’s a neat addition, especially on higher difficulties.  

As for the enemies, there are quite a few new ones. For starters KoD doesn’t have any Wheepers, but instead there are Overseers, City Watch and most importantly a new gang called the Hatters. We’ll talk more about both of these when we get to characters.

In BW, Wheepers make a return, along with more Overseers and City Watch, as well as two new group which I absolutely adore, because as I said in my Dishonored post, this is the first time we get female enemies! The two groups are the Hatters’ rival gang the Dead Eels, and Delilah’s coven of Witches.

Characters:

Daud is our protagonist, and he is a more interesting presence than Corvo, if only because he actually talks. He makes quite a few jokes too; my favorite is him telling two of his assassins who want to betray him to the Officers that he’ll come quietly.

Daud’s main conflict that follows him through both expansions, is his misgivings on killing Jessamine. He starts questioning the life he has lead and wondering how much of what he has done has been his own choice and how much has been subtly guided by the Outsider. There is a lot of debate about whether his decision to go after Delilah and stopping her from taking over Emily is really altruistic or motivated by a selfish, shallow need to ‘redeem himself’, and either way you land, the fact that there is this much discussion in the first place speaks of good writing. While there is some question of how ‘good’ Corvo is, you can actually play him entirely non-lethally and it’s easier to get on board with a wrongfully accused character than a man who has spent a good 30 years of his life killing. But I like that a lot about Daud, and the questions that he himself raises about faith and responsibility and regret are all fascinating themes that are way more interesting than anything raised in the base game.

Other important characters are: Delilah, Billie Lurk, Lizzy Stride, Barister Timsh, Thalia Timsh, Burndry Rothwild, Nurse Trimble, and the Old Geezer.

Level Breakdown:

The Knife of Dunwall has three levels, while the Brigmore Witches has four. Like before, we have a mix of city levels and single location levels, and some of these, like the first level of KoD and the third level in BW are on par with Flooded District in length.

The game starts with a short cut-scene and a visit to the Void. The Outsider is not happy with Daud; it’s clear whatever affection or relationship the two have had has long since ended, and it’s especially funny as the Outsider is about to mark Corvo to essentially replace Daud.

There is no Hound Pits Pub-like area where Daud can relax and shop, so you start each level with an upgrade screen. This is where we are introduced to Favors, a concept that gets even further developed with the Black Markets and Contracts in the sequel.

Favors are small things that Daud can pay for to make the game slightly easier or open up different paths of playing, such as purchasing extra tanks of whale oil to be put in a specific location or having a bonecharm hidden somewhere in the level. They are useful and can sometimes be done without, but sometimes, especially on medium chaos they make the job a lot easier.

A Captain of Industry:

The first level sees Daud breaking into the Rothwild Processing Plant and Refinery. The man who owns it, Rothwild is a ruthless businessman who is in the process of rather brutally crushing a workers strike in his factory. What Daud needs from Rothwild is actually information about his boat called Delilah.

The roofs outside the factory is where we first meet Billie Lurk, hands down the best character in this entire series. Billie is one of Daud’s assassins and point-woman, the best and smartest of all his Whalers. She is a snarky, no-nonsense person who will question Daud and banter with him during and in between missions.

For now, she informs Daud that punch cards are revoked because of the strike, making it difficult to get inside.

This is a good time to talk about the new enemy of this area: the Butchers. They are an imposing, lumbering yet fast gigantic enemies who kill you in a really gruesome way by burring their circular saws in your flesh. These enemies were horrifying the first time I played this level; their design is genuinely great, and makes for a fun contrast with Rothwild once you actually get to see him. The game sets you up to think he will likewise be a gigantic butcher, but instead is a skinny man who looks less intimidating than Piero.

Entering the Slaughterhouse isn’t easy and required you to acquire a punch card. This also potentially lets you see the prison where those who dared go on strike are held; again some rather gruesome imagery which at this point is par for the course for this world.

The Whale Butchers are like the regular Butcher’s jacked up cousin. They have a gigantic saw in the front and the engine of a tallboy in the back and are one hell of a monstrosity to fight. Best to avoid or bolt them. The Slaughterhouse itself is huge and contains a lot of interlocking rooms; it’s a perfect example of a single location level done right.  

There are several side-quests to be completed here, one of them being putting a whale out of its misery in the Refining Room where he is being slowly electrocuted and leaking oil and bodily liquids on the floor. This space is incredible and grim as hell; the Butchers, the sounds the whale makes, the enormity of the room, it’s all a brilliant piece of world building. It’s probably my favorite area in the whole DLC.

The rest of this level involves Daud exploring the Slaughterhouse and finding Rothwild involved in an argument with Abigail. Abigail is a union representative, sent to deliberately start the fire that was the strike to undermine Bundry. Her involvement in this level gives you a ton of options as to how you want to deal with anyone. It also presents you with an interesting choice.

If you decide to play non-lethally, you will be met with scorn and resistance from everyone you encounter, especially, at the start Billie. Here, Abigail mocks you for the decision not to do what she asks, which is essentially, not just killing Bundry, but also blowing up the Refinery along with every single Butcher that’s still trapped inside. Talk about overkill lady!

In return she offers to tell you about Delilah, but there is another way. You can knock her out and then take Rothwild to the very chair he has been using to abuse his workers and shock him until he talks. Then you can put him in a crate sent to the western part of the Isles and be on your marry way.

Well… sort of. Additional enemies appear as you exit, and if you avoid them, you get to experience Overseer’s music box. This was a weapon that appeared in the base game but wasn’t utilized much (other than the first level). Here it appears quite a lot; it dulls the assassins’ senses and makes it impossible for Daud to use his powers. A chokedust grenade will be enough of a distraction to let Billie escape the Overseers who have her trapped.

Eminent Domain:

With the information Daud got from either Rothwild or Abigail, you now know that the boat used to belong to Barister Timsh, a friend of Hiram Burrows who was Delilah’s lover. However recently he has been trying to get rid of the boat and a lot of other things, and learning that you are suddenly interested in Delilah, prompts his niece, Thalia to seek you out.

The level starts with you and Billie taking out some guards. Thalia is waiting for you on the other side of the wall of light, so you have to make your way there.

SHUT IT OFF. That’s the main advice I’ll give you, because if you don’t, there is no way to get back to the Waterfront, and you will essentially break the game. Do it and save yourself the frustration.

Thalia is waiting for you in a small square, harassed by a Hatter. This is where using Void Gaze really helps, because if you take out the Hatter immediately, you will be ambushed by two more who, if you’re not careful, will start a gang war.

Disposing of the Hatters lets you talk to Thalia. She will tell you that Timsh was so obsessed with Delilah, he rewrote his will to leave his entire estate to her. She wants you to kill him and replace the will which is maybe a problem if you’re playing Cleaner Hands.

Before you can worry about that though, there is the slight issue of getting into the Financial District. You need a key, and the key has been promptly stolen from the City Watch by the Hatters. This brings you into Hatter territory, where stealing the key from Chauncy is a lot harder than it sounds. Depending on your chaos level Chauncy will change location and getting to him can be tricky. Once you do manage it, you can enter the Financial District.

Since the assassins have been planning a hit on Timsh for a while, you have a scope location already set up where you can talk to Billie and stock up on weapons and gear. Before you do that, it’s good to save one of Timsh’ former ‘friends’ from some City Watch, since he gives you an alternative to killing Timsh. Essentially Timsh seized the friend’s property unlawfully, and he wants to repay the favour, using some forged documents and a bag of dead rats.

This is also the place where you can talk to the Outsider. Billie will make some snarky comments about your face while talking to, as Daud calls him “the black eyed bastard”, and now you can really go after Timsh.

Let’s talk about the way I did it. Blinking from the apartments across to Timsh’s fourth floor will land you right in front of the room with Delilah’s statue. Because Timsh wanders the house, there is a good chance he might be on this floor too. Knock him and the guards out, steal his key and replace his immunity document with a forgery.  Use Delilah’s statue to talk to her; this is your first interaction and she’s pretty great at self-aggrandizing.

Now all you have to do is take the will and dump the rats in the air duct in the basement. You can watch General Turnbull hilariously arrest Timsh and you are done my friend. Return to the sewers (though beware the Butchers who will appear as revenge for what you did to the Slaughterhouse).

I love this level. It’s a lot of weaving from building to building, carefully knocking out or avoiding enemies and some very entertaining scenes between Delilah and the Outsider. I like city levels the most because they are best at showing the world, and seeing the rich part of Dunwall was immensely entertaining. It adds another level to the world building we got in the base game. While I did love it there, most of the city levels were set at night and crawling with City Watch; it’s nice to see that Dunwall was still a functioning city while Corvo was out killing people.

The Surge:

And now, we get to the third and final level of the KoD. I won’t lie, the first time I played this level, I hated it. It’s very hard and it combines a lot of my least favorite things. It’s a single location level, that reuses a location (the Flooded District) and it’s a level full of enemies. For playing Cleaner Hands, this was a nightmare.

However, the plot here is good and it’s probably the best-known beat of the whole series, and it informs so much of what happens in the BW and the sequel games. So let’s start.

Billie Lurk informs you that the Overseers have taken over the Flooded District; someone has betrayed you and your base, and Daud’s first priority will be to find out who. You climb out of the chain and follow Corvo’s footsteps and get to see the massive number of Overseers. There are two main goals of this level; getting to Overseer Hume and freeing as many of the captured assassins as you can.

How you deal with the Overseers is a personal choice that I won’t even attempt to influence; I started out painstakingly taking them out one by one, until I figured out chokedust works really well to disorient groups and then either shoot or choke the Overseers while they are distracted. This goes double for Overseers who carry the music box, because they can only be attacked from the back.

You locate the assault plans in the house next to the makeshift platform and find out that Hume was tipped straight to your hideout. To take Hume out, it’s best to use the three story building directly opposite the hideout and use the open window. Once you take the letter he carries you can return to the roof and order your assassins to either kill or knock out the remaining Overseers.

And now we get to the moment. Billie reappears and informs Daud that the Overseer Hume moved too early; more Overseers should be on their way, but with Hume defeated it’s too late. Daud asks again how the Overseers knew where to find them and Billie admits to betraying you.

I love this moment. That Billie betrays Daud was unfortunately something that was spoiled for me, but I still thought it was a great beat. Billie has been your point woman the entire time, bouncing off ideas and plans in every level. To find out that she and Delilah wanted to kill you all this time is a big blow, especially because Billie doesn’t seem sorry to have done it. She explains that she thought Daud’s refusal to kill has made him weak and she was going to take his place. But seeing the change and his defeat of the Overseers convinces her that he isn’t and deserves better.

Delilah bamfs out, with a ridiculously over the top warning that she will “crush your cold heart and walk into your skin” and you get a choice; spare Billie’s life or kill her.

I said before that I didn’t like the DLC’s ending choice, and that’s in great part because of this one. There is a different weight to deciding Billie faith when you are Daud; she directly betrayed you, and if you died a lot in this level like I did then you have a lot of personal reasons to be angry with her. It’s a better motivated choice, and the weight of what decision you make, will really inform the way you interpret Daud’s character. Either he really is starting to change, and is sick of killing, or he is still just the same vindictive man he was before.

Another big debate is what type of relationship Daud has with Billie. The game leaves this open to interpretation, and honestly, I think it’s for the best. While I do lean a lot towards the fatherly, there is a case to be made that their attachment is romantic, but at the end of the day I think it’s irrelevant. They cared for each other, and being betrayed by someone like that will be a heavy blow, no matter how you interpret this attachment.

With KoD over we can go over to part 6 and the Brigmore Witches. 

part 4 < > part 6

[ghostportals]

Rejet’s Star Revolution: Starting the game

Uh yeah idk if there’s already a guide out but I haven’t seen one? so i figured i’d post a bit of one

keep in mind if you’re reading i can’t actually read japanese, a lot of this was done with google translate lol. but it can still be helpful to make things quicker till a proper guide comes out (if there. isn’t already one)

Menu stuff is at the very bottom of the post ! The stuff before the menu takes you through the tutorial and the basics that aren't covered in that.

edit before you click: warning that there’s currently irl blood on my desktop theme (won’t be soon tho)

Welcome to the Starevo tutorial! Lines with an * at the beginning aren’t in the tutorial, but are stuff I’m mentioning for the later gameplay.

1. Joining

Enter your Player name. Last name, then first name, Japanese style.

2. Intro

The school’s stuco VP will talk to you for a while. I’d like to tell what he says, but I’m not quite confident enough in my jp listening skills to do so lol. He does call you “president-chan”, though. You’re given a dialogue option:

It doesn’t matter what you say, but the top says “I’m not very confident” and the bottom basically says “I’ll try to do my best.” Both are not very confident sounding either way, which is understandable considering you’re suddenly being thrust into a position of power in a dang idol school, lol.

3. Lives - require LP

If you’re used to mobile rhythm games, the gameplay is pretty easy to get from just the images. There’s only one “button” and it doesn’t matter where you tap.

*Select a song, select a friend or guest as support, select a team, and click the pink button to begin (out of tutorial).

Small pink circle: Regular tap.

Blue circle with trail: Tap and hold.

Green circle with shine in the middle: Swipe.

Big pink gradient circle: Tap with two fingers (or double tap real fast, if you’re lazy.)

Star shaped: Tap A Lot Real Fast. You need to get a certain amount to get a perfect; continuing after the star fills gives you bonuses.

*After a live, you’ll see your results and get rewards. If your support was a guest, you’ll get a popup prompting you to send a friend request; you can send it (blue) or not (gray).

4. Lessons - require AP

You can increase affection(?) degree in lessons. Select the lesson type by selecting one of the colored circles. Keep an eye on the characters condition-- how effective the lessons are is directly proportional to how in shape the character is! (Just like real life wow)

Tap twice on a lesson type (circle) to begin. You’ll need to tap through several lesson types to complete a whole session, and can give items to the characters to increase how much they gain in a certain attribute by tapping on the orange button with a coffee cup.

Sometimes characters will be too tired, or moody, to participate in a certain lesson. Keep an eye on their mood, especially if you’re thinking about using an item. Sometimes they’ll sleep, which means they don’t participate in that bit of the lessons. However, letting them get rest can up their FEVER gauge and their tone. When the FEVER gauge is filled, the effectiveness of the lessons increases greatly.

*You can give presents during the lesson to make something good happen. Try to give what the character likes! When a character participates in a lesson, their affection goes up! Let’s become good friends with everyone!

*Lessons are done by unit. Outside of the tutorial, when you click the lesson button, you’ll choose a unit to train.

5. Story

The tutorial will next take you to the story page. After the introduction (which you already read), the stories will no longer be fully voiced. *You need to spend star/story keys to read most chapters. The mechanics work like any mobile vn; if you don’t want to sit through it, you can expand the menu in the upper right and click the skip button to fast fwd through.

*If you’ve played Enstars, the stories are similar to that. They’re organized by unit.

6. Units

Time to choose your boys! The screen shows you pura.net at first; switch between them by swiping, not by tapping the arrows. When a unit catches your fancy (or you find the one you’re already dedicated to), tap the pink button. It will then ask if you’re sure you want to start with this unit; click OK.

7. Gacha

Time to scout. You’ll automatically be taken to the gacha page in the tutorial, where you’ll be given a card of one of the members of your chosen unit. This ends the tutorial.

*Not in tutorial: the actual gacha function. If you’ve played other mobage, you know this. If not, it’s simple: The regular gacha (at the time of writing, only one, but there will probably be more) requires the little rainbow star stones. Spent 15 stars, get one card. Spend 150, get 10 cards. Getting 10 cards ups your chances of a better card! The point gacha (lower card rarities) requires 5000 points(?) for a 10 pull, and 500 for 1.

The tutorial ends after you get your card. The game will give you a couple messages and then prompt you to let it restart so it can complete more downloads (shouldn't take long). Upon starting the game again, you’ll receive login bonuses and be thrown into the fray.

8. Other stuff tutorial mentions

Cards can be strengthened using items. These are what you obtain from playing lives and completing lessons. You require a story key (blue star key) to read story chapters.

9. Cards

The top button on the card menu is your team organization. There are 5 team slots. Clicking the rightmost button on the bar that shows the cards will show the active skills in the team.

You have two types of teams: live teams, and lesson teams. When you open it, you’re on live teams. Click the other button above the card images to switch. There’s a bunch more buttons on here, but at the time of writing this idk what they are, I’ll. fix this later.

Second button is to level up your cards. Select a card (I have to tap them twice? sometimes more lol) to level. I’d like to add more but I can’t do anything there yet so I’ll fix this later;

Third button is awakening. I assume this is like idolizing/changing/blooming/ect. It looks to require items rather than a second copy? Will update later as well.

The bottom button lets you view a card’s stats. Level, specific stats, and skills. Click the middle button under the card to see the character’s profile. The third button will bring you to the unit pages, where you can look at any character’s profile by tapping them.

10. Menu stuff!

The main menu can be accessed from most pages by clicking the arrow in the bottom left. It’s shown across the bottom, and is showing by default on the home page. You can full screen your character/cg with the button in the left.

Left to right: Home, live, lesson, story, characters, gacha, friends, more menu menu.

10a. Friends

The rightmost button on the menu lets you view friends. It begins as a desolate and barren wasteland of loneliness. Right side buttons, top to bottom: Friends list, friend requests, pending approval from the other person, and search (find some friends!) The search page looks a bit glitchy atm but nothing gamebreaking. Click the button next to their name to view their profile, or the rightmost on their little bar to send them a request.

10b. More Menu Menu

Left to right:

Profile, settings, storage/inventory (items) Shop, friends, Transfer data, help, contact us Opening movie, terms of service, back to title.

10c. Settings

System options -> Live options -> Story options

System options top to bottom: music volume, sound effects volume, voice volume, lightweight mode (makes it run better).

Live options top to bottom: music volume, SE volume, voice volume, lightweight mode, timing calibration, movie (animations), cut-ins (the character popups when skills activate).

Story options is just text speed.

10d. Welcome menu

...This should probably be first but whatever.

Tap the bottom left button to access. Left to right (to bottom): OP movie, takeover/transfer/”inheritance”, clear cache, contact us.

In all honesty I don’t understand the transfer stuff myself... It looks like you can put an account on for sure, but I don’t know how to assign an email and password to your current account.

And that’s all I’ve got! When I figure out how to assign transfer codes I’ll add that in.

[crimeanarchivist]

Post-Famitsu FE:W Thoughts

I am actually more hyped for Fire Emblem Warriors than I was before this Famitsu dump.

“But only new FEs are getting represented”

Yeah, okay, sure, but I don’t have any particular animosity towards the characters in those games.  My love for Tellius is prolific and unmatched, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have favorites from Awakening and Fates.  No problems there.  The characters ultimately wouldn’t be what would make me excited anyways.  What makes me excited is actually the approach to the whole thing.

I’m not exactly embroiled in the musou fanbase.  I’ve played Hyrule Warriors nearly to completion, but my only other experience is the Gundam crossover, and that was in a Walmart.  I have no idea what other crossovers have been like, or even what the baseline is for your typical DW game.

I had a grand time with HW, but I’d be remiss if I said that the gameplay was deep in any sense of the word.  It’s broad, but not deep.  If I want to beat my foes with a hammer, I can do that, but I can only do that with one character, and most differences between hammers are immaterial in the grand scheme of things.  On harder maps with forced units, it’s silly to even try without using a second player using one of your most powerful characters.  And the general strategy is always more or less the same -- get to the fort, seize the point, beat the boss, grind up your KO count so you get an A rank.  Usually, you’re not actually at risk of death or failure, only of missing the A rank.  That’s fine, but not exactly the hallmark of the pinnacle of gaming.  It lacks layers.

If the class system exists (which is confirmed via Famitsu), there have to be meaningful differences between classes.  There also need to be meaningful differences and/or similarities between characters that share classes.  Ideally, these distinctions go beyond moveset and quickness.

If the weapon triangle exists, it needs to be strong enough to carry weight but weak enough not to be overbearing.  Imo, I think Heroes overdoes it a bit by making it proportional to the unit’s current Atk, making the advantaged state exceptionally brutal.  Rather, I’d like to see relationships along the lines of “striking with an advantageous weapon (opt. as a specific class) allows the attacker to act immediately out of it, even if it was a heavy attack”.  Give that to say, the Assassin class and restrict the “immediate action” to “dodge” and you’ve produced a class/attribute combination that

incentivizes quick movement

causes players to seek advantageous matchups (or requires them to adjust to disadvantaged states)

provides a means of getting in and out of your opponent’s face

draws lines between users of the same weapon and/or class

This is effectively what I’m looking for over all else -- reasons to play the whole cast, and to think critically throughout key portions of each map and objective.  Everything else, I expect to be very similar -- wild combos, beating up hordes of enemies with a single move; all that can stay the same.

Now the pipe dream stuff.

Usually, when people say that “X exists” in a game, they mean more than the mechanic is present.  They mean that the mechanic has a meaningful impact on the game.  Then, to clarify the extent the mechanic affects the game and its overall complexity, they add qualifiers, such as “extensive” or “involved” or “trivial”.  Using the Final Fantasy series as an example for a second, everyone thinks of FFV and Tactics as having “jobs systems”.  Technically, FF1 and 2 also have these, but the inability to change classes midgame and the general lack of differences outside of basic attributes and spell usage kinda sweeps that under the rug.  XIII has a crafting system of sorts, but it doesn’t seem to carry any real weight in how the game is played, so most people don’t think of it or bother to mention it.

This combined with the statement that “class systems exist” makes me hope two things:

That vertical class changes are possible (from tier 1 to tier 2)

That horizontal class changes are possible (from class family A to family B)

If (1) is true, there is cause for the player to try a wide variety of characters and classes if for no other reason than to see the divergence between, for example, a Myrmidon and a Mercenary after promotion.  If (2) is true, there is cause to experiment with each character in all of their existing options to find the best combination of skills, stats, and equipment.  Provided that no particular combination is gamebreaking, that on its own gives many opportunities for depth.  (2) would also provide cause to lean more heavily on recent characters -- each of which already has an established class set that can be carried over relatively easily without concern for whether or not it diverges from the source material.

The other big part of my pipe dream expands off of the interplay between character, weapon, and class.

I’ve heard that in some DW games, every or almost every character can use every or almost every weapon, with the catch being that each has a specialty that they use better -- they can use the higher-rank weapons or have specific key skills that are weapon-specific.  That’s so remarkably FE-like that there’s no reason it shouldn’t be brought to FE Warriors.  Mesh that with stat differentials and character skills, and a wide variety of combinations are possible.  Further distinctions build from how the individual attributes are distributed or earned -- specials can be weapon-specific while ults are character-specific, or something like that.

Expanding off of my example from before, let’s say that Gaius is the Assassin, he can use Swords up to B rank, Knives to A rank, and Bows to B rank, and he’s currently using the Sunrise Katana, which is a B rank sword.  He’s a unit with excellent mobility and attack speed, but his overall damage per hit is less than other units.  He gets a +30 attack bonus for using a weapon he has B rank in, and the Sunrise Katana has three skills: its “basic” katana skill, like a bonus against “Bandit” type units (Brigand, Bandit, Pirate, Berserker) in addition to WTA, its evasive skill as mentioned before, and another A-rank locked skill that Gaius can’t use in his current class.  As a katana, the moveset primarily strikes directly in front of the user, with the special being an extended dash-slash that hits multiple enemies in a line for heavy damage.  Gaius’ ult is an AoE “spell” attack that restores HP to all allied heroes based on the number of enemies hit.  Switching to the Steel Knife would provide +40 attack (absolute, not relative) due to rank bonus, even though the knife type of weapon is generally weaker, and would have just two skills. The new moveset uses more sweeping, disjointed throwing attacks and some short-range thrusts and slashes.  Now rebuild, except it’s Sully, she’s a Paladin using a Short Spear, etc., etc.  Done poorly, it’s effectively the same as before (for me, at least).  Done well, there’s a lot of value added.

And then support attacks.  Dual Strikes would be a wonderful addition to a team musou.

And the most pipe of pipe dreams: roster expansion.

The prevailing thought right now seems to be, “if FE:W does well, FE:W2 might include representation from [insert favorite game here]”.  I think that’s a valid line of thinking, but also there’s the potential for DLC.  Continuing off of recency as a criterion for inclusion and the fact that SoV was done so well (and will hopefully sell accordingly across its lifetime), I think it’s fair to look for Alm, Celica, and their compatriots in a relatively early DLC pack.  Beyond that, we may see a trickling of other characters from games gone by.

The obvious desire is to have characters that I like, but more importantly to have characters that I like in-game.  I love Tetra as a character but there’s no real point for me to try to use her when better options exist.  As a result, I am happy that Tetra is in HW but I never play as her.  That’s the line I want to draw, rather than “okay but Ike is better than Chrom in-universe” or whatever other trivial complaints I can think of.

tl;dr -- I see FE:W as a title that has a lot of potential.  Time will tell whether or not my expectations are realistic or justified, but I’m not dropping my hype for it anytime soon.

[sheminecrafts]

With kids and adults staying at home, are virtual worlds ready for primetime?

We’ve been diligently following the development of virtual worlds, also known as the “metaverse,” on TechCrunch.

Hanging out within the virtual worlds of games has become more popular in recent years with the growth of platforms like Roblox and open-world games like Fortnite, but it still isn’t a mainstream way to socialize outside of the young-adult demographic.

Three weeks ago, TechCrunch media columnist Eric Peckham published an in-depth report that positioned virtual worlds as the next era of social media. In an eight-part series, he looked at the history of virtual worlds and why games are already social networks, why social networks want more gaming, what the next few years looks like for the industry and why isn’t it mainstream already, how these virtual worlds will lead to healthier social relations, what the future of virtual economies will be and which companies are poised for success in this new market.

Given all that has changed in just the last three weeks — who would have thought that large swaths of the knowledge economy would suddenly find themselves entirely interacting virtually? — I wanted to get a sense of what the rising popularity of virtual worlds looks like in the midst of the outbreak of novel coronavirus. Eric and I had a call to discuss this and decided to share our conversation publicly.

Danny Crichton: So let’s talk about timing a bit. You wrote this eight-article series around virtual worlds and then all of a sudden post-publication there is this massive event — the novel coronavirus pandemic — causing a large portion of the human population to stay at home and interact only online. What’s happening now in the space?

Eric Peckham: I wrote my series on the multiverse because I was already seeing a surge of interest, both in terms of consumer demand for open-world MMO games and in terms of social media giants like Facebook and Snap trying to incorporate virtual worlds and social games into their platforms. Large companies are planning for virtual worlds in a way that is actionable and not just a futuristic vision. Over the last couple of years there has also been a lot of VC investment into a handful of startups focused on building next-generation virtual worlds for people to spend time in, virtual worlds with complex societies shaped by users’ contributions.

Talking to founders and investors in the gaming space, there has been a huge increase in usage over the last few weeks as more people hang out at home playing games, whether it’s on the adult side or the kid side.

Most of these next-generation virtual worlds are still in private beta but already popular platforms like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite are getting substantially more use than normal. A large portion of people stuck at home are escaping via the virtual worlds of games.

You wrote this whole analysis before you knew the extent of the pandemic — how has the outlook changed for this industry?

This accelerates the timeline of virtual worlds being a mainstream place to hang out and socialize in daily life. I think people will be at home for multiple months, not just a couple of weeks, and it’s going to change people’s perspectives on socializing and working from home.

That’s a really powerful cultural shift. It’s getting more people beyond the core gaming community excited about spending time in virtual worlds and hanging out with their friends there.

We have seen this most heavily with the youngest generation of internet users. The majority of kids 9-12 years old are users of Minecraft and Roblox who hang out there with friends after school. We’ll see that expand to older demographics more quickly than it was going to before.

One of the complaints that I’ve seen on Twitter is that even though we have one of the largest global human lockdowns of all time, all the VR headsets are basically gone. Is VR a key component of virtual worlds?

Well, you don’t need VR headsets in order to spend meaningful time with others in a virtual space. Hundreds of millions of people already do it through their mobile phones and through PCs and consoles.

This is at the heart of the gaming industry: creating virtual worlds for people to spend time in, both pursuing the mission of whatever a game is designed for but also interacting with others. Among the most popular mobile and PC games last year were massively multiplayer online (MMO) games.

Talking about gaming, one facet of the story that I thought was particularly interesting was the fact that gaming was still not that high in terms of market penetration in the population.

More than two billion people play video games in the context of a year. There’s incredible market penetration in that sense. But, at least for the data I’ve seen for the U.S., the percent of the population who play games on a given day is still much lower than the percent of the population who use social media on a given day.

The more that games become virtual worlds for socializing and hanging out beyond just the mission of the gameplay, the more who will turn to virtual worlds as a social and entertainment outlet when they have five minutes free to do something on their phone. Social media fills these small moments in life. MMO games right now don’t because they are so oriented around the gameplay, which takes time and uninterrupted focus. Virtual worlds in the vein of those on Roblox where you just hang out and explore with friends compete for that time with Instagram more directly.

Theater chains like Regal and AMC announced this week that they are entirely shutting down to wait out the pandemic. Is that going to affect these virtual world companies?

I think they are separate parts of media. Cinema attendance has been declining quite substantially for years, and the way the industry has made up for that is trying to turn cinemas into these premium experiences and increasing ticket prices. Kids are just as likely, if not more likely, to play a game together on a Friday night as they are to go to the cinema. Cinemas are less culturally relevant to young people than they once were.

We’ve seen a massive experiment in work from home, which is a form of virtual world, or at least, a virtual workplace. When it comes to popularizing virtual worlds, is it going to come from the entertainment side or the more productivity-oriented platforms?

It will come from the entertainment side, and from younger people using it to socialize, in part because there’s less fear around cultural etiquette compared to people meeting in a business setting who are worried about a virtual world context not feeling as professional. Over time, as virtual worlds become pervasive in our social lives they will become more natural places to chat with people about business as well.

As more and more people are working online and interacting virtually, a big question is how you get beyond Zoom calls or the technology that’s currently in the market for virtual conferences to something that feels more like walking around and chatting with people in person. It’s tough to do without the ability to walk around a virtual space. You can’t have those unplanned small group or one-on-one interactions with people you don’t know if you’re just boxes within a Zoom call or some other broadcast. It will be interesting to see what develops around virtual business conferences that stems from virtual world technology. I’ve seen a few teams exploring this.

Last question here, but we are looking at a major recession in the economy, and so how does the landscape of people earning money from virtual worlds change with coronavirus?

The second-to-last article in my series is about the virtual economies around virtual worlds. Any virtual world inherently has commerce and people have already been making real-world money from games and from early virtual worlds like Second Life.

Both people staying home amid the coronavirus and the recession that we seem to be entering are pressures that will push more people to look online for ways to make money. That will only increase the activity of virtual economies around some of these worlds, whether those are formally built into the game or they’re happening in a gray or black market around the games (which is more common).

Thanks, Eric.

A multiverse, not the metaverse

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/33BsMxe via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

We’ve been diligently following the development of virtual worlds, also known as the “metaverse,” on TechCrunch.

Hanging out within the virtual worlds of games has become more popular in recent years with the growth of platforms like Roblox and open-world games like Fortnite, but it still isn’t a mainstream way to socialize outside of the young-adult demographic.

Three weeks ago, TechCrunch media columnist Eric Peckham published an in-depth report that positioned virtual worlds as the next era of social media. In an eight-part series, he looked at the history of virtual worlds and why games are already social networks, why social networks want more gaming, what the next few years looks like for the industry and why isn’t it mainstream already, how these virtual worlds will lead to healthier social relations, what the future of virtual economies will be and which companies are poised for success in this new market.

Given all that has changed in just the last three weeks — who would have thought that large swaths of the knowledge economy would suddenly find themselves entirely interacting virtually? — I wanted to get a sense of what the rising popularity of virtual worlds looks like in the midst of the outbreak of novel coronavirus. Eric and I had a call to discuss this and decided to share our conversation publicly.

Danny Crichton: So let’s talk about timing a bit. You wrote this eight-article series around virtual worlds and then all of a sudden post-publication there is this massive event — the novel coronavirus pandemic — causing a large portion of the human population to stay at home and interact only online. What’s happening now in the space?

Eric Peckham: I wrote my series on the multiverse because I was already seeing a surge of interest, both in terms of consumer demand for open-world MMO games and in terms of social media giants like Facebook and Snap trying to incorporate virtual worlds and social games into their platforms. Large companies are planning for virtual worlds in a way that is actionable and not just a futuristic vision. Over the last couple of years there has also been a lot of VC investment into a handful of startups focused on building next-generation virtual worlds for people to spend time in, virtual worlds with complex societies shaped by users’ contributions.

Talking to founders and investors in the gaming space, there has been a huge increase in usage over the last few weeks as more people hang out at home playing games, whether it’s on the adult side or the kid side.

Most of these next-generation virtual worlds are still in private beta but already popular platforms like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite are getting substantially more use than normal. A large portion of people stuck at home are escaping via the virtual worlds of games.

You wrote this whole analysis before you knew the extent of the pandemic — how has the outlook changed for this industry?

This accelerates the timeline of virtual worlds being a mainstream place to hang out and socialize in daily life. I think people will be at home for multiple months, not just a couple of weeks, and it’s going to change people’s perspectives on socializing and working from home.

That’s a really powerful cultural shift. It’s getting more people beyond the core gaming community excited about spending time in virtual worlds and hanging out with their friends there.

We have seen this most heavily with the youngest generation of internet users. The majority of kids 9-12 years old are users of Minecraft and Roblox who hang out there with friends after school. We’ll see that expand to older demographics more quickly than it was going to before.

One of the complaints that I’ve seen on Twitter is that even though we have one of the largest global human lockdowns of all time, all the VR headsets are basically gone. Is VR a key component of virtual worlds?

Well, you don’t need VR headsets in order to spend meaningful time with others in a virtual space. Hundreds of millions of people already do it through their mobile phones and through PCs and consoles.

This is at the heart of the gaming industry: creating virtual worlds for people to spend time in, both pursuing the mission of whatever a game is designed for but also interacting with others. Among the most popular mobile and PC games last year were massively multiplayer online (MMO) games.

Talking about gaming, one facet of the story that I thought was particularly interesting was the fact that gaming was still not that high in terms of market penetration in the population.

More than two billion people play video games in the context of a year. There’s incredible market penetration in that sense. But, at least for the data I’ve seen for the U.S., the percent of the population who play games on a given day is still much lower than the percent of the population who use social media on a given day.

The more that games become virtual worlds for socializing and hanging out beyond just the mission of the gameplay, the more who will turn to virtual worlds as a social and entertainment outlet when they have five minutes free to do something on their phone. Social media fills these small moments in life. MMO games right now don’t because they are so oriented around the gameplay, which takes time and uninterrupted focus. Virtual worlds in the vein of those on Roblox where you just hang out and explore with friends compete for that time with Instagram more directly.

Theater chains like Regal and AMC announced this week that they are entirely shutting down to wait out the pandemic. Is that going to affect these virtual world companies?

I think they are separate parts of media. Cinema attendance has been declining quite substantially for years, and the way the industry has made up for that is trying to turn cinemas into these premium experiences and increasing ticket prices. Kids are just as likely, if not more likely, to play a game together on a Friday night as they are to go to the cinema. Cinemas are less culturally relevant to young people than they once were.

We’ve seen a massive experiment in work from home, which is a form of virtual world, or at least, a virtual workplace. When it comes to popularizing virtual worlds, is it going to come from the entertainment side or the more productivity-oriented platforms?

It will come from the entertainment side, and from younger people using it to socialize, in part because there’s less fear around cultural etiquette compared to people meeting in a business setting who are worried about a virtual world context not feeling as professional. Over time, as virtual worlds become pervasive in our social lives they will become more natural places to chat with people about business as well.

As more and more people are working online and interacting virtually, a big question is how you get beyond Zoom calls or the technology that’s currently in the market for virtual conferences to something that feels more like walking around and chatting with people in person. It’s tough to do without the ability to walk around a virtual space. You can’t have those unplanned small group or one-on-one interactions with people you don’t know if you’re just boxes within a Zoom call or some other broadcast. It will be interesting to see what develops around virtual business conferences that stems from virtual world technology. I’ve seen a few teams exploring this.

Last question here, but we are looking at a major recession in the economy, and so how does the landscape of people earning money from virtual worlds change with coronavirus?

The second-to-last article in my series is about the virtual economies around virtual worlds. Any virtual world inherently has commerce and people have already been making real-world money from games and from early virtual worlds like Second Life.

Both people staying home amid the coronavirus and the recession that we seem to be entering are pressures that will push more people to look online for ways to make money. That will only increase the activity of virtual economies around some of these worlds, whether those are formally built into the game or they’re happening in a gray or black market around the games (which is more common).

Thanks, Eric.

A multiverse, not the metaverse

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/33BsMxe Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[awesomeblockchain]

Think Outside the Block - The Future of Blockchain GamingIn our previous post, we discussed cryptogaming from a newbie perspective. You may have already dipped your feet by now, or perhaps you're still considering which game to try out. Maybe you're feeling a little underwhelmed at what these games even seem to be! Cryptogaming and games on the blockchain are still in a very early phase. Despite this, we are already seeing an alarming number of re-iterations of the same basic concept.

Most cryptogames simply present you with the ability to acquire a thing, be it a virtual kitten, a planet, or a city. There's usually variety within the things you collect, giving you incentive to get more than one, or to sell/trade things you don't like for something you do.

Currently, popular cryptogames all revolve around a simple 3 step process:

Collect, trade, or sell, a thing.???Profit!Some games then have a kind of revenue share system in place, such as CryptoCountries. In that game, a player (I hesitate to even call it a player) buys a country, which then immediately goes up in price, up to double what it cost previously. Any other player can then purchase that same country, and a portion of the extra cash goes to the now previous owner of the country. This goes on until the country gets so expensive that no one will want to buy it, leaving the final purchaser with a steaming hot pile of digital crap. In my opinion, this is only a game in the capacity that hot potato is a game - It's just something you do to pass the time when there's nothing else at hand. CryptoCountries is hot potato for people with more money than sense. There... I said it.

That was a loaded statement, and many will disagree with me. Of course, there's more to something like CryptoKitties or CryptoCountries than just 3 steps in the core gameplay loop - but it's not far off. And these represent just a few examples of many such games - all with pretty much the exact same basic mechanics.

And when I say basic, I do mean basic. Beyond owning a cat or monster, or whatever the thing may be in this case, there's just not much you can do with your newfound tokenized collectible buddy. Sure, you can admire the pixels that form the image of your thing, or sell it for profit if you're savvy... but this does not constitute a game in my book - far from.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not dismissing this genre entirely - as I said before, this whole industry is still in its infancy. I do realize all things need to start somewhere, and that Rome wasn't built in a day. But so far, I'm just not seeing any of the elements that make me love games in the first place.

I want to see new types of games emerge from this genre, a genre that could so easily mature into something beautiful. I'd like to see an always-online dungeon crawler, with perma-death and player killing with real, tangible impact. I want to see grand scale roleplaying games that go on for years, with similar cultural impact as the infamous Dungeons Dragons had back in the day. There's no limit to the number of things game developers could be doing with blockchain technology, from simple features such as securing trade and creating meaningful in-game economies, to games fully built with blockchain in mind from ground zero. I want a blockchain game worthy of its namesake.

There's a unique opportunity here to drive game design in a radical new direction. Outside of the bustling indie scene, mainstream game design has been pushed primarily by the pursuit of higher graphical fidelity, with gameplay playing second fiddle to the eye-candy. Then came the free-to-play revolution, making its mark on gaming, forever altering the way publishers monetize via in-game transactions.

The changes this new wave of thinking brought us opened up gaming to a much wider audience, but also went as far as gimping fully functional and well balanced gameplay elements for no other reason than to suck more money out of the playerbase. We saw F2P change games forever, for better, and for worse - and blockchain has the potential to make a similar impact on the popular digital medium. It's still unclear just how profound that impact will be - but it's undeniably going to affect the world of video games in the near future, and for a long time to come.

With blockchain games, I think it's more important than ever to think outside the box (or block, as it were). Flooding a budding market with a slew of uninspired games incurs the risk of stifling the genre before it even has a chance to bloom. Innovation, inspiration, and fresh ideas are what's going to solidify crypto games as more than just a passing fad.

There are a bunch of cool new games on the horizon though, and we're seeing developers reach further every day, implementing fresh ideas and applications of blockchain technology into their games and designs. It seems that just every few weeks, something new is available for crypto gamers to sink their teeth into, and I'm feeling very positive about the future. The downside is that all these exciting new games are going to be existing in complete isolation from each other.

That's where BitGuild comes in.

We're bringing games, players, and developers together on the same platform. Through the hard work and dedication of the team, BitGuild is optimally placed to provide the perfect ecosystem for crypto games, developers, and players through the BitGuild Design House, allowing games to be funded and for the community to interact directly with developers to bring their vision to life through crowdfunding, or even working on the game directly alongside the devs! Together, we'll usher in a bright new world for gamers and blockchain Dapps everywhere!

Join the Guild today! You can get in touch with the BitGuild Team directly via Telegram, and Twitter. Don't forget to stay tuned for all the latest news from BitGuild on the official website.

https://ift.tt/2uvp7mI

[ineversleep26]

Best Games Without WiFi

Competition In the end, users who want the extra info can trust the programs supplied directly from their carriers rather than needing to be worried about their carriers charging overages and additional charges that end in a costly invoice at the close of the month. But while we value the further data programs supplied from the country's top mobile carriers, they still retain two big problems: first, they're rather pricey and carry throttling that may, sadly, limit your internet usage rates should you cross over a particular percentile of information utilized state wide. Secondly, and possibly more importantly, each of the data on the world can not prevent dead zones or areas with no mobile system or WiFi.

So while our Need for mobile data is enormous and growing all the time, not everyone has the luxury of an unlimited data plan or a WiFi network available to play on. Whether you are on a very long flight, taking the subway to work, or just can't access your network from your current location, you may wish to be watching out for some superb mobile games you can play while on the long run. Whether you're on your life, travelling into a far off place for holiday, or bored while waiting in the line at Starbucks, these matches for the two iOS and Android offer something a little special for players looking to squander their time away.

Whether or Each of them comes fully examined and vetted to ensure great gameplay, promising you hours upon hours of offline play no matter what kind of gamer you're.

Angry Birds 2

We're all The sport was popular enough to establish an whole set of merchandise, spin-off games, television shorts, and an animated feature film (along with the upcoming movie in 2019). Strangely, despite the licensed spin-offs and complete scale console starts of the first match, Angry Birds did not see a comprehensive sequel printed until 2015, with Angry Birds two be a direct continuation of the original game. Even though the game works quite similarly to the original Angry Birds game in the last decade, the series has been revitalized here with new mechanics and reworked controls that produce the game feel better than ever.

Much like The first Angry Birds and most of its assorted spin-offs, you play the game by starting small birds in your goal, a set of platforms constructed holding pigs up that you will need to demolish. Employing a slingshot, you take your critters --each with their own unique powers--in the base, letting you crush the pigs in as few turns as you can without losing lives. Angry Birds 2 affects a couple of things about this specific strategy. Rather than each bird being supplied at a very specific order on every single level, you acquire a deck of the birds, permitting you to take the birds in whatever sequence you want to crush your enemy dinosaurs. You can increase your score and meet your "Destruct-O-Meter" to obtain access to new exceptional cards within the degree and perform supreme harm to your competitors.

Asphalt 8: Airborne

We will not Lie for you: Gameloft's Asphalt show, dating back to 2004 with an entrance to the first Nintendo DS, is mostly a replica of Burnout, the preferred 2000s high-speed racing game. Since Asphalt 4, the matches have made the transfer to Android and iOS, and mostly have found themselves to be seriously and commercially profitable. The most-recent principal entry in the show, Asphalt 8, is nearly four decades old, but it's also among the very best racing games we have observed on either cellular platform, and if you're in to Burnout-styled games, then it is definitely worth checking out.

Like most Portable racing games on phones and tablets, Asphalt 8 includes many different driving schemes and methods you can use to drive your vehicle through races and classes, completing missions and other achievables. Tilt to move (the default mode for many racing games, which entails utilizing your device's accelerometer), tilt with icons, onscreen controls, and tap to maneuver are all options, though we found the on-screen controls alongside the tap to direct choices are the most dependable for steering quickly and accurately. You can collect nitro to enhance your vehicle, and you're able to utilize that nitro to burst through other automobiles, destroying the contest in the process.

As a Free-to-play game, it must come as no surprise to readers familiar with this type of pricing arrangement that purchasing cars in Asphalt 8 might get fairly expensive. The game has in-app purchases around $99.99 on both Android and iOS, both for automobiles and charge packs for purchasing accessories and other optional stuff. In-game money can be obtained through racing, but as the game gets higher with respect to levels and difficulty, you will end up earning less and less cash for quicker and more powerful cars. The grinding for cars can get pretty intense, but there is no car that can not be accessed through some in-game devotion--even if the machine itself is marginally too grindy due to our tastings. However, Asphalt 8 seems fantastic, even after four decades of aging, and we can not help but urge the sport to other customers that may be interested in certain offline racing.

Shadow Fight Two

Action fans Here, the game is for you. Bear in mind these kung-fu movies with all of the acrobatic moves and cries; well here you've got the opportunity to try them on real enemies but with an addition of lethal weapons. Shadow Fight is a 2D game based on a character "Shadow "who lost his physical body when he unleashed several strong demons because he tried to save his home. He exists as a proficient shadow warrior who needs to fight the demons and their various bodyguards in his quest to get back what he lost. The sport has numerous stages to make sure you'll always have an enemy to battle. The game has some in-app buys but isn't impossible to play without.

Despicable me

The minions Are here, and they've brought with them loads of pleasure and bananas. Despicable me is a 3D runner game where you race with all the minions collecting bananas as you leap, roll, dodge or just scramble against others in fast-paced assignments. In the game, you have to run through amazing locations inspired by the true film as you update to awesomely outfits as you use hilarious weapons and power ups. In addition you get to combat villains like Vector is amazing 3D graphics. Banana!

Six firearms: Gang showdown

Created by Gameloft, six firearms provides you with the authentic sense of the west, and you better be strapped. You have to complete 40 missions, as you race horses, take outside robbers and complete off waves of enemies on the way. It's possible to unlock unique weapons clothes and weapons that will help you off in your action filled experience. The game is free to download and play Google play shop. Just the bandits and witches cover it.

Plants vs Zombies two

Everyone Adored plants versus zombies and two is here. The match was once on PCs before it arrived to mobile stage in 2013. The crops have many capacities such as launching corn or soy missiles from the zombies. Plants vs Zombies 2 includes funny and stimulating new levels to keep you amused all through. The game is free to install on Google play shop.

Fruit Ninja

Fruit Ninja Is an arcade that has gained great popularity on tablet computers and shortly on computers. The notion of the game is simple; you need to cut the fruit and berries (apples, oranges, kiwi, peaches, strawberries, watermelons, coconuts, bananas, pineapples) with the sword, and at the specific same time try to not cut on the beans, which can also fly in the screen inadvertently.

One of those Advantages of this game is the aid of the purpose "multitouch", in other words, the capacity to operate at once several points of the display (by way of instance, with two fingers or playing with a friend). It is very convenient when many fruits fly on the display and you may cut all of them at one time.

The sport is Recommended for those who want to have fun before the screen of this smartphone. Fruit look almost like real ones, and by the sounds of pulp and juice pouring out of them, appetite stems.

Starving

The game has Stunning 3D graphics and fascinating special effects. In Hungry Shark Evolution, you need to become a bloodthirsty shark that'll grow and grow right before your eyes.

As you pass The sport, new, more massive and strong species of these animals will become accessible. Maintain the entire underwater world in check! By the way, a shark shark may easily terrorize and horrify the whole coast, such as land! Hungry Shark Evolution includes seven distinct sorts of sharks in the arsenal; the first can be obtained from the start, each of the others open whilst passing the amounts.

The Hungry Shark Evolution sport is unique. All things considered, you can fully experience other people of submerged depths.

Townsmen

This match is An economic system in the middle Ages. In the game, you'll have a remarkably tough task -- to turn this gloomy settlement into a enormous populated city with a developed infrastructure. The construction method can be found in many variants: you can start in the previously prepared scenario, and you are able to begin everything from scratch.

Pictures, Drawing, and animation at the game causes only favorable feelings -- the atmosphere of the time is delivered in the very best way. Remember about the environment -- the trees go, along with the hares are galloping about and butterflies are flying. The musical accompaniment goes well with the gameplay.

Dragon Mania

Dragon Mania Is a sport in which you may cultivate and enlarge dragons of all kinds and breeds until you accumulate all.

The sport Each breed has individual skills and more than a dozen basic qualities which highlight their

uniqueness. So as to cultivate a dragon, then you will have to take decent care of the dragon and habitat food. That's how you can increase their level and attract new dragons into the island.

Additionally, Participation in conflicts also allows you to increase the degree of the dragon. Thus, getting a monster master in Dragon Mania You Have To collect and grow in your own island as many dragons as Possible, giving them a dwelling in excellent harmony.

PUZZLES

This match is Quite straightforward and has a very clear port, trendy design, in addition to a huge number of degrees. The primary job would be to start the procedure for the red cube, which has to be obtained from this match grid.

Do not Forget that you have the chance to pick the appropriate amount of difficulty on your own. Obviously, initially, it is well worth practicing and choosing the simplest in the beginning. The toughest one is another degree.

Special Attention warrants the amount of amounts from the match Unblock Me. Right now There are roughly 1200 of them. The approximate phase of all these Is a half an hour. Therefore, this game is going to be a excellent Way to unwind.